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‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without quite knowing what he was apologising for, ‘but if you do want to talk; if there’s anything I, or we, can do…’ His voice trailed off as she turned her face away, dismissing him, and he gave up and walked towards the door. Before he opened it he heard her speak, hissing like a cat under her breath, so that he had to strain to hear her.
‘Find out where he is.’
But when Ethan looked over at her she had turned fully away with her back to him and so he left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Those last words, uttered in that low angry hissing that sounded wholly unlike any side of Lucy he had ever known, resounded through his head all day, until he felt he was going crazy.
An hour later Lucy herself wondered if she would go crazy. Two aspirin had dulled the pain in her head but failed to get rid of it completely, and the constant shrill ringing of the telephone had threatened to render them completely useless until she had given in and unplugged it. The first call, moments after Ethan had left, had been from Ricky, for once pre-empting his mother’s worrying and letting her know he was safe at school. Then two calls from reporters and one inviting her to talk on the radio, all of which Lucy hung up on without saying anything further. Then her mother, then Susan, wearing her out with well-meaning but pointless questions. Of course she wasn’t okay. No, there was absolutely nothing they could do to help. The only thing she wanted was an answer to her last question to Ethan, and she knew that was impossible.
Finally, after a call from a shrill-voiced female journalist from the Telegraph, who Lucy had none too gently slammed the phone down on, she went and lay on her bed, overwhelmed and feeling completely alone. Perhaps she shouldn’t have rebuffed Ethan’s attempts to connect but really, what was the point? They could cry on each other’s shoulders and even start campaign plans but none of it would be any use, and at the end of it all Ethan would go home to the wife who didn’t understand him and she would be alone again. She lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, about to drift into sleep when the doorbell rang yet again. For a second she wondered if Ethan had returned, and wasn’t sure if she was annoyed or pleased, but it wasn’t Ethan’s knock. Funny how people had their own knocks, their own patterns and rhythms that, once you were familiar with them, heralded their presence. This was a stranger.
Lucy opened the door to a strange woman who smiled warmly but had strangely cold eyes. Lucy knew she was a reporter even before she spoke.
‘Lucy Randall? I’m from the Sun. I wondered if you would like to take the chance to express your opinions on the early release of Terry Prince.’
The woman smiled. She had a sweet voice, so polite, but eyes like a snake, Lucy thought. She smiled back.
‘Fuck. Off.’ Then she slammed the door in her face.
Lucy went to go back upstairs, feeling pleased with herself until she realised that was the second time she had used the ‘f’ word that morning. She who, in the transition from council estate single parent to middle-class surgeon’s wife, had stopped using any profanity stronger than ‘damn’. It felt quite good, she decided. In a single moment of revelation that she could in fact say and do whatever she damn well wanted, Lucy turned and flung open the front door. The reporter was hovering at the end of the drive talking to a man with a digital camera and nervous expression.
‘Come in,’ she said, as the woman turned to her in surprise at the about-face, then started towards her with a triumphant smile. ‘You can have all the opinions you want.’
Chapter Four Friday
It had been a Wednesday when she lost Jack. She had let him pedal his little trike out on the front yard while she loaded the washing machine, it never occurring to her that he was anything less than safe. He had been in her line of sight both through the kitchen window and the side door which she had left open, and when she ducked down to sort through the laundry basket, sorting the colours from the white, she must have only taken her eyes off him for two minutes at most. Yet when she stood back up he was gone.
Lucy ran outside, calling to him, but she hadn’t started to panic at that point, not the breath-stopping, freezing panic she would feel later. She expected him to be out on the road – a cul-de-sac, so there was little chance of cars – or in a neighbour’s yard playing with their children, or even in old Mrs Clary’s kitchen, asking for biscuits.
Ten minutes later she had been frantic, and twelve minutes later she was calling the police, her hands shaking and her voice barely comprehensible to the impatient switchboard operator on the other end of the call.
