Mothers' Boys

by Margaret Forster

  Chapter Seven

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT GRAHAM didn’t need to look at the Kennedy file. He knew every detail of it, remembered every date and fact and then some more. From the very beginning of the case it had felt different to him and it was all down to those two women, to Mrs Kennedy and Mrs Armstrong. Neither of them was typical. Time and time again he lectured police cadets on how there was no such thing as a ‘typical mother’, but nevertheless there was. A typical mother of a victim, a typical mother of an attacker. He’d seen them both, scores of times. The victim’s mother stunned then hysterical, wanting vengeance, only satisfied with a quick arrest, a Crown Court conviction and a long sentence; the aggressor’s mother, entirely disbelieving, then either blindly loyal to the idea of the son she held in her memory, who bore no comparison to the boy himself, or else wanting to distance herself from him, disown him.

  But Mrs Kennedy didn’t fit the pattern. Her name was Harriet but she never asked him to call her by her Christian name. That was his first failure. Usually, he established a rapport fairly quickly and the use of first names confirmed this. Rapport of any kind with Mrs Kennedy had been impossible. He could see she thought he was stupid and he didn’t mind that – if she wanted to regard him as stupid, then let her. He knew he wasn’t, he knew it was a defence mechanism, an obvious one. She had to hate someone for the ordeal her son had gone through and he was handy. He’d bowed to it, hadn’t resented it. But what he did resent was this mother’s assumption that he was insensitive. She wouldn’t give him credit for sharing her feelings. He’d told her he had two lads of his own, grown up now, and that he knew how she felt, and a look of absolute contempt had crossed her face. She’d almost spat at him, and that he did mind. The trouble was, she wouldn’t accept sympathy. That was very untypical. Usually, sympathy, sincerely conveyed, worked a treat. Not with Mrs Kennedy. She was visibly offended by it.

  In the first week he’d been at the Kennedy house every day. The boy, Joe, came home on the fifth day, his injuries not as bad as at first feared and the family anxious, and able, to take over the nursing. He had never been made welcome in that house. He was offered tea or coffee, and it was excellent coffee when it came, always in a cafetière, none of that instant muck policemen usually rated, but he wasn’t welcomed. Even after he’d applied all the relaxing techniques he had learned, the atmosphere never lightened. Mrs Kennedy did not want it to. She wanted to stay stiff, formal and hostile. So he had to battle against that all the time and it was hard work. It would have been unprofessional to take it personally, but it felt personal, he felt discriminated against as a man, not a policeman. Of course, he showed none of this unease. He went on being polite, responding to Mrs Kennedy’s wish. That was how he had been trained.

  But he couldn’t work out the dynamics of the family. It was tempting to think Mrs Kennedy was the boss. She did most of the speaking, she controlled access to the boy. Mr Kennedy was much more pleasant. He smiled, was prepared to discuss the weather, the garden, all the usual ways into communication. He deferred to his wife over anything to do with their son, but all the same he was no push-over. Graham was not at all sure Mrs Kennedy really ruled the roost here. He caught Mr Kennedy looking at her warningly several times and the unspoken warning carried definite indications of strength. What went on between them when they were alone he could only imagine, but what he did imagine were arguments, heated ones. But he could tell they were a devoted couple, the Kennedys. The tension between them was all to do with the aftermath of their son being so brutally attacked.

  Couples often split over this, over the reaction. He’d seen father and mother driven apart, usually because one took it harder than another, but also because they’d differ over how they should behave. One would suppress anger and grief, the other drown in it. One would want to confide in him, the other not. But in fact neither of the Kennedys confided in him. Mr Kennedy might be friendlier but even he wouldn’t really give, there was no hope of a real heart-to-heart. He wanted him out of the house as quickly as possible, just as his wife more obviously did. They both thanked him but there was not any real gratitude for a job well done. When Leo Jackson was arrested and admitted his guilt there were no congratulations, no recognition that the police had been successful.

