‘Are you sure?’
‘As sure as I can be. I was only five when she died.’
Charlie frowned. ‘You need to put it back where you found it.’
‘No! I want to keep it! I want to show it to the police as proof.’
‘Proof of what?’
‘That my aunt killed my mother!’
‘I thought you had Moody down for that.’
‘I don’t know, I just don’t know, okay!’ Helen clutched the bag.
‘Don’t lose it, all right,’ said Charlie. ‘Listen, it doesn’t prove anything. Maybe Letitia has the same sort of bag. She probably bought it in Marks & Spencer’s or John Lewis or somewhere like that. There are probably hundreds of them and—’
‘Then why hide it?’
‘Maybe she isn’t hiding it. She just keeps it there for, I dunno, carrying stuff around. Anyway, why would she keep it if she killed your mother? She’d have thrown it away. I know I would.’
Charlie reached for the bag, but Helen held it out of her reach, and she sighed.
‘Okay, let’s say for argument’s sake it is your mum’s bag. If you take it, to show it to the police or whatever, Letitia will know you were here and wonder what else you’ve seen. You want to risk that?’
She shook her head, still clutching the bag. Even if Charlie was right, leaving it behind would mean cutting the ties to the only true memory of her mother. She couldn’t do it. ‘It may not be proof enough for the police,’ she said, ‘but at least I’ll have something of hers.’
‘You can’t take it,’ Charlie insisted, ‘but tell you what, we’ll take a picture of it.’ She used her phone again and snapped a picture of the bag. ‘Now, can we please get out of here?’
They checked everything was back in place and left. They’d found no link to Moody, but maybe they would have more luck at the warehouse.
What Helen had found was proof of how easy it was for the picture she’d built up about her own world to be smashed to pieces. Again. She’d suspected her aunts of being involved in her mother’s death, then dismissed it, then suspected it again, and now she had proof of … well, exactly nothing, as Charlie had put it, because there could be hundreds of bags like this one.
Her life wasn’t an Agatha Christie mystery where one clue after another was uncovered, leaving no doubt in the investigator’s mind of the guilty party and how they should be punished. People were complex. They had both good and bad in them. Accepting that was the first step towards growing up, she saw now with a sudden clarity.
The moment she was the closest to finding out what happened was ironically also the moment she realised she’d been five years old inside for the past twenty years. Perhaps her mind had filled in the gaps between what happened, and what she thought happened, so it wasn’t all just a big empty space, but she was pretty certain the bag wasn’t a false memory. She’d sat on the back seat next to it and seen it for herself, stuffed full of papers and computer discs. The bag in the drawer was identical, if not the bag, whatever Charlie said, or Wilcox would said. It wasn’t her ‘desperate mind’ making things up …
As they slipped out of Letitia’s apartment building, an engine revved on the other side of the road, startling them both.
‘What the hell was that about?’ said Charlie.
A cold feeling curled down Helen’s spine, and she followed the sleek, dark car with her eyes as it sped down the road where it turned a corner in a screech of brakes. The image of Fay’s broken body came back to her, and she swallowed hard.
I’m seeing ghosts, she thought. The world was full of dark cars. Nothing to worry about.
‘Probably nothing. Someone in a hurry.’
‘Made me jump, I can tell you.’
‘I don’t think we should go to that warehouse,’ said Helen. ‘I have a really nasty feeling about this.’
‘Oh, come on, we want to find out what Letitia is up to. Now’s our chance. And we may get Moody too. That’s what you want.’
No, Helen thought, I want my mother’s killer. Whoever that may be.
Jason woke feeling cold and found himself sprawled on his stomach, clutching a cushion. The room was dark apart from the street light across the road, but he needed no light to tell him he was alone.
He sat up and felt the space on the other half of the bed where Helen’s warm naked body had been, but the bed cover was quite cool. She hadn’t just slipped to the bathroom, then; she’d been gone for a while.
Fumbling on the floor for his clothes, his hand bumped against something. Helen’s rucksack. Some papers and a notebook had spilled out of the open top. He switched on the bedside light and gathered up the papers, putting them back in the bag without looking at them. He’d already gone through her personal things once, and didn’t want to do it again.