The prosecution papers arrive on Tuesday as directed by the court. I phone and leave yet another message for Ellie – yet another call that she doesn’t return. By Friday afternoon, I wonder if I should notify the court that I’ve lost touch with her. On the one hand, I have a duty to let them know if I’m unable to prepare her case for a fully effective hearing. On the other hand, there’s still time. She may yet appear. I wonder if the police have discovered she’s missing yet. Has she been arrested? Am I about to get a call?
I send an email to Will: Still no sign of her. Not looking good.
Will emails back, Give her until Monday. Call me if you’ve heard nothing by then.
Alex texts on Friday evening to tell me that he’s been working late all week and will be spending the weekend at a conference, but will call round early the following week – that he has something for me, or more specifically, for Ben. I spend both days of the weekend in the park, walking Ben round and round the duck pond. He intermittently grabs at the railings or the leg of my jeans, but quickly lets go again and pushes my hand away if I try to help him, keen to prove to himself and to me that he can go it alone. This is the first time I’ve experienced this aspect of his character, this will to be independent, and although I’m under no illusion that he’ll ever, in fact, be truly independent of me, this new development still fills me with hope and joy.
On Monday I drop Ben off at nursery and head to court for a morning trial. I’m halfway through when I get a message from Lucy to say that there’s a client waiting for me at the office. I call her while the magistrates are out making their decision.
‘It’s Ellis Stephens,’ she tells me.
‘Tell her to wait for me,’ I insist. ‘Don’t let her go anywhere. Lock her in if you have to.’
‘Isn’t that illegal?’ asks Lucy.
I sigh. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
When I arrive back at the office an hour later, Ellie has gone.
‘She said she was going to the shops,’ Lucy tells me. ‘She’s left her number though. She said to call her when you get back.’
Lucy hands me a pink post-it with a mobile number scrawled on it in her big bubbly handwriting. I note with irony that it’s the same number I have stored for Ellie, the number I’ve been calling for the past week. I take out my phone and ring it.
‘Hi,’ says Ellie, picking up.
‘Ellie, where on earth have you been?’ I reprimand her. ‘I’ve left you a billion messages.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Sorry about that. I... I lost my phone.’
‘But you found it again?’
‘Yes.’
‘So how’s your gran?’ I ask her.
A pause. ‘OK,’ she says.
‘And what about your passport? Where is it?’
‘I’ve just been and handed it in.’
‘And they didn’t arrest you?’
‘No. They just took it. I don’t think they’ve been round.’
‘Jeez, Ellie. You’ve been sailing close to the wind,’ I say. ‘Are you OK? I’ve been worried.’
‘Really?’ Ellie sounds surprised.
‘Really. The court hearing’s tomorrow. I thought you’d done a runner.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Thanks for trying to help. Marie told me you came round.’
Did she tell you that I was inside your flat with her, poking around? I wonder. ‘Yes, well, I’m sorry if I intruded,’ I tell her. ‘I was worried that you’d get arrested and banged up again. Neither of us wants that.’
‘No,’ she agrees.
‘Well, hurry up and get back here. We’ve a lot to get through.’
‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’m on my way.’
*
Ellie slides her phone across the desk towards me. It’s an iPhone 7: top of the range. I note that her hands are perfectly manicured, her nails painted a pretty baby pink.
‘That’s Finn,’ she says.
Both Finn and Ellie are in the picture. Finn is beautiful, like his mother; I wouldn’t have expected anything else. His eyes are a startling blue and his face is creased up into a gigantic smile as he looks adoringly up into Ellie’s eyes.
‘He’s gorgeous. He looks like you,’ I say. I hand her back the phone. ‘So, how did you meet him?’
‘Who?’
‘Jay Barrington-Brown.’
Ellie looks down at her hands and picks at the cuticle surrounding her pink thumbnail. ‘At a party.’
‘A party... where?’
‘The Royal Cadogan. Knightsbridge.’
‘So what were you doing there?’
‘Working.’
