The Child Who

by Simon Lelic

  Howard smiled his concern.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Leo, more decisively. He slid the pile of mail below the table and into his lap, his thumbs pinning the topmost envelope in place. Beneath them, and beneath its outer skin, the note seared.

  ‘So what do you think?’

  Leo could not resist peeking. The question, though, registered and he glanced up to see who would answer. Alan, John, Terry, Howard; even Jenny, seated between Leo and their boss and jotting minutes on a notepad: everyone present had their gaze fixed on him.

  ‘Me?’

  There was laughter, not all of it kind.

  ‘You are fairly central to the proposal, Leonard. But if you feel it would make you uncomfortable…’

  ‘What? No. Of course not. Um. If what would make me uncomfortable?’

  Terry turned and muttered. Howard spoke over him.

  ‘The feature, Leonard. The interview.’

  The words resonated. On their way into the room, someone had been talking about an article. For a newspaper – or a magazine? The Lawyer was it? The Law Society Gazette?

  ‘Well,’ Leo said, as though considering. ‘What would be the focus, exactly?’

  Jenny looked down at her notes. Howard simply stared.

  ‘Honestly, Leo,’ said Terry. ‘I hope you pay closer attention in meetings with clients.’

  More laughter. A ‘quite’. Leo felt himself flush.

  ‘Let’s recap,’ said Howard. ‘Shall we? It’s exciting news so I’m not exactly loath to repeat it.’ He turned to Leo. ‘Although I do hope once more will be enough.’

  Leo, in spite of himself, was slinking another glance at the envelope. He pressed it flat with his palms, tweaked his frown and aimed it at his boss.

  ‘The Gazette, Leo, has approached us with a suggestion for a feature. Small firm, big case: that sort of thing. They won’t mention anything too specific, of course, but they’ll want to talk to you. They’ll want to photograph you. As well as the rest of us, naturally. We wouldn’t want you stealing all the glory.’ Howard twinkled and Jenny tittered. Terry, from his expression, seemed not to appreciate the joke.

  ‘Well,’ said Leo. ‘I see.’

  Howard extended a finger. ‘It’s only the Gazette, I realise, but you know how these things tend to get picked up. It would be an excellent opportunity for this firm, Leonard. And for yourself, of course. A clipping for the curriculum vitae.’

  Terry did not miss a beat. ‘Watch out, Leo. It’s not a good sign when your boss starts mentioning your CV.’

  There was laughter. Leo ignored it. ‘It sounds great, Howard. It really does. Although I think perhaps I should check with Meg. It’s only the Gazette, as you say, but this case… It’s…Well… There have been certain… pressures.’

  ‘Check with Megan,’ said Howard. ‘By all means. But it would be a shame to pass up the opportunity.’ His boss, suddenly, looked like a child denied Christmas.

  ‘No, of course. I mean, I’m not saying she’ll have a problem with it. Not at all. Quite the opposite, probably.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Howard, once again displaying his ivory. ‘That’s settled then. Is it? Provisionally, shall we say.’

  ‘Provisionally. Yes. Okay.’

  ‘They’ll be here a week on Thursday,’ said Howard. ‘At ten o’clock.’ And he flipped to the next page of the agenda.

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying, Terry.’

  ‘It’s what I heard, Leo. It’s what everyone – ’ Terry turned left, right ‘ – in this meeting room heard.’

  Leo regarded the faces regarding his. He’s right, they seemed to say: that is what we heard.

  ‘Well, it’s not what I meant. What I meant was—’

  ‘You remember what he did, Leo – don’t you? This “kid”.’ He pronounced the inverted commas. ‘This “child” you keep mentioning?’

  ‘All I meant was—’

  ‘Because it sounds to me like maybe you’ve forgotten. Like maybe you’ve lost track of—’

  ‘All I meant was,’ said Leo and his volume commanded a silence. ‘There are other considerations. He’s twelve years old. It complicates things.’

  Terry made a noise.

  ‘I’m sorry, Terry, but it does. We have different options. We have different priorities. Different problems, too,’ Leo added, more quietly.

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, Terry: we. I am his solicitor, you know.’

  ‘His solicitor. Right. Because all I’m saying is, it sounds to me like maybe you’ve convinced yourself you’re more than that.’

