Friday 8th December 2023
Chrissy
Chrissy kicks her front door closed, stands in her hallway and throws her car keys at the wall. She is seething with frustration, her head full of what Izzy told her, her teeth grinding in anger that the prison staff wouldn’t allow her to see Leo’s visitation record. But I’m his mum, she’d argued with them. They’d looked at her steadily, no intention of breaking protocol no matter how much she begged. I’m trying to find him, she’d almost blurted, before biting her tongue. They couldn’t know.
Bending to retrieve her keys, she stalls when she spots a white, windowed envelope on the mat between her feet. It’s addressed to Leo. Marked CONFIDENTIAL. She tears it open, hungry for clues.
Conditions breached … Please report immediately …
Sickness hits her stomach. Leo has missed his appointment with his probation officer. Her fear explodes like something unlocked and she drags her mobile out of her pocket. What had she been thinking, tiptoeing around, worrying about frowny prison guards? He could be in danger, could be—
‘I need to report a missing person,’ she blurts into the phone, the envelope slipping out of her grip.
Not long after she’s finished on her mobile, her home phone starts to ring. Did she give the police her landline number, amid all the other details she recited in a haze? She rushes to answer it, shoving back her hair as it flops into her face.
‘Hello?’
Once again, there is silence on the other end.
‘Hello?’ Her voice sounds pleading now, then exasperated. ‘Leo? Leo, is that you?’
But whoever it is, they are gone.
Chrissy recognises the two officers when they eventually arrive – the man with the bushy beard and the woman with braided hair – and even remembers their names, Ben and Kiri, just before they introduce themselves as PCs Lochland and Marley. She must’ve met them at one of the awards parties or other events Alice used to take her to in support of Peter. Or perhaps she’d served them in the Raven; he used to bring colleagues in there sometimes if they’d been on shift nearby.
She wonders what they’re thinking as she leads them to the kitchen, repeating over and over that Leo wouldn’t deliberately break the terms of his release. They must know what happened, why he’s been in jail, but they go right back to the beginning with their questions.
‘What crime was your son convicted of?’ the woman, Kiri, asks.
Chrissy blinks. He’s missing but it’s still his crime they’re interested in?
She despises the word she needs to say in reply; the violent, literal sound of it.
‘Manslaughter,’ she murmurs, and watches Kiri note it down without reacting.
There is a word that’s worse, of course. She remembers doubling over, tears on her cheeks, when she found out Leo would not be charged with murder. The relief was like a guilty secret, a tangle of hope and shame.
‘It was an argument,’ she says now. ‘A – a punch or a push, it was never established. Robbie fell, hit his head …’
She’s said it many times before, but it rarely makes a difference to how people look at her. Perhaps they think she’s trying to trivialise it. Maybe she is? But what she said to Alice that day in her kitchen came out so wrong. She didn’t mean that Robbie brought it on himself, got what was coming to him. Of course that wasn’t what she meant.
After that, Chrissy didn’t dare ask the question of anyone else who might’ve heard the boys arguing. Leo was the only other person she ever broached it with, but he would shut down, say it no longer mattered, his shoulders hunched and his fingers curled into half-fists.
‘And he was intending to come back here?’ the male officer, Ben, asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you think of any reason he might skip parole? Go on the run?’
‘He’s not on the run!’
‘In the case of a recently released prisoner—’
‘He was let out two years early.’ Chrissy’s voice rises. ‘He did everything that was asked of him inside. Education. Working. Behaving himself. Why the hell would he run away?’
Neither of them answers. Chrissy forces herself to breathe deeply, count to ten – losing her temper won’t do her any favours. She has to get through to them: Leo needs help. She gets up and walks over to a kitchen drawer.
Her hands shake as she gathers up the notes, realising just how many there have been. She smooths out the ones she screwed up in anger, and pauses over the one right at the back – the very first, folded the tightest – wondering what the officers might make of it.
You have to show them everything, she chides herself.
For Leo.
But she pushes that one deeper into the drawer, closes it and brings the rest over to the table.
Kiri’s eyebrows lift. ‘Are these …?’
‘I’ve been getting them every few weeks since I moved into this house.’
‘And you didn’t report this?’
Chrissy ignores her faintly disapproving tone, sliding the most recent one forward. ‘This was left on my bin on Leo’s release day. It’s the first one aimed at him, not just me. I didn’t really care when it was me.’ She falters, thinking of the exception. ‘But Leo …’ Her eyes cloud with tears and she gestures in exasperation. ‘Someone wanted him to stay away and now—’
‘Do you know who they’re from?’
