Keep Me Alive (9 page)

‘Don’t be silly. I wasn’t in any danger.’ Trish drank and felt the thin, bitter liquid cleaning her tastebuds. ‘But you were and you didn’t flinch. You’re more of a dark horse than I’d realized, Will.’

‘I learned how to hide fear when I had to a long time ago.’

‘What happened, Will?’ she asked gently.

His eyes were changing as she watched. There was no pleading in them now, and no boyishness either. His jaw clicked, with a sound audible even over the pinging and squeaking of the one-armed bandit in the corner. She was about to ask her question again in a different form when she remembered a piece of advice from her first instructing solicitor, in the old family law days, ‘Never push an angry man. That’s what tips them over. They hate it from anyone, but from a women it’s like a match in a box of fireworks.’

The children’s interview room at the local psychiatric unit was a cheerful yellow colour, although the paint was beginning to flake and there were the marks of small grubby hands in a dado around the walls. Above it, at right angles to the window, was a huge one-way mirror, which hid the observers with their video camera and recording machine. Anatomically correct dolls were kept in one of the cupboards and other less carefully designed toys were strewn carelessly about the room so that a roaming child could pick them up and use them to tell unbearable stories. There were paints and crayons and a generous supply of paper piled casually in one corner.

Having read Kim Bowlby’s file yesterday evening, Trish had known she must choose clothes that would look unthreatening. She’d picked a pair of faded jeans and an old droopy cotton sweater, which George disliked for its dishcloth colour and texture. She was sitting in a low chair and had crammed her long legs under the child-sized table so that she would not seem overpoweringly tall when Kim Bowlby first saw her. She wished the interview were already over.

This place was better than many of the rooms in which she had waited to unravel the secrets of brutalized children. A few had come with one parent or the other, but most of the escorts had been social workers, under-funded, under-supported and protecting themselves in the only ways they knew from too
much horror. No one could give the children what they most needed: one-to-one care in an atmosphere of unstinting and unconditional love. In many cases they couldn’t even guarantee the basics of decent nutrition, physical safety and adequate education.

 

They were not holding hands, the child and her foster mother, when they eventually appeared. Kim walked with an unnaturally stiff gait and straight back. Trish didn’t stand up to introduce herself because of wanting to stay as small as possible. Instead, she smiled, hoping it would make her black eyes look soft, and said that her name was Trish Maguire.

‘I’m Kim,’ said the child, holding out her right hand with stiff formality, while the woman who’d brought her moved quietly back to the other end of the room. ‘My surname is Bowlby.’

‘May I just call you Kim?’ Trish waited a long time for an answer, but eventually the child felt safe enough to nod. ‘Thank you.’

Name, rank and serial number, she thought, wondering whether the ex-army stepfather had coached Kim in what to say during interrogations. It seemed better to ask nothing difficult now. Kim had already been questioned into exhaustion. Instead Trish waited, interested to see which toy would attract her attention. None did. She simply stood where her foster mother had left her, waiting in silence. In spite of the stuffy heat, her skin was quite dry and her hair so tidy it looked like a wig.

‘Would you like to sit down?’ Trish asked, and saw Kim’s eyelids lift briefly. The eyes themselves were a wonderful blue, but they held no signs of either warmth or pleasure.

Trish knew from the file that the first symptom that had worried Kim’s teachers had been her sleepiness. At one time they had thought she must suffer from narcolepsy because she kept drifting off in lessons and during school dinners and even at play time. Now there was no sign of it, and she did not look
especially tired, either, only tightly watchful, as though waiting for the test she was sure would come.

It was an expression Trish had seen too often in David’s face to misunderstand. When he’d first come to live with her, it had been almost constant. Now, to her intense relief, it was rarer. But it had taken her months to shift it at all. Could she, in the tiny amount of time available, give Kim some of the same reassurance?

‘Do you like playing with dolls?’ she asked. Kim’s blonde head shook. ‘What about painting?’

She sighed a little and then nodded, as though it seemed more sensible to humour this strange woman by agreeing to something than to go on resisting. Trish fetched paper, paints, brushes and a jam jar of water, moving as quietly as she could to avoid imposing her size and strength on the child. She brought the painting materials to the table. Kim didn’t touch them.

‘Have a go,’ Trish said.

