The Blame Game

by C. J. Cooke

  ‘Was your client called Chris Holloway?’ Jeannie says. ‘Or perhaps Theo Aucoin?’

  Hearing Theo’s name on Jeannie lips is a whole new level of weird. Kareem gives a mild flicker of his eyes. ‘I operate a very strict ethical policy, and I must say upfront that I had nothing to do with the events that occurred in Belize,’ he says, a little too formally, as though he suspects we’re recording him. ‘I discovered that you and your husband had planned a holiday in Mexico and informed the client. That was my remit. Nothing more. My business is information. It has never been about violence.’ He holds up his hands, as though to prove he has no blood on them.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Jeannie says. ‘This is entirely about violence.’

  Kareem softens, lowers his eyes. ‘Indeed. A young child has been seriously injured and I believe your husband is missing. I am very distressed to hear this outcome. I’ll show you what I have.’

  He reaches down into his briefcase, pulls out a laptop and slides it in front of me. A slideshow of images flashes up on the screen.

  ‘You took these?’ I ask. He nods.

  There’s an image of Michael at the door of the bookshop, turning his key in the lock and glancing straight at the camera with a frown. He’s wearing his green parka and mustard-yellow beanie so it must have been taken around March, when the mornings still had a keen nip in the air. There’s an image of me, Saskia and Reuben walking to school, Saskia’s hair in bunches and her face angled up to mine. Jack-Jack in her arms. No sign of the tag on his collar.

  The next image is a screenshot of an email sent to our bookstore account. An airline ticket to Mexico City with Michael’s name in it.

  ‘You hacked into our email account?’ I say, incredulous.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how did you come across our plane tickets for Mexico?’

  A small, curious smile, as if I’m very stupid. ‘This kind of information comes cheap. Faster than hacking into your personal email account.’ His voice is so calm and mild I can imagine a lucrative side-line in hypnosis, or curing people of insomnia by talking at them. ‘Before the internet, being a private detective was pretty tough. But now you buy something online and someone somewhere has eight pages of information on you. Your credit history, your address, bank balance, what you eat, et cetera.’ He glances at the screen. ‘This cost me twenty pounds to pull off a data website.’

  ‘Some ethical policy,’ Jeannie says.

  ‘Please. I was only doing my job.’

  ‘Who was the client?’ Jeannie says, banging the table lightly with her hand for emphasis. ‘Tell us his name.’ Kareem holds her in a long stare, until Jeannie gives a huge groan of disgust and plucks a thick white envelope from her handbag.

  ‘Two thousand pounds, cash,’ she says, ignoring my whispers of protest. ‘Tell us who paid you to spy on my sister’s family or we walk away.’

  Kareem’s eyes fall on the envelope. He reaches out for it but Jeannie doesn’t let go.

  ‘Chris Holloway. That was the client.’

  My heart flips in my chest. ‘How much did he pay you?’

  ‘Six thousand pounds.’

  ‘Six thousand pounds to kill our family?’ I say, a sudden urge to cry sweeping across me.

  He cocks his head, a look of disappointment. ‘No, no, no. Of course not. Please. The request was to trace Michael King and find out the names and occupations of his network. Michael King wasn’t to be found.’ A pause. ‘But Michael Pengilly was.’

  ‘And Chris Holloway was satisfied with that?’ Jeannie asks.

  He takes a drink from his cup, dabs his mouth. ‘I believed so. But I started getting emails about the image of the plane ticket I’d sent. One asking about surveillance in Mexico City.’

  I feel my sphincter tighten, my hands forming fists. ‘My daughter had a tag on her teddy. A tracking device. Was that you?’

  He shrugs. ‘I know nothing about a tracking device.’

  ‘What about Jonas Matus?’ Jeannie asks. ‘You know all about him, don’t you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jonas Matus,’ Jeannie repeats tersely. ‘Oh, come on. He’s the driver who crashed into their car.’

  A blank stare. He shakes his head. ‘I have never heard of this person.’

  ‘What about Malfoy?’ I say then, recalling the name Reuben mentioned. The friend he’d told about Belize. Kareem looks even more confused. He mumbles something about Harry Potter but it’s clear he doesn’t make a connection.

