The Bad Things Read online

  When they first went missing, there she was, Jackie Wood, sitting next to him – the murderer – and saying what a tragedy it was. How the community had to pull together, that they were pulling together, and were organizing searches of the town, the beaches, the dunes, the harbour. The local and national media were hungry for interviewees about ‘the situation’, and Jackie Wood and Martin Jessop fitted the willing bill. Wood, the local librarian; Jessop, a lecturer at the college in Ipswich. There was much speculation about their relationship. Again, something else the media wanted to romanticize; document every twist and turn.

  If only they had known there was a much better story than that.

  If she closed her eyes, Alex could still see her, head cocked slightly to one side, the furrowed forehead, the oh-so-sympathetic expression. He, meanwhile, just looked at his shoes. Then, suddenly, he gazed at the camera and shook his head.

  ‘They were lovely children,’ he said. ‘So polite. Full of life.’

  Past tense.

  And she remembered knowing then; knowing absolutely that they were the ones who had taken the twins.

  When they were arrested, the feeding frenzy really started.

  ‘She is in,’ said a voice from behind her, interrupting her memories. ‘She’s always in.’

  Alex looked over her shoulder. A woman of about thirty with a cigarette in one hand, mug in the other, was standing in the doorway of the caravan opposite. The dark roots were showing in her hair, and her face had lost the fresh-skin look of youth. Alex wondered what she was doing in a caravan on the Suffolk coast in the middle of winter.

  ‘I came this way looking for work.’ The woman had read her mind. ‘Thought it might be easier here than in the city.’

  She wondered which city she meant. ‘And has it been easier?’ she asked.

  The woman shrugged. ‘No, not really. But I have got a few shifts at the Tesco’s on the high street, so I reckon that’s better than nothing.’

  Alex nodded. The idea of a new supermarket in the middle of the town had caused a lot of local consternation when planning permission was granted. There were petitions, and placards, and letters to the planning office and the local MP, and God knows who, but it had lumbered forward like a boulder rolling down a hill squashing everything in its path.

  ‘Anyway,’ the woman went on, ‘give her a knock.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Alex said.

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Sort of.’ She managed to give a rictus smile.

  ‘She looks familiar.’

  ‘Really?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘Tell her she can come over and have a coffee if she wants. Wouldn’t want her feeling lonely here.’

  Alex nodded. ‘Okay.’

  The woman shut her door.

  Alex swallowed. Her mouth was dry and her heart was thudding. She pressed her fist against her breastbone. ‘You can do this,’ she whispered. The enormity of her actions had just dawned on her. She was about to come face-to-face with the woman who was – whatever some bloody judge said – complicit in the murder of Harry and Millie. And she was supposed to be carrying out an interview with Jackie Wood when all she wanted to do was to shake out the answer to the question that had haunted her family for more than a decade – where was Millie buried?

  And why shouldn’t she? There was no need to talk to Jackie Wood for any length of time; she could even ditch the idea of an article. Nothing lost, except more of her dwindling savings. And she would have had the chance to ask her about Millie. On another level, Alex was curious about the woman; about what had made her tick then and what made her tick now. How she could sit and blatantly lie to everybody; the lies she was still continuing to tell now?

  Let out on a technicality. That was not innocence.

  Squaring her shoulders, she lifted her hand up to knock on the door.

  It opened before her hand made contact.

  ‘I saw you standing outside. Alex.’ Jackie Wood’s voice was pitched a little too high and had the soft Suffolk burr that Alex remembered from the courtroom – both characteristics had been blurred by the television microphones. What was more startling was that the long black hair she had seen on the screen was now cut short and dyed blonde. Jackie Wood was dressed in an off-white fluffy fleece, faded, ill-fitting black jeans, and brown slippers with pom-poms on the toes. She was even more diminished than she had seemed on television and her skin had not yet regained a healthy colour. Alex guessed the woman opposite was telling the truth; Jackie Wood didn’t venture out much.

  She was so very ordinary.

  Then Alex noticed the scar down one side of her face, the skin puckered, as though it had been sewn up by a child.

