The Silent Ones Read online

  Contents

  Also by Ali Knight

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Ali Knight

  Wink Murder

  The First Cut

  Until Death

  About the author

  Ali Knight has worked as a journalist and sub-editor at the BBC, Guardian and Observer and helped to launch some of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard’s most successful websites. Ali’s first novel, Wink Murder, was chosen as one of the Independent’s Books of the Year 2011. She lives with her family in London.

  Visit Ali’s website to find out more about her and her psychological thrillers at www.aliknight.co.uk and follow her on Twitter @aliknightauthor.

  THE SILENT ONES

  Ali Knight

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Ali Knight 2015

  The right of Ali Knight to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 9781444777161

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Stephen, Joseph, Luke and Isabel

  Two hundred and fifty thousand children are reported missing in Europe every year.

  Source: the European Commission

  1

  Roehampton High Security Hospital, South-West London

  May 2014

  There were two guards in front of Olivia and her lawyer behind her, the sound of their hard civilian shoes clattering on the wipe-clean floor tiles. She swung her hands easily by her sides; there were no handcuffs, though she was sure this mother would expect them. They’d probably put them on her outside the door, just for show, to keep the mother calm, to stop her thinking she was having it easy in a high-security hospital rather than a prison. Mothers dispensed their moral outrage so cheaply.

  Their little convoy paused outside a door as a guard fumbled for the right key. It amazed Olivia how clumsy people were. She suspected it was a reflection of their brains. She was the calmest here – none of them wanted this meeting to happen; one thing she’d learned over the years was that the prison system loved the status quo. Deviating from it upset everyone.

  They entered the windowless room and she was made to sit on a chair fixed to the floor. Her lawyer took a seat next to her. A long blacked-out window on the wall to her right would have the hangers-on peering through; there was probably a crowd. Maybe she’d give them a show.

  ‘Upset her and your privileges will be withdrawn,’ said one of the guards who had walked down the corridor with her. Olivia didn’t bother to nod. ‘We’re ready,’ he said to no one in particular.

  The door opposite her opened and a large black lawyer came in, followed by a small woman with a set mouth and dark hair. Her eyes met Olivia’s and the woman faltered in the doorway. Olivia noted with detachment that she had stopped breathing. Olivia smiled, spread her unchained hands wide, palms up. ‘Come on in, I won’t bite.’

  The men in the room stiffened; the woman’s mouth gaped and then closed. Olivia turned to the window, already enjoying herself. The woman’s lawyer indicated that she should take a seat and sat down after her.

  The mother was shrunken and shrivelled and old before her time, thin in the cheeks with tight lines migrating from upper lip to below her nose. She had her hands on the table. She shifted in her chair and looked straight at Olivia. ‘I’m Carly Evans’s mother. I wanted to ask you one last time to tell me where Carly is. So she can come back to us.’

  She said it with pride. She was defiant. That got you nowhere, Olivia knew.

  ‘You talk about her as if she’s still alive.’

  The black lawyer’s eyes bulged, the guard’s mouth dropped open a fraction, but the mother didn’t move.

  ‘I believe she is.’

  Olivia grinned. ‘And what do I get for revealing this precious titbit?’

  The lawyer found his voice. ‘You would get extra privileges, more time to attend courses, longer periods outside.’ He looked like he would rather be anywhere but here.

  ‘I have always felt myself a spiritual person,’ Mrs Evans said, and Olivia lost interest immediately and drifted off for a few seconds. Her own lawyer had grown old since she’d last seen him a few years ago; he’d lost his hair and presumably his wife too – she noted that the wedding band was gone.

  ‘Are you listening?’ the mother said, as if the bereaved should be offered special treatment. ‘I’ve got cancer, and I’m dying. I’m here today because I believe that despite what you’ve done, in your heart, you have feelings and you feel remorse.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Beca
use you’re a woman.’

  Olivia’s grin was replaced by a flush of anger. She was being underestimated and that made her mad. She had been fighting against lazy stereotypes of female intuition and womanly feeling all her life, and this mother was revelling in them. The assumption that made her maddest was that to do what she had done she had to have been influenced by a man. In love or infatuated; that she was incapable of killing them by herself. That she needed the cruelty and strength of a man to kill a child.

