Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

  We’re almost at London Bridge when Dominic takes my hand and squeezes hard. ‘Don’t give up. You really think Tom had something to do with Lilly Winter’s death? Find the evidence and bring it to me.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Three times in my life I’ve come so close to giving up that I could feel the breath of defeat on the back of my neck. Once was just before I left the Pemberton. I was eighteen, living with an out-of-control drunk for a mother and a sister who showed signs of heading the same way. The second time was when a dog walker whose name I never knew stumbled upon the decomposing body of Kylie Drinkwater. And there is now. Each time, a young and vulnerable girl has needed my help and I have failed to help her. My sister, a baby I never knew and now my daughter, Freya. Three girls. Quite a pattern, isn’t it?

  And so I’ve failed. For now, at least. But – and I’ll say this in my favour – I haven’t given up. I’m glad to have Dominic remind me of that.

  Back at the hotel, I call Gloria again. She’s wary and a little angry with me still.

  ‘I miss my daughter, so I know how you are feel terrible, but you did a bad thing and it have make everything more difficult for me,’ she says.

  ‘I know, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I have informations, but this time I want something in return.’

  ‘You’ve found Ani?’

  ‘Kind of. But your lawyer friend must help me find my daughter. You must say this.’

  Gloria has not found Ani. But Ani has spoken to Gloria’s contact.

  ‘He doesn’t want to meet. He say the problem with the boiler was very simple and he fix it. He say he switch the batteries in the CO detector, test it, everything. All running fine.’

  I feel a quickening. Hadn’t the police said there were no batteries in the detector? And hadn’t I come across batteries in Ruby’s room in the flat?

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Ani says the girl and the man in the flat watch him fixing boiler so they know was a good job.’

  ‘A girl? Or a woman? Did he describe either of them?’

  ‘Girl with red hair.’ I am trying to quell feelings of queasiness. Ruby Winter told me she’d never seen a boiler repair man. Why would she lie if she had nothing to hide?

  ‘And the man?’

  ‘Dark curly hair.’

  A lurch followed by a letting go. ‘That could have been anyone, Gloria.’ All the same, my voice is wobbly and I am having trouble steadying my breathing.

  ‘Ani say the girl is calling the man “Dad”.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  What if Tom is keeping Ruby’s secret and Ruby is keeping Tom’s? Wouldn’t that account for Tom’s refusal to allow Ruby to go into counselling? All those opportunities to tell. Didn’t Sal and I keep Heather’s alcoholism secret all those years? Don’t children keep secrets for their parents all the time? What if Tom has terrorised Ruby into keeping quiet about his role in Lilly Winter’s death?

  Ani remains the key, though perhaps not for the reasons I originally supposed. But Ani won’t talk or meet with Gloria and he certainly won’t meet with me or the police or lawyers. The morning after the hearing I’m back in my room at the Travel Express going through what I know in my mind and trying to figure out how to get to Ani. What if he was telling the truth and the boiler at Lilly Winter’s flat was broken and he fixed it? What if he really did check the carbon monoxide detector and change the batteries? And what if Ruby and Tom both saw him do it? Could Tom have somehow sabotaged the boiler in a way that would make it seem like an accident or, if not that, then the fault of Ani’s repairs? An opportunistic move. Would that have been possible? And what if, on the appointed day, Tom had shown Ruby Winter how to remove the batteries from the detector?

  Think back to the night Ruby Winter arrived on our doorstep. The doorbell ringing, Tom hunched over the bathroom toilet, the look of dread on his face as he went to answer the door. What if Tom knew what was about to happen that night? And the knowledge made him sick? What if Ruby somehow helped? Is it possible that what happened to Lilly Winter was planned by Tom and executed in part by his daughter? Was she bleeding him dry? Didn’t his bank accounts, the loan on the house, prove that? Hadn’t he felt cornered by her? A single, miserable one-night stand that he had been paying for ever since? Maybe Lilly got greedy, increased her demands. Or maybe, after all these years, Tom had just had enough.