  Jackie Wood blinked at her. ‘Come in. I’ve been expecting you for ages. Let’s not talk on the doorstep.’ She opened the door a little wider while keeping herself inside the caravan.

  For a moment, Alex was outside of her body. One part of her looking at what she was doing and wondering how the hell she could do it, the other part of her relishing the idea of talking to the woman. She wanted to sniff the air, see if she could smell evil.

  Not evil, but fustiness. The smell of a tin box that rarely had its windows or doors opened. Stale cigarette smoke, too. Grease, fat; the lingering smell of fast food. The lightness in her head dissolved.

  ‘Take a seat.’ Jackie Wood waved to a cloth-covered bench to one side of the caravan. The table in front of it was crowded with papers, a plate with a piece of half-chewed toast on it, and an overflowing ashtray. Some sort of convector heater was pumping out warm air. She sat on the bench, sliding round behind the table.

  ‘Sorry about the mess,’ said Jackie Wood, whipping away the plate and putting it into the tiny sink. ‘I should have cleared up before you came.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Alex, noticing that she had quite an array of daily newspapers, from The Times to the Daily Star. Again, Jackie Wood saw her looking and began gathering them up into a pile.

  ‘Something to do, isn’t it?’ she said, nodding towards the papers. ‘I like to see whether there are any stories in them about me. Since I came out. Sometimes, you know, they get the facts about me wrong. One of the papers kept saying I was forty-four years old. I’m not. I’m forty-three. It’s horrible reading really personal things about yourself in newspapers. And it’s even worse when they’re lies. Do you think I should write to the editor?’ She stood still, looking at Alex, blinking slowly. Then she turned away and dumped the papers onto the floor with a thump. ‘Are you warm enough? I’ve taken to wearing these thick fleece things, keeps the wind out.’ She plucked at the material. ‘It’s so bloody cold in this part of the world.’

  ‘Wind off the Urals,’ Alex said, for the sake of saying something after the sudden change of subject.

  ‘That’s what they say.’ Jackie Wood was nervous. Probably as nervous as she was, Alex realized. ‘I’ll make the coffee.’ Pom-poms flapping, she made the short journey over to the sink, filled the kettle and set it on the top of the cooker.

  Alex shrugged off her coat and put it down beside her, looking around the caravan. Not much to see, really. A small kitchenette, cupboards above the sink and cooker; a corridor that she guessed led to the bedrooms – two?– , and bathroom. A couple of paintings on the walls. One was a view of beach huts. The other of a few lonely sheep in the middle of a snowy field. Both had the corpses of insects preserved behind the glass.

  There was silence while they both waited for the kettle to boil.

  ‘Here we are.’

  Jackie Wood set a tray down on the table. On the tray was a cafetière of coffee and two plain, white mugs. There was a plate with chocolate digestives. A jug of milk. A bowl of sugar. She hovered.

  ‘Shall I pour?’ Alex asked.

  Jackie Wood nodded. ‘Please.’

  She pressed the plunger of the cafetière, hearing that pleasing sucking sound, then poured out two mugs of coffee. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

  Jackie Wood nodd
ed again. ‘Lots of milk. Three sugars. Please.’

  Alex did the honours, wondering when the Mad Hatter was going to turn up. ‘Here you go.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Jackie Wood lowered herself onto a plastic chair.

  Alex took a sip of coffee and then reached into her bag, taking out her digital recorder. ‘I hope it’s okay to record our interview, Jackie.’ She tried not to stumble over her name. She had never thought of her as ‘Jackie’, only ‘that woman’ or ‘the murderer’s accomplice’, or ‘Jackie Wood’, both names together. To call her Jackie was implying an intimacy that she didn’t feel. But then that’s what she did all the time; that was her job. She had to think of this as another job. Money. Cash. Gus’s skiing trip. Millie’s grave. No, not that, not yet.

  ‘I know who you are, you know.’ The words were spoken quietly.

  Alex switched on the recorder then looked up at her. ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve known ever since Jonny Danby told me you were coming.’ She smiled. ‘You think I’d forget you? Sasha’s sister?’