  She sat back slowly in her chair. ‘That I’m a woman seems to be important to you. I’ll tell you what’s important. I haven’t seen a bus for ten years. A river. I haven’t heard the sound of wind in the trees, feet kicking a stone, the crackle of a fire. And I never will again. I stare at these walls for fourteen hours a day. Yet I am freer than you will ever be. I lie in the gutter, but I am looking at the stars.’

  Mrs Evans frowned. ‘I have it in my heart to forgive. Please, tell me where my daughter is.’

  Olivia grinned. This was priceless! They might as well be in Scandinavia for all the liberal tosh that was being thrown around. She had often wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to have been born in Texas. They would have shoved the lethal stuff in her veins a decade ago. It would have spared her the mewling. ‘Mrs Evans, you’re going to have to try a lot, lot harder than that.’

  She saw the tears brim in the mother’s eyes. ‘Please, God, I beg you.’ Olivia felt the pleasure of power flush through her body. It felt as pure and sharp as freedom. ‘Make it end, for me and the other families. We have weapons we can use to—’

  Olivia laughed. ‘Do you know the most powerful weapon in the world, Mrs Evans? This.’ She stuck out her tongue and wiggled it. ‘A woman’s weapon, isn’t it? I bet your husband’s thought that over the years, your lawyer too. A tongue-lashing from a woman is a terrible thing. They say words can’t hurt you, but we know that’s not true. They hurt more than the sharpest tools, they can cast you into a pit of despair, or deliver you to ecstasy.’

  ‘Just tell me and put me out of this misery!’ The mother’s voice had risen to a wail.

  ‘That’s enough.’ The woman’s lawyer stood up sharply, his chair scraping back noisily on the floor. ‘This is achieving nothing. It’s time to go.’

  Mrs Evans didn’t move, staring at Olivia helplessly. She needed the strong arm of her lawyer to get her out of the seat and out of the door.

  Olivia liked having power. There was power in holding a secret, and she was going to keep it.

  2

  Streatham, South London

  Three Weeks Later

  Darren stood in the living room doorway, trying to block out his mother’s voice from behind him in the hallway. ‘Take him for a walk, otherwise he’ll bark all night and the neighbours have suffered enough. Darren!’

  ‘In a minute, Mum.’ Dad was watching golf in what must have been America, the course so green it was blinding, the sky Georgia blue. He’d seen a paint colour on a chart called that once, and had used it in a painting a few months ago. He didn’t understand golf and couldn’t see the attraction. He could never see the ball when they teed off, the camera swinging wildly to capture nothing except that Georgia blue. He began counting the beer cans on the table in front of Dad. Too many for this time of day.

  ‘Darren, the dog.’

  There was a ripple of applause onscreen from a lot of square, middle-aged men in baseball caps and oversized shorts.

  ‘Darren!’

  Her voice was loud enough to force him to begin moving.

  ‘OK, OK.’ He turned lazily to see Chester staring up at him, tail wagging.

  His mum had got the bit between her teeth. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you lately, honestly. You’ve finished that course that cost you a fortune and now you’re frozen. Like now, you’re not even really watching the golf, you’re hovering in the doorway, neither in nor out. Take that dog out and get a life, or at least a job. Paint the house!’ She was waving her hand at the patch of carpet beneath him, where all he could see was Chester and his lolling tongue and a pen lid that had bounced away behind the radiator pipe.

  ‘OK, OK!’ Darren gave in and grabbed the lead she was holding out. There was irony here, if you cared to look for it. Chester was Carly’s dog; she’d begged Mum and Dad for a puppy and they had joyfully complied. Now, this lazy heap of dog was just another painful reminder that Carly was gone. Darren had just completed a fine art degree at the London Institute, spent three years immersed in trying to not show things as they really seemed – to not represent them literally. And all his mum could do was nag him about painting the house, as if a three-year course and a degree show made him a painter and decorator.

  Not for the first time he had the feeling that his parents didn’t appreciate how he had struggled – that the shocks of the past caused him pain too. And everything was named wrongly – his home wasn’t his home, because his home had been Brighton and he had been uprooted from there in the aftermath of his sister’s death; his dog wasn’t really his dog, even though he was the only one who looked after him; Carly was his sister but she had been gone for years – dead but with no body and no grave, a murdered teenager who had become a saint. Life was as confusing as those invisible golf balls, everyone supposedly watching and applauding and seeing nothing.