  Not that he wanted thanks. If he did, he’d be a fool to have chosen to be a policeman. But he expected intelligent, middle-class people like the Kennedys to acknowledge how hard his station had worked to catch the attackers and how well they had done to get one of them so quickly. It had been annoying as well as puzzling that they hadn’t seemed all that elated. They should have been. Catching the criminal in a case like this was vital for the psychological welfare of the victim. That was another thing he stressed in his lectures: in every case of a random, violent attack the victim will be helped to recover only if the attacker is caught and punished. It was obvious, but it needed emphasising.

  They’d worked so hard, if only the Kennedys knew how hard. He hadn’t needed to suspend all leave – the whole station gave up time off of their own accord. The atmosphere had been tremendous, the sense of urgency exciting. He’d tried to calm this excitement – it wasn’t healthy, getting too worked up – but he’d failed. It fuelled itself. Those who’d been first on the scene told the others the state they’d found the boy in, and then there were the photographs taken before he was cleaned up. That kind of thing simply didn’t happen on their patch. There had never been a case like it and the one terror was that they wouldn’t be able to solve it themselves. The whole pride of the station hung on it and the relief when they got Leo Jackson was great, the air of celebration almost indecent. They’d known the attackers were not local and to have located and arrested one of them so far out of their own area was a triumph.

  He’d broken the news to the Kennedys himself. He’d gone to their house barely able to keep the smile off his face. ‘I’ve got some good news,’ he’d said, when Mrs Kennedy opened the door. She stared at him blankly, didn’t ask him in, and because he was impatient to tell her, and make her happy, he pushed a bit, said, ‘Can I come in?’ which he shouldn’t have done. She took him into the sitting-room and stood there in the middle of the room and because she didn’t ask him to sit down he was irritated and said, ‘Is it all right if I sit for a minute?’ Maybe he’d been a little sarcastic, but he hoped not. She apologised, said of course, and would he like some coffee. He declined, knowing it gave him pleasure to do so. ‘Husband at work?’ he asked. Yes, he was, due home in an hour or so. He asked how Joe was and was told he would soon be out of intensive care. She didn’t ask him what the good news was, which astonished him. He had to mention it again – ‘I’ve got some good news.’

  ‘Yes, you said.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’

  ‘Of course. It’s just that I can’t think of any news that could be good, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s a pity, because it is good news, Mrs Kennedy, make no mistake. It’s news your lad needs – we’ve arrested one of the attackers and he’s confessed, admitted it.’

  There was dead silence. She was still standing, hadn’t sat when he had. She swallowed several times, he could see her throat moving, and then smiled slightly, a bitter smile. ‘Well,’ she said, her voice husky and maybe – he was not sure – tearful. ‘Well, I’m glad, if it’s good news. Good.’

  He was exasperated. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you want whoever did those awful things to your son to be caught and punished?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, yes, I do. But it seems so irrelevant. What good does it do?’

  ‘A lot of good. It’ll help Joe. If we didn’t catch anyone he’d be afraid they were still out there and he’d know they’d got away with it. Believe me, it makes it all much worse not to catch the offenders.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that. I’m sorry.’

  He stood up. ‘Well, I just wanted to tell you myself. I’ll be visiting Joe in hospital tomorrow.’

  ‘Why?’

&nbs
p; ‘I’ll need to talk to him again and . . .’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Mrs Kennedy,’ he said, as patiently as possible, given his growing exasperation, ‘we’ll need Joe to identify our suspect.’

  ‘But you said he’d confessed.’

  ‘He has, but it doesn’t make any difference. We need Joe to verify it was him. You needn’t worry, he won’t have to confront him, it’s all done behind mirrors, behind glass. He just needs to look and point.’

  ‘But he’s ill, he has a broken leg and all those knife wounds and bruises. He’s in no fit state . . .’

  ‘We’ll show him photographs first, we can wait for the ID parade till next week, or as soon as we can arrange to get him to the station as comfortably as possible.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  She sat down suddenly, at last. ‘There will be a trial,’ she said, stating, not asking.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Joe will have to appear.’

  ‘Probably, almost certainly.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Oh, a while yet.’

  ‘It’ll drag on and on, he’ll be put through more and more.’

  ‘There’s no way round that, Mrs Kennedy, and in fact going through a trial often helps, it’s cathartic.’

