by M. J. Ford
‘Just a glass of water would be great,’ said Merriman. ‘Hotting up out there.’
‘And for you?’ Jo asked her companion.
‘Nothing, thank you,’ said Pritchard.
As Jo went to the sink in the kitchen to get the drink, she could hear Merriman cooing to Theo. A knot settled just under her heart. She’d known that this would be more than a routine visit, but the appearance of the other woman was still disconcerting. She carried the water into the other room. Merriman was already seated by Theo’s bouncer, spinning the mobile that hung in front of it. Pritchard was looking out of the window into the street below, as if appraising the drop, and Jo was pleased with her decision regarding ventilation.
Jo placed the glass on the table.
‘Thanks,’ said Merriman. ‘He looks a cheerful little chap.’
‘He is in the daytime,’ said Jo. ‘The hair and claws sprout after dark.’
Merriman offered the briefest of smiles. ‘And how are you coping with the lack of sleep?’
‘Fine, actually,’ Jo lied. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d got more than two straight hours, and the night before had been hell; it had taken three strong coffees that morning to rouse her to anything like a functioning mind, and a ton of foundation to take away the zombie pallor. Theo had seemed like a dream sleeper at first, but in the last month the nights had become progressively more fractured by his wakefulness. There seemed no cause. Even when he was fed, dry and the room was a perfect temperature, he still woke frequently and it took forty-five minutes of rocking and singing to help him settle once more.
She threw a glance at the clock, and Merriman caught it.
‘Don’t worry. We won’t keep you long.’
‘It’s not a problem,’ said Jo. ‘I just have to get to work by eleven.’
Pritchard looked surprised. ‘Goodness. You’re going back already? You’re a super-woman.’
Again, perhaps the hint of criticism there. ‘Thames Valley maternity pay isn’t great,’ Jo explained. It was a fib – they were rather generous – and Pritchard’s eyebrow rose sceptically. Working in the public sector, Jo reasoned, she’d likely know such things.
Merriman leant across, and Jo flinched as her visitor laid a hand on her knee. ‘I know it’s hard to juggle things,’ she said. ‘Have you found a nursery?’
‘Yes,’ said Jo. ‘Little Steps. They’ve got a good survival rate.’
Stop it, Jo. You’re not helping.
‘Parents nearby?’ asked Pritchard from the window. Jo wondered if she’d had her sense of humour surgically removed, or if she’d left it in her crypt at home.
‘Sadly my mum opted to pop her clogs rather than babysit,’ said Jo.
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Pritchard, with a purse of her lips.
‘Don’t be – she wasn’t particularly happy. In a home, you know. We weren’t that close.’
Pritchard nodded, and moved across to the sofa. She opened her own bag and took out an ominous black file.
Jo knew how she came across when she talked about her mother. It was true what she’d said though. There’d not been much affection even before her mum went into Evergreen Lodge, and by the end there wasn’t much of her mum there at all to love anyway. Jo hadn’t even wanted to tell her about the surprise pregnancy – it would have involved too many awkward questions about the identity of the father. Plus, she really didn’t feel she needed any advice on mothering at the time, especially from the woman who’d made her own childhood so miserable.
In the end, the decision to tell her mum or not was taken out of her hands. The physical changes to her own body, undeniable to anyone else, had coincided with her mum’s sudden decline at the home, sleeping for longer and longer periods, barely eating, then eventually, on a Monday afternoon, not waking up at all. Paul, Jo’s brother, had handled the arrangements, and she had been one of just seven at the Crematorium, her hips killing her as she waddled up to the lectern to read some cloyingly sentimental Victorian verse.
‘How’s feeding going?’ asked Pritchard. ‘Bottle or breast?’
‘Bottle,’ said Jo. ‘I’d wanted to breastfeed, but there were medical issues. He’s taken to solids though – loves pears!’
God, I sound deranged!
Pritchard wrote a few more words, then looked up. Her eyes moved around the room before settling on Theo. She smiled like an afterthought.
‘And healing up well, I see?’
