by Mel McGrath
‘Why would she?’
‘You see the way our daughter looks at Ruby, like she’s some sort of red-haired goddess.’ As I said this, I noticed the resentment in my voice. ‘Look, I’m not denying the awfulness of Ruby’s situation or saying I don’t want her to be part of the family, but neither do I want our daughter being drawn into a fucked-up situation. You know how eager to please she is.’
Tom drummed his fingers on his wine glass in an effort to quieten his irritation. ‘I’m not putting my daughter into care, Cat, and I’m not getting her any therapy so perhaps you’d just stop fucking going on about it and let us get on with our lives.’
He picked up his phone to indicate that the conversation was over and left the room. Ten minutes later, I heard the front door close and that was the end of that.
CHAPTER NINE
The weekend arrived. While Tom was at the park practising for his five-a-side league, I drove the two girls to a shopping centre in West London. I hadn’t intended to go retail crazy or to let the girls do so either, but in Claire’s Accessories Ruby proved unstoppable, loading her basket with whatever came to hand, and the sight of this thin spindle of a girl snatching at gewgaws as if they were tiny life rafts in an uncertain sea brought back such poignant memories of my own childhood spent rooting for swag in Brixton’s charity shops that I shelled out for whatever Ruby decided she wanted.
We bundled our haul into a couple of carrier bags and made it to McDonald’s in time to meet Sally, who was already sitting at a table waiting for us, with an obvious whisker burn on her chin and a hungry gleam in her eyes. She winked at me to say, We’ll talk about this later, then stood and embraced both girls and I was struck by how willingly Ruby allowed herself to be hugged. She even smiled with her eyes when Sally asked her what she’d bought, pulling a few things from the bags to show them off, and I was surprised to find myself envying them, just a little, for the ease with which their relationship had begun.
After a while, Freya and Ruby went off to order. The moment they were out of hearing range, Sal said, ‘She’s adorable, poor mite. All that hair.’
‘I do worry about Freya, though.’
‘Why? Freya looks amazed by her,’ Sally said.
‘Exactly.’
Sally frowned her disapproval then moved towards me and, slinging an arm around my neck, dropped a kiss on my cheek. ‘Don’t be such an Anxious Annie.’
The shopping trip really seemed to have helped Ruby turn a corner. All through lunch, she chattered and cooed happily, laughing and sucking up Sally’s tips on everything from how to apply nail polish to how to keep red hair in good condition. Lunch was followed by an uncomplicated afternoon back home and, by the end of the day, I really thought that maybe Tom and Sal were right and everything would settle down and I would find a way to forgive Tom and that the arrival of Ruby might actually mark a turning point in our marriage. Maybe I should stop being such an Anxious Annie.
The good feeling lasted through Sunday. It was hot, of course. I made scrambled eggs and Freya showed Ruby how to decorate the toast with stencils. Then Tom went to his match and the girls played outside until it was time to get dressed up and head next door to Charlie Frick’s party. While they were away, I busied myself with some housework. It was while I was vacuuming Freya’s room that I found my perfume bottle under the bed. I’d assumed Ruby had been responsible for the bottle’s disappearance but it now seemed my daughter wasn’t the innocent she was making herself out to be. This was new and unsettling. A Freya I didn’t recognise.
Around five, the girls returned, hot, tired and triumphant from the party, dropped goodie bags at the door and zoomed into the garden to claim the final few hours of sunshine. When I went out with iced lemonade an hour or so later they were performing cartwheels in their underpants and T-shirts. Ruby was wearing two friendship bracelets on her bony wrist and an orange T-shirt she had selected from the rack in H&M, which, in combination with her hair, lent her a biblical look, like a pillar of fire.
I called them to me and, handing over the lemonade, asked once again about the perfume. Ruby turned towards Freya and, with her back partly to me, I saw her flash her sister a conspiratorial look.
‘Maybe Pudge moved it,’ Freya said. I thought I saw something dark I’d never seen before scuttle across her face.
‘Don’t lie to me, Freya!’ I said. I was suddenly afraid I was losing her.
