by Kate Simants
She returns a small fraction of the smile, then says, ‘I can’t begin to imagine how that must have felt, Jake. To miss the funeral.’
‘Long time ago,’ he says, but his eyes and his words don’t match.
He says he has a few errands, so they start walking, out on a pitted concrete path towards the livestock.
‘Did you visit her much when she was in care?’
He shrugs. ‘Not much. Too far. I was in Bristol, she was out in Burnham.’
‘And your mum?’
A rapid shake of his head, and Wren takes the hint and lets it go.
They pass a pig shed, where he fills a bucket with feed and jumps the low wall. Half a dozen piglets swarm over, snorting with excitement, and he mutters to them like they’re old friends. After depositing the food, he casts his eye over the brood then selects one, pins it under his arm. He takes hold of a hind trotter and inspects it, then, satisfied, lets it go.
‘I did go there a few weeks later though,’ he says, climbing back over. They carry on walking the loop. ‘There was this inquest, but it was just a piss-take, took about two hours and then they were done. No answers, you know?’
‘Answers to what?’
‘How come she’d stopped going to school, or good as.’
‘She’d been doing OK at school, right?’
The memory of it makes him smile, revealing for the first time his crazy-paving teeth that justify the tight-lipped way he speaks. ‘Put us all to shame. Mum used to say maybe she wasn’t my dad’s after all because she sure as shit didn’t get it from either of them.’ He pauses to pull a bent roll-up from the top pocket of his shirt. ‘She knew it too, mind. That she was bright, like. Probably didn’t make her many friends.’
‘Did she get on with the staff? At the home?’
He motions weighing scales. ‘Some of them. One was really nice to her, she said. Oliver – whatever it was.’
‘Polzeath?’
‘Yeah. You know him? Same as the owner at Beech View.’
Wren stops. ‘You were at Beech View?’
He shrugs. ‘For a bit. Got moved after that girl disappeared.’
‘Paige Garrett? You knew her?’
His shoulders come up like a barricade. ‘Yeah. Why?’
‘Where do you think she went, Jake?’
He pulls a hand down his face, scratches at his stubble.
‘I – I don’t know.’
Wren waits.
‘That fucking girl,’ he says eventually. ‘So fucking special, everyone thought she was this perfect—’ he says, then cuts himself off and moves the hair away from his temple to reveal a faded pink scar. ‘That’s from where she smacked me round the head with a saucepan, this one time.’
‘Blimey.’ Wren gives that a moment. There’s no easy way to ask what she needs to ask next, so she just makes her voice soft and says it. ‘Jake, do you think there was any chance Makayla was being abused?’
He sighs. He’s not shocked; it’s clearly not the first time he’s considered it. But it takes a while for him to answer. ‘I don’t think so. I think she would have said. But who knows. One minute we’d be talking every night, then it just…’ He mimes a sad, slow explosion with his hands.
‘What happened?’
He looks away. ‘Went off the rails. Drugs, mostly.’
‘Where’d she get the money?’
Jake takes a lungful of smoke and points at her with the cigarette between his fingers. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it? Where’d the money come from? Or did someone give her drugs for free? None of them knew. I read the inquest report. It’s only about this thick.’ He indicates a millimetre between his index finger and thumb. ‘Nothing about the money, nothing about school. They didn’t even try to find out who knocked her up, before.’
Wren stops dead. ‘What? When?’
‘She had an abortion. Few months before she died.’
Wren runs the maths. If Makayla had been even three months pregnant, that would have made her fourteen at the time of conception.
Fourteen.
‘Did you know who the father was?’
‘No,’ he says. Too fast.
‘Did you, Jake?’
He looks at his feet, and Wren waits, trying to decipher it. This isn’t shame, not family shame at least. There are families that would be sent into a tailspin by a teen pregnancy, but she’d stake money on the Slaters not being one of them. Wren is no newcomer to shame, though. She knows it well enough to understand it has more than one face.
After a heavy sigh he lets it out. ‘She tried to tell me. I said I didn’t want to know. I got wasted a lot, you know? I was – unpredictable. I didn’t want to end up high and doing something I’d regret. That was the person I was back then, more interested in how it would play out for me than looking after someone who needed my help.’
There’s a moment of still air. When he looks up at her, there are tears in his eyes. ‘She wasn’t a slag.’
‘Oh, goodness.’ Wren touches his shoulder. ‘Of course she wasn’t, Jake.’
‘I didn’t hear from her for months,’ he says, his voice so small now that Wren has to bend towards him to hear over the sounds of animals and the shrieks of children. ‘Kept trying, just nothing. And then eventually I get this call in the middle of the night. She’d wanted to keep it. Said they wouldn’t let her.’
‘Who’s they? The father?’
‘I don’t know. She just kept saying they’d made her get rid of it, and what if she went to hell. Our mum was Catholic,’ he adds, by way of explanation.
‘Do you think she meant the staff pressured her?’ Wren says. He shrugs, but in her head, the gears are engaging. Because it wouldn’t have looked good for the Polzeaths, would it? Especially not if they knew who the father was and had done nothing to stop it.
Especially if it was Oliver Polzeath.
