The Trophy Child

by Paula Daly

  Or what if she had simply run out of talent?

  People lost their edge often enough, so it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Joanne had lost hers. Sportsmen became injured and never returned to form. Surgeons lost their steady hand and had to change discipline. Marksmen lost their nerve and were retired. Why should Joanne be any different?

  Except she didn’t feel as if she was losing it.

  She felt as if the answer was right there, just out of reach, and if she could only stretch a little further, if she could only think a little harder, then it would all fall into place.

  Joanne had been scanning through various pictures of Sonny for the past hour, pictures that were on his known associates’ Facebook pages. She noticed that Sonny liked his badass T-shirts and was particularly fond of one with the slogan: ‘AK47 – When You Absolutely Positively Gotta Kill Every Motherfucker in the Room’.

  And one that said: ‘Getting You Wet Since 1991’.

  Sonny was a career criminal. She’d had dealings with him back when she was a bobby on the beat and Sonny was a juvenile – going by his birth name then: Michael O’Riordan. Since then, you could bet that, if Sonny was awake, he was doing something illegal, though he and Joanne had not crossed paths since he’d upped his game and got into the supply and distribution of various class As. He’d gone off the grid, but his name kept popping up across Cumbria and Joanne was not going to stop until she found the little shit. And little he was. Five feet four and no more than eight stone with his hair wet and a gun in his pocket. A real runty-looking thing, too. Joanne thought that if he’d been born at a different time, or in a place without decent healthcare, he’d have been unlikely to survive infancy.

  ‘Oh, Sonny,’ she said to the screen now, ‘where are you hiding out?’

  It was Sunday afternoon and she didn’t really need to be at her desk, but she had little else to do, so she might as well be there, combing through Sonny’s file. Her Aunt Jackie was on a late – the two–ten shift – so she would have the house to herself but, weirdly, lately, Joanne had noticed a kind of malaise settle over her whenever she was alone. She couldn’t quite motivate herself to do anything and where, once, she had relished her time away from work – taking long baths, reading crappy romance novels – none of it seemed to hold her interest of late.

  She wondered if she was becoming one of those coppers who, over time, became married to the job.

  Joanne shook her head as if trying to rid the thought, but then caught sight of her reflection in the now blackened screen. She looked tired. Or old. She wasn’t sure which.

  In the dreams of her youth Joanne had seen herself with a couple of kids by now. She thought she’d be ferrying teenagers back and forth to football practice, spending her Saturday afternoons washing dirty kits. Later on, a curry perhaps, in front of the TV, enjoying a film and a ten-pound bottle of wine with her spouse.

  They weren’t exactly big dreams. She hadn’t been expecting glamour, long-haul holidays, expensive shoes. Just the basics afforded to most decent human beings.

  Funny that Joanne had always imagined herself as the mother of teenagers, she thought. As though she could bypass the baby and early-years stages entirely. Joanne couldn’t be sure, but she didn’t think she’d be great with babies. They frightened her, with their all-encompassing neediness, their helplessness. And she didn’t get the yearning to hold a child and sway on the spot, to kiss its head, to sing nonsense softly in its ear, the way she saw other women do. Perhaps this was part of the problem. Perhaps men sensed the lack in her and went the other way. Most of them were babies themselves, so that was probably it.

  Idly, she glanced at her mobile to see if there were any new messages. There was one from Jackie telling her to record an episode of 19 Kids and Counting at 9 p.m. Jackie watched all manner of US reality-TV programmes. She couldn’t get enough of them. Joanne reckoned if they combined a couple and called the show, say, Property-developing Dwarves, Jackie might reach near-nirvana.

  On her phone there was also a message with a photo from her old friend and colleague Ron Quigley. Ron had been pensioned off early because he had arthritis in both knees and ankles, and he seemed to be on one long holiday with his wife. He sent Joanne snaps from wherever he was (at present, standing at the entrance to the Caves of Drach, Mallorca), just like the series of photographs featuring the stolen garden gnome, working his way around the globe.

