Chapter Four
What a joy the run up to fifty was turning out to be.
Whatever, pregnant or peri-menopausal, it was definitely unsettling to find herself so fixated on the case again.
Right now, she was at her desk in the Hindsight office, a large, high-ceilinged room full of original character at the front of a classically Georgian house a stone’s throw from the SS Great Britain and the busy harbourside.
The usual sounds of construction and footsteps on the cobbles just beyond their small car park were muted by the closed sash window – or, more accurately, drowned out by the hammering rain.
There was no doubt the bad weather outside made it seem cosy and safe inside, especially with everyone around her.
Clover St Jean, dressed in an electric-pink polo neck that matched half the beads in her lively dreads, was in front of the whiteboard she’d already begun for the Ivorson case, while Jackson Cain, with his trendy ponytail, wispy goatee and gold-rimmed specs was, as usual, stuck into something on his computer.
Harry and Meena Quinn, the trusted business brains behind the podcast – and Cristy’s dear friends of many years – were seated comfortably on the battered leather sofa as they listened to a playback of the recording Connor had made at number 42 on Wednesday.
They were intrigued; she could see that as clearly as she could Meena’s beautiful Indian heritage and Harry’s charming public-school Englishness – and who wouldn’t be when the Ivorson case remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of its time.
As Connor clicked off the recording, Meena’s eyes remained on the whiteboard, where Clove had attached headshots of Nicole, Noah and Abigail Ivorson – the three figures at the centre of it all.
Here, Nicole was still only nineteen and was so like a Millais muse, with her luscious, coppery curls and creamy pale skin, that she could surely inspire any artist of any generation.
She was a true beauty, with wide, cerulean eyes, a perfect heart-shaped mouth and the look of a child in the process of becoming a woman.
Her babies, with their erratic caps of golden curls and innocent blue eyes, were as strikingly similar to each other as they were to their mother.
In his shot, Noah was full of smiles, showing his sweet little teeth and a dimple in his left cheek.
In hers, Abigail was gazing curiously at the camera as if trying to figure out what it was.
Cristy could sense how unsettling Meena was finding it to look at the children, to be reminded all over again of how those tender little souls might have met their end.
It had disturbed everyone when these very photos had first been made public, especially after Nicole’s purported attachment to a cult had come to light.
And there was no doubt that all the murmurings of evil, demonic practices and curses that had swirled around the case at the time were beginning to resonate again all these years later – not only in the press coverage of Nicole’s parole and the ongoing mystery of what had happened to the twins, but right here in this office.
Turning to Cristy, Meena said, ‘Does Matthew know you’re looking into this case?’
‘What on earth has it got to do with him?’ Cristy replied, startled.
Meena’s eyes were resolute as she put down her coffee. ‘I remember how much it upset you when it was happening, especially around the time Hayley was born and you went through a crazy period of thinking you had to give her up because she was Abigail really and didn’t belong to you.’
Stung and embarrassed, Cristy tried not to notice the others’ curious glances as she cried, ‘That was nearly twenty years ago, and I thought it once, when I was still drugged up after a very difficult birth.’ She was furious with Meena not only for mentioning it but for humiliating her in front of her friends, her colleagues, the team who looked up to her.
She was tempted to ask her to leave or at least to apologize.
However, sensing that would only make things worse, she forced herself to say, ‘As my state of mind twenty-odd years ago has no more bearing on this meeting than what my ex-husband might think about anything, shall we get to confirming that this is going to be our next series?’
‘Already on it,’ Connor announced, throwing a scowl at Meena.
‘I’m all in,’ Jacks piped up.
‘Me too,’ Clove said, gesturing to the board.
Meena shifted uncomfortably as she turned to her husband.
‘That makes you outnumbered,’ Harry told her, ‘but if you want my input, this case is tailor-made for Hindsight, and no one’s going to tell the story better than these guys. Hell, knowing them, they’ll turn up all sorts of stuff that didn’t come out at the time …’
‘Please don’t say they’ll probably end up finding the twins,’ Meena warned.
She turned back to Cristy, making a better show of hiding her concern this time, although Cristy knew it hadn’t gone away.
‘Is that what you’re hoping for?’ Meena asked.
‘To discover them alive somewhere, living a whole other life that no one’s ever known anything about? ’
‘It would surely be better,’ Clove interrupted, ‘than finding their bodies.’