  What if, on that day when Ani came to fix the boiler, it set off an idea in Tom’s mind? And what if Tom had taught Ruby how to blow out the pilot light and obstruct the flue then remove the batteries from the carbon monoxide detector and stuff the gap under her door with damp towels, the towels that were still strewn around her bedroom when I arrived to pick up her things? Ruby hated Lilly. And the way she’d been brought up, Ruby barely understood the idea that actions have consequences. Wouldn’t it have been easy to persuade her to do whatever was necessary to kill her mother and in such a way that nobody would suspect anything other than a terrible accident? The spotlight would be unlikely to ever land on Ruby. Who would suspect an eleven-year-old child? And if Ruby did tell, who would believe a disturbed kid who had proved herself to be obsessed with death? Killing by proxy. Wouldn’t that be one way to pull off the perfect murder?

  Because he knew. I’m sure of that. Tom knew it was going to happen that night and the thought of it made him queasy and that was why I found him in the bathroom throwing up.

  Everything comes back down to the boiler guy. To get my daughter back I need to find the evidence against Tom. And to do that I must first talk to Ani and then I must find a way to get Ruby to tell me what she knows.

  I reach for my mobile, tap in Sal’s number and am shocked to hear a deranged-sounding voice.

  ‘Oh Cat, I didn’t have your number, thank God you called.’

  A mental alarm starts up. ‘What’s happened?’

  A rising fall followed by a sob. ‘You’ve gone too far. Tom is going mad. The police are here.’

  My throat is a car in first gear with someone pressing on the accelerator. Inside my chest the breath stops. From a blizzard of thoughts, a single point of clarity crystallises. When I go to speak only one word emerges: Freya.

  ‘I’m outside Brixton police station. Tom is inside. Shelly is at the house with Ruby. The police want me to go back to Fulham just in case you decide to come to my flat.’

  ‘Where is Freya?’ Something in my tone stops Sal short. There’s a pause. An interminable two or three seconds in which my mind becomes eerily calm. ‘My daughter. Where is she?’

  Sal begins to whimper and the whimper becomes a whisper. Oh my God, oh my God. And then she is speaking but her words are vanishing. There’s a twisting as the blood begins to rush around my limbs. Every cell is rising up like some great army. Still Sal burbles on and I am wanting to speak but cannot. A fearful voice is calling me, ‘Cat? Cat? Are you there?’

  It is 11.56, nearly two hours since my daughter disappeared from Grissold Park. In broken sentences Sal tells me what she knows. Freya and Ruby were at the swings with Tom. They went off to play in the trees. Fifteen minutes later, Ruby came back alone. I force myself to picture the scene, the enclosed playground surrounded by benches, the utility area and railings, the gravel path snaking off into the woods, the exact configuration of tree trunks, the shape of their branches.

  ‘I would have called you but I didn’t even have your number. I thought of calling Claire but it took me a while to get her mobile number then she wasn’t picking up. The police are looking at the CCTV but the camera only covers the playground itself.’ Sal is flaming but she’s managing to pull herself out of the dive. ‘They’ve been to the school, checked your neighbour’s house, called Michael, all the obvious stuff.’

  From the terrorising jumble of mental noise, a memory surfaces.

  ‘There was a boy. Freya told me. She and Ruby have been playing with a boy.’

  ‘Yes, Tom says he’s about the same age as the girls, maybe a
little older, thinks his name is George maybe? He comes regularly with a woman, presumably his mother. Ruby doesn’t seem to know anything more about him. But it doesn’t matter, Cat, because they’re looking for you.’

  ‘No! No! I have nothing to do with this.’

  ‘They know you went to the hospital in breach of the notice. They’ve got CCTV footage of you. Tom is saying you went to try to persuade Freya to run away.’

  ‘Sal, that’s insane. You were there. Tell them that’s insane.’

  More slowly now, as if Sal doesn’t quite get it, she says, ‘Is it, though? Ruby says she saw you in the park this morning.’

  Somewhere far in the distance Sal’s voice is jangling away but I can’t make out the words for the blood screaming in my head.

  ‘I didn’t go anywhere near the park.’

