‘I don’t want to.’ Daniel heard his own voice as whining.
‘Don’t be a baby.’ She had never scorned him before, but he heard that in her voice now.
Leaning over the sink, the basin trembling beneath him, Daniel inserted his hand into the bloody insides of the chicken.
‘Don’t worry too much about the lungs,’ Minnie said. ‘They tend to stay stuck to the carcass.’
Daniel felt sick but he tried to grab the warm entrails and pull them. With each pull his own stomach tightened and bile rose in his throat. When finally he was able to pull forth the dark red slime, he stepped back as his own guts spewed on to the floor along with the bird’s.
Daniel bent over and vomited on to the kitchen floor. He had not eaten, and so his vomit was thin, yellow liquid that splashed on to the guts of the bird.
‘It’s all right,’ said Minnie. ‘I’ll sort it. You go and clean yourself up.’
*
In the bathroom, Daniel dry-heaved into the bowl, then sat slumped against the wall. The butterfly smiled at him from the shelf. He felt wretched. He felt like a snail cut from its shell. He washed his face in cool water and dried it with a face cloth, then brushed his teeth until the taste of the sick was gone.
He waited a few minutes before going back into the kitchen. He felt strange, as if he didn’t want to leave the bathroom. He felt like he did in the bathroom at home when one of them was hurting his mother. He had the same dark soup of scared in his stomach and the same itch in his muscles.
Carefully, Daniel unlocked the door and stood at the top of the stairs. He went to bed with his clothes on, but didn’t sleep. He listened intently to the sounds of her in the kitchen. The oven opening and closing, her footsteps crossing the floor, her words to Blitz and then the sound of Blitz’s food being poured into his bowl.
‘You were up there for ages,’ Minnie said when she saw him. ‘I was almost coming up after you. It’s after two, and you haven’t had any breakfast. Are you hungry now?’
Daniel shook his head.
‘But you’ll eat. Sit down.’
Daniel sat at the table and looked at the dumb placemat with a pony on it.
She had roasted the chicken and carved it. Slices of breast sat on his plate next to the tinned sweetcorn and boiled potatoes.
‘Eat it.’
‘Don’t want it.’
‘You’ll eat it.’
‘I don’t want it.’ He pushed his plate away.
‘You can murder it, so you’ll take responsibility. You’ll eat it. You’ll know it’s dead and its goodness is inside you.’
‘I won’t eat it.’
‘You’ll sit here and I’ll sit here until you’ve eaten it.’ Minnie placed her drink hard on the table. The ice shuddered in protest.
They sat until her drink finished. He thought she would get up and refill it and that would have been his cue to leave, but she let the glass lie dry before her. She looked at him and blinked slowly. Time started to grow on them, like moss on the stones in the yard. Daniel looked at the cold chicken and vegetables on the plate and wondered if he could swallow them like pills.
‘What if I eat the vegetables, like?’
‘You’re a bright lad, so why do you ask that? You know I don’t care if you touch the vegetables, but I’ll have you eat every morsel of the bird that you killed. Those birds are my living, but that’s not why I’m angry. You know I eat the birds when it’s their time. I care for them and love them and yes, we do eat them, but they are killed in a proper way, not out of violence, not out of hate or anger. This one’s dead and we won’t waste it, but I want you to know it’s dead because of you, because of what you did. If it weren’t we would have its eggs tomorrow. I know that you’ve had a hard time, Danny, and any time you like you can talk to me about it. I know you’re angry and you’ve a right to be. I’ll do my best to help you, but I can’t have you killing my birds every time you feel bad.’
Daniel began to cry. He cried like a child smaller than he was, slumped in the chair and quietly humming his sadness over a wet lip. He put a hand over his eyes so that he didn’t have to look at her.
When he stopped crying, he opened his eyes and took breath after new clean breath. She was still before him with her empty glass and her steel-blue eyes fixed on him.
‘Calm down, that’s it. Get your breath back and eat it up.’
