by Amy Lloyd
As I pass the policemen they smile and the barista behind the counter is turned away from me and making a coffee and I look back at the toilets and wonder what I am doing but it is too late because now the baby and I are outside and Iris has stopped crying and I am thinking how I just need to get around the corner where the police can’t see me when I realise that I am already in too much trouble. I have gone too far.
Without knowing where I’m going, I start to walk. It has turned into a bright and crisp morning. Baby Iris seems happy, content. I turn another corner and walk faster. A taxi stops at a red light and I find myself walking towards it, waving. The driver flashes his lights at me and when the light changes he pulls over and gets out of the car. Why is he getting out of the car?
‘Here we go – I’ll help with that,’ he’s saying, gesturing to the pram. I am shaking and I have no idea how to take a baby out of a pram or how to fold it up but the taxi driver disconnects the top of the pushchair from the other, handing me the baby in the top part. I climb into the taxi and put Iris in the footwell; then I realise that isn’t right and put her on the seat instead. The taxi driver leans in and hands me a handbag I don’t recognise straight away. A second later I realise it is the girl’s bag, hung on the back of the pram.
‘Where to, love?’ the driver says as he climbs back in.
I hear myself giving him an address I haven’t thought of in years.
‘That’s a fair way. I’ll need to charge you for how long it’ll take me to drive back. Will cost you about two hundred and fifty.’
I open the girl’s purse and it is stuffed with twenty-pound notes. Does Dr Isherwood pay her in cash? Is this all for baby Iris? My hands shake as I count out fourteen of them and pass them to the driver.
‘It’s kind of an emergency,’ I say.
‘Right-o,’ the driver says. He doesn’t sound particularly happy but he drives and for a while we pass through every light and I can almost relax. I try not to look at the baby but I can’t help it. She is staring at me in the unselfconscious way that babies and animals stare and when I look at her she smiles like she is in on a secret. I reach towards her and she takes a spit-covered hand out of her mouth and grabs my finger in her fist. My heart skips.
My phone buzzes once for a text. I let Iris hold my finger and try to take my phone out of my bag with one hand. It is Jack.
I know who you are, the message says. There is a link to an article. I don’t need to read it; I know he has found out what I did. For the first time, it doesn’t feel like it matters. I turn off my phone and put it back into my bag. The radio plays happy music; the driver taps his thumbs on the wheel to the beat. We hit the motorway and Iris starts to nod off. She still holds my finger. I stare out of the window, watching things fly past. There is a fox in the central reservation, its body limp, the bright red of its insides spilling out. I look back at Iris, asleep. I smile.
42
Him: Now
I run my hands under the cold water in the kitchen. Blood runs off my skin and over the dirty plates piled up in the sink. My blood or Calum’s, I don’t know. The blocked plug means the sink starts to fill with water, bits of food floating on the surface. The pile of crockery shifts and clatters, a noise that pierces the silence in the flat. I hear a groan from the living room.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, standing over Calum. ‘I don’t know what happened.’
Calum groans louder.
‘Shut up,’ I tell him. ‘Please.’
Slimy appears behind us. He’s groggy, drugged. I can tell from the looseness of his face that he has taken some of the pills I gave him.
‘What the fuck,’ he says.
‘He got in my face,’ I say.
‘This is bad,’ Slimy says. Calum tries to move his head, moaning loudly; blood fills his mouth, and he spits. Then Slimy starts to wake up. I can see him appearing through the fog; the fear starts to clear his eyes. ‘You need to go,’ he says. ‘Fuck. Jesus. He’s going to need an ambulance. What have you done?’
Slimy backs away from me like I’m radioactive.
‘It was a fight; he started it. It got out of hand.’
‘It looks like you were trying to kill him,’ Slimy says.
‘You can’t call an ambulance. They’ll tell the police.’
‘I don’t have a choice,’ Slimy says, still backing away until he hits the armchair and stands pressed against it.
‘He’s fine,’ I say. Calum coughs – more blood. I bend and grab one of his arms to pull him on to his side. ‘It looks worse than it is.’ As I say this, my hands throb. One bone in a finger of my right hand is definitely broken.
‘I’m calling them,’ Slimy says, voice shaking. He moves towards his bedroom and I step quickly after him. The way he looks back at me over his shoulder, those terrified eyes – they make me feel like a monster.
‘Stop,’ I say. He does, just like that. ‘If you call the ambulance the police are going to be searching your flat. How much has Calum got on him? Enough for possession with intent to supply?’
‘This is a fucking nightmare,’ Slimy says. ‘This isn’t fucking real. I thought you were all right. I thought you were a fucking mate.’
‘I am, Slimes, I am!’
‘Don’t call me Slimy,’ he says. His voice breaks. He grabs at his own hair. ‘I hate it! All of you come around here, eating all my food, using my laptop, my Xbox. You all take the piss! And now …’
‘Calm down S— What’s your real name, bruv?’
‘Mike,’ he says, his skinny chest rising and falling fast.
‘Mike, mate, we hang here because we like you. Yeah? It’s just a fucking nickname; we all have them.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t we all sort you out when you need it, yeah? When have I ever come empty-handed?’