Jo tensed, internally at least. It hadn’t taken long to get the pleasantries out of the way. The bruise across Theo’s right cheekbone was a sickly yellow now. If only the memories that led to it would fade as quickly.
‘I really don’t think it bothers him at all,’ said Jo.
‘Probably not,’ said Pritchard. ‘Must have been frightening for you both though.’
A moment’s silence. Jo heard the distinct sound of the kitchen clock.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
‘Women drivers, eh?’ she said at last.
‘What’s that?’ said Pritchard.
‘It was a woman who crashed into us. Silly cow was on her phone.’
‘Us?’ said Pritchard. ‘My understanding was that you weren’t in the car.’
This time, there was no accusation in the tone, but there didn’t need to be. Facts were facts. ‘Well, no,’ said Jo. ‘You know, it was just bad luck.’
‘I understand,’ said Pritchard, before returning to her notes.
‘You don’t need to write it down,’ said Jo. ‘I’ve already been over it twice at the hospital, and with the police.’
‘We keep our own records,’ said Pritchard, as she continued, infuriatingly, to scribble her notes. ‘It’s just a formality.’
Jo’s throat felt tight, just from the memory.
‘He’s fine,’ Jo insisted to the prim woman on her sofa.
‘It does seem that way, yes,’ said Pritchard.
‘No,’ said Jo. ‘It is that way. The matter is closed.’
Merriman’s mouth moved as if she was about to speak, but the older woman got there first.
‘This is just a routine visit,’ she said.
‘Really?’ said Jo. ‘In the past, it’s just been Liz.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ said Pritchard.
‘I’m not worried,’ said Jo, shaking her head. But as she spoke she felt a small tremble of her lip betraying her. She could almost imagine how she was coming across. Defensive, unstable, neurotic. She was stuck in a downward spiral, drowning. What scared her most was that, though she could see the impression she was giving off, she felt powerless to stop it. She felt herself welling up, and clenched her jaw to stem the flow.
‘Josie, it’s okay,’ said Merriman. She reached out again to touch Jo’s leg, but this time Jo drew back.
Tick. Tock.
She took a deep breath, trying to regain some equilibrium. Then she leant down, unclipping Theo from the bouncer and holding him to her chest. ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ she said. ‘We’re fine, as you can see.’
Merriman stood, as if ready to leave, but Pritchard remained seated. ‘Is it okay if we go over a few more things, Jo?’ she asked.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have time,’ said Jo. ‘You were late, you see?’
Merriman, to her credit, looked like she wanted to be out of there fast. After a couple of awkward seconds, Pritchard nodded too. ‘If you need us, you know how to get in touch.’
The only thing I need is for you to get out of my fucking house.
‘We can show ourselves out,’ said Merriman softly.
Jo watched them go, then followed to the hallway. Neither of them spoke to each other, and the older woman led the way out of the front door. Merriman paused a moment, looking back to Jo. ‘You’re doing a great job,’ she said. ‘Hope the return to work goes well.’
Jo, already on edge, lost it then, and the first tear rolled down her cheek. She nodded. As the door closed behind her visitors, Theo squirmed
a little in her grip, and she realised she was holding him tight enough to make his back clammy through his clothes. She loosened her grip, and kissed him on the head. Though her thoughts were an angry swirling mess on the surface – How could they march into her house? Ask her their stupid questions? – it was the pull of a deeper, more unsettling current beneath that was causing her legs to shake. Something Jo Masters rarely experienced. Fear. Theo was her child, and no one else was going to lecture her on how to look after him. No one was going to touch him, or talk to him, or ever take him away.
Chapter 2
Her first thought, in the aftermath of the visit, was to call and delay the return to work for another day, but after ten minutes giving Theo his bottle and spooning some mashed banana between his gums, she found a degree of calm. It wasn’t even a proper day’s work – she was only popping in for a catch-up. If she didn’t show, it wouldn’t look right. Her colleagues would make their own assumptions.