It took them six hours to find his body, and twenty-four to discover his killer. Terry Prince, fourteen years old and a pupil at the private school her eldest son Ricky would later win a scholarship for. She had been so proud of him, especially after the way Jack's death had affected him – to the point of taking him to a psychiatrist – but the pride was shot through with the sharp stab of grief. For had Jack been alive no doubt Ricky’s presence would have guaranteed her youngest a place there too. It was a fine school. Not that she was stuck-up, for Lucy was the product of hard-working yet poor parents and the finest education an inner city state school had to offer, but like most parents she longed for better for her own offspring. Especially Jack. Not that she would ever admit it to anyone, and barely even to herself, but her youngest son was the one closest to her heart.
Lucy had been nineteen when she had Ricky, on her own and totally unprepared, and he had been such a fretful baby. Almost as if he had known his arrival was unplanned and unwelcomed by everyone apart from Lucy herself, who was far too frightened by impending motherhood to greet him with much joy.
But just a few years later, now married – and to a private surgeon, no less – Jack’s arrival had been everything Ricky’s was not. Everything had seemed perfect, from conception to birth to beyond. There had been none of the crippling depression that had sunk her after Ricky and even the labour had been a breeze, after a glowing pregnancy with no sickness and only the cutest of baby bumps.
Sometimes she would lean over Jack's cot and watch him sleeping, her heart close to bursting with love. Only along with that rush of love for her child would come a creeping fear that she tried resolutely to swallow down, but that would stick in her chest undigested: the fear that she would lose him; that such perfection was too good to be true. Although her mother had reassured her that it was normal, that she herself had been so scared her babies would cease breathing in their sleep she had stayed awake for hours, Lucy looking back knew better. She should have known; should have never let him out of her sight for even a second. Should should should. Surely the cruellest word in the English language.
The guilt had crippled her for the first few years, weighing her down like the pressing of stones, a crushing yet excruciatingly slow death. Everyone told her it wasn’t her fault. Everyone except her loving husband of course, whose eyes were full of unspoken accusations. Everyone except her mother-in-law, who grieved copiously and loudly but never had a kind word for Lucy. But then she had never liked her, had always wondered – quite often aloud – what her clever and handsome son had seen in a teenage single mother. The atmosphere between Lucy and her husband Ethan had become so strained and weighted down with grief that she had almost been relieved when he had left her for a paediatric nurse at the hospital he worked at. A petite, pretty blonde who looked a lot like Lucy before she had become grey and faded with grief.
The guilt had been partially replaced by rage then; rage at the world, at Ethan and herself, and of course at Terry Prince. The adolescent boy, a shy, quiet loner they said, who had lured Jack away, beat him and then killed him with a brick to the head as if he were nothing more than a bug to be squashed underfoot.
A psychotic break, they had said. Perhaps brought on by an absent father, an overly strict stepfather and a history of mental illness on the mother’s side. Lucy hated that, the way people would try to find a rational reason, a logical chain of events that had led Terry Prince to murder her baby in cold blood. She dreamed over and over of throttling him to death with her bare hands. But like the guilt the rage too had subsided, although neither feeling ever completely stopped gnawing at her, and a numb kind of acceptance had taken their place. She went about her daily life as if through a fog, buoyed up by a sense of surreality, only Ricky giving her a reason to get out of bed. She was both over-protective of him and somehow distant. Afraid to be too tactile, too close, as if by loving him too much she would unwittingly put him in danger.
‘What were you thinking?’
Danielle Wyatt dropped the paper onto the table as if it were a particularly smelly diaper, her fingers curling away from it even before she had let it go.
Lucy had no time to defend herself before Ricky did it for her, glaring at his usually beloved grandmother.
‘I think it’s awesome. It’s about time Mum stuck up for herself. Maybe now they’ll lock that piece of shit back up.’
‘Stop swearing,’ both women said simultaneously, before Lucy straightened her back and looked her mother in the eye.
‘It needs saying, Mum, and it needed saying now. Okay, I was angry, but don’t I have a right to be?’