  Leo felt his back stiffen. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Howard, reaching both hands towards the centre of the table. ‘Perhaps we could try and keep this civil. Let’s remember there’s a lady present, shall we?’

  Jenny looked down.

  ‘And anyway,’ Leo persisted. He had the stack of letters in his hand and the envelopes were crumpling in his grip. ‘What’s so contemptible about feeling sorry for him? It doesn’t mean I condone what he did. It doesn’t mean I’m looking to excuse it.’

  ‘Diminished responsibility, Leo? What’s that if not an excuse?’

  Leo affected astonishment. He cast his expression around the table, then settled it on Terry. ‘Am I missing something?’ he said. ‘Is there something about representing a client I’ve fundamentally misunderstood?’

  ‘Gentlemen!’

  ‘You tell us, Leo,’ said Terry. ‘Think about it, then come back and tell us.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Howard again. He pressed his teeth and his jaw bulged. ‘Let’s move on, shall we?’

  Something about paper. Re-using it, not using it, the dream – impossible though it might sound – of a paperless office.

  Leo tuned in, out. Out, mostly, but he was wary of being caught not paying attention again so he was making an effort not to lose pace entirely with the drift of the discussion. The lecture, rather: Howard’s rant. The theme was familiar, though, and the message predictable so while the others bobbed their accord and doodled, meanwhile, on paper they were meant to be conserving, Leo worked slowly, soundlessly, on the seal of the envelope.

  Except he was getting nowhere. The envelope was gummed as though with superglue and there was no opening into which he could work his little finger. He picked with his nail but in truth, since the start of the case, he had no nails left – just raw, fleshy pads that were about as much use in this situation as his toes.

  Except maybe… He had a corner. Did he? It was difficult to tell without looking but it definitely felt like… He did. An opening. Just big enough to—

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Leo?’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘What?’

  Blood.

  ‘Ow!’

  Shit. Blood. Ow. Ow!

  He stood. The others stared: at him; at the blood, when they noticed it, that was flowing from his fingers.

  ‘Shit,’ said Leo again. ‘Jesus, ow!’ He had dropped all the envelopes except the one that had bitten him. And it had felt exactly like that: like a mouth with razor teeth had taken a bloody great bite.

  ‘Christ, Leo,’ said Terry.

  Jenny was standing at Leo’s side. Howard was standing, barely, at hers. From the colour of his face, the blood on the floor might have been his.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Leo, turning away. ‘It’s just, I don’t know.’ He lifted the envelope. ‘A paper cut or something.’ The hole he had dug into the seal was the colour of an open wound. It sparkled, though. It grinned.

  ‘That’s quite a paper cut,’ someone said.

  ‘Here,’ said someone else and a handkerchief appeared in Leo’s eye line. ‘Let me take that,’ the same voice said but Leo snatched the envelope away. He stuffed it, blood and all, into his trouser pocket.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Thanks. I’ll just…’ He bundled his bleeding fingers in the handkerchief and tipped his head towards the door.

&nbs
p; ‘Go,’ Howard managed. ‘Please.’

  Leo went. Through the doors and past the empty desks and into the nearest toilet. He spun the tap and winced as the water sunk into the wound.

  His finger was shredded. There was not one cut but several: a mesh of interlinked scores that seemed colourless beneath the water but bulged red as soon as he withdrew his finger from the icy flow. Leo reached across himself for a strip of toilet paper and had to tug twice, three times, to snap it from the roll. He ended up with far more tissue than he thought he needed but it quickly became sodden around his finger. With his good hand he squeezed. He counted, waiting until the blood and the pain subsided, then shifted. Gingerly, he pulled the crumpled envelope from his pocket.

  The grin was glass: crystals the size of sea salt dusted along the envelope’s rim. Incongruously, Leo thought of Ellie; of the pictures, not so long ago it seemed, that she would often bring home from school – seascapes stuck with sand or Christmas cards sprinkled with glitter. The glass on the note had been applied using the same technique, Leo realised. There was something juvenile too, it struck him, about the way the note writer had chosen to demonstrate his malice.