  She laughed and echoed, ‘Cathartic?’ as though it was the funniest word she’d ever heard, or at least in his mouth. He decided it was time to leave.

  And now, all these months later, he would have to return to the Kennedys and go through the same thing again, except not quite the same. They’d arrested one Gary Robinson, but he hadn’t confessed like Leo Jackson. He was denying everything at the moment, and Leo Jackson had never named the other one. It all depended on Joe to identify him to make the case tight, even though they were sure. All the evidence could be called circumstantial by a clever counsel – Leo or Joe, preferably both, were needed to clinch it. At least Gary Robinson had no mother to complicate everything. He was typical: fostered from the age of two, petty crime from the age of ten, convictions for assault, burglary and drug-dealing by twenty. A nasty bit of work, a pleasure to bang up. He’d been shopped, they’d never have got him any other way after so long. In all respects he fitted Joe’s observant description. He was still drug-dealing, still terrorising customers and exacting punishment for bad debts. But the debtor who’d shopped him wouldn’t do in court. He’d be a disaster, they wouldn’t dare produce him.

  He wasn’t going to tell either the Kennedys or Joe all this. He wanted Joe down for an identity parade as quickly as possible without too many explanations. This time he was going to be as cool and distant as Mrs Kennedy, quite abrupt in fact. He only wished he could get to the boy without going through the parents but, of course, he couldn’t. There’d be all that time he’d have to spend fencing with the mother before he got to the son and even then it would be no picnic. The boy was a nightmare. If his mother was difficult Joe was even harder to handle. He was clever, sharp, made a brilliant statement and he’d been brave, whatever his own opinion of himself. In the appalling circumstances in which he’d found himself he’d been sensible, even if he saw his own commonsense as something to despise, as being pathetically submissive. He could have been killed. Gary Robinson had all the makings of a psychopath – if it was Gary Robinson, bad to be already convinced, a sign he was slipping and must watch himself.

  He’d had to question Joe himself at the very beginning, while he was still in intensive care the first twenty-four hours. That was always difficult. The nurses didn’t like it and the family hated it, but he’d managed ten minutes with Joe on his own. There were things he’d had to find out, questions difficult to ask in front of a mother, any mother, never mind Mrs Kennedy, and he wanted them over. Joe, although with his leg in a hoist and tubes and bandages everywhere, had been alert and not, in those few minutes at least, in pain. ‘Joe,’ he’d said to him, keeping his voice soft and low, remembering his own instructions to cadets, ‘Joe, I know you were stabbed and beaten, but I have to ask you this, did they do anything else to you? It doesn’t matter what it was. You can tell me, don’t be embarrassed.’ He’d tried to put compassion into his tone, to establish trust, but he’d seen outright rejection in Joe’s eyes. Still, he’d replied, perfectly audibly and distinctly. ‘No,’ he’d said, ‘no. They took my clothes of’ – he noted the eyes filling now with tears – ‘but they didn’t do anything.’ The boy might be lying, but he said, ‘Good.’ It was still possible the state he’d been found in didn’t mean what he thought it meant. There had been his nakedness, the wounds and then the other, the filth. He asked him again, to be sure. ‘They didn’t interfere with you sexually, Joe?’ The boy had closed his eyes, almost shouted, ‘No,’ and a nurse came to turn him out. He’d questioned the doctor, of course, and the police surgeon: no evidence of any interference, so that was that and thankfully he could leave it alone.

  Sometimes he’d thought he should bring this up with Mrs Kennedy. Did she imagine something worse than the obvious injuries? It was as though she did, the way she was always hinting and then drawing back, and it crossed his mind that she hadn’t been able to ask Joe and he hadn’t volunteered the information because he couldn’t see she wanted it. Was it the excrement, then, that distressed her so? Joe was smeared in it when they found him, blood and urine and excrement. ‘Covered in shit,’ the horrified young PC had reported. Mrs Kennedy knew that. Everyone did. It was in the newspapers, it made the crime even more disgusting. Joe couldn’t have denied they’d – or one of them – pissed and shat on him, even if he’d wanted to, because too many people had seen his poor body, too many had been involved in cleaning him up, making him presentable before his parents saw him. Just in case his parents didn’t know, he’d told them right away that, as well as two knife wounds and a broken leg and bruising, Joe had been rolled in excrement. Maybe it was from that moment Mrs Kennedy had hated him, but what else could he have done? Somebody had to tell her, and he’d known very early that it was this final degradation which would be hardest for the boy to recover from. ‘The loss of self-worth,’ he warned his cadets, ‘is the hardest blow of all – never forget it.’