  There was no message from Seamus, she noticed.

  Seamus, the man with no surname from the hotel bar – and, later, the hotel room – earlier in the week.

  Joanne hadn’t meant to sleep with him.

  She didn’t have many rules, but that was one of them: do not sleep with a man you have just met. But she broke it willingly on Monday night, once she had a couple of whiskies inside her.

  Did she regret it?

  A bit.

  She regretted having slept with a man – a nice man – whom she now expected would call. And, clearly, that wasn’t going to happen.

  That was the part she regretted. Not the actual sex. That part had been good. And really rather lovely – considering they’d only laid eyes on each other a couple of hours previously.

  Seamus the accountant with the nice hands was funny and clever and sexy, and throughout their dinner Joanne had caught herself gazing at him, thinking, If this man doesn’t suggest getting a room, I might just break another rule and do it myself.

  Ultimately, she hadn’t needed to. She thought he might have made booze the excuse, saying something along the lines of it being a shame they couldn’t enjoy another drink, since they were both driving, and so on and so forth. But halfway through her dessert of frangipane tart he’d looked at her, seriously, and said, ‘Spend the night with me?’ and ‘Yes’ popped straight out of Joanne’s mouth before she had the chance to play hard to get.

  Which was all very well and good, but look at what she was doing now? Killing time, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, in a stuffy office, chasing Sonny O’Riordan, trying to take her mind off things.

  Foolish woman, Joanne. Foolish, foolish woman.

  This really was teenage behaviour. She should be above all this by now. Lord knows she’d had enough practice at being let down by men in the past.

  But Seamus the accountant was the first man Joanne had gone to bed with without her T-shirt on for around – oh, it had to be at least eighteen years. She didn’t go all the way with Seamus – she didn’t remove her bra. She wasn’t quite ready for that. The scars beneath each breast and around each nipple were still pink and a little raised. They would fade, apparently. ‘Turn to silvery threads no more than stretch marks,’ the surgeon had said.

  This was after he told her he was very pleased with the operation. ‘I’m very pleased with the result,’ he had said, but he didn’t look pleased. Joanne suspected it was something he said automatically to patients on the first ward round of the day after surgery to allay any fears they might have. And she was proven right, because the following day she could hear him saying the exact same thing to a woman in the next bed along who’d had a tummy tuck.

  Joanne had asked the woman how she came to get a tummy tuck on the NHS, as she had assumed that plastic surgery of this kind, without a medical reason, was something that had to be paid for privately. With no hint of shame, the woman replied, ‘I told my doctor I couldn’t stand the way it slapped around when I was on my hands and knees having sex. And he said he could see how that could be psychologically damaging.’

  Indeed, thought Joanne.

  Incidentally, Joanne didn’t mind the scars. She didn’t even mind if they didn’t fade completely; she was just so relieved to look like a normal person instead of a cartoon version of what a woman should be. She was now a sensible 36D, and when Seamus the accountant had gone to remove her bra and Joanne had said, ‘I’d rather not,’ he hadn’t done what she imagined he might do. He had not frowned, asked her why not, asked her if she was prudish in some way. He had s
imply nodded and touched her through the silk. His touch was light – the touch of a butterfly, in fact – as though he understood. And Joanne wondered if he somehow knew more than he was letting on.

  In the morning, Seamus left early. At around five. And that should have been her first clue. He’s probably married, Joanne thought, lying there watching him dress. She hadn’t noticed the patches of white skin covering his torso, his upper arms, because they’d had the lights off. But in the morning light Joanne thought them strangely beautiful.

  He looks like a lovely tortoiseshell cat without its fur, she had thought, idly.

  She’d asked Seamus if he wanted her number, and even though she suspected he was married he said yes and dutifully punched the digits into his mobile, telling her he would call her later that day.

  Time to move on now, she decided, shutting down the computer and grabbing her bag. She slipped her mobile into the side pocket, purposely not checking the screen as she did so, and considered this a small victory in her effort towards ridding her thoughts of Seamus.

