Until You're Mine (42 page)

‘The thing is, they’re key philanthropic figures, Heather,’ he’d said when I grumbled on about capitalists. ‘They make regular donations to many major research facilities, medical institutions, the space programme, education – you name it. It’s just how the world works. The best we can do is make it as hard as possible for them. And to do that, I need little old you in this house in rainy Birmingham looking after those kids.’

I was up for the challenge.

It turned out the Sheehan brothers were only a very small part of the criminal activity, and without the paperwork I discovered they might have got off on a technicality. My boss assured me that with the evidence I’d provided in the form of letters, printed emails and statements, there was no way they could claim they didn’t know the provenance of the money they were laundering on behalf of their clients. They were bang to rights and would go to trial in the spring.

Elizabeth Sheehan hadn’t known anything about her brothers’ activities. Her legal work had been at the opposite end of the social spectrum. And having got to know him a little before he’d left, it was a shame that James hadn’t come out quite so clean. His involvement with the brothers was now a matter for the Navy after it was discovered he’d conveniently ‘inherited’ illegal trust funds in Elizabeth’s name. There would be a full Naval inquiry and no doubt a dismissal from service.

‘If in doubt, photograph everything,’ my boss had said, and it stuck in my mind. ‘Nearly everything,’ he laughed at the end of our phone call. He told me he’d already destroyed the images of the irrelevant social work files I’d taken to be on the safe side. I’d been instructed, over the course of several weeks, to copy everything I could get my hands on, from the contents of filing cabinets to messy papers in the kitchen drawer. I was simply following my brief and, by all accounts, had given them exactly what they needed.

However, I’d never expected to feel so dreadful at the prospect of leaving the household just as Claudia was due to give birth. It felt as if I was well and truly doing the dirty on her. ‘We’ll feed you a plausible reason to leave,’ my boss had told me, but, of course, a reason was never needed.

Right now, I’m feeling stunned, empty, bereft and certainly very low at the prospect of what I know I have to do.

While the boys are watching television, I make the phone call I have been dreading. They will need a short-notice foster home, and I asked my boss to allow me to deal with this myself. I take a deep breath and make the call to Social Services.

*

‘I’m home,’ I sing out tentatively. It feels odd saying it. The flat smells of strawberries and coffee. Cecelia is sunk into the couch with four boxes of the ripe red fruit arranged around her. She grins up at me. It feels as if I’ve never been away.

‘Heather,’ she says sweetly, almost convincing me everything’s normal. I pray she’s having a good day. There are things we need to discuss.

‘Sissy,’ I say, launching straight in. ‘I’ve been thinking. Things are going to get better around here.’ I stand with winter steaming off me. I remove my jacket.

She doesn’t react. Rather, she puts the biggest strawberry I’ve ever seen into her mouth. She looks dreamy and unreal.

Look after your sister, Heather
, Mum had said.
She’s going to need you for the rest of her life. Promise me you’ll take care of her no matter what
.

‘Look, I don’t know if I nearly lost my job because of you or kept it because of you.’ It’s the start of what I have to tell her, things that I’ve just decided on the walk home but that I’ve been thinking about for ages. ‘I want to look after you, Sissy, honestly I do, but things are going to have to change.
You’re
going to have to change.’ I have her attention. ‘I’m a police officer and it’s a really tough job. I need your help.’

Her eyes don’t divulge whether she’s known this all along and just forgotten it, or if it’s the shock of the century. Either way, she keeps perfectly still.

‘We have to agree on some things.’

Cecelia doesn’t have a clue about my undercover work and I don’t intend to tell her. She remembers that as a geeky eighteen-year-old I joined the force in a fit of panic. I had no idea what to do with my life. I was the clunky average-achiever at school whereas Cecelia was always the arty, creative and fanciful one. She had to be the centre of attention but, unbeknown to her, I was in the background keeping the bullies at bay. Her own secret security guard. It’s always been my job to look after her.

