The Push

by Claire McGowan

  ‘But?’

  He knew her so well. ‘She wasn’t at the scene, was she? It was weird, Tom. They were all, I dunno. Off their heads. Different stories. Jumpy as hell.’

  ‘Maybe you would be, if someone just died at your party.’

  ‘It was more than that. I’m gonna look into it, for as long as she lets me.’ They’d had to let the witnesses go home overnight, but she would be calling on them all, starting tomorrow. At least until Colette pulled her off it to work on something that was definitely a crime.

  Tom leaned against the counter. ‘Because?’ He was listening avidly, and she was glad of this, that they’d always have something to talk about together, namely the grisly things that people did to each other, the lies that they told.

  ‘You ask me, the balcony sides are way too high to fall over accidentally. I think there must have been a push. I just have no idea who from.’

  ‘They can do forensic modelling of that sort of thing.’

  ‘If she gives me the budget.’ It was confusing enough trying to figure out where everyone had been at the party, and exactly when the fall had occurred. All they had was the phone records, but two separate 999 calls had been made three minutes apart, which was suspicious in itself. ‘You should see this house though.’ She sighed, looking round at their one-bedroom flat, which could charitably be called cosy. Tiny was also a word that would fit. Cramped. ‘Five bedrooms. Rockery. Glass all round, hot tub, garden studio. Not that the rockery’ll be much good after forensics dig it all up.’ It also currently had bits of a person smeared over it, but she didn’t want to dwell on that while cooking spaghetti bolognaise. ‘This is done.’ She turned off the pans, fished out a colander for the pasta. As she did she caught sight of the calendar on the wall. Two days from now, a big red x was marked. The earliest day she was allowed to test, to see if it had happened this month, by some crazy chance, unlike every other month for a year. If it hadn’t, it would have to be IVF most likely. And if that didn’t work, if it vanished inside her like a ghost baby? Then what? Another, and another, until they had nothing left? When did you call it quits, admit you weren’t going to be a parent? It might not be so bad. More money, lovely holidays, pelvic floor tone, unsaggy boobs . . . She thought of the babies today, their chubby little wrists and vulnerable heads, their helplessness. The idea of having her own seemed so far away. Two days. That was all she had to wait, but it felt like forever.

  Jax – ten weeks earlier

  At work, I was the opposite of how I was with my mother. Firm, authoritative, but never cruel. At least, I tried not to be. After all the self-help books I’d read, I was aware of how easily a bullied person could begin to bully another, just to assert some power, a sense of self. I strode in the Monday after the first group meeting, my bump carried high in front of me in my wrap dress. I’d given up heels when I got pregnant, with much relief – approaching forty, my body just didn’t forgive me for pushing it too hard. Coffee, an unexpected spin class, carrying a bag on my shoulder – all these things could ruin me for a week.

  My assistant, Dorothy, rushed out from her desk to meet me. Despite her name, Dorothy was twenty-two years old. She wore large clear-rimmed glasses and seemed to live in jumpsuits, which meant I spent more time than I should wondering how she peed. ‘Problems?’ I said, without breaking stride. I actually liked managing people. I tried to guide them, build their careers. There were fundraisers loyal to me spread across many of the charities in our interest area (vulnerable children and teens). I’d had half an eye on applying for a CEO post in a different charity, before I got pregnant. Funny how it just happened: a cell divided, and all your careful plans for the future were derailed. Maybe that was why my generation found pregnancy and motherhood so hard. In the past, people knew not to make plans. They knew that life was something that happened to you, not something you directed yourself.

  ‘Um, no, all cool.’ I’d tried to get Dorothy to speak more professionally, but behind the ums and literally and all the feels, she actually knew what she was doing, so I’d overlooked it. One day I’d coach her on how to hide all that in job interviews, how to fit yourself into the mould they expected, so later on you could unfurl yourself and smash it all wide open. I put my bag down in my office, rolled my wheely chair to the desk, and wondered if I could ask her to make me a tea. Assistants didn’t seem to do that sort of thing any more.

