Cari Moses 2: Mind the Cracks

By Judith Tyler Hills

Cari Moses has been plagued throughout her childhood by a web of mystery and intrigue. She was abandoned as a baby beside the canal where her birth mother was brutally murdered. Another family took her in, but now, Cari no longer trusts her “mother” Karen and is repelled by her cloying attention.

Meanwhile the serial killer responsible for the murder of Cari’s birth mother, serving a life sentence for his sadistic attacks, plots revenge. Leckie, the daughter whose identification resulted in the killer’s capture, is still coming to terms with the repercussions, and Sandy the police officer has lost the job she loved due to her befriending of Leckie. Cari’s true father persists in his belief that his daughter did not die at the time of her abduction. He seeks the help of the new detective agency formed by Sandy in an effort to find her.

Now, the serial killer has escaped from a high security prison hospital and resumes his killing spree. He targets Cari and the daughter who betrayed him. Despite the danger that surrounds her, Cari finds a way to forge a new life, avoiding at last the cracks in family relationships that have plagued her since birth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781728379821

Judith Tyler Hills

Dr. Judith Tyler Hills has led a busy and varied life working for forty years in health, education, psychology, and research. She first qualified as a nurse, midwife, and health visitor in the 1960s and worked for some of that time in a large psychiatric hospital. This is Judith’s first novel, inspired by her working life, her experience as a Samaritan volunteer, and her leisure time spent aboard her narrow boat Cloud Nine.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Their so-called ‘holiday’ had been an unmitigated disaster. They were four people from the same family undergoing the same experience at the same time, but the same four people experienced it very differently indeed.

For Karen, the hastily contrived break strengthened her certainty of the terrain they had last explored on the fateful occasion when she had rescued the baby abandoned by the canal lock and determined in an instant to take her in as her own. No … it went beyond determination. That would suggest she’d made a conscious choice—that she’d weighed up the odds and formed a calculated decision. There had been no such resolve. She had merely accepted it as something predestined, meant to be. After so many years of disappointment and distress—the pregnancies snuffed out before the tiny foetuses were remotely viable—Cari Moses, her babe from the bulrushes, was surely her just reward.

And throughout the child’s formative years, she had been that—the centre of Karen’s universe and the sublime fulfilment of her dearest dream. When had that first begun to pall? Karen was not sure, but even before the onset of puberty, Cari had shown early indications of the troubled young teenager she would become. Oh, it was nothing tangible—nothing Karen could put her finger on and say categorically that was the point when her own elaborately constructed web of deceit had started to unravel, but she sensed in the girl a hesitant withdrawal and a distancing that was both worrying and wounding in its implied rejection.

Initially, Karen’s response had been an intensification of the all-consuming devotion she gave to the child. This had been a conscious decision and one she fervently hoped would bring a return of the maternal bliss she had formerly enjoyed. Somehow, it was never quite enough. And although she continued to dote on the child to the exclusion of almost everything and everyone else, the cracks were beginning to show.

Ben, meekly compliant Ben, always in the past had deferred to his partner, Karen. He only ever wanted her happiness. He had loved her from the moment he’d first known her, way back as school children and throughout the heady days of their youth. He had supported her, grieved with her, and even tried to overcome his profound misgivings and share her happiness when Cari Moses had come into their lives. He’d known even then that he was destined to be supplanted in her affections—second best to the child they should never have had. But such was his love for Karen that he was prepared to accept the relegation.

For her sake, he’d tried to be a good father to the little girl, playing with her as she grew up, making things for her, and quietly pleased when she began to share some of his interests. He could see her now, tending the bed of primroses in the little garden he’d constructed for her. But truth to tell, he had never felt totally easy in her company. He could not shake off the sense there was something inherently unnatural in his relationship with a child who was never legally theirs.

It was only years later when Megan was born—the product of a brief and welcome reconciliation with Karen—that Ben was able to really relax in his role as father to both his girls. He felt sorry for Megan, so obviously unplanned and unwanted by her mother. And amid the stirrings of years-long unease about the situation with Cari, he experienced a growing empathy with her too. He sensed her unhappiness and his own impotence to rectify it. Things had come to a head during that awful holiday week, culminating in the terrible events that night on the bridge.

Megan had so looked forward to all the promised excitement of this unexpected holiday. She was a happy child and embraced every new experience with vigour and enthusiasm. She knew she was not her mother’s favourite, but she held no grudge; it was just the way things were. She adored her father and idolised her older sister, and for Megan, that was enough. Life was fun and the holiday should have been too, but from the outset it had failed to live up to her expectations. They had driven through miles of boring countryside with few attractions for a child of her age. Her mother was even more distracted than usual, and even her father seemed to have lost patience with her and appeared more concerned about Cari.