Halted by that, Meena sighed as she sat back and said, ‘OK, so talk us through the detail of what Nicole said happened the day her children … disappeared.’
‘Her story at the time,’ Cristy replied, keeping an edge from her voice, ‘was quite simple in its way. Apparently, the family cat had died that morning, so she waited until the twins were having a nap and went down to the woods to bury it. When she got back, they’d gone.’
Harry nodded, as though remembering. ‘Just like that. Two kids vanished into thin air, and no one saw a thing. Did anyone ever find the cat?’
‘No,’ Cristy replied. ‘They dug up the woods, but there was no sign of it.’
Meena fanned her hands as if to say, guilty as charged.
‘Anything from a vet to confirm the cat was put down that day?’ Harry asked.
‘Apparently, it choked on something,’ Cristy told him. ‘Or maybe it died in its sleep. It was very old – eighteen, from memory – so it wasn’t exactly a shock.’
‘How long after she claimed she’d buried it did they start digging up the woods?’ he wanted to know.
‘Five days,’ Jacks replied, reading from his screen.
Harry nodded. ‘So maybe a fox went off with it. Would a fox do that: dig up a dead cat?’
‘I checked and it could,’ Jacks confirmed.
‘The other theory,’ Cristy told them, ‘was that she, Nicole, took the cat and the twins down to the woods and handed them over to someone who was waiting there.’
Meena shivered. ‘Back to the cult thing.’
‘Which no one’s ever been able to make stand up,’ Connor put in, ‘but back then, a lot was said about it.’
‘Anything of substance?’ Harry asked, clearly searching his memory.
‘Not really,’ Connor replied, ‘but we’re hoping Julian Hargreaves, Nicole’s defence lawyer, might help us with that when we see him later.’
‘Definitely feeling cultish to me,’ Clove muttered to no one in particular.
Casting her a glance, Harry said, ‘Let’s go with the abduction claim for the moment.
Tell me how anyone could have got them out of the house, which I recall is on a main road, and into a waiting vehicle, without anyone seeing?
Is that what Nicole wanted us to believe, that someone drove off with them? ’
‘She claimed never to have known what actually happened,’ Cristy reminded him, ‘only that the twins were gone when she got back to the house.’
‘Wasn’t the place covered in blood when the police arrived?’ Meena asked.
‘I don’t know about covered,’ Cristy replied, ‘but there were definitely traces found all over the place, mostly belonging to wildlife – hence the rumours of sacrifice.’
‘But some of it belonged to one of the twins, didn’t it?’ Meena persisted.
Cristy nodded. ‘Abigail.’
Meena took this in. ‘So what did you believe at the time? Before you went a bit …’ She circled a finger at the side of her head.
Wanting to slap her, Cristy said, ‘To be honest, I changed my mind about it so often – we all did – that I can’t tell you now what I did or didn’t believe at any given time, but what I do know is that Nicole never had any witnesses to stand up for her.
No one, apart from her mother, could say that the cat had died; no one saw her go down to the woods or come back again.
No one saw the twins being taken from the house, and no one came forward with any solid evidence to say she belonged to a cult. ’
‘Where was her mother that morning?’ Meena asked.
‘At her sister’s,’ Cristy replied. ‘Apparently, Nicole was at home alone with the twins from the time her mother left the house at just after nine o’clock.’
Reading from her notes, Clove said, ‘There was a neighbour who came forward to say that he’d noticed Ronnie, Nicole’s father, leaving for work around seven, as usual.
And Maeve’s sister confirmed that Maeve was at her house in Chippenham from around ten until two o’clock, when they got the call from Nicole to say the twins were gone.
Same for Ronnie, who was alibied at his office all day until two. ’
‘Remind me what he did,’ Cristy said. ‘From memory, he was some kind of an engineer, working at British Aerospace in Filton?’ She looked to Jacks for confirmation and received it.
‘Guidance, navigation and control,’ he said. ‘That was his thing. And it was BAE Systems by then, although I think a lot of locals still refer to it as British Aerospace even now.’
‘One of the glaring questions for me,’ Clove said, ‘is who was the twins’ father? I know he was never named, but … any thoughts?’ she asked Cristy.
Cristy shrugged. ‘Take your pick – the mystery cult leader was, unsurprisingly, the favourite theory, but with no proof of his existence …’ She simply shrugged.
‘There was also talk of a random rapist for a while – no, she didn’t ever report an attack – even Ronnie’s name was in the frame at one point. ’