‘So what’s he like?’
It was Jenny, one of the admin girls, who had voiced the question but, from the hush that hurried in behind, she was clearly not the only one impatient to have it answered.
‘What’s who like?’ Leo said, as though for a moment he had been genuinely confused. ‘Oh, you mean the boy. You mean my client.’ There was laughter and Leo savoured it because he knew he was about to disappoint. The truth was, he had spent an hour in the same room as Daniel Blake and not once had he heard the boy speak. Not once, that Leo saw, had the boy even looked at him, nor acknowledged his presence on the Blake family’s side of the table. If Leo had not known better, he might have described his manner as shy. ‘Quiet,’ then, was all he could say. Also: ‘Just a boy. Just, I don’t know. Like a scared little boy.’
Collectively, his colleagues twitched.
‘Scared? I bet he was scared.’ Terry Saunders held his cup with his hand around the hot part. He jabbed the handle towards Leo. ‘I should hope he was. Little fucker. I mean, sorry, Jenny, sorry, Stacie, but – ’ Terry puffed his cheeks, as though his temper were straining just at the thought of it ‘ – but that’s exactly what he is. A little. Fucker.’
The others, the blokes at least, nodded. Even the girls made fair-enough eyes into their coffee.
‘I know what you’re saying, Terry, but—’
‘There’s no but, Leo. I mean, sure, he’s your client now and I understand, sort of, why you’re acting like you’ve just won the pools . . .’
‘Now hold on, Terry. That’s hardly—’
‘. . . but let’s not lose sight of who this kid is, shall we? Of what he did.’ Again Leo tried to interrupt but Terry angled himself to centre stage. ‘If it’d been me,’ he said. ‘If it’d been me with that kid in a room . . .’ Once again he inflated his cheeks. ‘Well. Let’s just say, when I came out, I wouldn’t have expected to be allowed to practise again.’
Terry stood to the height of Leo’s shirt collar and was an uncut toenail above ten stone. He might, Leo estimated, just about be able to handle a twelve-year-old child but his bluster was in reality nothing more than that. Still, it garnered appreciation. There was nodding and mumbling in general agreement. Jenny and Stacie both tutted but not, to Leo’s ear, entirely wholeheartedly.
‘Well,’ Leo said. ‘There’s no denying it was a terrible crime. But the boy – Daniel – he hasn’t been charged, not officially. He’s barely spoken. And anyway it’s hardly our place—’
‘Did he do it, Leo?’ This from Stacie. ‘Surely they wouldn’t have made the fuss they did if they weren’t sure he did it?’
‘Now, Stacie, you know I can’t . . . That is, I shouldn’t . . .’ But already her eyes were leaching disappointment and Leo was loath to let down the crowd twice. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would say he did it. There’s not a doubt, if I’m honest, in my mind.’
Talk about bluster. He was worse, in a way, than Terry, with all his nonsense about beating up a twelve-year-old.
No, Jenny. Yes, Stacie. There’s not a doubt in my mind.
For pity’s sake.
‘Leonard.’ A hand on his shoulder. ‘A word.’
‘Howard. Listen. I’m sorry if I . . .’ Leo gestured to the dispersing crowd, his colleagues drifting back now to flashing phones and rolls of faxes.
‘No, no. Enjoy the moment. It’s a coup, I grant you.’ Howard revealed a troupe of too-white teeth. Falsies, was the rumour, and there were doubts as well about the authenticity of the pelt on his crown. It was too thick, surely, to be home-grown; too solidly the colour of honey when a man of Howard’s age – sixty? sixty-five? – should have been struggling against a tide of baldness just like most of the younger men in the practice. ‘A real coup,’ Howard was saying. ‘Well done, Leonard.’ His boss’s hand was on Leo’s shoulder again. He found himself being led into a leafy corner of the open-plan office. ‘How’s your caseload? Got much on?’
‘No, not really. A few odds and ends. Bread-and-butter stuff, mainly.’ Drunk and disorderlies, exclusively, unleavened even by an ABH. There was such minimal variation in their work these days that Howard, really, should hardly have had to ask. Little wonder the office was so abuzz. Little wonder Leo was.
‘Unload what you can, at least for the next week or so. Talk to Terence. Speak to me if he kicks up a fuss.’