It was then I noticed the bruise on her right arm, in the tender stretch of skin just above the crook of the elbow.
‘How did you get that?’
‘She fell off the trampoline.’ Ruby Winter’s face was tilted up towards mine. Perhaps it was just the effects of the heat, mixed with my own confusion, but when our eyes met I found my head filling with visions of imps, goblins and sinister spirits. Ruby Winter was lying. I knew it and she knew I knew it.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.
Ruby’s head swung round to look at Freya then back again to me. Then she raised her chin and a little smile came on her lips and, with a dismissive gesture of the head, she said, ‘I don’t give a fuck what you think.’
Freya took in a big breath and looked away.
At that moment, Tom strode out through the back door. He’d returned in an upbeat mood, his team having won their match, and immediately challenged Ruby to a game on the Wii. Freya and I sat on the sofa reading. I decided to not to confront the girls about their behaviour because I wasn’t convinced that Tom would back me. I’d wait until I got them on their own again. Maybe there was some innocent explanation for the bruises on Freya’s arm, but I wasn’t prepared to take the chance. Tom and I hadn’t returned to our fraught discussions about his daughter but I was decided. I would not allow Ruby Winter to continue living with us unless we got her some professional help.
Tom and Ruby were finishing their game when the doorbell rang. Shelly Frick was standing in the porch with her fingers pressed together, her head cocked, and with an alarmingly immaculate expression of concern on her face. Though that could also have been the Botox.
‘Is something wrong?’
‘Probably not, but…’ Shelly continued to witter for a while then finally managed to spit out what she’d actually come to say. The iPad Charlie Frick had been given for his birthday by his grandparents had gone missing. ‘It’s in a blue plastic case with a sort of handle. This is a bit awkward, but Charlie says he saw your girls with it.’ Shelly withdrew a small piece of paper from her pocket and held it out. ‘And I found this.’
It was a note addressed to Charlie written in alternating red and blue pens.
Dear Charlie,
We are sorry your birthday had an unhappy ending.
The red handwriting was Freya’s. The blue was unfamiliar but I guessed it belonged to Ruby.
I took the note, apologised and promised to look round the house.
‘I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding,’ I said, unconvincingly.
The girls were sitting where I’d left them, Freya buried in her book and Ruby at the Wii with Tom.
I relayed what Shelly had told me. The girls exchanged glances. Neither of them said anything. I went on, addressing myself this time to Freya, who was the easier target. ‘Maybe you thought you were just borrowing it?’
Freya looked at her lap.
‘Ruby?’
The girl sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘We don’t know anything about the iPad. One of the boys was crying because he didn’t like his party bag so we just, like, wrote a note to be nice to Charlie.’
I said, ‘I’m sorry, Ruby, but I don’t believe you.’
Tom shot me a disapproving look. ‘For heaven’s sake, Cat, stop going on and on. You heard them. They don’t know anything.’
I didn’t believe that either. They all knew something but whether it was the same something or a set of different somethings I had no idea. All I knew was that, whatever they each knew, no one was telling me.
CHAPTER TEN
&n
bsp; The events of that evening left me watchful and troubled but they seemed to have the opposite effect on Tom. By the time I turned in he’d been asleep in our bed for a couple of hours. Trying not to wake him, I crept under the sheets. My thigh brushed against something. Imagining a balled-up tissue, a sock or maybe some underwear, I reached down only to find my hand clamped around something soft and covered in fur with sharp points. Horrified, I threw off the sheet and scooted from the bed.
‘Jesus, what is it?’ Tom’s voice was still heavy with sleep.
The edginess in my voice caught me by surprise. ‘There’s something on the mattress.’
‘A husband?’ Tom said drily.
I turned on the bedside lamp and saw a tiny leg with a foot attached. The sharp points I’d felt were hamster claws.
‘Oh, God, it’s Harry.’
‘Jesus Christ! What’s it doing there? Pudge must have got him. Go back to sleep, we’ll deal with it in the morning.’ But something told me this wasn’t the cat’s doing. And I knew too that when the morning came we wouldn’t deal with it, not really, because to deal with it would mean confronting Ruby and Tom would not allow it.