The tension was palpable, and even Megan, the happy one, the extrovert, had felt its stultifying presence.

As for Cari, the break had presaged the climax of so much—years of uncertainty, never completely at ease in the present and fearful for a future she could barely envisage. The family around her was beginning to disintegrate. The small cracks over the years, of which she had been increasingly aware, were becoming fissures, canyons, and ravines. And somehow, in a way she had yet to comprehend, it was all her fault.

However she looked at it, there seemed only one possible solution. She needed to get out of their lives—forever.

CHAPTER 1

Ben

Ben envied her. He looked at her now, her familiar features illuminated by the light of the moon; her face was relaxed and serene in sleep. Thick curly hair, which fanned out across the pillow like a veritable halo of curls framing her face, shone golden and incongruous. Karen—the enormity of whose deception had plunged their entire existence into chaos, toppling the mundanity of their early years together and threatening the very fabric of the family life she’d once passionately espoused—looked serene. How could she rest like this? It appeared as if hers was a deep untroubled sleep. And tomorrow, they must return to their everyday routine and strive to maintain some semblance of normality in the face of who knew what devastation lay ahead.

Resigned to yet another sleepless night and not wanting to disturb her with his inevitable tossing and turning—although he conceded that was less out of kindly consideration and more to avoid their increasingly pointless arguments—Ben gently slid out of the bed they shared and made his way across the unfamiliar hotel room towards the window. Shivering, as what seemed like a wave of cold, damp air hit him, he retrieved his sweater from the chair where he had discarded it and pulled on a pair of warm woolly socks.

Pushing aside the remaining clothing, he drew the chair closer to the window and parted the flimsy curtains. The little town was silent, the streets deserted. There was only the occasional headlight from a car or lorry on the trunk road beyond. He would sit here until morning, he decided, and if he fell asleep, then so much the better. If not, then he would be awake with the birds and find himself a few hours nearer to the journey home—and whatever fate awaited them there.

It was then that he saw her. But had he known then it was a girl? or had he only realised this as an afterthought? Whoever or whatever it was, the figure in the street below was slight and moving quickly. She was travelling purposefully away from the hotel. Suddenly, as rising panic threatened to engulf him, Ben knew what he must do. He had to find out for sure. He had to have his suspicions verified or denied.

Hastily struggling into his jeans and slipping his feet into his trainers, Ben grabbed his coat from the back of the chair. It was as though he was acting on autopilot as he instinctively checked his pockets. Satisfied his car keys were there, he let himself out of the bedroom and made his way across the landing to the room where his girls slept.

A quick glance was all it took to confirm his worst suspicions. Megan, like her mum, was fast asleep. But beside her, Cari’s bed was empty. Stifling a sob, Ben quietly closed the door before descending the stairs two at a time, leaving the hotel by the front door. Quickly looking down the street, he was surprised to see no sign of the slight figure he’d glimpsed from the bedroom window. Thinking perhaps she had turned and gone back the other way, he looked behind him. But even as he did so, he knew that his premonition was correct—there was no one to be seen in that direction either.

Without any further hesitation, Ben made straight for the car park behind the hotel, keys at the ready. He knew where the girl was heading. His only hope was that he could get to her in time.

CHAPTER 2

Cari Moses

It had come to this. At the final hurdle, she had lost her courage. Standing on the parapet, confronting her personal abyss, shaking with fear, she was filled with a penetrating numbing coldness. The mobile phone she had been clutching fell from her lifeless fingers and plummeted into the depths below. The girl staggered and fell backwards into the arms of her father, Ben.

He had found the child’s bed empty, and guessing her likely destination, had followed her here by car. Seeing her slender figure outlined against the moonlight, a figure as black as the seething waters beneath the bridge upon whose parapet the girl stood poised, Ben had known instinctively the slightest sound from him could startle her and cause her to fall to her inevitable death below. He imagined her lithe young body broken and crushed by the cruel rocks beneath the foaming waters—waters waiting and ready to thirstily engulf whatever might be left of the child. No gentle drowning this, no Ophelia garlanded and drifting prettily downstream but, rather, a savage tearing of flesh and consummate return to nature.