‘Have you got any guesses, even, about who might have been responsible?’ She speaks as softly, as gently as she can. ‘She was very young, Jake. I mean, fourteen, that’s—’
‘I know what it is! All right?’ His eyes connect with hers. ‘I know. But I don’t know anything else to tell you.’ He breaks off, the tears streaming down his face now. ‘I could have saved her. She wanted to tell me. She was asking me to save her and I didn’t. I didn’t.’
27
Before
As soon as Luke gets home from school, Geraint ushers him into the office. Luke hasn’t spoken to the fucker since he dobbed him in to Mr P about being in Paige’s room that time, but he knew he could only avoid him for so long. Geraint gets behind the desk and he puts on his get-ready-for-the-shit-news face.
‘So we heard from your social worker today, Luke.’
‘Right.’ He makes his gut go hard, ready.
‘Your brother had a hearing in the family court about an application for guardianship. I think you knew that was coming up?’
He shrugs. In the bottom drawer of his desk there’s a piece of paper with a grid on it that he drew up twenty-two days ago, like a calendar, counting down the days with a felt-tip x every day until today.
Geraint says, ‘I’m afraid things have changed slightly, Luke, since the incident at your old house. With the threat to the baby.’
Luke’s eyes cram with tears. ‘I didn’t—’ he starts to say, his voice cracking. ‘I wasn’t going to—’
‘But, mate, it’s what it looked like. No one called the police, you don’t have it on your record, so it could be a lot, lot worse. You know that, right?’
The files on the shelves are mostly red, and some of them are blue. It would look better if all the red ones were on one shelf, and the blue ones underneath.
‘I know this isn’t really what you wanted to hear.’
Through the open window that looks out onto the side path there’s the sound of a bird.
‘Luke.’
‘Yeah?’ He looks him in the eye. Geraint’s waiting for him to reply, but he doesn’t know wha
t the question is.
Geraint lets out this massive breath like Luke is literally the most disappointing thing in the universe. ‘Did you hear what I said, Luke?’
‘Yeah.’ He bends, gets his bag. ‘Can I go?’
He spends the afternoon in his room. He doesn’t go down for dinner. He waits for Rob to ring, but Rob doesn’t ring. In the end he has a shower, makes it last ages. He puts everything out of his head, and he starts thinking about Paige. He gets hard thinking about her.
Paige, kneeling in front of him and taking him in her mouth and the water raining down over her naked back and—
Standing. Kissing him on the mouth. And then he pictures turning her around and fucking her and holding her wet tits in his hands and
and then she turns around to kiss him but oh God—
It’s not her
His eyes fly open and he slaps his hands high against the tiles and stands blinking against the water because the face—the face he saw wasn’t Paige.
It was his mother.
And he drives his fist into the tiles, again and again until the water running down them is tinged red with blood, because everything’s fucked now. Everything. He bends in half and whips the towel from the floor and stuffs it in his mouth. And he bites down hard, his body rigid with horror and rage, each muscle in spasm and each bone crushing against the next like he’s at the bottom of the sea. And with the water at his feet getting redder, getting darker, he clenches his eyes shut and he screams and screams.
Mel’s on the eight-till-eight, and he hears her come in but he doesn’t go down. One of the twins is kicking off about something, but once everything’s gone quiet, there’s a knock.
He lets her in and she goes straight over to sit on his bed. He shuts the door, stands there with his back to it.
‘I’m really sorry about your guardianship thing,’ she says, and she means it. She looks at his hand, goes out, comes back with a bandage and a pad and some antiseptic in a blue tube. She doesn’t say anything, just gestures for it. But he doesn’t move.
She puts the first aid stuff down on his table. He picks up the cream, smears a white glob of it on his knuckles.
‘I know you’re angry with me,’ she says. She doesn’t know the fucking half of it. She didn’t have to tell the panel about the flowers, did she. Or the baby. It wasn’t like he was going to hurt anyone.
The cream stings like fuck but he puts some more on. ‘I read that booklet, the one they sent before the hearing. Says if they turn it down we can reapply in a month.’
She shuts her eyes and when she opens them again she sighs. ‘Listen, Luke…’
‘And then I’ll be out of this shithole. And you’ll never have to bother about me again.’
‘Luke.’
‘And I’ll be fucking fine, thanks very much, I don’t need any of you—’
‘Luke!’ He’s never heard her shout before. ‘Listen to me,’ she says. She looks really, really tired. ‘I know you were holding out hope for this. We had to disclose it, about the…’ she pauses, fumbling for the word, ‘the incident. At your old house. I didn’t want to do it.’
The bed creaks and Mel’s standing behind him. She puts her hand on his shoulder, and he shakes it off, but she puts it back and he just stands there.
‘We all know you didn’t mean anything, my love, but the fact of it is, there’s some serious child protection issues around what happened. If your care gets transferred anywhere else, we have to be able to show that your new guardian is completely across all of that.’
He knows what she’s saying now. She’s saying he has to stay. And if he has to stay—
He spins round. ‘What about Paige?’
Mel blows out her cheeks and looks at the ceiling. ‘What about her?’
