‘Mr Curtis?’
‘I’m sorry . . . I popped home briefly for lunch. I wasn’t there for more than twenty minutes. Half an hour at the most.’
‘Our witness says they were listening to the Archers, which runs from two to two-fifteen p.m., when you left, so it would be at least half an hour.’
‘I wasn’t timing it.’ He feels a burst of frustration. ‘If you say it was thirty minutes then it must have been, but no more.’
‘Was it usual for you to pop home for lunch, Mr Curtis?’ DC Farron eases forwards from his settled position to pick up the baton of the questions.
‘No. Not really.’ There is no point pretending.
‘But you did on that day? The day Betsey was hurt?’
He doesn’t like the implication but tells himself to remain even-tempered. ‘Yes, I did. Yes.’
‘It’s quite a commute for you, isn’t it? At least an hour and a half, possibly two, there and back?’
‘Taking into account delays on the Underground it can be that, yes.’
‘So I suppose we’re wondering why you decided to do something so unusual?’
Ed shrugs. He isn’t going to help them out and tell them that he’d intended to take the afternoon off but changed his mind after Jess’s frosty response.
‘I imagine you’re a busy man, Mr Curtis,’ the detective continues, ‘and there’s no shortage of places to eat around these offices, so why did you think to go home in the middle of the day?’
‘I wanted to see my wife.’ They have goaded him into admitting it. He doesn’t want to lie and perhaps complete honesty is what is needed to get them all out of this mess. But he can’t admit to everything that happened: can hardly tell them he lost his temper and shouted, when he went downstairs after checking on Betsey, though there’s a risk Jane might have heard. He compromises: offers the truth about returning home and a lie about returning to the office. ‘I’d intended to take the Friday afternoon off for once but on my way home I realised I just had too much work to do and I’d have to go back; I knew that even before I arrived.’
‘And was there any particular reason for going home for lunch?’
‘We . . . we’d had a disagreement the previous evening. I just wanted to check she was OK.’
Something passes over DC Rustin’s face. She has what she was after, and he feels snared.
‘Was there any reason she wouldn’t be OK after a “disagreement”?’ She does a good impression of looking both surprised and concerned and Ed, at that moment, hates her. What must it be like to be so immune from emotional frailty?
‘I just wanted to see her. We very rarely argue and I wanted to put things right.’
‘And how did it go? Your attempts to put things right?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure how that’s relevant?’
‘It may be relevant because you and your wife are the subject of a police investigation into how your daughter sustained a head injury,’ DC Rustin explains. ‘If you’d argued and you continued to argue despite your best intentions, then that may be relevant to what happened to your daughter next.’
The temperature seems to drop a couple of degrees. How completely stupid could he be? Or should he be honest? Admit that their conversation did deteriorate. That he’d left without saying a proper goodbye? That he’d slammed the door after she’d given him the silent treatment, when he’d gone downstairs, rather than telling him what was wrong, as he’d so desperately wanted? Jane would have heard that slammed door; would have heard his raised voice, too; would, no doubt, have mentioned all this to the police. With horrible clarity, he imagines the detectives’ narrative. A row, raised tempers, and the baby bears the brunt of it at the hands of one – or both – of her parents. And yet that’s not what happened here.
You’ve got this all wrong, he wants to tell DC Rustin. We would never hurt anyone; we would never touch our little girl. Instead he admits: ‘It didn’t go very well.’ And then, because Jane will be bound to have heard male footsteps trudging up the stairs and he cannot trust that Jess won’t tell, he bows to the inevitable. ‘I went to give Betsey a kiss in her cot. She was awake but gurgling. Was perfectly happy. And then I left.’
DC Rustin eases back from her out-of-the-starting-blocks position and watches him, carefully. She has some of what she wants. She can take her time now. Ed glances at his desk: everything is as it was when they entered – even his coffee is sufficiently hot to be drinkable – and yet the atmosphere has irrevocably changed.
‘Why didn’t you mention any of this before, Mr Curtis?
When we asked where you were that day?’
‘You asked where I was that afternoon and evening. Where I was earlier in the day didn’t seem to be an issue.’