‘Doing what?’
Ellie sighs. ‘Didn’t Anna tell you all of this? Do I really need to go over it again?’
‘All right. We’ll come back to that later. Let’s go through the statements. The initial case papers came in last week.’ I open the file of papers in front of me and hand a set to Ellie.
I look up. Ellie looks back at me in silence.
‘So, first we have the witness statement from your social worker Heather Grainger. She was assigned to your case in April after Finn was admitted to hospital for the first time.’
‘He had a chest infection, that’s all. A virus.’
‘I know,’ I agree. ‘No one is suggesting that it was anything else on that occasion. But we also have statements from the two nurses that treated him, who say that when they removed his clothing, he had a number of injuries which varied in age and ranged from smaller ones on his arms, finger-sized bruises that looked as though he’d been grabbed or held too tightly, to larger ones on his legs and trunk, which had the appearance of knuckle marks.’
Ellie shakes her head. ‘Anna said they couldn’t prove that. The expert in the other case – he said they were accidental.’
‘He didn’t say that. He said that he couldn’t say definitively that they weren’t accidental. There’s a difference. The prosecution in the criminal proceedings can still use their own findings as part of their case. This evidence is important, Ellie.’ I look up at her. ‘The number of injuries and the period of time over which they occurred help to build an overall picture of harm to Finn whilst he was in your care, which they’ll use as a backdrop to what happens next.’
I pull out the colour copies of the medical exhibit photographs of Finn’s arms, trunk and legs and spread them across my desk, so that she can see them. ‘There are quite a few bruises, there’s no getting away from it.’ I peer at a close-up shot of what I imagine, after cross-referencing with the nurse’s statements, is Finn’s abdomen. ‘This one on his tummy is big. Then there are these,’ I continue, pointing to some healed scabs of varying ages which are scattered on his legs and on the backs of his hands. ‘The prosecution expert says these are cigarette burns. And, whatever the expert said in the family proceedings, a jury might well conclude that all of these injuries were deliberately inflicted.’
Ellie says, stubbornly, ‘Well, they weren’t.’
‘Then, how did they get there?’
Ellie colours a little. ‘Finn was accident-prone. He was always climbing onto things, falling off...’ She tails off.
I put the exhibits down on the desk and look Ellie in the eye. She glances up and meets my gaze. ‘Did anyone else look after Finn for you?’ I ask her. ‘During that period, did anyone else babysit?’
She shakes her head.
‘What... never?’ I persist. ‘Not even once? A neighbour, perhaps? While you popped to the shop?’
Ellie’s eyelashes flicker for a second. ‘No,’ she says, firmly. ‘No one.’
‘And when you went to work? Hairdressing,’ I add, looking her squarely in the eye.
‘I took him with me.’
‘Really? Every time?’
She shrugs. ‘Yeah.’
I let out a sigh and turn back to the papers in front of me. ‘OK. Well, Heather Grainger’s now made a second statement. She cites a number of instances, when Finn was first taken into care, when you had supervised contact, when your care of him was lacking. She says that she had a number of concerns about your parenting.’
Ellie heaves a sigh and rolls her eyes.
‘Why would she say that?’
‘Because she hates me, that’s why.’ She folds her arms and sits back in her chair.
‘She does agree that her relationship with you was a difficult one,’ I agree. ‘She mentions several arguments you’d had, about you prop-feeding Finn, sleeping in the same bed with him, things like that. She was concerned that you thought you knew best, that you wouldn’t be told anything, that you were unwilling to acknowledge any problems.’
‘She was in my face all the time,’ Ellie says, sulkily. ‘I did what she said, but it was never good enough for her.’
I nod. ‘OK. Well that’s open to interpretation, I suppose. But she also says that, on one occasion, she asked you about the bruises and you told her that you may have grabbed Finn, or held him too hard.’
‘I don’t remember saying that. But if I did, it’s not true.’
