The Flower Girls Read online

‘Yes, of course she will,’ Amy had replied. ‘She’s going to be absolutely fine, Rose-Red. Don’t you worry about anything. Mummy’s here.’

  Rosie had lowered her chin and tears had spilled onto the pale pink of her unicorn T-shirt. Fifteen minutes later, they were outside their hotel room with the social worker briskly telling them that she would pick them up at eight a.m. sharp and they should try and get some sleep.

  Sleep, Amy thought as she stared up at the lights from the dual carriageway outside traversing the ceiling, the hum of traffic still constant even this late at night. She turned and looked at her daughter, lying next to her peacefully, her eyelashes dark on her cheeks. Sleep was very far away from Amy as she lay thinking about her girls. One so close to her, and one a thousand light years distant in the way she had always been.

  Oh, precious girl, Amy thought, anger flaring and battling for purchase against the tears that threatened to fall.

  Oh, silly, silly girl. What have you done, my precious girl?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘How on earth have they managed to stay together?’ Will asks as he stands in the queue at the crowded deli with Joanna.

  ‘Hmm?’ she murmurs, running her eyes over the blackboard in front of them which soars above their heads to ceiling height. ‘Who on earth would ever want tuna and banana in a sandwich?’ she asks nobody in particular, a look of disgust on her face as she moves over to the drinks fridge next to them in the cramped space.

  ‘Your sister and Rob,’ Will answers, taking the two bottles of San Pellegrino that Joanna passes him. He shuffles forward in the line behind two suited men, heads bent to their iPhones. ‘I’ve always wondered. Because I mean,’ he says, his voice low to prevent anyone overhearing, ‘it’s a common phenomenon. Couples breaking up after the death of a child. Particularly after a murder.’ He glances at Joanna to check she’s OK with this line of questioning. Sometimes she can be robust about Kirstie’s death but often she will clamp down and not want to discuss anything about more personal details relating to her family. ‘It’s much rarer for them to stay together.’

  Joanna shrugs, taking one of the waters and rooting through her handbag for her purse. ‘Debbie was pregnant with Ben at the time. So they had to stay together to look after him. And,’ she moves to the counter, putting her bottle on top, ‘they do just love each other. I don’t know what Deb would do without Rob. Tuna mayo and sweetcorn on a baguette, please,’ she directs to the woman wearing a hairnet behind the counter. ‘Really, I think they were just lucky. It brought them together rather than pulling them apart.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder about the Bowmans, though,’ Will says. ‘Ham and cheese on brown, thanks.’

  Joanna gives him a sharp look. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, did they manage to stay together? They were put under so much stress themselves.’

  ‘Nothing by comparison to Rob and Debbie’s suffering,’ Joanna retorts.

  ‘No, of course,’ Will says, handing a twenty-pound note over the counter. ‘But imagine dealing with it nonetheless. Your own child responsible for one of the most horrific crimes the country has ever seen. Having to live another life, in secret.’ He grabs the white paper bags containing the sandwiches along with his change, not noticing the wide eyes of the woman behind the counter. Joanna gives her a quick reassuring smile, raising her eyebrows as if to say: What’s he on about, eh?

  ‘How do you ever get past that? How can you live your life knowing that someday, somewhere, someone could turn around and point a finger and say – “I recognise you. You’re the parents of that murderer.’’ ’

  They exit the shop into a clear and cold January day. ‘Seriously, Will? I have absolutely no pity for them whatsoever,’ Joanna says as they walk together along the pavement, edging past a woman with a double buggy. ‘They raised Laurel Bowman. They have to be held responsible.’

  ‘Really? Is that what you think?’ He looks surprised. ‘Ah, look, never mind. We probably shouldn’t talk about this.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Joanna says. ‘It’s nothing I haven’t thought about before. Been asked about by the liberal media . . .’ She smiles at him.

  ‘Well, OK,’ Will goes on tentatively. ‘So, there was never any evidence of abuse or bad treatment of Laurel, was there? She did well at school. She had piano lessons, for God’s sake,’ he snorts. ‘They were so bloody middle-class. It’s hardly the stereotype the Daily Mail would have us believe. Under-privileged, abandoned, angry little match girl.’