  He had keys. He unsnagged the bunch from his pocket and used his latch key to work an opening in the envelope’s closed side. The paper seemed thick, toughened somehow – chosen, perhaps, to disguise the glass – and yielded reluctantly. Leo hacked and gained an inch, another. Blood began seeping through the toilet paper and glass fragments pattered from the envelope onto his lap. Leo ignored them, ignored the throbbing too, and finally had the note free. He shook it, unfolded it, turned it and stared.

  HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT LEO

  HOW WOULD YOUR DAUGHTER?

  THE BOY IS GUILTY

  LEAVE HIM TO ROT

  13

  The lobby smelt of leather and centuries-old tomes, and was infused with a luxurious hush. There was artwork on the walls and copies of Country Life and Vanity Fair fanned meticulously on the side tables. Leo, doing his best not to slump on a deep-tan, button-backed Chesterfield, felt obliged every so often to straighten his tie. His suit, wrinkled from the train journey, seemed tattier than he remembered and shapeless. Nothing like those that drifted past once in a while atop handmade, leather-soled shoes. Leo looked, he imagined, like a wide-eyed yokel, which was exactly the way he felt. Out of his depth: that was the phrase. And it was apposite in so many ways.

  ‘Leo!’

  Leo, tapping his fingertips on his knees, had not even realised the lobby housed a lift. He raised his head and saw the wooden panels across from him had drawn stealthily apart. Beyond them was a sparkling brass interior, out of which stepped the man Leo had come to see.

  ‘Dale.’ Leo got quickly to his feet. He buttoned his jacket and aimed his hand at the one being propelled towards him.

  Dale Baldwin-Tovey should, by rights, have been a tosser. It was the word Terry had used to describe him the last time the barrister had been engaged by their practice but, unsurprisingly perhaps, Leo had felt obliged to demur. Dale was younger than Leo and Terry both. In financial terms he was considerably more successful. He had more hair than they did in the places it mattered and less where the lack of it mattered double. His teeth were almost as impressive as Howard’s but his grin was less ostentatious. The man seemed embarrassed by his good looks and was openly so of his double-barrelled surname. Leo found him humble, engaging and almost disconcertingly bright. A tosser then, as Terry would have it, precisely because he was not.

  ‘You found us okay? How was the journey?’ With his hand on Leo’s shoulder, Dale guided him back towards the lift. The barrister pressed the call button and kept pressing it, as though unwilling for his guest to be kept waiting.

  ‘It was fine. Thank you.’

  ‘Good. Great. Thanks again for coming up. Sorry you had to bother but there was just no way I could leave London this week.’

  Leo made a face. ‘It’s fine. Really.’ Although the truth was, he had almost cancelled. Ellie was refusing to return to school and Meg had asked Leo to speak with her. Not only had Leo not had the chance, he had barely spent more than a few snatched seconds this past week talking to Megan. His wife, he knew, was less than happy. But the case – Daniel – could not wait, which was something Megan did not seem to understand. Plus, of course, there were the notes. Leo did not trust himself not to show them to his wife and doing so, given her obvious anxiety, would not be fair, at least until Leo could decide for himself whether they were worth worrying about. Which, actually, was another reason why Leo had decided in the end to make the trip.

  The lift arrived and Dale gestured Leo inside. The doors closed and Leo found himself surrounded by an army in his own likeness. The floor, a dark-wood parquet, was the only surface that did not gleam. It was Leo’s first visit to a set of London chambers and his astonishment must have shown on his face.

  ‘Don’t be fooled,’ said Dale. ‘The decor’s as contrived as the whiskey barrels in your local Irish pub. They want you to like coming here, that’s all – they want you to enjoy spending your money.’

  Leo did his best to return Dale’s roguish grin.

  They got out on the fifth floor and Dale led Leo along a corridor that did nothing to undermine the impact of the lobby. Elegant wall lights and walnut panelling channelled them into a meeting room and they sat across from each other at a table worth more, probably, than Leo’s car. There was coffee and a tray of pastries and Dale offered Leo both. When Leo declined, Dale slid the trays to one side. He clicked his pen.

  ‘So.’