It was then I started to wonder if there wasn’t more to Tom’s protectiveness than paternal concern.
Another unpleasant discovery on my run into work on Monday: a stabbing on Holland Hill. It had happened overnight. Two teenagers caught in some terrible and pointless turf war. I thought about James White saying that we get the kids we deserve. And then I forgot about it in the hectic rush of budget meetings, scans, research papers and clinical work. One notable thing: I had no further contact with the Master of the Neuroverse, so it looked as though the business with James White had died down.
In the afternoon, Emma Barrons came by on her way to pick up her son from the clinic. She seemed jittery and on her jawline I noticed a cut but Emma dismissed it as nothing. A little accident in the shower.
‘Did Joshua tell you he’d seen you in the park? He was with his nanny.’
‘No, he didn’t.’ I had seen Joshua and his nanny near the lake on my run. The nanny had been wearing a striking pair of red shoes, but I didn’t think either of them had recognised me. Even if they had, it would have been crossing professional boundaries to have acknowledged them or to have mentioned anything to Emma Barrons.
‘How do you think he’s getting on?’ I said.
We chatted for a while about Joshua and, as Emma was leaving, I brought up the cut again and suggested that if it happened another time she ring one of the domestic violence helplines.
‘I can give you some numbers if you like,’ I said.
She flapped a hand as if trying to hold back tears, then, taking a hold of herself, she said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dream of wasting their time. Not for a silly slip in the shower.’
When I got back that evening the house was empty. Tom had taken the girls to one of the summer blockbusters. I poured myself a Diet Coke from the fridge and as soon as I went into the living room I knew something had changed. It took me a while to work out what was different and the moment I did it seemed so obvious I was astonished it hadn’t jumped out at me the second I’d walked in the room.
On the table in the bay window with all the other family pictures sat a framed photograph of a thin-faced woman with red hair and a face so white it was as if she were peeled down to the skull. It was Lilly Winter. I felt an overwhelming need to leave the room. Returning to the kitchen, I noticed, as I poured away the Coke I no longer wanted, that my hand was trembling. What was a picture of my husband’s dead lover doing on the table with the family photographs? Surely even Tom couldn’t have been that insensitive? More likely, I thought darkly, it was Ruby’s doing. Either way, it seemed my home was no longer my own and that it had been taken over by a ghost – and the ghost’s troubled daughter.
An opened bottle of Pinot Grigio stood in the fridge. I took it and went out through the French doors into the garden. Despite the late hour there was still heat in the sun and the air was noisy with next door’s diggers. I sat on the bench under the leylandii tree at the back of our patch where I always went to think. For years Tom and I had been promising to take the tree down – it was sprawling and unattractive and it cast a shade on the rest of the garden – but for some reason we’d never got round to it and, over the years, it had become the place I went to when I needed to think clearly. I had named it the ‘ideas tree’ and was attached to its quiet company. I sat for a long time under its branches now, trying to empty my mind of the image of my husband’s lover, but it was firmly lodged in my brain, only one among hundreds of thousands stacked like old newspapers in a vast library, but every bit as indelible. I idly flicked through the catalogue, by date order, from mine and Tom’s first few dates, our weekends away, holidays, Christmases with friends and family, mental images of Tom in our first flat, bursting from the Ritzy cinema in a spray of laughter at the film we’d just seen, Tom buying oranges in the market, Tom playing computer games, Tom looking out at the view from Waterloo Bridge, Tom crouched over my hospital bed with a newborn Freya in his arms. But no matter how many images I had stored away or how vital the memories they conjured, none would now erase the ghost of Lilly Winter.
One picture stayed at the front of my mind. It must have been taken nearly fifteen years ago. Tom and I had only recently moved into the flat in Brixton. Our neighbour there, Paul Fellowes, was an art director for a free sheet called London Style. Shortly after we moved in, we invited him for a drink and a couple of days later he knocked on the door and he said he’d like to feature us in a photo essay. The idea was to take a picture of ten couples who were in some way emblematic of the capital. Paul was going to call the essay ‘Ten Defining Twenty-First-Century Couples’. And he wanted us, a science geek and a gaming geek, to feature as Couple Number One.