‘The guardianship. Once Rob got me, I thought he could apply for her too. And she’d be out of here—’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ she says, and turns her back to him, her hands in her hair.
‘What?’
Mel drops onto his mattress again, plants her hands on her knees. ‘Luke, Paige is not going to live with your brother. That’s never going to happen.’
‘But Rob said—’
‘Well, he’s full of bullshit, isn’t he? He’s not someone you can rely on! It should have been him telling you he’d withdrawn the application, you shouldn’t be finding out from us.’
Luke gapes. ‘Withdrew it? No. They turned it down.’
She’s shaking her head. ‘They didn’t. The hearing was cancelled. The panel contacted Rob about the incident and he backed out.’
‘What do you mean? He promised me—’
‘Well, he talks out of his arse, doesn’t he? And how the hell did you even think that was possible about Paige? What was even going through your—’
She cuts herself off, but her shoulders are right up and she’s angry. Well, fuck her. She doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.
After a silence she takes a deep breath and she says, ‘OK, I’m sorry. That was unnecessary—’
‘She’s being abused right under your fucking noses.’
Mel pulls her hands down her face. ‘What?’
‘Paige. She’s being sexually abused.’
She turns to him and he meets her eyes and although he knows he has to hide it, he almost wants to smile. He’s done it. He’s done it and Paige is going to be all right.
‘Who by, Luke,’ she says flatly, and the feeling disappears. Because he promised.
‘I can’t.’
Mel tips her head, eyebrows up. ‘What?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Well, firstly, you can, and secondly, if you don’t, I’ll have to go straight downstairs and call my manager, and then you’ll have to tell them. That’s how this works, Luke.’
It’s right then that he sees it. It’s not a choice, even though it seemed like one. Because he doesn’t get to make choices, does he. Things happen to him. He’s not master of a single thing.
He says the name, quiet as dying.
‘Mr Polzeath,’ she says, repeating it as if it’s in a foreign language. ‘Oliver Polzeath.’
And then she laughs. ‘Oh, Lukey, for fuck’s sake.’ But she doesn’t laugh for long. ‘You’re going to tell me exactly what you think you saw.’
He opens his mouth, closes it. This is not going the way he expected it to go.
‘Tell me what you saw.’
He folds his arms. ‘Stuff.’
‘Stuff?’
He says nothing.
‘What stuff, Luke?’
‘Just – he was – in the car—’
‘And?’
He just wants her to stop looking at him like that. Like he’s any of the others, giving her gyp.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, sitting next to her. ‘Sorry.’ He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know what else to say.
She shifts so she’s facing him, making it so that he has no choice but to look at her. But not in a way like she’s worried. In a way like she’s so fucking furious with him that she might smack him.
‘Listen to me, Luke. If you do this, if you let your little crush do this – no, let me finish – not only will it ruin that man’s life, but it will be the end of anything you think you might have with her. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
His mouth is clamped so tight shut that he can feel the roots of his teeth. Her fingers dig into the shallow flesh on his shoulders and he wants to cry out.
‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ he says, his voice breaking. He sounds about six.
‘You start mucking around with that kind of shit, Luke, things get pretty fucking serious pretty fucking fast. I’ve seen it happen.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘No? Well, I do.’ She goes to the window. ‘Let me explain how this goes. You make an accusation like that, the first thing that happens is we call the police. The police will interview you, and they’ll interview Pa
ige, right? They will go through every little detail of your statement, they will check where Paige has been, who she’s seen, who she’s spent any time with. What she was wearing and when. They will go through every inch of her background.’ She pins him with her eyes, and he understands without a doubt that she knows he’s read Paige’s files. ‘All of it,’ she says.
She knew, and she never said a word.
Why?
28
Now
Callum Roche tucks the phone between his ear and his shoulder and waves Wren in. She closes the door behind her and takes the chair he gestures her into.
‘I’ve already got half of them doing extra shifts,’ he groans into the receiver, elbows on the desk and fingers splayed across his scalp, which is noticeably sparser than it was a month ago. ‘Fine, fine. Yes, I’ll find a way. Well, I’ll have to, won’t I?’ He mutters a beleaguered formality to end the call and replaces the handset. Then, glancing up at Wren, he delicately removes two pencils from an overstuffed desk tidy, inserts one into each nostril, and mimes slamming his own face onto the table.
Wren laughs. ‘That bad, huh?’
‘You don’t know how lucky you are to have such a caring and sharing boss, Reynolds.’
‘Is that so.’
He casually removes the pencils and makes a big deal of looking at the clock behind him. ‘Glad you could make it.’
Wren apologises. ‘We had a scan, whole thing took twice as long as we thought.’ He doesn’t need to know that the scan itself had only overrun by ten minutes, and that the bulk of her tardiness was down to the argument they’d had afterwards.
The default irritation on his face gives way momentarily to a grudging concern. ‘All well with the baby, though? And your…’ he pauses, waving an awkward hand, ‘your girlfriend… wife… she OK?’
‘Partner,’ Wren says, putting him out of his misery. ‘Both fine.’
‘Right then,’ he says, clapping his hands together, pleased to have dispensed with the niceties.
The news he needs to share with her is that the deadlines are tightening.