Kim bit her lips. Her eyes crumpled. Trish waited for the burst of tears she was sure must come, but Kim fought it, swallowed, then said in a thread of a voice. ‘What do you want me to paint?’

‘Anything.’ Trish kept her voice as warm as she could. ‘Whatever you like.’

Carefully, Kim selected a small brush, dipped it in water, wiped the excess off on the edge of the jar and dabbled it gently in a jar of pink paint, again cleaning off any bits that might drip. Then she painted a diagonal from the top left of the page down to the bottom right, without once lifting her brush from the paper. The line might almost have been drawn with a ruler. Trish waited, without a word.

Kim sighed again, washed her brush in the water, reloaded it with lime green and drew another line, only about two centimetres from the first. A third line, in pale yellow, completed
her painting. She washed the brush, looked in vain for a paint rag and then shook as much water as possible off the bristles before laying the brush down on the table beside the water jar.

‘I have finished,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Trish wished she had some expertise in interpreting children’s art. To her this said nothing except that Kim was unbelievably neat, over-controlled and doing her best to provide whatever the adult in charge of her wanted.

‘You work very tidily,’ Trish commented. ‘I always make sploshes and drop bits. I couldn’t do anything like that without a ruler.’

The child’s eyelids lifted again. Now Trish thought she could see the faintest sign of pleasure. Or maybe it was just relief that Kim had passed a test.

‘Do you always paint in lines?’

Kim nodded.

‘Always the same colours?’

‘They’re my favourites,’ she whispered. Trish wanted to celebrate. This was the first unsolicited comment.

‘What other things do you like?’ she asked, hoping she wasn’t pushing too far. ‘Toys and TV programmes and food and things like that?’

The interview progressed for the next thirty minutes, during which Trish failed to elicit any facts at all. At the end of the session, Kim’s foster mother came back to the table from her seat in the corner. Kim didn’t look at her or move.

‘Thank you for talking to me,’ Trish said. ‘I hope I get a chance to see you again.’

The child continued to sit. Her foster mother held out a hand. ‘Come on, Kim. It’s time to go home.’

Kim continued to look at Trish, who eventually nodded. At once Kim slid off the chair and pushed it neatly, and without any sound at all, under the table.

Trish watched them go and waited for Andrew Stane. She
knew he’d been observing the whole session with the psychiatrist who had been working on the case, and who had given up her Sunday afternoon for this unusual meeting. When Andrew came in, his round face was tight and his voice was much higher than usual.

‘What were you doing? We haven’t time for a lengthy therapeutic acquaintance, Trish. If we don’t get her to talk about her stepfather before next weekend, she’s going back.’

‘I know,’ Trish said, pressing her fingers against the ache between her eyebrows. ‘But it was clear from the file that questions about him weren’t going to get us anywhere. Did you notice how quiet she was?’

‘Most frightened children are quiet.’

‘It was more than that. When you run the video, watch the way she washes her brush. Most children slosh the bristles in the water and the shaft of the brush rattles against the glass. Kim made absolutely no sound at all. And it was the same when she tidied the chair.’

‘And what does that tell you?’

‘I’m not going to speculate. But there’s more to this than simply being told not to talk about what’s been done to her. I need to see her again. And quite often if I’m to get anywhere.’

‘Like I said, we haven’t time for a lengthy therapeutic association.’

‘I know.’ Trish fought for patience. Andrew was the gatekeeper. She needed to make him understand. ‘And I’m not a therapist anyway. But she’s so frightened of getting it wrong that I can’t do anything that might suggest the answers I want. She’d agree to anything I said, and it’s not going to help you or her to build a case on that kind of falsity.’

‘You’re right there.’

‘So, I’ll need to see her often if I’m to tease out what has been happening. The bugger of it is that I never know when I’m going to be free of court. Look, would it possible to have her here at
half past four every day so that I could have half an hour with her before I go back to chambers?’

The judge nearly always rose by four, and Trish thought she could fend off Antony for an hour after that. He was in such a good mood these days that she might not have to tell him about Kim to explain why she needed the time.

‘I’ll do my best,’ Andrew said.

 

All the way to the hospital, Trish thought about the child and her quietness, playing scene after scene of what might have happened through her imagination. She wished she could have talked the case through with Caro, but that was too much to hope for. Trish thought she’d settle for finding Caro even a little better than she’d been on Friday.

