by LK Fox
‘I think Harry was worried that Karen would leave if there was a baby in the house.’
‘Well, maybe you’re right about that. He’s my brother and all, but he can be a stubborn son of a bitch. And he’s certainly changed a lot since your mother died.’ She took her wooden spatula out of the pan for a minute. ‘He never made her happy. Only you and your sister did that.’
I set out the dishes. ‘I didn’t let him come and see me at the clinic.’
‘What about Lesley?’
‘I didn’t want her to worry. We’re both independent.’
‘You’re stubborn, Ella. It runs through the women’s side of the family as well, God help us.’
‘I got paranoid at the clinic. I was sure they were going to take the baby.’
‘Well, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy now. You did a very stupid thing, and I don’t suppose you have much chance of getting him back now. It doesn’t sound like you had a plan in place for any kind of a life together.’ She chopped a handful of none-too-clean-looking greens and threw them into a saucepan. ‘What’s wrong with you, Ella? Why didn’t you think? Well. What’s done is done. You were always the apple of your mum’s eye. You’re lucky they didn’t apply to have you put away after what you did. Maybe you should just’ – she swiped the air with her spatula – ‘just walk away now. Leave that boy be.’
‘I need to make sure that he’ll be happy. I’m still his mother.’
Charlie shoved the greens about, sniffed them, stirred some more. ‘You’ll never find him through the clinic. The system is constructed for the specific purpose of keeping mothers away from adoptive parents. By now, they’ll be looking through their files for a nice new family that can take him. Did you sign any paperwork?’
‘I signed a few things.’
She gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘Did you actually stop to read any of them?’
‘No,’ I said miserably. I took paper napkins and cutlery from her. ‘I’ll never see him again, will I?’
‘Short of breaking into the clinic’s headquarters and hacking into their computers, there’s no way of tracing . . .’
‘Gabriel.’
‘Gabriel. So let me ask you again. What do you hope to achieve? Are you absolutely sure you want to find out where he is?’
I watched the orange glow of the charcoal in the stove. The evening air was filled with the scent of wood smoke and burning leaves. I made no reply.
‘Because I have to ask what your motives are,’ she said, rattling the pan. ‘If you did trace him, would you be tempted to try and steal him away? Or would you truly consider what was best for him now?’
I thought carefully. ‘If I found out where he was and saw that he was being properly raised, I told myself I would happily leave him there. ‘I promise you, I would never do anything to spoil his new life.’
She looked me in the eye. ‘You’re being honest with me?’
‘I have no reason to lie to you, Aunt Charlie. You’re the one person I can trust.’
‘That’s what I needed to know.’ She dipped a spoon in the bubbling goo and decided the meal was ready. ‘It’s against my better judgement, but I hate to see you like this . . . I think I may be able to help you.’
We sat at one of the damp pine tables on the dockside, eating from enamel plates as the sun sank below the tree-line. Boat people spend a lot of time outside.
‘Gabriel’s new identity will be carefully hidden,’ said Aunt Charlie, thinking it through. ‘The case history will be archived, although I’m sure your child’s assigned worker will still have to check up on the adoptive parents from time to time.’
‘I left the clinic after they took Gabriel away,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t cause any more trouble.’
‘Honey, you went on the run.’
‘I never thought of it like that.’
‘What about getting in touch with your case-worker? You said she liked you.’
‘Not enough to risk her job.’
‘But you could just call her.’ Aunt Charlie pushed back her plate and lit up a cigarette. ‘Hell, I could call her.’
I gave her Marleena’s mobile number.
Nick
Step by step, I re-created the events of that morning while Kaylie took notes with her purple gonk pencil on a child’s drawing pad. It didn’t fill me with confidence.
‘So, yesterday morning, you repeated the trip you made on the day you lost Gabriel, one year earlier.’
‘Yes. As I drove away from the school, I collided with a car, and I thought I saw the man who took him a year ago.’
‘This man was real, not imagined.’ She sucked her gonk thoughtfully.
‘Absolutely.’
‘What time was this?’
‘When I reached the school? Just after nine.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘School starts at nine. I was running late.’
‘You stopped outside the gates. Was it also raining the last time you saw Gabriel alive?’
‘Yes, the light was low. Everything looked flat and colourless.’
‘Not surprising, at this time of the year. And in your mind – yesterday, I mean – you saw him walk in through the school gate.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you stay there until he went into the building?’
‘No – at least, I don’t think so.’
‘You left before he went right inside?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because it’s what you did a year ago. Well, this is starting to make sense now. You repeated the trip to work through your guilt.’
‘I was in too much of a hurry to leave. A woman in a green 4x4 was trying to get out of her space. I was blocking her. The road is narrow there. She was trying to do a three-point turn but had no idea how to make the car’s wheels go in the right direction. It distracted me.’
‘Was she also there a year ago?’
‘Maybe someone like her. It might have been a different car blocking me then. It happens all the time there.’
‘The traffic was bad and it was raining. Roughly the same conditions as a year ago. What else did you see?’