I didn’t want to do it, but Tom managed to twist my arm. Paul showed up a week later with a lanky kid who styled us in borrowed gear that made both of us look way hipper than we were, and before we knew it our picture was stacked in piles outside every Tube station above the legend ‘Couple Number One’.
What followed was completely unexpected. Invitations began to arrive, slowly at first then almost daily, to gallery openings for artists we didn’t know, book launches for writers we’d never heard of, celebrations of obscurely distilled boutique vodkas we were never going to drink, and birthday celebrations of people we only knew from seeing their names in the papers. It was bullshit but by the time we realised that, we were already along for the ride. Besides, it was bullshit with benefits. Games developers began calling Tom, wanting to work with him. At the time he was working at a small start-up with only one moderately successful game under its belt but only a couple of weeks after the piece in London Style came out, he got an approach from Adrenalyze, the coolest gamers in the capital. The job was perfect, the pay was amazing and they wanted him to start as soon as he could. My husband was in geek heaven.
But then, only months later, a dog walker came upon the body of Kylie Drinkwater in an East Anglian wood, Rees Spelling was arrested, and the press descended on the flat in Brixton like some malevolent blizzard, keen to pick over my part as an expert witness in the first trial. My chief persecutor throughout that terrible time was James White. His coverage was outrageous, incendiary and not entirely wrong but the effects were monumental. I was accused of being misguided, unprofessional, in cahoots with criminals, almost everything short of actually murdering Kylie. For months I was forced to shuttle by cab between work and home to avoid reporters. I didn’t go out, I barely saw friends or family; I became virtually a prisoner, safe only in my home or at the institute. A few weeks after Spelling was tried and convicted for Kylie’s murder the media lost interest but by then Tom and I had become Couple Number One in a whole new context. No more invitations and freebies. No parties or boutique vodka. People we’d considered friends drifted away, extended family members stopped calling, neighbours no longer waved hello on the st
airwell. Even Paul Fellowes went out of his way to avoid us.
Tom took our fall from the number one spot badly. Even though it was all hot air, and we both knew that, Tom had loved the ride. His career suffered too. Adrenalyze held back from letting him go but they soon found a way to sideline him.
The publicity was too much for the institute. I was forced to give up clinical and court work and move into the less public realm of research.
But I wasn’t so bothered about our status or even my career. What I couldn’t get over was knowing that in an indirect way I was responsible for the death of Kylie Drinkwater. If I hadn’t misjudged the threat Rees Spelling posed, he might not have been released back into the community and left free to kill.
Once the worst was over Tom and I stopped talking about the case. It was all too painful. But even though he would never admit it, I’m pretty sure my husband never quite forgave me. I never quite forgave myself.
A voice propelled me back into the present. Shelly was standing at the garden fence with a forced smile on her face. ‘Oh, Caitlin, I’m so glad I’ve caught you. I don’t, um, suppose you found Charlie’s iPad?’
I relayed what the girls had told me, even though I didn’t really believe it. It was evident from Shelly’s reaction she didn’t believe it either. Pointing to a gap in the fence panel where it had come loose from its vertical and, adopting an icy tone, she said, ‘Well, anyway, I was hoping you might get that fixed since it’s on your side.’
After she’d gone, I finished up my wine and went back into the house, picked up the photograph and, holding it picture side down, took it upstairs and left it on Ruby’s bedside table.
Sometime later Tom and the girls returned. When the kids had gone to bed, I cleared away the evening meal and Tom went into his study. Neither of us said anything about the photograph. Intending to check over the grant application for the final time before submitting it, I took another bottle of wine and a bar of chocolate into the living room, put the wine down on the table and settled myself on the sofa. It was then I saw it. The picture of Lilly Winter was once more sitting among the family photographs by the window. I got up and knocked on Tom’s study door.
