The Trophy Child

by Paula Daly

  Also by Paula Daly

  Just What Kind of Mother Are You?

  Keep Your Friends Close

  No Remorse

  The Mistake I Made

  Copyright © 2017 Paula Daly

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Daly, Paula, author

  The trophy child / Paula Daly.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780385686075 (paperback).–ISBN 9780385686082 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PR6104.A59T76 2017 823’.92 C2016-905707-0

  C2016-905708-9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph © Cultura/Getty Images

  Cover design by R. Shailer/TW

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v4.1

  a

  For Harvey

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Paula Daly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Two

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Part One

  1

  Monday, 21 September

  The girls’ changing room smelled heavily of sweat, mud and a sickly-sweet deodorant that was beginning to irritate the back of her throat. She didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for hockey. Not a lot of enthusiasm for school, full stop, now that she was on a probationary period. It was to be a period of indeterminate length, during which her behaviour would be monitored by a variety of well-meaning professionals.

  Verity Bloom: not quite a lost cause.

  Not yet.

  Everyone was doing their utmost to prevent a deterioration in her performance – not least the staff of Reid’s Grammar, because, up until recently, she had always been such a promising student.

  ‘We have so much invested in her,’ the head teacher had told her father. ‘We want her to realize her full potential, and it would be a travesty if a girl such as Verity was not given the proper support at what is clearly a very difficult time. A difficult time for all of you, in fact.’

  They had left that meeting with her father stooped, a man beaten down by life, a man who was just so tired of it all. ‘You’ll do as they say?’ he’d asked, and Verity had shrugged her response in the way only a teenager can. ‘It’s this, or you’re out of here,’ he said.

  ‘Would that be such a bad thing? Maybe this isn’t such a great place after all.’

  Her father had sighed hard.

  ‘It costs eighteen thousand pounds a year. In total, I’ve spent over seventy-five thousand pounds on your education here, just so you can come out with nothing…Christ, Verity.’

  ‘I wouldn’t come out with nothing,’ she’d argued. ‘I could do my GCSEs elsewhere.’

  And he had held her gaze for such a long time, a deep, deep sadness forming in his eyes, that, finally, she’d said, ‘Okay.’

  She’d said, ‘Okay. I’ll do it.’

  Three weeks into the autumn term and the long summer break was fast becoming a distant memory. She removed her boots, her shin pads, her underwear, and made her way to the showers. She let the water run over her shoulders, the skin of her back; the temperature was kept just below optimal heat to prevent the girls from dawdling, to make certain they would be in time for the next lesson. Pointless, really. Sixteen-year-old girls were never so comfortable with their new bodies that they lingered in the communal showers. A few would try to get out of showering altogether. It had been that way since they had started secondary school, back in Year 7. But the PE staff had got wise to their excuses early on and now they documented them on a spreadsheet. Exemption from showering was not permitted two weeks in a row.

  The head of girls’ PE put her head around the tiled wall and scanned the assorted faces before her until she found Verity. ‘Where do you need to be next period?’ she asked.

  ‘IT.’

  ‘You can be a few minutes late. Get out now and get dry. Come and see me when you’re dressed. I’ll be in my room.’

  Verity nodded, exiting the showers to a flurry of whispers and stifled giggles.

  Alison Decker was a serious-looking woman. Verity supposed you had to be to run a PE department. Every day, she wore black Ronhill running pants and a school-issue sweatshirt with her name emblazoned across the back, as though she were on a netball tour. (She did use to play for Cumbria.)

  Verity liked her. She was straightforward; you knew where you were with her. Not like the vague, flaky dance teacher, whom the girls approached when they had a problem. Or the blond-bobbed, overstyled woman they hired to coach tennis during the summer term. That woman had a sneaky way about her, and the students always felt as though she was listening in on their conversations. Alison Decker was too busy to eavesdrop. And, frankly, she couldn’t care less what the girls were saying. They were students. They were meant to be organized, disciplined and exercised. She did not want to know about their personal lives.

  Which made her the perfect choice to administer the test.

  Verity dressed quickly, keeping her head low. She was well aware that she was being watched by the others. They were pretending to talk among themselves, pretending they weren’t looking her way. An affected girl she shared a lab bench with in physics was showing pictures of baby sloths on her iPhone; her friends cooed excessively, made long, loud awwwwww sounds, as though they were infants once again and a puppy had been led into class.