Having wiped Theo’s face, and changed his nappy, she felt composed enough to search for Annabelle Pritchard online. She was listed as a ‘welfare co-ordinator’ with the Oxfordshire City Council Child Welfare Team. Jo preferred ‘Child-Snatcher’ – it seemed to fit Pritchard rather well. She didn’t know why she had let herself be caught off guard like that, but told herself the visit was indeed a formality, a simple safeguarding procedure. After several incidents of neglect in the last few years, local authorities often erred on the side of caution. Better that than catch negative publicity later. And who could blame them? There really was nothing to worry about though. What had happened outside the shop was a freak accident – nothing more – and it certainly didn’t reflect any cause for concern, or approach anything like the threshold for taking further action. She was, as everyone close to her said – and as she frequently tried to convince herself – a good mum.
The cottage she was renting was in the small village of Wolvercote, far enough from the city centre that she didn’t feel tied to the station, but still walkable on a good day through Port Meadow. As she drove Theo to Little Steps, the nursery she’d found on the Woodstock Road, he gurgled happily from the rear seat. Though she tried to block out the memory of the accident eight days earlier, it was like a stubborn tune that wouldn’t leave her, playing from the depths of her subconscious.
She’d heard the crash from the queue at the front of the minimarket – everyone had. She’d dropped the nappies and run out, seeing her own car at an angle, the front of an Audi TT buried in the rear wing. She hadn’t even found her voice to scream; she could hardly breathe as she ran on unsteady legs to Theo’s door. A young woman was climbing out of the Audi, her phone still in her hand. She looked up at Jo approaching and mumbled something about ‘single yellows’. Jo rushed right past, and flung open the back door. Theo’s cries were wild, like no sound he’d ever made before. She heard the woman say, ‘Oh my God!’
Jo felt an echo of the same sinking feeling as she stopped at the lights. The pores of her skin prickled at the memory.
The only immediate sign of damage to Theo had been a graze across his cheekbone. The doctors said later that it could have been much worse, but the baby seat’s headrest had done its job, cushioning the impact as the car jolted sideways. Still, they’d insisted on several different tests – keeping Jo in a purgatory of guilt and worry. Theo, amazingly, had stopped crying while they carried out the examinations, as if, even in his own distress, he’d recognised her emotional turmoil was greater. Though nothing turned up in the X-rays or brain images, they’d kept him in overnight as a precaution, with Jo curled up in a chair on the children’s ward beside him, eyes gritty from tears and exhaustion.
She released a deep shuddering breath as she cruised down the Woodstock Road. What she’d told Pritchard about the matter being closed wasn’t strictly true. Though the police had shown no interest in pursuing things, the insurers were still in a process of arbitration. Jo hadn’t even noticed the parking restrictions when she pulled up directly outside the shop. She hadn’t seen much at all, other than that the small car park was full. Theo was fast asleep; he needed to sleep after the broken night before, up every hour crying inexplicably. And if she parked near to the door, she’d practically be able to see him in his seat. It would be for two minutes, maybe less …
It had turned out to be more like seven – bloke at the damned checkout deciding he’d picked up the wrong hummus – and every second haunted her. Might she have made a different decision, if she hadn’t been so fucking exhausted herself? If she hadn’t been so desperate for him to get some decent sleep, and to wake up smiling rather than crying, eyes clear and shining rather than pink with fatigue? If she was a better mum, and not the sort who left her baby – her precious, defenceless, innocent, six-month-old baby – in the car while she dipped into a shop to buy nappies?
The car behind was honking its horn. The lights were green. Jo lifted a hand to apologise and drove on.
Theo had already had a couple of sessions to settle in at Little Steps and, despite some tearful protests, the staff had assured her he was perfectly happy as soon as she was out of sight. She wished she could have said the same for herself. As had so often happened in recent months, the extremes of her own emotions surprised her – the swings and lurches of her moods were not something she was used to at all. Tears came more easily, and mawkish films that would once have induced nausea now reduced her to sobbing. She’d actually had to turn off a nature programme a couple of nights earlier when it showed a lion cub being stalked by hyenas.
