Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

Dominic picks me up in a cab. He wants me to stay at his flat near Spitalfields until more permanent living arrangements can be found. It’s in one of those new blocks thrown up on brown-field sites across London. There’s a lift and a concierge and a gym too, not that I’ll be using that. Or not for a while, anyway. For now, Tom and Ruby are still living at Dunster Road and I can’t go back there.

  Dominic’s place is large and calm with clean lines and light open spaces. There’s something wildly relieving about the lack of clutter, the level of orderliness. It’s a place in which to think.

  ‘I’ve got to go back to work. I’ve made up the bed in the spare room. Help yourself to whatever you need. We’ll talk when I get back.’ Dominic picks up his rucksack and moves towards the door. At the entrance, he turns and, lifting a finger, says, ‘Oh, and I forgot. A woman called Gloria called. You gave her my number apparently. She said she couldn’t get through on your mobile.’ My phone had fallen out of my hands in the Tube station. The police told me it had been found crushed on the track beside the live rail.

  ‘Will you be OK?’

  ‘So long as you have plenty of chocolate and Pinot Grigio lying around, sure.’

  Dominic’s eyes narrow. ‘What are you up to? I can tell you’re up to something.’

  ‘I’ll tell you once it’s done.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ‘You don’t call. Is very annoying,’ Gloria says.

  ‘I’ve been tied up. It’s a long story. But I’m calling now.’

  ‘You still keep our deal, lawyer to help me with Elmira?’

  ‘Yes.’ I haven’t yet discussed this with Dominic because he thinks I should be going to the police with my suspicions about Tom. But I’m pretty confident that Dominic will find someone in the office who can advise Gloria and if he can’t, I’ll fund a lawyer myself.

  So here is Gloria’s news: in return for access to a lawyer who can help him with his immigration papers and immunity from prosecution, Ani is willing to say what he knows about the day he went to repair the boiler at Lilly Winter’s flat. We agree to meet with him at 3 p.m. Gloria lists an address in Honor Oak.

  ‘Ani will only talk if lawyer comes.’

  ‘I’ll make sure he does.’

  Though it’s only been an hour or so since he left the flat Dominic doesn’t seem at all surprised to hear from me.

  ‘Thanks for calling back.’

  It’s then I spot the blinking light on Dominic’s phone. I must have been in the bathroom when he called.

  ‘You wanted to tell me something?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. Tom’s been picked up by the police for questioning over the cyberstalking. He’s at Brixton station. No arrest as yet. They’ve got a forensic computer guy looking at the evidence. He’s also being questioned by social services about the incident with Ruby.’

  ‘The bruising?’

  ‘Freya told Sally she saw Tom hitting Ruby. The day you left. They got into some kind of a fight apparently.’

  ‘Where is Ruby now?’

  ‘Her grandmother refused to have her so they put her in temporary foster care.’

  ‘She’ll be safe there.’

  ‘Safe? You think Tom might hurt Ruby?’

  ‘He’s already hurt Ruby. He might well go a lot further. I think he was hoping the problem of Ruby would just go away. He probably figured that Ruby would never tell because she’d be too afraid she’d get the blame.’

  ‘Is this about revenge?’

  ‘It’s about all kinds of things, Dominic. Since you ask, among them is justice, and a desire to protect Freya and Ruby, and yeah, because I screwed up with Rees Spelling and Joshua Barrons and I can’t go through that again. I can’t let Ruby down as well. Revenge is in there somewhere. But don’t ask me where.’

  When I tell him what I need from him he points out that he’s not an immigration lawyer and doesn’t do international child abduction cases.

  ‘But there’ll be someone in your building who does.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Right now all they’re asking for is a face, Dominic. A friendly face.’

  ‘You know I don’t approve of you doing this.’

  ‘But you’ll come?’

  ‘You know that too.’

  A nondescript suburban south-east London street, 3 p.m. Gloria, Dominic and I are moving along a Victorian terrace. Beat-up cars squat on cracked paving where once sat pretty front gardens. It’s quiet, though by no means emptied out. This part of London saw a night or two of mild disturbances but missed out on the worst of it. Judging from the curtains, the few houses that remain intact are occupied by pensioners, the rest given over to fast turnover, multi-occupancy private rental. Eastern Europeans and, if the flags in the windows are anything to go by, a smattering of Somalis.