 

Will woke at five on Monday morning, and lay in bed hating his life. In adolescence he would have been able to sleep for England if his father hadn’t always been there, hoiking him out from under the duvet at dawn. Now he could barely manage four hours, and he couldn’t bear to get up until he’d heard his brother-in-law leave for the City. Rupert’s contempt was less vocal than the old man’s, but somehow worse.

At last a heavy door banged downstairs. That must be him going out. Will hauled his aching body up off the unnaturally squishy mattress to shave and dress. But he’d misjudged it. The bang must have been the newspapers arriving. He heard Rupert’s voice from halfway down the stairs.

‘The suspense is killing me. Do we have any idea when his bloody case is going to end?’

‘No,’ Susannah said wearily. ‘All Will’s said is “not more than a week or two now”. But I don’t think he really knows. Poor man.’

‘I suppose it must be worse for him.’

‘Of course it is.’ Susannah’s voice was acid. ‘I haven’t seen
him this bad since Dad died. It’s far worse than when Fiona left him.’

Rupert laughed his rich banker’s laugh. ‘I’m not surprised. He was probably glad to be rid of her. She’d have driven me barking in five minutes. How could anybody that pretty be so stupid?’

‘I think she was just unhappy and bored. And she hated country life.’

‘She should’ve thought of that before she married him. Why was he so cut up about your father’s death? I thought they hated each other.’

Will’s jaw clicked, sending pain shooting up into both his ears. It was none of his brother-in-law’s business what he’d thought about his father. And the last thing he wanted now was anyone so sodding clever asking questions about the time the old man died. He pressed fingers to the hinges of his jaw to soothe the ache.

‘I know.’ Amazingly Susannah sounded as though she was on the brink of tears. ‘It used to worry me. But I’ve come to think it must have been because they never had a chance to make peace. They fought all the time and with Dad just dropping dead on the spot like that, Will must have been beating himself up for everything he’d ever said.’

Stop there, he thought, willing her to come to her senses. She didn’t know anything, but that didn’t mean it was safe to chatter on like this. The sooner everyone forgot the day his father died, the better.

‘I’ve been trying to get him to go and see Annabel, you know the one I was at school with who trained as a counsellor, because—’

‘No therapy’s going to help a man in Will’s position. Winning damages might, and getting back to work, but nothing else.’ Rupert’s voice had softened a little, but it crisped up again as he added, ‘Except getting out of our house. From the look in his
eye whenever he can’t avoid catching mine, he’ll be as glad to go as I’ll be to see the back of him. I hope to God it’s soon.’

‘Rupert, that’s unkind.’

Uncoiling his fingers, forcing himself to keep calm and not burst into the kitchen to tell his brother-in-law what he thought of him, Will turned to creep back upstairs. He might be a charity case, but he had his dignity. There was no way he could bear to be caught eavesdropping on this particular conversation.

An hour later it seemed safe to go down again. His niece and nephew had finished reducing the kitchen to the usual battleground and were chasing each other around their rooms in search of their swimming things. As he opened the kitchen door, Susannah looked up from her shopping list to ask whether he’d be in this evening.

‘I think so,’ he said, safe in the knowledge that if she’d wanted him to babysit again she’d have given him a bit more warning. ‘Why don’t I take those sausages out of the freezer and cook them? Give you a chance to put your feet up for a change.’

She made the face that had been familiar all his life, a screwed-up expression of pitying disgust.

‘I don’t like sausages, and I’ve promised Rupe shepherd’s pie in any case. It’s his favourite.’

‘Well, don’t go and buy supermarket mince, whatever you do.’

She sighed. ‘Will, I wish you’d drop it. I’ve been feeding the family mince since I got married and it hasn’t done any of us any harm.’

‘You have no idea what kind of rubbish may have been mixed in with the meat. Susannah, you must ’

‘Leave it, Will.’

He felt like a puppy that had to be trained not to chew her best shoes.

‘Are you going to court again today?’ she asked a moment
later, smiling brightly, as though the little episode had never happened.

 

Susannah found Will’s drooping around the house more than she could bear. If it went on much longer, she’d have to rent a cottage somewhere and take the children away for the rest of the school holidays.