His heart raced as he desperately fought back the urge to rush to the child and pull her to safety. Ben approached as silently and stealthily as possible—reaching out in time to catch her as she fell. Shaking now, weeping with relief, he held the girl in a tight embrace before carrying her back with him to the car. She was limp and unresisting in his arms, allowing herself to be deposited on the passenger seat. Her father wrapped her in their picnic rug with the seat belt fastened around her. She had not uttered a single word, and Ben was too shaken by the near catastrophe that had been averted to say anything much himself. Just the usual sort of platitudes. I’ll get you back into the warm, love. You don’t have to worry about a thing.

But even as he thought it, the promise in his heart was dying on his lips. How could he ever make it all right for her when, all the time, it had been so very wrong?

CHAPTER 3

Leckie

Creating a new life and a new persona was not turning out to be as easy as she had hoped. Lacking anything in the way of references, she had found it difficult to find work. And there had been the fraught situation of having to find somewhere to live. She was wishing now she’d been a little more amenable to the idea of involving social services, but as soon as the kindly detective had made the suggestion, Leckie had vehemently opposed it. She knew only too well what meddling social workers did. They took you away from your roots, threatened your identity, and pigeon-holed you into some needy category or other. It was always with the caveat, in your own best interest. She had come this far without any help from the likes of them, and she would continue in the same way.

She had helped the police with their enquiries—jargon speak for answering their interminable questions. She’d reported a crime, possibly several, identified the perpetrator, and even confessed to her own involvement in a failed abduction. Prior to that, she had survived life on the streets, living a rough hand-to-mouth existence. She had recovered from a horrific assault, which had left her hospitalised for months. She had evaded capture and escaped from the cloying clutches of a would-be benefactor.

No. Leckie did not need the services of a social worker. She would do what she had always done—make her own way in life. Any aspirations of achieving a worthwhile career seemed a distant pipe dream now. There was the much more immediate and pressing requirement to find a job, any job at all—one that at least meant she could pay her way and even possibly move out of the women’s hostel where she currently had a bed each night. It offered a place to put her head down but little more. She was able to wash and had been allocated a small locker where she could store her meagre belongings. Not that this provided much in the way of security.

She knew only too well how easy it was to break into these lockers. Although they weren’t all like that, some of the women in the hostel had few scruples when it came to accessing someone else’s possessions. And so Leckie had developed the habit of carrying anything of value in a large tote bag; the locker being used for her few changes of clothing and the odd packet of biscuits, a fallback for those occasions when the evening meal offered by the hostel was even less substantial than usual.

It was a harsh regime, comprising stringent rules and little privacy. No alcohol allowed on the premises, no smoking indoors, and everyone out by ten in the morning. No one was allowed back in until five in the evening. A modern day workhouse, she thought.

Since living in the hostel she had made few friends—that is, until Barbara moved in at some point during Leckie’s first month there. She was a similar age to Leckie and had endured many of the same sort of privations during her young life. Having been abandoned by her birth mother and brought up in foster care, she was always hoping, one day, she might just be lucky enough to be adopted. Yet, she knew deep down the likelihood of this was, at best, remote.

Barbara had not been an attractive child. Extremely myopic, she’d worn a pair of pebble-lensed NHS spectacles and was always fearful of losing them and of the vulnerability to which this would expose her. Barbara had developed a nervous twitch and an unprepossessing tendency to chew her nails, often down to the quick. She bit the skin around them so her finger ends looked perpetually ragged and neglected. Her overall appearance was not helped by her lank mousy hair and prominent front teeth, which earned her the nickname Rabbit Fangs. She had left school, one of many she’d attended during a childhood that had seen her moved from foster home to foster home, without any formal qualifications and little expectation that life could ever get better.

In Leckie, she had found her first real friend and ally. The two girls had developed the routine of leaving the hostel together each morning after breakfast and making their way into town, where they would try and find work. They answered any advertisements they found in newsagents’ windows or posted outside various business premises. To date, it had been an unrewarding and soul-destroying experience. No one seemed prepared to give these two young women, clearly down on their luck, the chance of regular employment. It probably didn’t help that this was a university town, and there was a steady pool of bright well-qualified youngsters available for evening bar and restaurant work, while the factory premises were largely staffed by older employees with fixed addresses nearby.

Returning to the hostel each evening, increasingly despondent after yet another fruitless hunt for the ever-elusive jobs, the girls had little left in the way of conversation. It was as they sat quietly picking at the remains of another uninspiring meal that they caught the gist of a discussion taking place farther along the table from them. One of the older residents, Janet, a rather aggressive Scot with a history of alcoholism, was regaling the woman next to her with an account of the day’s activities. Apparently, she had answered an advertisement for work in a care home and been grossly affronted to have been offered a post as a domestic. ‘Bloody cleaner … and crap pay to boot. I’m worth more than that, Madge. Told ’em where they could stick their bloody job.’

