When I Wasn't Watching
Michelle Kelly
Every parent’s worst nightmare… Eight years ago, Lucy and Ethan Randall’s little boy, Jack, was abducted and murdered by teenager Terry Prince. A moment’s distraction had ripped a family apart – and with the loss of their son came the collapse of the Randalls’ marriage. Tortured by memories, Lucy was left to battle her grief while raising her remaining son alone.Now, Jack’s killer has walked free, giving him the second chance at life that little Jack never had. Lucy’s wounds newly opened, her world is turned upside down a second time when another child goes missing – and she can’t shake the suspicion that Prince has struck again.When DI Matt Winston, the same officer who found Jack’s body, is assigned to the case, the echoes of Lucy’s past grow ever more insistent. Bound by their tragic shared experiences, Matt and Lucy grow closer – and become fixated on bringing the culprit to justice. But now history has repeated itself, answers seem even further out of reach. And for Lucy, it’s time to face her ghosts, and ask the most terrible question of all: can she ever really forgive herself?For fans of Linda Green and Sue Fortin
At the tender age of fourteen, Terry Prince is sent to prison for the horrific abduction and murder of toddler Jack Randall. The marriage of Jack’s parents, Lucy and Ethan, crumbles under the strain of losing their child, and Lucy is left with her grief and the struggle of raising her seven-year-old son Ricky alone.
Eight short years later, Terry Prince is released on parole. Lucy’s world is turned upside down and all her pain rushes back to the surface. And when another young boy, Ben, goes missing in similar circumstances, she fears Prince has struck again.
Ben’s case is assigned to newly single DI Matt Winston, the same officer who found Jack’s body all those years ago. A chance encounter with Ricky renews his connection with Lucy, and they embark on a relationship. But with the memories of Jack’s murder suddenly so fresh in their minds, the line between hard and circumstantial evidence starts to blur. Matt is desperate to find the culprit before it’s too late this time, and Lucy is desperate for some kind of justice. But will catching Ben’s abductor really bring them the closure they seek?
When I Wasn’t Watching
Michelle Kelly
Copyright (#ulink_3d4ca660-e830-5b9f-bb8d-71debd4c7d7c)
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2014
Copyright © Michelle Kelly 2014
Michelle Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9781472096432
Version date: 2018-09-20
MICHELLE KELLY is a mother, writer and teacher from the West Midlands in the UK. She began writing for a living in 2013 and is the author of three historical romances for Harlequin Mills and Boon, including the Regency story 'The Rake of Glendir' the Paranormal Investigations Agency series for Xcite Books, and a forthcoming cozy mystery series for St Martins Press in the US. 'When I Wasn't Watching' is her first crime novel, and she is currently working on her second, to be published by HQ Digital in 2015.
For my son, Callum Michael Ian Bird. You make me proud every day.
Contents
Cover (#ua0be7dd9-700b-59d8-8d6f-693def8c4efd)
Blurb (#uca224466-1c9e-59e3-8045-fe048b8bee13)
Title Page (#ufea1041d-e5e4-5705-9f5f-7c560779e6ac)
Copyright (#u6a8d6075-cf03-5831-82dc-f283c4216580)
Author Bio (#u477f1823-cc38-5377-a9e7-4a469d797b19)
Dedication (#u156be5b2-3e24-5db4-af55-97d71869898d)
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Two
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Three
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Endpages (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part One (#ucdaf0003-401a-5a38-9dbb-5b55b86db713)
It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Chapter One (#ucdaf0003-401a-5a38-9dbb-5b55b86db713) Tuesday
They told her over the phone.As if she, of all people, wasn’t important enough to warrant a face to face visit. For the next few minutes Lucy sat very, very still, staring at nothing in particular. Then she got up with exact movements, determined to be calm. She even made herself a cup of tea. Which she managed to drink half of before the rage came, hot and bubbling.
The cup smashed against the far wall, the liquid leaving stains that looked like mud across her delicately patterned wallpaper.
‘Bastards!’
Then she burst into tears.
When the phone had rung Lucy had expected it to be Susan from work. They had arranged a movie night on Saturday and she had been looking forward to it; even treating herself to a new pair of jeans. So she answered cheerfully enough, then frowned as a throat cleared on the other end of the line before asking, after a slight hesitation, for Mrs Randall. She paused before realising the voice was asking for her.
‘It’s Ms Wyatt now,’ she said firmly. There was after all a new Mrs Randall. ‘I got divorced five years ago.’
‘I do apologise.’ It was a male voice, quite official sounding and also, Lucy thought, nervous. As soon as she thought it a sense of dread twisted low in her belly.
‘But you were Mrs Lucy Randall? Jack Randall’s mother?’
Lucy felt as though her throat was full of sand as she spoke.
‘Yes, who is this?’She hoped to God it wasn’t the press. They had hung around enough in the days after Jack’s death and the weeks leading up to the trial, and then again when Ethan had left her. They had been sympathetic but still intrusive and she had always refused to comment, an instinctive need for privacy taking precedence over the urge to talk, to share and to rail against the injustices Fate had dealt her. But why on earth would it all be dragged up now?
Lucy realised she was gripping the phone so hard her knuckles were white, and she couldn’t process the words coming through.
Until she heard ‘Parole Board’ and her guts twisted further.
Ethan and herself had been asked to attend a meeting with them a few months before, but she had let Ethan deal with it. Afterwards, he had seemed pretty certain that the general consensus was that Terry Prince wasn’t getting out any time soon. But then Ethan always had the knack of hearing exactly what he wanted to hear and no more.
‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that please?’ Lucy said, her voice sounding far away. Inside she was screaming no no no, because she didn’t want to hear what she suddenly already knew.
‘Terry Prince is to be released on parole tomorrow. You and Mr Randall are of course being made privy to this information before it goes public.’
‘How considerate,’ she said with just a trace of sarcasm, her throat still feeling as if it had been sandpapered. ‘But why were we not made aware when the decision was made?’
She wondered if they had told Ethan yet, or if she was the first to know. The first to be told when it was too late to do anything about it.‘It was decided it was in the public interest…to avoid a media furore…’
Lucy gave a hollow laugh and sat down on the leather arm of the chair, the words floating over her and forming into sentences that made no sense. Public interest. Exactly who was this public? Not her, or her family. Not all the mothers who had read about Jack’s murder and clutched their own children that bit tighter, kept them that bit closer for a few weeks until the news stories had been replaced with something else and Jack’s murder had become yesterday’s drama.
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand,’ Lucy had said, her voice sharp and cutting into the speaker’s less than confident explanation, ‘how can he be released? He killed my son.’
She said the last dispassionately, a wave of calm settling over her. The body’s way of shielding itself from trauma. As a child, whenever she had felt threatened or scared, that same calmness would settle over her, just for long enough to get her through. Lucy’s mother always said she was strong, especially in the aftermath of Jack’s death when she hadn’t tried to kill herself or stay in bed for a year. When Ethan had left her for another woman and she had barely reacted. When her oldest son Ricky had his…problems.Lucy however knew that it wasn’t strength, more the ability to hide, but the day would come when there would be no more hiding and she would have to face it all head-on.
And then, she thought, she might finally break.
The voice continued. Talking about good behaviour, rehabilitation, how every care had been taken to ensure Terry Prince was fit for release. How he would have a new name; a new address away from Coventry. How he would be monitored and on licence for life; how the smallest misdemeanour would see him back inside. Lucy didn’t care about any of that. There was only one question, would only ever be one question now, instead of the ‘why?’ that had echoed in her mind all these years.
‘Where is he?’
Another throat clear.
‘That’s classified information I’m afraid, Mrs Ran…Wyatt. Ms Wyatt.’
Lucy put the phone down on him while he was offering her an appointment with a Family Liaison Officer ‘to discuss any concerns’. She held her breath for as long as she could, fully aware that the moment she inhaled, life would come rushing in, and everything would be once again irrevocably changed.
Chapter Two (#ucdaf0003-401a-5a38-9dbb-5b55b86db713) Wednesday
Detective Inspector Matt Winston rolled over in bed, saw the back of his girlfriend’s head and sighed. She wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t sure exactly how he knew that; perhaps because she was too still, her breathing too controlled, or just because he could feel the animosity rolling off her like a stench. He sat up taking most of the covers with him, and she didn’t flinch. Definitely awake. Carla was a light sleeper and she would have turned and made that cute murmuring noise that she did when her rest was disturbed, following by a burrowing down beneath the pillows.
Matt got up, flinging the covers back over her and going into the adjoining bathroom for his usual morning routine. Shit, shower, shave. In less than ten minutes he was back in the bedroom and lifting his shirt and trousers from the hanger. Carla hadn’t moved. He began the countdown in his head, knowing she would speak before he left, and that she wouldn’t be able to hold her tongue all day.
