The Child Who (10 page)

She did not follow the boy into her daughter’s room but she returns there once he has left. She perches at the foot-end of the single bed, a notepad on her knees and Leo’s antique Casio beside her. She taps, reckons, taps. The calculator is straining in the dim light, displaying figures as faded as the pattern on the bed sheets. She has deducted all she needs to, though, and the important thing is that there are numbers still showing. Enough to pay off what she owes. Enough for rent. Enough, if things work out, for something permanent. And this, if the estate agent is to be believed, is worst case. Best case is . . . She taps the keys again. She shakes her head. Why on earth, she wonders, has she been deaf for so long to her own advice?

The answer comes unbidden: circumstances have changed. Isn’t that how she put it? I have awoken, she might have said. Or, I was caught in a barrel on a hill and it has shattered, finally, and thrown me into glorious freefall. She laughs. She thinks she is laughing but it turns out she is crying. Worst case, best case. The money has nothing to do with it. Or perhaps it did, when she did not think she had enough. The point is, it does not any more. The money, now, is the least of things.

She drags a hand across each eye and she stands. She straightens herself, as though there were someone there to straighten herself for. She glances around her daughter’s bedroom and she gathers her things as though to leave.

She lingers.

A shrine, her mother called it. She did not mean it in a good way. You can’t mourn forever, darling, she said. You should clear things away. I could help. It would be less painful. Wouldn’t it? To take down the curtains and box up the CDs and cover the wallpaper with just plain white. But Megan would not let her, so a shrine it remained: one Megan worshipped at, in the earliest days, but only ever visits now to clean. Or so she tells herself.

She sets down her notepad and the calculator on the bed. She lets her hand graze the bed sheets. She would grip them, hold them, clutch them tight to her face and inhale – but she has done it before and it has never helped.

Her eyes sweep the bookshelves and the CD spines, ordered to a code she has long since cracked. The music, by mood: melancholy, for the most part, through angry and then outraged and thinning, at the furthest end, towards joy. The books, by worth. Not simply most preferred, a teenager’s top forty, but by her daughter’s estimation of their content. On the top shelf, in prime position,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, the creases on the spine repaired to black with a Magic Marker. Beside it, T.H. White, L.M. Montgomery and
L’Etranger
by Albert Camus. A school copy, it looks like, read and re-read and requisitioned. There is more Montgomery on the bottom shelf, alongside C.S. Lewis and Enid Blyton and a re-issued hardback of
The Catcher in the Rye
, which for some reason her daughter took against
.
Also, beside it,
Lord of the Flies
, which to Megan has also never seemed quite right. Her daughter, though, was categorical: only a
Beverly Hills, 90210
annual has been afforded a less esteemed spot.

From the pen holder on the desk, Megan plucks a pencil. She studies the gnawed end for a moment, then sets it within the cradle of her tongue. She sits, on the floor, and she sucks.

It is where she would often find Ellie: on the carpet, in the space between her desk and the foot of her bed, a pillow against the wall behind her and a book, often, propped on her knees. Other times she would simply be sitting, as Megan is, to a soundtrack perhaps and with her eyes lidded or to the ceiling. What are you thinking about? Megan might sometimes dare to ask from the doorway. Her daughter would rarely answer. Or, if she did, her response would in no way be formulated to reassure a worried mother. Nothing. Just things. Shut the door, Mum – please.

A piece of pencil comes away in Megan’s mouth and she dabs to catch the scrap of sodden wood. It sticks to her fingertip and evades her flick so she uses the handle of one of the drawers beside her to dislodge it. Her grip, once she has, returns to the handle. She hesitates, then pulls, and the drawer expels its contents.

The drawer, the topmost of three, is full of clippings. It was Leo’s idea to save them. He was in the habit, Megan would have said, but he claimed too that they might help. They might, he insisted, yield some clue. That he was wrong gives her no satisfaction. She would have sacrificed any part of her – her pride, a limb, her very life – if it would have meant that Leo was proved right.

She did not read the clippings then and she has no desire to read them now. She makes to shut the drawer but pauses with it halfway closed. Well? she thinks. Why not? She opens the drawer more fully once again and begins taking out the clippings by the handful. She makes a pile. For recycling, is her citizenly instinct, but there are better options, surely. Shredding, say. Or burning.

When the first drawer is emptied she shuts it and opens the next. She shifts herself onto her knees, taken suddenly by the decisiveness of the task. Her daughter’s waste-paper basket is beside her and she hoists the discarded clippings into it and scrunches them down. From the second drawer she takes out a folder and frowns at the absence of a label. She lifts the flap and, swallowing, shuts it again. Posters, a sheaf of them, with the sketch of the suspect beside a picture of Ellie, A4-size and copied by the ream at Leo’s office. They ran out of lamp posts.

Below the folder is another, again unlabelled and this time empty. The ancient cardboard rips easily and she stuffs the pieces on top of the posters and the newspaper clippings. The bin, already, is halfway full.

The next three folders she cannot bring herself to throw away. They are stuffed with letters, removed from their envelopes to save space. Leo counted them once. Megan cannot remember what figure he reached but she knows it was over two hundred. There were others too, less supportive – vicious, in fact; vindictive – but those are elsewhere. The police asked for them, as she recalls. She does not think they ever gave them back. They were welcome to them, as far as she was concerned, though she would take a certain pleasure in adding them to the kindling pile now.

She starts to read and has to stop. The letters were sent to help but they remind her only of how much they made her hurt.

I simply can’t imagine.

It must be awful.

They’ll find her.

They’ll find
him
.

You must not give up hope.

Platitudes, the least of them. Lies, the worst. Nothing at the two extremes or between them that made anyone feel any better but the person who wrote them. Not that she was permitted to say as much. Not that she was able to voice, at any stage, what she was truly feeling. Even to Leo, as things turned out, which was almost the hardest part.

