‘We can but try,’ she replied, looking out of the passenger side window. Dennis knew she’d picked up on his desperation, sensed that nothing else mattered to him apart from securing an arrest in the Kent case. ‘We can but try,’ she said again, gently this time, surprising Dennis with her compassion. He held the sausage roll between his teeth and changed into first gear as the traffic moved forward. Their conversation dwindled.
There’s a heart in there somewhere, Dennis thought, grateful for her company as they stop-started towards the station on their way back from court. Other cases had to be dealt with however much Dennis wanted to work round the clock on Max. This one was annoying but drawing to a close and they soon got back on topic.
‘In all my time at the Met, I’ve never encountered such a . . .’ Jess swung round to Dennis, her seatbelt preventing her leaning too close, although he sensed her proximity. He smelt her perfume. The one she always wore for work. Today it was more immediate, more urgent, as if her own body chemistry was reacting with the scent. It speeded up his mind, made him wonder what she was getting at.
‘. . . such a mess, really,’ she finished. ‘A mess that just isn’t leading to anything.’
‘It’s more than a mess,’ he said, oddly calm. ‘It’s a fucking nightmare and there’s nothing I can do about it. We had the little shit, you know, Jess, and they let him go.’
‘No we didn’t,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think it was Warren Lane who stabbed Max.’
At this, Dennis spared a few seconds’ glance sideways. Was she mad? Perhaps that perfume had done for her brain. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he found himself saying. ‘We just need an arrest.’ He realised how it sounded but didn’t care.
‘That woman called me earlier.’
‘What woman?’ It was stupid of her to hold things back. Probably still sour about the promotion, he thought, after all this time.
‘The show producer.’
‘Leah? How come?’ Was everything slipping out of his control? Leah always called him.
‘It’s a woman thing. You know.’ She pulled a face, her expression conveying everything in her coy smile, her glinting eyes, the quirky way her eyebrows curled, one up, one down. She laughed and put on a silly voice. ‘She’s cute.’
‘For God’s sake, Jess.’
‘She wants me to have a word with Dayna. Convince the girl to go on the show tomorrow.’ Jess was serious again. A moment’s frivolity lost in the depths of the case. Dennis was almost pleased.
‘Do you think that’s wise?’
‘Don’t see why not. Carrie wants to give the case airtime. I mean, she would, wouldn’t she?’
Because we’ve failed, Dennis thought but didn’t say. He didn’t need to. ‘To be honest, I don’t think she’s in any fit state to . . .’ But he stopped. Out of everyone he knew, everyone he’d ever met, if there was one person who could pull off an hour of live television, win the sympathy of the nation, get those hotline phones ringing only a week after her son had been stabbed, it was Carrie Kent.
‘So why don’t you cruise past the girl’s house and let me have a word with her?’ Jess glanced at her watch. ‘We have time. Just.’
Dennis nodded. He chucked the remainder of the limp sausage roll at Jess’s feet, did a U-turn at the next set of lights, put the siren on when the traffic ground to a halt, and drove Jess to Dayna Ray’s house so she could work her new-found feminine magic.
MARCH 2009
Carrie knew something was wrong. It was a mother’s instinct, wasn’t it? It had been a crazy week, with a family of eight pulling out of the live show at the eleventh hour. She hated re-runs. Hated the complaints they got when repeats were aired. But what choice did they have? No guests. No show. They had a backup guest but he couldn’t be contacted. Of course, they still had the pre-filmed segment which the single mother – single with seven kids under the age of ten – had signed off on for them to broadcast, but that was no good on its own. Carrie had wanted them, and the absent fathers, to have their say live in the studio. It wasn’t a police-linked show. No crime had been committed. Not in the strictest sense of the word, anyway. Between her and Leah – and general public interest – they’d decided to devote a week to benefit fraud, to having kids for the apparent financial gain.
Pregnant For Profit
, they were going to call it.
But the woman had obviously got wise to the tack she was going to take – had a researcher given too much away? – and she’d pulled out with no hope of them changing her mind. Carrie was working from her office at home when the news came through from Leah. She was aware that Max was in the house, a rare occurrence of late, she’d noted, and she swept up from her desk and stormed into the kitchen for coffee. She felt like a chat with her son. She sensed something was wrong.