These days, in her more lucid moments, she gets angry and defiant when I shrug and tell her I’m in between jobs, that I’ve left the force and I work in a bar, that I’m a cleaner or a door-to-door salesman. It explains my erratic hours, my sometimes odd clothing, and it’s often loosely the truth depending on the case, but the spoilt side of Sissy still comes thrashing out. She senses when I’m being shifty and she feels threatened. As far as she is concerned, I am alive solely to look after her. And mostly I do.

But in the last year or two, her grasp of reality has loosened and her focus has shifted from obsessing about my work to wanting a baby. The doctor said it might be all the changes of medication she’s had. They can’t seem to find the right one.

‘I’ve been thinking long and hard about stuff.’ I sit down beside her. The sofa groans beneath us. ‘About us, Sissy.’

‘Strawberry?’ she says, holding one out. ‘I want to make edible jewellery.’ She holds the fruit against my neck.

‘For a start, we’re going to move into a new flat.’ It will be a blessed relief to get out of this tiny place.

Cecelia lowers her hand and stares at the strawberry before licking it. It’s as if she hasn’t heard me or digested the implications.

‘We can have a good old clear-out,’ I say. ‘Get somewhere better, somewhere with more room for you to make your jewellery.’ She’s at her best when she’s creating. More volatile and unpredictable, certainly, but somehow she seems more alive. I prefer her that way; the way she was meant to be.

Cecelia’s got a streak of your mother running through her
, Dad told me once.
When we’re dead and buried, you’ll have your work cut out with that one
. He’d laughed and lit a cigarette, and died a few months later. Responsibility passed down the line. It sometimes seems as if our childhood happened to someone else.

Cecelia laughs and pops the strawberry in her mouth. When she bites, juice dribbles out from between her lips. ‘Where will we move to?’ she says incredulously. ‘We never move.’

‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘So it’s about time we did.’

I watch her scan the contents of the flat, mentally packing it all up, making sure I don’t chuck out her much-prized clutter.

‘I’ve got a bit of money saved up,’ I tell her. ‘I can use it as a deposit. And I might be up for a promotion soon.’ She barely reacts to my good news, but that’s just Sissy. My boss sent me an email telling me to see him next week. He wants me to apply for an internal vacancy.

‘We could have a party,’ she suggests. ‘And a cat. And maybe I could get a little shop again.

I sigh. I’d better get on with what I really want to say before she overthinks my plan. ‘You know those little twin boys I told you about?’ I curl my fingers into my palms, hoping she’ll take my lead. Cecelia tries to appear disinterested but nods all the same. Apart from anything, I want someone to know the twins’ fate so it isn’t consigned solely to my thoughts. ‘They’re going to a foster home.’ After that, I don’t know what will become of them. It depends on their father’s fate. ‘And talking of children . . . of babies . . .’ I stumble.

She’s not listening to me.

‘Cecelia,’ I say, taking both her hands in mine. Her heavy eyes try to focus. ‘We’ve got to get one thing straight. You’re not going to have a baby. Do you understand me?’

The blank look gives nothing away.

‘I know you get these ideas in your head and it all seems exciting and wonderful, but believe me, you’re better off concentrating on your designs. Put all your energy into that, will you?’

‘I see,’ she says flatly. I can see the beginnings of an outburst swelling from her feet up. She jams her knees together and locks her arms in a defiant embrace around her body. Then the deep breath in comes, sucking up the entire room, followed by the flushed cheeks, the clenched jaw and the sharpening of her stare. Followed by nothing. The calm before the storm. I know it so well.

‘I’m serious, Sissy. I’m run ragged after what you’ve put me through. I thought I was doing the right thing by trying to indulge your demands, but it got way out of hand. I was as much to blame as you, to be honest, and I should have said a firm no from the start.’

There. It’s out. I was lured into a dark corner of Cecelia’s mind and got caught up in the torrent of her desire. There’s no way she could look after a baby, despite me believing it could be just what she needed, and there was no way I wanted to be pregnant either. I would have had to give up work and take care of the poor little thing myself. That was never in my life’s plan.