  Pushing her chair away from the desk, she heard it ring.

  ‘DS Aspinall,’ she said.

  ‘Joanne? You still upstairs?’

  It was Rebecca Fowler, the duty sergeant at the front desk.

  ‘I’m here,’ Joanne said.

  ‘Oh, great. Look, I’ve just had a call from a couple of officers out your way in Windermere. A girl’s missing, and—’

  ‘What age?’

  ‘Ten. She’s only been gone an hour or so – looks like she could have wandered off – but the mother’s a stroppy sort. She’s demanding a detective on the scene and I wondered if you wouldn’t mind calling in, showing your face. She won’t deal with the uniformed officers.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Joanne said, and reached for a pen. ‘Go ahead with the address.’

  10

  ‘WHERE THE FUCKING hell are you?’

  Good question, thought Noel.

  He’d headed off earlier for a drive, something he did on Sundays to escape the house (sometimes, Karen), and now he wasn’t exactly sure where he was. He had the satnav of course, safely stowed in the glove compartment. He could plug it in and find his location within seconds. But there was something quite romantic in following his curiosity, driving without an agenda, driving until he found something of interest – and granted, yes, that was usually a pub.

  He had headed north that morning with the vague notion of visiting Peebles, the old market town in the Scottish Borders. He hadn’t been there since…had he ever been there? He couldn’t remember. But it sounded like a nice place to spend an afternoon, so he filled up the Volvo with fuel and bought a copy of the Sunday Times.

  But Noel hadn’t made it to Peebles. Heading over Shap Fell, he’d seen a sign for Haweswater.

  Haweswater is a man-made reservoir that was built by flooding the Mardale valley. It was done specifically to supply water to the people of Manchester, back in the twenties or thirties. Noel remembered learning about it in primary school: how the villages and farms had been lost; about the outcry from the local communities at the disappearance of what was supposed to be one of the prettiest valleys in the whole Lake District. So he’d pulled off the A6, thinking it was high time he took a look at Haweswater, deciding he could stop there for an hour, maybe more, and still make it to Peebles later on, if that’s what he wanted to do.

  Noel spent a few pleasant hours on the banks of the reservoir, longer than anticipated, his only company the occasional guest from the nearby hotel out taking a stroll. The air was still, the water a deep, deep, cobalt blue, and he sat reading happily, first the sports supplement (did every sportsman have a beard now? And they weren’t even good beards. Kris Kristofferson’s in Convoy – now that was a beard), then the news review and finally the culture section.

  Studying the movies for the week ahead, he made a mental note to record a Spanish film which was going to be shown late on Tuesday. It had been adapted from a Ruth Rendell novel and it sounded right up his street.

  Then he was heading north again, passing through a village he hadn’t caught the name of, his plan being to find a cosy-looking pub and stop for a late lunch – something substantial, like game pie or lamb shanks. Something that would tide him over until night-time, if necessary. And it was at this point that he received Karen’s call.

  ‘Where the fucking hell are you?’ Karen screamed at him. And as he began to stutter out his reply he realized she was crying.

  ‘Karen?’

  For a while she couldn’t answer.

  He could hear the sound of her breath, short and rasping, as if she had developed some sort of respiratory problem. Bronchiectasis, it sounded like, when the walls of the lungs become dilated and full of holes.

  ‘I don’t actually care where you are,’ she said, quieter now, her tone more measured. ‘You need to come home. Brontë has gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’ he asked.

  ‘Just gone. We don’t know where. Your idiot daughter lost her. She took her out and came back without her. No one knows where Brontë is. No one’s seen her. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  —

  In the lounge, Noel found two police officers, as well as Karen and Verity. He recognized the officers from having attended unexpected deaths as the on-call doctor over the years, but he introduced himself all the same. He shook hands and thanked them for coming so quickly.

