Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

  I set my face to a cheerful blank. I won’t be here for dinner. Or for the talk. From now on, I need to be on my own. I have to hope Claire will understand.

  Once she’s gone I take a shower, get dressed in a pair of my own jeans and a bland T-shirt and make more coffee. As I’m drinking it, I cut up all my credit and debit cards with the exception of the one that gives me access to my secret stash. Because we women always have a secret stash. When it comes to money we’ve learned to be practical and think ahead. Thousands of years of history have taught us that we have to.

  That done, I call the offices of Hunt, Baylor, Strachan and leave my new number on Dominic Harding’s voicemail.

  Dominic always felt bad about the way the Spelling case turned out because it was he who had hired me as an expert witness. But I didn’t see it that way. He and I both had stakes in the game. Dominic was a young, ambitious solicitor who wanted to win the case. I was a young, ambitious forensic psych who wanted to make a point. We were united by our mutual outrage at the Crown Prosecution’s desire to try Rees Spelling as an adult. The kid was twelve when he left his brother out in the woods. He couldn’t write, he couldn’t read and he was naive about the consequences of actions. In the months prior to the incident, he had been driven to the point of madness by his mother’s continual bleat that his brother was ‘doing her head in’ and, if the crying didn’t stop, she would kill herself. Rees was in an impossible position. He chose to leave his brother in the woods in a desperate bid to keep his mother alive. I told the court what I considered to be true: that, when Rees Spelling left his brother in the woods, he was suffering from a temporary psychosis brought on by his circumstances at home. In my professional opinion, what he’d done, while terrible, was a one-off. On that basis, I suggested he receive psychiatric care. I considered him not to be a significant risk to others.

  What I hadn’t spotted was that there was some core delusion remaining in Rees Spelling that would compel him to repeat the crime. Which he did, leaving Kylie Drinkwater to die of exposure not far from the spot where, six years earlier, Spelling had left his brother. It was Dominic who called me with the news. When the story broke in the press the following day, Rees Spelling was portrayed as a cold-blooded, psychopathic killer. It was James White – then a young and ambitious cub reporter – who first connected the two victims to my fatal misjudgement of the perpetrator. His suggestion that my desire to keep high-profile young offenders out of adult courts had clouded my professional judgement probably wasn’t so far from the truth. And even though the series of grabby op-ed pieces he wrote broke my career and were the first nails in the coffin of my marriage, I knew I only had myself to blame. For a short while, the shock sent me into the consoling arms of Dominic Harding. Tom never knew. I walked away before it got out of control and for a long time afterwards Dominic and I avoided one another lest it all start up again. Years later, when there was no chance of our becoming anything else, Dominic and I decided to be friends, two souls bound together by guilt and grief and, perhaps, by the faintest memory of love.

  Before leaving, I write Claire a thank you note and fold away the bedding. Then I take the first bus going east. It has cooled down overnight and there has been some rain. The sky is a muddy grey wash stirred only by the echoes of helicopter blades. Perhaps the violence will calm now.

  A roadblock at the South Circular sends the bus on a diversion into unfamiliar terrain. We’re heading north. Somewhere near Hoxton the bus rattles by a cheap chain hotel. I get out at the next stop and walk back. The Travel Inn appears to be almost entirely empty. No real surprise. Business travellers will be avoiding London, lovers will have other things on their minds. The receptionist is a wiry young man in an ill-fitting suit with seams rubbed to a polyester shine, by the name of Khalid. He’s used to business travellers and couples having affairs and doesn’t quite know where to place me.

  ‘You paying by card or cash?’

  ‘Cash.’

  ‘I’ll need your credit card for extras.’

  ‘There won’t be any extras.’

  ‘All the same.’ Khalid’s voice wobbles and he looks away. He’s sticking to the script.

  I hand over my secret account card. ‘Please don’t charge it. I’ll pay cash for any extras.’

  He tips his chin. ‘No problem. I’ll put a note on the account.’

  In the mirrored tiles lining the lift I am startled to see a face I hardly recognise. My hair is an unkempt semi-fro and there is something wild in my eyes. I’m sensing the swell in my brain where the safe, calm waters of sanity give out to a muddled chop – I’m sailing close enough to madness to feel its salty spray on my face. I do actually look mad. But I’m not. At least I’m pretty sure I’m not. What I think I am is very, very angry.

