When She Was Bad (15 page)

Charlie launched into his prepared pitch, but he hadn’t been speaking long before he started to feel strange twinges in his lower abdomen. He tried to ignore them, but within minutes they’d worsened and now his stomach was cramping intermittently in painful spasms. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his skin felt clammy under his shirt. He battled on with his pitch, but now, oh God, he needed the loo.

‘Charlie, are you still there?’

A sudden sharp pain had caused him to stop mid-sentence and Margaret Hoffman didn’t sound too impressed.

‘Yes, sorry. Where was I?’ His eyes scanned the printout in front of him, trying to regain his train of thought.

‘You were telling me about your post-hiring assessment strategy?’

He started to explain his system for following up on appointments he’d made. Suddenly a horrible loud gurgling sound erupted from his insides. Sarah’s head whipped around, her mouth open, her eyebrows raised in shock. Charlie’s voice again dried up as his stomach spasmed with pain. Horror flooded through him as he realized what was about to happen.

‘Sorry,’ he gasped into the receiver, and then he dropped the phone and bolted for the door that led to the lobby where the toilets were.

When he emerged some twenty minutes later, his face pasty, but his gut slightly calmer, Amira was waiting outside.

‘Sarah emailed me to tell me to come and find you. She was worried about you, but doesn’t dare leave her desk. You look like shit – no offence. What happened to you?’

‘I don’t know. It just came out of nowhere. I’ve been trying to work it out while I’ve been in there glued to the toilet. Do you know, I think there was something in that coffee.’

‘Don’t be daft – how could there be? Anyway, we’ve all been drinking that coffee today and no one else has been affected.’

‘Well, the sugar then. It tasted disgusting. Do you know, I think someone must have put something on it – some kind of laxative maybe.’

‘Oh, come on. Why would anyone do that?’

Charlie put his hands on his belly, feeling the stirrings of something deep inside there.

‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘All I know is I was completely fine, and then I drank the coffee which tasted really odd, and then I was on the phone and all of a sudden . . . Oh God.’

He was remembering Margaret Hoffman and how he’d cut her off mid-conversation. What would happen now? He couldn’t imagine her giving the contract to someone whose stomach erupted mid-sentence as if the creature in
Alien
was tearing out of it. And tonight – no way was he going to be able to make it out for dinner. And he didn’t think Stefan was the type to volunteer to come round and hold his hair back while he hunched over a toilet bowl – or worse.

As if in sympathy with his thoughts, his stomach started to make a low groaning noise.

‘I’ve got to—’

Amira pushed him back through the door of the toilet before he could finish what he was going to say. He made it into the cubicle just in time, which was probably the one good thing to happen to him that day.

22
Anne

As well as lecturing at the university and advising in legal cases, I also have private clients, some of whom I’ve been treating for years. Not so many new ones these days admittedly, but there was a period when I couldn’t get enough. I was hungry to expand my knowledge and my reputation. During that time I dealt with some harrowing cases. There was a man who’d been sexually abused by a teacher from the age of six and suffered permanent and ongoing physiological damage, and a young woman who’d drowned her own baby in the bath because a voice told her that was the only way he’d be safe from her. There was a teenager who hadn’t spoken in the three years since her father stabbed her mother in front of her, yet cut words and phrases into her skin.

Some cases made me question everything I thought I knew about human relationships; others made me go home at night and stare at my own reflection in the mirror, asking, ‘Could you?’ ‘Would you?’ Then I’d hug Shannon wordlessly till she got fed up and wriggled free. But nothing ever came as close to totally derailing me as that day in late summer when I stood at the top of a flight of basement stairs in an anonymous suburban house while a large cop in low-slung pants flicked on a light switch.

‘Quite something, ain’t it?’ asked Sergeant Cavanagh, making his way down the steps so that Professor Ed Kowalsky and I could properly take in the scene in that basement.

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ It was the first time I’d ever heard Ed swear.

‘Yep,’ said the cop.

The basement was a squarish room, probably around five metres by six. The floor was that grey concrete that starts to go greenish after a while. The walls were grey also. The smell was damp cut with decay and something darker and more rancid.

