Yet now Pam was asking her to give herself up to those same emotions she had kept in check for so long and with such stern vigilance. Shona knew the dangers that compliance posed, but she did want to get better. She had never found it easy, fitting in, being one of the gang, but Pam had been kind to her, understanding, and she yearned for her therapist’s approval. The others in the group said they wanted to share in her healing. When they had gathered around her the other night, she had felt protected, shielded, included. She did not want to go back to the awful colourless days — the days when she hated herself and envied the world its companionship.
Pam had shown her what it was like to be welcome, to be needed and loved. The others had accepted her because they respected Pam, and now they were beginning to see her as part of the group. Perhaps they would even come to like her. Max Greenberg’s lecture had belittled Pam, had rubbished her work and ridiculed the people she helped. People like Shona. She felt a sudden rush of feeling, an overwhelming urge to prove her love for Pam in some courageous act.
* * *
Shona moved cautiously, quietly, down the side of the building. She knew the house was empty: she had watched Max Greenberg leave, just as she had watched him arrive the previous night, swaggering and smug from his evening lecture.
Now she crept like a cat from light into darkness. The shadow of the neighbouring building sliced through the evening sunshine, throwing the side of Dr Greenberg’s house into shade so deep that she hesitated in the darkness, momentarily blinded.
Quivering, alert to sounds and smells, even her skin was sensitive to the subtlest vibration of movement. The faintest of breezes, warm and unrefreshing, stirred the air. The wall felt smooth and cold to her fingertips and she extended her arm until its length was in contact with its surface, its coolness calming the fever of terror within her. Mingled smells of lawn clippings and garbage drifted to her as she edged deeper into the shadows, close to the brickwork, using her fingers to guide her, lacking the gift of feline night vision. The bricks soothed the hot ache in her joints.
The stink of waste became overpowering just as her fingertips brushed metal and her knee made contact with something hard and abrasive. She yelped in pain and surprise, jumping back, flailing, fending off an imagined attacker before the familiar outline of a bin began to emerge from the gloom, and she sobbed, half-laughing.
Somehow it did seem grotesque and funny that a man like Greenberg would perform such mundane tasks as putting the bins out for collection.
She waited a minute, two minutes, panting, pressed against the wall, listening for noises from the neighbouring house, signs that they had heard her yell, the scrape of the bin, moved by her knee. Abruptly, music screamed from an ice-cream van near the house. It played ‘Greensleeves’ at a manic pace, waited less than a minute, then roared off down the street. She calmed herself, willing the thudding of her heart to slow. Radio music floated tinnily from somewhere within, but there were no windows on this blind, blank wall, and when she was sure no one would come to investigate, she continued to the gate.
A brick wall divided the two gardens, and the gates into the respective properties were angled at forty-five degrees to the centre. She lifted the latch and drifted, silent as a wraith, into his domain. The garden was in shade, save for one small wedge of sunlight at the south eastern corner.
She listened: traffic noise, and that radio, playing jazz. An aeroplane, somewhere high and distant, its engine noise a single, faint note, stirred an intense longing in her.
She had suffered, but she was a survivor and she would put a stake through the heart of Max Greenberg. Put a stop to his venomous attacks.
The broken pane of glass had been repaired. She looked round for something to heave at it and almost screamed when the door opened a crack, creaking in the slight current of air. It was open. Every fibre, every muscle and sinew tensed to run, she stepped forward and pushed the door with her fingernail. It gave.
She almost walked past the envelope pinned to the kitchen door, but something made her stop and take it down.
I don’t know your name yet, but I soon will, it read.
I think we should talk, don’t you?
Her hand began to shake so violently that she dropped the paper. My God. My God! He must have seen her! Her head felt suddenly helium-light, expanded, explosive. She brought her hands to her head to convince herself that it was still its normal shape and size, to pull herself back to earth. Then she turned and ran from the house to her car. She had parked it only a few yards from his front door. She threw up in the gutter, then dry-heaved wretchedly, near collapse for several minutes longer. When she came to herself again, a cold, wet sheen glistened on her skin. Her hands were hurting. She examined them: they looked swollen, and when she touched them the skin was sensitive and hot. A brief flutter of excitement — this was the sort of sign she had been waiting for — then she had a fleeting impression of fear. She faced it, doing as Pam had instructed, thinking into the pain, into the fear, into the darkness that obscured her memory.