Defeated, Daniel sat up and began to cut the chicken. He cut a very small piece and set it on his fork. He let the meat touch his tongue and then took it into his mouth.
Guilt
13
Daniel looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly 3 a.m. A cool blue light filtered into the room. He couldn’t tell if it was the moon or the streetlamps below which caused the chill, austere glow. He had worked until ten, eaten at his desk and then gone to the Crown for a pint on his way home. Casual strips of desire whipped him, but the stress of the day had left him empty and he felt light as he turned and turned again in its wake.
In the near dark, he lay on his back with his hands behind his head. He thought about the years of anger towards Minnie that had folded into years of disregard. This had been his defence against her, he realised: anger and disregard. Now that she was dead his anger was still there, but set adrift. Half asleep, he watched it float and turn.
He had chosen to leave her all those years ago and now it was hard for him to grieve for her. To grieve he had to remember, and remembering was grief. In the half-dark he blinked as he remembered graduating and his first few years as a lawyer in London. All this had been without her. He had felt proud of his self-sufficiency. After he cut her off, he had paid his own way through university and then got a job at a firm in London, only three months after graduating. He had taken credit for this, but now, in the near dark, he was honest enough to wonder if he would have gone to university at all had it not been for Minnie.
He felt darkness circling around him and alighting on his chest, hooded, wicked, shining black like a raven. Daniel put a palm to his bare chest, as if to relieve the sting of the claws.
He had left her, yet her leaving still seemed the greater. As he turned and turned again he felt the death beyond the loss which he had created. Her death was heavier, dark, like a bird of prey against the night sky.
Ten past three.
With his mouth and eyes open, Daniel remembered killing the chicken. He remembered his child’s hands throttling the bird that she held dear. He sat up and swung his legs out of the bed. He sat there in the half-dark, his body curved over his knees. Because there was nothing else that would stop it, he pulled on his shorts, stepped into his trainers and went running.
Four o’clock when he checked his watch. The early autumn morning was warm and fresh against his face. He could smell the water from the fountain when he ran past it, and then the dewy leaves of the trees. The pounding of his feet on the path and the warming of his muscles energised him and he ran faster than he usually would, lengthening his stride and allowing his torso to drive him forward. Even at this pace, images came to him, causing him to lose concentration: he saw again her coffin; Minnie with her wellies on and her hands on her hips, cheeks reddened by the wind; Blitz bowing his head deferentially when she entered the room; the market stall stacked with fresh eggs; his childhood bedroom with the rosebud wallpaper.
He had been wild. Who else but Minnie would have taken on such a child? His social worker had warned him. Minnie had cared for him when no one else would.
Although he was already breathing hard, Daniel ran faster. He felt heat in his stomach muscles and his thighs. A stitch seared along his side and he slowed to accommodate it, but didn’t stop. He took longer, slower breaths as he had been taught, yet the stitch remained. In the darkness of the park, indigents shifted on cold benches, newspaper fluttering over their faces. His mind was torn between the pain in his side and the reluctant ache that came whenever he thought of Minnie. She had been the guilty one, but, accused at her fun
eral, he now considered his own part in her death. He had intended to hurt her, after all. He had been aware of punishing her. She had deserved it.
Deserved. Daniel staggered, then slowed to a walk. He was still a mile from home. The night acquiesced to a shameful, reluctant glow in the east. Daybreak. It seemed appropriate to Daniel; that the new day should be a small violence. The dark blue sky was beginning to bloody. He walked with his hands on his hips, breathing hard, sweat coursing between his shoulder blades. He wasn’t ready for the day. He was exhausted before it had even begun.
When he arrived back at the flat, he was sweating hard. He drank a pint of water and had a shower, staying under the jet for longer than usual, letting the water pour on to his face. He could feel the slow pulse in his veins from the exercise, and yet for once he did not feel calmed by it. All his life he had been running. He had run away from his mother’s home and her boyfriends. He had run away from foster homes, back to his mother; he had run away from Minnie, to university, to London. Now he still wanted to run – he still felt the need for it, an angry hunger in his muscles – but there was no longer any place to run to. And there was nothing left to run away from. His mother was dead, and now Minnie too; the one he had loved and the one who had loved him were both gone, and with it his love and his proof that he could be loved.
