From the Cradle

by Louise Voss

  ‘Hattie’ came back with, I can proov it. Im sending you a link to a video that ur stepdaughter made. REMEMBER evil Alice did this. SHE IS GUILTY!!!

  Winkler waited for what seemed like forever and was starting to think that ‘Hattie’ was bluffing or had chickened out, when another message popped up, with a link to an external site.

  He clicked it. As ‘Hattie Styles’ had promised, it led to a video. Winkler clicked play and started watching it.

  ‘Well, fucking well,’ he said.

  Chapter 32

  Helen – Day 5

  Helen sat in the office with her back to the door, but kept an eye on the laptop screen for a movement in the reflection that would signify Sean’s approach. It would only make things so much worse if he spotted the contents of the email discussion she was having with Marion. After returning from the encounter with Janet Friars, Helen had got home to find an email from her gym-buddy, asking her how she was doing. Quickly firing emails back and forth, Helen had asked Marion what she was up to that evening and her friend had replied that she had a date with a guy so hot he made Brad Pitt look like Shrek. Sex was, apparently, very much on the cards.

  I actually can’t imagine ever having sex with Sean again, Helen replied. She paused and stared at the photo montage on the wall above the desk, a selection of the best photos from their last few holidays, of her, Sean, Alice and Frankie, mostly on beaches with wind-whipped hair and summer-dark skin, only Sean pale and freckly next to the mocha skin tones of the three girls. She wondered, not for the first time, if Alice minded the fact that she, Helen, could pass for her mum.

  Then she added, How depressing is that?

  Marion had replied immediately. Try not to worry, honey, you’re under so much stress. Sex is probably the last thing on your mind.

  Helen crossed her legs, squeezing them tightly together. No, she replied, typing furiously, her fingers pounding the keyboard. I’m gagging for it, to take my mind off everything. Seriously. But every time I think of Sean and I doing it, the way he is now, so cold and distant, it just turns me off again. And I feel so guilty for even thinking about it, with F missing …

  Helen hesitated before hitting ‘send’. Perhaps she was ‘over-sharing’, something she knew she was prone to doing, usually after too much white wine. She was over-sharing, she decided. She deleted the last few sentences and instead wrote, Yeah. Not really in the mood these days … Anyway, got to go …

  She was unwilling to admit the reason ‒ that her Diazepam was about to kick in. It had been her only chance of getting any sleep since Frankie had gone.

  … Thanks for messaging me. It’s good to hear from you.

  Marion replied, See you at the gym, honey. You’ll get your princess back again soon. Hang in there. XXX

  Sure, said Helen, brushing away a fat tear that dropped onto her keyboard. Bye XXX.

  Then she sat still for a long time, thinking about the words she had almost sent her friend in a moment of honesty. She wanted sex so badly; craved its oblivion – but her only available option was currently staring blank-eyed at the TV screen downstairs, an almost-empty bottle of red wine beside him, his tongue stained black. Last time she had popped down to get a cup of tea, Sean had been watching Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model, a programme that Alice loved, but that Sean would, under normal circumstances, rather scoop out his eyes with a spoon than watch voluntarily.

  When had they last made love? It took her a moment to recall: it had been the day before Frankie was taken, a middle-of-the-night wordless quickie. The next evening in the restaurant she remembered wondering if she could already be pregnant. She recalled her feeling of pure heady happiness at the thought of another baby, sanctioned by Sean, a confirmation that their marriage was working and their family putting down deeper roots – and then, less than an hour later, everything was in pieces, as though a giant wrecking ball had come long and bashed their lives to shit, its huge hard smooth surface blotting out all light and future and hope … at least until Frankie came home.

  She didn’t bother saying goodnight to Sean. Overcome by a huge tiredness, so great that she couldn’t even summon up the energy to trudge downstairs and tell him she was turning in, it just seemed easier to close her laptop lid, give her teeth a perfunctory brush, strip off all her clothes and collapse into bed in a drug-blurred haze.