Danielle’s face softened. Even she had to admit to herself that it was better Lucy was like this, fired up by righteous ire, than retreating further into the shell she had built around herself since Jack died. Even before that, she had often thought privately. Remembering Lucy’s attempt to be the perfect wife to Ethan, to conform to what he and his family wanted, as if she wasn’t good enough. Even seeming to accept it when Ethan ran off with someone else. It was good to see a glimpse of the old Lucy, of the spunky young woman she had been before Ethan, before Jack, but this was a step too far. This was dangerous.
‘It’s inflammatory, Lucy, it could stir up no end of trouble. There have already been protests; I saw them on the news.’ Danielle saw everything on the news, or through her twitching living-room curtains. If she didn’t know everything that was going on in the world around her, she didn’t feel safe.
‘Good,’ Lucy said defiantly, but her eyes strayed towards the newspaper lying like a time bomb on her mother’s Cath Kidston tablecloth. The picture of her took up most of the front page and the nervous-looking photographer had managed to capture the anger in her eyes, the firm set to the jaw, so that she looked like a crusading Amazon, with her light brown hair tumbling around her face. It was a good picture, she thought with a touch of pride.
There was no doubting that the headline the Sun had chosen to run above it, however, was nothing short of incendiary. ‘If the government won’t do something I will.’ Not that Lucy had any real idea what, if anything, she could do, but it had felt good to sound off to the whippet of a reporter with the greedy eyes who had so eagerly spurred Lucy on.
The interview took up five pages; mostly Lucy talking about the toll Jack’s death had taken on her life, but then at the end, when the reporter had asked her if she had a message for the hundreds of people currently hurling abuse outside the City Hall, Lucy’s reply had been a flippant ‘Tell them to shout louder.’ In front of her in black and white, she could see her mother’s point.
And yet, that newly awakened angry voice inside her whispered, why shouldn’t they carry on? Why shouldn’t taxpayers and voters and any citizen in fact have the right to raise their voices against such a gross miscarriage of justice? Parents who feared for their own children knowing there was a vicious child killer on the loose? Lucy felt something burning in her that had lain dormant for too long. She had needed to speak out. If that caused trouble, well whose fault was that? She hadn’t released Terry Prince. The hot wave of hatred that came over her at the shape of his name in her mind made her bow her head and clasp her hands together as if to contain it.
Under the table Ricky reached for her hand and squeezed it and Lucy smiled at him, grateful. Sometimes Ricky was older than his years, and she drank him in for a moment; his handsome face and lanky body, growing too fast but with the promise of filling out one day. A shame he insisted on covering the bloom of youth with a too-big baseball cap perched on his head and jeans that hung nearly to his crotch.
‘I’m going out,’ he announced, breaking the tense silence, ‘I’m going to play Xbox at Tyler’s.’
Lucy nodded. ‘Ring me…’
‘…when I get there and before I leave, yeah I know.’
‘Do you want me to drive you?’
Ricky scowled, his face showing exactly what he thought of that suggestion.
‘No! It’s only round the corner.’
He kissed her on the cheek and left, leaving Lucy staring after him until her mother’s words cut through the unease that would linger around her until Ricky returned.
‘Don’t smother him, Lucy. He’s a young man now, in his own mind at least.’
Lucy turned a stricken face to her mother, her blue eyes seeming to take over her whole face.
‘Mum,’ she said matter of factly, ‘I lost a child.’
Danielle said nothing, just watched her daughter, a moment ago so full of wrath, now anxiously worrying at her nails, and remembered how in the aftermath of Jack’s murder Lucy had seemed to fold in on herself over and over until there was nothing left. So did I, she thought, I lost my child too.
Matt jogged up the stairs to Carla’s apartment, a bunch of lilies in one hand. A poor peace offering no doubt, but after two days of the silent treatment Matt knew he had to make some kind of gesture. He had never known Carla to be silent for two hours, never mind days, and when she had failed to even answer her mobile to him that morning he had begun to wonder if there was something seriously wrong. Having seen the interview with Lucy Randall in the paper the day before, he guessed Carla would be seriously put out that another reporter had pipped her to the post, but even so three whole days of sulking seemed excessive.