Sure enough he was sitting on the end of the bed pulling on his shoes when her voice came, cold and clipped. Trying not to betray any trace of the hurt he knew she was feeling. Perhaps he should be more sympathetic, but as far as Matt was concerned her pain was self-inflicted. He had been straight with her, had promised nothing because he knew he couldn’t deliver, and she pulled this shit on him now? But at the same time he knew it had been coming, had seen the inevitable in her eyes, and knew he should have called time on the situation before it ever reached this stage. He pushed away the gnawing guilt. It was easier not to feel, and that was precisely the reason Carla was mad at him.
‘So,’ she said, her voice muffled by the pillow, ‘where do we go from here, Matt? Should I take my things today, is that what you want?’
Matt shook his head, feeling instantly like a bastard. She knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t say yes, just go, and in all honesty he didn’t want her to, or at least he wouldn’t have if she hadn’t started all this where are we going? crap. He didn’t see what was wrong with the way things were, or at least, he tried to tell himself that.
‘I never said I wanted that,’ he said, cursing himself for sounding defensive, ‘just as I have always made it clear I don’t want the whole marriage and babies thing. I told you when we got together.’
‘Three years ago, Matt!’ she snapped, sitting up in one fluid, angry movement. Even first thing in the morning and with her eyes puffy from crying, Carla was beautiful. Her jet-black hair – all natural – and piercing green eyes against flawless ivory skin gave her the look of an old-time Hollywood star. Any man with any sense would have a ring on her finger before she could escape. Unfortunately for her, Matt wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be, more that the barrier he had erected round himself where relationships were concerned was too high for even Carla to scale.
‘I meant it, Carla. Five years, ten years, it isn’t going to make any difference. That just isn’t what I want.’
‘You mean you just don’t want it with me.’ She narrowed her eyes at him like a cat. ‘Is there someone else? Is that it?’
‘Of course not.’ God forbid he would have to deal with this from two women. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. We’ll talk later, okay? I’ll come to your house, bring a Chinese.’
Carla glared at his pathetic attempt to placate her and as he stood up and reached for his jacket she sighed dramatically and lay back against the pillows, lifting her hands in a gesture of resignation.
‘Fine. Call me later.’
Matt leaned over to kiss her goodbye but she turned her face away, giving him a perfectly drawn profile, and his lips just brushed her hair. He straightened, murmured a goodbye and left the room and his apartment without his usual coffee, relieved the morning hadn’t brought the showdown with Carla that he had anticipated.
He had to let her go. It was only fair, but he also had to admit to himself that he would miss her. She was great company, witty, beautiful, great in bed and, with a flourishing journalistic career of her own, didn’t complain – too much – about his long hours. His girlfriends loved her and his male friends wanted her. She was a great girlfriend; but that was all he was ever going to want her to be. Not his wife and certainly not the mother of his children. It wasn’t her, but like most women she wouldn’t believe that and would start trying to change him. Then when that failed, to change herself, making herself into the sort of woman she thought he wanted, unable or unwilling to grasp that Matt didn’t have anything more to offer her.
He knew how this would play out if he let it continue, so the kindest thing for both of them would be to stop it in its tracks now. She deserved better.
He was so preoccupied on his way to the Central station that he ran a red light and cursed himself. Having started his career as – very briefly – a traffic cop, he was anal about his driving. He concentrated on the road for the rest of the way and by the time he arrived, parking his shiny Mercedes in his own designated spot, all thoughts of Carla had dissipated.
Coventry’s Central Station was situated between the courts on one side, the Job Centre across the road on the other and the City Council building at the top of the street, near to a string of boozers. Matt had often heard a colleague joke that on a Friday afternoon the local low-life didn’t have far to walk from the Job Centre to pick up the giro to the pubs to the station where they were likely to end up, and then on to the courts the next morning.
Matt personally thought that with the country in the grip of a crippling recession they were all a short walk away from the Job Centre, but knew better than to say so to some of his more staunchly Conservative co-workers.
Although the Central station was the hub of the Coventry police force Matt was Local CID, technically affiliated to the whole of the Coventry and Warwickshire division of the West Midlands Police Force rather than just Coventry City itself – or ‘Cov’ as it was affectionately known to the locals. He frequently spent just as much time over at the Willenhall station on the outskirts of the city, and if he was honest he preferred it over there. The uniformed officers at Central were wary of him; at least the male ones.
That was how Matt knew there was something wrong as soon as he walked into the station. The WPC manning the reception desk gave him a nervous look instead of her usual cheery greeting and sultry smile from underneath mascaraed lashes. Like most of the women he worked with, she made no secret of the fact that he would be welcome in her bed, a fact Matt always found embarrassing rather than alluring. This morning, though, she looked positively scared.
Dismissing her greeting as her having a bad day, Matt had to think again when he met the same look from everyone he passed on his way to the office and when he found Marla, the tight-lipped ancient secretary, placing a steaming mug of coffee on his desk he knew there was something wrong. Marla never did anything without being asked and even then, not without a look on her face that said plainly what she thought about being interrupted.
‘What’s wrong with everyone today?’ he said, a nasty foreboding beginning to gnaw at his gut when Marla’s blackbird eyes darted away from his.
‘I think Dailey wants you in his office, just as soon as you’ve got settled. Drink your coffee first,’ she added, as if it was a magic elixir that would somehow strengthen him for whatever was to come. Though he had to admit, she did make great coffee.
As she hurried out Matt hung his jacket on the door and sat behind his desk, rubbing his hand over his chin thoughtfully. No doubt Dailey wanted to talk to him about his current case – a stabbing in Coventry’s increasingly violent City Centre – but that didn’t explain the funny looks and Marla’s uncharacteristic concern. Or perhaps he was just being paranoid, arguing with Carla having wound him up more than he cared to admit.
But as soon as he walked into Dailey’s office, he knew something was seriously wrong. Chief Superintendent Dailey, considered a dead ringer for Winston Churchill and every bit as forthright, looked nervous and uncomfortable. Matt slid into the chair opposite him, eyebrows raised.
‘What’s up, boss?’
Matt had earned the informality. In ten years, so the general consensus went, it could be Matt sitting in Dailey’s chair.
Dailey didn’t mess around, but came straight out with a sentence that felt like a sucker punch to Matt’s chest.
‘Terry Prince will be released on parole today. New location, and new identity of course. It will hit the newsstands by this evening; I thought you would want to know first.’
Matt just stared at him. His brain seemed to have slowed down; he couldn’t quite process what Dailey was saying.
‘Parole? Already? Wasn’t he supposed to get life?’ Matt knew he should know better. Life rarely meant life, not even for child killers and certainly not for those who were underage at the time themselves. But even so, it was too soon. Terry Prince had been tried as an adult, in spite of protests from bleeding heart groups that seemed to forget the innocent-faced teenager was the perpetrator, not the victim.
‘He’s served eight years, Matt. He was eligible for parole. He has been impeccably behaved, apparently. Shown remorse for his actions.’
Matt knew Dailey was deliberately not revealing his own thoughts on the matter. Dailey was old school. Matt often thought the man had been born in the wrong place, that he should have been the Governor in an American state that still had the death penalty. Texas, maybe. But right now, Dailey was carefully choosing his words.
‘He’s shown remorse? Great. Another triumph for the British justice system then.’ Matt’s sarcastic tone betrayed nothing of the rage that he could feel curling round his intestines, squeezing his gut like a vice. He could control his temper now, he wasn’t the hot-headed detective of eight years ago, who had pinned Terry Prince up against the wall of his cell and threatened to kill him, police brutality be damned. Dailey had covered for him, citing reasonable force following a threat to Matt’s person, and it was never mentioned again. Or at least not to his face.
The Jack Randall case had been his first murder, his first chance to prove himself within the Investigations team, and the case that had made his career. He had always wanted to be a police officer in plain clothes, catching the bad guys. Making the world a better place. Except it was only when he had discovered Jack Randall’s body that he had realised just how bad the world could be.
He had almost been eager for his first murder, keen to prove himself, yet had always imagined his first body would be an adult. A crime of passion perhaps or a gangland execution. Not a child. A child whose big blue eyes, as evident in the picture that had been circulated when he went missing, would stare at him from the face of his mother in silent pleading. When Jack had turned up dead, his body broken and battered, hastily covered with bark and gravel in the middle of the Baginton Woods, Matt had dreaded having to look into those blue eyes and tell them their worst nightmare had come true. Jack Randall was never coming home.
Matt had been praised for his handling of the murder, for the calm efficiency he had displayed but not felt, and for bringing in the killer within twenty-four hours, but he could feel no pride in hauling in a frightened fourteen-year-old boy. Had prayed he was wrong in fact, in spite of the now overwhelming evidence, until Terry Prince had sneered at him when he went to close the cell door. Dropped the bewildered, scared adolescent act and looked Matt straight in the eyes. Matt had never forgotten those eyes; strangely opaque, and without expression.
‘Think you’re a hard man do you? Big bad copper, pushing little boys around?’ There had been no fear then, not even after he had done far more than push little Jack Randall around. Matt had put the fear back in his expression for real when he had slammed him up against the cell wall, still damp from the last occupant’s urine. But he hadn’t seen any remorse, and having looked into those flat and expressionless eyes, doubted now that he would see any eight years later.
