The Watcher

by Kate Medina

Over his quarter century in Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, Marilyn had arrested more people than he could count without resorting to an abacus. He used to rehearse each arrest in his mind multiple times before enacting it for real, like a professional footballer visualizing the perfect goal before his foot connected with the ball. Arrests could be unpredictable beasts, particularly when the arrestee was at the mercy of a substance – alcohol, drugs – or had an extreme mental disorder, and it paid dividends to be prepared for every eventuality. But Marilyn realized, as he stood in Allan Parker’s hallway, the splintered mess the steel enforcer had made of the front door hanging off its hinges behind him, that he hadn’t done that for a long time, that arresting criminals was as natural to him now as stepping off a kerb.

  Allan Parker’s hands were cuffed behind his back, a brick of a uniform clutching his arm. One firearms officer stood to Marilyn’s left, guarding the entrance to the kitchen, with eyes up the stairs; another to his right, covering the entrance to the lounge, eyes on the patio doors beyond; and two more firearms officers outside in the front garden, two in the back – Marilyn wasn’t taking any chances. DC Cara hovering by the front door, taking it all in, learning, doubtless committing every detail of this arrest to memory as Marilyn had done in his rookie days. He met Allan Parker’s insipid blue gaze with his own, mismatched one, directly, with challenge.

  ‘Allan Parker, I am arresting you for the murders of Hugo Fuller, Claudine Fuller, Daniel Whitehead, Eleanor Whitehead and Denise Lewin and for the kidnap of Leo Lewin—’

  Silent and ghoul-pale, Allan nodded.

  ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence against you.’

  Despite what Jessie Flynn said – that the label of psychopath was too easy – despite her logical reasoning, he couldn’t agree with her. Observing Allan now, the blankness of his expression, the cold emptiness of his gaze, Marilyn was convinced that Flynn was wrong.

  Stepping back, he addressed himself to the uniformed brick-shithouse clutching Parker’s arms.

  ‘Take him away, please.’

  A sudden movement on the stairs caught Marilyn’s eye, the armed officer standing beside him responding at the exact same moment. He dodged as the business end of a Heckler & Koch MP5 clipped his ear.

  ‘Jesus Christ, put that fucking thing away,’ he snapped.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  A boy, Robbie Parker Marilyn presumed, was standing at the top of the stairs, pale, diminutive, appearing so much younger than the fifteen years Marilyn knew him to be. At the sight of his son, the expression on Allan Parker’s face flashed to one of intense vulnerability and for a brief moment he looked almost as young as Robbie, boy-like, brittle and pregnable.

  ‘Let me go,’ he shouted, springing to life, struggling and kicking out, as if some invisible finger had found his on switch. ‘For God’s sake, let me go.’

  The brick-shithouse must have given him a swift jab in the side with his elbow as Marilyn heard a ‘pouf’ and Parker bent double.

  ‘Enough,’ Marilyn snapped, warning in his tone to both of them. He addressed himself to Robbie. ‘I’m sorry, son, but I’m going to have to ask you to show me your hands.’

  One pale hand and then the other slid from where they had been buried deep in the pockets of his baggy jeans. The ragged, chewed sleeves of his iron-grey sweatshirt gathered around his elbows as he raised his arms above his head. Even Marilyn had to take a breath to stop himself from reacting with horror at the sight of the kid’s arms, the self-inflicted gashes carving up his skin like crazy paving.

  ‘Come down the stairs slowly, please,’ Marilyn’s voice croaked from a parchment-dry throat.

  Arms raised, Robbie stopped a few steps from the bottom. Looking at him now, at the devastation of his arms, the ravaged expression on his face, Marilyn regretted his rush to arrest Allan Parker. He should have put a watch on their house, front and back, then called Jessie, waited for her to drive back from Frimley Park Hospital before charging in mob-handed. What would another couple of hours have cost him?

  ‘I’m sorry, Robbie,’ Marilyn said.

  The boy’s shoulders lifted in a tiny shrug.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Allan wailed. ‘For everything.’