  ‘That would be the Guardian’s view,’ Joanna corrects him. ‘The Daily Mail would just say that she’s wicked. And they’re not wrong. I mean,’ she halts outside the door to the Bang to Rights office, putting her key into the lock, ‘like you say, she had no reason to do it. None. One day, she just wakes up and decides to kidnap a toddler. Kirstie, as it turns out.’ Her voice is bitter. ‘Do people – kids – do that unless they’ve been primed for it, unless something in their background has led them to that point? Meaning they’ve watched it on films, played video games – like the Bulger murderers, Thompson and Venables. Normal kids don’t just think one day: Oh, I know! I’ll go and torture and abuse a baby girl. Either they’re nurtured into it or they’re just born evil.’

  ‘Thompson and Venables didn’t play video games. That’s apocryphal. Presumably the judge mentioned it in his sentencing to give some – any – kind of rationale for a crime he considered incomprehensible. But there’s no evidence they were playing violent games,’ Will says, following her up the stairs. ‘Anyway, what you’re saying is that Laurel Bowman must have been genetically wired to be wicked.’

  ‘Yep. And that explains the parents too,’ Joanna says, sinking down into the chair at her desk and pulling open the sandwich bag. ‘It lets them off the hook to a certain extent. Which,’ she points her baguette in Will’s direction, ‘I know negates my earlier point.’ She looks down, thinking. ‘I just don’t feel any pity for Amy and Gregor Bowman. I can’t. Because whatever they’re suffering now, or have suffered in the past, is nothing – nothing – to what Debbie and Rob have been through. There’s no comparison,’ she repeats. ‘And even though they are still together, they were destroyed by it. Destroyed. We all were to a certain extent.’ Joanna puts her sandwich down, her appetite gone. ‘That day, all those years ago, it changed everyone’s lives. None of us will ever forget it.’

  ‘And what about if you don’t believe in evil?’ Will asks. ‘What’s the answer then?’

  Joanna is silent, contemplating this. She picks up her barely touched sandwich and flicks it into the bin. ‘Then you’ve got a problem,’ she says.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Toby sits in the hospital waiting room, his hands still cold after the walk from the Tube. A huge cast-iron radiator clanks in one corner, water gurgling inside, a negligible heat emanating. The room is filled with chairs occupied by wan-faced patients, sitting obediently with crossed legs, newspapers aloft. They are all men of a certain age, a certain portly stature. Toby looks round the room and feels like a clone of a middle-aged man, a man on the cusp of old age, a man with a prostate bulging uncomfortably inside him.

  He sighs and folds his newspaper, placing it across his knee. He looks up at the ceiling and shuts his eyes. Six pounds lost since his diagnosis, with twenty-two more to go if he is indeed to be operated on. Life is a slog at the moment, a trawling through treacle with a monkey on his back. And he can’t even eat the treacle.

  He had once considered his job the most noble of all professions. A criminal defence solicitor. A paragon of non-judgement. A man who would counsel and provide fair and just legal advice, whatever the crime, whatever the type of defendant. He wouldn’t be one of those lawyers who would gradually get worn down, mired in the sinewy fats of their own cynicism. This would never happen to him, for the simple reason that he believed in the system so absolutely that any variation in his thinking could only indicate the most abject turnabout in his personal philosophy. And
, of course, as a twenty-one-year-old law graduate, beginning his legal Articles with stars in his eyes, his philosophy was as grounded in him as his love for his parents or the memory of his home address.

  Thirty years later, though, while he can remember the address of his first flat out of law school, he can’t remember the details of its rooms any more. They blur into dashes of brief memories, spasms of recollection when faced with a particular smell, or a song playing on the radio.

  And as for the love he had for his parents: well, there was a narrative that ended with his representation of Laurel. His brother Gregor had decided to break all contact with him because of his continued connection with her and so had his parents. In their seventies by the time of the murder, they had not so much been shocked by the scandal involving their ten-year-old granddaughter as withered into submission. They had shrivelled behind closed curtains, their faces wrinkled tight like milk skin, their mouths set and stubborn. Toby hasn’t spoken to them in nearly twenty years. He suspects they are in a nursing home now, if they aren’t dead, and he feels nothing about it. A state of being that he experiences about most things these days.