‘Where have they put him?’ he asked, although he knew the answer he would get.
‘No idea. That’s why it’s called a secret location, Matt; it’s a secret.’
Matt snorted. Dailey could find out anything if he had a mind to. Prince’s details would no longer be available on the general PNC, or national computer, for any local constable to look up but there would be no shortage of people in on his ‘secret identity’ that would have cost the taxpayers around a quarter of a million pounds at the very least. If he knew Dailey, he would have made discreet enquiries already, if only to ensure that Prince would be as far away as possible from his jurisdiction.
‘This is why everyone is tip-toeing around me? It was eight years ago. I’ve dealt with worse since.’
He had, of course. Murders, rapes, even the serial killer a few years ago who had preyed on prostitutes in Hillfields, Coventry’s once notorious red light district. When he had helped bring that particular guy in he had been hailed a local hero and even the Met had tried to snap him up. It had been just after, in fact, that Carla started pursuing him, and more than once he had wondered if his minor celebrity status hadn't been a big part of the attraction for her.
‘No one ever forgets their first murder,’ Dailey said softly, ‘especially a child’s. And it was such a high-profile case.’
‘Does the mother know?’
‘She will have been told, yes. I believe the father spoke at the parole hearing.’
Matt remembered the stricken face of Lucy Randall when he had to tell her that her baby was dead. Remembered the way the light had seemed to fade out of her eyes as if she was dying herself, right there in front of him. She had been attractive, he recalled, all caramel waves and big blue eyes. Not stunning like Carla but pretty, soft. Yet the grief had carved lines into her face before his eyes. He wondered what she looked like now; if she had had more children. He had a vague image of a skinny lad of about six or seven clinging to her legs, asking where his brother was.
‘Matt?’
Matt started, realised Dailey was peering at him with concern, and shrugged.
‘Look, I’m okay. I don’t understand why he hasn’t been left to rot, but that’s not our job is it? We just bring them in.’
Dailey looked at him for a little while longer, then nodded as if satisfied.
‘Okay, Matt. But if you need to talk…’
Matt got up before Dailey could finish, cutting him off.
‘Did you read the witness reports from Saturday? I’ve got a feeling they won’t hold weight with the CPS.’
Dailey blinked at the abrupt change of subject but went along with it, knowing it was pointless to push further. Matthew Winston was his best officer, but he could also be quick to fly off the handle and Dailey would know better than anyone how much the Randall boy’s murder had affected the younger man. Had been there when Matt had cradled the slight body in his arms. It had been a horrible case, not least because the perpetrator had been barely more than a child himself.
And would only be a young man now, capable of God knows what other atrocities.
‘Eight years.’ An edge of disgust showed through Dailey’s usual restraint. ‘What kind of justice is that?’
Matt inclined his head in agreement. Eight years for taking an innocent life. It wouldn’t be the first time Chief Superintendent Dailey had wondered if justice was now an old-fashioned concept. One that had no meaning any more. Although Matt was used to the old-school opinions of his superior, this time he was inclined to agree with him.
‘Call This Justice?’ screamed the tabloid headlines that confronted Matt when he popped out for a sandwich at lunchtime. He never used the canteen, he preferred to eat alone. He picked up a paper, then thought better of it and put it back on the stand. Reading the crass media attempts to inflame the outrage most of the country would already be feeling would do nothing to improve his mood or his appetite.
As he left the shop his phone rang and he hesitated, expecting it to be Carla and hoping it wasn’t. When he saw it was Scott, a Local CID colleague over at Willenhall, he pressed the answer key and lifted it to his ear.
‘Mate; I just saw the papers. What a load of bullshit. So I was thinking, fancy a pint later? I’ll meet you at the Stag about seven.’
Matt agreed and hung up before he remembered his promise to Carla about the Chinese. He would go and see her first, he decided, and cry off until tomorrow. As much as he could use some female comfort he doubted Carla would be in a very comforting mood after his dismissal of her this morning, and right now a pint with Scott sounded like manna from heaven. After the news he had just had, Matt was sure she would understand.
Of course, Matt was wrong. When he turned up on Carla’s door step earlier than expected she greeted him with a cool smile that turned into a scowl when she realised he wasn’t early but was, in fact, standing her up.
‘I don’t need this right now,’ he began, only to be interrupted. There was a note of hysteria in her voice that he knew meant she was about to launch into full-blown screeching if he didn’t calm her down.
‘You don’t need this? You? It’s all about you isn’t it; what you want, what you need. Do you ever think about me?’
He felt ready to snap and raised a hand as if to ward off her words. When he spoke his voice sounded surprisingly calm to his ears, even though his insides were tumbling.
‘Terry Prince was released on parole today.’
He expected her to look concerned, even perhaps apologise for giving him grief, but she only looked annoyed.
‘I am aware of that, thank you, Matt; I’ve been run ragged today trying to put together some decent copy on it and get someone involved to talk to me before they talk to the tabloids. This is local news, it should be my story. So you’re not the only one who’s had a bad day. I wouldn’t have thought it would affect you lot down at the station anyway.’ She said you lot as if Matt and his colleagues were synonymous with a bad smell rather than the police force. Matt took a step back in the face of her disdain, feeling hurt.
‘It was my first murder case, Carla. Remember?’ For God’s sake, he had told her about it all before, back when they had been in the first flush of their relationship and would spend the night in each other’s arms, talking and fooling around until dawn. She should know it meant more to him than just another case, just another story, but no, all it was to her was an opportunity for her to further her career, even get her out of the local Telegraph and into the tabloids. It hit Matt that he had never before realised just how self-absorbed Carla was. Or at least, he had turned a blind eye to it, if only because it meant she didn't try to probe too deeply into his own failings and the insecurities he had grown adept at suppressing.
As if she had heard his thoughts and decided to live up to them, Carla crossed her arms and looked at him with the disgust evident on her face.
‘That’s your reason for standing me up? Or is it an excuse? Honestly.’ She shook her head as if Matt was beneath her contempt, and there was no trace of irony in her next words: ‘You get far too over-involved with your work. What about me? Us?’
Matt gritted his teeth. If she said ‘what about me?’ one more time he was going to seriously lose his temper. Instead he stepped back and looked at her evenly.
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I am far too involved. But not with work.’
He turned on his heel and walked off, leaving her spitting highly unladylike insults at him. As his anger died down however he felt guilty for jibing her. That pint was looking more and more tempting.
It was waiting for him when he walked into the Stag, along with a grinning Scott. Scott had a permanent grin, like the Cheshire Cat. It made women swoon and criminals squirm, and managed to elicit a weak smile from a still conflicted Matt.
There were more than a few lingering glances aimed his way as he approached the bar and Matt wondered if he was being paranoid, until the bartender waved a copy of the same tabloid he had spotted earlier at him.
‘Travesty,’ he said bleakly. Matt nodded non-commitally before sliding onto the bar stool next to Scott’s and taking a long, slow swig of his waiting beer, looking around at the familiar and not-so-familiar faces.
The Stag and Pony was a regular haunt for the Coventry police force, plain-clothes at any rate. Uniforms were more likely to be found in the Green Giant down the road. Matt wasn’t much for bars, but Scott was in here so often even his wife joked she should send his laundry over.
‘Okay?’ his friend was asking now, his trademark grin in place but his eyes worried. Matt sighed.
‘Everyone’s asking me that today,’ well, exceptCarla, he thought ruefully, ‘and yeah, of course I’m okay. It’s not like there’s anything I can do, is there.’ A statement, not a question. Scott took a long drink of his own and obviously decided to change the subject, having done the required probing. Everyone who worked murder cases had their own particular nemesis, the one that haunted them, and he knew his friend’s had been Jack Randall. But he also knew that, as with most cops, those hauntings went unspoken and for the most part unseen.
‘How’s the delectable Carla?’ he asked instead, only to see Matt’s face darken further.
‘Pissed off with me, as usual. Asked me about moving in together last night.’
‘I take it you said no? Maybe you should take the plunge, mate. It worked for me and Suzy.’
‘Neither of you are ever home,’ Matt pointed out. Scott’s wife had a successful interior design business and when she wasn’t working was either shopping or going on holidays with her friends. In ten years of friendship Matt thought he could count the times he had seen the couple in the same room together on one hand.
‘That’s why it works.’ Scott’s grin widened. ‘But I’m guessing Carla’s not that type of woman. She’s after getting you under the thumb.’
Matt nodded, although he personally thought Carla wanted more from him precisely because he wasn’t ready to give it. She was so used to men falling all over her that he often thought the whole attraction for her was the novelty that Matt didn’t. God knew most men would gnaw off their own right arm for a woman like Carla, and not for the first time he wondered if there was something wrong with him. He wasn’t a player; even in his youth when he had possessed less self-control and been horny from the minute he woke up to the minute he went to bed, even then he had been selective. And he had to admit Carla was right about the over-involved part. Some of the things he had seen; it would be impossible to face if he hadn’t learned to close a part of himself off. Learned to not care.