Sod it. Sod
them
. She stuffs the letters into the bin and keeps stuffing until the folders are empty and the bin is almost full.

Her momentum regained, it quickly stalls again. She has reached to open the final drawer but her fingers curl from the handle. She has remembered the part she had forgotten. The part she willed herself to forget. They are inside. They must be. The police have the originals but Leo, being Leo, took copies. So surely they are . . .

They are. She has opened the drawer the way she would peel away a plaster and there, all alone, is a plastic wallet. Inside, sealed as though in an evidence bag, are the notes.

Again Megan hesitates. She dares herself. More than a dare, it would be a penance. Not like reading the newspaper clippings, which would be detestable mainly because they are so emotionally amiss. The notes, in contrast, would drag her through the way she felt. Even just lifting out the wallet, for instance, reminds her of the weight of her shame. At their failure. At
her
failure. Because she blamed him for so long but who, really, was in a better position to know the truth? To see past the deceit and the misdirection and to act –
act
– before it was too late?

She can see the first note quite clearly through the plastic and the first note, tame enough compared to what followed, is more than enough. The shame is one thing but she is not prepared to relive the terror. Of the memories. Of her imaginings. Of the sick, morbid fantasies of her masochistic mind. Nor is she prepared yet to reconcile the way she felt with what is to come. Equally terrifying, in a way. Her fresh new start. Her brave new world. Her attempt to rediscover what was lost.

The notes go in the basket. The contents, downstairs, go in a sack. The sack goes in the dustbin and Megan shuts the lid. Before she can stop herself she picks up the telephone. She will call the agent, first, as she promised she would. Go ahead, she will say. Press the button. After that she will call her husband. Not because of Daniel Blake but because she should have called him long ago. She has a confession to make.

It might have been a school:
modern, characterless, crouched amid the office blocks and council flats and camouflaged to the colour of slabs. It was mainly the fencing that gave the building away. The security signs, adorning it, were discreet enough until you noticed them but once you did you noticed other things too. Cameras, for instance, trained inside and out. An intercom at the entrance, higher-end even than the system in the city’s courthouse or gaol. And the windows on the building itself appeared barred – discreetly, again, in window-frame white, but still barred.

He was unsure, at the gate, for whom to ask. Leaning through the car window, he offered his name to the expectant static. It seemed to have no effect and he started to explain himself – clumsily, warily, trying to avoid explaining anything – but then the static gave a surge and a buzzer buzzed. The gate, with a jerk, beckoned him in.

This was it, then: the place Leo had read about just that morning in the tabloids. Here were the cushy, five-star surrounds in which Felicity’s killer was being made to feel at home – at the taxpayer’s expense, in case readers needed to be reminded. It was like Butlins, apparently, this facility the newspapers had shied from naming but had spared no adjectives in describing.

There were two empty visitor bays sectioned off in the expanse of tarmac and Leo pulled into the first of them. He gathered his things from the passenger seat and, out of habit, lifted his chin to check his teeth in the rear-view mirror. His eyes caught instead on his cheek. The wound, it felt like, was taking an age to heal. Beneath it, he noticed, there was a patch of stubble he had skirted when shaving. Above it, his eyes were recessed and bloodshot.

His teeth were fine.

A neat, narrow pathway led him through bark-topped flower beds and he arrived at the main entrance. He considered the windowless door and looked about for another intercom. As he was searching, the door buzzed.

Inside, it was a school once more. Leo had expected a lobby: guards, a desk, something to sign. The area, unmanned, was more an entrance hall, with a set of double doors in each wall. The linoleum-tiled floor seemed polished, the walls recently painted. Through one set of doors he saw a figure approaching. The man ducked and gave a cheerful, inefficient wave through the glass, then moved to one side as though to punch a code. The door clicked and then opened and the man bore his smile into the entrance hall.

‘Mr Curtice?’ The man’s smile broadened and he covered the hall in three emphatic strides. ‘I’m Bobby. Hope you found us okay.’

Bobby wore a suit that shone and shoes thirsting for polish. He was younger than Leo but carried with him a certain authority: the confidence and depth of voice of an out-of-work actor. Or a schoolteacher; or social worker. Someone who would inspire suspicion in most adults but devotion, probably, among children.

‘Just about,’ said Leo, accepting Bobby’s enthusiastic hand. ‘Although I came close to missing the turning.’

‘Cool,’ said Bobby, bobbing. ‘That’s kind of the idea.’ His smile had not faltered but somehow it seemed to reassert itself. ‘Come through. This way. Daniel’s waiting for you.’

Leo hesitated and Bobby seemed immediately to realise why.

‘We use the boys’ real names,’ he said. ‘We think it’s important they face up to who they are. To why they’re here.’ He winked and tipped his head. ‘Come through.’

They left the entrance hall through a different set of doors and were immediately confronted by another. Bobby waited until the first set was sealed and then, as he had a moment before, prodded a code into the adjacent keypad. ‘You get used to this,’ he said. He gave one of the doors a hearty shove and held it open. ‘After you.’

There was a man waiting in the next corridor, wearing a name tag and dressed in a shirt and trouser combination that might, or might not, have been a uniform. His biceps, hamlike, were straining the seams. The man did not speak but fell into step behind them as they passed. ‘This is Garrie,’ Bobby said. ‘He’ll be your escort today.’

Leo, as they walked, checked behind. He nodded but Garrie said nothing. Leo turned back and Bobby shrugged, gave another wink. ‘Not a big talker, our Garrie. But he’ll watch your back.’ Bobby’s eyes dipped towards Leo’s cheek, then glanced away.