‘Can you bloody believe it?’ She saw the way Max’s shoulders hunched and stiffened as he curled over his cereal bowl at the kitchen bar. Did the boy eat nothing else but chocolate crunchy stuff? ‘I’m looking for a backup. Fancy being on the show?’ It was meant to be a joke, a smattering of light-heartedness in what was turning out to be a bleak morning. It had barely got light, the day outside resembling a November afternoon more than spring.
Max shrugged. Or at least Carrie thought it was a shrug. It could have been a twitch. Was that his way of urging her to ask what was wrong? she wondered. She poured coffee from the machine and spilt some on the shiny work surface. Martha would tut-tut as she wiped it up, no doubt.
‘What’s up?’ Carrie held the mug in one hand and draped an arm round her son’s shoulders. He was still wearing his dressing gown. It smelled faintly of sleep, lightly of detergent, mostly of teenage boy. She pulled him close, but his body turned rigid. How thin you’ve become, Carrie thought as his shoulder blade pressed against her forearm. She blamed it all on that revolting school.
‘Don’t,’ he muttered.
‘Don’t what? Hug you?’ She released her son and, still in good spirits despite the annoying news, she ruffled his hair like she used to when he was younger.
‘For God’s sake, Mum.’ He ducked away from her hand.
‘Max . . .’ She suddenly realised that she didn’t know what to say. From the age of eight, he’d been someone else’s problem at boarding school. In the holidays, nannies at Charlbury had taken care of him, or he’d been with his father. Those times, he always came back wretched and angry. Since he’d been at Milton Park, that same anger had surfaced again. ‘If there’s something bothering you, you should tell me.’
He swung round. Carrie saw his red, puffy eyes and nose raw from too much blowing. ‘Get me on your stupid show then. Let your viewers decide what to do with your hopeless son.’
‘That’s rid—’
‘Is it? Is it ridiculous, Mum?’
He hardly ever called her mum, she realised, as the single word hit her heart.
‘I don’t think it’s fucking ridiculous. Just think, we’d get to spend a whole hour together.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ She could get stuck into lecturing him on what a privileged life he led because of her work; that how, because of her spending hours, days, sometimes weeks away from home, she’d made sure they could have anything and everything they ever wanted.
‘Nothing.’ Max turned back to his cereal and stirred the brown rice bubbles into the milk. His face was a few inches from the bowl. His chest heaved a couple of times – almost a sob – but nothing came out. Carrie felt desperately sorry for him but at the same time angry as hell.
‘When you were at Denningham we didn’t have trouble like this.’
‘You call this trouble?’ He shot her a look.
He was her baby, her son, but at that moment she believed he truly hated her.
‘It’s not trouble, Mum, me sitting here looking a bit miserable and eating cereal.’
He was right, of course. On the surface there wasn’t any trouble. But she knew that somewhere deep inside him something was brewing, festering, composting,
eating
away at him. It scared her because she didn’t know how to stop it.
‘Just tell me, honey. Tell me what’s bothering you.’ How she hated herself at that moment; hated the way she sounded, the way she couldn’t break through to him. It was as if motherhood had slipped unnoticed right beneath her feet; as if she’d reached out for it, tried to have a go and missed. Here she was, asking him ineffectual questions when in her mind she was wondering if that email had come in yet from her agent, or if her stylist had managed to secure her favourite designer for the spring wardrobe. ‘Nothing can be that bad, can it?’
‘Nah, you’re right. It’s not bad.’ Max shovelled a couple of spoonfuls into his mouth and ended up with chocolate milk on his chin. Carrie wanted to wipe it off. Max took care of it with his sleeve.
‘How’s school?’ she asked, reminded again of the dreadful place by his lack of manners.
‘You know,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Lots of work.’
‘Really?’ Maybe there was some hope. Perhaps, in her craziest and wildest of dreams, Max would leave the city comprehensive with eleven GCSEs all at A star grade and four A levels with similar stunning results.
‘Yeah. Doing English at the moment.
Romeo and Julie
t.’ Max snorted as if there was buried humour that Carrie simply wouldn’t get.
