It was a question Thomas Simms had asked himself repeatedly as he made plans for the girls’ funeral. When you’re deep in shock and assaulted by grief, how do you find the right way to pay tribute to someone—to two people—whom you loved more than life itself? It was an impossible task, but it had to be done—the thought of drying up while making the funeral oration was too horrific for words.
For a long time the answer had eluded him. There were so many amazing things he could say about Karen and Alice, but each time he gathered their many virtues—the many happy memories—together, he was crippled by his sense of loss, unable to think or say anything that wasn’t steeped in bitterness and regret. And nobody wanted to hear that.
But now, as Thomas pushed his son up the church aisle in a wheelchair, he suddenly knew what he would say. There was one thing that had struck him with real force this morning as he’d straightened his son’s tieand wiped the tears from his freckled face. And that was that Karen and Alice, though gone,wouldlive on—through Luke. They all had the same coloring and shared many of the same mannerisms. His hazel eyes were identical to Alice’s and when he laughed his nose crinkled up—that was pure Karen. They had similar beliefs and shared the same daft sense of humor—many was the time they had all been reduced to hysterics by theAirplanemovies. They were so similar in so many ways and Thomas was surprised at how much comfort that now gave him.
He felt himself start to smile, then immediately swallowed it back down. People wouldn’t understand and he couldn’t be bothered to explain himself to disapproving relatives. But the feeling was real and Thomas clung to it now as he prepared himself for the most difficult two hours of his life.
“Dad?”
Thomas looked down to find Luke’s eyes fixed on him.
“Can you hear that?”
Thomas had been so lost in his own thoughts that he hadn’t heard a thing. But he knew instantly what his son was referring to. Even above the somber tones of the organ, loud sirens could now be heard. One, two, three emergency vehicles, maybe more, racing past the church on their way somewhere fast.
“Do you think it’s . . . ?” Luke began.
“No, son. It’s probably just a false alarm. Nothing to do with us, so don’t worry.”
Thomas was determined that his son would not be ruled by fear. There were still many questions to be answered, many painful discoveries to make perhaps, but he refused to let his son spend his life jumping at shadows. Someone had tried to destroy his family and they had failed—Luke’s happiness and confidence would be Thomas’s riposte to the person who had tried to break them. Though his son was still working his way through his injuries, both mental and physical, it was Thomas’s jobto see that he made it out the other side in one piece. As he pushed Luke to his place next to the front-row pews, Thomas knew that this was it for him now—his job was to guide his son safely through the next few years until he could stand on his own two feet. And that, Thomas reflected, was something thatheshared with Karen. Had she been in his shoes, she would have done exactly the same.
115
She jumped from plank to plank, enjoying the simple pleasure of the game. When she was little, she’d played it with other truants, pretending that if you misjudged your jump and landed on the stones that separated the railway sleepers, then you’d fall through the tracks and straight down to hell.
Later, when Naomie was older, the game had taken a more sinister turn. She would walk the railway track alone, challenging a train to appear in front of her. To alleviate her boredom she would set herself challenges, determining to walk to a certain point on the track, regardless of whether a train appeared or not. No train ever did, so she’d never had the chance to test her courage, to see whether she would have held her nerve. But she always thought she would’ve seen it through, if the cards had fallen that way.
But now things were going her way and suddenly she felt the vibrations on the tracks and, moments later, the unmistakable growl of atrain approaching. It was like she could do no wrong at the moment and she laughed out loud—hadshesummoned the train? Was the world finally dancing to her tune? This was nonsense, of course, but it was a nice fantasy to indulge in. She paused to listen, reveling in the slow but steady growth in volume, as the train hastened toward her.
Now it was coming into view, arcing round the curved track a hundred feet ahead, before straightening up to charge directly at her. Still she didn’t move. She felt in control of the situation, as if the train were just a character in her movie. Her feet were glued to the tracks as they had been so many times before. But she felt no fear now, only exhilaration and joy.
A sharp blast of the train’s horn made her look up. The driver had spotted her and was sounding his horn frantically. She made no attempt to move, so now he applied the emergency brake, metal colliding with metal in a hideous scream. But it was too little, too late. Naomie had chosen her spot well and there was no way he would be able to stop in time.
So many times she’d dreamed of this moment, had seen her own destruction in a shattering explosion of blood and bone. Whenever the world was black and her bruises smarted, she hadlongedfor this moment. But things were different now, so even as the train careered toward her, as the driver repeatedly gestured to her to move, she simply smiled, raised her middle finger and stepped out of the way of the screeching train, before calmly walking away.
Thingsweredifferent now. Now she had something to live for.
116
“They’ll be here in five minutes. What do you want to do?”
Sanderson’s voice was as tense as her expression. Following Sharon Jackson’s tip-off, she and Helen had raced over to Mandy Blayne’s house, gaining a head start on the emergency services. Helen had called them in as a precaution, but as reports of a house fire in St. Denys began to filter through via police radio, it became clear to both of them that they had been too slow to stop Naomie’s latest attack.
Helen paused before responding to Sanderson’s question. Mandy’s house was ablaze and there was no sign of its unfortunate owner. Smoke billowed out of the windows on both floors, but more so on the lower level, suggesting the fire had not fully taken hold yet. Was Mandy even in there? Helen couldn’t be sure, but Naomie hadn’t put a foot wrong so far, so they had to assume the worst. Waiting for the emergency services to arrive was the sensible thing to do, but the whole house might have gone up by then, by which point any chance of rescuing Mandy would have passed.
“We’ve got to go in,” Helen replied, already marching toward the back of the house. The front door was locked from the inside and Helen felt sure that Naomie would have entered the house from the rear, where her trespassing would go undetected. “But I’m going in alone. You wait here and—”
“No chance,” Sanderson said firmly. She had let Helen go into a fire on her own before, and the memory still haunted her. “If you’re going in, so am I.”
Helen nodded her assent—there was no time to argue now—and they marched round to the back door. As Helen expected, one of the panes had been broken and the open door lolled on its hinges. Helen hurried inside, Sanderson close behind. Immediately they were assaulted by an intense heat and smothered by a cloud of thick smoke that made it impossible to see each other, let alone the geography of the room. Grabbing Sanderson before she lost sight of her completely, Helen dragged her junior officer back out of the house to safety.
“What now?” Sanderson barked through a coughing fit.
Helen was already casting her eyes over the back of the house for another means of entry. There was no shed, no sign of anything that might contain a ladder, so acting on instinct, Helen grabbed a wheelie bin and rammed it up against the wall.
“Climb on and give me a hand up,” she said quickly.
Before she had finished her sentence, Sanderson was on top of it, holding out her hand to pull Helen up. Helen climbed up and, pressing her heel into Sanderson’s interlinked hands, made a sudden upward lunge for the second-floor windowsill. Her fingers scrambled up the rough brickwork and just as she felt her body begin to fall again after its swift ascent, she caught hold of the windowsill with three fingers of her left hand. She hung there for a moment, out of Sanderson’s reach now and suddenly exposed, before, swinging her body to the right, she managed to get some purchase with her other hand. Now the momentumwas with her and, using her legs to push herself up the brickwork, she jammed first one elbow, then the other onto the narrow sill.
