The Bad Things: A gripping crime thriller full of twists and turns

‘That’s the way it works.’

He sighed and turned to look at her. ‘Is this gonna make you even worse?’

‘Even worse? What do you mean?’

‘Come on, Mum. You know what I mean. You don’t let me have a life now. And if there’s some murderer roaming the streets—’

‘It’s only because I care and want to keep you safe. Anyway, the courts say she’s not a murderer.’

‘Mum. I’ve said this before. Harry was killed fifteen years ago. Fifteen, you know? And Millie? Who knows what happened to her, but it happened. A long time ago. It wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t yours.’

Alex closed her eyes and let the guilt invade her body.

‘Mum? Mum? Are you listening to me?’

She opened her eyes. ‘Yes, of course I am.’

‘No, you’re not.’ He turned back to the screen, disgust evident on his face. ‘You never do.’

Alex looked at him. Did she have any idea what her own son was thinking or feeling? She saw more than the beginnings of fluff on his chin and wondered who was going to teach him to shave. Maybe he had already done it, guided by his friends. She ached for him inside and, for the first time, wondered at her wisdom in going it alone after she’d got pregnant. Not that she’d any choice, as the one-night-stand father hadn’t wanted to know. But still.

His hands were busy with the controller. ‘Besides. Me and my mates think they should bring the death penalty back. For murderers of kids. They don’t deserve to live. Do they, Mum?’ Another zombie bit the dust.

What should she say? Teenagers saw things in black and white – there was no grey or in-between in their world. But then, how could she disagree with him when she didn’t? For most of her life she had been vehemently against the death penalty, arguing that it was plain murder by the state, and that the sign of a civilized society was the way it treated criminals. But that was then. Fifteen years ago she changed and believed nothing short of hanging would have been good enough for Martin Jessop and the same for Jackie Wood, even though she was only found guilty of being an accessory. But the pair of them made the family go through a long and tortuous court case, which completely destabilized Sasha. There had been no rest for any of them; every day they had to live with what had happened.

Now she hated her, Jackie Wood, more than him. That woman could have stopped Jessop. She could have not given him an alibi and saved them weeks of misery, of the police hunting for the bodies.

But although Jessop was dead, the guilt was still alive in her. Her house. Her garden. Her fault.

If Jackie Wood had any self-respect, any at all, she would reveal where Millie was buried.

‘Do you ever wonder what happened to Millie?’ Gus’s voice broke into her thoughts.

She took his hand and squeezed it. ‘All the time.’

‘Ask her, Mum, won’t you?’

She nodded, her throat all at once too full to speak.

8 (#ulink_a6b267ce-fb83-5c98-9c9d-25691f88dd9d)

The rain had eased off by the time Alex reached the caravan site at the harbour end, but still she pulled her scarf up around her face. The rain might have stopped, but the wind was still strong enough to make skin sore, especially when combined with the salt from sea spray. The sea looked rough and wild, too, and you couldn’t tell where the greyness of the sky bleached into the greyness of the sea. Plenty of white horses rolled into the shore, only broken up by the groynes that stretched out like witches’ fingers into the water. Seagulls swooped and screeched overhead, and in the distance the smooth, ping-pong dome of the nuclear power station rose like a modernist sculpture.

The caravan site, rather obviously called ‘Harbour’s End’ was, as it said on the tin, at the end of the harbour road and opposite the lifeboat station. At its entrance were the public toilets.

She looked at the piece of paper that had the directions to the caravan on it; the cold air making her shiver. Number forty-four. Down the main bit of road, turn second left, and it was at the end of the row.

The wind moaned in and around the lines of static caravans. She saw the odd person in the distance, tending to the outside of the vans, but generally it was very quiet. A ghost town.