I can see him accept this but he still looks afraid, looks at the exit behind me.
‘Mike, don’t do anything stupid, bruv. Just hear me out, yeah? If I get arrested for this I’m not coming back out. I’ve got too much on my record. I’ve never fucked you over, have I? He was baiting me. I was minding my own business and he got in my face. This isn’t me. This was an accident.’
Behind us, Calum starts to rise, leaning on one elbow.
‘Don’t tell them I was here,’ I say. I grab my backpack, take out everything I’ve got and drop it on the coffee table. I see Slimy’s eyes widen, hungry. ‘See? He’s fine. He’s OK. All he needs is a fucking sit-down, yeah?’ I unzip the inside pocket of my coat and drop down a load of cash. ‘I won’t bother you again,’ I tell Slimy. ‘I’m gone. But let me take your laptop so I can sort some shit out.’
‘I don’t know,’ Slimy says. He looks at the cash, then at the pile of baggies and pill packets on the table. ‘Fine. Whatever.’
‘There’s some oxys in there,’ I tell him as I stuff the laptop into my backpack. ‘Let him have one in a couple of hours. He’ll need some ice for now.’
‘What if he goes to the police?’ Slimy asks.
‘He won’t,’ I say. I know that he has too much to hide, like me.
Before I step over Calum to the front door, I crouch. He instinctively flinches but I rest a hand on his shoulder.
‘For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry,’ I say. ‘Sometimes I don’t know my own fucking strength, you know?’ And then I leave, closing the door quietly behind me.
I dump my bike outside Starbucks and go in to use the Wi-Fi. If you look like me you can’t just sit down, you have to buy something and even then you can expect the bitchy-looking girl behind the counter to side-eye you every thirty seconds until you leave. I get a coffee and sit towards the back where no one can look over my shoulder.
First I check Isherwood’s email. Nothing. I check her Sent folder but there’s nothing new there either. I refresh and refresh and refresh until my coffee is cold and the queue at the counter swells then dissipates. I try calling again and again but, as expected, I go straight to voicemail.
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Frustrated but not ready to give up I resort to pissing about aimlessly on the internet, killing time until I can hit refresh again. I get a notification. At first I think, irrationally, that it’s her, that she’s found a way to let me know she’s OK. Instead, I realise it’s a Google alert I set up for news about our case. I set it up in a moment of paranoia, convinced that Calum was a spy, a fucking undercover journo trying to out me. I physically cringe at the memory and I almost don’t click at all. What is there they can say that they haven’t already said before?
But then I think of her and my blood runs fast to my head. My hands even shake as I click the link. Immediately, my panic turns to confusion. It’s not some BBC, Sky News, fucking Daily Mail article. It’s some weird alt-right bullshit. A tiny site, badly put together and looks cheap as fuck. There’s a headline: ‘Child Killer’s New Identity Exposed’.
Beneath it is a picture of a woman who looks sad but whose mouth is tweaked into a kind-of smile. She’s holding a spoon. In front of her are three scoops of ice cream.
It isn’t her, though. It can’t be. I lean in. Her eyes are huge and sad and afraid and in them I see her. An absurd part of me thinks: This can’t be her because she is only ten. I feel years rush by me, the weight of all that lost time, of her loneliness and my part in it. I have to scroll past it and put it out of my mind before it destroys me. She is a woman now. She is as real as I am. How am I only just realising this?
‘Security officers Andrew Grayling and Jack Collins sensed there was something up with “Charlotte” from the start. “I thought she was fit, like,” Jack said. “But she was weird. Like she was hiding something.”’
I read on.
As Jack got to know her, ‘Charlotte’s’ behaviour started to get more and more bizarre. Not only did ‘Charlotte’ steal from Jack’s place of work, she also lived in a halfway house and wore an electronic tag on one ankle. It was only when he introduced her to long-time friend Andrew Grayling that he started to realise how much she was hiding.
Andrew thought he recognised her, though he couldn’t quite place how. Andrew, who works with a leading security company, used his professional links to find out more about the mysterious girl who seemed to be taking his friend for a ride. ‘I thought she might be some kind of con-woman or something, you know?’ Andrew said. Little did he know the girl he was researching was one of Britain’s most notorious murderers.
As I read, notifications for Google alerts start to ping one after the other. I can feel sweat beading at my hairline. My skin starts to itch.
The Luke Marchant story is one of the most infamous cases in living memory. A story that broke everyone’s hearts and a shining example of how the criminal justice system is BROKEN as Luke’s killers have received MILLIONS of pounds to date in legal aid, benefits, housing and the cost of creating not one but TWO separate, new identities for both of these twisted, vile human beings. It just goes to show that so long as you’re a TERRORIST or a PSYCHOPATH this country will support you financially while hardworking BRITS are left to rot. Until now she has been protected by a veil of anonymity and allowed to carry on her life as if nothing ever happened. Not any more. The mainstream media won’t be reporting this because they are RESTRICTED by LAW against telling you the truth. But we are not afraid to tell you the truth. To protect yourselves and your families, you need to know who she is. Jack had a close call; don’t let it happen to you. Now we just need to find where Sean is these days …
The news alerts ping faster and faster into my email. I sip my cold coffee but it only makes my stomach feel worse, acid rising in my throat. Fuck. Shit. I click the latest alert and it chills me to the bone. A link to a BBC news article: ‘Baby Iris Kidnapped from Coffee Shop’.