‘Some other women, I don’t recall them exactly. And on the other side of the street I noticed a fat man trying to light a cigarette in the downpour. There was a black Saab parked on the left, a blue Renault on the right.’
‘Why did you notice the makes of the cars?’
‘It’s something I do. A habit. Doctors figure out how much people weigh by looking at them. It’s just training, from my old security job.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Then I pulled away and hit the other car. A worn-out grey BMW.’
‘You mean the car was there yesterday.’
I fidgeted. There was something sticking into the small of my back and I couldn’t get comfortable. ‘Yes, it was the same car that was there a year ago.’
‘Let’s be absolutely clear about this, Nick. The BMW was in the same place as the last time you saw it, a year earlier?’
‘No, not exactly. Maybe a bit further down.’
‘So, one year ago, you saw the same car. What he was doing back at the school a year later?’
‘If he was dropping off a child, it would explain why I saw him again, but I don’t think he was doing the school run.’
‘Why not?’
I shook my head, trying to conjure his image. ‘There was something furtive about him. He just didn’t seem the type.’
‘How do you know if you didn’t see him clearly?’
‘I don’t know – body language, I suppose.’
‘On that first occasion, you didn’t get out and talk to the man. You didn’t take a picture of his vehicle.’
‘No. There was no need because I didn’t hit him. I just swerved around as he pulled out and drove off.’
‘But this time you clipped him.’
‘Yes.’
‘Same car. Same man.’
‘Yes.’
&nb
sp; She frowned. ‘Bit of a coincidence.’
‘It wasn’t a coincidence. It was the anniversary.’
‘Wait, you’re saying he was there for the same reason as you?’
‘I don’t know, Kaylie – I just don’t know.’
‘Did you recognise any other faces yesterday? Any of the old crowd standing outside the school?’
‘Yes. No.’
‘Which?’
‘Similar, at least, in roughly the same positions. There was a woman in a yellow raincoat. She was there yesterday and the time before. Chinese, I think. Black Saab. Blue Renault. White Toyota. Mercedes. Grey BMW. There’s always a similar mix of cars. In slightly different places, but essentially the same. There’s only a short section in front of the railings where the parents can stand. And there were roadworks again, but then there are always roadworks.’
‘So you’d say that everything you could see was more or less exactly as it was a year ago.’
‘One thing was definitely different. A year ago, there was a poster for a Hollywood movie beside the school railings, something called The Killer Inside. A huge picture of a muscular guy with a machine gun, and a strapline that read: “They took his family – he took their lives.” The parents had complained about it being sited there, right near the classroom windows. The hoarding has gone now.’
‘But apart from that everything else was the same.’
‘Yes.’
‘And as you left, the car pulled out, except this time your reactions were a fraction slower and you hit the BMW.’
‘I keep telling you, yes.’
‘Did you see the driver?’
‘Which time?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘I guess I saw more than the first time, because we’d had a collision. You look at who’s driving, to see if there’s going to be trouble.’
‘Describe him. What was he wearing?’
‘A business suit, navy blue with pale pinstripes, very old-fashioned. A white shirt, dark tie; blue, I think. Hankie in his top pocket. A red baseball cap, the peak tightly bent. There was a blanket on the floor next to him, or at least something that was black, old clothes maybe.’
‘But the face.’
‘Ordinary. I’m not sure.’
‘Isn’t there anything else you can recall?’
I thought for a while. ‘I got an impression of strength.’
‘Why, was he big?’
‘No, quite small, compact. But he had the sleeves of his suit jacket pushed up, like some guys do when they want to show they have attitude. He looked dangerous. And he wore those weird old driving gloves, black leather with string on the back, the kind nobody wears any more.’
‘And it was definitely the same man?’
‘For crying out – yes. He had a tattoo on his right forearm.’
‘What kind of tattoo?’
‘I couldn’t see very much of it. Something red and green.’
‘A Celtic pattern? A ring of thorns? An animal?’
‘I don’t know. An animal. Something like mine, only bigger. And it looked amateurish, like the ones you see on prisoners.’
‘Did you see the tattoo both times?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I’ve been over the day of Gabriel’s abduction a million times. I’m sure I would have remembered something like that.’
Kaylie brought the session to an end, counting me down and waiting while I slowly surfaced and sat up.
‘Well, you’re not clairvoyant,’ she told me, licking her fingers and snuffing out the candles. ‘That’s a shame. We might have made history. There’s a pretty simple explanation for what happened today. You set out to make sense of what you saw the first time. You went to the school because the anniversary was at the back of your mind, and you came close to duplicating the original circumstances. The rain, the configuration of cars, the woman in the yellow raincoat, but the main thing was seeing the man in the car. You recognised the BMW again. You might even have caused the accident subconsciously, in order to try and stop him from leaving.’
‘You think that’s possible?’