Resolving to ask Janet where she had been for this work, which she clearly thought demeaning, the two girls finished their meal and waited with some trepidation for Janet to finish hers. They needn’t have worried. Janet was only too pleased to have a further excuse to vent her anger about the way she felt she had been treated by ‘that jumped-up little madam—Matron Bell, she called herself. Supercilious bitch.’ And she gave the girls the address of the care home, together with a few unsolicited tips on how to handle the ‘uppity little cow.’

CHAPTER 4

Pam

She was struggling to make sense of it. She knew she was in hospital and thought she must have been very ill because she could remember them hovering over her, the staff constantly waking her up, taking her blood pressure, shining lights in her eyes. She recalled the monitor over her bed bleeping and blinking, a constant flickering series of patterns dancing before her heavy weary eyes. All she wanted to do was to sleep. Why had no one just let her sleep? Surely it wasn’t too much to ask. She had such a headache; it pounded and hammered behind her ears, behind her eyes, a crushing all-consuming pain from which there had been no respite. The only time she wasn’t in pain was when she was asleep. But they didn’t seem to allow that, always waking her up.

She did not know how long she had been so ill. They had kept her in bed until she felt totally absorbed in it. Her heavy limbs had sunk deeper and deeper into the mattress so she wondered if she might sink completely, submerged forever or whether she would just continue the downward trajectory until she fell through the bed onto the floor beneath.

There was nothing she could have done to stop it. Her legs were useless; they didn’t seem to be working at all. It was as though they were no longer even a part of her. And her arms were clamped into some sort of restraining device, which prevented them from moving of their own accord. She knew now she’d been wearing splints, that her arms had been immobilised to keep her from dislodging the intravenous infusion or pulling out the hateful catheter that was so horribly invading her private places. It wasn’t just her arms that were splinted. Nor was it just her bladder held by tubing to a bag on the side of the bed. Her neck seemed to be held in some sort of rigid collar so she couldn’t even move her head—away from the noise and from the perpetually flickering lights. Her only recourse was sleep, and that had been cruelly denied her.

She supposed she was on the way to recovery. They’d moved her in among other patients, firstly on a ward where she still spent most of her time in bed or lifted out onto a chair alongside. It was a horrid Rexine-covered chair, where they compounded the indignity of the ever-present catheter by sitting her naked bottom onto an incontinence pad. ‘Just in case of leakage, dearie … from either end!’ And the fat auxiliary had cackled at that.

Both ends indeed. It was one and the same end—the private space between her legs where the catheter had begun to chafe and where (was there no end to the humiliation she must suffer?) where she had to have the horrible jelly suppositories inserted into her rectum. They had made her leak—nasty faecal fluid. And the staff had left her sitting in it for what seemed like hours. Oh, the utter degradation she had felt. How dare the fat little woman, not even a proper nurse, how dare she laugh?

Then, just last week, they had moved her again. ‘Neuro rehab, Dear. You’ll like it there. So much nicer than the ward.’ And it was better. She had her own little room for a start—a bit of privacy at long last. It was quite a small room but had its own en suite bathroom … well, just a toilet and wash hand basin really. The main bathrooms were further down the corridor and had full sized baths and accessible showers, all with handrails and an assortment of different aids to make it easier for the nurses to help their charges make full use of the facilities. What’s more, the lady who said she was an occupational therapist had told Pam they would try her out with all the various appliances to assess which might be of most use to her when she went home and that they could arrange for her to have them installed there too and at no cost to her.

It had all sounded so positive and for a short while Pam had found herself sucked in by the optimism of it all. But now she had time to think, the prospect had begun to worry her. All this talk about going home, and here she was, unable to remember anything about her home. Well, that wasn’t quite true; she did get occasional flashbacks to a time when she must have had a home. She had a vague memory of being in the bathroom hunting through a laundry basket looking for something she had lost. It must have been something important because she kept on shaking the clothes and going through them again and again. She remembered a kitchen door and feeling angry and helpless that it was never properly locked up. They were odd memories, little more than fragments really. There was a bread bin where she hid her cigarettes. She hadn’t realised that before, but she must have been a smoker back then. And there was something else about the kitchen … food left congealed on a plate, scraping it into the bin. And there was a table and the boy, the one who came in to visit her with her sister, Mary, claiming he was her son, not that she could recall ever having a son before, sitting at the table with her.