  It sounded ill-considered. More than that, it sounded naive. Arguing with his colleagues back in Exeter, a presumption of rectitude had allowed him to skirt the obvious flaws in his thinking. Dale, though, was not hostile. He clearly sympathised with Leo’s intent. Which meant Leo could not resort to bluster, nor hide behind a moralism that was beside the point. And so he fidgeted. He cleared his throat, for the fourth or fifth time it felt like – even though it was Dale he was willing to speak.

  ‘What about his IQ?’ the barrister said at last.

  ‘Ninety. He was tested last week.’

  Dale responded by twisting his lips. Low, he did not have to say – but not low enough.

  ‘And the psychiatrist…’

  ‘Karen.’

  ‘Karen. She doesn’t feel there’s anything compelling we might use?’

  The ‘we’ was reassuring, until Leo considered the context.

  ‘Nothing obvious. He’s of sound mind, capable of rational judgement. He knows right from wrong. He has post-traumatic stress disorder but no sign of anything underlying. She has her concerns, though.’

  Dale raised an eyebrow but Leo could only disappoint.

  ‘They’re just concerns,’ he said. ‘Nothing concrete. He’s clearly damaged in some way but… Well. We knew that already.’

  Dale clicked his pen again: a double beat, followed by another, and then another in a metronomic rhythm. ‘You could use someone else, you know.’ He held still as he spoke, as though wary of Leo’s reaction. ‘Assuming Karen left us room for manoeuvre in her report, we could always find someone who would be more… sympathetic.’

  Leo shifted. He had considered it, of course he had. But, ‘He’s on legal aid. We wouldn’t get the funding. And it was hard enough convincing him to see Karen in the first place, let alone someone new.’ Again Leo shuffled in his seat. ‘Besides. This is about doing what’s right for the boy. It’s not about fabricating a lie.’

  ‘No one’s suggesting we lie, Leo. But truth, in this field, is hardly absolute.’

  ‘Of course not. But there’s the matter of consensus. And I trust Karen’s judgement. She’s not wrong. She was never wrong. For every expert we find who disagrees with her findings, the Crown will find ten who concur.’

  Dale shrugged an eyebrow. There was quiet for a moment.

  ‘Let’s go back to the victim.’ Dale moved his weight to the opposite armrest, set his legs at
a different angle. ‘What was the boy’s connection with her?’

  ‘They went to the same school. They lived in the same city.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘It seems to be. The first time I spoke to Daniel, he could barely recall her name.’

  ‘She didn’t bully him? Taunt him? She didn’t provoke him in any way?’

  ‘Not that anyone has suggested. Not even Daniel. And to be honest, she didn’t seem the type.’ An image of Felicity’s hands, bloodless and bound in fairy lights, flickered in Leo’s mind. ‘She was in the wrong place,’ he said, forcing himself to focus on Dale. ‘At the wrong time. Or Daniel was: physically, mentally.’

  ‘So provocation, self-defence… ?’

  Leo shook his head.

  ‘And he’s not an alcoholic? A drug addict? He wasn’t drunk or anything at the time?’

  ‘He’s twelve years old, Dale.’

  Again Dale twitched his eyebrows. ‘You’d be surprised.’ He frowned at his leather-bound notepad. His pen, between his fingers, seemed to whirl of its own accord. Leo watched it spin, grateful on the one hand that a man with such dexterity was on his side; terrified, on the other, that having Dale as an ally might not make the slightest bit of difference.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Dale said. ‘Diminished responsibility, if Daniel decides to plead not guilty, would be about his only option.’

  Leo tensed. He sensed a but.

  ‘But, with the evidence we have, I just don’t see how we could make the case.’

  The ‘we’, now, seemed generous. A consolation, that was all. Leo waited for something more.

  ‘When’s the arraignment?’ said Dale, after a pause. ‘A month, you said?’

  ‘Just over.’

  ‘And your client. Daniel. He’s insisting on this, regardless of your advice?’

  Leo had been waiting for this. Waiting – but not ready. ‘He’s not insisting on anything in particular.’

  The pen in Dale’s hand came to a stop.

  ‘He trusts me.’ Leo spoke to the table but realised as he uttered the words that they yielded a certain pride. He looked up. ‘Daniel’s instructed me to do what I think is best.’ He paused but the silence that followed felt like a condemnation. ‘He’s a boy, Dale. How can he be expected to understand the complexities of—’