As he reached the doors and passed the flowers from one hand to the other to press Carla’s number, he felt a gnawing sense of dread at seeing her that in turn made him feel sad. What had happened to the days when they had looked forward to seeing each other, when they had actually enjoyed each other’s company? They seemed a lifetime away.
Matt shook off his nostalgia as Carla’s voice rang out a hello through the intercom.
‘Can I come in? I want to talk.’ There was a silence that even through the intercom system managed to convey frostiness. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he added, even though the nature of his job – and his own regular need for solitude – meant that going three days or even weeks without seeing each other wasn’t unusual. She didn’t answer, but the buzzer went and the door in front of him clicked to signify his welcome.
Carla, as he expected, curled her nose up at the lilies but took them anyway, and bustled around putting them in water and arranging them without saying a word to him as he stood awkwardly waiting.
‘Carla, I’m sorry,’ he began, though as usual he wasn’t quite sure what he had to apologise for. She straightened and looked at him, her full mouth pursed. She was wearing a ridiculously tight, low-cut top and Matt had to tear his eyes away from her breasts, his cock twitching at the thought of burying his head in them. It had been a while.
As if reading his thoughts, Carla crossed her arms across her chest. She looked lovely, her hair curled and face carefully made up, as if she had pre-empted his arrival.
‘No, Matt, I’m sorry. This clearly isn’t working. You’re selfish, egotistical, and clearly don’t appreciate what you’ve got.’ She uncrossed her arms and motioned towards herself, displaying again what he was apparently not appreciating. Matt sighed.
‘Carla, we’ve been over all this before. I’ve always made it clear how I feel. If that’s not enough for you, then I’m sorry.’ He realised that he was sorry. For all her faults Carla was a good woman, and certainly did deserve better than a short-on-time, commitment-shy cop. Even so, her next words weren’t what he was expecting.
‘Well, it’s not enough. So I’ve found someone who is.’
Matt gaped at her. In two days? Even by Carla’s standards, that was pretty quick. It dawned on him that the display of cleavage and shiny hair weren’t meant for him after all.
‘Okay,’ he nodded, determined to be grown up about this. ‘Well, I hope we can be friends.’ Did anyone even say that any more? The phrase sounded false even to him.
He didn’t ask the question Carla obviously expected – or wanted – him to ask, but she answered it for him anyway.
‘It’s Jacob. The new editor from work. You’ve met him before.’
Matt remembered him, a stuck-up, pretentious public schoolboy type who looked vaguely like Brad Pitt and was all too aware of that fact. Perfect for Carla.
Carla stepped away, her arms folded again but an anxious expression on her face. She expected him to be angry. It dawned on him that Carla had probably lined Jacob up as his replacement long before their current clash. Had maybe been sleeping with him all along. Matt waited for a rage of jealousy or sadness to overtake him, but it didn’t come. In fact, the only emotion slowly creeping up inside him was relief.
‘I’m happy for you,’ he offered, realising he meant it. It wasn’t the reaction Carla expected – or perhaps wanted – as she glared at him with her eyes narrowed.
‘You mean that don’t you? You really don’t care.’
Matt took the raising of her pitch to be his cue to leave. He walked over and kissed her on the cheek before she had time to react then turned to leave. Carla darted in front of him.
‘That’s it? You don’t have anything to say?’
He looked down at her, seeing how sharp her features were, how in the overhead light her thick make-up looked like a mask across her face, and thought that no, he had nothing to say to her. In fact, he felt strangely empty of either feeling or words.
‘What do you want from me, Carla?’
She looked genuinely puzzled.
‘A reaction at least would be nice. We’ve been seeing each other for three years, you could show some emotion. Or do you just save that for missing kids?’
Her barb hit home, evoking in him the reaction that her dismissal of their relationship had not. Angry and hurt, Matt went to step past her but she stepped in front of him, spoiling for a fight he didn’t want to have. She reached up as if she were about to slap him, or perhaps she meant to caress his cheek, but Matt caught her slender wrist in his hand. Anger radiated off him now, causing Carla to cower a little under his gaze.