  She awoke several hours later in the pitch dark, lying on her side, not quite sure if she was dreaming the prodding sensation in the area of her coccyx. Not entirely sure if she was even awake. Sean’s breathing was light and fast on the back of her neck and the prodding became more insistent. Instantly aroused, she moved her bottom up and back, returning the pressure, feeling the tip of his cock slip between her naked buttocks. Perhaps because it was dark, perhaps because she had her back to him, and she didn’t have to see the naked grief in Sean’s eyes, or maybe because of her lustful thoughts earlier on, she felt almost overwhelmingly turned on. Everything in her focused on his penis, the softness of the head of it as it probed her, squeezing briefly, tantalizingly, towards her anus, then further down, slipping in, shoving hard into her wetness … Helen felt her breathing change too, and she moaned.

  ‘Sean,’ she murmured. ‘My darling.’

  He came almost immediately, pushing deep inside her and shuddering. ‘I love you,’ he said.

  Only now, she noticed the smell of stale alcohol coming off him, and before she could decide whether to say something about it, his breathing changed. He was asleep.

  Helen lay in the dark, her eyes open, staring at the digital clock, wondering where Frankie was right now, if she was warm. If she was suffering. Sean shifted against her in his sleep, muttering something. She felt more alone than ever before.

  Chapter 33

  Patrick – Day 5

  Patrick opened the door to his parents’ house and let himself in, surprised to hear Dora the Explorer urging Swiper to stop swiping from the TV in the living room. He peeked in – Bonnie was propped up on the sofa, the new cuddly monkey he had bought in a petrol station during a moment of parental guilt clutched to her chest. The stair gate that acted like a prison cell door was shut and Bonnie’s eyelids were drooping despite the noise coming from the TV. Plastic toys and brightly coloured books were scattered across the room, the aftermath of the toddler-sized hurricane that swept through the house every day and that Patrick’s mum, Mairead, spent hours clearing up. She wouldn’t let Patrick hire a cleaner, despite his protestations. For the ten-thousandth time he felt a pang of guilt, followed by a stab of resentment aimed at Gill.

  He found his parents in the kitchen, sitting at the table, half-empty cups of tea in front of them.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, reacting to their glum faces. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Oh, decided to pay us a visit, have you?’ Jim’s expression was dark.

  ‘Leave it, Jim.’ Mairead forced a smile. ‘Would you like a tea, Pat?’

  Patrick ignored the question and addressed his dad. ‘You know I’m in the middle of a very intense case. You should also know that I feel terrible about you having to look after Bonnie all the time.’

  Normally, his dad would have told Patrick not to worry about it, but today he said, ‘And so you should. Your mum is exhausted. We both are. We love Bonnie to bits but we’re retired now. We should be out enjoying our retirement, but we’re stuck in this house every day.’

  ‘Jim!’ Mairead protested, but Patrick felt a chill run through his veins. It was pretty obvious that this was what they’d been talking about, why they’d left Bonnie sitting on her own in the other room. And he didn’t blame them. Instead, the guilt he’d felt a minute ago intensified and took away all his strength. He sat down with a thump at the table and rubbed his face.

  ‘I know. I’m really sorry. I feel terrible about it.’ His eyes stung with emotion.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Mairead hissed at her husband. ‘Pat, my darling, don’t worry – your dad and I are ju
st having a bad day, that’s all. Bonnie’s been playing up, having tantrums. She chucked an entire bowl of Cheerios over the floor, went crazy in Tesco because I wouldn’t buy her any sweets and has basically spent the whole day refusing to do anything we tell her to do.’

  ‘She’s spoiled rotten,’ Jim muttered.

  ‘We’re the ones who’ve spoiled her.’ Mairead stood up and went over to Pat, resting a hand on his shoulder. Pat had a flashback to when he was a kid, coming home from school with another lousy report saying he needed to try harder, that he was ‘so laid back he’s nearly laid out’. Jim would tut and shake his head and lecture Patrick about how he was never going to fulfil his potential if he didn’t buck his ideas up. But his mum would almost always be calm and reasonable, making him his favourite dinner to help him feel better. But then, as now, he could tell what she was thinking, the emotions she was too kind to express.