  Following Khalid’s directions, I head through quiet corridors smelling of warmed plastic to room number 367 on the third floor, a small box filled with modular furniture whose cheapness is thinly disguised with cheery, formulaic prints of city views which, in the circumstances, seem rather ironic. Tower Bridge at sunset is not somewhere you’d want to be right now. I unpack my rucksack and sit on the bed. In the space of twenty-four hours I have lost my husband, my daughter and my job, the soil in which I was once rooted. In their place is a large hollow.

  I call Sal from the hotel phone and ask her where she is.

  ‘Dunster Road.’ There’s a tremor of impatience in her voice. ‘You told me to stay with Freya, so that’s what I’m doing. Good timing, as it turns out. Tom needs help with the girls so he can look after his dad. The atmosphere is horrific.’ She sighs. ‘I really don’t know what to think. You’re my sister and I love you but you’ve become someone I don’t recognise. Tom thinks you’re having another episode. Maybe he’s right. I mean, what the hell were you thinking going back to Dunster Road when the DV notice specifically says you’re not allowed to?’

  So Frick reported me. Nick Frick, the bloody prick. All it would take to turn myself in to the machinery of madness right now is for me to say, ‘You’re right, I’m not myself,’ and my sister would pop or whiz or zoom over and within an hour or two we’d be walking into the emergency department at King’s Hospital and I would be closing the door on getting custody of my daughter.

  ‘Can I speak with Freya?’

  Sal’s voice is wobbly and full of anguish. ‘God, I hate doing this. Tom made me to promise not to contact you. It’s one of the conditions of the notice.’

  When did either of us ever take any account of the conditions of the notice?

  About six months after I took Sal away from Heather to live with me in a tiny rented room in a shared house, a woman with a soft voice called and introduced herself as Fionella. She explained that she was a social worker. Fionella wanted me to come in and discuss Sally’s future. My little sister was fourteen, a minor. I knew that if I gave her up to Fionella, she’d be forced to return to our mother or be taken into care. So, on the day I was due in the office, I packed our things and Sal and I left the shared house and moved to another. We did that four times until social services eventually lost interest in us.

  ‘Please,’ I say, ‘let me talk to my daughter.’

  ‘Oh, all right. But only for a bit. Tom’s not here but he’ll go bananas if he finds out I’m doing this so you’ll have to be super quick and ask Freya not to say anything to her father.’

  A wait, then the tense, bright music of my daughter’s voice: ‘Mum, are you going to be ill for long?’

  ‘No, my love. I am going to be well very soon. I need to ask you something, though. Are you on your own now? Do you have some paper and a pen to hand?’

  Freya answers a yes. I follow the sound of her footsteps as she walks across the room.

  ‘Good. OK, so take this down.’ I give her the number of the new pay-as-you-go phone and ask her to keep it to herself. ‘If anything happens, anything you don’t like, I want you to call me and I promise I will come for you. Got that?’

  ‘G
ot it.’

  It rains all day, murky rivulets cascading down the window. In the late afternoon, I turn on the TV news. The city is calmer. People do not riot in the rain. Pretty soon, the recriminations will begin. People like James White will write hand-wringing ‘analyses’. Pundits and politicians will weigh in. Before long everyone will be working their angles.

  At four, I call Dominic Harding’s mobile number and leave another message. By six I am standing outside Forest Hill station in the outer south-eastern suburbs of the city to meet with Gloria and, we hope, Ani. The sun is out again, but it’s cooler now, more like the English summer Dad used to call ‘Blink of an Eye’. Everything not Jamaican had been fleeting and a little unreal to Dad. It’s been a long time since I thought about the shadow he left when he disappeared. Maybe I’ll take Freya to Jamaica one day, I think, to find her roots. Then reality hits with a terrible thud. I may never be able to take Freya anywhere again.

  ‘Caitlin! What are you doing in this neck?’ A bloke in his mid-thirties is standing on the pavement squinting into the sun. Six foot, male-pattern baldness, glasses, an air of genial surprise. For a moment I can’t place him then I realise I’m looking at one of Tom’s football buddies and an old colleague from the Adrenalyze days. Phil somebody? Yeah, definitely Phil.