  Robbie ignored his father. From under the concealing darkness of his fringe, his deep green eyes remained fixed on Marilyn.

  ‘I’m afraid that I must ask you to leave the house, so that we can search it,’ Marilyn said. ‘But Detective Sergeant Workman, Sarah, has said that you can stay at her house for tonight until we can sort out a foster family placement or find space in a children’s home. Go back upstairs and grab a few things for the night.’

  A barely there nod, but Robbie didn’t move.

  ‘Detective Constable Johns will go with you.’ Marilyn gave a nod to the firearms officer to his left.

  ‘Let me speak to him,’ Allan Parker pleaded. ‘Please, just let me speak to my son for one second, like a human being.’

  There was nowhere for Parker to run: Marilyn had the place in lockdown.

  ‘Go ahead, Mr Parker,’ he said.

  Christ, where had that sliver of humanity come from? He never used to have a heart, not for scum like this.

  ‘I never meant it to happen, Robbie. I was weak and self-centred,’ Allan implored, his voice breaking. ‘And I’ve had to live with the truth of what I did for my whole life.’

  What the hell is he talking about? Marilyn’s gaze moved from Parker to his son. Robbie was standing motionless on the stairs, his face an unreadable mask. He had lowered his arms and his hands were clenched into fists, the right larger than the left, fingers moving, kneading … a ball, Marilyn realized. Marilyn had one himself, on his desk, filled with sand. A stress ball.

  But Robbie didn’t looked stressed.

  Despite the ravages of his arms and the paleness of his face, he looked calm, serene almost. Then the corners of his mouth twisted into a tiny smile. Slowly, very slowly and deliberately, he began to shake his head.

  ‘No, I’ve had to live with the truth of what you did for my whole life.’

  He opened his fist and the ball fell. Five pairs of eyes watched it bounce down the stairs, stream across the hallway and out through the open front door, Marilyn stepping aside to let it pass, as if it was a bomb.

  77

  The policeman, that block of wood in the uniform clutching onto his dad for all he was worth, began to fade from Robbie’s vision. And the two firearms officers, and the young, handsome multi-racial chap who Robbie bet had never been bullied in his life, and the scarecrow in the black suit. They melted away, along with the characterless beige walls and the shit-brown carpet that Robbie had always thought summed up his life way too fucking perfectly.

  The only person who remained in their dingy hallway was his father. But instead of carpet, Robbie saw, in his mind’s eye, pale, weather-beaten wooden slats under his father’s feet, a yawning crevasse between each, and ten metres beneath, a chill, grey-black churning, swallowing sea. His father wasn’t a middle-aged man, but a boy of about the same age as Robbie was now. But he and his boyhood father looked nothing alike. Where Robbie had spent his life creeping through the shadows, making himself invisible, apologizing by every means he knew how for his existence, his father was the opposite. He stood tall, feet planted wide apart, hands jammed into the pockets of his army-green parka, which he wore casually, slouchily, the same way he wore the second skin of arrogance that Robbie had never known, would never know or wear.

  But something wasn’t right. His father’s face was pale – not from cold, Robbie realized, but from shock.

  It was too late now, though.

  Too late to have regrets.

  Too late to save the boy.

  ‘What was it like, Dad?’ he asked quietly. ‘What was it like, watching him die?’

  78

  Jessie
could hear the persistent miaow-miaow of the siren cutting down the phone line, could picture the blue lights washing across the front of Allan and Robbie Parker’s chalet-style house, the black-clad figures of the firearms teams in the front garden, slapping each other’s backs, packing up their kit, Allan Parker handcuffed and secure, another job well done. The elderly neighbours in their small, out-of-the-way cul-de-sac would be watching the unfolding drama with the glee of hyenas eyeing fresh kill – much as Parker’s victims’ neighbours had watched from their windows as the black-bagged bodies were shunted from the sanctity of their homes to the morgue’s van – nothing sacred in this media age, nothing too personal, too base, not to be classed as entertainment. Perhaps there would be a couple of press vans there too, the team’s leaky teabag, whoever that was, doubtless keen to cash in on the final triumph with highly paid tip-offs.