I look up. ‘Then, why—’
‘Look,’ Ellie protests. ‘I was trying to get Finn back, OK? Anna told me that I had to cooperate. I was supposed to tell her what she wanted to hear.’
‘Not if it wasn’t true.’
‘Of course it wasn’t true. I would never hurt Finn. I told you, I don’t know how he got those bruises,’ Ellie insists, then shakes her head, dismissively. She folds her arms and swings back on her chair leg. ‘But why does any of this matter? I told you, they were going to give Finn back to me. They gave me overnight contact, unsupervised!’
I nod. ‘Which was when Finn fell seriously ill.’
Ellie glares at me, her cheeks flushed. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on my side?’
‘Ellie, I am on your side,’ I sigh. ‘But I’m putting the case to you – the case against you – and I need to know your answers before anyone else in that courtroom does. Trust me, when you’re standing in the witness box and the prosecutor is asking you the same questions I’m asking you, she’s not going to be on your side and you’re going to know about it. She’s going to rip you to shreds.’
‘She can try,’ Ellie mutters. She takes her phone back out of her bag and starts to scroll through her messages.
I look at her in silence until she looks up to face me and meets my gaze. Her face is like stone, her eyes angry.
‘I know the prosecutor,’ I tell her. ‘Carmel Oliver. She’s the Crown’s instructed advocate in this case and she’s good. She does all their children cases. You want to know what she’s going to do?’
Ellie doesn’t answer, but she’s looking at me.
‘Here’s what she’s going to do. First of all she’s going to do everything she can to show you up in the worst possible light as a mother. She’s going to get you to admit that you were inadequate, that you didn’t look after Finn properly, that you didn’t always respond when he cried, or dress him appropriately for the weather. That you didn’t get him the medical attention that he needed when he needed it.’
‘But Will said there’s no direct evidence—’
‘There’s evidence.’ I cut Ellie off, sharply, the exasperation I’m feeling now creeping into my voice. ‘And what Heather Grainger witnessed is supported by the circumstantial evidence that is your background, your upbringing. As Will has already told you, in the absence of any other credible explanation, the finger is going to point firmly and squarely at you.’
I pause, as I watch Ellie take this in. I now have her full attention. I can see that taking the hard line with her is the right thing to do.
‘The prosecutor is going to do everything she can to show the jury that you did a lot more than neglect Finn,’ I continue, ‘but she’s not going to do it straight away. First, she’s going to show them why. First, she’s going to get you to talk about your parents.’ I look at Ellie with sympathy for a moment, as I imagine the prosecutor might, and then I say, ‘They were drug addicts, weren’t they, Ellie? Junkies. Their instinct, their motivation, was not to protect and nurture the child they’d made together; it was to secure their next fix – and that was all. They were so bound up in their own needs, their own desires, that they were unable to see you. They didn’t love you, Ellie. They didn’t want you. Your own parents didn’t want you. God, that must hurt. How does that make you feel?’
Ellie’s face turns pink.
‘You were in the way,’ I persist. ‘You were a nuisance. You were abandoned, used, misused by them. You were left to crawl around the flat and pick up the sharps that they and their druggy friends had dropped. You were left in a stinking nappy for hours until your bottom was sore. When you were hungry and crying and found your parents slumped on the sofa, when you tried to crawl up beside them to get their attention, you were met with their spaced-out faces, their eyeballs rolling back in their heads. You must have been so scared, Ellie. These were your parents – the ones who were supposed to take care of you, protect you, feed you, love you... who was going to look after you? Who was in charge?’
Ellie says. ‘So what? What does that prove? I don’t remember any of that, anyway.’
‘Just because you don’t remember it consciously, it doesn’t mean it isn’t all stored away in here.’ I tap my head. ‘You were twelve months old, the same age as Finn is now, when you went into care. But Finn knows you’re his mother, right? You carried him in your womb for nine months, it’s your voice he heard every day. You’re the person who he snuggled up to in the first few months of his life, who gave him his first experience of security. He was a helpless baby. He needed you, just like you needed your mother. But she wasn’t there for you. No one was.’