But now as the shards of recollection scrambled, reassembled, before disintegrating again—as these precious snatches of a life before her illness, returned to haunt her by their very insubstantiality she thought she and the boy, Robert, had been sitting at that table. They were sharing a cup of tea, she thought, although she had a sneaking, fleeting feeling that neither of them should have been there … well, not at that time of day.

As she struggled to process the confusion of thoughts and images, a fresh consideration suddenly struck her. If the boy really was her son, then that must mean he had a father somewhere. For the life of her, she could not remember anything about that. Perhaps she was a single mum. Her sister would know. She would ask Mary to tell her about it. She would get her to help sort out the muddle in Pam’s mind, and then perhaps she would be able to make sense of what was happening and begin to face up to what her life held in store.

CHAPTER 5

The Man

Not all new beginnings were even as promising as Pam’s. The man who had been convicted of the serial killing and desecration of a number of young mainly pregnant women across the Midlands and the north-west of the country, prisoner Zabot, was chafing at the ignominy, not only of having been caught but also of failing to live up to his own high standards. His previously meticulous preparation had given way to spontaneous acts of violence and, furthermore, had allowed that little bitch he barely acknowledged as his daughter to have identified him as the perpetrator. He should have got rid of her years ago—erased her from the picture just as he had erased her elder sister Margarita and her succession of bastard children.

He should never have entrusted that job to Martyn, useless wanker he had turned out to be, repeatedly failing to kill the girl and finally bringing about his own dénouement with the fire at the cottage and everything that had ensued. Martyn should not have followed him there; he should have made sure of that. Following him there and then having the audacity to demand payment for a killing he had failed to carry out. Following him, wanting to exploit him, threatening him. Well, he had got his comeuppance, for sure. Perishing in the fire like that.

But at what a price to him! Another murder added to the tally of pregnant women and their miserable unborn brats. He would serve time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for the rest of his life because of that—and all due to a few careless mistakes and a woeful failure to effectively plan and control events.

All those years devoted to his hobby, his art, counted for nothing now—now that he was incarcerated for most of the time in seclusion. ‘For your own protection,’ they said. ‘You’d be a sitting target otherwise. You know who are the most hated inmates here, and not just here, in any prison? Well, I’m telling you—kiddie fiddlers and men who violate and murder young women and their children—men like you.’

That was what the screw had told him, locking him into his cell on this the highest security wing of this category A high-security prison.

‘No association for you. Far too risky. You’ll be allowed out for exercise—thirty minutes max—but only when the others are in lockdown.’

And when there are enough prison officers to escort me, at least two each time, so that’s not going to happen too often, he thought.

He had begun to wish that he’d pleaded insanity. Surely a sentence spent in a secure hospital like Broadmoor would be better than this. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became. So, what had stopped him? But even as he posed the theoretical question, he knew the answer.

Pride. That had been the problem. He, who saw himself as a master craftsman of his particular art, could not countenance such a disparaging judgement. He had wanted the world to see him as an expert, a power to be reckoned with—not as a madman whose actions were merely the product of a disordered mind. He had not been able to bear the thought of them looking down on him. They belonged to that privileged class who had had all the advantages that had been so cruelly denied to him. They were those he nevertheless thought of as lesser beings, his intellectual inferiors, lacking imagination and creativity, dullard police officers mechanically sifting through the clues he had left them, speculating, putting two and two together and never getting to four. He may not have had much in the way of conventional education, but he knew he was cleverer than them. He had always known it—ever since that first murder all those years ago, the one that had sparked his interest and fuelled his habit. One they had never solved. Just thinking about it now brought the familiar stirring in his groin, a hardening and a growing tightness within the constriction of his clothing. He wished now he had not refused to wear the proffered prison-issue jogging pants, insisting on his right to wear the clothes he had brought with him. (Not the motorcycle leathers he’d been wearing at his arrest but, rather, the jeans and sweatshirt retrieved from the panniers of his bike).

He did not know what they had done with his other luggage, only that his precious manual of procedures and box of surgical instruments had been produced in court as evidence of his involvement with a whole sequence of killings.

The moment was passing, and he was glad of that. There was no way he could have sought the release he craved, not with the winking security light attesting to their continued surveillance of his every move. He knew then that he had to do something to improve his current situation. The curtailment of his liberty was bad enough. The continuous spying was intolerable. If there was one thing life had taught him, it was that it’s never too late to alter the