‘Well, you’re going to be late for school if you don’t get a move on.’ Better leave it there, she thought. Quit while she was ahead, although she had no idea what she was ahead of. Certainly not the start of their conversation.
‘Mum,’ Max said fondly now, standing, placing his hands on her shoulders. A smile, slightly mad, spread over his face and those puffy eyes narrowed as they beheld her. Carrie half expected a kiss on the cheek. ‘It’s the fucking school holidays,’ he finished, shoving her as hard as he dare before lifting the cereal bowl and hurling it across the kitchen.
The mess didn’t matter. His mother would be neither hurt nor bothered by the lake of chocolate milk on the floor and the rivers of brown on the white, white walls. That was what Martha was there for. He wondered what he was there for.
In his room, Max lay on his bed. Not what most teenagers do, he thought bitterly, in their school holidays. How had she not even noticed? How had she not known that he’d been off school for the last ten days? He recalled, in her favour, that she had been in Paris for a while, then at Charlbury before spending virtually eighteen hours a day at the studio or out filming. And he’d been at his dad’s, smoking, drinking beer, sometimes seeing him, sometimes not; sometimes sitting in the grotty flat alone, wondering what it would be like if he lived somewhere like that with Dayna . . . with the . . . the . . .
Max hurled himself over on to his belly. He pressed his face down hard into the pillow and bit on it. The wail forced its way out of his core.
. . .
with the baby
. . .
‘Nooo . . .’ he screamed, but wasn’t sure if it was even audible. Nothing else that came out of his mouth had an effect on the world so why would this? Why would anyone take the slightest notice of his agony?
She’d told him; told him yesterday that she was pregnant. In the hut that was full of his prizes, in the space he’d called his own until last year when this girl with her crazy hair and long fingers and heart as big as a watermelon had come into his life and shared it with him.
‘What?’ was all he’d said. Then there was fifteen minutes of silence. He’d chain-smoked and she did the same. It hadn’t occurred to him until later that, if she really had a baby in her, she shouldn’t be lighting up.
Then, ‘What?’ came out again, a thousand times and it was as if she said ‘I’m pregnant’ a thousand times too, like when he stood in the bathroom and opened the mirror cabinet door. With the other big mirror behind, he could see himself stretch to infinity. Max for ever, he used to say when he was younger. Well, that was how he felt now, as if that baby inside her would make him immortal, that his genes would carry on for ever.
‘How?’ he said very quietly, slumping down on to the car seat. ‘Is it . . .’ It nearly came out but he stopped. He didn’t want to ask if it was his. The vile phone messages from those shits at school made a little more sense now. They’d got it in for him, whatever happened.
‘Is it yours, you were going to say.’ Dayna wasn’t stupid. He couldn’t believe how thin she looked for someone who had someone else inside her. Had she been eating properly?
Max just shrugged.
‘Well, it is yours,’ she replied. Then she turned scarlet and stared at the floor, scuffing and kicking the leaves that had somehow curled beneath the door in the wind. To Max, it looked as if she was guilty as sin.
‘People have been saying stuff,’ he said. He just didn’t understand how they, them, their . . .
relationship
. . . had gone from hand-holding to hating. If he was honest, he didn’t actually hate her at all. It was the situation he hated. But self-protection prevented him from admitting that. He watched the crispy leaves disintegrate beneath her boot. ‘Stuff about me. Bad stuff. Things no one should know.’
Dayna’s leg heaved back and came forward at an almighty rate. It hammered against a box of baking tins until there was a hole in the side and they could hear the clanging of metal.
‘What you gonna do with all this shit?’
Max laughed. ‘We’ll need it, won’t we?’ That’s when he first imagined setting up home with Dayna. A little flat, like his dad’s, probably on the same estate with raucous neighbours and gangs of yobs wreaking havoc every night. Would he let his son or daughter play out? he wondered. Probably not. How would his mother feel about him living somewhere like that? She would have nothing to do with him ever again, he reckoned. Leaving Denningham had virtually killed her; being a father at his age would finish her off.
He had become her worst nightmare. He was the kind of person she had on her show. He had, comprehensively, let her down and he hated himself for what he had become.