‘The Girls on the Shore’

Matthew took out his mobile and hit a number. ‘Jen, can you do me a favour please? Come to my house. There are two girls in the kitchen. I found them on the beach and their mother’s gone missing. Sit with them. Find out a bit more about them. The family name is Sellers and they’re Olivia and Imogen. I don’t really want to be alone with them if I can’t find the woman.’

‘Course boss.’ The Scouse accent was reassuring. He’d been discomforted by the girls, with their hair pulled tight back from their faces and their watchful eyes. Jen would know the best way to talk to them.

‘And see if you can track down their father. Apparently, he’s working away at the moment, but I don’t know what sort of business he’s in.’

‘Sure.’

He could tell that she was already moving and heard a door slam shut before the line went dead.

Inside, the car seemed spotless, rubbish-free. It was hard to believe that a real family, real children had ever been inside. Matthew liked order, had inherited an obsession with cleanliness from his evangelical mother, but even his car had an occasional sweet wrapper on the floor, or a used parking ticket on the dashboard.

He leant in and felt under the seats. Right at the back, under the driver’s seat, there was a half-bottle of vodka. Empty.

He had a picture of the woman, sitting in her car on the grand drive in the smart street, drinking herself into oblivion while the girls were in the house doing their homework. He assumed that the expensive school, which they considered themselves lucky to attend, would give their pupils a lot of homework.

If the mother were ill, an alcoholic, that might explain her daughters’ watchful eyes, their wariness. The girls would be used to making excuses for her. She would have made them complicit. Perhaps the father had run away, unable to cope. But it wouldn’t explain the phone call that had caused Elizabeth to pull into the side of the road, the diversion to Braunton Great Marsh and the beach with the girls still in the car. Something urgent must have brought her here.

He climbed the shingle bank and walked along the beach away from the house and towards Crow Point. He saw the woman almost immediately, sitting on the dry sand, her back to the dune. The girls had been searching in quite the wrong direction. Because this must be Elizabeth Sellers. Who else could it be? He hadn’t seen her when he was standing with the girls because of the curve of the shore. She was wearing a long down coat with the hood up. She was alone. If she’d been summoned to a meeting on the shore it was over.

The way that the woman sat gave the impression that she was listless and disheartened. Had she been brought here by her husband? Had she learned in some cold, bitter exchange that her marriage was finally over?

Matthew’s work was all about what if? He was always playing out different scenarios in his mind. Jonathan said that was why he was such a good detective; he had imagination, creativity. Matthew pictured a stand-off between two adults, raised voices and tears, the father driving off in his expensive car, leaving the mother to come to terms with a new and lonely life.

As he got closer, Matthew suspected that Elizabeth had been drinking, all thoughts of her daughters forgotten. She seemed slumped against the sandbank. He imagined her drowning in self-pity and vodka, and he felt a flash of anger. These moments of fury came to him occasionally, unbidden as strikes of lightning. He was always ashamed of his lack of control once they’d passed, but he thought now that the Sellers girls, with their politeness and old-fashioned uniforms, deserved better.

‘Mrs Sellers?’

There was no reaction. No sign of life at all. And then another picture came into his head. A body on a beach. A man in cheap jeans and a denim jacket, a tattoo of an albatross on his neck. The first murder case he’d investigated had begun not far from here.

He began processing this as an unexplained death and sorting his response: he would need a medic, and to contact his colleagues. Although this was more likely to be suicide, they’d need to be sure.

At that point the woman turned her head. The movement and her voice, pleasant and deep, startled him.

‘Yes?’

‘I found your daughters on the beach. They’re in my house. They’re a little anxious, but quite safe.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Poor things. I’ve been sitting here much longer than I realized.’ She didn’t sound drunk to him, but he knew that alcoholics could be magnificent actors. She started to scramble to her feet. He held out a hand to help her up. Now he was very close to her, but he couldn’t smell drink on her breath or her clothes.

‘Is anything wrong? The girls said you were driving them to school, when you got a call.’

‘Did they?’ She looked up at him. Her hood had fallen away from her face. Her skin was very pale and smooth, her mouth a little too wide, her blond hair short and expertly cut. ‘No nothing wrong. Not really. I was feeling under the weather and needed some fresh air.’

‘I’m a police officer. It’s in my nature to be suspicious. To ask awkward questions.’

She said nothing and swept loose sand from her coat with her hands. The sunlight caught the grains and made them sparkle like gold dust.

He continued. ‘The girls will be very late for school.’

‘Yes.’ She gave him a little smile. ‘I suppose they will. I should go and collect them, get them on their way.’