‘We are investigating how your little girl was injured,’ she reminds him. ‘It would have been helpful if you had been more forthcoming about this.’
Silence stretches, tense and taut. All he can think of is Jess’s laptop. Though he deleted the search history, any expert could retrieve it, couldn’t they? Better to distract Rustin with his failure to admit to this impromptu visit. And yet he doesn’t want to implicate himself.
‘There was no reason for me to mention it since I have done nothing wrong,’ he manages eventually. ‘You didn’t seem to think it relevant at the time and it didn’t occur to me to mention it.’
DC Rustin looks dissatisfied and glances at her colleague.
‘You’ve been most helpful, Mr Curtis,’ says DC Farron. ‘I’m sure you’ll appreciate that we need to iron out any inconsistencies in statements. So we’re now clear that you returned home to Kneighton Close at one-thirty p.m. on Friday lunchtime and left between two and two-fifteen?’
‘It would have been straight after two. I was back at my desk by three p.m. You can check with my PA, Jade.’
He no longer feels rattled; is nudging towards being his usual, urbane self, confident of managing any situation. It is a relief to have cleared this up, to be honest, but he wants them to go now. The strain of having to pretend that everything is fine with Jess is intense, and he doesn’t know if he can maintain it much longer. The more DC Rustin digs, the more likely he is to say something that implies he is concerned for, or no longer understands, his wife. Work has been a sanctuary but now their inquiries have spread into the one place he thought he could briefly escape from his anxieties. He stands abruptly, eager to initiate some change and conscious of looking assertive as he pulls himself up to his full height.
‘I don’t mean to be rude but if that’s all, I really should get on with some work.’
‘Of course.’ DC Rustin gathers her bag together but takes some time doing so. ‘There’s just one thing that keeps bugging me,’ she says, and he sees that it’s deliberate, this prevarication. ‘I can’t help thinking about what a distance it was for you to go back home, that lunchtime, and how disruptive. How it would have been easier for you to speak on the phone.’
‘Possibly. But I wanted to see her. I’m better at apologies face to face.’
‘I understand you took her flowers?’
‘Yes.’ Is there nothing Jane didn’t see?
‘Must have been quite an argument to do all that,’ she says, tilting her head.
She moves back into the room and perches on the edge of his desk. He resents her doing this. It’s a clear imposition: a means of asserting she isn’t leaving. He wills her to move that bony bottom as he concentrates on not saying anything sharp.
He loves Jess and he is not going to implicate her. There is no way he is going to say anything that might increase their suspicions because of course he has considered that she might have snapped. ‘Why do I want to harm my baby?’ Christ, that phrase has been rattling around his head since he read it in the early hours of Sunday morning, and that conversation yesterday with Charlotte hasn’t helped. What was it she had said? ‘It would be perfectly normal if you felt some disquiet, some doubt.’ Do they all sense he mistrusts his wife?
He is keeping these thoughts quite private. These people will never detect the slightest disloyalty to her, however hard they try.
And yet DC Rustin is tenacious. Here she is now, her bottom shifting on the edge of the desk and provoking irritation. She knows she is in control, knows that he will have to give her an answer. Perhaps for this reason, there’s a flicker of a smile on her face.
‘So,’ she says, with a look that says she has all the time in the world, and they both know it. ‘Perhaps you could tell us what this row was about?’
JESS
Wednesday 24 January, 7 p.m.
Twenty-seven
They are back in hospital.
Kit has broken his arm. A forearm fracture. They’ve been here for over four hours, waiting in A&E then getting it X-rayed, manipulated and put in plaster. Now they’re in Radiology, waiting for it to be X-rayed again.
At first, Jess was riddled with fear.
‘They’ll think I’ve hurt him, too. They’ll think it’s too much of a coincidence, having two children injured. They’ll take the boys from me.’
‘It doesn’t look great,’ Martha admitted. ‘But I’ll tell them I encouraged him to scale the tree.’
‘But then they’ll think I can’t parent,’ Jess fretted, paralysed at the thought of how Kit’s injury might be perceived.