There was anger too, always there, like a Mr Hyde lurking and ready to attack. She really had come close to kicking the desiccated old bitch Pritchard up the arse on her way out of the door. But now, replaying the conversation from memory with her Dr Jekyll head, she wondered if actually she’d imagined the judgemental tone completely. For someone who so often had relied on calm intuition – on reading people and their motives – it was a little frightening to think so.
Today, there were no tears at all from Theo on drop-off, and so she took the nursery worker’s advice and left without making a big deal of the goodbyes. Back in her car, she felt a sudden release, then immediately on its tail, guilt. Theo was still so young. The welfare officer wasn’t the only person to express surprise at Jo going back to work so soon. Her sister-in-law Amelia, and Heidi Tan, the other mum in CID, had both suggested she needn’t rush back. And it wasn’t as though her financial position was particularly parlous even – with the inheritance, and her share of the sale of her mum’s house, she could’ve easily prolonged her maternity leave for another six months.
So what was it, pulling her back in now? She was honest enough with herself to acknowledge that she missed the hustle of police work. Some women, she knew, never looked back once they started their families. Work took the back seat, and good luck to them. Amelia was like that, taking four years out for Emma, their first child. She’d been on the way to making deputy head at a good school prior to the birth, but she’d paid the price in terms of career progression, settling for a demotion in order to continue teaching when her former role was absorbed. She’d told Jo she really didn’t mind the pressure being off, but Jo knew Amelia was no pushover, and she had always been ambitious; it must’ve stung.
Jo was luckier with her line of work. Once you had your rank, they weren’t taking it away. She could have stayed out for a couple of years, and there’d have been few impediments to rejoining later. Maybe the odd training course to bring her up to speed on the latest rules and regs, but otherwise it would have been back into the thick of it. The only thing she’d had to fight for – and it was a quick and bloodless fight with the HR department – was a return to active duty rather than desk-work like Heidi had settled for. That had never been her thing.
It wasn’t just the thrill of the chase she missed though. She’d been thinking about it a lot, and realised a large part of the job’s appeal was that, at St Aldates, things were actually simpler. There were ple
nty of problems, obviously – mysteries to be solved, charges to be brought, wrongs to be righted, justice to be served. But at the end of the day, there was procedure, paperwork, and shared routine that everyone understood – shift patterns, briefings, pecking order. And results that spoke for themselves. No one had warned about the complexities of motherhood, and she’d never anticipated the psychological challenges it would bring. Not knowing the solutions to calm a crying child. The trial and error. Never being sure if you were doing the right thing, either in the moment or for the long term. The constant second-guessing. It had been a different proposition altogether, stirring up insecurities she’d thought she’d put behind her years ago, creating others she never knew she had, a rollercoaster of highs and lows, doubts and difficulties. Through the fog of sleeplessness, answers seemed less certain. Even the questions being asked weren’t sometimes clear.
* * *
She pulled up in the St Aldates car park feeling a little like an adult revisiting her childhood school. In reality, it was only six months since she’d last been at the station, and she wasn’t sure why she expected it to look different. Nevertheless, the complete lack of change came as a surprise. The same takeaway menus were pinned to the board in the hallway at the same angles. The same scuffs were on the floor. The same smells, even – whatever refrigerant was leaking in the break room, mixed with the stuff they used to clean the holding cells along the corridor. Plus George Dimitriou’s strong, though admittedly very pleasant, aftershave.
As she entered the CID room, though, it was empty. Her own chair was under the desk, a woman’s lightweight jacket slung over the back, and a nice-looking handbag perched on the edge of the desk. Heidi had mentioned a new DC had started, in her late twenties. Alice something. Jo heard the mumble of voices and laughter from the briefing room, so dropped her things on the desk and wandered over. The door opened before she’d reached it, and it was Dimitriou who ambled out. He was sporting a new, finely sculpted moustache, which unnerved her a little. She backed away, unable to take her eyes off it.