  ‘Jessie.’ Marilyn sounded distracted, unsurprisingly. Jessie didn’t care. She was practically combusting from fury.

  ‘You should have told me that you were going to arrest Allan Parker. I should have been there, be there now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jessie. DCI Janet Backastowe stepped in as soon as an arrest was imminent and I’m now just a highly overqualified sidekick. Thank you for all your help on this case, but we can take it from here. Your work is done.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Robbie needs me.’ Someone. He needs someone who understands him, at least, and I’m the best he’s going to get.

  ‘Workman is looking after him.’

  ‘Sarah—’ Jessie broke off. Should she tell Marilyn that she’d just got off the phone to Sarah Workman who had pleaded with her to sprint back down to Chichester, that she was terrified for Robbie’s mental health? No, she couldn’t break Workman’s confidence.

  ‘Workman isn’t a psychologist, which is why she asked me to help Robbie in the first place.’

  ‘Workman is a very capable—’

  ‘Detective sergeant,’ Jessie cut in.

  ‘Woman, I was going to say,’ Marilyn cut back. ‘And Robbie knows her.’

  Jessie sighed, exasperated. Why the hell was Callan taking so long in his neurologist’s office, she wondered, a moment later chastising herself for being so … so selfish? But it wasn’t selfishness driving her. It was a desperate need to be in two places at once, to support two people who needed her. The electric suit hissed and crackled across her skin at the feeling of being trapped between a gargantuan rock and a limitless hard place.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jessie. I feel for the kid, really I do, but this is way bigger than Robbie. We couldn’t risk Allan Parker absconding while we waited for you to finish holding Callan’s hand.’

  Jessie didn’t rise, not that she wasn’t tempted, but she knew how stressed Marilyn must be to have made that comment in the first place. And her attention had been caught by the door to Callan’s neurologist’s office opening, further down the hallway, Callan emerging, walking towards her, the expression on his face – what? She couldn’t tell. He was wearing his military policeman’s poker face. Was that good or bad? Phone clamped to her ear, she raised her hand, forced a stressed smile.

  ‘Robbie’s spending tonight at Workman’s cottage as, surprise surprise, given the funding cuts, there were no emergency foster care spaces,’ she heard Marilyn say. ‘And we’ll hand him over to Children’s Services tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s been through way too much to be dumped in a children’s home or in a foster home with people he doesn’t know, Marilyn.’

  ‘I can’t have this discussion now, Jessie. I have a quintuple murderer in custody and I need to question him.’

  ‘He’ll end up committing suicide.’

  ‘I can’t have this discussion now.’

  ‘And his blood will be on our hands. Marilyn. Marilyn.’

  Silence.

  ‘Fuck.’

  79

  Allan Parker closed his eyes and tuned into the sound of the car’s tyres swishing on the wet road, trying to sink into the unchallengingly repetitive noise in the same way he tried, vainly, every night, to sink into the state of blissful relaxation his guided sleep meditation tapes promised. But there was one repetitive sound that he could never listen to, that snapped him back to relentless wakefulness, lodged a choking lump in his throat: the sound of breaking ocean waves.

  Now, his mind’s eye found Robbie standing gazing down at him from the stairs, found his ruined face, the look on it. He had spent the past fifteen years loving Robbie with every molecule of his being, fighting fiercely to protect him, to ease his path through life, and he had recognized in that one look that his efforts had been in vain. Though, in truth, he had known long before. He had known the second his son was born, terribly disfigured, that karma had caught up with him. Had known, when he had collected Robbie from prep school on that first afternoon, when he saw his son’s scarred face bruised and tear-stained from the first incidence of the bullying that would come to define his life.

  Because of what Allan had done twenty-five years ago.

  Because of who he had been.

  What was it like, Dad? What was it like, watching him die?

  He had expected the boy to struggle, to fight to the death for his life. They all had. But as soon as Hugo had thrown his little dog into the freezing sea, he had diminished, physically diminished in front of their eyes. He was small and thin and pale, always had been, but when he saw his little dog disappear under the slate-grey surface of the water, it was as if every bone inside his body dissolved, leaving only a baggy carcass of skin. He had been standing on the edge of the lifeboat station jetty, pleading with Hugo to let his dog go.