  Patrick said, ‘Dad’s right. I’ve been asking far too much of you, taking you for granted. I need to sort something out – get a nanny or something. Bonnie can go to nursery.’

  ‘That’s so expensive, though, Pat. We really are happy to look after her. I don’t want you to spend all your money on childcare.’

  ‘I’m happy to help pay for the childcare,’ said Jim. He added hastily, ‘Not because I don’t love spending time with Bonnie but … We’re too old for this. We just need to be able to cut down on how much we do.’

  Patrick nodded. ‘I know, I know. Listen, as soon as this case is over, I’ll sort something out. I promise.’

  The three of them fell quiet. The only sound was a singing guinea pig from the TV in the other room.

  ‘What about Gill?’

  Both Patrick and Mairead looked at Jim. He usually refused to speak Gill’s name.

  ‘She can hardly look after Bonnie,’ Mairead said.

  ‘I know that. I don’t want her anywhere near our granddaughter. But do you know what’s happening there? When are they going to let her out? Is she going to be allowed access?’ Before Patrick could respond, his dad fired another question at him. ‘You went to see her the other day, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how was she?’

  ‘She seemed … better. A lot happier. More her old self, in fact.’

  ‘So, what? Are they going to let her out? What are you going to do when that happens?’

  Patrick sighed. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t know why you haven’t divorced her …’

  ‘Jim!’ Mairead finally snapped. ‘For goodness sake, shut up.’

  Jim pouted like a pre-schooler. ‘Alright. But if and when they do let her out, you’d be mad to take her back, son. As mad as her.’

  Down the hallway, Bonnie started wailing. Mairead immediately moved towards the door.

  Patrick stopped her. ‘No, Mum. I’ll go.’

  He hurried off toward Bonnie calling out, ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, daddy’s coming.’ At the same time he thought about his dad’s questions. Why hadn’t he divorced Gill? And what was he going to do when they discharged her? Did he still love her?

  It was a bigger, more difficult puzzle than any missing child.

  He waited until Bonnie was fed, bathed and in bed before heading back to the station, leaving his parents in front of the TV, his dad frowning at his Sudoku while his mum watched Coronation Street. Through the day, Carmella had updated him on the lack of progress and their failure to locate Alice and Larry.

  When Patrick got to his desk and checked his email, he found that Helen had emailed him the list of Alice’s friends. At the top was Alice’s best friend, Georgia, followed by around forty more names. How did girls have so many friends? He imagined her Facebook friend list was considerably longer but, according to Helen’s email, these were her real friends.

  This was the kind of job he ought to delegate to a lower-ranked member of the team, but Patrick wanted to hear the voices of the girls and boys on the list. He wanted to hear any hint of a lie or cover-up. He picked up his desk phone and started dialling, beginning with the name at the top of the list.

  It was going to be a long night.

  For the second time in a week, he awoke with daylight penetrating the room and the sound of the cleaner’s hoover buzzing in a nearby room. He unpeeled his face from the desk and sat up, rubbing at his scratchy eyes.

  The buzzing stopped and was replaced by another sound: shouting. He got up, ignoring the moans of protest from every muscle in his body, and walked out into the corridor. Someone – a woman – was yelling and screaming obscenities, the sound coming from the direction of the front desk.

  He decided to check it out, see if they needed any help. When he got there, he found two PCs trying to usher an old woman out of the building, while she continued to yell about ‘babies’ and ‘those kids’.

  One of the constables appealed to her to be calm, at which point she threw herself to the floor, just as Bonnie had apparently done in Tesco earlier.

  ‘They tried to kill my baby,’ she screamed, thumping the ground.

  It was time to step in and help.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, kneeling beside the woman. He looked up at the PC and said, ‘It’s alright, I’ll take over from here.’

  ‘Are you sure, sir?’

  ‘Yes, don’t worry.’ He gently coaxed the woman from her prostrate position. ‘We know each other. Don’t we, Martha?’