  ‘So … Chris Holloway paid you to find out information on Michael,’ I say. ‘And that was it?’

  Kareem nods.

  ‘You’re lying,’ I say, he holds up his hands again and I can sense he’s itching to take that envelope and walk.

  ‘Look, my husband is gone,’ I say, growing emotional. ‘We think he’s been kidnapped and I know your client had something to do with it. Who is Chris Holloway? Where is he? What has he done with Michael?’

  ‘She, not he,’ Kareem says. ‘Chris Holloway is a woman.’ He eyes the envelope. ‘I might have her address …’

  ‘The address or no money,’ Jeannie cautions.

  He holds out his hand and Jeannie places the envelope in his palm without letting go.

  ‘She lives in France.’

  ‘Write down the address,’ Jeannie says.

  Reluctantly he lets go of the envelope, pulls a pen from his shirt pocket and writes something on a napkin. Jeannie hands him the envelope and he tucks it discreetly into an invisible pocket inside his jacket.

  ‘We have to pass that information on to the police,’ Jeannie says, reading the napkin.

  She pulls out her mobile phone, but Kareem raises his eyes to me. ‘I don’t think Helen will like that. If you tell the police too much they’ll start looking in places that you’d rather they didn’t.’

  Jeannie looks confused. ‘What?’

  He turns back to his laptop and taps on the pad, clicking through to the next image. ‘Your call, whether or not you want to see,’ he says, his face serious. ‘But I should warn you that my client has this information.’

  The screen shows our bookshop. Late evening. A woman coming out of the shop, wrapped up in a scarf and heavy coat, pulling the shutters down.

  Kareem clicks through to the next image, and the next, showing the first signs of the fire, an orange glow appearing behind the shutters. I want him to stop. Smoke barrelling out of the door in heavy black spirals. Flames creeping through the windows upstairs.

  ‘Your client set the bookshop on fire?’ Jeannie hisses, fear streaked through her voice.

  ‘I have withheld this information from the police,’ Kareem tells me. ‘But my client knows.’

  ‘Your client knows what?’ Jeannie says. ‘Who started it?’

  ‘I thought that this was the reason why they wanted me to watch your family,’ he says, curiosity etched on his face. ‘I assumed they must have known somehow what your plans were. That they wanted proof that you planned to burn it down.’

  Jeannie stares at the screen. ‘What is this? Why were you in the shop when the fire started, Helen?’

  I can barely bring myself to look her in the eye. I can see her turn from me to Kareem, reading the shame all over my face and the satisfaction on Kareem’s. In a handful of seconds her worst suspicions are ringing true.

  ‘Did you … Helen, tell me you didn’t have anything to do with the fire?’

  I keep my head hung low, a hand pressed to my mouth.

  ‘Helen. Tell me you had nothing to do with that fire.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I whisper.

  When I look up her mouth is open and her eyes are dark with horror. It’s as though she’s seeing me for the very first time.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ she whispers. ‘You … you set fire to the shop? Like, on purpose?’

  I nod and squeeze my eyes shut. I can’t bear to see the way she’s looking at me.

  ‘Why?’ She shouts it and looks at me as though I’v
e gone mad. ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘I was trying to talk to Michael about his insomnia,’ I blurt out. ‘I knew he hadn’t been sleeping and suffering because of it … I wanted him to try a new medication. I started talking … and … he just clammed up. He walked out of the room. I was just … I couldn’t take the silence anymore …’

  Her forehead is bunched into lines of confusion. ‘So you … went to the bookshop and burned it to the ground?’

  I give a shrill laugh. It sounds so absurd. My laughter turns into a sob.

  The eyes of the mountain were watching. I felt them in every corner of our lives, in every triumph, in every sadness. In every ‘I love you’ I heard myself shout ‘Cut the rope!’, and every time I uttered our children’s names I heard Luke’s name. These things might not have been. This love might not have happened. It could have been me hanging off the end of that rope, at the mercy of someone else’s self-preservation.