‘These are getting on for half a metre thick,’ said Cavanagh, patting the walls almost proudly. ‘Two layers of bricks with a thick insulating membrane between them for soundproofing. Guy was a regular self-builder.’

But Ed and I weren’t paying attention to the walls, or to the eight narrow steps that led down to where the outsized policeman was standing. Both of us were fixated on one thing.

The cage.

It took up over half of the floorspace in the basement and was just under adult height, with black bars up the sides and across the top. A wide wooden plank ran horizontally across the middle section of the top with a pulley and rope attached. At one end of the rope was a large hook. As I stared at it, something foul-tasting shot into my mouth and I tried not to gag. The only other things in the cage were a toddler-sized cot with the side down, a hard wooden chair and, at the far end, a large metal bin with a lid.

‘Kid used to wear this harness kind of thing that wrapped around him and kept his arms by his sides with a ring on the back that the hook clipped into.’

Sergeant Cavanagh could almost have been a tour guide in a museum and I wondered why it was that Laurie’s room had so affected him, while this horror show in the basement left him seemingly unmoved. Was it just because of his own children at home – so easily relatable to the little girl we’d met in the meeting room at the university medical facility – but a world away from the poor creature in the cage? Was it the depth of the boy’s suffering that set him outside the cop’s radius of empathy, like the blank-eyed refugees I see these days on the television news?

‘They never let him out,’ said Ed. He looked pale in the harsh overhead light and I remembered with a start that he was also dealing with the boy. David. Child D. We never spoke of this other assessment being run simultaneously. Ed felt it better that we kept the two completely separate until our reports were made, ostensibly so that Dan Oppenheimer and I couldn’t be swayed by each other’s opinions but also, I now believe, so that he would be the only one with full knowledge of the case, the only one qualified to write up the account. The result was that I’d forgotten how close he was to the things we were seeing now.

‘Nope.’ Cavenagh was matter-of-fact. ‘This was it. The full extent of the kid’s life. Going from the cot to the chair.’

‘No toilet?’

‘Diapers. Used to sling ’em into that bin every coupla days. Place absolutely stank when we found him. When you think of what it’s like upstairs – everything all covered in plastic and lined up so neatly – and down here the place is crawling with flies and maggots. You know they used to scrape all their leftover food into a bucket and bring it down. He ate it with his hands.’

‘The feeding rota on the fridge door,’ I said, thinking out loud. ‘So Laurie would have been down here pretty regularly.’

‘Sure. Sure,’ Sergeant Cavanagh agreed. ‘Plus obviously you know they had her help out with the punishments.’

I’d seen the initial police reports and the accounts of the child welfare officers who’d interviewed Laurie after the gruesome discovery was made. The boy was found with marks all over his puny body. Some looked like they’d been made with a stick of some sort; others were burn marks – as from a heated hair device, the medical report had said. I thought now about Noelle Egan’s dark glossy curls and shivered. And right at the top of one of his scrawny arms was a perfect bite mark scored purple into his flesh, and of such a size that it could only have been made, said the report, by a young child.

23
Sarah

‘You don’t have to go.’

Oliver had a hand on each of her shoulders to hold her in place and was gazing into her eyes. He looked worried.

‘Don’t kiss. Oh yuck, you’re going to kiss. Disgusting.’ Sam made vomiting noises behind Oliver’s back.

‘Mummy, stay,’ said Joe, clinging to Sarah’s leg.

‘I do have to go, we’ve already discussed it.’

‘No. It’s not reasonable. It’s the weekend, for God’s sake. We hardly see each other as it is. And you look awful. When was the last time you had a proper night’s sleep?’

‘You’re just fed up because you’ve got to look after the kids all weekend instead of going to poker at Jimmy’s tonight.’

‘That is so unfair.’

It was unfair, Sarah knew it. Oliver hadn’t even mentioned the poker. But she was so tired. And he was an easy target.

‘Look, there’s nowhere in the world I want to go to less than this stupid weekend in Derbyshire. Last night all I could think about was how Rachel is going to manipulate the whole thing to suit her agenda. She’ll do anything to humiliate me. But I can’t give her an excuse to sack me.’

