Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

  For a while we peer, goggle-eyed, at the tops of heads, odd disembodied hands, bit of faces, ponytails, hats. And then, all of a sudden, a flash of red hair and a momentary glimpse of Joshua’s face.

  ‘That’s them!’ My throat tightens. I’m pointing, then standing.

  The guard pushes himself from his chair. ‘Lower concourse, right-hand side. Here, I’ll come with you if you like.’

  But as he’s saying this I’m already halfway out the door, sharply elbowing my way through the crowd and pushing behind a commuter at the barrier to dart in before it shuts, then I’m tripping down the escalator two steps at a time. A tall man steps out from the right-hand side and begins to descend in front of me and by the time I reach the lower concourse, the children are no longer visible.

  Since Brixton is a terminus there’s only one direction to go: north. Noting the first departure on the board, I head towards platform two where a train is filling up with passengers but in the cram it’s impossible to know if the kids have already boarded. If they’re not on this train, they will be on platform one, where another is just pulling in. I duck around the crowd and make my way across to platform one just as the train doors are opening. No kids. Then it’s back to the lower concourse, standing on tiptoes, looking about. The indicator board ticks down to one minute and I’m elbowing my way past the hurrying commuters and back onto the platform and then I’m on the train itself, inching around the passengers and calling Ruby’s name. But it’s hopeless. In the next thirty seconds I’m going to have to decide whether to leave the train or not.

  Mind the closing doors.

  Two seconds later, the train is hauling away and I am standing alone on the platform, seized by a feeling of panic.

  Back on the lower concourse, a few stragglers from the train on platform one are still making their way out. The indicator board announces that the next train north will depart from platform two. In a few moments, a train will appear and disgorge another few hundred passengers and the lower concourse will once more fill with people queuing to get on the escalator heading up and out onto the upper concourse. Still Joshua and Ruby are nowhere to be seen. If they weren’t on the departing train, they must have gone back to the upper concourse or maybe they disappeared into the stairwell or a fire exit or access shaft.

  When people jump in front of the train their heads explode and it’s cool.

  On either side there are only service tunnels and maintenance tracks, ghost platforms and evacuation points, deep-level shelters, leftovers from the war, ventilation shafts, odd access routes, a labyrinth no passenger ever gets to see, places only the staff and taggers and vagrants know.

  When people jump in front of the train their heads explode…

  The door to the escalator shaft is locked but there’s another, just inside one of the platform access tunnels, which has been chinked open just wide enough for a child to squeeze through. I shuffle inside. I can stand but only just. The light from my mobile phone blues the walls on either side, picks out swags of cabling up ahead. A train passing beneath shivers the brickwork and crimps the air. There is a smell of burning dust and static. What drives one child to harm another? The question is so complex it’s almost unanswerable. But if you put the question another way, it becomes almost frighteningly simple.

  Why would a kid like Joshua harm a child like Freya?

  Because he wants to.

  When people jump in front of the train…

  ‘Freya!’ My voice is a hollow howl, an animal yell.

  The shout is met by a distant echo and the shuffles of fleeing mice or maybe rats. I edge forward by the light of the phone. Time is slipping away. My daughter needs me to find her. My daughter needs me. Ahead the light from a square grate illuminates a fork in the tunnelling and I stumble towards it. I’m at the fork now, wondering which way to turn. A dim red arrow points left but gives no other clue. Which way would a twelve-year-old psychopath lead an anxious girl? My heart is a bird trapped in a chimney, full of a terrible, fluttering energy. I turn down the right, unsigned fork and into darkness. Partway along the tunnel my foot makes contact with a single adult shoe. A little way further I find myself standing on a piece of cardboard. The walls around are littered with graffiti and there’s a faint smell of urine.

  ‘Freya!’

  Moving through the tunnel in blue light, limbs heavy as a bear’s, stumbling a little now, thoughts a magic lantern, nothing sticking. All around the roar and shake of passing trains. A damp stink of impacted earth. Suddenly there’s movement up ahead, a shadow of an indistinct presence where the tunnel narrows and takes another turn. The faint shuffle of footsteps and the sudden fast-moving wash of a shadow along the wall.