She turned the sideboard lamp on so that I could properly see the mildewed patches in the yurt’s roof. ‘I’ve never heard of anything quite like it, but I don’t see why not. You were hungover, running on automatic, not thinking with the conscious part of your mind. Acting out. We tend to form routines that become so familiar we don’t need our surface cognition to handle them. The brain is free to find other ways of seeing. Everything else this morning was similar to that day.’
‘As you said, quite a coincidence.’
‘This city is full of coincidences,’ she said. ‘Yesterday, I bumped into my old yoga teacher in a fried-chicken shop. You superimposed Gabriel into the back of the BMW because you can’t accept that his death was accidental. You need to find someone to blame. Either that—’
‘Or?’
‘Or you really did see someone steal him away a year ago. Only, this time, when you looked at the photograph, you filled in the part you missed.’
‘Christ.’
‘When magicians perform a magic act, there’s something called the angle of perception. It’s what they can see, as opposed to what you can see. You think their hand is empty, they can see the coin in their palm. I think you saw Gabriel the first time, only you didn’t realize it. He was there in the back of the car, but you failed to understand exactly what it was you saw. You didn’t get out the first time, so your angle of perception would have been different. You recognised Gabriel’s sweatshirt. Did you see his face?’
‘I think so.’ I tried to conjure up the image again. ‘He looked kind of distant. His eyes – they weren’t alert. Maybe even shut. He put his hand out to the glass. But he didn’t seem frightened. It all happened so quickly.’
She rummaged in her bag for a pad and pencil. ‘If I asked you to sketch the driver’s face, could you do it?’
I’d never been much of an artist. ‘I know what he looks like in my head,’ I explained, ‘but I think any drawing would just look kind of generic. There were no special features that stood out apart from the moustache, and they’re everywhere these days. I don’t even know if he had any hair under his cap.’
‘How old?’
‘I don’t know – late twenties, early thirties? I’m guessing.’
‘This man,’ said Kaylie, continuing to scratch away at the idea. ‘Let’s suppose for a minute that he wasn’t just some parent dropping off a child. What if he really did abduct Gabriel and you saw it before but failed to process the information correctly?’
‘I never mentioned the BMW to the police in the witness statement. I didn’t even think of it until yesterday.’
‘Because you didn’t believe it was really feasible. A total stranger couldn’t have had time to befriend Gabriel. He must have called him over, picked him up and dropped him straight into the back of the vehicle.’
‘In a crowded street, outside a busy school. Without him fighting back?’
She gave a shrug. ‘Maybe it’s easier to get away with that kind of thing in a crowd.’
‘It doesn’t seem very likely. Gabriel was trusting, but not that trusting.’
‘Then perhaps he was taken against his will.’
‘What, you mean the guy got out of his car armed with a gun and used chloroform on him? Chloroform doesn’t even work like that. You see kidnappers in movies pressing a pad over someone’s face and, two seconds later, they’re unconscious. Forget it.’
‘Then it was somebody Gabriel knew and trusted. Who else did he know well enough?’
‘Well, Phoebe upstairs, but she doesn’t drive. And Shirley next door, who he hated, and you. But, you know—’
‘Wrong gender, wrong shape. What about men?’
‘Ben, of course. He was at work.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you absolutely sure of that?’
‘Ben? What would his motive be? Besides, he could have taken him
any time – why go to the school?’
‘Gabriel’s ex-wife died—’
‘I’ve seen her grave. There’s no one else. And this guy was really badly dressed. Ben’s a clothes-horse.’
Kayley sighed. ‘Well, however it happened, I think you must have known more than you realised all along. It took yesterday’s events to match everything up. But this time was different, wasn’t it? Because of the accident. He knows you took a picture of his car.’
‘Shit. You think he recognised me as well?’
She smoothed out the wrinkles in her sweater. ‘I don’t know, Nick. It seems probable.’
I hadn’t considered that. ‘What I don’t understand is, what the hell was he doing back at the school?’
Kaylie shrugged. ‘It couldn’t have been coincidence. Perhaps he was planning to do it again with another child. Maybe the day is significant in other ways.’
I rose and rebuttoned the top of my shirt. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence that he just turned up. I know it was an important date, but there has to be something else. If he was looking for another child, why go back there? Why not go somewhere he’d never been before? I should go and look for this guy. He’s out there somewhere.’
‘Nick, I’m not being funny, but you spend your days planting flowers for dying people. You lack the basic skill set for locating him.’
‘I used to work for a security firm before this,’ I said indignantly. ‘You don’t know what I’m capable of doing.’
‘All right, what are you going to do if you find him?’ Kaylie asked. ‘Beat the truth out of him? Maybe you should go to the police.’
‘You’re kidding! You have no idea what I went through with them. You want me to tell them I had a hallucination in which I witnessed Gabriel’s abduction a full year after it was forensically proven that he suffered an accidental death? What on earth could they do?’
‘Okay, let’s rule the police out.’ She adopted the same tone with me that she’d used with her child. ‘I suppose you could at least check up on him before you involve the cops again.’
‘How?’