The BBC include another picture of her now, her hair cut into a severe bob; the edges razor sharp, not a hair out of place. Unsmiling, the fear in her eyes hardened to something like hate. They don’t name her, but sites all over the internet have linked the article which does.
This is my fault. All of it. I want to ask what the fuck she was thinking but I know that she is probably asking herself the same thing.
Uselessly, I try her phone again and again. I try to picture her, wherever she might be, what she’s going to do next.
And then it’s obvious. I know where she’s going, and I need to get there before anyone else does.
43
Her: Now
The taxi slows; I open my eyes: traffic. I see the driver shake his head and rest his elbow against the window. When I open the window and lean I can see cars bumper to bumper into the horizon.
‘Accident,’ he says.
Some way up ahead there are people who have switched off their engines and stepped out to stretch their legs. The car is still. I look at Iris, still asleep, but for how long?
The driver switches radio stations, searching for a traffic report. As he does so I catch just a part of a news report: ‘… baby was taken from a café while her childminder was in the bathroom …’
Then it is gone. We listen to a traffic report and the driver rubs a hand over his face. His skin is pink with the stress of it. I want to move forward so badly that I could scream but instead I sit back and look at Iris, her eyelids as delicate as butterfly wings. Thick black lashes fluttering in her sleep. The car is warm, too warm, but I don’t want to annoy the driver any further.
The presenter starts to give a rundown of local headlines.
‘Can we turn this off?’ I ask. ‘Just for a while. I don’t want the baby to wake up while we’re stuck here.’
The driver turns it off without saying anything and we sit in the suffocating silence of the stuffy car, winter sun pouring through the windows, waiting to move.
Finally, the traffic starts to move again and with it my heartbeat seems to come back, like I’ve been holding my breath for the past forty-five minutes. At first we only crawl forward slowly and I feel I could get out and run faster than we will ever drive but eventually the space between us and the car in front starts to grow and we begin to pick up just a little speed. That is when Iris starts to wake up.
I notice her frowning and wrinkling her nose in her sleep. She looks angry, fierce. Then the smell fills the car and I have to lean over and open her window, which only brings her closer to being fully awake.
‘Someone needs changing,’ the taxi driver says. He sounds weary, sick of me and Iris.
‘What do I do?’ I say out loud.
The taxi driver looks into the rear-view mirror to catch my eye. I see him frown.
‘Only ten miles to the next services,’ he says.
I ask him how long is left in total and he sighs.
‘If there’s no more traffic – touch wood – we’re looking at another half-hour, forty minutes.’
Iris starts to grimace; now she is making little angry baby noises.
‘Maybe we should stop, then,’ I say, though I want to keep going, I never want to stop moving forward, away from everything.
‘Right-oh,’ the driver says. Back into silence. Only Iris complains out loud, unembarrassed by the smell.
The taxi driver says we’ll meet back at the entrance of the services in fifteen minutes. As soon as I walk away I see him take out his phone and make a call. Inside I check for televisions or radios playing the news but there is only gentle muzak and the sounds of the fruit machines in the little arcade room.
Baby Iris is screaming now so I walk quickly towards the women’s toilets. There is a room especially for changing babies and I go inside and lock the door. Then I panic again. I have never even seen someone change a baby’s nappy before, not properly. I waste some time rifling through the bag that was hung on the back of the pram, pulling out nappies, baby wipes and a folded-up mat that I think I am supposed to put on the baby-changing station before I put Iris on it.
Once everything is ready I take a deep breath and start to unbuckle Iris from the car seat. She fights me, pushing my hands away and screaming.
‘I’m sorry,’ I keep saying. ‘I’m really sorry. I’m sorry.’
She is stronger than she looks. As I lift her she wriggles and squirms, like eighteen pounds of pure anger. I lay her down on the mat and try to figure out how her onesie works. The whole time she resists me and I wonder if it is personal or if this is what it is always like. Not long ago she seemed to like me and it hurts me now that she doesn’t. The process is disgusting but manageable. We get through it and as I lift her up she already seems calmer, blinking tears from her eyes and staring at me with that serious expression she has. I smile; she smiles back.
‘Friends again?’ I ask.
I put her back into the carrier and I wash my hands under hot water, though I cannot shake the feeling that I am covered in germs. For a second I think about leaving her here, to be found by the next person who comes in. A mum; someone better than me. I could leave the taxi driver, walk out to the motorway, step in front of a lorry.
But, as stupid as I know it is, I can’t leave Iris now. So I pack everything away, looking at the bottle of milk and wondering when she will need that, if it will be enough, if I will need to buy more. When everything is in the bag I head back to the entrance where the taxi driver is pacing.
‘Fifteen minutes we said,’ he tells me, shaking his head. ‘I’m going to hit the rush hour on the way back if we aren’t careful.’