‘If you insist, Howard. I mean, I’m sure I can handle—’
‘I’m sure you can, Leonard. But you’ll have enough on your plate, I promise you.’ Howard stopped and guided Leo round to face him.
‘Howard, is something—’
‘Are you ready, Leonard?’ His boss gripped him on both shoulders now and sought out Leo’s eyes with his.
‘Ready? Well, I—’
‘You understand what I’m asking you? You understand that this will be like nothing you have experienced before?’
‘Well, yes, certainly. I mean—’
‘He’s a murderer, Leonard. He’s twelve years old and he’s a killer.’
Leo attempted a smile. ‘An
alleged
killer, Howard. Don’t forget—’
Howard squeezed. Leo could feel the man’s fingernails through the polyester blend of his shirt. ‘Don’t piss about, Leonard. Enjoy the moment, certainly. Relish the attention if you must. But this little fucker killed an eleven-year-old girl.’ Leo winced, as much at his boss’s use of Terry’s terminology as at mention of the crime itself. ‘He goddamn nearly raped her. You are his representative. You, as far as the entire country will see it, are on his side. Think about that for a moment. Think about what that might mean.’
‘I’ve got a thick skin, I promise you,’ said Leo, even though it felt like the skin on his shoulders was about to break. ‘Really, Howard.’ He squirmed and his boss’s hands fell away. ‘I’ll be fine. It will all be fine.’
‘And Megan? Your little girl – Eleanor, isn’t it? Have you told them?’
‘What? No. Not yet. I will tonight. When I get home. I’ve hardly had a minute since I took the call. That was, what? Two-ish? And it’s already . . .’ Leo looked to his watch. ‘Wow. It’s getting late, Howard. I should get going. You should get going. Celia will be wondering where you are.’
Howard regarded Leo beneath eyebrows joined at the middle. ‘Okay,’ he said. Then, slowly, he unpeeled his alabaster grin.
He goddamn nearly raped her.
It was true, he nearly had. And yet, in actuality, there had been no rape. Of that Leo was thankful because the rest was more than enough.
Felicity Forbes had been a few years younger than Leo’s daughter. Ellie was fifteen and Felicity’s twelfth birthday was approaching. It would fall, Leo calculated, on the two-month anniversary of her death. Not a vast gap in age, then, but Felicity seemed otherwise to have been a very different child. Superficially, for instance: Ellie was fair-haired, like her mother, and freckled and wiry; the Forbes girl had been auburn, sunned and stout. Podgy but not unhealthily so. In the only photograph Leo had seen of Felicity alive, she was grinning in a toothy, cheery way that seemed to vindicate entirely her parents’ choice of name. This again was a contrast with Ellie. Ellie, when it came to having her picture taken, was bashful, even resentful. Stalking her through a lens was like stalking something wild, and the reaction, if she noticed, invariably equally so.
At their respective schools, both girls were considered middling. In Ellie’s case, however, Leo suspected – and not, he told himself, just because he was her father – a latency of potential. His daughter, clearly, was less than happy. She had changed schools when they had moved to Linden Park and possibly that was part of it. But even before the move she had lacked something that other children her age seemed to exude. Like in the photographs, for example. Ellie lacked . . . joy. It was a heart-wrenching thing to admit but Leo consoled himself, his wife too, that it was because Ellie thought too much. She was
too
bright, that was the problem. Her imagination could not easily accommodate glee because glee, in Ellie’s case, would always be tempered by the worry about what might come next. That was why her eyes so rarely hoisted her smile. That was why her obviously fierce intelligence always seemed to be held in check. But her temperament would stand her in good stead, Leo insisted. It’ll pay dividends, Meg, you’ll see.
Felicity Forbes had hoarded no such angst. A steady Cs and Bs student, with the occasional A-minus in music and a blossoming predilection for the stage, she had spun between her schoolwork and her social life with dizzy delight. Certainly she had been outgoing, in the way the youngest in a large family is often compelled to be. Whereas Ellie was an only child, Felicity had left behind two brothers and a sister, all of whom had reportedly adored her. And it had not been just among her teachers and family members that Felicity had been popular. She had amassed a quantity of friends that Ellie, and indeed Leo himself, could never hope to. A people’s princess, the
Exeter Post
– the self-anointed voice of the region – had dubbed Felicity. It was a shameless reference to events three years previous but not entirely unfitting given the quantity of foliage that had adorned her school’s gates and the mass of mourners expected at her funeral. Indeed, that Felicity Forbes had so readily been beatified should hardly have come as a surprise. It was inevitable really, as much from the nature of how she had lived as the excruciating manner in which she had died.