  For a minute or two we swap notes about the riots. Already they’ve taken on the character of old war stories. Evidently he doesn’t know about me and Tom. Why should he?

  ‘How is Tombo? Haven’t seen the old bugger in a while.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Phil pats his left leg. ‘Been playing up.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He must be getting ready to launch that game soon. Labyrinth, is it? Sounds bloody amazing. I hope Adrenalyze will kick themselves for giving him the boot.’

  ‘The boot?’ The story Tom tells, he left the company of his own accord to develop Labyrinth. He lived off savings for a while then borrowed a bit of cash from his dad. Except now I know that’s not true because at least some of that money was going to Lilly Winter.

  Sensing he’s put a foot wrong, Phil rocks awkwardly on his heels, searching for something appropriate to say. ‘Yeah, well, you know, I mean, all that stuff about his expenses, I never believed it. But Tom wasn’t really a corporate type, was he?’ A light comes into his eyes. He’s amused. ‘Well, better get on. Good to see you, though, Cat.’

  ‘Good to see you too, Phil.’

  As I’m watching his back disappear down the hill, I’m wondering what else I’ll discover about my husband that I didn’t know. From the corner of my eye I spot Gloria heading up the hill from the crossroads, panting a little from the effort but managing a wave. I wave back.

  Gloria watches Phil leave. ‘Why you have lover boy? Perhaps you are more stupider than I thought.’

  ‘A friend of my husband’s.’

  Gloria gives me a penetrating look then decides to believe me. As we set off along the pavement towards the Albanian cafe where the man who knows a man who might know Ani works, Gloria talks about her daughter, Elmira. Losing a child is like having someone suddenly unplug you from the world, she says. The body remains but it’s only really a shell.

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly how it feels.’

  Gloria stops in her tracks, turns and looks at me carefully. ‘What you want from Ani?’

  ‘I need to know if he met Ruby Winter.’

  I decide against repeating what Ruby told me in the bathroom about not wanting her mother around, not least because I think it sounds crackers – and Gloria is one of the few remaining people who doesn’t think I’m losing my mind.

  ‘I can’t really explain it now.’

  The pavement narrows in front of a parade of convenience stores and a corner off-licence whose owner had cleared the display shelves and braced the shop window with boards. Gloria leads me down a side road past a shoe repair outlet to a scruffy cafe going by the unlikely name of Dionysius. Inside, a sallow man with thick, custardy skin and hair like an oil slick quits polishing glasses and comes round the bar with his head cocked and an obsequious look of enquiry on his face. What can he do for us?

  As Gloria launches into her explanation in Albanian, the sallow guy’s face quickly loses its mask. He goes back around the bar and resumes his task. He hears Gloria out then waves casually towards a bead curtain at the back as if to say, Help yourself. Who knows what Gloria has told him but I know she wants to help me and I have a feeling that she’ll lie if she has to.

  We move through the curtains into a dank, windowless room packed with mismatching tables and chairs on which a dozen men are playing cards and dominoes. There’s a pervasive smell of men, tar and drink. The men are quiet, their eyes on the visitors. Gloria says her piece. I pick up the names Ani and Caitlin and a word that sounds very much like ‘English’ but the rest is unintelligible. Murmurings follow. A good-natured argument starts up. A big fuss for such a simple question. Do they know Ani or not? Eventually, the owner turns and gestures towards me while addressing himself to Gloria and when I ask Gloria to translate she blushes.

  ‘He want to know if you are proper English because…’ She cuts off, shifts her weight and looks at the floor.

  The cafe owner points to my kinked hair.

  To me Gloria whispers, ‘Please ignore this. I tell them you work for landlord with lots of rental flats. I say you hear Ani is good worker. Cash under counter, all that. But is possible Ani has no papers for UK. They don’t want no bad risk. Understand?’

  ‘So that’s a no?’

  ‘Yes, is no.’

  We’ve hit a blind alley. Outside, the grey sky is beginning to darken. I offer to buy Gloria a drink and something to eat. We duck into a nearby cafe. As we’re pulling up chairs, a group of men and women tramp past armed with an assortment of dustpans and brooms. A new kind of community activist, one of the more unexpected by-products of the riots: friends, neighbours and business owners literally sweeping the fragments of the city back together. It’s good to see. A small crumb of comfort.