You cannot be what you are, until you know what you are. Pam’s wisdom confronted her, as she must confront her deepest terror. It eluded her until she had a brief flash of something, an image and a feeling. The horror was too awful, she shook her head, forcing it away, pushing it back into the shadows.
Chapter 12
Paul had finally gone off to sleep, and Jenny was watching TV in the sitting room. Fraser folded the paper he was reading and dumped it by the side of his chair. ‘I think I’ll go up,’ he said.
Jenny looked at him. She wanted to ask if everything was all right, but she knew it would irritate him, and anyway, she wouldn’t get an honest answer. ‘I’ll be up in a few minutes,’ she said.
The phone rang just as Fraser got into the hallway. Jenny reached for the extension near her chair, but Fraser got to the hall phone before her. Why was he so jumpy? She felt sure it had something to do with the calls from Mr Hunter, but whenever she suggested that they could be linked to the telephone calls to the hospital switchboard, he rubbished the idea.
Fraser put his head round the door. ‘For you,’ he said. ‘Max.’
‘I’ve had another visit,’ Max said, without preamble.
‘Oh, Max — did they do any damage?’
‘No, I—’ He checked and said instead, ‘Have you heard anything more from your Mr Hunter?’
‘I haven’t.’ Jenny hadn’t meant to put the emphasis on the ‘I’, but it was there, nevertheless, and of course Max heard it. ‘Why are you so sure there’s a connection?’ Jenny went on, to deflect him from probing further.
‘I don’t know, Jenny. It may be coincidence that your phone calls started at the same time as . . . all this. But the burglaries . . . What if they’re after reports on Paul?’
‘But you don’t keep your hospital files at home,’ she said, surprised.
‘Not the full files, but I do take notes home to complete them, and to prepare for case meetings and consultations. Anyway, it’s a hell of a lot easier breaking into my place than the hospital records office.’
‘It could be recovered memory protesters,’ she suggested. ‘You know how paranoid they be.’
‘What could they hope to gain?’
‘Making you as fearful as they are?’
Jenny could hear Max’s smile in his reply. ‘Who’s supposed to be the psychiatrist around here?’
She laughed, but when he spoke again, all trace of humour was gone from his voice. ‘Jenny, promise me you will be very, very careful.’
* * *
‘He wants you to be careful!’ Fraser put his book face down on top of the bedcovers and looked at her in frank amazement. ‘He leaves his house empty eighteen hours a day with no security system, a back door that could be blown open with one good sneeze — leaves the damn key in the lock, just to make it easier for any would-be burglar — and he says you should be careful!’
‘His security arrangements may be a bit ha
phazard, Fraser, but he’s not reckless.’
Fraser snorted derisively. ‘Have you seen the car he drives? If it was a building it’d be condemned. And his driving’s pure radge.’
‘Be fair,’ Jenny said, laughing. ‘You think anyone who drives a car is a certifiable loon.’
He didn’t reply to that, only shrugged.
Which reminded Jenny that someone — whether certifiable or just plain criminal she could not say — had taken their car, crashed it, driven it away and then replaced it exactly where they had found it. The phenomenon was not exactly common, Mike had told her, but neither was it unheard of, for criminals to test drive cars they intended to use on a robbery — a kind of dry run — replacing it where they found it and returning a day or so later to use it in the real thing. But wouldn’t that apply to cars parked in the same contract parking bay every day — office hours, reliable? Her occasional trips hardly fit into that category.
So who had taken the car, and why had they taken pains to make her think it had never been moved? When she had told Fraser that the police had called and why, he had sat down heavily and said, ‘Fuck.’
Fraser, who had got out of the habit of swearing entirely after they had started fostering, anxious to set a good example to the children in their care, no matter how brief their stay might be.