Or perhaps Carla was just all wrong for him. Matt felt a sudden surge of hurt again at the memory of her dismissive attitude towards his news and complete disregard for anyone’s feelings but her own. Unbidden, the image of Lucy Randall swam into his mind, of those ocean-blue eyes turning stormy with grief. The hope extinguishing as he told her he wasn’t bringing her boy back home.
When he looked down at the bar and saw her face he did a double take, wondering if he was seeing things, then realised Scott had opened the newspaper – not the Telegraph, thank God, that the bartender had been waving around; he had had enough of Carla for one day –. On page two was a picture of Jack’s mother emerging from her house, one hand up towards the cameras to shield herself. From what he could remember she had never spoken to the press apart from that first day, when she had made a heartfelt public appeal to anyone who held information to come forward. Once the body had been discovered she had never spoken another word, refusing all interviews.
Matt looked more closely at the picture. He couldn’t see her eyes and her mouth was set in a pinched line, but he could see she was still attractive. Thinner and of course older, but with a maturity that suited her. She would be in her early thirties now, just a few years younger than himself. He was almost a decade older than Carla.
‘The mother must be devastated.’
Matt nodded, opening his mouth to say something, then closing it abruptly when Scott added, ‘Great legs though. I remember, she was a sexy piece wasn’t she?’
Annoyed, Matt glared at him, Scott’s words seeming inappropriate to him even though he had been appraising her picture himself. Knowing what the woman had been through, remembering the broken body of her son, he felt almost protective, closing the paper as if to cover her image from Scott’s admiring eyes. He downed his pint in one long swig, slammed it onto the counter and got up from the stool.
‘You going already?’
‘Yeah. I ought to go and sort things with Carla.’
Scott winked at him, unaware of his friend’s annoyance, and slapped his back in a cheerful goodbye. Matt left, knowing he was going nowhere near Carla’s but home to bed. The day’s news had affected him more than he wanted to try and fathom, and he wanted his own company, clean sheets and the peaceful oblivion of sleep.
It was a while coming, and the last thing he saw before it finally claimed him was the pitiful body of Jack Randall and the blue eyes of his mother, fading to grey as she listened to Matt tell her that he had failed to save her son.
***
He loved his new swing in the garden, and the little trampoline that meant he could bounce really high, although Mummy had to lift him onto it because it was too high for him. He loved Mummy; she smelled like apples and like the sheets she put on his bed. He had a new bed now, a proper one without rails on the sides, although sometimes that meant he woke up and thought that Teddy was hiding, then found him fallen on the floor. But he liked his new bed because it made him feel like a big boy.
Mummy told him he was her big boy, but sometimes she called him her baby too, even though he had a big bed and wore proper pants now like Daddy, except at night times. And she let him play on the swing by himself sometimes when she was cleaning in the kitchen, because she could see him through the window. He knew that he had to stay where Mummy could see him.
There were bad people in the world, he knew that from the TV. They looked like monsters.
Chapter Three (#ucdaf0003-401a-5a38-9dbb-5b55b86db713) Thursday
City Councillor Hagard peered out of the ornate windows of the City Hall and immediately wished he hadn’t. The thick walls and heavy-paned windows drowned out the noise of the protesters quite effectively, and had he not looked, he could have simply imagined they weren’t there. Rows of people with home-made banners and placards, faces screwed up with varying degrees of outrage, betrayal and even excitement. Did they not have jobs to go to, or homes to run? Precisely what they expected him or anyone else at City Council to do about the situation he didn’t know.
He hadn’t made the decision to release Terry Prince from prison, and had been as in the dark about it as anyone else. In all honesty, he didn’t particularly care. With rising crime and youth unemployment, housing shortages and a recent influx of immigrants raising the usual complaints, he had more important things to deal with. Not to mention his wife putting him on a low-fat, no-alcohol diet that was fraying the edges of his temper.
Hagard came away from the window and sat down at his polished oak desk just as something heavy and soft hit the window with a muffled thump, and he heard an accompanying cheer from outside. Sighing, he lifted the phone receiver and dialled Little Park Street, the Central police station that was just over the way, a few blocks behind the angry faces and gaudy banners. Pressing the correct extension numbers, he got directly through to Dailey, who listened to his complaints and then said dismissively, ‘What do you want me to do? There’s a bunch of them outside here too. I can’t arrest them all. Freedom of speech and all that.’
‘But you’re the police,’ Hagard protested, in vain as he heard the phone being replaced and the buzz of the line telling him their brief conversation was over. Hagard got up, heaving his considerable bulk from behind his desk and walking purposefully out of his office and down the main stairs to the plush reception. From outside the revolving doors he could see the banners, distorted in the glass. The secretary looked up at him and then down again as if somehow responsible for the insults they could now hear through the entrance. Hagard had heard quite enough. He walked through the doors, waiting impatiently for them to revolve.
A sharp gust of wind blew at him as if it too was protesting, causing him to blink. He opened his eyes to something being waved in his face and for a moment thought it was a placard; then realised it was a microphone. A skinny redhead simpered before him, a steely look in her eyes at odds with the pretty smile.
‘How do you feel about the news that Terry Prince has been released, Councillor? Are your sympathies with the citizens of Coventry, and with the Randall family?’
Now what kind of loaded question was that? Hagard glared at the reporter, certain he had seen her before and noting the crow’s feet around those rather cold eyes. Yes, he was certain she had been here the first time around, pushing another microphone in his face, when the little boy had been murdered. It had been easier to express sympathy then of course, whereas anything he said now could be ill-advised. If he remembered rightly this woman wasn’t even from the local Telegraph or news station, or even the BirminghamPost, but a national tabloid. That was all the city needed.
Glaring again at the woman he turned on his heel and pushed his way back through the revolving doors. He was going straight to the over-priced staff eatery for a steak, chips, and fried onions, diet be damned.
Outside the red-headed reporter merely shrugged and tucked away her microphone into her handbag, jerking her head at the photographer who stood ever ready behind her. She had already got plenty of copy from members of the crowd but had thought to try her luck with Hagard when she spotted him lumbering through the doors looking ready to have a fit. His dismissal of her wasn’t a problem; she had her eyes on far more interesting prey.
Lucy peered through the nets, her stomach sinking. This was all she needed. Behind her Ricky grumbled to himself as he threw books into his bag, already late for school. Lucy had insisted on driving him, having sat him down to talk to him about the news. She knew how children – perhaps teenagers in particular – could be and could only imagine the stares and questions that Ricky would face today at school.
She was worried enough about him as it was; had caught the whiff of cigarette smoke and perhaps worse on his breath more than once in recent weeks. Typical boy behaviour, her own mother had shrugged, but not for the first time Lucy felt the lack of a father figure in her eldest son’s life. In spite of nearly a decade of bringing him up and letting Ricky call him ‘Dad’ Ethan had barely bothered with him since he had left. When Ricky had been having his ‘issues’, as they had referred to them after Jack’s death, Ethan had offered the boy no support at all.Now as she saw her ex-husband striding up her drive she bit her lip just in time to stop herself saying ‘Your father’s here’. Instead she dropped the net and took a deep breath before the door knocked.
‘It’s Ethan.’
‘What does he want?’ Ricky asked, his face folded with distaste. Lucy opened the door, not even bothering to check her reflection in the little mirror by the coat stand. In the last couple of years she had started to take a pride in her appearance again, but this morning she had woken with that heavy, lethargic feeling she remembered so well from the first years after Jack’s death. It had taken all of her willpower to drag herself out of bed and get dressed, even the fabric of her clothes feeling heavy on her skin.
‘Ethan.’
‘Lucy.’
They stared at each other for a moment, Lucy taking in his slightly rumpled appearance, his suit looking less than ironed and his jaw unshaven. It wasn’t like him, his appearance was usually immaculate. In a flash of compassion, Lucy realised he must be feeling as wretched as she did and opened the door, stepping back to let him in.
Ethan walked in and looked around his old home as if uncomfortable at being here again. He had only lived there a few months, had started his affair even before they had started making plans to move from their old home. Jack’s home.
Ethan’s eyes flitted round the room and then settled on Ricky, still standing at the kitchen table with his book bag.
‘Hey, kiddo.’
Ricky’s lip curled. He stared at Ethan until he dropped his eyes, then hoisted his bag onto his shoulder.
‘I said I’ll drive you,’ Lucy protested as he walked towards the door, but Ricky carried on, slamming it behind him. Shocked, Lucy went to go after him but Ethan laid a hand on her arm.
‘Let him go, Luce, he’s bound to be upset.’
Lucy bit back the retort that sprang to her lips at the cheek of him advising her on her eldest son, the child he had taken on as his and then walked out on. She didn’t want to open that particular can of worms.
‘Don’t call me Luce,’ she snapped instead, the unnecessary shortening of her name annoying her as much as it always had. It was two syllables, for God’s sake, hardly difficult to pronounce.
She sat down at the table, waving Ethan towards the chair opposite. He took the one next to her instead, leaning forward and taking her hands. Lucy flinched but didn’t pull away. He had slim, long hands. Clever, surgeon’s hands, that had once touched her and held her, but were now holding someone else. She looked down at them dispassionately.