  Chapter 34

  Winkler – Day 6

  St John’s was one of the biggest and best secondary schools in Richmond, the kind of school that sent property prices in the surrounding streets soaring as parents who couldn’t quite afford to go private clamoured to get into the catchment area. This was the school that Alice Philips attended along with her boyfriend, who lived in one of the Local Authority houses that the middle-class parents wished could be moved to allow space for more of their little darlings. If those parents knew what Winkler had just watched, they might think about putting their overpriced houses on the market, start looking for a different school.

  It was dynamite. After the girl – he assumed it was a girl – calling herself Hattie Styles had sent him the link, he’d watched the video it had led to with a slack jaw, so stunned and amused by what he was watching that his brain forgot to send the signals to his body that porn usually elicited.

  In the ten-minute clip, a boy and girl – or should he think of them as young man and woman? – shagged each other in what was actually a pretty vanilla way. A strip, a quick blow job, followed by missionary position sex and a bit of doggy style on a double bed. As porn went, it was at the softer end of the scale. What made it remarkable though was the fact that, until they stripped, the fornicating couple were wearing school uniforms, and on their heads they wore masks to conceal their identities. Because he couldn’t see their faces, Winkler couldn’t tell exactly how old they were, though he would guess from their bodies, and from their voices as they spoke a few lines of clichéd dialogue, they were no more than fifteen or sixteen. A quick Google image search told him the uniforms were, as he suspected, from St John’s.

  By the time he’d finished watching the video, Hattie Styles was no longer online. He printed out all her messages – and, more crucially, his own replies masquerading as Helen – then deleted them from Helen’s Facebook inbox. Then he sat back and thought about what all this might mean and how it could be connected to the investigation. The girl in the clip was definitely white, so it wasn’t Alice. But ‘Hattie’ had said Alice was responsible for the video. So … what, she’d filmed it? Were she and her boyfriend amateur porn directors? Good grief, teenagers today. When he was a kid, the worst things he ever did were shoplifting seven-inch singles from Woolworths and getting into the odd scrap with lads from the rival school. The closest he came to porn was passing round a contraband copy of Penthouse with his mates and marvelling at the bushes. Now, though, he lived in a world where women didn’t have pubes and every teenager
in the western world had instant access to every variety of hardcore porn ever created. He sighed. This generation was so fucking lucky.

  Now, he walked across the grounds of the school towards the reception. It was that time in the summer term when most pupils had finished their exams and there was a giddy quality in the air. Winkler felt like he had a hand grenade in his pocket that would destroy all that carefree good feeling. Pull the pin and boom! He had a Tigger-ish bounce in his step as he buzzed for the receptionist to let him in.

  Five minutes later he sat in the head teacher’s stuffy office drinking a lukewarm glass of tap water. The head teacher, Hazel Fletcher, was a smart white woman with a golden bob who reminded him a little of Helen Mirren. A silver vixen. He felt only slightly guilty about ruining her day.

  ‘I’ve found out something involving a couple of your pupils that might shock you,’ he said.

  Hazel Fletcher gave him a wry smile. ‘I’ve worked with children for almost thirty years, Detective Winkler. I don’t shock easily.’

  ‘Do you have internet access on that computer?’ he asked. ‘And do you have a firewall that prevents access to adult material?’

  She did. Winkler waited while a guy with a head that was balder than a baboon’s bum fiddled with the settings on Hazel’s computer. After Baldy had left, Winkler read out the URL of the porn clip, then sat back while the head teacher watched it. Her face gave nothing away. He wondered idly if she was slightly turned on by it. She’d never admit it, and neither would he, but when it came down to it humans were animals. The whole lot of them were only a few social niceties away from tearing off their clothes and cluster-fucking in the streets.

  Winkler told Hazel what he knew about the source of the video. ‘And Alice Philips and Larry Gould are currently whereabouts unknown.’

  He expected her to start spouting off about how Alice and Larry were model pupils and how she couldn’t possibly imagine how they could have done such a dreadful thing. But he guessed she hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said she’d seen it all.