  Verity packed up her things and headed out to the main corridor. The bell was yet to sound, so it was empty save for a teacher at the far end. He was attaching a sheet of A4 to the music notice board. Once it was in place, he stoo
d back, hands behind his head, to survey the rest of the announcements.

  Reid’s Grammar was no longer a grammar school but had kept the title when it switched to independent status in 1977. It was positioned on the eastern shore of Windermere, at Countiesmeet, where the old counties of Lancashire over the sands and Westmorland used to join.

  Reid’s was a good school. That’s what everyone said: ‘Reid’s Grammar is a very good school,’ and Verity was privileged to attend such an institution. She knew she was. And it was pretty idyllic. It occupied some of the most expensive land in the country. It had lake access, three jetties (belonging to the sailing school), two croquet lawns and a state-of-the-art livery where students could board their horses.

  At Reid’s the students wore exactly the kind of uniform you would expect them to: the prefects black, billowing gowns; Years 7 to 11 brightly coloured striped blazers, the girls long, pleated skirts. They used to wear straw boaters in the summer months but these were jettisoned after a series of stealth attacks from the kids at the local comprehensive school in which the hats ended up in a variety of places – once, on the head of a boarding mistress’s horse, its long ears sticking out through holes that had been cut in the top.

  For the most part, the pupils of Reid’s stayed out of trouble and the school was able to maintain its untarnished reputation.

  For the most part.

  The bell sounded and the corridor was immediately flooded with bodies.

  ‘You, boy!’ came a shout from behind Verity. ‘No running!’

  Verity was swept along with the throng. Two boys from the year below, heading in the opposite direction, caught sight of her and immediately began pretending to strangle each other, their eyes crossing, tongues lolling out. Both shot her wicked grins as they passed. Verity stared right through them, taking a right down a side corridor and pausing before knocking on the frosted glass of Miss Decker’s door.

  Decker must have seen her shadow through the glass because she threw the door open, telling her to come in. She did not invite her to sit down, instead gesturing that Verity should stand to the side of her desk until she had finished filling out the under-fourteens hockey team sheet for the match against Stony-hurst on Saturday.

  Verity chewed on her lip and moved her weight to her other foot.

  ‘How are things at home?’ Decker said, without looking up. This caught Verity off guard, because Alison Decker never pried.

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  ‘Okay good, or okay bad?’

  ‘About the same,’ said Verity.

  Decker gave a curt nod. ‘Very well. We’ll wait for the start of the next lesson and then we’ll get on with it.’

  Verity was aware that Decker didn’t have to extend her this courtesy. In fact, it was probably interfering with her schedule and would make her late for the next PE class.

  ‘You thinking of running cross-country again this year?’ Decker asked.

  ‘Haven’t made up my mind.’

  ‘It’d be a shame not to.’

  Verity shrugged.

  ‘All right,’ Decker said. ‘I won’t hassle you. Let’s get this over with and get you on your way.’

  She followed Decker to the girls’ toilets. The corridor was empty again. She hung back a little as she watched Decker walk in, pretty sure of what she’d find in there.

  A moment later and Decker stopped dead in the doorway, her trainers squeaking to a halt.

  It was really quite theatrical.

  ‘Do you three mind telling me what you’re doing?’ she demanded loudly.

  ‘Nothing, miss…’

  ‘Sorry, miss.’

  ‘We just needed to…’ came the voices from within.

  Verity watched as three Year 11 girls exited in a cloud of perfume. They were heavily caked in fresh make-up and scowled upon seeing Verity, as the real reason for Decker’s presence registered.

  ‘If I catch you in here again when you’re supposed to be in lessons, I’ll wash that muck off your faces myself!’ Decker shouted to their backs, and they hurried away.

  Once inside, Decker withdrew a container from her pocket and said, ‘Quick as you can now, Verity,’ and Verity took it from her silently, without meeting her eye.

  Urinating into a beaker, aged sixteen, when your PE teacher is on the other side of the cubicle door, had to be one of life’s low points. It was mortifying for Verity, handing over the still-warm sample. Alison Decker took it from her, her face a perfect mask of indifference, when Verity knew she must be repulsed, and wondering how this weekly task had landed at her feet.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Decker said.