‘How are you?’Lucy couldn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t want him to see the pain in them any more than she wanted to see it in his. It should be a shared pain, something they should face together, but Ethan had given that up. When she didn’t answer he started talking in a broken voice, cracking the way Ricky’s had started to now that he was hitting puberty, and Lucy looked at him properly then and saw the anguish in his eyes.
‘I really thought he wouldn’t get parole, you know? Thought they would never let him out yet. Jack would still only be eleven now.’
‘I know how old he would be.’ Lucy didn’t mean for her words to come out so harsh and yet somehow they did. She didn’t want to do this with him, didn’t want to relive the horror, and couldn’t bring herself to offer a comfort she didn’t feel.
‘Does your wife know you’re here?’ she asked instead and Ethan started, a flash of guilt in his eyes, though he still didn’t remove his hands.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to see how you were. To talk. She doesn’t understand.’ His voice sounded choked again and Lucy pulled back, wrenching her hands away from him. Ethan looked up at her, hurt, and Lucy realised she was suddenly angry.
‘She doesn’t understand, so you come here, to me? Because your wife doesn’t understand you?’ she laughed, and it sounded bitter even to her own ears. ‘Isn’t that what you used to say to her about me when you were fucking her behind my back?’
Ethan’s eyes grew wide and shocked and Lucy pressed her own hand to her mouth as if to stop any further outburst. She rarely, if ever, swore. And she knew it wasn’t really Ethan she was angry at. When he reached for her again she stood up, bumping her hip against the edge of the table.
‘This is hardly the time, Lucy,’ he reprimanded, regaining some of his usual composure. ‘I came here to talk about Jack.’
Lucy pressed a hand to her head, which had begun to pound, heralding one of the fierce headaches she suffered on and off. Tension headaches, her doctor called them.
‘Jack’s dead,’ she said. As she spoke the words it occurred to her that in eight years she had never spoken them aloud, had either avoided such simple statements of fact or cloaked the cold truth in less final language. Because she had never spoken to the press and avoided discussing her business with either strangers or friends, those two words, together like that, had never come from her mouth.
Now they lingered in the air between them, weighed down with eight years of guilt and grief.
Ethan winced.
‘About Terry Prince then. About this mess.’ Such an understatement. He spread his arms, belying the word. Lucy folded hers, not in anger now but as a way of holding herself upright on suddenly weak legs.
‘I’m going to have my solicitor release a statement to the press detailing how sickened we are. There must be something we can do, surely?’
She didn’t like this side of Ethan. He had always been in control, always taken care of everything. Now he sounded lost, was sitting here in her kitchen looking at her like there was something she could do; as if she had all the answers and he was waiting for her to enlighten him.
‘They won’t lock him back up now they’ve let him go,’ she said, turning her body away from his, ‘not unless he re-offends.’
Her head was really pounding now and she wanted him to go if only so she could take some painkillers and lie down. She had phoned in sick at work this morning and now she genuinely did feel ill, a psychosomatic response perhaps. Also, she wanted to phone Ricky and check he had got to school before his first class began. He would moan at her for mollycoddling him, but the memory of those brief minutes when she had taken her eyes off her youngest son and lost him forever haunted her every time Ricky went out of the door, even now.
Ethan stood up and pushed in his chair, straightening himself even as Lucy crumpled, leaning back against the kitchen side with her head in her hands, trying to fold into herself. Her head whipped back up though when Ethan approached her.
‘Just go, please. You shouldn’t be here.’
‘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 (#ucdaf0003-401a-5a38-9dbb-5b55b86db713) 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.
They flashed out instinctively, balled into fists, when a heavy hand descended on his shoulder. He landed a punch into the stranger’s gut, which was firm and tensed as though the man was expecting it, and then found himself with his arm twisted up his back. Not really enough to hurt, but enough to render him helpless. The bottle of Bud rolled out from his jacket and smashed on the ground.
‘Forgot to pay for that, did we?’ the man said conversationally, letting Ricky’s arm free but keeping a grip on him.
‘What’s it to you?’ Tyler said even as he began to back away up the street. ‘You’re not a cop. You should mind your own business before you get hurt.’ Ricky winced at the lame threat.
The man cocked his head and smiled at Tyler, reaching into his jacket pocket with his free hand. Ricky felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach. This wasn’t going to be good, he just knew it.
‘Nice threat; it might actually be effective if you weren’t obviously shitting yourself,’ the man continued in his relaxed voice, flipping open the card in his hand as he did so, ‘but unfortunately for you, I am a cop.’
That was enough for Tyler, who turned and ran, disappearing into the nearest alley. The man – cop – pushed Ricky towards a smart silver Mercedes, shoving him into the passenger seat and central locking the car as he walked round to the driver’s side, so that Ricky had no chance to run also. He slumped down into the seat as the man got in next to him.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked. His tone was sterner now, but Ricky was sure he could detect a note of amusement in it.
‘Wanker,’ he muttered under his breath. The man laughed.
‘Nice. Well, Wanker, we’ve got two choices. I can drag you down to town and have you arrested, thrown into a cell and cautioned, and your parents will have to be informed anyway, and my day off will be more ruined, or I can take you home and have a quiet word with your mum and dad and leave it at that.’
‘Haven’t got a dad,’ Ricky said with a snarl, thinking immediately of Ethan, which always made him angry.
Next to him Matt sighed at the kid’s words and rubbed his hand over his chin thoughtfully. He needed a shave. He was beginning to wish he hadn’t bothered with the boy, petty theft wasn’t his problem, but he had him in the car now and if he just let him go what kind of a deterrent was that? Looking at the kid he realised he looked familiar in a vague way; he also noticed the gleam of tears in his eyes that he was fighting to hold back.
‘Are you all right?’ Matt asked softly, praying the boy wasn’t going to unleash some awful tale of abuse and neglect. He was well dressed and it was a nice side of town but Matt from experience knew that meant nothing.
‘I don’t want to give my mum any more grief. She’s having a hard time.’
All the more reason her son needed to be kept from going off the rails, Matt thought. Not that he classed a bit of shoplifting as ‘going off the rails’, more a teenage rite of passage, but there was clearly more than that going on here. Looking at the boy he again had the nagging feeling he had seen him somewhere before.
‘Just give me your address, son, and we’ll get you home, okay?’
Ricky’s head snapped up, the glint of tears gone. Matt wondered if he had imagined them.
‘I’m not your son,’ he said in a raised voice, then slumped back, defeated, and mumbled his address. Matt shook his head as he pulled away. Another kid with an absent father and the world on his shoulders. He was probably headed for the police cells anyway, one way or the other.
They didn’t speak on the brief journey to Ricky’s house and the boy walked before him, his swagger replaced by a surly expression as Matt knocked the door, wondering what the mother would be like. A typical overworked single mother, no doubt. He prayed she wouldn’t be a woman like his own mother, so wrapped up in her grief or whatever issues she had that she didn’t know or care where her son was.
Matt remembered a time when, not long after his father’s death, he had stayed out past midnight, hours after his curfew. He was just eleven.
One of his mates had stolen their older brother’s cheap cider and even a bit of weed and a gang of them had sat in the field pretending that the cider wasn’t making them feel sick and attempting to roll a joint. After five aborted attempts a roll-up the size of a tampon was passed around, inducing various coughing fits and, in the case of one boy, the emptying of his stomach all over his brand new Rockport shoes. Matt had been the last to leave; it was a mild night and after his friends had gone he had lain back on the grass, watching the stars and wondering if his Dad was up there. Was anywhere, other than six feet underground, withering away.
He must have dozed off because when he had looked at his watch it was nearly midnight. His first thought was that his Dad would kill him, and he had run home at a crazy speed, bursting through the front door with an instant ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ springing to his lips.
His mother, curled up on the sofa in her dressing gown and staring dead-eyed at the TV, had simply looked over her shoulder and smiled weakly at him. As Matt trudged up to bed he realised she hadn’t even known he was still out, hadn’t even looked at the time or checked his room. She was still on the sofa in the exact spot she had been sitting in when he had gone back out after school. Although he should have been relieved he had escaped a grounding, Matt had only felt a gnawing sense of emptiness, a feeling of the ground shifting as he realised there was no one at home worrying about him any more. No one to keep him safe. Now, sitting next to this surly boy, he had to wonder what he would find when he took him back to his own mother.
The woman who opened the door was certainly not what he was expecting. He stared at her, recognition and then incredulity dawning as Ricky pushed his way inside and ran up the stairs.
‘What’s going on? Ricky?’ She turned back to Matt, a question in her eyes that gave way to recognition and then more confusion.
‘Inspector?’ It was evident from the tone of her voice that she had knew who he was.
‘Mrs Randall.’
They stared at each other for a few moments before Lucy shook her head as if to clear it, breaking eye contact. She still had those beautiful eyes, hypnotic as whirlpools, and now wide with concern.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I'm afraid I caught Ricky shoplifting.’ He cleared his throat, self-conscious under her gaze.