Chrissy’s hands sink to her lap. As her mouth starts to shape Alice’s name, a lurch of sickness clamps her lips together. She takes jagged breaths through her nose, battling with herself. Why can’t she say it? Is her loyalty so deeply ingrained?
Or is she afraid of what might happen if she accuses Alice outright? Afraid of how much she gave to her, showed to her, back when it was unthinkable they would never not be friends. All those precious pieces of herself.
‘The … the whole village turned against him – and me – after what happened. It pains me to say it, but … there are lots of people who might wish him harm. That’s why I’m so worried. Why I need you to—’ Her voice cracks and she holds a hand over her mouth.
Ben pulls out his phone and takes several photos of the notes. Kiri writes something down, murmurs about fingerprints. Chrissy sits forward and words start tumbling in panic. ‘Can you get a record from the prison of who visited Leo? I heard someone new visited him right near the end. And can you talk to some of the other inmates, find out if they know anything? I really think—’
‘We’ll do what we can,’ Ben interrupts, somewhat guardedly. ‘In the meantime, can we have a look around?’
‘Around … the house?’ The suggestion throws her right off. Nobody except her has even been upstairs in this cottage. ‘Um … well, yes. It just seems like … He hasn’t even been here before. We lived above the pub, until … And I’m very certain he’s not hiding under a bed …’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Kiri says, with a slow blink that Chrissy can’t interpret.
Ben goes to poke around the house and Chrissy sits with Kiri, listening to the sounds of him moving from room to room. This all feels wrong. Now that she’s made the leap and told the police, she wants helicopters, search parties, CCTV. A trace on her landline, perhaps? She opens her mouth to ask, but Kiri gets to her feet and walks over to the collage of Chrissy-and-Leo photos pinned proudly
to the wall.
They’re both silent as the officer’s eyes move over it. Chrissy feels herself growing protective of her amateur art project, which should have been another welcome-home surprise. She gazes at Leo, her boy who writes songs like nothing she’s ever heard, who can make her laugh even when she’s angry or exhausted with life.
‘No photos of his dad?’
Chrissy stiffens. ‘What?’
Kiri turns with a new flare of interest in her eyes. ‘You … don’t have any photos of his dad …’ She gestures around the whole kitchen, as Chrissy’s face turns hot.
It’s true, she cherry-picked photos without Ethan in. It seemed only natural as she was doing it – the collage was about her and Leo, reunited – but now she sees what it looks like, Ethan airbrushed out of their lives.
‘Ethan, wasn’t it?’ Kiri says. ‘Head teacher up at the school, wasn’t he?’
Chrissy stares at her. All pretence of not knowing each other lifts like a curtain. Was she one of the officers who came to the flat that night, almost four years ago now? Who took a statement while Chrissy sat on the stairs rocking uncontrollably?
An image flashes into her head. How grey and shrunken Ethan looked – powerless, for once, hanging there – and how she gazed into his blank eyes, feeling nothing, not yet, before her vision blacked and she crumbled.
‘Is that …’ her voice breaks again ‘… relevant?’
The policewoman looks away without answering.
Chrissy kicks back her chair and stands up. The room pinwheels and she thinks she’s going to fall straight over. ‘What happens next?’ she demands, putting her hand on the tabletop. ‘Are you going to search for my son?’
‘Of course.’ Kiri’s eyes flicker back to the notes. ‘We’re just the on-call officers, but a detective will be in touch.’
‘He’s not just taken off,’ Chrissy says urgently, one last time. ‘Something’s happened to him. I’ve been getting calls. Silent ones. Maybe he’s …’
‘We’ll do everything we can,’ Kiri says, parroting her colleague’s earlier promise. ‘In these circumstances, I’m sure they’ll make this a priority.’
But her words aren’t comforting. They sound more like a threat. Chrissy hugs her elbows, dread binding itself around her.
‘You’ve had a bad time of it,’ Kiri adds, almost matter-of-factly. ‘Losing your husband, then your son going to prison, and now …’
Chrissy gapes at her. Kiri looks calmly back, and Chrissy can’t tell if her tone is supposed to be sympathetic, or something else. And what the hell can she say in response? It’s true, life has thrown everything at her. Leo is all she has left.
‘Just find him,’ she croaks. Then picks up her cigarettes and walks out of the room.