In the end, the doctor didn’t seem unduly perturbed. It was a nasty but standard forearm fracture and Martha was there at the time.
And as the hours ticked on – two, three, four – and no police officer arrived, Jess’s fear that the boys would be physically taken from her began to ease.
Martha’s uncharacteristic nervousness diminished too, and segued into boredom.
‘I’m gasping for a cup of tea.’
The air is cloying and Frankie frustrated, as he kicks away at his chair leg with a dull, rhythmic thudding. Martha can’t take him home because she has to remain with Kit, and Jess can’t take him because she can’t be left alone with any of her children. Her sister gives a long, heartfelt sigh. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, though she doesn’t look apologetic; she looks fed up. ‘It’s all catching up with me.’
‘I’ll get you a drink.’ Jess springs up, desperate to make amends and to do something to break this stasis. ‘There’s a vending machine near A&E.’
‘Oh, don’t worry. I can’t bear that crap.’
‘Or I could get you a proper cup, or a decent coffee – at the shop on the concourse.’ Martha hesitates: she runs on caffeine. ‘We’re going to be a while here, and then we’ll have to wait to be discharged and given a date for fracture clinic,’ Jess says. It’s not that she wants to leave her boys but the opportunity to escape for a moment is suddenly hugely appealing.
‘Well, if you’re sure? Then a proper coffee would be lovely.’
‘Of course.’ She is gathering up her bag and coat; suddenly cannot get away from there quick enough. ‘It shouldn’t take too long, depending on the queue, and I’ve got my phone with me.’
‘I’ll call you if they tell us we can go before you get back.’
Jess smiles apologetically, knowing they’re unlikely to be discharged any time soon. Four hours will stretch to five, then six. ‘I’ll try to be quick,’ she says.
*
She doesn’t mean to make a detour but she gets lost on the way to the main hospital concourse. She’s trying to take a shortcut and then she sees the word: ‘Chapel’. Of course, she takes it as a sign.
The room is empty. All the trappings of religion are here: the stained glass window, the brass candelabra, the plush red velvet cushioning, the tapestried footstools, even a table of candles to be lit for loved ones in desperate hope. She takes a pew, hoping for a rush of warmth or certainty, some reassurance that Betsey will be OK. (Kit’s fracture, though further evidence of her poor parenting, is a more containable, familiar worry.) But none is forthcoming. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispers, over and over. ‘I just don’t know what to do.’
She reaches into her bag for a small ragdoll she’s been carrying around like a talisman; holds it to her nose to catch Betsey’s smell. But it’s incense she can detect, and that potent mix of ammonia, bleach and fear that burrows inside her nostrils. Her throat thickens. She’s so tainted by this place she can’t even conjure up her child.
Panic flares and she aligns her rings in her own troubled rosary but none of her usual rituals are helping. Perhaps lighting a candle might calm her down? She strikes a match, watches as the wick catches and the flame spits into life. But why has she only lit one? She needs to light three. She fumbles with the matches. Now they will last for different lengths of time, Betsey’s burning out before the boys’. Will that mean her life is more fragile than theirs? Her hands shake as the match flares and the flame nips her flesh, her nail blackening. ‘Ow!’ The smell of singed skin; a shiver from the burn and she is trembling with fear.
How can she get out of this mess? Should she just be honest? But no one will believe her. Not DC Rustin. Not Liz. Not Martha. Not even – and this is the thing that distresses her the most – Ed.
She sobs and swipes her mouth with her hand, wipes her nose with a clagging tissue, snot bubbling from her like a child. She is broken. Completely hollowed out.
For some reason, she thinks of the puppy: yet further proof of her maternal failings. The boys had clamoured for one and, ignoring her desire for calm and order and a day that was suddenly hers from nine to three, she eventually gave in. They chose an apricot cockerpoo, who the boys named Teddy: a bundle of fluff; less dog, more bear. She had intense misgivings in the run-up to picking him up but the joy on Frankie’s face when they collected him on Christmas Eve reassured her this was a good thing.
How wrong could she be?