‘Shoplifting? Ricky?’ She frowned as though trying to process what he was telling her, then sighed and opened the door further, ushering him in.
With Ricky out of sight, no doubt hiding in his bedroom, Matt filled her in on what had happened at the shop, but at the last minute substituted a chocolate bar for the ill-fated bottle of Bud. Lucy looked as if she was at the end of her nerves, and once again Matt wished he had left well alone.
Not least because he was attracted to her. Even in this, the most inappropriate situation, he felt the pull of her, wanted to take her in his arms and soothe her. Then he remembered Jack, and immediately berated himself. There was no denying the jolt of electricity that had raced through him when she had opened the door and their eyes met. But it was laced through with the same protective instinct he had felt in the pub two days before.
‘How is everything?’ he asked. ‘I had no idea who Ricky was, but perhaps it makes sense that he would be acting out. It must be a distressing time for you all.’
‘I never got to thank you,’ she said, ‘for catching him.’ There was no need to ask which him she referred to.
‘And now they’re letting him out,’ he said with a flat voice. He didn’t deserve her thanks.
‘That’s not your fault.’ Her tone was soft, compassionate even, and Matt wondered how at a time like this she could find it in her to care about anyone else’s feelings.
‘I know you did all you could.’
She stepped forward, placing a hand on his arm, and a warm tingling ran through him that had nothing to do with comfort. Their eyes met again, and Matt swallowed hard. Then she swung away from him, an expression he couldn’t read on her face.
‘I should go,’ he said, making no move to go anywhere. 'I thought I could have a chat with Ricky, but under the circumstances…’
Lucy shook her head.
‘Stay, if you want to? I was just boiling the kettle.’
Matt caught a hint of vulnerability in the question, a need for adult companionship perhaps, and so he nodded, watching her move around the kitchen with unconscious grace. She truly was lovely, if fragile.Then he wondered why that word popped so immediately to mind. Fragile. It suited her slim, ethereal beauty, he supposed, and certainly she was slimmer and more ethereal-looking than the last time he had seen her, but then it had been eight years. Nearly a decade. But nothing in her tone or demeanour suggested she was at all frail; if anything she seemed to have coped admirably. It was his own preconceptions, his own knowledge of the horrors she had been through, that had made him attach that description to her. Just as most people no doubt looked at him and attached certain words, based on what they knew of him and his lifestyle choices. Words like jaded now, or once maybe hot-head. And what was it Carla had said? Egotistical.
He had to ask himself if it was egotistical to be looking at Lucy the way he was, with an uncomfortable mix of desire and admiration as much as sympathy. Perhaps he wanted to think of her as fragile so he could justify coming in and doing the whole alpha male thing.
Shaking his head clear of his thoughts his hands closed around the warm cup of coffee she placed in his hands.
‘Er, I take two sugars,’ he said, certain he hadn’t told her. Lucy smiled.
‘I remember.’
‘Good memory, ’ he said, impressed, then wished he hadn’t spoken as her blue eyes clouded over.
‘I remember everything from that time, inspector. Even the silliest of details. It’s as vivid as if it was yesterday.’ She visibly flinched, and he thought his assessment of her hadn’t been so far off the mark after all. How, as a parent, did you even begin to go about coping with something like that, and still get up and go about your business every day?
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You say sorry a lot.’
She smiled, motioning him towards a chair. He sat, suddenly tired. Rather than sitting at the table next to him she pressed her hands against the kitchen counter and sprang her weight up, perching on the edge with her legs dangling, a girlish movement that unfortunately put her very nice legs at eye level. He looked away, wondering what the hell was wrong with him. Rebounding from Carla perhaps? But even back when he was investigating the boy’s disappearance he had been aware of his attraction to this woman, however inappropriate the circumstances. It was a feeling that unnerved him then and continued to do so now, an attraction that went beyond the superficial and even the sexual. And those feelings were just as inappropriate now as they had been then, he reprimanded himself sharply. Matt drained his coffee quickly and made to stand.
‘I should be going.’
‘Did you see me in the paper?’ she cut in, and he looked properly at her. Her eyes were bright, but too bright, almost feverish. He pushed his cup towards her.
‘Make another of those perfect coffees, and you can tell me,’ he said, groaning to himself as his voice came out more flirtatious than intended. Lucy looked grateful, springing down from the side to grab his cup. She obviously wanted his company. Hell, right now with all she had to deal with she would probably welcome any company.
Lucy handed him a newspaper, and he started as he saw her on the front page, eyes blazing in anger. She looked more alive in the photo than he thought she ever had in real life, as if the camera captured the rage so obviously simmering in her and ignited it, lighting up her whole face. Matt sucked in his breath as he saw the headline.
Lucy slid into the chair opposite him.
‘I’m sorry if it stirs up trouble,’ she said, not sounding apologetic at all, ‘but I needed to speak out. You understand?’
Matt nodded, though as his eyes skimmed the article, he felt angry. Not at her, but at the press for turning one family’s pain into a media circus. For inciting the protesters who were still there now, waving their banners and calling for Terry Prince’s whereabouts to be made public. He was just glad it wasn’t Carla’s name on the article.
‘It won’t help,’ he said, pushing the paper back towards her, ‘but you might be able to organise something, a campaign perhaps.’ There were laws in America now that required the whereabouts of registered sex offenders to be made available to certain members of the public, but he didn’t think much of them. The exact names and addresses weren’t made public record, just the area, and what good was it knowing there was a paedophile in your midst if you didn’t know exactly who it was? That was only going to result in innocent people getting hurt.
Even here in Cov there had been a recent case of a local vigilante hunting sex offenders; more often than not his targets were innocent and the information the self-styled hero gave to the police turned out to be based on little but unfounded rumour. It was an incendiary subject.
Regardless of whether a more accessible register was a good idea or not, it was redundant in Terry Prince’s case. He was only a murderer after all, not a sex offender. The fact that there had been, as far as anyone could tell, no sexual element to the killing meant there were no laws anywhere that required his whereabouts to be disclosed to any but a select few. As if beating a two-year-old to death was somehow not as shocking as long as there had been no 'noncing' involved.
A familiar, sickened rage swept through Matt and he marvelled at Lucy. How could she live with this, every day, and still be sane?
‘Maybe I will,’ she was saying now, nodding her head decisively, ‘or maybe I’ll set up a charity or something. My mother is always on at me to do something like that, she thinks it might give me a purpose, help with the grief or something. But,’ her eyes glittered again, this time he thought with tears, ‘it doesn’t change anything, does it?’
Without thinking Matt reached over the table for her hand, squeezing it in his. It felt tiny and delicate. Fragile, yes. Yet a jolt of electricity shot up his arm the instant he touched her that was anything but. When he spoke his tongue felt thick in his mouth.
‘It’s always stayed with me, your son’s case. I can’t begin to know what you’re going through but I’ve been angry too, ever since I heard. It’s a travesty.’
It was a relief to finally say it, to admit how he was feeling, and although Lucy was the last person he should be talking to about it, she squeezed his hand back.
‘I heard that you attacked him you know. My friend knows a girl at the station.’
Matt winced. ‘I think “attack” was a bit strong.’ It wasn’t exactly his finest moment, it was something he was ashamed of in fact, even if on the other hand he wished he had given the boy exactly what he deserved.
Lucy smiled, but those expressive eyes of hers had gone cold and flat. The effect was unnerving.
‘I want to find him, inspector.’
Matt pulled his hand away, a sudden chill creeping up his arm. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to get into.
‘Lucy, I’m a police officer,’ he reminded her, though his tone was gentle.
He didn’t want to hear what she would do if she ever got her hands on him, didn’t want to be privy to her confessions. People did that sometimes, he had realised over the years; they were either suspiciously unforthcoming with the police, reluctant to divulge even what they had had for breakfast, or they had a sudden need to pour their hearts out. This was a job for the Family Liaison Officer, not a murder detective, and yet something in him responded to her, wanted her to confide in him not so much as an officer of the law, but as a man.
He cleared his throat, searching for something to say to lighten the sudden, strange tension in the room when a surly Ricky came down the stairs, glaring at both his mother and Matt.
‘Did you bring me home to teach me a lesson or to hit on my mum?’ he challenged Matt, puffing out his scrawny fifteen-year-old chest. Lucy got up quickly and went to him, laying a placating hand on his shoulder.
‘Ricky, this is the detective who handled your brother’s disappearance.’
Ricky grinned at Matt, such a change in attitude that Matt blinked as Ricky bounded over to him and shook his hand.
‘You’re the one who roughed Prince up in his cell, right?’
‘Er, I didn’t quite “rough him up”.’ Damn it, he was beginning to think that the whole city knew. But he returned Ricky’s handshake anyway, glad to have finally got a smile out of the boy. The shoplifting seemed irrelevant now, but even so he put on his best authoritative voice, then winced at how damn old he sounded.
‘I trust I won’t be seeing you again under these circumstances?’