  Alex held up her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Just…don’t. Her name.’

  ‘What? Sasha? What should I call her?’

  ‘Not her name. After what you and Jessop did. It does not give you the right to call her by her first name.’

  She looked startled. ‘What Martin did. Not me. Not me. Anyway, I looked you up. Googled you. Found out about your work. I’d never read any.’

  It didn’t surprise Alex that Danby had lied. ‘She likes your work.’ Please.

  Jackie Wood smiled. ‘We didn’t get too many upmarket newspapers in High Top. And when we did, someone had always nicked the supplements.’ She shifted herself and reached into the back pocket of her jeans, pulling out a squashed packet of cigarettes. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked, pulling one out and putting it between her cracked lips. ‘Only it’s a hard habit to break. Something to do when you’re banged up.’

  Alex shook her head, wanting one herself.

  ‘Here.’ Jackie Wood thrust the packet at Alex. ‘You can have one if you want.’

  How did she know? ‘No thanks, I’ve given up.’ Alex found herself smiling apologetically.

  Jackie Wood shrugged, put the cigarette between her lips, took a lighter off the table and lit it. She inhaled deeply, then coughed – a great hacking cough that shook her whole body. Alex hoped the smoke was furring up her lungs, causing changes in the cells of her body. She hoped it was killing Jackie Wood.

  ‘I missed my books,’ she said, quietly.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Books. Being around them all the time. Discovering new authors. Flicking through a book, deciding if I wanted to borrow it from the library. I missed that.’

  ‘Right.’ Alex was suddenly wrong-footed by a sudden feeling of compassion. ‘But you had a library in the prison?’ What did she know?

  ‘Oh yes.’ Jackie Wood waved her hand, a dismissive movement. ‘Statutory requirement and all that. But it wasn’t the same. I mean, I could look at books at all times of the day in my job. Savour them. There was a time limit in prison.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I miss the children.’

  Alex’s back stiffened.

  Jackie Wood waved her arms. ‘No, no, what I meant was the children in the library. I miss seeing them, reading to them, story time. You know.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Anyway, I expect you’ve got better things to do than spend all day with me. What did you want to know?’

  A loaded question, but Alex restrained herself. She smoothed back her hair. ‘You agreed to see me because you wanted to do the interview?’

  ‘’Course I did.’ Jackie Wood blinked at her. ‘Why else? It’s a good chance to put my side of the story, to tell the world what really happened.’ She leaned forward on her chair, put her elbows on her knees, and it was all Alex could do not to recoil. ‘It’ll be a good scoop for you as well. Don’t think I haven’t thought of that.’

  Alex ignored the jibe. ‘Your side of the story?’

  She blinked again. ‘That’s what you told Jonny. That it’d be an opportunity for me to tell everyone what really happened. How I was only trying to help.’

  ‘Trying to help?’ Why was she echoing everything?

  Jackie Wood put her mug down, leaned back again. ‘Look, I hardly knew him, before, before the…you know.’ There were tears in her eyes.

  Alex tried not to move a muscle; if she did she would hit her. How dare she cry. How dare she.

  Jackie Wood blinked harder than ever. ‘Sorry.’ She gathered herself. ‘He – Martin Jessop – just came to my door and asked if I wanted to help, organize searches and stuff. Well, there was no question about it. I knew little Harry and Millie from the library. Sash – your sister – used to bring them to story time.’ She gave a sad smile at a memory. ‘They used to love the stories.’

  Alex had a prickling sensation in her nose and was finding it hard to swallow. She hated hearing Jackie Wood say their names. Sasha’s names, the children’s names, all of it.

  ‘But I want to start at the beginning. Can I do that, Alex? I can call you Alex, can’t I? Even if I can’t call your sister by her first name?’

  She nodded, but she still didn’t want to call her Jackie.

  So Jackie Wood told Alex about her childhood – middle class, ordinary, lonely, brought up in Great Yarmouth by parents who were both teachers. She liked books, didn’t want to go to university so she thought she would enjoy working in a library.

  ‘You know, I was quite happy, in my own world. I even had a boyfriend.’

