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Three months later
Just before Christmas 2004
I sat down at the kitchen table, feeling sweat drip down my back, aching in my calf muscles, a drumming pain in my shinbone. There was something about exercising: feeling the agony of pushing your body to the limits, your pulse rate rage above a hundred and forty. It was the only time my mind was truly empty and, for a few moments, I was able to forget Joe.
I checked my watch. Ten miles in just over an hour. It wasn’t good enough; I needed to get down to an hour.
Over a few months I’d transformed my body. Now it was lean, toned, fit. And very strong. My resting heart rate was down to forty-nine. Getting into shape had become an obsession. I’d taken up karate again, for the first time since my mid-twenties, and had moved from brown to black belt easily. I could bring down anyone, of any size, without a knife or a gun – I was utterly self-sufficient. My teacher said I was lethal; that was the same day he asked me out on a date. I wondered if he knew who I was, if he remembered the newspaper coverage. I didn’t think he did, but he knew I was single.
Liam and I had gone through a quiet, but not amicable, divorce six months after I’d gone back to work. It was Liam who’d moved out. This was the way it had to be; I wanted be in the house with my memories of Joe. My son and I would be irrevocably linked, in this life and the next.
I sensed strongly that Joe was always near to me, but that he wasn’t sympathetic to my plan. Was it Joe’s reticence I thought I felt, or my own?
Liam had moved to a house very near to where Charlotte lived. It had a garden and he’d built a den at the bottom of it before moving in. He’d also taken up Buddhism, and we had less and less contact as we had increasingly little to say to each other.
But yesterday evening had brought us together again.
Tom Gillespie had been to see Liam, not me – he was still pissed off with me for resigning – to tell him the news that would soon break from Littleworth, news of which I was already aware. It was all as Razor had described: there had been ‘visits’ by young children to the institution. Brought in with adult visitors, the children had been left alone with convicted paedophiles and murderers within the hospital walls. It had been going on for years.
Michael Hemmings was instrumental in bringing much of the information to the attention of the hospital authorities. He had helped with the internal investigation that had been on-going for the previous six months. As Razor had told me after our official interview at the station, Michael Hemmings had testified at the internal hearing. The hospital’s management, undoubtedly with the help of the Home Office, had managed to keep it out of the press.
Liam informed me on the phone that Jonathan was looking into the allegations. I remembered I’d had a message on my answering machine from Jonathan around six weeks before. I’d deleted it as soon as I heard his voice, just as I’d regretfully ignored the other messages over the past three years. I’d wanted to see Jonathan and to talk to him, but resisted.
Jonathan had said it was something important, but I’d thought that it would be about my not contacting him or about my resignation. The message had probably been about Hemmings and his imminent review, the first steps towards a tribunal meeting.
The last message he left had said, ‘When you’re ready, call me. I’ll wait as long as it takes.’
One psychiatric nurse at Littleworth had been cautioned and they were still investigating a contracted psychiatrist. Michael Hemmings had earned serious brownie points for his whistleblowing. Hemmings had proven that the treatment was working, proving, said the director of Littleworth, that we may have internal security problems but the ultimate aim of the institution, to rehabilitate and give hope to the mentally disabled within our society, is indeed, working and effective.
Liam had already contacted Sean Skerrit, to see whether we should appeal against the review of Hemmings’ case. Sean told Liam that any appeal would, in all likelihood, fail. Everything was too far down the line. Hemmings is responding well to treatment, Sean had said. I was sick of hearing that statement.
I left a voicemail on my karate teacher’s mobile, saying I’d be missing the class. I texted Jonathan. He texted me back within an hour, saying he’d drive up from London first thing in the morning.
That night, as I lay alone in the queen-size bed my mind cracked open a little, and I pushed hard mentally at the wall I’d constructed, allowing myself in. And watched from afar as if I were someone else.
If I did that I’d found I could look, only tentatively, but it was a start.
—
It was a wet Sunday and Rachel’s Dad was coaching the local football team. Rachel was at Sunday school. She liked going. It got her out the house when her dad wasn’t around. Even at seven, she found being on her own with her mother at home wasn’t that much fun. Margaret dropped Rachel off, saying she’d pick her up in two hours. Rachel had felt unwell before going, but ignored the discomfort from her stomach so that she could still attend. She suffered with regular cramps.
As soon as Rachel sat down on a small chair next to the other children, she squirmed with the pain in her upper gut. Mr Roberts, the teacher, saw straight away. They waited a while to see if the pain would go away, but it didn’t. Mr Roberts left the class in the charge of his sixteen-year-old daughter, and took Rachel to his car to drive her home himself. When they got to the house, Rachel saw her mum’s car in the drive and the door was unlocked. Rachel thanked Mr Roberts for bringing her home; he was keen to return to his class and happy to leave her. Rachel didn’t shout for her mother. Her stomach hurt. Her mum wasn’t in the lounge. She went upstairs, knowing she’d find her in the bedroom. The door was closed. Normally, she would have shouted or knocked to let her mum know she was coming in. Their relationship was like that. Only open doors with her dad. Her mum liked her privacy.
But Rachel opened the door.
My window was open and a strong wind from outside blew the lamp off the windowsill, pulling me away from the child, Rachel. The hot sweat that covered my body quickly became too cool, and I shook.
But young Rachel, opening my mother’s bedroom door, was still with me. And they were merging with thoughts of Joe, of him when he came home from Melanie’s to find Liam’s car in the drive, but no one answering the door, leaving him shut outside. The same as what had happened to me – my mother’s car had been there, too. She had been at home, but had not opened the door. And no one had opened the door to Joe. Why didn’t you go to the den, Joe?
I sat up in bed.
The painting that I’d kept away from Liam lay in my bedside drawer. I studied it in the full moonlight, as I had done periodically over the last few years.
‘What did you see, Joe? What did you hear?’ I asked the darkness. A strong aroma. Then it vanished.