Ellie bites her lip.
‘There is no granny in Kent, is there Ellie?’ I continue. ‘You had no mother, no father, no grandparents – no one; no one who had any emotional connection with you whatsoever. All you had was a series of staff members in a care home who had twenty other kids to look after. There was no one who was there just for you, to pick you up when you fell over, to stroke your hair and tell you funny stories when you were sad, to wipe away your tears and... and to love you, Ellie, to love you, in the way that you so desperately needed, in the way that you deserved.’
Ellie looks away at the window. Her lips are pursed and angry tears are forming in the corners of her eyes. I wait a moment, but she refuses to look at me.
‘If there was no one to do that,’ I say, allowing the emotion to creep into my voice, ‘if there was no one to care for you and be there for you when you needed them most, if no one has ever touched you or held you, or brushed your tears away when you cried... then how could you have ever learned to love your own baby?’
‘But I do love him,’ Ellie protests. ‘I do! I can.’
‘No, you don’t! You can’t. You don’t know how! When Finn cries, it’s just noise to you. You try. You try to be patient, but he’s so demanding. He needs so much from you. You never get any time to yourself. You get so angry with him, so mad, when he needs you that way. After all, no one was ever there for you, so why should he be special, huh?’
‘He is special,’ Ellie says. ‘He’s beautiful.’
‘So were you, Ellie. But it wasn’t enough, was it? Babies are hard work. They don’t stop needing you just because you’re tired and at the end of your rope. Finn needed you too much, didn’t he? He just wanted everything. He sucked every little drop of energy out of you, he took over your life. You weren’t prepared for it. And after a few weeks of this, of trying to do the right thing, you couldn’t cope any more. You snapped.’
Ellie shakes her head vigorously, her face contorting in rage and pain, her eyes glistening. ‘No!’
‘Oh, you didn’t mean to,’ I say. ‘The first time you picked him up a bit too roughly and saw the fingermarks on his arms, you were mortified. You thought to yourself, did I do that? Can I cause a bruise like that, just by holding his arms? But the next time he cried, the only way you could stop him was to slap him – which worked at first, but... but then it didn’t any more, and before you knew it you were smacking him regularly. Then one day you punched him in the stomach until you’d winded him. That shut him up, didn’t it?’
‘No, because I didn’t do it!’ Ellie sobs.
‘Then who did?!’ I yell.
‘I don’t know!’ Ellie yells back, tears now streaming down her face. She pulls the sleeves of her top down over her hands and wipes her eyes with them.
I pick up my pen and start tapping it on the desk. ‘You don’t know?’ I repeat, my voice loaded with sarcasm. ‘You’re his mother! How could you not know? You say no one else looked after him for you, that you were with him all the time. And yet, you don’t know how he got these injuries. Your story doesn’t add up. It makes no sense. And that’s because there is no other explanation, is there, Ellie?’ I push the photo exhibits across the desk towards her. ‘It was you who did this to Finn!’
‘All right!’ Ellie cries angrily. She inhales deeply and licks her lips. ‘You can stop now,’ she says. ‘I get the picture.’
I shake my head. ‘But I don’t think you do. That’s just for starters. After that, once she’s made you cry and got you to admit you had a crappy childhood and are unable to empathise with your baby, she’s going to go beyond that. She’s going to suggest that you’ve got a bit of a sadistic streak, that you’ve started to enjoy this power you had over Finn. After all, you had so little control over anything when you were growing up, and here it is at last, the power to finally make another human being shut up and listen to you, to behave the way you want him to. You’ve beaten Finn, you’ve burned him with cigarettes and you’ve fed him salt until he’s so sick that he’s practically unconscious. If Heather Grainger hadn’t arrived when she did, Finn would have died.’
‘That’s not true!’ Ellie protests. ‘I was just about to call someone!’