Then, looking up at her, he had asked, ‘What did you tell them?’
‘What could I tell them? I didn’t even know the damned car had been moved. They were convinced it was me — got the whole thing on video.’
‘Then how could they think it was you?’
‘That’s exactly what I said,’ Jenny replied, touched by Fraser’s unquestioning trust in both her driving ability and her honesty.
‘And?’
‘And. The important bit, with the thief getting into the car, wasn’t on tape. I don’t know if that was good luck or good management on his part.’
‘His?’
‘I assume it’s a man. You don’t get that many women stealing cars.’
‘Oh.’
‘Fraser,’ she said, ‘are you all right?’
He had stood impulsively and paced the room. ‘Funny phone calls, Max’s house burgled, now the car taken and mysteriously replaced. No, Jenny, I’m not all right.’
There did seem to be too many coincidences, and in a sense she was comforted to think that she wasn’t alone in feeling disturbed by the accumulation of circumstances, but she could not push from her mind his shrug, his failure to respond to her joke that he classed all drivers as lunatics. That was surprising, because he always did. Respond, that is. He always made some remark that if it weren’t for other drivers, he wouldn’t be afraid to drive at all, or cars didn’t scare him, people did. But this time he had shrugged and said nothing.
* * *
Damp. Cold. Without warning. The boy was wrapped in something. Twisted tight. Suffocating. His face, shoulders imprisoned, his arms pinned. A cold, soapy smell. A towel.
Then he was picked up bodily.
There was a silence lasting a few seconds — long enough to hear the water drip, once, from the tap. Then shock. Sharp. Hard.
Icy water. He opened his mouth to scream, but he couldn’t breathe, and for what seemed like an age, he gasped, open mouthed, unable to draw breath.
* * *
Fraser was out of bed and halfway into his dressing gown before he realized what was happening.
‘I’ll go,’ Jenny said. ‘You may panic him.’
The screams continued — prolonged, high pitched, interspersed with a few gabbled words.
Jenny reached the boy’s bedroom within seconds. He was sitting up in bed, his eyes wide open. He was drenched in sweat, the window closed and locked despite the heat. She spoke to him, approaching him slowly, calming him, telling him where he was, who she was, that he was safe.
Oh, dear God, she thought, Safe from what?
‘Darling,’ she soothed, knowing that it would only make things worse if she were to address him by a name not his own, ‘you’ve had a dream. A bad dream, that’s all. Just a dream.’ She repeated these words over and over, cautiously lowering herself onto the bed next to him, slipping her arm around his shoulders, talking above his screams. After a few moments, he subsided into babbled apologies.
‘Please I’llbegood. Sorrysorrysorry. I didn’t mean it. Please — didn’t mean it. I’ll wash myself. I’ll wash myself clean. Pleasepleaseplease!’
This went on for several minutes, Jenny talking calmly all the time, wanting to weep for the boy. He replying with his pathetic apologies, until they moderated to a whisper and he wept, sobbed, hugged her tightly, and she kissed his hot forehead, murmuring reassurances until he was calm, exhausted.
She changed his pyjamas. He had wet the bed, too, and he watched Jenny change the bedding from the safety of a little nest of beanbags in a corner of the room. He had gathered to him a polar bear and a lion and had them sitting on either side of him, like sentinels, while he sucked on an ice lolly Jenny had given him to serve the dual purpose of cooling him down and soothing his throat, which must surely be sore after all that screaming.
He had insisted on coming with her, mutely refusing to be alone, clinging to her and whimpering, so they had fetched the fresh bedding together, and his pyjamas, and the ice lolly, and she had not had the chance to talk, even for the briefest moment, to Fraser. She spoke on in a conversational tone as she worked, telling the boy about the following day. Jenny had arranged for Paul to be looked after by Phyllis, another foster carer, while they attended his case conference. Gina Vance, the senior social worker in charge, had cleared it. It was standard practice, in these circumstances, to use the network of foster care contacts — social services preferred to leave the child in the care of another foster carer, rather than someone who hadn’t been thoroughly vetted.