He wasn’t sure what else to say. Perhaps he was making a drama out of a rather trivial domestic incident. He had no proof that a crime had been committed, or that the children were in any kind of danger. Elizabeth set off along the beach, walking very quickly. He was about to say that it might be easier if they cut across the bank and walked along the track, but she’d already turned the corner of the point and they could see the white house ahead of them.

‘That’s my house,’ he said. ‘That’s where they are.’

‘It was very kind of you to take them in.’ She spoke as if this was a final comment and there was nothing more to say. He supposed that when they got to the house, she would call the children to her, and they would obey immediately and follow her out to her car. They would drive away and he would have no reason to be involved again.

The thought made him feel sick, panicky. He could call social services and explain his unease, but emergency social workers had many cases of neglect and cruelty to investigate. Would they really see this as a safeguarding issue? A mother had felt unwell, left her children in the car while she went for a walk and got some air.

Perhaps that would be considered a more responsible thing to do than to continue driving. He thought he would contact the school later and see if they had any concerns. He could do that, at least.

+++

Approaching the house, he saw Jen’s car in the drive and immediately relaxed a little. Jen didn’t suffer from flights of fancy. Through the long window, he saw the three of them in the kitchen. Olivia was reading a book, frowning with concentration, and Imogen was drawing. They were ignoring Jen, who seemed to be trying to engage with the younger girl, standing behind her looking down at the picture. But she might not have been there, so absorbed were the girls in what they were doing.

‘Who’s that?’ Elizabeth’s voice was sharp, almost imperious.

‘A colleague. I asked her to look after your daughters while I came to find you.’

The woman nodded, almost relieved it seemed.

‘Thanks so much for all your trouble. We can leave you in peace now.’

‘Why don’t you come in for a coffee?’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘That’s very kind, but I really should get them to school.’

Jen had seen them approaching the house and came to the door to meet them.

Elizabeth Sellers shouted across her to her daughters inside the kitchen. ‘Come along girls. Time to go! Please thank the lady for looking after you.’

‘Not yet,’ Jen said. She blocked the doorway with her body. The girls, who were starting to pack up, looked confused. Jen turned back to them. ‘I bet you’re a bit peckish. I happen to know that the blue tin on the bench there is where Matthew keeps his biscuits. Why don’t you help yourselves? Finish that drawing, Imogen. It’s brilliant. I just want a quick chat with your mum.’

The girls sat, frozen. Imogen looked at her mother for permission, expecting, it seemed, to be denied the treat. But Elizabeth nodded.

Jen had taken her coat from a kitchen chair and pulled it on over her jeans and sweater. ‘It’s a bit parky outside, but I could do with some good clean air. We’ll sit here, shall we? We don’t want the girls ear-wigging.’ She was acting as if she owned the place, leading them to garden chairs placed around a white wrought-iron table. The trees to the side of the house were bare and it felt as if they were surrounded by space and light. Exposed. In the summer Matthew and Jonathan sat here after work, with a glass of wine, looking at the sunset. Now the seat was icy through his clothes and his breath came in clouds.

‘Well,’ Jen said to the woman sitting opposite to her, facing out at the view, the wide sky and the estuary slowly filling up with water. ‘What’s been going on at home?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I’ve been phoning around,’ Jen said. ‘One of my posh neighbours has a daughter at your girls’ school. Brookes is it called? Seems your kids haven’t been there since Christmas.’

‘Ah yes, it’s their first day back for a week. They’ve been a little unwell.’ The woman’s voice was tense, tight.

‘I’ve seen the bruises on Imogen’s arms,’ Jen said. ‘Where she’s been gripped too hard. Old bruises, but they still hurt her. Olivia wouldn’t let me look at her body. Too embarrassed maybe. Or trying to protect someone.’

There was silence.

‘I assume that was why you kept them off school.’

‘You can’t understand.’

‘Oh, believe me, I understand.’ Jen was barely keeping her self-control. ‘I was married to a bastard who beat me. When he started on the kids, that was when I left him.’

‘You think my husband hurt the girls?’ Elizabeth’s shock seemed genuine enough. ‘No! He wouldn’t do that.’

‘Was it you then?’ Matthew kept his voice gentle. He’d take over the interview now. If Jen lost her temper, the woman would only become distant and defensive. ‘I found the empty bottle in your car. Alcoholism is an illness. We can get help for you. Support.’

‘Is that what you think? That I’m an alcoholic?’ The fight had left her. She leaned forwards, her head in her hands. ‘No, I’m not a drinker. Not in that way.’

‘Why don’t you explain?’

