The Silent Ones Read Online Free PDF

in his face. ‘You know what this is?’ The pills rattled and bounced around their plastic prison like Lotto balls in a Saturday night draw. ‘This is my failure.’
    ‘Melanie baby—’
    ‘Andy, please. A mother does one thing. She looks after her child. Keeps her safe. These are the sign that I failed Carly. That I’m going to end up down there –’ she jabbed a finger melodramatically at the floor ‘– before I find her.’ Darren reached out to hold his mum’s hand but she pulled away. Her illness had brought on bouts of aggression mixed with a terrible passivity. ‘Oh, go up there if you want,’ she said, before leaving the room.
    Out of respect for her he waited until she and his dad had left the house before he climbed the ladder into the stifling loft.
    The contents of the first box were pathetic really, some schoolbooks with Carly’s handwriting in them now faint and at times indistinct, as if with every passing year she faded away a little more. Her skateboard poked out of another box that also contained storage boxes filled with jewelry and photos of her as a baby. There was a pile of images of her with her best friend Isla Bukowski, tongues sticking out, and back to back and hands aloft like Charlie’s Angels, brandishing imaginary guns.
    Propped up in the corner of the attic was her surfboard. He ran his hands across the wax that still clung to its surface, brittle and flaking with age. He put his cheek on the graffiti tag she had designed and had painted on to the end of the board. It was her initials winding round each other, the C enclosing the E in a curly topographic embrace. Maybe she would have grown to be an artist; maybe he had become one because of his sister’s influence. So many what-ifs.
    ‘Where are you?’ he whispered. ‘Where in God’s name did you go?’ He wanted an answer to that question more than he wanted anything. He hugged the board like it was her body and he cried. He had not cried over Carly for a long time, years in fact. It wasn’t finished. More than anything, he needed to finish it, to get his sister a place in a graveyard before breast cancer carried his mum away. A grave was timeless, body after body in serried ranks in the grass, a stone angel gazing down. It was where she belonged. He laughed through his tears. Fighting to get into a graveyard, battling even for that.
    His fingers traced over the bumps of wax and he thought again about Roehampton. He wouldn’t find any answers sitting in a stuffy attic in Streatham. But there was one person who knew exactly where Carly was. Just one.

8
     
    W ith no job and no dog to walk, Darren found himself staring at a weekend that looked as long as a prison sentence. He needed to distract himself and began a self-imposed exercise regime – chin-ups on the bar in his bedroom, a run round the neighbourhood, yoga when he got home. As his mum got weaker, it was as if he was trying to defy her illness by getting stronger.
    On Monday he drove his mum to her hospital appointment and cleaned the house for her. He was reading an article on the internet about serial killers when his phone rang – number unavailable. He answered cautiously, wondering if it might be Kamal.
    It was. He was short and to the point. ‘Two people have left with no notice, I need you tomorrow. It’s a simple yes or no.’
    Darren didn’t even hesitate. ‘When do I start?’
     
    Darren arrived at Roehampton at 9.30 as instructed and locked up his bike, scanning the car park for Chloe’s car. He couldn’t see it.
    He spent some time with a silent woman in an office next to Kamal’s, getting a pass with a photograph. He balked at seeing the name Smith, but didn’t have time to dwell on it as he followed her outside to a large cupboard where uniforms of varying sizes were stacked on shelves. The uniform was scratchy nylon and comprised a loose-fitting short-sleeved top with the Roehampton logo on the front and baggy trousers with an elasticated