‘But you didn’t, Ellie. You didn’t call anyone and the jury will only have your word that you were going to do so. Heather Grainger says that Finn was barely conscious when she arrived. The jury will want to know why in God’s name you hadn’t dialled nine-nine-nine already.’
Ellie puts her head in her hands. After a moment, she flicks her hair back and looks up again. ‘Because I was scared, OK? I... I knew how it would look, and I was scared.’
‘Of what? What is it that you’re hiding from me?’
A tiny flicker of fear crosses her face. ‘I... I didn’t know what was wrong with him, OK? I knew they’d ask me loads of questions, about how he’d got like that, but I didn’t know the answers. I was worried they’d take him away from me again if they knew...’
‘Knew what?’
‘That I’d left him with Marie and gone to work! OK?’ she splutters, her eyes wide and frightened.
I look at her in silence for a moment. ‘He was with Marie?’
She nods.
‘When he became ill?’
She hesitates. I can see she’s thinking hard about what she’s about to say. ‘Well, I can’t remember exactly if he became ill then, or... maybe, was it after he got back? It’s hard to...’
‘Why are you protecting her, Ellie?’
‘I’m not. Marie hasn’t done anything wrong.’
‘Are they threatening you?’ I ask her. ‘Her and her boyfriend? Are they blackmailing you?’
She looks up at me and sneers, unconvincingly. ‘No.’
I put down my pen and look her in the eye. ‘Ellie, I know. OK? I know why Marie was babysitting for you. I want to help you, but if I’m to have any chance of properly preparing your case you need to start telling me the truth.’
She looks at me silently for a moment. ‘What?’ she whispers. ‘How...’
‘Look at you.’ I wave my hand at her. ‘You’re beautiful. You’re immaculately dressed. Your handbag’s... what? Louis Vuitton? Or is it Miu Miu? Your perfume... I don’t know what that is, but I can tell it’s expensive. When you were collecting your property in the cells... then when I went to collect your passport with Marie and I saw what was inside your wardrobe...’
I wait for her to speak. She scrutinises my face, but says nothing.
‘Ellie, I saw your underwear,’ I confess.
She bites her lip and her neck flushes pink.
‘You do realise, don’t you, that if this comes out in court and you haven’t fully discussed it with Will and me, we’re going to be at a disadvantage. We won’t be able to defend you properly.’
Ellie looks startled. ‘Do they know? The prosecution?’
‘Not that I’m aware of. It’s not mentioned in any of the statements we’ve received so far. But we haven’t yet seen what Jay has to say.’
She shakes her head. ‘He won’t give a statement,’ she says. ‘He won’t give evidence against me. He doesn’t want anyone to know about... about that.’
I nod, slowly. ‘So that’s how you met. And why you didn’t want me to talk to him.’
Ellie looks down at her lap. She says nothing for a moment. ‘If I tell you... if I tell you everything, do you have to tell the court?’
‘No. But I think it might be helpful if you did.’
‘What!’ Her mouth drops open. ‘How’s that going to help? They already think I’m a bad mother. What are they going to say when they find out I’m a whore?’
‘I thought the job title was “escort”?’
She gives me a wry smile. ‘I thought you wanted me to be straight with you?’
‘Look, Ellie, there might not be much difference between an escort and a whore,’ I say. ‘But there’s a big difference between making mistakes as a parent and deliberately hurting your child. Most of us do the former. The latter is what you’re being prosecuted for.’
Ellie sighs, heavily. ‘It would be in the papers. Everyone would know.’
‘That’s probably true. But it’s not illegal, and it hasn’t necessarily harmed Finn. So long as you’ve been careful...’
‘I’m always careful.’
‘...and you haven’t got involved with drugs.’
‘I wouldn’t touch that muck.’
‘Then, you haven’t done anything wrong, not in the eyes of the law, anyway. Whereas if you’re locked up for... for this... well, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see Finn again.’
Ellie squeezes her eyes shut. A teardrop escapes. She moves her head sharply down and her forehead furrows. After a moment she opens her eyes and looks up at me. ‘But I might not ever see him again,’ she says, her voice barely more than a whisper. ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to see him again, do I?’