‘It’s been such a fight,’ she said, ‘holding it all together.’

Matthew said nothing and shot Jen a look to stop her from speaking too. Elizabeth wanted to talk. She was just trying to find the right words. She looked up.

‘We were older parents. I was thirty-nine when Olivia was born and my husband, Will, is six years older than me. Our lives were ordered. We had careers, a lovely house. We didn’t think a baby would change things very much. We were competent adults; we’d manage the arrival of a small human being into our home as we’d managed everything else. But Olivia was difficult from the beginning. She hardly slept and she cried. Oh, how she cried! And as she got older, she was never still, never content. I took time off work, then we had a series of nannies, but none of them stayed, even when we paid them a fortune. Will escaped into his business. And when he did spend time with Olivia he was cold.’ A pause. ‘Strict.’

‘Cruel?’ Jen asked.

‘He wouldn’t have described it as that.’

The sun had risen above the house now and was shining across them, throwing long shadows across the lawn. Matthew waited for Elizabeth to continue.

‘I discovered I was pregnant again. It wasn’t planned. I considered an abortion, but in the end, I couldn’t do it.’ She paused. ‘From the beginning, Imogen was a very different child. She ate and she slept at regular times. I suppose she was easy to love.’ A pause. ‘Will found her easy to love.’

‘And Olivia resented her.’

‘Olivia hated her.’

‘She caused the bruises?’

Elizabeth nodded. ‘I think she’ll do anything for drama. Her life seems to be one long escape from boredom. If you found an empty bottle in the car, it will have been hers. She steals from us, gets older kids to buy booze for her. She’s always disappearing in the evening and we don’t know where she is. And believe me, she can look a lot older than her age.’

‘Did you try to get help for her?’

The woman didn’t answer directly. ‘The girls started off in our local primary school, but Olivia was always in trouble. Will thought Brookes might provide the structure she needed.’

‘You didn’t ask social services for help? CAMHS?’

Elizabeth shook her head. ‘Will would have seen that as failure. A matter of shame. To have a social worker prying into our lives! He’s a great believer in self-reliance. Except he’s never at home to deal with it all.’ Her voice was faint with exhaustion. Matthew could imagine the relentless discussions about their daughter’s future, battles continuing long into the night.

‘Tell me what happened this morning. Did you get a phone call?’

‘Is that what Olivia told you? No. She asked me to drive here.’

‘And you just did as you were told?’ Jen couldn’t help interrupting.

‘I couldn’t face another scene at school. Olivia refusing to go in. When we got to the shore I needed air and space. I shouldn’t have left them alone in the car together. I see that now. After all, I had Imogen’s safety to think about.’

‘And Olivia,’ Matthew said. ‘She needs help too.’ He paused. ‘We’re all redeemable.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ Her voice was mocking.

‘I do.’ It was only as he spoke that he realized it was true. He looked through the window at the girls in the kitchen. They were still drawing. From here they looked like perfectly well-adjusted children

‘You should talk to their father,’ Jen said. ‘Or leave him. The three of you might cope better without him.’

Matthew was shocked. It wasn’t their place to break up a family. But he said nothing and waited for Elizabeth to reply.

Elizabeth stared out at the shore. ‘Sometimes I dream of doing that, but I don’t think I’m sufficiently brave.’

‘I didn’t think I was that brave either.’ Jen paused. Matthew watched. Still he said nothing and Jen continued speaking. ‘My husband hit me. Olivia’s troubled. Seems to me that not facing up to her problems is a kind of abuse too.’

There was a moment of silence. Elizabeth had started crying, but she made no noise. Matthew could hear the suck of the tide on the beach. The woman looked up at Jen.

‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘I have friends who work in the field,’ Jen said. ‘We can help. If you’d like us to.’

Matthew was aware that he was holding his breath. At last Elizabeth nodded, slowly, as if an important decision had been made.

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‘I’ll make some calls,’ Jen said. ‘We’ll go in. Out of the cold.’

Elizabeth nodded again.

A little later, the family walked away, the mother in between the girls, her arms around them both. Olivia briefly rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. Matthew stood on the terrace and watched them go.

Back in the house Jen was making tea. ‘Good work,’ he said.

She grinned. ‘Hardly legitimate police stuff though, is it? Not sure what the boss will say. Two detectives spending all morning on a sad little girl.’

‘It’s crime prevention,’ Matthew said. ‘Without you, who knows how it would end up?’ He thought of all the young women he’d met in his career who had gone off the rails, committing ever more serious crimes. They’d all once been sad little girls, with no one to look out for them. Perhaps this time their intervention would make the difference.

—The End —