Phyllis planned to take Paul, along with her own foster children, to Chester Zoo. Jenny tried to interest Paul in the trip, but he responded to none of her questions about his favourite animals, returning to his mute state as if he had never spoken. She could not discover if he had pets at home, nor if he had visited the zoo before. He had merely sat, licking his ice lolly and staring at her with his huge, dark eyes, but when she put him into bed he had caught her hand and held it tightly, tightly, as if he were afraid of her leaving him.
‘D’you want me to stay?’ she asked, expecting no reply, but going through the motions, for surely, some day he would talk to her. His grip tightened and his eyes widened, and she considered herself answered.
‘Of course I’ll stay,’ she said, adding, ‘You are safe now, Paul.’ He understood, she was certain of it. ‘I won’t let anything hurt you.’ She thought she saw a fleeting dread in his face, then he looked away. She tucked his favourite toys either side of him, telling him that polar bear and lion would guard over him while he slept. This seemed to console him, and he relaxed a little.
The therapy sessions didn’t seem to be having any impact on him at all. He isolated himself from the other children, crawling under tables to avoid physical contact, staring at the toys as if their purpose were unknown to him. The only activity he would participate in was art, during which he repeated the obsessive routine of painting a house and then barring the windows with thick, black lines, adding a huge padlock for the front door. Once, another child had become overexcited and had splashed paint from his brush onto Paul’s painting. Paul had looked at the fine spray of carmine red, watched it blur and merge with the primrose yellow curtains behind the barred windows of his house. The child beside him laughed in delight and flicked his paint brush again. A few drops fell on Paul’s hand, one or two on his face, and he began screaming—
A sudden spurt, as fine as mist, but he felt it — felt the heat of it on his face. ‘Come here, you little bastard! Come and take your punishment.’
—short staccato bursts of sound, which no one could stop, until Paul had been washed clean of paint. After that, he had sat s
lumped in a chair, totally withdrawn, unable to look at the psychologist who spoke to him, perhaps unaware of his presence.
Jenny had wanted to keep him at home after that, but Max told her it would be unwise to increase his isolation — they would just have to be more careful during group activity sessions. So she had taken him each morning, even though his condition seemed unaltered. She did not notice the car parked outside the hospital every day, for it was hidden among scores of others, always in different areas of the car park, but always with a clear view of the main entrance.
She sat beside Paul, in the chair that had served for so many night vigils, and watched over him for an hour after he slept. No dreams seemed to trouble him now, but she lingered, unwilling to leave him.
She knew that Fraser would be lying awake, wanting to help, but knowing that his presence would only alarm the boy. She felt for him: he hated to be isolated in this way, unable to support and solace, barred from all but the most superficial contact. It was imperative to Fraser that they function as a family — he had worked hard to achieve that with all their foster children — and for some reason it seemed even more important to him in Paul’s case. And yet, with Paul, more than any other child, he was locked out, emotionally and physically, since Paul avoided physical contact except at times of extreme distress, even with her.
She had hoped that the police would have discovered something about him by now — even DC Sallis had said they’d had a good response from the Granada News appeal. Fraser had decided to come with her to the boy’s case conference and had even arranged for time off school so that he could be there. Often, she would go alone to these reviews and Fraser would occupy the child, but occasionally, as with Jamie, the boy from Glasgow, the roles would be reversed. It didn’t matter — whichever of them was closer to the child attended. In truth, neither of them knew much about Paul. All they knew was what they had been able to observe. He told them nothing and communicated little in other ways, and yet Fraser had wanted to be there. He had explained that since he couldn’t make himself useful looking after the boy he may as well go with her. There was an ache of longing hidden beneath his feigned indifference, and Jenny wished she could do something to soothe his pain, but that was not within her power — perhaps not even within the boy’s power, for it did seem that it was the boy’s arrival that had triggered this disquiet in Fraser. Perhaps, also, the crank caller, who may or may not be linked with the boy, or with Max.
THE LOST BOY an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists Page 10