  ‘Where are we with the mailing?’ I was keen to get our annual fundraising mail-out done before I went off. Although print mailings were old-fashioned, so were many of our donors, and it was our biggest single source of revenue each year. When I needed inspiration for my work, I usually flicked through Protect, our supporter magazine, thinking about the good things the money I raised could do. Training for teachers and youth workers, programmes for abused kids, even a halfway house for when they came out of care, something that would have helped Aaron a lot when he was a kid. Some days it felt like I was trying to prove it to the universe. See, I’m a good person. Despite the evidence against.

  ‘The printers said, like, you could sign off the proofs this week.’

  ‘Good. Chase them up if they’re dragging their feet.’ She was still hovering in the doorway. ‘All OK?’ I asked again.

  ‘Um, well, there was just one kinda weird thing. A message through the info at email this morning. I forwarded it to you.’ We got a lot of strange spam through there, requests for money, anguished cries for help, and so on. I sighed. I didn’t need this today.

  ‘You can send that kind of thing to Sharon, or just bin it if it’s spam,’ I explained patiently. Semi-patiently. I thought young people were supposed to be digitally literate. Sharon was our CEO, not very good at it – if I’d wanted, I could have had her job within six months, but I had better things in mind than this middling child-protection charity.

  Dorothy twisted her hands. ‘It’s about you, Jax.’

  What? ‘Alright. I’ll take a look.’ Finally, she left, but I could see her head at the desk outside my door, bobbing anxiously. I clicked on my email. I hated my desktop computer – I’d lobbied for years for ergonomic keyboards and proper chairs, but Sharon was of the old-school ‘save the budget’ approach. She didn’t see that you had to balance it off against potential lawsuits from employees with RSI.

  The email Dorothy forwarded had come from a bot-like address, a string of meaningless numbers and letters. It read, JACQUELINE CULVILLE IS A CHILD MOLESTER. She got with her ‘boyfriend’ before he was 16. Pass it on.

  I sat and stared at it for a moment, my whole body turning cold like a wave was passing over it. What the hell? I’d met Aaron two years ago. Admittedly, he’d been twenty-two then. Admittedly, I was fourteen years older than him, something that in a man might be thought sleazy. But there was a world of difference between twenty-two and not-quite sixteen. Wasn’t there?

  My finger hovered on the mouse, shaking slightly. Nasty spam, lies and rubbish. Jacqueline, it said, which I never called myself – only my mother called me that. I’d been Jax since university, trying to reinvent myself as someone cool and edgy. So whoever had sent this didn’t know me well. I ran through names in my head – someone I’d fired, some service user with a baffling grudge? A lot of the people we worked with were unstable, not always able to see who was trying to help them and who wasn’t. I told myself firmly it was nothing, blind malice, likely from someone hurting and confused. But I worked for a charity that did child protection. The merest whiff of scandal here had to be rooted out. But someone must have sent this. Someone had been watching me, and knew my partner was young, and had sat down and written this and sent it to a general inbox, that anyone could read. That meant someone must have it in for me. A jealous ex of Aaron’s? I wasn’t aware that he had any serious exes.

  I should tell Sharon, I knew. We had to be spotless here, above any suspicion whatsoever. We’d laugh about it probably. Sharon’s husband was so old he was dead – he’d had a heart attack last year. My partner was to
o young to hire a car by himself in some places. Maybe she wouldn’t laugh as much as I thought. I breathed deeply, feeling how much this had shaken me, feeling angry that a mere string of words could do that, and I pressed delete.

  I didn’t tell Aaron about the email. He worried, and I could see when I came home that he already had something on his mind. When you were with someone much younger than you, money was almost unavoidable as an issue. Aaron had been working in a variety of temp jobs since quitting the bar – he wanted to spend his evenings with me, he said, and especially when the baby came he didn’t want to be out hauling barrels until 2 a.m. I knew he hated the new job he’d found in an insurance office, the petty squabbles over who’d used whose margarine, the monotony of every day being the same, having to be indoors all the time. He did it for me. He was studying bookkeeping on the side, with a view to becoming an accountant, something I couldn’t feel excited about and I didn’t think he could either.