Dressing, he opened the box that she had left him and took out the photograph of Minnie and her family. Why had she left him this photo, he wondered? He understood the photographs of him and Minnie at the beach, the photos from the market stall or working on the farm. This photograph he had always been drawn to, but only because it depicted a youthful Minnie – a good mother and her perfect family. Perfect families had obsessed Daniel when he was a child. He used to watch them on buses and in parks, hungrily studying the interactions between parents and children, and between the parents themselves. He liked to see what he had missed out on as a child.
Frowning, Daniel put the photograph on the mantelpiece beside his Newcastle United tankard.
He buttoned his shirt and ate his breakfast and was ready to leave at five thirty. He would be at work at six. As an afterthought, brushing his teeth and throwing files into his briefcase, he went back to the box and retrieved the butterfly. He didn’t know why, but he put it into his briefcase also.
Daniel bought a paper when he exited the Tube at Liverpool Street. Rarely was he at work this early. Even the paper felt fresh, warm as bread. He knew a coffee shop that would be open by the station. He bought a coffee and instead of taking it straight to his office, he lingered and allowed himself the luxury of reading the paper while he sipped the hot liquid.
On page four of the Daily Mail, Daniel saw the headline ANGEL OF DEATH and sighed.
A boy of eleven is being held over the horrific killing of eight-year-old Ben Stokes, who was found beaten to death in Barnard Park, Islington, over a week ago.
The Crown Prosecution Service said it had advised Islington Borough Police to charge the boy, who is reportedly from the area, with murder. Ben Stokes was found dead hidden in a children’s play area.
Jim Smith, head of the service’s Crown Court Unit, said: ‘We authorised the police to charge a boy aged eleven for the murder of eight-year-old Ben Stokes.’
The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, appeared at a youth court hearing at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court on Friday morning and stood in the dock with a security officer. The boy wore a shirt and tie and green pullover as the charges were read to him. He did not show any emotion during the hearing. The boy has been remanded in custody and will appear in court again on 23 August.
The boy, who lives with professional parents in an affluent area of Angel, was well known at his Islington primary school for violent and disruptive behaviour. The boy’s mother refused to answer her door to reporters yesterday. Ben Stokes’s parents were too distressed to speak to reporters, but released a statement which said, ‘We are overcome by grief on the death of our beloved Ben. We will not be able to rest until the person responsible is brought to justice.’
The assault – which bears similarities to the murder of toddler James Bulger by two ten-year-olds in 1993 – has horrified the nation. Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May both called it ‘appalling’.
Daniel loosened his tie and tucked the paper under his arm. The coffee was now cooling and he sipped it as he walked to his office. There had been other articles: small paragraphs in the local press at the time of the bail hearing. This article was different. It was a headline.
It’s starting he thought. It is starting already. It was bright daylight now, but the day still smelled young. His stomach was curdled with tiredness and he felt as if he could lie down on the pavement, press his cheek to the dirty stone and sleep.
He was first to arrive at work. The cleaners were still there, emptying bins and wiping desks. In his office, Daniel finished his coffee reading through Sebastian’s prosecution papers. There were several photographs of Ben’s battered body. The first showed the crime scene itself, with Ben’s face buried under the brick and sticks that had been used to assault him, as if the killer wanted to make a shrine of his small body. Other pictures taken at the postmortem showed the full extent of the injuries to the face: the broken nose and fractured eye socket. It did not look like a child’s face, but rather a doll that had been broken, squeezed out of shape. Daniel frowned as he looked at the photographs.
Just before nine his phone rang and Daniel picked it up.
‘It’s Irene Clarke,’ said Stephanie.
‘Fine, put her through.’