I take a deep breath. I lean forward and touch her hand. ‘It’s been over two weeks and he’s still alive, Ellie. There’s still hope.’
She shakes her head, her eyes brimming with tears again. ‘Have you any idea what this is like?’ she asks. ‘Waking up every day, without him. Every day, it’s like I’m there in the hospital again, seeing my baby’s blood all over the floor... seeing him lying there unconscious and watching the doctors trying to save his life. I didn’t even have a chance to kiss him goodbye. The cops dragged me away. That was the last time I saw him. I spend a week in prison, not knowing if he was going to live or die, and now this... It’s killing me,’ she sobs. ‘Not seeing him, not being able to hold him and be with him. It’s tearing me apart!’ She waves her hands at the photo exhibits. ‘Do you think I don’t want to know who did all this stuff, who pulled that fucking tube out? Do you think I don’t worry, every minute of every day, that it’s going to happen again?’
I nod. I know the kind of fear that she’s describing – the icy kind of fear that clutches at your stomach, that lives with you, hour after hour, day after day.
‘We can’t stop time while we wait for Finn to get better,’ I tell her. ‘We have to prepare your case. What happened in the hospital... well, the evidence against you is largely circumstantial. We’ll explore that further once we get the CCTV. But who caused the injuries, how and what he swallowed on the day he was admitted to hospital... this is crucial to the case as a whole. Finn was in your care. At this moment in time, the finger is pointing at you, fairly and squarely. If you didn’t hurt Finn – and I believe you that you didn’t – you are going to need to tell the court who did. You need to tell the truth.’
Ellie turns her tear-streaked face towards the window again for a minute, and then says, ‘I don’t want to get Marie into trouble.’
‘Ellie!’ I shake my head, my voice rising in disbelief. ‘Don’t you care that he’s been poisoned while she was looking after him? If it was me, I’d have been banging her front door down, demanding to know what she’s done to my child.’
‘But I don’t think she hurt Finn. She’d never hurt Finn.’
‘So you’ve never even confronted her about any of this?’
‘Of course I have. I asked her about it, all of it,’ Ellie protests. ‘She said she didn’t know.’
‘And that was good enough for you? You just accepted that and handed Finn back over to her?’
‘No! It wasn’t like that!’
‘Well, what was it like, then?’ I demand.
She looks up, plaintively. ‘I thought the bruises were accidental. I really did. That’s what the expert said.’ She catches my eye and corrects herself. ‘That’s kind of what he said. But I didn’t know then what I know now...’ She tails off.
I pull my computer keyboard towards me and open a new document. ‘Go on.’
Ellie pulls her sleeves down over her hands again and wipes at her eyes. ‘I did notice some bruises a few times,’ she says. ‘But they were small, and there weren’t that many, nothing like that.’ She waves her hand at the exhibits, which are now stacked into a pile on the corner of my desk. ‘I bruise easily,’ she adds. ‘I just thought Finn did too. He learned to sit up and then he was crawling and then he was pulling himself up onto furniture and falling down again all the time, and... But those pictures... I honestly didn’t realise he had so many bruises. I’d been away.’
‘Away?’
‘The week before he got that virus and went into hospital. I’d been away with a client. An overseas booking. He was a... a politician. Quite a well-known one.’ She glances up at me and I think for a moment that she’s going to tell me who it is. ‘When I got back and picked Finn up from Marie and got him changed for bed, I was really shocked, and worried, when I saw how many bruises he had, and that big one... the one on his tummy. I’d never seen that before, I swear. But I still thought they must have been an accident. Once he was on the move, there was no stopping him. He could climb onto anything, the sofa, the coffee table... he was always falling off.’
‘And the cigarette burns?’
‘I thought he had impetigo.’
I look up from the computer screen. ‘Impetigo?’
‘I had it when I was a kid,’ she explains. ‘That’s kind of what it looks like. I never... I never thought for even a moment that someone had burned him.’