  He opened the front door and slammed it behind him, the front of the house Mum was so keen for him to paint shaking with the impact. The roads to his right were Victorian terraces. To his left they gave way to roomier streets with houses built in the 1930s, cars jostling for space in what at one time would have been front gardens. His own house was in a little row of seventies houses with clapboard fronts, an anomaly more suited to a Kent coastal village. South London was full of dreamers imagining other places, he felt. Now the peeling paint on the clapboard was like another reprimand. He jumped over the crazy paving of the front yard, edges striking skywards like a row of teeth growing awry.

  He turned left, up the hill, the boxy skyscrapers of central London just about visible through the pollution haze in the distance. Shit, he had forgotten his keys. Mum would nag him about it when he returned. The day was muggy and close and he had on a T-shirt that was too thick and made him sweat. Chester was waddling, making strange wheezing noises as he grubbed about on the pavement, weaving round the skinny saplings that lined the road.

  Despite his protestations, Darren loved this dog. He used to walk him miles over the Downs behind Brighton when they lived on the south coast, desperate to get out of the house and away from his mum’s grief and the spectre of his missing sister. They’d moved to south London a year after Carly’s disappearance, passing the exodus of people moving from London to the coast for a better life and fresher air. He always felt he was going in the opposite direction to other people.

  He crossed the street at the top of the rise but Chester didn’t follow, sitting instead by the edge of the road, paws dangling over the gutter. ‘Come on,’ Darren called to him.

  Chester didn’t move. Darren crossed the street and bent down, ruffled his ears. ‘Come on, old-timer.’ Chester gave a low whine of pain and got to his feet, turned in a circle, his breath coming in jagged gasps. ‘Chester?’ Darren put his hand out towards him as a violent shudder passed along Chester’s back. Darren fancied the dog looked up at him with despair in his eyes. Another whine escaped, louder and more desperate. Chester’s legs collapsed under him and he stared up at Darren, as if disappointed. Darren managed to say ‘No!’ before the dog’s painful panting stopped and he was still.

  Darren crouched down over Chester, shocked. The dog was ten years old. Too young to die, surely? He bent down and picked the dog up in his arms and walked back down the hill to the house. Chester was surprisingly heavy. Darren rang the doorbell with his chin and his mum pulled it open, ready to let loose a stream of invective about the forgotten keys, but instead she stood stupefied as Darren came in, the body of the dog large and awkward in the small
hallway.

  ‘He just keeled over in the street at the top of the hill.’

  Mum had her hand over her mouth as Dad came out of the living room. She put a shaking hand on Chester’s head. Darren could see her lip beginning to go, the quiver that always began one of her crying jags.

  ‘He died right in front of me.’

  He could see his mum’s face crumpling like a paper bag and he knew he had to say something to try to make it better. ‘He didn’t suffer, Mum.’ The lies we tell, Darren thought, to make it better. Death was not easy, or quick. ‘He died right away.’

  As soon as he’d said it he wished he could take it back. He heard her jagged in-breath and the wail that came after it. ‘Mum, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Darren—’ Dad was trying to butt in.

  ‘I’ve got the body of her dog but I haven’t got her!’

  Darren felt his knees give way and he had to slump against the wall.

  ‘I can stand by the grave of her dog, hold him in my arms now he’s gone, but not my own daughter! She never had me there.’

  ‘Melanie …’ Andy’s long arms were round his wife’s shoulders now, her wailing coming louder, as if the hallway wasn’t large enough to contain it.

  Anger chased after her grief as Chester had chased his tail in earlier years. ‘All I get is a dog! This dog’ll get a better send-off than Carly …’

  Darren and his dad looked at each other and tried to swing into action. They had done this before, on the many occasions that had set his mum off. This time Andy dragged her into the kitchen and took some pills off a kitchen shelf, urging her to take one. Darren was still holding Chester’s body, a weight in his arms so heavy he was in danger of developing back spasms.

  Melanie was quieter now, her head buried in Andy’s chest. Darren looked around for somewhere to put Chester, and decided on his basket. He suddenly didn’t want to let him go; he felt a terrible fondness towards him, remembered the passage of the years. Tears pricked his eyes as it dawned on him that he had known this dog as long as he had known his own sister.