  Ani – he gives his last name as Njeri, which Gloria says means ‘human’ so it’s probably made up – is waiting for us in the front garden of number twenty-seven. He told Gloria on the phone that he shares a bunk in the shed at the bottom of the garden with a man from Romania. In the summer it’s liveable, but Ani has been there long enough to know that in winter it will be hell. Besides, he says, the Romanian is a terrible snorer. As we follow him through the house and into the back across a badly paved yard area to the shed, he outlines his plans. A few more years in the UK saving as much money as he can then back to Albania to be with his wife and three kids. But he desperately needs those few more years.

  At the moment the bunkmate is out working. He has the top bed, Ani the bottom. Ani waves us through the door. There is hardly space for all four of us. Ani fills the kettle for tea. Gloria and I find a spot on Ani’s bunk. Dominic is in a chair. Ani distributes sweet black tea in small glasses then props himself up against a small, shaky-looking table. The incident with the woman and the boiler has made him think. He struggles to explain himself in English then gives up and reverts to his own language.

  ‘What did he say?’ Dominic asks Gloria.

  ‘He must turn his life around before his bollocks freeze to his bunk. In summer, this is not way to live, this only way to survive. In winter, this is way to die.’

  Ani wants to talk to Dominic about his immigration problems. Then he’ll decide whether or not he wants to tell us what happened on the day he came to fix Lilly Winter’s boiler. Gloria will translate where necessary. After the right assurances, he begins.

  It happened like this. A friend of Ani’s had done some odd jobs on the Pemberton and recommended Ani to a neighbour, who must have passed the recommendation on to Lilly Winter. When she called, Lilly told him she was behind on her rent and the council was trying to evict her and wouldn’t come and fix the boiler. She said she knew someone who’d give her the rent and the money for the boiler repair in a couple of days. Ani didn’t ask too much about it, or about Lilly. He told her to call him when she could pay for the work. For the next few days he got on with other jobs and thought no more of it.

  When Lilly Winter rang again to say she had the money, Ani went right over. He was met by Lilly, a girl who looked just like her and a man who didn’t introduce himself. Ani got the impression this was the money guy. The atmosphere was tense, he was pretty sure there had been a row, so he was keen to fix the boiler and leave. The fault was a small electrical problem, nothing that could have made the boiler dangerous. Fiddly, but an easy fix. While he was working, Ani could hear Lilly and the man arguing over money in the living room and he became anxious about not getting paid. He struggled to understand all the English, but it was his impression that Lilly was threatening to tell the man’s wife about something unspecified. The man started shouting. At one point it got so bad that Ani thought he should intervene, if only to keep the police away. To his relief, not long afterwards Ani heard footsteps in the hallway then the slam of the front door and the man’s voice calling Lilly back. She didn’t return and Ani didn’t blame her.

  Dominic, who has been listening to all this, leans forward in his chair and in a ca
reful voice says, ‘Did this man tell you his name? Anything at all about himself? Can you describe him?’

  All Ani can recall is a man of medium height with dark curly hair, a description so generic it could apply to more or less any male between the ages of eighteen and sixty. Plus, there is the possibility that Ani too might be lying. There’s no way to know. Gloria says something to him in Albanian. He lets out a sour laugh and goes on.

  The man stayed in the living room for a while. When he finally came into the kitchen he seemed eerily calm. He didn’t mention the fight but seemed very curious about the operation of the boiler. Ani played along. There was something about the man that frightened Ani a little, a kind of unpredictability. And he was now seriously worried about getting paid. Ani recalls the man asking specifically whether the boiler would become dangerous if the pilot light blew out. Ani said not really, at least, not unless the flue was blocked. In any case, Ani pointed out, there was a carbon monoxide alarm that would warn anyone in the flat if the levels were getting too high. He told the man that he’d check the alarm to make sure it was functioning before he left.