  And me, in my turn, I worried about how little money he made in the entry-level admin job, the cost of his season ticket and suits and lunches. I’d be supporting three of us soon. That gave me another stab of anxiety over the stupid email – what if I lost my job? Who would send such a thing? But I squished it firmly down, carrying on chopping the pak choi for dinner, with Minou my Persian cross twining about my legs, hoping for titbits. Aaron knew nothing about cooking when I met him, not even how to peel a potato. In the foster homes where he grew up, they taught them to make things in microwaves and with kettles. Often, that was all they had access to in the tiny bedsits and studios the kids were kicked out to at seventeen.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said.

  He set down his man satchel, which I’d bought him for Christmas. It had the unfortunate effect of making him look like a schoolboy. ‘Oh, nothing.’ I’d learned with him that you had to ask several times to find out what he was thinking. In the homes, you didn’t last long if you were vulnerable.

  ‘Nothing?’

  He sighed. ‘I heard back from the adoption people today.’

  ‘Oh?’ I slid the leaves into the wok. Stir-fry felt too easy, too lazy – I could just imagine what my mother would say – but Aaron was bowled over the first time I knocked one up. So tasty! Amazing! It broke my heart a little, the things that impressed him. Going to the theatre. Flying. Vegetables.

  Aaron had been searching for his birth mother for the past year or so. It was something he’d always wanted to do but didn’t know where to start or how to even begin to feel about it. I think it was meeting me that gave him the push, the capacity to kick it off. I had researched it for him, found the right forms. We didn’t even know his mother’s name, which made it harder, or what Aaron had been called at birth. I think he felt it more urgently now our baby was coming, the need to search. ‘They’re still looking. Can’t find anything so far, maybe the records went missing or something.’

  ‘Oh. That’s a bit rubbish.’ Although I had helped him, I didn’t know how I felt about this whole thing. Did I really want some mother-in-law coming into my life, upending everything? My own mother was enough to handle. Aaron had turned out amazing considering his upbringing, but there were dark depths I knew nothing about, moods that sprang up out of nowhere. I needed him as stable as possible now, because who knew what would happen to me when I gave birth?

  My mother’s voice told me I should have been leaning on him, now that I was so heavily pregnant, that if I didn’t fully trust him we shouldn’t be having this baby together. Since the support group, it had been joined by Nina’s voice telling me to take care of Aaron, that it was a struggle for age-gap relationships. I ignored both as best I could.

  Aaron hunched by the sink, and he looked even younger when he did that, a sulky angsty teenager, so I put my hand to his back and gently straightened him out. Minou, who wasn’t his biggest fan – he had usurped her – slunk away. ‘They’ll find her, love. It just takes time. Anyway, it gives you a bit of space to adjust to it.’

  His gaze snapped up, hard and blue. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Just that it might be tough, seeing her again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because . . . well, she gave you away.’

  He toyed with an apple from the fruit bowl, rolling it along the counter. I wanted to ask him to stop but I struggled every day not to turn into my mother. ‘She won’t have had a choice. They’ll have made her.’ Aaron had convinced himself of this fact, that his mother had desperately tried to hold on to him. It was true he had lived at home with her until he was two, unusually old. It had made it harder for him to be adopted, which meant a life ping-ponging between children’s homes and foster care. I worried that, when she did resurface, his mum would be hard-faced, tattooed, a drunk, a drug addict, not the sweet helpless girl of his imagination.

  I didn’t want to think about why my boyfriend, abandoned by his mother, was with me, so much older than him. He put the apple back, visibly pulled himself out of the mood. He came and put his arms around me from behind, and I sank into his warmth and strength. ‘Sorry, babe. How was your day?’

  I should tell him about the weird email, I knew. But something stopped me – some long-ago shame, memories I didn’t want to dredge up. Fear of disturbing the calm we’d found, waiting for our baby to arrive. Nina’s unasked-for advice. ‘Oh, it was OK. Bit of a slog, you know. Sharon getting on my nerves.’