  He’d never forgotten it himself but it had done him no good. Maybe something was still held back. He’d grown tired of his own suspicions, of the way his antennae bothered him. Mrs Kennedy didn’t think he had any, didn’t realise he could pick things up. She was making it harder for the boy, he’d picked that up. And her agonising put another burden on him. The boy saw what all this had done to his mother, it added to his guilt and shame. The fact that she didn’t appear to make an open show of her suffering, that on the contrary she was determined to deal with it by hiding it from him, if not everyone else, only made it worse. The message she gave out was: We do not collapse, we do not crack up, so Joe was obliged to follow her lead. He never cracked up. He was always composed, went straight back to school as soon as he was able, consistently underplayed his distress. And he’d had no counselling or psychiatric help – fatal. He knew it surprised people how in favour he was of counselling, they didn’t expect it from a solid policeman, but he’d thought of training as a post-traumatic stress counsellor himself. Pity he hadn’t the time.

  Right, he had to take the Kennedys on, forget they had resented him. Then he’d have to go and see the other mother, the grandmother rather, and see if she could help over getting Leo Jackson to talk. Everything had changed, surely, with the arrest of Gary Robinson. There was no need for Leo to keep quiet as he’d done almost from the moment he was arrested. It had been a very strange scene that morning. A quiet street, a quiet part of the town where decent lower-middle-class people, who owned their own houses, lived. Mostly elderly people who’d lived there a long time. No skimpy curtains. Lace curtains, very clean looking. Freshly painted door, shining knocker. And the door was opened by a rather imposing older woman, neatly dressed, calm, showing no evidence of guilt or even concern. He’d been momentarily embarrassed to be disturbing her Sunday
morning. Then they’d gone up and there was the boy, asleep, still in his bloodstained clothes. The woman had turned deathly pale, so pale he thought she might have a stroke. They’d made her sit down, in the boy’s room. She watched as they woke him up. She saw him nod his head when the question was put to him, in official language with all the names and times. He admitted guilt immediately. The look on the face of Mrs Armstrong was disturbing. Disbelief, of course, but anger and horror too, horror struggling with revulsion. He’d been concerned for her, suggested that the constable with him should find her husband who, it turned out, had gone off early, fishing, but she was furious with him at the suggestion. The boy had his eyes closed. He was sitting up but his eyes were closed, his head turned away. ‘This is a mistake, you’ll see,’ the grandmother had said and had shaken off the help he and the constable had offered her to get back downstairs.

  They took him to the police station and charged him there. Mrs Armstrong never said a word all the way there and neither did the boy. He wouldn’t look at her. Only when it was time to leave him did she say, ‘You’ve broken my heart, you have.’ It was moving, the way she said it. Very moving. So quietly, without any vehemence. Wearily. And he could see the boy was crying, though the tears were almost completely trapped behind his still shut eyes. Once his grandmother had left, the tears dried up. The boy became what he could only call proud. Lifted his head up, opened his eyes and made a short statement. He described going to the club, drinking, accepting drugs, falling in with a gang he didn’t know at all, driving off with them, and then suddenly finding himself standing holding a knife and on the ground a naked boy whom he did not know either. So he dropped the knife and ran. He maintained he didn’t know how he got home, how he covered the forty miles. And then he wouldn’t utter a word, except to ask if the boy on the ground was dead.

  He wouldn’t say who he’d been with, though he agreed he had not been alone – he remembered that, at least. Graham had told him ‘Don’t think you’re a hero, taking the blame on your own, because you’re not. You’re an even bigger coward. Whoever it was you know fine well he will do it again, and next time it’ll be your fault, understand? Your fault.’ But it had made no difference. According to Mrs Armstrong the boy hadn’t talked even to her. Well, that would have to change.