  A few minutes later, Ani realised he’d left a screwdriver he needed in the van he’d borrowed from his friend. He told the man he’d decided to have a break and eat the sandwich he’d brought while he was gone, but the truth was he wanted to call his friend and ask him whether he should just leave in the middle of the job. Something about the situation spooked him and he was becoming convinced that he wasn’t going to get paid. In any case, he left, telling the man he’d be back in an hour. As he was emerging from the flat, Gloria appeared and offered him a cold drink. He thanked her and said there was something he needed to fetch from his van but after that he’d love a drink. He got to the van and called his friend but there was no answer. He decided he needed the money too much to walk away from the job. When he returned about fifteen minutes later, Gloria had left a glass of iced Coke and some biscuits out on the walkway, so he stood there and ate his lunch and the biscuits and had a smoke. He didn’t know at that point whether the woman had returned but he could definitely hear the voices of the man and the girl inside the flat.

  Something strange happened then. The window of the bedroom at the front began to open and shut and it went on like this for several minutes. The sun was glaring on the glass and he couldn’t see who was behind the window. The opening and shutting began noisily then became progressively quieter until you could barely hear it. Ani decided this was just one more weirdness about the job and the smartest thing to do was to finish up and go. He swallowed the last of the biscuits and the drink, had another quick smoke and went back inside.

  The moment he entered the hallway, he sensed something conspiratorial going on. The man and the red-haired girl were hunched over the carbon monoxide detector. They both straightened up the instant they saw him and the man told Ani he was showing his daughter how to replace the batteries, but there was something off-key and edgy about the whole scene which left Ani with the sense that he’d come in on a secret. Shortly afterwards, the man left and not long after that the woman returned with the money for the job. Whatever had been said between the man and the woman had evidently upset her. She looked like she’d been crying and she smelled of alcohol. Ani finished up the job, cleared away and took the money, though the woman didn’t give him nearly as much as they’d agreed. He felt sorry for the little girl trapped between two warring parents but he was glad to be gone. Even if the woman had ripped him off, Ani sensed it was a bad situation and he wanted to be shot of it. Of them.

  It wasn’t until his friend told him what had happened at the flat a week later that Ani became convinced the man had set him up. Here he was, an immigrant without papers or good English, working illegally fixing up boilers: the perfect stool pigeon.

  ‘In my country I am engineer, working big projects. I make boiler good, impossible kill anyone. But now I am afraid this man, afraid police, afraid everything.’

  ‘Do you think you would recognise the man if you saw him again?’

  Ani exchanges a few words with Gloria then says he would.

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ Dominic says.

  ‘But not all,’ adds Gloria. ‘Ani has something you will want to see.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  When he left Lilly Winter’s flat that day Ani had taken a pair of sunglasses. He’d spotted them on the table in the hallway. He hadn’t intended to take them from the beginning but when the woman only gave him half the money she owed him, he figured he would help himself to payment in kind. They were clearly expensive and Ani reckoned he might be able to sell them on.

  ‘I not thief. This world make me thief.’

  In any case, God punished him for thieving. When he got home he discovered the glasses had prescription lenses. He could barely see out of them. He reaches into a box under the bed and pulls out a pair of thick-rimmed boxy tortoiseshells.

  ‘Do you recognise them?’ Dominic asks me.

  ‘Of course, I bought them as a birthday present for Tom last year.’

  Dominic wants us to go directly to the police but Ani won’t agree to come. In any case, what does this prove? Only that Tom was in Lilly Winter’s flat that day. We have no physical or forensic evidence linking Tom to Lilly Winter’s death and unless we can guarantee Ani’s co-operation we have no circumstantial evidence either. I’ve been in court enough to know that we wouldn’t get anywhere without more.

  ‘Would you be prepared to give evidence in court?’

  ‘Maybe you fix my papers I come.’

  ‘Gloria?’

  ‘My daughter, Elmira.’

  Dominic looks momentarily defeated.

  ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’ I say.

  We agree that Dominic will get started on Ani’s papers and look into Gloria’s case with her daughter. We’ll meet later. In the meantime, there is something I need to do.