  ‘The cops say they’ve got CCTV of you beside the park from the night before the hearing. They say you were probably staking it out.’

  Panic rising. Mine. Sal’s.

  ‘No, Sal, I was going to see the mother of one of my patients in Springfield Road. This is ridiculous. Let me speak to Tom.’

  ‘I’ll have to go and get him and call you back.’

  The wait is endless, a thousand seconds, each one elongated into a year. An age passes: 12.03. 12.05. Then the phone rings and my husband’s voice is on the other end of the line and I feel far, far away.

  ‘Tom, please, listen to me, I swear, I swear I haven’t got Freya. Please, please believe me. We need to keep looking. The police need to search. That boy, maybe she went off with that boy and his mother.’

  ‘Ruby saw you. The police have you staking the place out the night before. Caitlin, before this gets out of hand, for Chrissakes, just drop Freya off at a police station and that will be the end of it.’

  ‘No, Tom, no, please, please believe me, the police have to keep looking for her. The boy…’

  Footsteps. The background echo from the speakerphone clicks off. Tom is speaking so quickly now that the words are sliding about like surface water on an ice rink. ‘Listen, you cannot do this, Caitlin, you fucking mental bitch. You have absolutely nowhere to go. They’ve got all the ports and the airports covered. Don’t you even realise you could go to prison for this? You bring my daughter back now, or I swear, I will find you and fucking kill you.’

  I cut the call and punch in Dominic’s number.

  ‘Caitlin, thank God. Claire called me. She tried to get back to Sally and to you but your phones were busy. Have they found Freya yet?’

  ‘No, and they won’t. Because they’re not looking for Freya. They’re looking for me. They think I’ve taken her because I lost the hearing.’

  ‘I’ll call them. I’m not sure what good it’ll do but it might at least buy you some time.’

  I give him my new phone number and tell him to call me when he’s spoken to the police. ‘Only please, don’t give them this number.’

  ‘Of course not. Client privilege. But Caitlin, what are you going to do?’

  ‘What any mother in this situation would do. I’m going to find my daughter.’

  But how? My first impulse is to search the area, comb the streets, knock on all the doors. Where to begin? And what if I run into the police? Another course of action comes to mind. Go to the police and convince them you don’t have Freya. But then I run the risk of taking up police resources and time. While they’re grilling me about where Freya might be they’re not out there looking for Freya and nor am I. If this were a piece of research, a neuroscientific problem to be solved, how would I go about it? OK, then. What I would do is set the terms of the investigation, design the methodology, amass the data and analyse the shit out of it.

  This morning, shortly after 9.15 a.m., my daughter and her half-sister were playing in the tiny strip of woodland in the southeastern corner of Grissold Park. Ruby emerged from the woodland at around 9.30 a.m. and reported Freya gone. At some point in the intervening fifteen minutes, Freya either left the park of her own free will or was taken. At around the same time someone – a dog walker, a parks attendant, a gardener, a jogger, a kid, a commuter – will have been in the park taking a picture. Most likely they’ll have uploaded the pictures onto the net. There will be images. They may be helpful.

  I pull out my phone, key Grissold and the date into the search engine and wait for it to load. Up comes a selfie of a woman and her baby, someone’s lurcher, an array of roses. Nothing useful. Removing the date parameter results in thousands of images. That’s no good either. It will take too much time.

  Think again, Caitlin. Think harder, think smarter.

  A thought arrives with a hunch attached. Or maybe not a hunch so much as a faint hint of possibility. When Sally told me the news my first thoughts went to the boy. Call it a feeling or an intuition. A murky sense of the direction of travel. Who is the boy and his mother? It’s hardly strange to me that Tom seems to know so little about him. Whenever Tom takes Freya out to the park or to swimming he absorbs himself in a computer game. But isn’t it odd that having played with him all these weeks, Ruby suddenly claims she knows nothing about this boy? What if this is just one more secret Ruby is keeping from the world?

  I have pictures, I remember now. That first week after Ruby arrived and Tom took the girls to the park, he emailed me some pictures. They may confirm my suspicions or take me down a different road. Either way, I need to look at them. Or rather, at one of them, an image of the two girls by the swings, with, I remember now, a blurry figure in the background.