He goddamn nearly raped her. Nearly, which meant not quite. And yet what Daniel Blake was alleged to have done was worse than rape. It was more brutal, more venomous. It was, in the coldest terms, more clinical.
Felicity, on her final morning, awoke to a January day that wore a frost like jewellery. Snow had been forecast but had failed to arrive and possibly it was a result of having already prepared herself for a day off school that Felicity dallied so on the walk in. It was not out of character – she was frequently late. She had, in fairness, further to go than most students; further, that is, to walk. Her family lived on the north-western boundary of the city, where the city itself was already lost to view behind wooded hills and the dilapidated halls of residence that disfigured them. Without the option of a lift most mornings, Felicity’s choice was a walk along the riverbank or a lonely wait for a bus that was more reliably unpunctual than she was. It was, Felicity had long since decided, barely a choice at all.
She passed the Waterside Inn at twenty-five minutes past eight, according to the freeholder, already fifteen minutes later than usual. She had been a little behind on leaving the house, her parents had told the police, for no reason that they could recall. Gassing, her father had suggested, at which point the interview had been interrupted by her mother’s tears. From the walkway adjoining the pub, Felicity crossed the pedestrian bridge and followed the river south. She had to climb a stile to access the footpath, the freeholder said; the sight of her in her crimson overcoat, straddling the fence and struggling to unhook her trailing rucksack, was the last he had of her. It was the last time she was seen alive by anyone other than her killer.
He goddamn nearly raped her. But he did not. He used a stick.
That, at least, was the pathologist’s finding. The implement itself was never identified but the scratches – the wounds – were, apparently, unambiguous.
He used a stick. This boy, this child: he used a stick.
She was a flash of red clambering across a stile and next she was a corpse, trussed with a string of discarded fairy lights and bloated and blue after hours in the Exe. What happened in between could only be guessed at from the picture the investigators were left with. The pictures, in fact, because there were dozens of them. Only one in the file of the girl when she had been alive but six, for example, of her hands bound in wire. Seven, eight, nine of her ripped and muddied overcoat, which had washed up on a bank a mile downstream. Innumerable shots of Felicity herself: her face, streaked with silt; her injuries, puffed and bloodless; her fingernails, chipped and cracked – her only weapon against an attacker who had made use of anything and everything that had been to hand.
She drowned. She was drowned, rather. That, in the end, is how she died. Held under perhaps. Set adrift, more likely, still bound in wire and with gravel in her pockets and her book-laden bag on her back. The child, the boy: he had thought of everything.
He goddamn nearly raped her. This is what they all kept coming back to, as though rape were as bad as it could get. It had been enough, certainly, as far as the police had been concerned. Enough blood and guts with which to feed the press and more than enough to persuade the public to be forthcoming. The rest, the truth, would actually have been too much. For Leo, who had followed developments but not with the fervour – the fury – of others in the community, it was already more than he could contemplate. This boy, this child: your client. This is what he did. This is the case, then, fully disclosed. This is your cause for celebration.
He wondered what Terry, in the office, would have said if he had known; whether his rage would have turned murderous or whether it would simply have fizzed itself flat. What possible reaction was there after all except utter deflation? Horror, yes, and anger, certainly, but both depended wholly on conviction, on being convinced that the thing you had been told had actually happened; that contrary to everything you thought you believed about the fundamental principles of humanity, evil was unbound, unlimited – capable, easily, of excelling itself.
And his father. Gone for well over a year now but only in the most literal sense. What would he think? After Leo’s mother had left them and his own career had crumbled – had failed, really, to turn into a career at all – Matthew Curtice had bet his hope on the prospects for his son. He had always been so proud of what Leo did – not of what the job in reality entailed but of his son’s
profession
. A chance to make a difference, he had said; to achieve something with your life. More than he had ever managed, his father told him – just after Leo had qualified and only weeks before the first of his strokes.