‘So, did you take him to the doctor?’
‘It wasn’t that bad.’ She looks up. ‘I mean, obviously it was if it was what they’re saying it was. But I thought it was just a few... scabs. I always used to have to just keep them clean. You’re not supposed to do anything about impetigo unless it gets infected.’
I tap at my keyboard and she waits for me to catch up with what she’s said, before adding, ‘I can’t believe Marie would do that. She wouldn’t do anything to hurt him. Not on purpose.’
‘Maybe not on purpose. But she drinks and she smokes and she’s clumsy, Ellie. She nearly set fire to her carpet when I was there. And then there’s her boyfriend. Darren.’
‘You met Darren?’
‘Yes. Tell me about him.’
Ellie pushes a strand of hair behind her ear, sighs and looks away at the window again. ‘His name’s Darren Webb. They’ve been together ages. I thought he was OK. I even kind of liked him. I mean, I knew he was a bit... I knew he liked a drink and that. I knew they argued, him and Marie. But it didn’t seem anything to worry about. But now I know other things about him. I’ve heard stuff. And when I got arrested the first time, he threatened me. He was waiting outside the police station when they released me on bail.’
I look up. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said that if I dragged him into any of this, he’d tell Social Services that I was a hooker and I’d never see Finn again.’
I stop typing and look at her. ‘He threatened you?’
‘Yes. And I believed him. Especially later, when I found out...’
‘What?’
‘That he’s a drug dealer. I’ve seen people coming and going from Marie’s flat. I’ve seen people getting into his car on the back of the estate. And I’ve heard he carries a knife.’
‘So is it possible that he did these things to Finn?’
‘Well, yes. Of course it’s possible.’ She glances at me. ‘And I feel terrible. I would never have left Finn anywhere near him if I’d known.’
I think about this for a moment. ‘Is it possible that Darren left drugs lying around? That Finn could have swallowed something, the day he fell ill?’
She shrugs. ‘Well, yeah. Of course it is. Like I said, Finn was into everything... every cupboard, every drawer. But if you say anything... he’ll just deny it. How are you going to prove it was him?’
‘I don’t know yet. But in the meantime, you need to tell me the truth about their involvement with Finn, his and Marie’s.’
‘OK,’ she agrees.
‘So, when did Marie start looking after him?’
‘From day one,’ she says. ‘Pretty much. Well, not day one, obviously, but she had him a few times for me, here and there from when he was around three months old. And then when he was a bit bigger, I just took on more and more work.’
‘So when did you first start to leave him for any length of time?’
‘I don’t know. When he was around five or six months old, I suppose. Marie started having him overnight.’
I flick through my bundle of papers and pull out the statement of the A&E nurses. ‘So would that coincide with when the bruises first began to appear?’
‘Yes. Probably.’
‘Do you have any dates? Dates that you worked?’
‘I didn’t keep a diary. I would just get a call asking me to work, and I’d go. I kept it all in here.’ She taps her head.
‘Who was in charge of your bookings?’
‘The agency. It’s called Charms of Chelsea. It’s just off Sloane Square.’
I tap Ellie’s words into the computer. ‘So, can you speak to them? They must have a record.’
‘OK.’
‘Get the dates, and then we’ll go through the statements in detail. So... if Darren knew what you were doing, presumably Marie knew too?’
‘Yes. It was a friend of hers who introduced me to the agency. She got me into it in the first place.’
‘Really?’
‘Her friend, not Marie. Marie isn’t really cut out for the escort business.’
‘No. I can... I can see that wouldn’t be an obvious choice for her.’
Ellie says, ‘She hasn’t always looked how she does now. She used to be quite slim. But it wasn’t for her anyway. She said she’d rather have a pint than a shag.’
‘She likes a drink, does she?’
Ellie frowns. ‘She’s not an alcoholic, if that’s what you’re saying.’
‘She was drunk when I was there.’
