Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

  ‘I’m not crazy, Sal.’

  She sighs. ‘You’ll get a chance to explain. There’ll be a hearing apparently.’ Then in a hiss, ‘But Jesus, Cat, I mean, assault a little girl?’

  ‘You mean Ruby?’

  ‘There’s more than one?’ Sal says. She’s being sarcastic.

  ‘Listen, Sal, Ruby said something and I lost it and I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did but it was a grab and a push. And that was it.’

  In the background I can hear my daughter’s voice and Sal whispering, ‘Go back upstairs, I’m on the phone.’ My daughter’s voice fades and there is the sound of a door swinging shut, then the hard whoosh of Sally’s voice. ‘You just don’t get it do you, Caitlin? Ruby’s got bruises. One of her fingernails is bloody.’

  ‘The fingernail thing, that was self-inflicted. She did it with a paper clip. About a week ago. I talked to Tom about it. Ask him, he’ll tell you.’

  There’s a harrumphing sound on the other end. Sal isn’t going to ask Tom because she doesn’t believe me. ‘Look, all I know is what Ruby told the police. Besides, Cat, Tom saw you hit her.’

  ‘Tom said what?’ I’m conscious of my thumb scraping the fabric of the sofa. ‘Is that what he told you?’ I’m up now and pacing around the room, dizzy with outrage.

  Sal says, ‘I’ll tell you exactly what Tom told me. He told me you threatened to kill him. You said it to me too. A couple of weeks ago. You said, “I could murder him.”’

  I laugh in spite of myself. ‘This is absolutely insane. Tom’s manipulating you; he’s playing both of us. He wanted me out of the house; well, now he’s got me out of the house. But I’m not going down that bloody easily, Sal. If Tom Walsh wants a mad woman, he’ll get one. Let him try to take my daughter from me and he’ll find out just how crazed I can be.’

  An hour later, I’m picking my way through police cordons, broken glass and smoking buildings along Brixton High Street in the direction of the police station. The riots have calmed but it’s edgy and at the station itself there’s a manic overload of young people and their parents. Now that the DV thing has been flung at me, I no longer have a game plan. Until I do, I’m vulnerable. For the time being I need to play by Tom’s rules, double bluff him, make him think he’s got me.

  I tell the desk what I’ve come for and am added to a long queue. While I’m waiting to be served and processed, Gloria calls with news. She’s located someone who knows someone who might know Ani. He hangs out in the evenings at an Albanian cafe in Forest Hill but there’s no point in going there tonight. With the police so much in evidence and the rioting likely to blow up again, the Albanians will be lying low. She will take me tomorrow, when she comes off shift at the old people’s home, say at six o’clock?

  The queue at the police station moves at glacial speed. Looks like half the kids in London have piled in. I could pick a copper, a woman perhaps, take her to one side, say that, for reasons I don’t fully understand yet, my husband is trying to protect one daughter at the expense of another. I could mention Tom’s attempts to gaslight me so he can get custody of our child. But she’d say I sound mad and she’d be right.

  It takes four hours to be served with a DV Protection Notice. The constable dealing with my case is a man by the name of Sergeant Neil Forrester, about my age, with pocketed, reddened eyes and the manner of a man dragged from his bed. Most likely been up all night. He flips through the documents and double-takes when he gets to my name.

  ‘Oh, Dr, is it?’

  I bite my lip and say nothing.

  The conditions of my DVPN are that I do not enter Dunster Road and have no contact with any associated person. If I breach, the police have the power to arrest me without a warrant. Before too long there will be a summons to Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court for a hearing. I will be given a minimum of two days’ notice.

  ‘What’s your temporary address?’

  I give him Claire’s.

  ‘Can I go back and get some stuff from home? I left without any clothes or my bag.’

  Forrester peers over his glasses. ‘You probably should have thought of that before.’

  Forrester drones on through the conditions. I am entitled to be represented by a lawyer at the hearing. I am also entitled to call witnesses. If I do not attend, the hearing will go ahead without me anyway. If the magistrate sees fit to convert the notice into an order, then there will be further conditions imposed upon me.