Daniel waited to hear her voice. Apart from a glimpse at her silk party in March, it had been nearly a year since he had seen her. They had gone out the night of Tyrel’s sentence. He remembered her small sarcastic mouth and her arched brows.
‘Hello, Danny, how are you?’
‘How are you, more to the point? How’s life as a QC? Congratulations on your silk appointment.’
Irene laughed.
‘You coming with me to see the pathologist tomorrow?’ Daniel asked. ‘Just looking through the reports now.’
‘Yes, definitely. I was just calling to say we should meet at Green Park or something – go together.’
‘Sure,’ said Daniel. ‘And afterwards I might even buy you a drink – toast your success, like.’ He deliberately allowed his accent to broaden. He smiled, expecting her to tease him, to lapse into her best wae’aye man.
‘I’ve been working so bloody hard,’ she said, ‘I’ve almost forgotten all about it. Be good to see you though. Been a while.’
‘I can’t tell you how glad I am that you took this.’ The honesty brought a brief warmth to his face.
‘I had to. It touches a chord …’ she said.
‘I know. Me too.’
She was waiting for him at Green Park when he arrived, late afternoon. She looked pale and tired, her hair flattened on top and at the sides as if she had just taken her wig off, but her face lit up when she saw him. He kissed her on both cheeks and she squeezed his upper arm, running her hand right down to his wrist, which she held for a second before letting go. ‘Danny boy, eh. You look good.’
‘So do you,’ he said, meaning it. Despite her wig-flattened blonde hair and tired eyes, she stood out on the street, with her chin tilted to one side to admire him. Irene always made him want to stand up straight and pull back his shoulders.
They made their way down Piccadilly, past the Ritz and then to Carlton House Terrace where they were to meet the pathologist, Jill Gault, in her office overlooking St James’s Park.
Daniel could smell Irene’s perfume as he walked, even as passing buses contributed warm gusts of smog to the air. Their strides matched and Daniel was distracted for a moment by the easy rhythm of their paces.
It was late afternoon but the sun was merciless, high in the sky, like a critical eye. The pathologist’s office was a relief: not air-conditioned but cool, the heat of the
day forbidden by the thick stone walls. She sat behind an expansive desk with tortoiseshell glasses pushed up into her curly red hair.
‘Can I get you tea or coffee?’ said Dr Gault.
Daniel and Irene both declined.
Dr Gault opened a brown file and lowered her glasses to the end of her nose, to allow her to review Ben Stokes’s pathology report.
‘Your report was very interesting, Dr Gault,’ Daniel said. ‘You’re clear that the cause of death was acute subdural haematoma caused by a blow to the front right side of the head?’
Dr Gault slid an X-ray on to the desk in front of them. With her pen, she indicated the extent of the haemorrhaging.
‘You are quite sure that the murder weapon was the brick found at the scene?’ Irene asked.
‘Yes, the contours match exactly.’
‘I see. Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Irene continued, ‘but you have identified the time of death as approximately six forty-five in the evening, but you have been unable to state the time of the assault – that’s the case with this type of injury?’
‘That’s correct,’ said Dr Gault, letting her pen fall to the desk and sitting back in her chair with her hands resting on her stomach. ‘With this type of injury, it is quite impossible to determine the time of the assault. Haemorrhaging causes pressure on the brain but it can be anything from minutes to ten hours or more before it becomes fatal.’
‘So that means that the attack could conceivably have happened around six o’clock at night?’ said Daniel, with one eyebrow raised.
‘That’s correct, or it could have happened some hours before.’
Daniel and Irene looked at each other. Already Daniel could see Irene presenting this in court.
It was cooler when they emerged from the pathologist’s office, but the London streets still felt dirty and noisy and stuffy. It was just after five o’clock and crowded, people navigating each other like fish; cars honked at cyclists; people talked on invisible mobiles. Taxi doors slammed; buses breathed in and up from the road, out and down towards it; jets coursed soundlessly through the blue sky above it all.
Guilty One Page 13