Ricky just shrugged and then, at a furious glance from Lucy, shook his head with vehemence.
‘’Course not. Promise. Mum, can I go back out now?’
‘No. You can go back up to your room please. I’ll come and talk to you when the inspector has gone.’
Ricky glared at her but obeyed, the thump of his trainers on the stairs leaving no ambivalence as to exactly how he felt about his confinement. Matt set his cup down again, knowing this was his cue to leave but not wanting to go. He turned to her before he walked out of her front door, his eyes lingering on her full mouth just for a moment, but long enough that she noticed and a corner of that mouth turned up wryly.
‘Thank you, I’m glad you were there. I’ll have a word with him; it’s really not like him at all.’
‘He’s just a kid. Still, if you would like me to have a more thorough word with him, or if there’s anything I can do…’ he trailed off, feeling suddenly ridiculous. He had never been tongue-tied around a woman, but this was far from a usual situation. When Lucy disappeared behind the door he had to wonder if he had offended her, then she was back, pressing a piece of paper into his hand.
‘My phone number. In case you think of anything you can do.’
She was definitely flirting, there was no mistaking it. Matt smiled at her and pocketed the number before he walked back to his car, feeling unsettled again He looked back as he opened the driver’s door, expecting her to still be watching, but the door was closed.
***
When he first saw the man watching him playing in the garden, he wanted to go and talk to him, because he looked so sad. Maybe he wanted to play, but was too shy to ask, just like when he had gone to nursery and wanted to play in the sandpit with the bigger boys. But Mummy had told him not to talk to strangers so he didn’t, even though the man didn’t look like the bad men Mummy worried about, the ones like the baddies on TV. This man just looked sad.
Perhaps it would be okay if he asked him his name, because if you knew someone’s name then they weren’t a stranger were they? But then the man had gone, and he decided he should ask Mummy first anyway, because she would know what to do. He would ask her at tea time.
Except, by the time he was ready for tea and saw that he had his favourite fish fingers, he had forgotten all about it.
Chapter Five (#ulink_3d4ca660-e830-5b9f-bb8d-71debd4c7d7c) Saturday
The woman hoisted the heavy bag containing all the various forms she had to fill in onto her shoulder and smiled with no real conviction at the weary young man in front of her.
‘So that will be all for now…John,’ she said in a bright tone, wondering what his real name was, because he didn’t look like a John, and couldn’t the powers that be think of a name a little more imaginative than that? ‘But if you need anything, let me know, you have my number. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week.’
She was aware of sounding patronising, but it was a long day and she wanted to get home and get ready for her weekly bingo night with the girls. He just looked at her blankly, though she thought she saw a flash of impatience for just a moment. Well fine, she didn’t want to be here either. She left ‘John’ sitting alone at his new kitchen table in the house the government had paid for along with his new identity, and went home to get ready for bingo.
Later, after a few cocktails courtesy of a win on the next-to-last house, which was a modest sum but enough to pay for this week’s night out, it didn’t seem to matter much if she spoke more about her job as a Resettlement Officer than she should have. If she let slip that she had spent the day ‘settling’ a mysterious young man into his new home under an assumed identity; if she let her friends jump to certain conclusions that were most likely true. People needed to know who was living among them, after all.
By the time she was on her fifth drink she had all but convinced herself that she had a civic duty to warn people if there happened to be a dangerous criminal in the area. It wasn’t the sort of thing she was quite used to dealing with and the responsibility, she told herself in a fit of tequila-induced disapproval, should be on somebody with far broader shoulders than her own.
Ricky had looked up at the disused building, one of its boarded-up windows put through by Tyler and his mates, and nodded.
‘Yeah, it’s perfect.’
Somewhere to hide when they wagged school, or playing truant as his mother would call it if she found out, and have a fag or even some of Tyler’s brother’s weed when they could sneak some. Ricky liked weed better than fags, it tasted better in his mouth and made him feel a bit light-headed and more relaxed, somehow. Fags just made him want to be sick.
‘We could bring girls here too. Bet there’s some right fit birds in that posh school of yours.’
‘It’s not posh,’ Ricky had said automatically, then more or less contradicted himself with, ‘but you won’t get any of them round this place.’ Not with him and Tyler anyway. If they were sixth-form boys maybe. Tyler just shrugged, for once making no comment about Ricky and his ‘posh’ classmates.
‘I’ll bring these birds I know then. Get them stoned, get a blowjob.’ Tyler used his hand and a tongue in his cheek to mime the action, and Ricky laughed, because he was expected to.
‘You ever had one?’ Tyler asked, sly now, looking sideways at him.
‘Had what?’
‘A blowjob.’
Ricky had shrugged, nonchalantly.
‘Yeah course.’
He hadn’t even kissed any girls, and couldn’t imagine how you even went about asking them to do that to you.
That was how he had ended up here, lying on his coat sharing a spliff with a girl who was apparently the best friend of the other girl Tyler had invited, whose head was conspicuously bobbing up and down under Tyler’s jacket as she did just that. Tyler looked at him from across the room through the smoke haze and winked as he pushed his hand down on the shape of the girl’s head in his lap. Ricky tried to grin back, but inwardly winced. It seemed vaguely abusive, somehow, even though the girl was obviously more than up for it.
The girl’s friend who was eagerly smoking Tyler’s weed, a hand resting high on Ricky’s thigh, turned to him and giggled, passing him the spliff, now ringed at the end with sticky pink lip gloss. He took a drag, closing his eyes for a moment and waiting for the familiar wave of peace, but it didn’t come. He only felt irritated as the girl – Mandy, Molly? – snuggled up next to him. She smelled of fags and some fruity cheap perfume and, he realised, a touch of body odour. Or maybe that was him. Ricky tried to surreptitiously sniff his own armpits, ducking his head towards the girl, who instead took it as a sign and moved in for the kill, planting her sticky lips on his.
His first kiss. It was kind of gooey, but not unpleasant, and he felt a stirring in his trousers that intensified when she guided his hand to one of her small breasts. Irritation forgotten he kissed her harder, using his tongue clumsily, and was only jerked back to reality by the nasal tones of the other girl, appearing from underneath Tyler’s jacket and wiping her mouth.
‘Oi, you’re the brother of that kid that got killed aren’t you?’
Ricky felt his erection shrivel and he sat up, shrugging off Mindy or whatever and glaring at the other girl.
‘Yeah, so what?’ He sounded more aggressive than he had meant to and the girl next to him shrank back, but her friend only laughed and turned to Tyler.
‘Touchy isn’t he?’
‘Leave him alone, man.’ Tyler’s voice was a contented drawl. He pushed the girl none too gently in Ricky’s direction. ‘Go and give him some of what you just gave me, that’ll chill him out.’
The girl made as if to comply, moving towards Ricky with what seemed to be a sly and yet also somewhat vacant look, and Ricky felt a moment’s panic at the thought of her lunging at him, but her friend shoved her back.
‘He’s with me; you always do this. He’s not interested are you?’ She fixed Ricky with a challenging stare.
He had had enough. He got up, passed the spliff back to Tyler and shrugged his coat on.
‘You goin’?’
‘Yeah.’
Tyler shrugged. ‘More for me then,’ meaning, Ricky knew, the girls as much as the weed. He felt nauseous, looked around at the grimy room and suddenly wanted a shower. He walked off without saying goodbye to Mindy, making his way out onto the street and breathing in grateful gulps of cold air. As he started off towards home he heard heels clattering along behind him.
‘Wait!’
It was Mindy, hurrying up to him with a worried expression on her face.
‘I’m okay,’ he said, sharp enough that she stopped a few yards away looking deflated. ‘I just want to go home, all right? I'm not in the mood.’
‘Is it true, what Shauna said?’
Ricky sighed, shuffling his feet and looking down at them, then back up at her.
‘Yeah.’
Taking his confession as a positive sign she stepped towards him, close enough so they were almost touching, looking up at him with an expression of hope. She was pretty, he thought, and would be more so if she didn’t have that stupid stuff on her lips and fake eyelashes stuck awkwardly onto her eyes like deformed spiders with legs going every which way. She couldn’t be any older than him.
‘I’m not like her you know. I mean, I wouldn’t have done that.’ She waved a hand in the area of his groin.
‘I know.’ He thought about her moving his hand onto her tit, but decided not to mention it.
‘It must be hard.’ She changed the subject abruptly, leaving him wondering at first what she meant and glancing down towards the very area he thought for a second she was referring to. Then she went on, ‘Knowing the killer’s been let out. I saw your mum in the paper. Pretty, isn’t she?’
‘I suppose.’ He didn’t want to talk about his mum, not now, and when the girl moved in for another kiss it was the memory of Lucy’s face as she had berated him about the shoplifting incident yesterday that caused him to pull away.
‘It’s not you,’ he said quickly when the girl looked crushed, ‘it’s just, I don’t want to talk about that. I’m sick of hearing about it all, to be honest.’ As he said the words he understood they were true, that he would be happy to never have to think about the release of his brother’s killer and the implications of it ever again. ‘I’ll see you again, yeah? Give me your number.’