She had tried to love it. And it wasn’t just its neediness that stopped her but the grim reality of being responsible for a tiny creature that pissed and shitted everywhere. Life became an endless cycle of disinfecting floors and washing its bedding at ninety degrees. Then she would have to clean the stupid creature, which would trample in the poo in its excitement and distress, and jump up at her – meaning she had to start washing herself, the floor, and it, all over again.
Everyone said things got easier after two weeks but at three weeks she was still trapped. Her hands so raw they started bleeding, her chest tight, her throat sore from inhaling the smell of bleach. Her thoughts were of germs, and blindness caused by shit smeared in her children’s eyes. It frightened her, the force with which such thoughts could cascade. She’d been anxious about germs when the boys were small, but never at this intense level. Now her fears delighted in rushing back in.
One night she had stood in the frozen garden for half an hour with a puppy that refused to poo but did so as soon as it bounced inside and she realised she couldn’t cope. Mel had a puppy from the same litter and was managing admirably, and its softness and eagerness to please would constantly highlight Jess’s failure to be a similar owner, and by extension, mother: someone competent, capable, fun. But she knew, standing there in her kitchen confounded by that tiny, encrusted creature, that it - she no longer gave it its name or thought of it lovingly in the least – had the potential to break her.
Perhaps there is something wrong with her that means she fails to do what’s right – whether it’s persisting with a puppy, or confessing she is overwhelmed by motherhood. A fatal flaw that made her resist taking her baby to hospital; made her fudge her story; made her lie to the police.
But the truth has become so tangled that she no longer knows how to make things right. She watches the flame of Betsey’s candle, mesmerised by its brightness until the light brings clarity. If she can only rely on herself to be vigilant, then she has to do one thing.
*
The paediatric ward is quiet when she arrives there a little after 8.30 in the evening. She hasn’t called Martha to tell her what she’s up to; has closed her mind to the fact she was meant to be getting h
er a coffee. Her phone has vibrated in her bag a couple of times but she ignores it, just as she ignores the fact that she shouldn’t be here.
To her surprise, she gets in easily: a parent who recognises her from the previous day buzzes her through and the night staff are preoccupied at the start of their shift. The woman at the nurses’ station is unfamiliar. A bank nurse, perhaps; someone employed through an agency who hasn’t seen her before, who doesn’t usually work here.
‘Who are you here to see?’ The nurse’s English is abrupt and fractured. Jess hopes her understanding of the agreement forbidding her from visiting without a social worker is equally rudimentary.
‘My daughter, Betsey Curtis – she’s in that bay.’ She gestures in the direction of her bed. ‘I just wanted to drop off a toy of hers – and to say goodnight.’ She pulls the ragdoll from her bag and the nurse nods, convinced by this badge of parenting. ‘Thank you,’ Jess whispers. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’
Betsey looks so tranquil as she sleeps. The pressure bandage is still in place and a tube snakes from a cannula in her finger but there’s no evidence she’s recently experienced a series of seizures. Her limbs are still and her eyes closed, not rolled back in her head.
Jess strokes one plump cheek, savouring its soft peachiness, then brushes her forehead with her lips. But Betsey’s smell is masked by that of the hospital ward and the fabric of her bandage.
She sinks into the blue plastic chair by the side of the bed. She hasn’t thought about what she will do next. All she had wanted was to sit with her baby girl, unquestioned and unnoticed, and then, somehow, to spirit her away. I need to take my baby away from here. That’s a mad idea, isn’t it? Not in Betsey’s best interests since it contravenes what the police, social services and the doctors have said. She knows this, just as she knows she should have returned to Martha, but it makes no difference. Perhaps her maternal instinct – never as strong with this baby as with her boys – is finally kicking in?
She places a hand on her daughter’s fragile arm, circling her wrist with her fingers. The tube protruding from the cannula in the back of her hand can be unscrewed from the drip and from the cannula so easily. And once it’s gone, there will be nothing to bind her to these machines. Her coccyx prickles as she thinks of the needle piercing her baby’s skin. She has long since resisted medicalisation, preventing Betsey from being vaccinated, trying so hard to give her a natural birth – and how she failed there! Now, she can spare her any further intervention and take her away from this.
Little Disasters Page 19