Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

  ‘I’ve always hated snoopers.’

  He’s standing in the doorway, his hands in the pockets of his old jeans.

  ‘That’s funny coming from you.’ At some deep, survival level my brain is conjuring Tom’s hands around my neck. He would like that, if he knew. The power he has over me.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’ I am fit but Tom is stronger. My eye falls on the door. Would I be able to slip by him and into the corridor? I watch Tom following my gaze. A thin smile appears on his face. There was a time that smile would have melted me but not now.

  ‘In all our years together you’ve never been afraid of me. Until now. I rather like it.’

  ‘I’m not afraid.’

  ‘Maybe you should be.’ He laughs. ‘I always thought you were hopelessly deluded, Cat. The very first time we met at that games conference, remember? When you gave me that spiel about games helping kids with empathy issues. What you never understood was that games aren’t about teaching some fucked-up kid who doesn’t give a shit to be able to pretend to. Games are about winning. They’re pure. That’s why I like them.’ One more step towards me. ‘You want to know how this game ends? Is that why you’re here?’

  Stay cool.

  ‘You know why I’m here.’

  A look. The look, which in recent years I’ve seen only in flashes, the gaze I once mistook for passion. He’s beside me now, that raw, dazzling, predatory intelligence, the long, soft voice whispering in my ear. ‘You’re wondering what I’m capable of.’ He lurches back. ‘Jesus, Caitlin, you’re even crazier than I thought.’

  You are not afraid. You cannot afford to be afraid.

  ‘You can win this, Tom, only not in the way you imagined.’

  He rocks back on his heels and crosses his arms. ‘Shall I tell you what I planned to do this morning? I planned to take an axe to the “ideas” tree.’ He air quotes the word ‘ideas’. ‘Because you know what? I’ve never had a single fucking idea under that tree. Not one. But then the police came so I had to postpone my little piece of forestry management. The police. You send the fucking cops. To my home.’

  I’ve risen from the chair now but I know better than to retreat. The instant I show fear I’ve lost.

  ‘You know, I suppose, that if anything happens to me, the police will be all over you.’

  ‘What is going to happen to you, Caitlin?’

  For an instant his eyes meet mine but they’re not seeing me, they’re seeing the game.

  ‘Eventually, Ruby will stop being loyal to you. You know that, don’t you? That’s why you didn’t want her to get into therapy. You thought she might blab. And you’re right. One day she will. She will tell someone what you tricked her into doing to her mother. You’re banking on people not believing her. Maybe they won’t. But they’ll believe me. And what are you going to do then, Tom? Kill Ruby? Kill me too?’

  Tom stiffens and takes a step back, a sudden reckoning on his face. His mouth opens but the tongue seems stuck in his palate.

  ‘I don’t think what you did was anything most of us haven’t thought about. Killing someone, I mean. I thought about it once or twice, when Heather was on her Slow Stoli Suicide Slide and terrorising Sal. I thought, well, maybe this is the best way out of the situation, for all of us. I could put a pillow over her head and in minutes it would be over.’

  Tom closes his eyes and screws up his face. ‘The bitch was milking me dry. Endless demands and none of it spent on Ruby so far as I could see. Always more, more and more. I couldn’t see an end to it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘We were Couple Number One. Don’t you remember how that felt?’

  ‘But it wasn’t real, was it?’

  Tom laughed. ‘It felt pretty bloody real to me.’ His head is turned away from me and cocked a little. He’s considering his options.

  I take a step towards him. ‘Walk away, Tom. Wind up this game. There’s one on every corner if you know where to look. And you know where to look. You can start again, set up somewhere else with a new set of people.’

  ‘You’ll call the police.’

  ‘You’re the father of my daughter. And besides, I’m not supposed to be here, remember?’

  His eyes find mine. He smiles and for just a moment, as his face relaxes, Thomas Walsh might almost be the man I thought I married. Then, turning away from me, he walks from the room. There’s the sound of footsteps on the stairs followed by the sweep of cupboards and drawers being thrown open. His tread on the stairs again and the sight of his legs and the leather weekend bag I bought him for his thirtieth birthday.