  Defending Laurel was, in Toby’s life, as seismic an event, as immaculate, as the Rapture. After the trial, all ten weeks of it, he had no longer been the same man. And he would say the same of the majority of the solicitors, social workers, policemen and women, and even Mr Justice Follett, who had all gazed down upon little Laurel as she sat in an adult dock, playing with a rubber band in her lap, her lips trembling. Her dedicated social worker had had to help her to stand to hear the jury’s verdict. When it was relayed, in a shaking voice by the foreman of the jury, that she had been found guilty, with malice aforethought, of the murder of Kirstie Swann, she had cried at last. Eyes that had been dry for the whole trial now sprang forth a well of tears; her knees buckled as she was led down to the cells.

  Gregor had been at the trial although Amy hadn’t managed it. She was surviving on a cocktail of Valium and antidepressants. They had thought she would make it that morning. Toby had begged her, telling her Laurel needed to see her, needed to say goodbye to her mum. But Amy had faltered at the front door, at once nervous and resolute. ‘I can’t go through with it,’ she had said, her expression mulish. ‘I can’t have them all looking at me like that, with such hatred. It’ll break me, Gregor.’ She had clawed at her husband’s chest and he had submitted, walked on his own to the waiting car, shoulders hunched in the falling drizzle.

  After the trial, when Laurel had been taken to the secure unit where she knew she would spend the next eight years, Toby had gone with his brother to a tiny, dark pub he knew, around the corner from the Crown Court. They had sat deep in a corner, nursing pints of bitter, Gregor still in his coat, collar up, shivering from tension.

  ‘She can’t take much more of this,’ he had said.

  ‘Laurel?’

  ‘Amy. The police say they can move us tomorrow. Somewhere nobody knows us. Give us new identities.’

  Toby bit his lip, thinking over what the judge had said at the sentencing, the violence with which he had directed his remarks to Laurel as she had stared at him, uncomprehending. The shouts from the public gallery, the high fives, the heat of wrath from all those adults displayed towards a ten year old. As Laurel had left the dock, turning onto the stairs and facing the courtroom, someone had shouted from above, ‘How do you feel now, you little bitch?’

  Toby shook his head. ‘If only Justice Follett hadn’t identified her,’ he said quietly. ‘If she was still Child X, you wouldn’t need to be so frightened of payback. Of revenge.’

  ‘People know who we are anyway,’ Gregor answered. ‘Everyone in Grassington does. There’s no way we can go back there.’

  ‘But you could live somewhere near Laurel,’ Toby persisted. ‘Somewhere where you can visit her. See her regularly.’

  ‘Our family has been destroyed because of her.’ Gregor shook his head. ‘What about Rosie?’ he said. ‘What about her life? Is she supposed to have that ruined too? It’s bad enough that we’ve lost Laurel.’

  ‘You haven’t lost her. She’s right here. She needs you,’ Toby said.

  ‘But who is she?’ Gregor avoided his brother’s eyes, staring up at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know any more. And Amy certainly doesn’t.’ He forced his eyes to meet his brother’s. ‘You should never have taken her case.’

  ‘How could we have trusted anyone else?’

  ‘It should have been someone different. Someone not part of our family. Now . . . the whole thing’s so messed up.’

  ‘It is messed up, Gregor. That’s exactly why I stepped in. I wanted Laurel to have the best possible chance.’

  Gregor ran his hands over his face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know. I’m terrified of losing them too. Amy and Rosie.’

  ‘You won’t lose them,’ Toby said firmly. ‘But if you cut out Laurel, abandon her, that girl will have no one. She’ll be on her own in an institution. For all those years. You heard what the judge said. She’s not eligible for parole until she’s at least eighteen. It will ruin her. He may as well have given her the death penalty.’

  Gregor finished his beer in one big swallow and put his glass down carefully on the table. ‘She’s already been given it, hasn’t she? What’s her life going to be now? Wherever she goes, people will know. I mean,’ he gave a bitter laugh, ‘what job’s she ever going to get? No one will want her anywhere near them. Her life is over.’ He leaned forward, fist tight around his empty pint glass. ‘Over.’

