Chapter 12
Julian awoke long before dawn to a gnawing pain, not in any one place, but all over and all through his being. She was nothing to you, nothing at all, he tried to tell himself. But it was no good. Mia had been something to him — something he didn’t understand, but something nonetheless. She’d felt that nameless connection, too, and reached out to him — consciously or subconsciously — for help. And he’d failed her — and, in doing so, failed himself.
Julian started driving. He had no clear idea where he intended to go, but a short time later he found himself outside Eleanor’s house. He made his way around to the back garden and threw gravel at her window. A light came on and she appeared at the glass. “Julian, is that you?”
“I need to talk.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Please, it’s important.”
“It always is when you need something from me. But what about when I need something from you? You wouldn’t talk to me when I called last week. So why should I talk to you now?”
“I know I’ve used you, Ellie. I know that, and I’m sorry for it. But if you’ll just let me in, I’ll explain.”
Eleanor’s forehead wrinkled in thought a few seconds, then she shook her head. “No, Julian, enough is enough. You’ve got to-”
“Mia Bradshaw’s dead,” interjected Julian.
Eleanor’s eyes widened, her hand went to her mouth. “Oh my God. How?”
“Let me in and I’ll tell you.”
“Okay.” Eleanor disappeared from the window and reappeared a moment later at the backdoor in her dressing-gown. She frowned at the sight of Julian’s face in the light of the kitchen. “What happened to you?”
“Jake Bradshaw.” Rubbing his bruised jaw, Julian dropped heavily onto a chair. “I could do with a drink.”
“You want a coffee or something?”
Julian nodded and as Eleanor made it he told her everything that’d happened the previous day. She shuddered, no doubt imagining, as he’d done, what it would be like to drown. He sipped his coffee, staring at the tabletop. “I should’ve known she’d do something like this.”
“How could you know?”
“From the way she looked at the river. Her eyes had this weird blankness.”
“This isn’t your fault, Julian. This isn’t anybody’s fault.”
He shook his head hard. “People don’t kill themselves for no reason. There’s something behind all this — maybe something that goes back to Mia’s mother’s death.” A sudden thought came to him. “When Mia’s mum died it must’ve been in the newspapers at the time. Would it be possible to look through some old copies of The Chronicle?”
“Sure. But why bother? What good can it do now?”
“Probably none, but I need to at least try to understand what’s happened.”
“Why does this mean so much to you, Julian? You barely knew Mia Bradshaw.”
Feeling he owed Eleanor at least an attempt at an explanation, Julian said awkwardly, “It’s hard to put it into words, but I felt something when I was with her that I’ve never felt with anybody else. I’m not talking about love…Or maybe I am. I don’t know. Maybe if I can find out why she did what she did, I’ll know why I felt what I felt.” Eleanor lowered her eyes from Julian’s, the hurt plain on her face. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She managed a smile. “Don’t be, there’s no need.” Raising a finger to her lips, she motioned for Julian to follow her. They went into her dad’s study and she booted up his computer. “The website’s only been online a few weeks,” she said, logging onto the newspaper’s archives site. “I designed it myself. What year do you want to look at?”
“Well Mia can’t have been more than a baby when her mum died. So I guess we’re talking roughly fifteen years ago.”
Mia clicked on 1995 and typed in the search term ‘Suicide. The High Bridge’. “Here we are.” She read a headline, “Missing schoolgirl found dead in river.” Underneath it was a photo of a girl — the same photo Julian had found in Mia’s diary, except that it was black-and-white.
He bent to read the article, which continued ‘Police searching for a fifteen-year old girl have found her body in a river. Deborah Bradshaw was last seen when she left her home on the night of March 23. It’s been speculated that Deborah jumped from The High Bridge because her twin babies, a boy and a girl aged just three months, were taken away by Social Services last month after a family court hearing. A police spokesman said: “At this time we’re treating the death as suicide. However, we can’t be a hundred percent sure, and theories of something more sinister are understandable.” An inquest into Deborah’s death is expected to be opened later this week.’
“Something more sinister,” said Julian, frowning. “What does that mean?”
“It means some people thought Deborah Bradshaw was killed and it was made to look like suicide,” said a voice from behind him. He started and looked over his shoulder.
“Dad, what’re you doing up?” said Eleanor. “We didn’t wake you, did we?”
Mike shook his head. “I’ve been awake a couple of hours, thinking.”
“About what?”
“Funnily enough, about Deborah Bradshaw. I’ve been thinking about her a lot since her daughter went missing.”
Eleanor gave Julian a slightly sheepish look. “I had to tell someone, and Dad promised to keep it to himself.”
Julian barely heard her. Mike Hill’s words were swirling in his head like debris in the aftermath of a tornado. “What people and why?” he asked.
“People who knew her and said she just wasn’t the type to kill herself,” said Mike. “They were convinced her death had something to do with the father of her babies.”
“Who was the father?”
“No one’s ever found out. A rumour did the rounds that it was a much older man, a family man.”
Eleanor wrinkled up her nose. “That’s horrible. It makes my skin crawl to think of it.”
“So this guy, whoever he is, threw Deborah Bradshaw off the bridge because she was going to expose him, is that it?” said Julian.
“Something like that,” said Mike.
“Do you think that’s what happened?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she was simply overwhelmed by everything that happened to her.” Mike motioned at the computer screen. “So what’s got you reading this?”
“Mia Bradshaw’s dead. She jumped off the bridge too.”
Mike’s eyebrows lifted. “How do you know she jumped?” When Julian told him, his eyebrows drew together again and he said, “Well, I must say that sounds pretty conclusive. But it doesn’t have to mean what it looks like.”
“What else could it mean?”
“Maybe Mia wants the police to think she’s jumped when-”
“When she really has run away,” Julian interjected, his voice quick with fresh hope.
“Exactly.”
Anxiety returned to Julian’s eyes as another possibility occurred to him. “What if somebody threw her in the river and made it look like she jumped.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“There’s something else,” Julian glanced at Eleanor. “Something I haven’t told you.” He gave them the full story about Mr Ugly and what’d happened the night Mia disappeared. “I thought maybe she was involved in some kind of prostitution or pornography, something like that. But now I’m thinking, what if it had something to do with her father? What if she found out who he was?”
“How would she have done that?”
“Maybe her mum left behind a letter or a diary.”
“If she had, the police would’ve found it at the time she died.”