  ‘Joshua!’

  In a split second he’s gone and I’m hurrying after him along the tunnel and into the turn and complete darkness.

  ‘Joshua, please come back!’

  A scuffling sound, then nothing. The illuminated screen on my mobile casts a triangle of light only three or four feet ahead. The path in front of me is marked by a giant tangle of cable, the entrance to what looks like an access well and a ladder. No sign of the boy. I’m moving forward now, but slowly, one hand directing the light, the other edging along the wall, still calling, hands cupped to my mouth to carry the sound, heart ablaze with terror. The echo hits me like a punch, a deep bellowing sound, followed, dimly, by a tinny echo. Then nothing.

  It’s cold here; not cool, but cold, a damp, subterranean chill. A cold, black, underground sea and in it somewhere my daughter, drowning.

  I move forward down the tunnel, following it through another turn until the dim sodium light begins to dazzle my night vision. I’ve no idea where I am now, though I can hear the ticking of the live rail which means I must be near the tracks. I call again, once only, holding my breath for a response. ‘Freya?’ Silence followed by a single, strangled sob.

  ‘Oh God, Freya! Are you hurt? I’m coming, it’s OK.’

  There’s a terrible rattling in my chest now, a mixture of terror and relief. I call again and hold my breath, waiting for a reply that doesn’t arrive.

  ‘Freya, where are you?’

  Ahead of me, a set of narrow metal steps leading down into a well. Was this where the sob was coming from? It’s so hard to tell.

  Descent. One foot gingerly tapping on the next rail down, phone in my mouth. A few steps down a low tremble in the metal followed by the tick, tick of electricity on a live line. I freeze, take the phone with one hand, shine it downwards and see nothing more than two steps and some cabling running through the brickwork. Tick, tick, tick. The rumble of an as-yet distant but approaching train.

  A sob-squall. A child trying and failing to catch her breath.

  ‘It’s OK, I’m coming. Breathe deep.’ Breathe.

  Stepping further down into the darkness.

  ‘Freya?’

  Only panting in response.

  I look down and see a faint glow. A lamp? No, the sway suggests something moving. Train lights. Yes. Somewhere heading towards us a train, the passengers on their way home from work, tired, preoccupied. A driver at the front, unaware that not far ahead an eleven-year-old girl is in harm’s way. Approaching, drawing closer, the light growing stronger, gradually illuminating the scene below. An access well giving out onto the track. A small figure crouched, back to the wall. The track running close by. Tick, tick, tick. Carefully.

  ‘Don’t move, just tell me, are you on a track?’

  If there is a reply, the fierce echo of the train carries it off.

  ‘Look to your left. Can you see the ladder?’

  I’m clambering down now, hands slick against the metal, willing myself to go carefully, not to trip.

  The blank white light of the train.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  When people jump in front of the train…

  In that moment the phone clatters down, ricocheting off the wall, bouncing at a wild trajectory as it hits the floor and landing right onto
the track. A hand reaching into the light towards it.

  ‘Let it go.’

  I can see movement but her face remains in darkness.

  ‘Take hold of the ladder, Freya, climb up the ladder.’

  The rumble now a mechanical roar.

  My feet tramping down, down. The light flaring, my eyelids snapping shells, my ankle turning over on the step, and then the sensation of the foot stamping air. My hands are clinging to the ladder and I’m shouting something now but I do not know what it is. And the light is a terrible apocalyptic glare. A whipping, electric sound. Tick, tick, tick.

  ‘Climb the ladder, Freya.’

  ‘Mum, I can’t.’ A terrible alarm is sounding in my daughter’s voice.

  Another louder tick, my pulse drumming in my temple. I can see the top of Freya’s head now, but her body is angled mostly away from my line of vision.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  The sound of sobbing.

  A sallow wind as the train approaches and the light whumpf of the air surge.

  ‘Is anyone down there with you, Freya? Talk to me!’