  ‘Might they affect my chances of getting custody of my child?’

  Forrester blinks as if to suggest that he’s not a man without sympathy but it’s more than his job’s worth to offer advice.

  ‘Get a lawyer.’

  Back at Claire’s flat, despondent and bone weary, I crash out on the sofa again. When I wake, my back is sore and my eyes hurt. Two mugs of strong coffee later I’m smoking a cigarette (the first in ten years) out of the window and thinking about Ani. Just say Ani deliberately sabotaged the boiler. Barring the very faint possibility that Ani is some random psychopath, the only logical reason for him to screw with the machine would be to get back at Lilly Winter. Maybe they were lovers or drinking pals or scored drugs together. Perhaps Lilly owed him money or he found out that she was getting a regular sum from Tom and hustled her for a cut. Maybe she cheated on him or rejected him. But whatever it was, if Ani did mess around with the boiler, Lilly must have trusted him enough to ask him to fix it and Ani must have been pretty confident Lilly wouldn’t check on him.

  If that were the case, why hadn’t Lilly died on the night of his visit? This wasn’t a slow, barely noticeable leak. It was a catastrophic gas escape. And why hadn’t the police found any evidence of sabotage? Ruby told the police that she was alone with her mother all day. She and Lilly had watched TV and turned in around the same time. There was no one else in the flat.

  If Ani had inadvertently broken the boiler, why had it taken so long for the fault to manifest? And if it was just a freak accident, as the police had said, why was Lilly Winter’s window closed, when it was her habit to leave it open? To anyone who didn’t know Ruby Winter the damp towels and batteries in her room would hardly have aroused suspicion. She was eleven years old. When Ruby had told the police she’d never met the boiler man, they would have had no reason to doubt her. But supposing she was lying?

  I open a can of baked beans and switch on the early evening news. There’s to be an independent inquiry into LeShaun Toley’s death but, everyone knows, what’s happening in the streets has gone beyond all that. It’s a terrible mess. Just after eight, I scribble a note to Claire and go out. The light is foxed and patchy. Even the trees look tarnished. On the streets everywhere there is evidence of last night’s rioting. The park railings flutter with police tape, the public bins are full of the hastily discarded and partially burnt packaging of looted goods and a tarry smell is blowing in from more distant southern suburbs. Some of the shops are boarded up. Others are still ragged with broken glass and the pavements are crunchy. All that glass and debris would be a danger to passers-by if there were any, but the streets are empty of almost everyone, including police. This little sector of the south-eastern inner suburbs appears all but abandoned.

  At Dunster Road, light slices from the edges of the neighbours’ curtains and here and there I can see the blue flicker of a TV. Number forty-two lies in darkness. Above the bay window the burglar alarm box blinks red. The security light clicks on in the porch. The spare set of keys has been removed from its usual place under the potted bay tree in the front garden. Tom may well have changed the alarm code too but there’s a manual override key in the cloakroom. No way to get in from the front, other than to force the living room window, which is too risky. I will have to go back the way I came via the open side return next door. The Fricks have a motion-sensitive light at the front but theirs is larger and more sensitive than ours. Tom must have threatened to smash it a dozen times when, after a gust of wind or a cat jumping onto the wall, we woke to a blinding glare. And th
ey are in. The dim glow of a light leaks from under the blinds in the bay window. It’s too faint to be coming from the front of the house. The Fricks must be at the back, most likely, at this time of the evening, in the kitchen having dinner. I can knock on their door and make up some story about having my bag stolen with the keys inside it and Tom being away but nothing gets past Shelly. She’ll know about the police visit and there’s every possibility Tom will have told them to be wary of me.

  The act of stepping inside the front gate sets off the security light. A hard white dazzle spreads across the front garden and, as I move along the side wall, I’m struck by the thought that anyone finding me here sneaking through my neighbour’s house under cover of darkness would assume I’d lost it. What if I have lost it? Wouldn’t I be the last to know?