  Toby pushed his half-drunk pint away, searching his brother’s face with bewildered eyes. ‘Come on, Gregor. It’s bad, I know. But we’ll get through this. Laurel’s a child! She’s your little girl. And she always will be. She needs you to help her.’ He laid a hand on Gregor’s sleeve. ‘You have to be there for her.’

  Gregor jerked his arm away, his eyes glistening. ‘Don’t tell me what I have to do. What do you know about it? Look at us now. Bloody life sentences for all of us. We can’t go home. You saw what they did to our house. The graffiti . . . We can’t go anywhere without being terrified some psycho’s going to kill us. What’s left for us, Toby? Everything’s gone. Even her, even Laurel. I don’t know who she is any more. I mean . . . it’s easy for you, isn’t it? Sitting there all clever and wise. But it’s not your child, is it? It’s not your life.’ Gregor wiped his mouth, rubbing away spittle.

  ‘No,’ Toby had said. ‘But she is yours. And nothing’s ever going to change that.’

  Gregor stared at him for a moment. ‘Fuck you,’ he said at last, pushing back his stool and leaving the pub with his head down.

  ‘Toby Bowman?’ The receptionist calls his name, jolting him back to the hospital waiting room. ‘You can go through now.’

  That was when it happened, Toby thinks as he hefts himself to his feet. He remembers the day he saw his brother turn his back on his child, and still he feels the guilt, the terrible raw guilt, of it. That was the grenade that pulverised the sanctum of his legal citadel. He had known it was right to fight for Laurel – she, who had no one else on her side. Of all people, she needed someone – anyone – to take her case, to speak for her. But in doing so, in doing what he knew was the right thing, he had lost his brother, and his parents, forever.

  Even if his niece was as innocent as the driven snow, the decision he had made that day had changed his view of the law. Suddenly, it became something not only rational but emotional. Suddenly, it was not just about due process, it was about what was right. And that had shifted his perspective. If it’s not about due process, you can’t be dispassionate, you have to take a view, and this was something that before his niece’s case Toby had been certain was wrong. Previously, he had wholly believed that the law should be an impartial master, weigh only in fact, not feeling.

  This change had made him hate Laurel just a little bit. Because even if she hadn’t killed that child, he could never know the truth for sure. She was the firs
t one to make him see, to cause the scales to fall from his eyes.

  See that the law has nothing to do with the truth.

  God . . . he thinks as he leaves the hospital eventually, with his prognosis tucked next to his newspaper, inside his satchel. He desperately needs a coffee to deal with his bounding, leaping thoughts.

  … the law has nothing to do with the truth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The car edges its way across the icy gravel away from the hotel. Jonny is at the wheel, staring grimly ahead of him. Evie is in the passenger seat, clicking her tongue against her teeth, her long legs bunched up to her chest.

  ‘There they are,’ Jonny murmurs, changing gears and pressing down on the accelerator. ‘Vultures.’

  Expelling frosty breaths into the air are a huddle of photographers and journalists. One man in fingerless gloves holds a bulky television camera at his thigh. Others smoke cigarettes and crack jokes, their gaze never leaving the façade of the hotel. They are craggy and worn, with beer-flushed faces and eyes as sharp as flint.

  On the backseat of the car, underneath a pale blue blanket, Hazel keeps her eyelids tightly shut, feeling the warmth of her breath against the wool pressing down on her nose. She senses the car speed up, the sound of its tyres spinning over the frozen ground.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Jonny mutters. ‘Get out of the way, you idiots!’ He beeps quickly on the horn and a woman in jeans and a Puffa jacket hops out of the way. ‘Piss off,’ he says to her through gritted teeth.

  One of the journalists bangs the car roof as they pass and Hazel flinches in her hiding place. It is only after what seems like hours, when Jonny finally tells her that it is safe and they have left the hotel grounds, that she risks uncovering her face, blinking in the bright of the day.

  There is so much to say that there appears to be nowhere to begin. The three of them are silent, digesting the earlier controlled chaos with the arrival of the paramedics and the coastguard helicopter that was commandeered to speed Georgie to hospital. Once she had been found, it had seemed they were free to tell Hillier they were leaving, bundling their possessions into the car, taking Max’s advice to hide Hazel from the waiting press. Now they sit quietly, watching the countryside race past them, thinking of all that has transpired in the last twenty-four hours and how it will affect them.