  It’s still light by the time I reach Dunster Road. Rush hour is mostly over and the sky is dreary with the first hints of twilight. If there were anyone home, there would be lights on. But the house is dark and silent. The police have twenty-four hours to hold and charge Tom. Fortunately, they’re taking their time. I open up with the set of keys that was in my bag. Tom has not got round to changing the locks.

  Inside, the house is a small oasis of familiarity in a life turned upside down. The umbrella Sal gave me one Christmas still sits in its stand, my mackintosh hangs on the hook in the hallway besides Freya’s winter coat, there’s the old crack in the plaster by the kitchen door that we’ve been meaning to fill for years. Some things have changed. The warm aroma of family life has gone and in its place there is something sharper and sadder.

  In the kitchen is Freya’s favourite Pippi Longstocking DVD. One blink and it is the start of the school holidays and we have the long summer ahead of us. Charlie Frick’s birthday party is looming and there are plans for family trips and barbecues and weekend summer blockbusters followed by plates of grilled chicken at Hoopoes. The reminders of us in happier times. All that is gone now. Already the leaves on the shrubs in the garden are darkening and the branches of the ideas tree hang thick in the last of the summer heat. Autumn and winter are imminent and those summer days are already etching themselves into our memories. I don’t want to linger here. And I won’t have to. What I am about to do is the work of ten or fifteen minutes.

  I walk over to the dresser. The receipt for the sunglasses is clipped to a bunch of others in the left-hand drawer. The glasses were expensive, an extravagance for a man I no longer know and perhaps never did. I slip the receipt into my jacket pocket then turn my attention to the other part of the plan, the one that will take down Tom and finish the game. So far as it can be, I have it all mapped out. The only really unknown quantities are Tom himself, the stranger in my bed, and the woman inside me, the other stranger I am about to get to know.

  The door to Tom’s study cracks open. Inside everything is as it always was:
the large wooden desk with its matching ergonomic chair and tasteful mid-century lamp. Behind it the L-shaped shelves of games and developers’ magazines, the Marvel comics Tom loves, the precious CDs he couldn’t bear to part with when MP3s came in and, at the end of the shelving against the side wall, the love seat where we first talked about starting a family.

  I’m waking the screen on Tom’s laptop and thinking how different it all could have been. If the Rees Spelling case hadn’t happened, if Kylie Drinkwater had survived, if I’d had an easier time getting pregnant, if Tom hadn’t had a drunken fling, if Lilly Winter hadn’t become pregnant, and Tom had come clean, if Adrenalyze hadn’t let Tom go, and Lilly Winter hadn’t demanded money from a man who increasingly had no means of providing it. And yet none of that explains it. Who hasn’t found their heart suddenly overwhelmed by a dark rage? Or woken up one day to discover that someone they don’t know has taken up residence inside them? Who hasn’t watched their moral compass fail and found themselves tempted to take desperate measures, then come to their senses and been shocked by what they had, only moments before, been contemplating? Tom Walsh made a choice to do what he did because he thought he would get away with it. Because men like Tom are raised to think they can.

  The screen lights up then fades to the password page. I tap in Ruby Winter’s birthday and it fades again. Recent history leads me to several multiplayer games sites: League of Legends, Counterstrike, Diablo. The passwords to these are lodged in Tom’s keychain. I check the accounts. Turns out my husband has been gaming for money. Small bets at first, by the look of it, little sprinklings of spice to heighten the play. A few larger sums on his own game at first, a few more, some wins, mostly losses, then expanding out to bets on games played by strangers, tournament betting, bet and counter-bet. No wonder he was broke.

  I key Labyrinth into the search box. Dozens of files appear, named Labyrinth 1, 2 and 3 all the way up to – let’s see – 268. I check the date last modified – about four years ago – click open file one and see… absolutely nothing. A blank. File two is the same. Three, four, eight, one hundred and ninety-six, all the same, all blanks. Is this it? The culmination of late nights and early mornings, of money spent and time gone by? Was Labyrinth never more than a few blank files and an ever-evolving fantasy in Tom’s head?