  Verity followed her back to her office, neither of them speaking, and waited as she unlocked the ancient grey filing cabinet and took out the drug-testing kit from the middle drawer. Surprisingly, you could buy them on Amazon now. They were not expensive and were easy to do. This was part of the deal Verity’s father had struck with the head. They would allow her to continue her studies, remain part of the school, if she agreed to weekly on-site drug tests and attended biweekly counselling sessions.

  Verity did try telling them that she wasn’t into drugs – that she had never been into drugs, so all of this was rather unnecessary. But it didn’t seem to matter.

  A minute passed. ‘You’re clean,’ Decker said. ‘Keep up the good work, Verity.’

  ‘You betcha.’

  Then Decker hesitated, as if what she was about to say was painful in some way.

  ‘I’m here, Verity,’ she said eventually. ‘If you need to talk…anything like that.’

  Decker had been told to say this. The woman did not want to be Verity’s sounding board, any more than Verity wanted her to be.

  ‘I’m okay,’ Verity said, offering a benign smile.

  ‘As you wish, Verity. Probably for the best.’

  2

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT JOANNE Aspinall scanned the hotel bar for signs of her date. She wondered, not for the first time, if people really did enjoy eating out and long walks in the countryside or if that was something they wrote on their profiles when they were too embarrassed to write the truth. Would anyone reply if Joanne were to write: ‘Overworked copper, generally too tired to socialize, recently dumped by colleague, lives with aunt, not very good with kids.’

  Probably.

  She’d most likely get some weirdo who had a fetish for slightly sad, exhausted women.

  A colleague from work, an officer in the mounted police, had recently been out with a guy from a dating site. He’d asked her to post her dirty underwear to a sales conference he was attending in Devizes. To remind him of her while he was working.

  Joanne hadn’t told the truth on her profile page. She’d ended up plumping for the standard ‘long walks’ and ‘eating out’ in an attempt to lure someone relatively normal. And it had taken weeks to arrange a date. One date. It should have been simple. But it had become evident to Joanne almost immediately upon joining secondchance.com that most people were not looking for love. They were looking for no-strings sex. She had spent far too many hours sifting through profiles, answering questions about herself from prospective suitors, when she could have been sleeping:

  If you could change one thing about your appearance, what would it be?

  Joanne did think of responding with the truth. Saying that she’d already changed the thing that needed changing – by way of breast-reduction surgery. But she got the impression that when a man asked that type of question he was hoping for an answer more along the lines of: ‘I’d change my bee-stung, porn-star lips and tendency to be promiscuous when drunk.’

  So Joanne had played it safe and moved on to the next candidate.

  Which is how she ended up chatting online to Graham Rimmer.

  Graham Rimmer, who was now quite late.

  Joanne hadn’t told him she was in the police. It wasn’t something to volunteer on a first meeting, as she would most likely be pressed for information, and she certainly didn’t want t
o talk shop all evening. Also, when people found out she was a detective they were in the habit of becoming rather jumpy and restless. As though she could see straight into their souls, and discover all manner of dirty secrets. Like a psychiatrist. Or a pub landlord.

  Joanne signalled to the waiter. The hotel bar was busy, but he’d been glancing her way every few minutes. He knew she had a booking in the restaurant for two, and Joanne suspected that her body language was giving her away, making it obvious that she was on a first date. A first date with someone she couldn’t guarantee looked anything like his profile picture.

  Graham Rimmer had told her he worked for the National Trust, managing a large area of land close to Ullswater in the North Lakes, and Joanne had thought that sounded rather sexy, in a Lady Chatterley/Mellors kind of way.

  That’s if he’d told her the truth. And since she had listed her occupation as ‘bookkeeper’, she could hardly complain if it turned out to be nonsense.

  ‘What can I get you?’ the waiter asked.

  ‘Small Cabernet Merlot, please.’

  ‘Sure I can’t get you a large?’

  ‘I’m driving.’

  Joanne checked her watch. It was 8.23, and a few couples were making their way from the bar area through to the restaurant to dine. She fiddled with her phone, checking it once more, hoping to see: ‘Be there in five minutes!’ Except that would be a miracle, since she’d not given Graham Rimmer her number.