  And I’m there in the hallway, waiting for him, his daypack dangling from my hand.

  ‘Don’t forget this.’

  He shoulders the bag. A pause at the door, then the mortise lock clicking open, footsteps along the front path, the gate swinging open and the shapeshifter who was my husband steps into the street and away.

  For what seems like a long time after he has gone I am fixed to the spot, my mind a sea of white horses crashing on a distant shore. Then the nausea rolls in and I am mobile once more but with only a few moments to lock the mortise and fit the chain in the door before I’m throwing up.

  I do what I need to then call Dominic. He sounds upset.

  ‘It’s nine o’clock. Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘At Dunster Road. Tom left the house five minutes ago. He’s about to jump bail and disappear.’

  ‘Call the police.’

  ‘No, I want to do this one in person. Will you meet me outside Brixton police station? And bring Ani and Gloria.’

  A few minutes later, I am running down Holland Hill, past the shrine to LeShaun Toley and Jamal’s shop, past McDonald’s and the Tube, past the yellow boards appealing for witnesses to the riots, past what used to be the covered market and is now gourmet food shops. Every so often a bus rumbles by. It’s plenty dark now. And there’s an autumnal zip in the air. But for the uneasy quiet and the presence of boards over the darkened shop windows, this could be any other night in this corner of south London.

  I stop for a moment under Brixton railway bridge and there in the sickly glow of a luminescent tube I see my mother, Heather Lupo, standing beside Lilly Winter, LeShaun Toley, Kylie Drinkwater and Joshua Barrons. The dead lined up like warriors about to go into battle. And as I’m standing there, the crumbled growl of a train taking me from my thoughts, some kind of growing happens, some kind of awakening, a consciousness of being on the threshold of something. Turning my back to McDonald’s and the Tube, I set off in the only direction I can.

  On the pavement beside the station, Dominic is waiting with Gloria and Ani.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  At the desk the custody sergeant raises a weary and familiar head. Oh, it’s you, the DVPO woman. He scans the four of us warily, checks the wall clock, and draws a blank. Dominic turns and, with an encouraging look as if to say, This is yours now, nods me on. I close my eyes for a moment and I think to myself, Remember this moment, Caitlin, remember it for you and Freya and Ruby, but most of all, remember it for Lilly Winter. I take a single step towards the desk. The custody sergeant leans forward.

  ‘So what can I do for you this time?’

  For a second or two the words are hard knots in the brain then there’s a sudden softening and as they tumble out I hear myself say, ‘We’ve come to report a murder.’

  EPILOGUE

  It’s cold now, and dark; the streets are heavy and wet with winter. From every shop and office door warm, electric air billows. London is bracing itself for Christmas. At the institute, the cucumber-green corridors are rimmed with shabby tinsel and a dusty fir tree strewn with lights squats forlornly in reception. Festive cheer, institution-style.

  It is Tuesday morning. On any other Tuesday morning it would be my job as head of the CU clinic to sit down with a set of anxious parents and explain why their child has been diagnosed as having callous and unemotional personality disorder.
But not today, not so close to Christmas. There are limits. Today we are having a Christmas party at the clinic. Adam is coming, and Ayesha is returning with her mother to say hello to old friends.

  Otherwise, life at the institute is pretty much back to normal. The article exposing the Master of the Neuroverse appeared in the Herald eventually and created a predictable shitstorm both within the institute and beyond, but what was more surprising was how quickly everything settled down. Once MacIntyre and Anja and the accounts department employee who assisted them were dismissed, the waters quickly closed over the episode and everyone got back to doing what they do best: research and clinical work. The institute’s governing board sensibly decided that the best kind of damage limitation was the kind that dealt swiftly with the chief offenders then shut the hell up. And that was what happened. Within a day of White’s piece, both MacIntyre and De Whytte were suspended, and within a month they had both been let go. The incident swiftly became a non-story and the media moved on.