‘Maybe, but she’s not like that all the time.’ She looks up. ‘Marie’s a good friend,’ she insists. ‘And she was willing to have Finn whenever I wanted, and keep him overnight. She’s just next door. It was easy. I thought I was doing the right thing, for me and for Finn; I was just trying to earn enough money to get a better life for us both, to get us off the estate.’
‘So, how much did you earn?’
‘Anything between a hundred and fifteen hundred pounds per client. It would depend.’
I nod, quickly. I know what it depends on; I don’t need the detail.
‘And how much did you pay Marie?’
‘I paid her well. It depends on what I earned but if I was out all night she’d get a hundred plus.’
‘OK. So how often would she have Finn?’
‘Whenever I got work. It could be one night per week or three or four clients in one day.’
I try my hardest not to picture this. ‘So, is it fair to say that there were weeks when you weren’t at home very much?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Marie would have Finn every time?’
‘Yes. She was really good. I could just get a call, pick Finn up with his things and take him next door five minutes later. She’d have him overnight for as long as I needed her to.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised. I expect she was more than happy to have him; she must have been making pretty good money herself. But what about Jay? Why didn’t you ask him? Or his parents?’
Ellie shakes her head. ‘Jay’s mum offered to babysit, but I just told her I was breastfeeding Finn and couldn’t express much milk. I think Jay knew that that wasn’t true, but he didn’t want her to get wind of what I did for a living any more than I did.’
‘So was there ever a genuine relationship between the two of you?’
Ellie hesitates for a moment. ‘No. Although... he was a regular client. I saw him for at least six months before I fell pregnant.’
‘So, how did that happen? If you’re always careful?’
Ellie shrugs. ‘I was sick, messed up with my pills that month. I always make them use a rubber anyway. But he liked to do it without. He was always asking and just the one time I let him. I never did that for anyone else.’
I look at her. ‘Do you think you were falling for him?’
Ellie doesn’t answer.
‘Did he have feelings for you?’
Ellie shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know. But I’m not stupid. He was never going to marry me, a hooker from a housing estate. He would never have done anything about it if he had.’
*
By the time we’ve been through the toxicology report and I’ve taken details of what Ellie’s given Finn to eat, I can see that she’s had enough. We still don’t know if the evidence from the agency nurse will be admissible and there’s nothing yet from the doctors, so I tell her that we will call it a day.
I follow her down the stairs into the reception area. ‘Ellie, tell me something,’ I ask. ‘About the escorting.’
‘I’ve stopped,’ she says, quickly. ‘I’m not doing it any more, I promise. That last one... the one last week. That was a one-off. I owed him. He’d bought me a lot of nice clothes and stuff. But I can’t risk it any more. They’ll hold it against me. I can’t risk losing Finn.’
‘That wasn’t what I was going to ask, actually.’
She turns to face me. ‘Oh. So, what? You want an introduction?’ she asks.
I laugh and glance over at Lucy who, fortunately, has her headphones on and is busy typing.
‘You’ve got a good figure. You’re pretty,’ Ellie adds. ‘You could make some good money.’
‘Thanks,’ I smile. ‘I’ll bear that in mind when the next round of legal aid cuts comes in. But what I want to know is, what do you talk about? I mean, isn’t the idea behind escorting that you provide great company and witty, sparkling conversation and generally make the man feel as though he’s on a first date, albeit one that comes with a guarantee of sex at the end?’
‘Pretty much,’ she agrees.
‘So, don’t take this the wrong way, but conversation doesn’t exactly seem to be your thing. What do you talk about?’
Ellie looks at me for a moment. ‘Cars,’ she says.
‘Cars?’
‘I watch Top Gear and I read the Telegraph. That pretty much covers it. After that you just have to listen.’
I smile. ‘I’d bet you could teach us women a thing or two about men.’
Ellie shrugs. ‘There’s only one thing you need to know about men.’
‘What’s that?’
‘They’re not women,’ she says, before pushing the door open and walking out into the street.