  I’m edging along the garden fence towards the loose panelling at the end of the Fricks’ garden when my eye is drawn to a movement in one of the upstairs rooms. An instant later Charlie Frick appears at the window of his unlit bedroom. We squint at one another in the thin light from the kitchen. I freeze and hold my breath, anticipating that at any moment Charlie might call out and blow my cover. If that happens, I doubt I’ll have time to make it to the end of the garden and slide through the panelling before one of the adult Fricks switches on the garden floodlight and I am exposed. Still Charlie gazes out from the window, his face pressed against the glass. What is he thinking? I try a smile. Does he know it’s me? Seconds tick by. The little boy raises his right arm and waves. I wave back. Then, without warning, Charlie turns and is gone. To tell his parents? My instinct tells me no. But I can’t be sure.

  The fence panel gives with a soft whump and I am in my own back garden. I am hoping to find Tom’s study window open but no such luck. Tom has closed and locked it. In the shed is an old pair of long-handled iron pruning shears Tom’s father gave him after Michael downsized from the grand old vicarage Tom grew up in to the practical three-bedroom estate cube where he now lives. Once I’ve found the right angle, the lock of the box sash gives readily. After pushing the base upwards, I slide through the gap and onto the floorboards. Immediately, the alarm begins to chirp. I hurry into the hall and switch on the small table lamp then open the alarm cover and plug in Freya’s birthday. But Tom has taken care of this too. Of course! He’s a techie. It’s too late to reach the manual override. Summoning Ruby’s birth date, I tap in six digits. Silence falls. In this dark game Tom and I have begun to play, the trick, it seems, is to try to stay a step ahead.

  I skip upstairs and cross the hall into my daughter’s bedroom. On the little bookshelf by the bed is Freya’s pile of Pippi Longstocking books. I take one and slide it into my bag and am in my bedroom putting together a few clothes when there’s a rattle and an instant later the whoosh of the front door. The blood is singing in my temples. A single set of footsteps travels along the tiles, pausing at the stairs.

  Eventually, a nervous-sounding male voice says, ‘Hello?’

  Nicholas Frick is standing halfway up the stairs peering into the darkness of the landing. His features soften when he sees me but there’s confusion scribbled across his face.

  ‘Oh, you’re here! Tom asked us to feed the cat.’

  ‘Sorry, yes, I got held up at work, joining the others later. I should have called you.’

  Frick’s eyes dart about and his jaw twitches. He swings his head back in the direction of the hallway, as if wishing he could just wind back time. He knows. Tom has told him. Now he’s trying to decide what to do. An instant later the question seems to answer itself as he takes a breath and with a nervous smile says, ‘Oh well, then. I guess I’m surplus to requirements, so I’ll be off. Will you, uh, be needing the cat fed tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  I watch him make his way rapidly down the stairs towards the front door. On a sudden impulse, I hurry after and stop him in the hallway.

  ‘If you speak to Tom, I’d be so glad if you didn’t mention you saw me.’ I assume a fake smiley face and try to make it look real. ‘I told him I’d leave directly from work but I remembered I’d left my bag here so I had to dash back. He’ll be cross with me for leaving it this late. I was going to say the traffic was bad.’

  Frick’s eyebrows go up as he considers the request. Thought processes cross his face. A man like Frick does know how it is to be late home. The manufactured excuses. The little white lies. His lips smile at one corner. I’m reminding him of himself.

  He winks and taps the side of his nose. ‘Not a word.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  You have trust issues, the therapist announced after my illness. Well, let’s lay that out and look at it. Because, the way I see it, being alive now, in this time, in this world, when you might, on any morning, wake up to a financial crash or to rioting or to the realisation that the person you married is not who you thought they were, or that you are not the person you thought you were, you’d have to be nuts not to have trust issues.

  Trust nothing, my PhD supervisor once told me, except the evidence.