  Alex must have looked startled. ‘Surprised you, haven’t I?’ she said. ‘And it wasn’t Martin Jessop, whatever the papers might have said.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  Jackie Wood looked out of the window. ‘I didn’t say anything about him then, and I’m not going to now.’

  ‘Come on, Jackie. It’s been fifteen years.’ Alex could scent a good story here. A different story. She didn’t think she’d read anything about her having a boyfriend before.

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter who he was. He wasn’t involved, wasn’t around when it was all happening.’ She gave a harsh laugh. ‘Certainly didn’t want to know when I was arrested.’

  Alex sensed she would not open up about this mysterious boyfriend. Yet. It was a case of gaining her trust and confidence, and to do that she really had to put any negative feelings aside. ‘And then?’ She tried the gentle probing, concerned face, furrowed brow.

  ‘And then I was alone.’

  Jackie Wood stubbed out one cigarette, but not before lighting another from its stub. ‘When the children disappeared it was a dreadful day.’

  A dreadful day. Alex shuddered inwardly and wanted to tell the woman how her sister’s life had been destroyed that afternoon. How she had waited, not knowing what to do with herself while Jez hunted for the children, dreading Sasha’s return. Then, after what seemed like days but was only hours, a police car picked her up and took her to Sasha’s house. Jez white-faced, holding Sasha’s hand saying over and over again: ‘they’ll be back soon, Sash, they’ll be back soon.’ Sasha crying. At first great screams that tore the air to shreds, then silent gulps, her face running with tears and snot and saliva. More police turning up, wanting a picture of the twins. Sasha scrabbling in her bag. Finding that picture taken on a sunny day in a clearing in the woods. They were having a picnic: Sasha, and her, Millie and Harry. Who took the picture? Must have been Jez. Then a policeman asking questions while a young woman police officer sat by, her notebook out, pen poised. She didn’t take one note as far as Alex could tell. Endless questions. Questions she couldn’t answer. Alex, not looking at Jez, keeping her arm around Sasha, comforting her, telling her it would all be all right. Their parents driving over from Mundburgh to stay. Then the endless searches, the false sightings, the weirdos who wanted a piece of the grief. How, as the days went on and the
re was no news, Sasha grew thinner and smaller. Insubstantial. When they found Harry it was a sort of tortured relief.

  Then they found the clothes in Jessop’s rubbish bin. More evidence in his flat. Evidence linking Martin Jessop and Jackie Wood. And the guilt that settled on her, suffocating her. So, yes, Alex wanted to tell her how her sister’s life had been destroyed that afternoon.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ Alex looked at her properly then, for the first time. She looked past the scar and noticed how her eyes were dull, her skin lifeless. She had lines around her eyes – not so much crow’s feet as bloody great emu feet – and there were smoker’s lines around her mouth. Her forefinger and middle finger were stained yellow and her nails bitten down to the quick.

  She took out another cigarette from the squashed packet. Lit it. Inhaled deeply. ‘I told you, I didn’t kill anybody.’

  ‘You gave him an alibi.’

  She smiled, the scar down the side of her face rippling. ‘He didn’t do it. Funnily enough, he was in the library that day, researching something or other, I can’t remember what now.’

  ‘Nobody else saw him.’

  She laughed. ‘For one thing, hardly anybody came in that day, and for another, he was tucked away in a corner behind one of the book stacks. Unless you went round there, you wouldn’t see him. Anyway, I’ve been over that a hundred times. I was only telling the truth, and look what it got me. Accessory to murder.’ She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and grabbed Alex’s arm. ‘I didn’t do it. Nor did he. That’s what I want you to say.’ Her voice was earnest, a note of desperation.

  Alex sat still for a moment, then shook her hand off. ‘You were both put in prison. The police didn’t believe you. Nor a judge and jury.’

  Jackie Wood’s mouth twisted in a parody of a smile. ‘You think evidence can’t be manipulated? That the police can’t be corrupted? That a jury can’t be fooled? What are you? Stupid or something? Have you already forgotten that I got out because the evidence was suspect? The expert witness was discredited!’