  The picture won’t be hard to find. I’m organised with my data. I like to keep it filed and logged and tagged. The new laptop takes a moment to boot up. Since the discovery that Tom has been spying on me I’ve been turning it off rather than leaving it on standby. I push in the memory stick, go into the picture folder and enter some search criteria and it comes up almost immediately – a photo of Freya and Ruby in Grissold Park. Ruby is swinging too high and Freya is watching with that awe which was a permanent fixture in the early, happier days. And there it is, in the background, the real object of my interest. Standing beside the swing, a dark-haired boy, about the same age as the girls or maybe a little older. There’s a stick in his hand, more like a small branch actually, which he’s digging into the gravel. His face is out of focus as if he’s been caught mid-movement turning to something on the outer edges of the image. Or not to something, but to someone. And at the very periphery of the picture there’s a woman making her way towards the boy, her arms outstretched and her mouth open to call him or perhaps shout some instruction. The woman’s face has been captured in motion and, like the boy’s, it’s blurry and out of focus, but it’s what she’s wearing on her feet that draws my eye. Big feet in distinctive shoes, tomato-red sequined trainers, a swoosh on the side and a sparkle at the toe. Shoes that once tramped through the drab corridors of the institute and right into my office.

  In an instant I’m pecking out Emma Barrons’ number.

  ‘Emma, it’s Caitlin Lupo. I need you to tell me where Joshua is.’

  ‘I imagine he’s with his nanny. Is there something wrong?’

  ‘Are you at the house?’

  ‘In London? No, no, I went to the country this morning.’

  ‘I need you to give me the nanny’s number.’

  But no, Emma says, better if she calls the nanny, because it’s a condition of her contract that Erika always picks up if it’s her boss calling. So she gives me the London landline instead. Whatever.

  The number clicks to voicemail. I’m telling the recorder this is an emergency so please answer but no one does. Moments later, Emma calls me back.

  ‘There’s a message to say the number has been disconnected. So now I’m worried. Is Joshua in trouble?’

  ‘I think that’s possible.’

  There’s a pause and in a very quiet voice, Emma says, ‘Oh God, my son’s done something really terrible, hasn’t he?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  When
you become a parent you have to trick your mind into believing that nothing will go wrong in your child’s life that is beyond your capacity to make right. You have to live this way or you wouldn’t be able to live at all. But we all know the trick is fragile, under-rehearsed and unsound. We know every time we switch on the news or read the stories on the web, stories about kids going missing, abducted by strangers or members of their own family, kids catching rare and fatal diseases, kids crushed under cars, kids going down in splintered planes. Tricking the brain isn’t easy. Tricking the brain is hard. It’s why, in the dead of night, after some confused dream, you’ve woken quaking and, springing from the bed and with your heart thumping, you’ve sprinted across the hallway to your child’s room. It’s why, at the sound of the phone in your child’s absence, you’ve trembled at the thought of who might be calling.

  You live this way because you cannot live in any other. And so what happens if the disease sets in, the car fails to stop, the riptide pulls or your child goes missing from the park? What then? There are no how-to guides or manuals, there is no saving formula, no set of rules. And now your back is to the wall. And your mind has run out of tricks.

  What happens is you run. You see the abyss opening up before you and as fast as you can you run towards it. Because if she’s nowhere else, this is where your child might be, and so this is where you belong. In the heart of darkness, the midst of the horror.

  Now is the time to ask myself, What do I know?

  What do I know about Joshua Barrons? I know he’s a smart judge of what the people around him are thinking and feeling. I know he is driven by dark impulses. I know he’s a thrill-seeker, forever in search of the next high in order to be able to feel at all. I know that right now his brain is only capable of shallow and fleeting emotions. I know he likes burying animals and setting things on fire. I know that he is driven by vengeful, narcissistic, destructive impulses heightened by the violence he’s witnessed on the street and at home. I know he is an explosion being steadily detonated. And I know he is with my daughter.