  Claire and Lucas celebrated by getting engaged. They’d kept that one very quiet. There was a party where you had to come dressed as a brain scan. Cute. More recently Claire has taken to salsa-ing in with my morning coffee. She’s practising in order to be able to shimmy down the aisle to Celia Cruz next spring.

  ‘It’s not as easy as I’m making it look,’ she says today at our daily diary check-in. ‘You should come to the club one evening, check it out.’

  ‘Sweet of you, but a world-beatingly bad idea. I am the anti-stereotype, a brown girl who can’t dance.’

  ‘Oh phooey,’ Claire says.

  ‘Well, OK, let me get this grant proposal in first then I might feel like dancing.’ I’m hopeful. The first research results from the CU clinic are looking promising enough to suggest trialling the programme through Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. There’s a unit in Manchester who are interested and we’re hoping to hook up with a clinic in Ohio to pool our expertise. Five years ago the kids on our programme would almost certainly have been heavily medicated, and some of the most challenging cases – like Joshua Barrons – would have ended up in secure facilities. But who deserves a second chance more than our children? Kids are our second chance, in a way. When we get the grant we need we’ll set up a unit named after Joshua Barrons so that we never forget what can happen if we fail.

  Claire brings up my patient list and reminds me that I’ll need to look at the scans for my ten o’clock. After that we go through the diary. ‘And don’t forget you have a lunchtime budget meeting with the acting head.’ When MacIntyre left his deputy took over until a permanent new head could be appointed. This one’s sensible, northern, nice. Bit of a movie buff. For a while after the scandal of the missing files broke, there was talk of me taking up the post, but that was never going to happen. I like my patients too much.

  At the door Claire turns. ‘Oh, and your sister called, but she says it’s not urgent.’

  The evidence against Tom stacked up. The glasses put him at the flat and Ani’s statement condemned him further. Then there are the batteries and the towels. When the police came to search the house at Dunster Road they found no evidence of cyberstalking. Tom must have come straight back home and deleted all the spyware on his devices. What the police did find, though, were the batteries and towels stashed in Tom’s locked cupboard, which I had moved from Ruby Winter’s room and put there. Ani was able to confirm that the batteries were the same make as those he’d placed in the carbon monoxide detector at Lilly’s flat. And forensics turned up carbon smuts trapped inside the towel fibres. Gloria can give evidence about the window. And finally, there’s me. I can testify that, after putting our daughter to bed the night before Lilly Winter’s arrival, I went for an hour-long run, time during which my husband could easily have driven over to sixty-seven Ash Building and sabotaged the boiler. Naturally, I don’t think he did. He is too smart for that. What I think is that he showed Ruby how to do it and remove the evidence. But I won’t be giving voice to my theory. After all, it’s just a theory, isn’t it?

  And who, honestly, would believe an eleven-year-old daughter actually committed the crime. Where’s the evidence? Only three of us know what really happened: me, Tom and Ruby. I won’t tell and I don’t think Ruby will, at least not for a very long time. As for Tom, well, who knows where Tom Walsh is? The chameleon will have long since shed his skin. Perhaps the police will find him one day. And if they do? He might try to pin the death of Lilly Winter on her daughter, but he will have no means to prove it. The secret will be kept so long as Ruby wishes to keep it.

  I hope, one day, she will share it with someone who will help her to bury it. Perhaps that someone will be me. It’s been four months since Ruby Winter went into emergency foster care. Freya and I have visited her regularly. In that time she hasn’t asked after her father. Which is perhaps just as well since none of us would know what to say. It’s a good family she’s with. Solid, loving, reliable people.

  After the hearing, Freya stayed with Sal until my psych assessment came through then returned to live with me at Dunster Road. She’s still going to the therapist Spiro mandated. From time to time, I tag along but I always stick strictly to the therapist’s rules. If Freya brings up the subject of her father, we talk about him, but she doesn’t very much. She misses him, I think. I trust her to talk about it all eventually. Between times I try to give her space to think and feel.