  Fine, Hugo said, in retort. I’ll let him go.

  But Allan caught the look on Hugo’s face, the sly smile. It was a smile that Allan knew well.

  What happened next played out as if in slow motion, the little black and white body flailing as it fell, feet pedalling for purchase, finding nothing but air. The boy had turned to face them, standing in a row as they were, all of them laughing. But even then, Allan remembered their laughter had had a hollow timbre as if, in that moment, they had all realized that Hugo had gone too far – that they had all gone too far. They knew what the little dog meant to the boy. They knew the home the boy came from, the grim life he led, no light, no colour in it, no kindness and no love, except for his dog. But still they had tormented him for years purely because they could. And because it was so much fun.

  80

  Jessie sped away from the bend, pressing the accelerator to the floor, wrenching the gearstick from third to fourth, finding second accidentally – her scarred hand still its own master when she most needed it not to be – wincing as the engine screeched in protest.

  Thank God Callan wasn’t here to witness the sacrilege she was inflicting on his gearbox. Quick change to fourth, concentrating hard on the movement of her hand, then fifth. The country road wound ahead of her through dense woods, the solid trunks of the trees only faintly darker than the spaces between, into the open again, the hills that she knew rose on either side hard to distinguish from the black sky above, the twin cones of the headlights picking out the thin strip of tarmac, guiding her towards Chichester. Nightfall at barely five p.m.

  Callan was spending the night in hospital, undergoing an MRI scan and a plethora of other tests, and Jessie would collect him in the morning. So much for that romantic dinner in a poster-child country pub. Allan Parker was safely in custody, doubtless now sweating under the unrelenting questioning of DCI Janet Backastowe, Marilyn resenting his relegation to ‘bit-part’ status. Robbie was at Sarah Workman’s cottage, secure and comfortable – for tonight at least. Marilyn’s on my case. I’m needed back at the office pronto. Workman had signed off with: Robbie seemed OK. He surprised me . And Jessie would be there soon to make sure that he really was OK.

  So why the hell did she feel as if the electric suit was wrapped claustrophobically tight around her, hissing and snapping, its wires constricting with each kilomet
re she drove?

  81

  The bleached wooden planks creaked and groaned beneath teenage Allan Parker’s feet. Goosebumps rose on his exposed skin from the chill wind and his eyes stung from the salt spray thrown up by the waves slamming against the jetty’s pilings. None of them had expected Hugo to actually do it: to toss that struggling little bundle of fur into the freezing sea. The boy’s eyes found each one of them in turn, a world of impotent pain and horror in his look, and then he turned, climbed calmly over the jetty’s rusted railing and dropped from view.

  One of them had leapt forward, trying, too late, to grab him, save him. Who? Simon? Daniel? Allan couldn’t remember. He only knew that it hadn’t been Hugo and it hadn’t been him. He had been a coward back then and he was a coward now. All he had wanted to do throughout the many years they had tormented the boy was to ensure that he wasn’t a victim and he had been prepared to do anything to secure his own safety.

  Now, he saw the image of a boy, his face blue with cold, as he was tossed and slammed by the waves. But it was the boy’s little black and white dog that held Allan’s attention more. Allan could see its white front legs churning through the dark water as it fought with utter determination for its life, driven by a survival instinct no one could break. They had burnt it with cigarettes and lighters, sliced its skin, kicked it between them like a football until its ribs cracked, stamped on its two front feet so that it hobbled on clubs, until finally Hugo had tossed it off the jetty into the freezing sea and still the little dog wanted, so badly, to live.

  The boy, though, was different. For the first time in the eight years that Allan had known him, tormented him, he looked at peace. He had lost. He had been losing his whole life and now he looked as if he had made peace with that reality. As if he knew that whatever he survived in life, it would never be enough, that he was born to lose, would always lose. That someone up there – God, fate, whatever – didn’t want him to live a good life.