  ‘Please come, please, Mum.’

  ‘Stay there.’ I’m holding on with one arm and reaching down with the other and gripping only air. Something is badly wrong with my ankle. I’ve found the step again but my foot is like a rotten apple hanging lifeless on its branch. By using the strength in my arms to cling on to the side rails, I can hop one strut of the ladder at a time. It’s clumsy and slow but the train is moments away now, the air beginning to suck back into the partial vacuum of the tunnel. Freya reaches out with one arm and grabs for my feet and I’m lowering myself to the floor oblivious to the pain. At its base, the well gives out onto a section of track from where a thin beam blades through and, in that dim light, I see my daughter scrabbling vainly at a mess of cables around her legs. I’m rushing towards her, calling, but she’s flailing, grasping at the air, and I have to fling my arms around her to contain the panic. Immediately, she stills, her whole body shaking now. We’re beside the track, the air around us electric and trembling. Kertum-kertum-kertum.

  Then I’m bent over the cables, freeing my daughter’s legs, and in a second I’m pulling her back inside the service well. And we are safe from the approaching train at least, my hands on my daughter’s shoulders, my face in her eyeline.

  ‘Darling, darling, listen to me. Is Ruby here?’

  Freya takes a huge shattering breath and, through chest-wracking sobs, shakes her head. An arm comes up and flutters in the direction of the track.

  ‘Don’t move!’

  In an instant, I’m glaring into the darkness as the track disappears further into a tunnel and makes an arc left and, in the flare of the tunnel lights, there is someone moving.

  I scream, ‘Get off the tracks!’ but the figure takes no notice. The brickwork at the curve of the tunnel is illuminated now with the lights from the approaching train. I take a step out. My eyes are on the figure backlit from the lamps of the approaching train. I’m yelling at the top of my voice for whoever it is to clear the track. Part of me is tempted to run forward but I know I risk my own life if I do so I hang back, one arm slung across Freya in the well, the blood screaming in my head. The train has rounded the curve and is slowing for the approach to the station. The lights are blinding. For a brief moment the figure on the track turns as the train bears down. Instinctively, I turn my head away before the whumpf and a sucking, depressurising feeling of the kertum-kertum-kertum as the final carriage thunders by and then away towards the platform.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Time floats about, melts, then gathers in great pressure ridges, but whenever I try to summon my daughter’s face all I see is snowdrift. At some point in the night a fragment of myself crumbles off and floats into distant, unrecognisable waters. I am afraid to stay awake and afraid to sleep and not sure which state I am in. Freya flickers at the edges of the picture and sometimes in the middle. Is this me dreaming or me in the realm of the mad? Slowly my eyes crack open and I am relieved to find that I am still here, on this thin mattress in this blank rectangular room. From under the sheet my plastered ankle throbs. What do I remember? I remember the hospital, I remember a woman with black-rimmed glasses.

  I’m sitting up now and a face is coming into focus.

  ‘Cat? It’s me.’

  I’m blinking away the painkillers. An IV swings from my arm to a saline rack by the side of the bed. In the corner of the room is a wheelchair and a pair of crutches. From somewhere beyond the curtains a monitor bleeps.

  ‘Where’s Freya?’

  ‘She’s fine, she’s with Sally.’

  ‘I want to see my daughter.’

  Dominic stills me with his hand. ‘It’s the middle of the night, Cat. You’re in St Thomas’s. They had to put you under to pin your ankle. You came out of the OT a couple of hours ago.’

  I slump back onto the hospital bed. A smell of stale food rises in my nostrils. Behind the cubicle curtains two shadows play.

  ‘The police are here. They’re going to need to talk to you, but only when you’re up to it.’

  An image flashes across my inner field of vision. The boy on the rails, his face in the moment before… Dominic’s hand is on mine and there’s a painful tightening in my throat and the thin burn of tears.

  ‘Try not to think about that right now.’

  There will be a lifetime of thinking about what happened in that tunnel. ‘Can you bring me some coffee?’