  At some point I’ll have to decide whether to keep some of the details of the story from her forever. So much has been revealed which neither of us could have guessed at. Most of it shows Tom in rather a poor light. But it doesn’t leave me untarnished either.

  I still keep Lilly Winter’s picture on the table in the living room. Sometime after the hearing it dawned on me that I have a lot to be grateful to her for. In life she gave my daughter a sister. In death she exposed Tom for what he is and enabled me to find my freedom. I think she probably understood Tom’s nature before I did. She had him down as a predator and tried to play him at his own game and lost. Tom refused to remain trapped for long. Though he was once one half of a defining twenty-first-century couple, his greatest skill was to remain slippery and impossible to pin down. Maybe, in the end, the only way to explain what he did was that it was a game. And the one thing that really mattered for Tom about playing a game was winning.

  For the most part, Tom was a good father. To Freya at least. My daughter loves him. I never wanted her to grow up in the kind of household I grew up in, fragmented, split, and catastrophically unhomely. And for eleven years we managed that. He loved Freya too, as much as Tom could love anyone. Perhaps in her he saw a reflection of his genes, the pool into which he could gaze and have a version of himself reflected back.

  Right now is not the time for thinking, at least not about this. For now, there are scans to check and research papers to write and budget meetings to endure and Sal to call back. And hope to hold close. There is always hope.

  And so the morning passes. At lunchtime I throw on my scarf and my good winter coat and head out to meet my sister. It’s still cold and some early snow has painted out the worst of the urban grime. London looks luminously beautiful, at least in this normally murky south-east corner. You forget sometimes how quickly the city can be made new. A sunny day, some spring leaves, the first whitening of winter.

  Through the fug of superheated air at the Wise Owl Cafe I spot my sister waiting for me at the table at the back where not so long ago Anja and I talked about the future over tuna salad. It’s soup weather now. Sal’s been shopping; a large bag sits at her feet. We greet each other and she waits for me to settle, then she pulls out her iPhone and flashes me a calendar set to 7 January. She waits for me to make the link. It takes a while. My head is still full of scans and experiments and grant applications.

  ‘The fostering panel!’ Of course. How could I have forgotten?

  ‘The social worker says I’ll sail through.’

  For the first time in her
life, Sal has a plan. It’s a big thing she’s doing, not just for Sal but for Ruby Winter. If she gets through the panel, she could be fostering Ruby by the end of January.

  Pulling a small green coat from her bag, she says, ‘Look, I got her this for Christmas. It’ll go so brilliantly with her hair. That’s not too creepy, is it? What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s great.’

  A waitress comes over and takes our orders.

  ‘It’s not going to be easy, you know that, don’t you? Ruby’s not going to be easy, she may never be.’

  Memories move across my sister’s face. ‘Do you remember the day you came for me?’

  ‘How could I forget?’ It was a drab, early winter day, the sky a bleary drape behind which the sun sat sulking. I was eighteen years old, newly installed in a grimy room in a house share, and very pleased with myself. Sal was four years younger, with sharp eyes and a blistering tongue. No one’s fool, even then.

  ‘You had one of those Chinese laundry bags with the blue and red checks,’ Sal goes on.

  I can see it now. ‘And you went on about there not being enough space for all your stuff, and I said, “What stuff?”’

  ‘In my head I had wardrobes and wardrobes full of lovely glittering outfits.’

  ‘What you actually had was a pair of shoes, a pair of trainers, a couple of pairs of jeans, and three tops we got in Brixton Oxfam.’

  Sal lets out a dry laugh. ‘God, is it any wonder I’ve got a shopping habit?’

  I can see Heather now, wrecked and slumped at the table, watching her two daughters leaving for a new life, so pissed she could hardly string two words together but still managing to mutter darkly.