‘Do you know why I didn’t want kids with you?’ he said, his words measured yet throbbing with a quiet rage. ‘Because children aren’t a fashion statement or something you have because you’re the right age and all your friends are doing it. Because once you have a child they should become your whole world. And you have to keep them safe. I wouldn’t leave you in charge of a fucking hamster.’
He dropped her wrist and pushed past her. This time Carla let him go. Matt drove off in a blind fury which the congested traffic did nothing to ease. He realised he was heading not for home but for the station, naturally gravitating towards it even on his day off. Perhaps it was taking over his life, but Matt had to concede, with a desolate misery that dampened his anger, that he didn’t really have anything else in his life. Carla had been a foil, the prerequisite trophy girlfriend that showed he was successful without being married to his career. That even a hard-bitten murder detective could hold down a normal relationship, and with a beautiful woman no less.
It was all bollocks, he thought as he swung the car away from the station and headed who-knew-where. His whole life was becoming a bad joke; give him a few years and he would have a drink problem and a mangy cat. He drove without any particular destination for a while, reaching a suburb of town that felt familiar before pulling up outside a newsagents. He was thirsty and tired. A can of energy drink should do it; he might be headed for clichéville, but he wasn’t going to succumb just yet.
Ricky looked into the smug features of his friend and shrugged.
‘There’s cameras,’ he said by way of explanation, cutting his eyes towards the corner of the shop. The shopkeeper could be heard humming away to herself in the back. There were two types of shopkeepers, Ricky had found: those who instinctively distrusted teenagers and who followed them through the aisles like a hawk, with their eyes if not their actual bodies; and then those who trusted everyone in their local community. Who would steal from their friendly local newsagent, who always gave credit and slipped extra sweets in for the little ones?
Which of course was exactly why Tyler had dared him to steal something right now, right here. Ricky was becoming adept at pinching things; he was naturally quick and nimble-fingered, a talent he had previously employed in sports and craft classes but had now found a much more interesting use for. Just not here. This wasn’t the local supermarket or even the Asian shop, whose owners were definitely of the former variety of shopkeeper. This was Mrs McKellar. She knew his mum. The last thing Ricky needed, right now was his mum turning those worried and always slightly disappointed eyes on him and making him feel guilty.
He always felt guilty around her, although he was never sure quite what for. Being born maybe. Or just not being Jack. He wondered if Jack would have had nimble fingers too. No one would notice a sweet little kid pinching stuff, not with two surly-looking teenagers looking naturally suspicious in the next aisle.
Tyler gave him a none-too-gentle push in the arm, bringing him sharply back to reality.
‘Told you you wouldn’t do it,’ he sneered, sounding a lot younger than his fourteen years.
‘It’s not even worth it,’ Ricky said under his breath as Mrs McKellar’s humming got closer.
The door tinkled and a well-built man walked in, his eyes sweeping over them without interest as he headed to the fridge which held the soft drinks. Tyler raised his eyebrows at him. The guy was standing in the direct view of the aforementioned cameras. Not that they were even real; they were empty, put there by Mr McKellar as a deterrent, which his wife had pooh-poohed but then left up to keep him happy. Of course, Tyler didn’t know that.
He thrust the bottle of Budweiser towards him and Ricky took it, tucking it into the inner pockets of his hooded jacket with impressive speed. Maybe he could be a magician when he was older, one of those sleight-of hand-ones.
They left the shop, swaggering with an affected casualness, as Mrs McKellar emerged to serve the man. She waved at Ricky as he left and he nodded at her, his face flaming. Tyler sneered at him again as soon as they were outside.
‘Likes you doesn’t she? Maybe her husband ain’t giving her any.’
Ricky dug him half-heartedly in the arm. Tyler was a nuisance, but as he was the new kid in the area and going to a different school, Ricky had taken to hanging around with him more over the past few days. Ever since the story on Terry Prince’s release had broken. As of yet, Tyler didn’t know who Ricky was, though it wouldn’t be long before someone realised – especially with his mum in the papers – and brought it up and then it would be questions, questions, questions. Perhaps even taunts, though Ricky was confident he wasn’t the type of kid that got bullied. His quick, bony little hands were pretty useful for self-defence too.