  ‘On it.’ Dominic reaches across to the bedside table. ‘Not sure it’s coffee but it’s brown and hot and may contain caffeine.’ Dominic looks at me for a moment. ‘How the hell did you know Freya would be in the Tube?’

  ‘I didn’t. I knew Joshua would lead me to her.’

  Dominic says that after I’d lost the guard at the barrier, he had returned to the control room and seen me on the CCTV screen. It was he who had alerted the transport police.

  ‘Freya told me it was supposed to be a game. That’s what Joshua and Ruby told her.’

  ‘Did she… ?’ Dominic doesn’t need to finish.

  ‘No, I shielded her from it. There was no sound, even. It was like he just vanished.’

  ‘The police spoke to the guard and I’ve had a chat with them too. They’ve accepted that you weren’t trying to take Freya, but they’ll want to interview her later today or tomorrow, once she’s had some rest.’

  ‘And Ruby?’

  ‘She’s with her father. They’ll want to talk to her, too.’ He pats my hand. ‘The Barrons family has obviously been told. The father’s on his way back from New York.’

  My hands move to my face. ‘There was no time, the train was right there. I couldn’t save him.’ Another dead child.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Cat. You know that. Something very odd must have been going on in Joshua Barrons’ mind. I wonder what, though?’

  ‘He was a very disturbed boy. Perhaps he wanted someone to bear witness to his dreams. I should have seen the psychosis coming. He was my patient.’ My hands are in my lap now and I’m stroking my thumb along the opposing index finger as if to soothe it. I look at Dominic and feel curiously detached. ‘Did I ever tell you why we picked the name Freya, goddess of love and war?’

  Dominic’s eyes soften. ‘No, you never did.’ He raises a hand and rubs his eye. He’s tired, it’s nearly dawn and only part of him wants to hear this story.

  ‘Our daughter had to fight so hard to come into this world. But love is worth fighting for, isn’t it?’

  No answer. None needed.

  ‘I should tell you, James White called. He asked for a comment.’

  ‘Seriously? If he’d done what I asked him and broken the story about the files, Joshua might just be alive today.’

  ‘That’s what I told him.’

  DS Lisa Crane and DC Mark Williams take up chairs beside the bed to explain that while I’m no longer under suspicion of kidnapping my daughter, they want to hear my story to s
et the record straight. They’re pleasant, efficient and – though perhaps I am imagining this – sympathetic, even as they’re explaining that the DVPO against me still stands. They have already spoken to Tom and to Emma Barrons and will be taking statements from Ruby and Freya in due course. There will be an inquest into the death of Joshua Barrons. Though Ruby has not retracted her insistence on seeing me in the park yesterday morning, the police now have reason to doubt her testimony. She has admitted to planning to help Joshua trick Freya into the Tube station but it seems that Ruby, too, was duped by Joshua’s plausibility. Both she and Freya had believed him when he said he would let them ride up front as he drove a Tube train, but when the boy had led them through the tunnels Ruby had spooked and run away.

  Once the police have gone, social services arrive. Given the circumstances, they’ve granted Sal temporary custody of Freya until a more long-term solution can be found. In the meantime, I can call my daughter once every other day, so long as I do not discuss the DVPO. The final call of the day, nurses aside, is a psychiatrist with a clipboard who pokes his head around the curtains and asks if it’s OK to do an assessment. I find myself repeating the story, or at least the finished part of it, and he seems to go away satisfied that I am not mad, but maybe that’s because I have not told him the final chapter, the big reveal, the common element that ties this all together, the one and only thing I know and cannot as yet prove.

  In the late afternoon, I am discharged a day early, mostly because I insist on it. I cannot put any weight on my ankle but I can hobble around on crutches and the analgesics they’ve given me are managing the pain. Sally has been to visit and brought a get-well card with a letter from Freya inside. Following the hearing and the incident in the Tube, and while various reports are still pending, I am not yet formally allowed a face-to-face meeting with my daughter. Sally’s card wishes me well, Freya’s letter reassures me that I am loved. They are the only possessions I take with me. They are all I need.