‘You should take her to a bloody tribunal. That’s what you should do. This is bullying.’

‘Um, you said bloody. Mummy, Daddy said bloody.’

‘Yes, I know he did, Sam, but sometimes people say bad things when they get upset.’

‘
I’m
upset. I’m upset because you’re going. Bloody. Bloody. Bloody.’

‘Sam!’

‘I’m allowed to say it because I’m upset.’

Still attached to her leg, Joe started crying.

‘Look, it’s only two days. I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ve got to do it otherwise it’s going to be even worse when I have to tell her about . . . that other thing.’

She dipped her head in Sam’s direction and raised her eyebrows meaningfully.

Oliver sighed and dropped his hands from her shoulders.

‘I suppose I could ask Mum to come over and help.’

‘Are you serious? I’m away just one night and you can’t cope without reinforcements? Anyway, the last time your mum came over while I was away she basically scalped Joe.’

‘Oh come on, it was only a trim.’

‘She knew I loved his hair long.’

‘He told her he wanted it cut.’

‘Only after she’d said it would make him look like a big boy, like Sam.’

They glared at each other. Oliver was the first to look away.

‘Fine. I won’t call her if it makes you happier. I’ll look after the boys and do the shopping because there’s bugger all in the fridge, and clear out the stinking nappy bins and . . .’

‘Bugger! He said bugger!’

‘What you mean is you’ll do exactly what I do ninety-nine per cent of the time.’

‘That’s not fair. I do more than my share.’

Sarah put up her hand wearily. ‘There’s no point having this argument. I’m too tired and I need to get going. Boys, you be good for Daddy.’

‘That’s right. Walk away. Just like you always do.’

‘Mummy stay Joe,’ said Joe, his chubby hands clamped around her knee, creasing up her dress.

‘I’ll be back before you know it,’ she said, peeling his fingers off her and planting a kiss on the top of his head where his hair was still messy from sleep.

She went to kiss Sam but he darted away from her outstretched arms and climbed up on to the side and then the back of the sofa.

He folded his arms and glared at her.

‘Bloody bugger,’ he said.

She was meeting Charlie and Amira at St Pancras station to catch the train to the hotel in Derbyshire. Paula was driving and giving Chloe a lift. Ewan, he’d admitted the previous afternoon, was travelling up with Rachel.

‘It makes sense,’ he’d said defensively. ‘She has a company car and she drives practically past my flat.’

‘Since when was Clapton on the way from anywhere, let alone Islington?’ Amira had asked him in the office, but he’d just smiled, looking pleased with himself.

By the time she arrived on the concourse, twenty minutes late thanks to the argument with Oliver, Sarah was tired to the very bones of her, so that just lifting one foot in front of the other used up vast reserves of energy.

‘You’re late. We’d better put our skates on,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t think missing our train would be the best way to kick off all that lovely team bonding.’

‘Team bonding my arse,’ panted Amira. ‘Team absconding, that’s what I’ll be doing first chance I get.’

It was a relief to find their reserved seats, just as the train was pulling out. Sinking down opposite Charlie, Sarah noticed for the first time how pale he was.

‘You OK?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ he replied over-brightly, brushing a hand across his brow in a self-conscious gesture. Sarah gasped.

‘Your arm! What happened?’

Instantly Charlie tugged down on his shirt sleeve which had risen up when he lifted his hand, trying to hide the jumbo-sized plaster on the side of his arm, just above the wrist, through which she could see a faint pink stain seeping.

‘Oh, this – cut myself opening a can of tomatoes, can you believe? Got halfway round with the tin-opener and it got stuck so I was jerking at it and the bloody thing stabbed me. Hurt like a bugger as well.’

The story sounded as if it had been rehearsed, but Sarah knew better than to push Charlie. For all his gentleness, he was fiercely protective of his privacy.

‘Only you could have a near-death experience over a tin of tomatoes,’ said Amira.

During the course of the journey, the mood among the three of them picked up. Amira and Charlie bought canned gin and tonics and made Sarah howl with laughter by acting out some of the activities they imagined might be on the itinerary for the weekend.