Jackie Wood’s caravan, which was cream and green with a lick of decay, just like the other hundred or so, was opposite the river that ran into the sea, with a good view of the fishermen’s ramshackle huts and the row upon row of fishing boats, some from Lowestoft, some from Aldeburgh, most from Sole Bay. There were net curtains at the windows, and a couple of terracotta pots either side of the door, sporting fronds of grass and dead twigs. Alex stopped, realizing she was shivering not just from the cold, but also because she felt lost, a bit frightened even. What was she expecting Jackie Wood to say? Come on, she told herself, treat this like any other interview.

She thought back to the last time she’d seen Wood, before the court case. She was being interviewed on the News Channel – News 24 as it was then – sitting in her flat, Martin Jessop by her side. Mr Jessop from upstairs. Nice flats they were too; a well done Georgian conversion in a decent part of town. Nobody wanted to rent them after Jackie Wood and Martin Jessop were arrested for murder. They were holiday lets now; completely repainted, redecorated, rehabilitated. There was a campaign to get the whole block demolished and a memorial garden planted. But the Sole Bay Society put their boots in and saved the Georgian building. It didn’t really matter to Alex – Georgian building or memorial garden – it was still where her nephew and niece had been murdered.

When they first went missing, there she was, Jackie Wood, sitting next to him – the murderer – and saying what a tragedy it was. How the community had to pull together, that they were pulling together, and were organizing searches of the town, the beaches, the dunes, the harbour. The local and national media were hungry for interviewees about ‘the situation’, and Jackie Wood and Martin Jessop fitted the willing bill. Wood, the local librarian; Jessop, a lecturer at the college in Ipswich. There was much speculation about their relationship. Again, something else the media wanted to romanticize; document every twist and turn.

If only they had known there was a much better story than that.

If she closed her eyes, Alex could still see her, head cocked slightly to one side, the furrowed forehead, the oh-so-sympathetic expression. He, meanwhile, just looked at his shoes. Then, suddenly, he gazed at the camera and shook his head.

‘They were lovely children,’ he said. ‘So polite. Full of life.’

Past tense.

And she remembered knowing then; knowing absolutely that they were the ones who had taken the twins.

When they were arrested, the feeding frenzy really started.

‘She is in,’ said a voice from behind her, interrupting her memories. ‘She’s always in.’

Alex looked over her shoulder. A woman of about thirty with a cigarette in one hand, mug in the other, was standing in the doorway of the caravan opposite. The dark roots were showing in her hair, and her face had lost the fresh-skin look of youth. Alex wondered what she was doing in a caravan on the Suffolk coast in the middle of winter.

‘I came this way looking for work.’ The woman had read her mind. ‘Thought it might be easier here than in the city.’

She wondered which city she meant. ‘And has it been easier?’ she asked.

The woman shrugged. ‘No, not really. But I have got a few shifts at the Tesco’s on the high street, so I reckon that’s better than nothing.’

Alex nodded. The idea of a new supermarket in the middle of the town had caused a lot of local consternation when planning permission was granted. There were petitions, and placards, and letters to the planning office and the local MP, and God knows who, but it had lumbered forward like a boulder rolling down a hill squashing everything in its path.

‘Anyway,’ the woman went on, ‘give her a knock.’

‘Thanks,’ Alex said.

‘Do you know her?’

‘Sort of.’ She managed to give a rictus smile.

‘She looks familiar.’

‘Really?’

The woman shrugged. ‘Tell her she can come over and have a coffee if she wants. Wouldn’t want her feeling lonely here.’

Alex nodded. ‘Okay.’

The woman shut her door.

Alex swallowed. Her mouth was dry and her heart was thudding. She pressed her fist against her breastbone. ‘You can do this,’ she whispered. The enormity of her actions had just dawned on her. She was about to come face-to-face with the woman who was – whatever some bloody judge said – complicit in the murder of Harry and Millie. And she was supposed to be carrying out an interview with Jackie Wood when all she wanted to do was to shake out the answer to the question that had haunted her family for more than a decade – where was Millie buried?