  ‘Michael didn’t speak all night,’ I tell Jeannie in hurried whispers, palms pressed across my eyes. ‘He went to bed, I opened a bottle of wine. I went to the bookshop with the intent of pulling all the books off the shelves. He did this thing when … anytime we got into a serious conversation about something he’d lock himself in the bookshop and stock the shelves, make all the books the same height or some stupid thing like that. I had this idea of just trashing the place to make a point, of forcing him to see how angry I was. And then, once I was there, I saw a box of matches. I thought, I won’t re-arrange the books, I’ll burn them! That will really wind him up. Force him to talk. And then I left and it got out of control.’

  I felt them watching, and I wanted them to see. I wanted them to accept it as supplication. We would lose everything. An offering. Retribution.

  ‘But … what about the JustGiving fund? What about Michael? You said … the police said he went crazy because of the fire. And you started it?’

  Jeannie rises to her feet, anger and bewilderment radiating from her in hot waves.

  ‘I don’t believe anything,’ she says, lifting her bag to her hip. ‘I don’t believe a word you’ve said. Everything is lies.’

  ‘Jeannie …’

  But she turns on her heels and walks quickly across the station towards the stairs.

  I turn to Kareem, apoplectic. ‘What do they want? Why go to such lengths? My daughter’s seriously ill. We could have died … Why are they doing this?’

  ‘I was right in one respect,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘This is about retribution. Many of my clients seek this. It’s why they pay me to investigate. They want justice for a wrong that’s been done to them.’

  ‘You call what happened to Saskia justice? She’s an innocent child!’

  He holds me in a strange look. ‘In my line of work, context is everything. Perhaps if I jog your memory a little you’ll change your perspective.’

  ‘I don’t care about context. You said I’m in danger. After everything we’ve been through, you’re suggesting this client of yours wants to inflict more pain?’

  ‘You do realise,’ he says, leaning forward so that his voice is only audible to me, ‘that my client believes you murdered their son?’

  47

  Reuben

  8th September 2017

  I’m standing at the front of the classroom by the whiteboard and every time I look up I think I’m going to puke. Miss McKinley is standing to my right with her arms folded and a big grin and I wonder if she’s laughing at me, even though Miss McKinley is nice and says things like, You did a super job, Reuben! My legs are shaking and my teeth chatter as though I’m freezing.

  ‘Today my presentation is called Nomads in Deep Blue and it’s about a whale. A blue whale. Blue whales are the largest animals on earth …’

  ‘A whale is a fish,’ someone shouts out. Oliver Jamieson. I can see him rubbing his nose on the cuff of his sleeve. Miss McKinley says, ‘Try not to shout out of turn, Oli. A whale is a marine mammal, and it technically is an animal.’

  Oli scrunches his face up. ‘What’s the difference between an animal and a mammal, then?’

  ‘Mammary glands,’ Lily says, and everyone starts to laugh. Someone shouts ‘whale-sized boobs’ and I wonder if I should sit down now.

  ‘Continue, please, Reuben,’ Miss McKinley says.

  I look down at my iPad. I hate speaking out loud like this. My voice always sounds different to the voice I think in.

  ‘Blue whales can grow to a hundred feet long and weigh over two hundred tons. They are very solitary creatures but they do talk to each other with an A-call, which sounds like a rave drum beat …’

  ‘Whale raves,’ someone else sniggers. Miss McKinley urges me to keep going.

  ‘… or a B-call, which sounds a bit like Chewbacca.’

  ‘Excellent description,’ Miss McKinley says, folding her arms.

  ‘They have accents, too, depending on which ocean they live in. Some live in Southern California. They used to live in the Antarctic but in the 1920s people kept bombing them until they were almost extinct.’

  People are talking. Sebastian Edu in my last school said I sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I stop talking and ask Miss McKinley to turn out the lights. She flips a switch and the classroom goes dark. I bring up my animation and then say, ‘It’s not quite finished yet.’

  I press play.

  The animation starts with a drone shot of an ocean. From above it looks like a blue carpet but then it moves down so you can see the waves and the whale from above. The camera moves to the side and runs along the length of the whale. I studied lots and lots of videos on YouTube to get this right and also pictures from National Geographic. Even though it’s an animation I didn’t want it to look like a silly cartoon – I wanted it to be as real as possible, as though it was real-life.