  ‘Not a problem, Dr Bloom,’ one of them said, and Noel had the sense that he was supposed to know the officer’s name. He might be a patient he’d not seen in a while. It wasn’t as if Noel could remember everybody.

  The other officer – a clean-cut guy in his early forties with a deep tan and a Mr Punch chin – told Noel that they were going through the events leading up to Brontë’s disappearance in an attempt to work out what might have happened. And it was at this point that Noel took a proper look at Verity.

  She was wedged at one end of the sofa, as far away from the others as she could possibly get, her legs twisted beneath her. Her shoulders were somewhere up near her ears. She was covered in mud and scratches, and her eyes were red-raw and bulging.

  Noel moved towards her, crouching down and laying his hand on top of her foot. She was icy cold. ‘Hey,’ he said, when she didn’t look at him.

  She dipped her head lower, her eyes focused on the arm of the sofa. ‘Hey,’ he said again, giving her foot a gentle squeeze, but she shook her head as though she wasn’t physically able to meet his gaze. As though he should leave her be.

  A couple of tears slid down her cheeks and dripped on to the skin of her chest. He took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it against the scratch running down the length of her arm; it was beginning to seep. ‘How’d you do this?’ he asked.

  ‘Looking for Brontë,’ she said.

  He moved the handkerchief up to her cheek and tried to dry her tears. ‘It’s okay,’ he whispered.

  ‘Okay? Okay? ’

  Karen.

  ‘Why don’t you tell us what exactly is okay about this situation, Noel?’

  Noel didn’t have an answer and instead turned his attention back to the two police officers. ‘What do we do?’ he asked. ‘What happens now?’

  The first officer told him that Verity was about to provide them with a list of the names of Brontë’s friends who were at the recreation ground with her at the time Verity left. At this, Noel did a double-take.

  ‘That’s right,’ Karen snapped. ‘Your daughter left her there. Alone. While she went to visit her bloody mother. She’s yet to provide us with an answer as to what was so pressing. Why it was so important to see her mother that she couldn’t stay and look after her sister.’

  Noel turned to Verity. The tears were falling fast now.

  ‘Verity?’ Noel said.

  And Verity replied, crying softly, ‘She’s not
a baby. Brontë’s not a baby, she’s ten years old.’

  ‘But she’s my baby!’ Karen yelled. ‘Not yours. The decision was not yours to make. Can’t you understand that?’

  The tanned officer asked Verity why she hadn’t taken Brontë along with her to visit her mother, and Verity hesitated.

  ‘I think I can answer that,’ said Karen. ‘Verity’s mother is sick. She lives at Applemead, and it is full of people with the kinds of disabilities that can be shocking for a child. I have never wanted Brontë to go there. There was never a need for her to go there.’

  The officer looked at Verity, his expression posing the question: That the reason? and Verity nodded, saying, ‘Pretty much. And I thought that because she was with her friends, and her friends were playing there on their own, that she was old enough to look after herself for ten minutes. It’s not like I left her at a train station. Or in the middle of a city. It’s the rec.’

  The officer told Verity that he was sure Brontë’s attention had been caught by something and she had just wandered off.

  ‘Oh, do, please, stop saying that,’ Karen said. ‘Brontë did not wander off. And we are wasting time going over this when you should be out looking for her. And when is that detective getting here, anyway? Surely he should have been here by now. You did make the call, didn’t you?’

  11

  JOANNE STOOD OUTSIDE the front door, warrant card in hand, straightening her spine in an attempt to appear more professional than she looked. She wasn’t in her usual workwear: of tailored black trouser suit (sometimes grey). Instead she wore a powder-blue linen dress which was cut above the knee; this was partly on account of it being the weekend but mainly because of the heat. The day seemed to be getting hotter as it went on. Unusual for September. It wouldn’t be long before she was packing the dress away beneath her bed, along with her sandals and shorts, ready to pull out her winter wardrobe again. She looked around at the pretty front garden, the large bay trees in pots flanking the front door, thinking that soon it would be Christmas. How depressing.