The girl looked happy again, whipping out a state of the art mobile that made Ricky embarrassed to have to pull out his mum’s old Nokia. She rattled her number off to him, frowning when Ricky paused as he went to enter her name into his contacts.
‘It’s Mitzi. Like the girl off the telly.’
‘I know that. My phone was just playing up.’
As Ricky walked away he wondered why he didn’t feel any more pleased with himself. His first kiss and a girl’s number and she was nice too, especially when she was away from that other one. But mention of his mother and Jack had annoyed him. It was everywhere he turned at the minute, he couldn’t get away from it. Stirring up old memories of playing with a smiling, red-cheeked toddler who held his arms out to Ricky with an expression of absolute adoration. He had never been jealous of Jack, not when he had been alive anyway.
He was worried too about his mum, who had been in a strange and restless mood ever since the news that Terry Prince had walked free. There was a determined light in her eyes, a tension in her body as if she were waiting for something that unnerved Ricky and made him wonder what his mother would do next. He had the feeling something was about to happen, something even bigger than him scoring with a girl, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be around for the fall out.
When he reached his nan’s she pursed her lips at him and Ricky hoped she couldn’t smell either tobacco or weed on him, or see any difference in his eyes, but she only said, ‘You’re late. I hope you got your homework done? You know your mum said you weren’t to go out at all.’
‘Sorry, Nan.’ He hurried off up to the spare room he always slept in when he was here, sitting on the bed and taking the phone out of his pocket to have a look again at Mitzi’s number. Quickly, before he could change his mind, he texted her.
It’s Ricky, this is my number, he typed and then paused before he pressed send. He ought to put a kiss, but then kisses were for girls weren’t they? He half wished Tyler were here to ask his advice, but he wouldn’t want Tyler to know about his lack of experience with the opposite sex.
It was at least ten minutes before his phone buzzed in response and Ricky grabbed at it, eager to see if it was Mitzi. It was, but her response puzzled him.
Look on Facebook. I’ve just seen it she had typed and Ricky’s brow creased. He rarely even used Facebook, it was more for his mum’s generation, and most of his mates used Pheed or Instagram now or just messaged each other on their BlackBerrys, which unfortunately with his ancient phone wasn’t something he could join in with.
No internet here. What have you seen? he typed and this time her answer came swiftly, words that Ricky sat and stared at for a long time, a knot of dread unravelling in his gut.
There’s a page about your brother and the guy that killed him.
Ricky didn’t reply but lay back on his pillows staring at the ceiling. It was to be expected, it had already been all over the news, yet here was what he dreaded most, that it would encroach on his life, his world, even colouring his meeting Mitzi. He felt like he didn’t want to see her again at all now. Five minutes later his phone buzzed again.
Are you ok? I’m here if you want to talk.
Ricky turned his phone off.
While Ricky was navigating the uncharted waters of teenage dating, his mother had been preparing for her own date, the first in two years. Lucy was surprised at how her hand shook when she leaned over the mirror to apply her eyeliner, and at the way her stomach fizzed with excitement, making her hungry yet at the same time unable to eat. As much as she tried to tell herself that she was only doing this for the information she hoped to get out of Matt, part of her reacted to the prospect of seeing him again with an entirely different agenda.
She wondered if perhaps going to bed with him would help get rid of the jittery, on-edge feeling that had been with her constantly since the phone call. Four days. It felt like so much longer, and yet at the same time Lucy had the disconcerting feeling that time was not being measured in increments of how long had passed since that morning, but rather was counting down to something, some momentous event that the phone call from the Parole Board had triggered.
Her mother had looked at her quizzically when Lucy confessed she was meeting Matt at the Italian restaurant in town, but to Lucy’s relief had voiced no disapproval, nor questioned Lucy’s motives when she had revealed who Matt was, only passed comment on vaguely remembering how handsome the young cop had been. Ricky was staying at hers and was still grounded, though Lucy knew her son would attempt to talk her mother round if he could.
Matt had phoned her that morning, as she had somehow known he would, to ask how things were with Ricky. Lucy had found herself steering the conversation around to him asking her for a meal. There was an unspoken connection between them somehow; both having been brought together yet again by his involvement with her children. Not the most romantic situation perhaps, but it could prove to be a fateful one. To make their ‘date’ for that very night was her own idea, perhaps in fear that if she gave herself too long to think about it she might change her mind.
Lucy knew that Detective Inspector Winston was attracted to her; although he had never been anything but polite she could read it clear as day in his eyes and the way he had so very deliberately not looked at her bare legs when she had been perched on the counter. She had noticed at the edge of her awareness even back then, but it had barely registered, all information unrelated to Jack coming to her as if through a fog, the same fog that had followed her for years, always threatening to envelop her. Somehow, since the news of Prince’s release, that fog had gradually cleared after the initial shock, leaving behind a sharp anger yes, but also the feeling that she was fully alive again.
The look Matt gave her when she opened the door to him was confirmation of her renewed state. His eyes drank her in, clearly appreciating the effort she had made with her hair, her make-up, her dress. Lucy found herself giving him a sultry smile.
‘You look lovely,’ he said, looking down at himself self-consciously, although he looked just as delectable himself, she thought with a half-smile. When they walked into Marco’s after a somewhat awkward car drive, Lucy saw the heated glances other women gave the man at her side and felt as giddy as a teenager at the school disco who had somehow managed to bag herself the hottest guy in school. Much as she had once felt with Ethan, yet back then she had been very much aware of being in his shadow. Somehow being next to Matt made her feel more secure, not less.
She ordered wine in an attempt to calm the fizzing in her gut, even though Matt was of course not drinking. He watched her as she sipped at it, his expression unreadable.
‘So, things are okay at home?’ They had already spoken about Ricky, who had been very much subdued after his run-in with Matt, so Lucy knew what he was referring to. She took another sip of wine before looking straight at him.
‘As good as can be expected. I still intend to do something, I just don’t quite know what yet.’
‘Maybe no more tabloid interviews,’ Matt suggested, and although his tone was light Lucy wondered if he meant it as a reprimand. She had seen the protesters on the news, pacing the town square that lay between the City Hall and the main station, no doubt causing the officers some extra work. Although she had applauded their efforts Lucy thought it strange that in the angry crowd of faces, all of them there because of her child – she had even spotted a home-made banner calling for ‘Justice for Jack’ – there hadn’t been one she recognised. No one who had ever even met either her or Jack.
Lucy smiled and opened her mouth to say something upbeat, but Matt reached over the table and closed a hand over hers.
‘Lucy, you don’t need to put a face on, not with me.’
As sudden tears stung at her eyes Lucy pulled her hand away, more sharply than she meant to, nearly knocking the bottle of wine over until Matt caught it with a deft flick of his wrist. Lucy was impressed.
‘Good reflexes.’
‘I used to box.’
Lucy looked at his broad shoulders and defined arms that his shirt couldn’t fail to highlight.
‘That fits. You look like a boxer, rather than a cop.’
Matt laughed.
‘Should I take that as a compliment?’
‘Maybe.’ She was flirting with him again, she realised, except this time it was natural rather than a contrived effort on her part. Aware of the attraction he felt for her, for the first time she felt the stirrings of desire on her own part, completely independent of who he was and how they were involved.
Although the question she needed to ask him still waited on her lips, it occurred to her that she could allow herself this at least; to sit opposite an attractive man and feel like a young woman again, with all the needs and desires of a young woman, that had been lying dormant under the weight of her grief.
Her leg brushed his under the table. It was an accident, or at least an unconscious movement, but when Matt didn’t move his leg away, only looked at her with a smile playing around the corners of his mouth, she realised he thought she had done it on purpose and felt her cheeks heat up.
‘Shall we order?’
She nodded and grabbed the menu, glad he had broken the loaded silence, and looked at the menu without seeing it, the words swimming in front of her eyes.
‘I’m having Bolognese,’ Matt told her, ‘not very original I know, but I don’t know what half of the things on that menu are. Why can’t they just write them in English?’
Lucy laughed.
‘That’s not very cosmopolitan, inspector.’
‘Will you please call me Matt? You’re making me feel old. But yeah, I’m a pie and potatoes man to be honest.’
‘Not steak and raw eggs? Isn’t that what you testosterone-fuelled boxer types eat?’
‘I think that’s bodybuilders,’ Matt laughed, ‘but what are you having? Salad?’
‘God no. I’ll have the Bolognese as well.’
They smiled at each other as Lucy took another sip of her wine. There was a pleasant warmth in her belly now that was as much due to laughter as alcohol.
‘You know, you’re surprisingly easy to be around. Even yesterday, when you brought Ricky back, it was nice to talk to you. I’ve been isolated lately.’ For a long time, she added to herself.
‘I can imagine,’ he said, leaning over as if he would say something more, but paused when the waitress came over to take their order. The girl’s eyes lingered on Matt as he ordered for them and Lucy felt a simultaneous stab of jealousy – the waitress was young, pretty and wearing a ridiculous tight uniform that showed every inch of her to full effect – and a frisson
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