‘I want to put it all behind us, Sissy, and pretend it never happened. I’m not proud of what I did, but I’ll hear no more about babies, right?’ I take her by the shoulders and force her to look at me.

‘You have no idea how much I want a baby,’ she whispers in a voice that throws me. For the first time in ages, Cecelia sounds . . . normal, sincere, as if her thoughts have come from somewhere sane. ‘I have
always
wanted a baby.’

‘Oh, you poor thing,’ I say, and I can’t help but think of Claudia for a moment.

‘Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had this huge desire to take care of a baby. To love it, to feed it, to keep it warm and watch it grow up.’ There’s a pause. A still moment of memory. ‘I had this doll,’ she continues, with tears in her eyes. ‘And I prayed it would come to life. I did all kinds of magic to make it real, but it just stayed a cold lump of plastic.’

‘Sissy,’ I say. ‘I had no idea.’ To think, we went through an entire childhood without me knowing this.

‘Perhaps it was because Mum never really, truly loved us.’

It is the most plausible thing ever to have come out of Cecelia’s mouth. ‘I . . . I don’t know if that’s true. I’m sure she loved us in her own way.’ In my head there’s a woman, existing, interacting, taking care of her children, going through the motions of life; but as for love, I can’t say if she truly cared. Perhaps I was too busy watching out for Sissy to notice. As Sissy says, having something to love goes a long way towards filling the void that not being loved leaves behind.

‘Anyway, I know you’re right,’ she continues, sounding less morose now.

‘You do?’

‘I know I can’t have a baby,’ she says quietly. ‘I’m utterly sad about it, though.’ There’s a pathetic finality to it, as if her life had always been written up as childless from the moment of her own conception. ‘To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have been a very good mother,’ she adds resignedly. ‘And, Heather?’ Her face remains disturbingly calm, as if all those years of agony, desire and longing were nothing more than a miscarried dream gone wrong in her unfathomable head.

‘Yes, Sissy?’ I say. Her hands are warm in mine, slightly sticky from the fruit.

‘I’m sorry. Really, I am.’

And then her head is resting on my shoulder, right where it belongs.

RECORD OF INTERVIEW

Person Interviewed:
MORGAN-BROWN, Claudia

Place of Interview:
Police HQ, WMP, Birmingham

Date of Interview:
28/11/12

Time Commenced:
10:18
Time Concluded:
11:14

Duration:
56 minutes (inc. break)

Tape/Image Reference Number:
11/BH4/03561

Other Persons Present:
DC 8932 P. Ainsley

DI Scott:
This interview is being tape-recorded and may be used in evidence if this case is brought to trial. The interview is taking place at Birmingham Police Headquarters and the time is currently eighteen minutes past ten a.m. on the twenty-eighth of November two thousand and twelve. I am Detective Inspector Adam Scott and also present are Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher and Detective Constable Patrick Ainsley.
   We are here to interview you about the offences for which you have been arrested. Can you state your name, please?

CMB:
Claudia Morgan-Brown.

DI Scott:
And your date of birth?

CMB:
Fourteenth of April nineteen seventy-two.

DI Scott:
And please will you confirm, for the tape, that there are no other persons present in the room except those already mentioned?

CMB:
Yes, I can confirm that.

DI Scott:
Before we begin, I must remind you that you have the right to free independent legal advice, but you have elected not to have this. This is an ongoing right, and if you change your mind, please let me know and I can stop the interview so you can do this. I will now caution you that you do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be used in evidence. At the end of the interview I’ll explain to you what happens to the interview tapes.
   Do you know why you’ve been arrested and brought here today?

CMB:
Yes.

DI Scott:
Please speak loudly for the tape. Did you attack and kill Sally-Ann Frith and her unborn baby on or around the fourteenth of November two thousand and twelve?

CMB:
Yes. But I didn’t mean for them to die.

DI Fisher:
Will you explain what you mean by that?