  It was Malfoy’s idea to have the whale breach, though it was my idea to show the breach in slow motion, with the whale breaking the water in a spiral, showing the three hundred baleen plates that stripe along its jaw, and the camera passing overhead like a drone to get a good shot of the blowhole. The blowhole of a blue whale looks like a giant human nose, it’s weird. Last night I decided to have the whale shoot out a big jet of water as the drone passes overhead, with specks of water hitting the lens for super-realistic effect. I was so excited that I sent it to Malfoy and messaged him like forty times but he didn’t answer.

  After that the camera plunges underwater and runs the length of the whale to its tail. I added some dolphins to give a sense of scale. They jump in and out of the water and the camera moves all around the whale to show its body. At the end the whale flips its tail right close to the camera and splashes down, with the whole screen wobbling as though the whale has hit it.

  And then the animation finishes. Miss McKinley turns the lights back on and claps loudly. There’s a pause, and I feel a drop in my chest, as though I’ve failed.

  ‘I’ve still to add some music,’ I say quickly. ‘And the movement of the waves needs a bit of polishing. I need to use an onion skin to check the arcs …’

  ‘That was wicked,’ Oliver Jamieson shouts out.

  ‘I like what you did with the breach,’ Savannah McArthur says. ‘It was really cool.’

  ‘Can we see it again?’ Dashiell Marden says.

  Miss McKinley says we can see it one more time, so I dim the lights again and we watch it and I chew my nails. Maybe it’s not that bad. When the lights come up everyone is excited and talking about whales and someone says it’s epic.

  ‘See?’ Josh whispers when I sit back down. ‘Told you it was amazing.’

  I go to say thank you but my throat is so tight with fear that I can’t speak. I’m sweating so much that my palms leave a wet print on the table.

  At lunchtime I log on to my iPix account to tell Malfoy how it went. He told me to tell him and he’ll be excited when I say it was mega.

  Roo: Malfoy!!! R u ther???

  I wait for six minutes and forty-seven seconds. There is
no response. Lucy is online and says hi but I don’t want to talk to her. All she talks about is musical.ly and how she thinks I should do a music video but I don’t like music. At seven minutes and ten seconds the word ‘typing’ appears beside Malfoy’s name and I tell Lucy I have to go.

  Malfoy: Hi Reuben. I’m here.

  Roo: Hey Malfoy … GUESS WOT?

  Malfoy: what?

  Roo: My presntatoin was EPIC ☺ ☺ everyone loved it it and My teacher said she ws super proud of me

  Malfoy: That’s great.

  Roo: I’m buzzin ☺ ☺ ☺ ☺

  Malfoy: What did your mum say?

  Roo: My mum’s not here ☹

  Malfoy: Where is she? R u at home?

  Roo: Yeah I’m at home but my mum’s in France!!

  Malfoy: France? Why?

  Roo: Dunno

  Malfoy: Whereabouts in France?

  Roo: I can find out

  Roo: heres a screengrab of the map – I put a tag on her bag so I could see when shes comin home

  : [A FILE IS AVAILABLE TO VIEW]

  Roo: Malfoy?

  48

  Helen

  8th September 2017

  I can see Paris from my window seat, a sprawling grey web veined with rivers. The plane begins to descend into Charles de Gaulle.

  I have all the instructions written down on a piece of paper, an old Nokia phone with a pay-as-you-go SIM card for emergencies. Jeannie pressed a Platinum Mastercard into my hand and told me to use it. My phone bleeps with a message from her.

  Pin is 7612. Be safe. J x

  I thought she was so disgusted with me that she wouldn’t want to see me again. The old Jeannie would have flounced off, no contact for years, but when I boarded the train at York she was already on board and in the seat next to mine. Naturally, she was upset, her face marked with angry tears, but the cool air outside had helped her calm down. She wanted to hear me out.

  I told her again about how the fire started. I told her about my frustrations with Michael building up until I wanted to scream from my toes.