  Gloria rests her head on her hands for a while, the steam from her coffee rising like a thought bubble. Eventually, she says, ‘Caitlin, I am going back to that place. Not now, later, on my own. Maybe this way I will find Ani.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The corners of her mouth quiver. ‘I know what is to miss daughter.’

  Back at the Travel Inn, I turn in early, but the room gives out directly onto a bus stop and at regular intervals the night buses rumble and sway past. I have not slept properly for what seems like weeks now. All night, I drift on a dark swell, the madness creeping around me like fog. The boundary between sanity and insanity, riches and debt, life and death, is paper-thin. No one knows this better than someone who has been on both sides. I am spooked by the riots and I am frightened for my daughter. I am afraid of what Tom will do and of what Ruby will do. I am scared of myself.

  Morning arrives and with it the chirp of the phone. It’s early. The cheap curtains are topped by a halo of ashy light. Only three people know my number now: Claire, Dominic and Freya. Reaching out an arm, I pluck the mobile from the table and peer at the screen: 7.43 a.m. A number I recognise. It’s Claire. She’s picked up three messages on the office voicemail from Sal.

  ‘What does she want?’ My voice is edged with alarm.

  ‘She just says please call her urgently and not to worry.’ There’s a pause. ‘Caitlin, I got your note. You don’t have to tell me anything but are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Because if you’re not…’

  Moments later I am dialling Sal’s number from the hotel phone. My sister answers, sounding anxious.

  ‘Listen, we’re at the hospital in Tonbridge. Freya’s fine, but there’s been an incident.’

  A tightness grips my temples. An incident? ‘What happened? Let me speak to her.’

  In a frosty tone, Sally says, ‘Calm down. Freya’s OK. Everyone’s OK.’


  I’ve switched to speakerphone and I’m up and throwing on my clothes. Something is happening in my brain at the deeper, primitive regions to which I have no conscious access.

  ‘ Put Freya on.’ My voice is a growl, more animal than human.

  ‘I can’t, she’s sleeping.’ My sister’s tone is aggrieved and sour now. ‘There’s no need to be so aggressive. I shouldn’t even be calling you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sal. Please, just tell me what happened.’ I’m sliding my feet into my trainers. Whatever bleary mood I’d been in last night has evaporated.

  According to Sal, Freya woke in the night feeling breathless with a bad headache and somehow managed to fall out of bed and was then sick. ‘There’s some bruising and what’s likely to be a mild concussion. But that’s all. They’ve tested for meningitis and it’s negative. It’s nothing, really, probably just a bug.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘You can’t come.’ Sal is silent for a moment, torn between her loyalty to me and her agreement with my husband.

  ‘Look, I know I’m putting you in an awkward position, Sal, but I’m coming whatever Tom or the police say. I’m coming, OK? Freya is my daughter. I need to know if Ruby was with Freya when she fell out of bed?’

  ‘Nuh uh, Ruby slept in the spare room with Tom. Why?’

  ‘Just tell me the best time to come when Tom’s not likely to be there.’

  ‘Can you get here in the next couple of hours? Tom left Ruby at home with her grandad but she had some kind of meltdown, so Tom’s gone home to deal with it. I’m with Freya.’

  At the reception desk on the ground floor Khalid calls a taxi. When I tell him where I want to go his face creases and he says, ‘Isn’t that miles away?’

  ‘Yes, and I need to get there quickly.’

  ‘I know a guy who drives like a maniac.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The rain and the heavy police presence have brought the rioting to an end overnight but the route out of London is knotted with diversions and roadblocks. Forty-five minutes into the journey the residential streets give way to industrial parks. Somewhere out near Sidcup, that the driver – named Harpeet and who does indeed drive like a maniac – takes it upon himself to engage me in conversation, but I’m not in a chatting mood. He soon gives up and switches his attention to talk radio. We speed through suburbs in various states of disarray. The radio show is dominated by the riots. A local business owner calls in. His stock has been stolen and he’s got no insurance. He doesn’t know how he’s going to survive. Next a copper, speaking on condition of anonymity, who’s been on duty twenty-seven hours straight and wonders why the parents aren’t out on the streets looking for their kids. Then a court clerk who was working till 3 a.m. and is about to start again.