  I’m holding his advice close while waiting for the bus to Claire’s flat. I’m jittery. Anyone seen roaming around this late with a large backpack is going to be a target tonight, either for a gang or for the cops. I’m now also technically in breach of the DVPN. It’s still possible that Nicholas Frick will give me away. If the police find out I’ve been back to the house, or even to Dunster Road, they’ll be within their rights to arrest me. So I’m intent on disappearing, at least until tomorrow when I can meet Ani the boiler man.

  Somewhere not far away the rioting has started up again. Police helicopters are out and the air is abuzz with the sound of sirens. A bus appears at some distance further up Holland Hill and lumbers its way through a series of diversions, the driver stop-starting at unfamiliar junctions and traffic lights. The city’s thoroughfares have short-circuited. This happens in the brain. Everything freezes, then, slowly and gradually, alternate neural paths emerge. Before long the city will route around the damage. New routes will open up and the traffic will begin to flow along them.

  For now, though, it’s a long journey. By the time I get back, Claire has retired to her room. On top of the sofa bed lies a crumpled sheet and a pillow with a note to say there’s some cold pasta salad and a bottle of Pinot Grigio in the fridge. I’m tired and edgy, too fatigued to eat but most definitely in the mood for wine. How good it would be to drink enough not to have to think. How good and yet how dangerous. I pour a glass and take the bottle over to the sofa. The alcohol will allow me to surf the crest of my fatigue and barely notice it, at least for a while.

  For tonight I am safe, but cosy and comforting though Claire’s flat seems now, before too long it will become a trap. Charlie Frick will tell Shelly he saw me or Nicholas Frick will tell Tom. My husband will report my breach to the police. Claire won’t give me away, but neither can I expect her to lie if the police question her, and I wouldn’t want to get her into trouble. One way or another it won’t take the police or Tom very long to figure out where I am and when they do, they’ll arrest me for breaching my DVPN conditions. Tonight, I can sleep. Tomorrow, I will have to find a way to disappear.

  I am woken by the aroma of toast. It’s early. Through the curtainless windows the first iron-grey light of dawn is in the sky. Claire is at the kitchen sink. She’s already dressed and has made coffee. As I sit up, she turns and looks over.

  ‘You’re awake.’ She brings over a mug of coffee. ‘I was hoping we’d get to talk.’

  ‘I’m in a bit of trouble.’

  ‘I guessed that much,’ Claire says quietly, turning back to the kitchen.

  ‘It’s nothing for you to worry about, I promise.’

  She brings over a plate of buttered toast. ‘I’ll worry anyway. Can we talk about it when I get back? Some of the research department’s windows got smashed in the rioting last night. They want me to go in and make sure nothing’s been taken then call maintenance to board over the broken pa
nes.’

  She sits, pressing her palms together, with an anxious expression on her face, weighing up whatever she’s wanting to say next. ‘I think I should tell you something. Joshua Barrons’ patient file has been deleted.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know. I went into the relevant folders and they’ve all gone. His case notes, reports, images, genetic profile, everything. It’s like he never existed.’

  I lean back against the sofa and try to take this in. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I asked Lucas to double-check, just in case I’d got something wrong, but he couldn’t find anything either.’

  Deleting patient files goes against every institute research and ethical protocol but it’s obvious why MacIntyre has done it. Both Anja and MacIntyre know that Joshua Barrons is a time bomb. While he was a patient at the clinic it was our responsibility to locate and defuse the detonator. Now he’s no longer in treatment they’re going to make damned sure whatever he might end up doing doesn’t come back to the institute.

  No one but me knows the files still exist. I know because I have them. The scans, assessments, research, all copied and stored away for such a time as when I’ll need them.

  I say, ‘At some point this will all backfire. You know that, don’t you? Maybe not now or next week, but eventually. MacIntyre will sacrifice Anja the moment he hears the drumbeat. But he’ll go down too. The truth will all come out eventually.’

  Claire leans in and gives me a hug, then picks up her rucksack and makes to leave. At the door she says, ‘Oh, and by the way, there’s still nothing in the fridge, except the stuff you bought. I’m a domestic shambles. But I can go shopping at lunchtime. Risotto for dinner?’