  ‘You’ll be out of it soon.’ He massaged my neck as I finished cooking, and I wondered why the words sent a shiver down from where his hands were. That was what I was afraid of, being out of it. What would happen to my career if I stepped aside for a year, on reduced pay? And if I wasn’t working, who was going to hold this tiny family together? Could I rely on Aaron to keep things running?

  ‘Go and sit down,’ I said, forcing a smile. ‘It’s almost ready.’ As he moved out of the kitchen, I turned my gaze to the apple he’d been playing with. As I’d thought, it was bruised now. Spoiled.

  Alison

  Monica Dunwood, the owner of the house where the death had taken place, was very, very nervous. Alison had learned over the years that this wasn’t a sign of guilt, not necessarily. She’d interviewed men about a missing wife or girlfriend who it turned out was lying murdered upstairs, and they hadn’t turned a hair. She’d seen parents who knew very well that their child was dead do begging press conferences urging their ‘abductor’ to bring them back. Equally, some people were so distressed by the very idea of the police that they went totally to pieces, babbling about every transgression from going two miles over the speed limit to once smoking a spliff in college.

  ‘Mrs Dunwood . . .’ The woman was at the living-room window, peering out on to the street.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. Your car, I just – is it marked? You know, the neighbours, I wouldn’t want them to ask questions.’

  ‘You had a violent death on your property, Mrs Dunwood, I think that ship has sailed,’ said Alison crisply.

  Diana Mendes, Alison’s new partner, frowned. ‘The car isn’t marked, ma’am. Why don’t you sit down? Would you like a cup of tea, perhaps?’ So she was good cop in this situation, forcing Alison into bad cop, and that suited her just fine in her current mood. During the hours that had passed since she’d eyed up that pregnancy-testing stick, her breasts had begun to ache, a sure sign her period was coming, like a squall of bad weather. She was telling herself it could also be a pregnancy sign, but didn’t even believe her own lies.

  Monica turned, distracted. ‘Oh no, I don’t drink caffeine.’ She was that nervy without coffee? Alison would have appreciated a cup of tea herself, but apparently none was on offer.

  Diana nodded. ‘Please tell us, in your own words, what happened yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, it’s awful, just awful. I never could have imagined – in my house!’ That stirred an echo for Alison, something she had once read or seen, but she couldn’t think what. ‘And my rockery’s ruined. Five grand, that cost. Who’s going to pay for it?’<
br />
  Diana’s sympathetic expression sagged a little. ‘You’ll have to take that up with your insurer.’ Diana was a small and neat woman somewhere near thirty, with shiny black hair pulled into a bun, clear olive skin and quick, dark eyes. She reminded Alison of that US congresswoman, Alexandria something. Young and vital. Alison hadn’t realised she was actually old until quite recently, when she’d seen on her medical file that she was considered geriatric in baby-making terms. Jesus wept.

  ‘But it’s destroyed! And it was practically brand new! We only moved in six months ago!’

  That struck Alison. Was that an odd time to move, while pregnant? Or did it make sense to find a bigger place while you could? She caught sight of a wedding picture on the mantelpiece, noticed that Monica’s hair was the same as it currently was, dark with a Claudia Winkleman fringe, so it must have been taken recently. A shotgun wedding, perhaps, if those still existed. ‘How long have you been married, Mrs Dunwood?’

  Was that a slight hesitation? ‘A year or so. Why does that matter? I have officers in my garden, people in white suits tracking over my upstairs landing . . .’

  ‘Yes, well, could we talk about the death?’ They weren’t using the word murder. Not yet. Not until they could get more of an idea who’d been where that day. Alison was getting the impression Diana also thought it was an accident, but still. She was going to ask questions for as long as she was allowed.

  Finally, Monica sat down, perched on the edge of her grey sofa as if about to take flight any moment. She brushed at invisible crumbs on the cushion. Alison passed her a piece of paper. ‘Can you confirm this is everyone who was here yesterday?’

  She scanned over it, biting her lip. ‘That’s right. The adults, the five couples plus Kelly and . . . the other one.’ She didn’t seem able to say the name. ‘Eleven apart from . . . you know. But no, that’s not right. Chloe was here too. Thirteen! Oh God, unlucky.’