by Paula Daly
Jack came rushing out, the first of his class, and thrust a huge sheet of paper at Leon which was covered in hand prints. He had blue paint around his collar and on the inside of his left ear. Leon bent to kiss his son’s cheek as Jack fumbled in his book bag, saying it was very important that he gave us a letter about Knowsley Safari Park. If the money wasn’t handed in straight away, then he wouldn’t get to go.
‘There are only thirty spaces,’ he said worriedly.
I stood there silent. My breath had caught in my throat and I was struggling to breathe. All at once my whole body had started to quake as though I’d stepped directly from a warm pool straight into cold air.
Jack was wearing a cap. A red cap. A Liverpool Football Club cap. It was a small, child’s version. Brand new. Never before worn.
Ryan Toonen had worn the same Liverpool cap when he attacked me in prison.
‘I like your hat,’ Leon said to Jack.
Leon was a lifelong blue. An Everton FC supporter. The sight of his son in a rival cap like this would have at one time made him lose his shit.
I spun around.
The faces were a blur. They melded into each other. Each face was the same.
Who had given the cap to Jack?
Leon plucked it from Jack’s head and tried to wear it himself. Jack responded by leaping up repeatedly, trying to reach it.
‘That’s mine!’ he said, laughing, not really minding. Happy that Leon was more fun than the other dads who were pulling their kids along by their hands, eager to get home.
I took the cap from Leon.
Inside, scrawled in capital letters with a permanent marker, was a message: ‘WATCHING YOU’. Then, below, there were a couple of badly drawn eyes.
‘Who gave you this?’ I screamed at Jack.
And Leon looked at me, horrified.
I shook the hat in Jack’s face. ‘Who gave you this, Jack? Answer me!’
‘A man,’ he said, frowning.
‘What man?’
‘A nice man.’
‘When? Where? What did he say to you? It’s really important that you tell me exactly what happened here, Jack. What did he say to you?’
Leon caught hold of my elbow and said, ‘Jane, what the hell’s wrong with you? You’re scaring him.’
I shook him off. ‘What did he look like?’ I said to Jack. ‘What was he wearing?’
Jack burst into tears. ‘I don’t know,’ he whimpered.
He dropped his bag and threw himself at Leon’s legs, clinging on to his father and burying his face in Leon’s jeans.
I squatted down next to him. ‘This is so important,’ I said. ‘What did the man say to you? Why do you have this hat?’
But Jack shook his head, his face still buried. He didn’t want to tell me.
I touched his shoulder. ‘Please, honey.’
Jack wiped his nose on his hand and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘He told me it was for me. He told me he had a present and I was special – that’s why he was giving it to me and no one else.’
‘He didn’t try to hurt you? Didn’t ask you to go anywhere with him?’
Jack shook his head. ‘He was nice, Mummy. Honestly. He was a really nice man.’
We took a cab to get Martha. I called the nursery en route and yelled at the poor assistant who answered. ‘Where’s Martha? Where’s my daughter?’ She was there. And by the time we arrived the manager of the nursery was waiting for us at the front, a grave look on her face, not sure what all the madness was about.
‘Did anyone come here?’ I demanded. ‘A man? Did you see anyone hanging around the play area? Anyone asking for Martha?’ It wouldn’t have been difficult to spot her. She was the only biracial child in the place.
The manager assured me that, no, no one had been near. No one suspicious. ‘Just another ordinary day, Jane,’ she said.
Back at home, Leon didn’t understand why I hadn’t told him about Ryan Toonen. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that I would take this on alone without saying anything to him. He was mad at me leaving him out of the loop. ‘You don’t trust me,’ he said.
‘No, it’s not that, it’s—’
‘You don’t think I’m capable of knowing this stuff!’
‘I do.’
‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’
‘They threatened me. They threatened us, Leon.’
He was as mad at me as he was at them – whoever they were – for threatening his family. He paced the room, his hands clenched into fists, the tendons in his neck standing proud of the skin, corded like guy ropes.
He wanted to smash something up. Tear someone’s face off.
‘These are the same people who attacked you, Leon,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what they want. I don’t know why they won’t leave us alone.’ Then I added quietly, ‘I don’t know what you did to them.’
Leon stopped.
It was the first time I’d broached the subject to Leon himself that his brain injury could be the result of a revenge attack. That he might have actually done something to cause it.
Watching him, it was clear that this had not occurred to him until this moment.
He closed his eyes.
He pulled his brows together in concentration as he seemed to be willing the memory to return. His head rippled with tension. And I went very still. I could see he was close to a breakthrough.
Come on, Leon.
Remember.
It took everything I had to keep my mouth shut and let his brain do the work. Why did they do this to you? Why did they want you dead?
Leon opened his eyes.
‘I can’t remember,’ he said.
31
Hazel Ledecky interviewed Jack.
She did it at home as she thought it would be less intimidating for him. I watched as she did her best impression of an approachable adult, a friendly person, a person a small four-year-old boy could place his trust in, open up to, and I realized she was a lousy actress.
Jack was ashen, scared to death of her.
‘Jack,’ she said, bending towards him, ‘tell me as best you can what the man looked like.’
But as she leaned in, Jack leaned away from her in his chair and, realizing he had nowhere to go, lifted his knees up and hugged them tightly.
‘Did he have white skin like your mummy …? Or was his skin like your daddy’s?’ she asked.
‘White,’ Jack whispered.
Ledecky glanced at me. ‘The playground is without CCTV,’ she said. ‘And can you tell me how tall he was?’ she asked Jack. ‘Was he tall like your daddy? Or was he a much smaller person like that police officer over there?’ She pointed to DC Payne, who was by the back door, taking notes.
Jack looked at me. ‘Mummy, I need to go to the bathroom.’
He didn’t. He’d only just been.
‘It’s OK if you don’t know the answer, sweetheart,’ I told him. ‘Just tell Inspector Ledecky that you don’t know the answer. It’s quite all right.’
‘I don’t know the answer,’ he said. ‘I think he was tall.’
‘Did he know your name?’ asked Ledecky.
Jack nodded.
‘Did he call out to you?’
Jack nodded again.
‘And why did you approach the man, Jack?’
Jack looked at me, lost.
‘She means why did you go to the man,’ I said.
‘Because he shouted out my name.’
This went on for the next hour, Ledecky gaining very little in the way of actual intelligence from Jack, and Jack getting more and more rattled, more and more upset that he’d made a mistake, that he’d committed a grave error of judgement, by simply accepting a gift from a man who knew his name. It might have been easier if we could have explained to him the context: that he was being used to frighten us, that whoever had attacked Leon was using this incident as a warning. But of course that would have frightened him all the more, unjustifiably. And I could see he really coul
dn’t get his head around why this austere, serious-looking woman was in our kitchen, going over the facts with him in minute detail.
Ledecky left the house armed with very little from Jack, but now at least she knew about Toonen and the prison incident. ‘You really should have told us about that sooner, Jane,’ she castigated; she was annoyed with me. ‘We could have been working on it, we could’ve—’
‘He told me someone would hurt my kids.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘He told me they’d hurt my kids,’ I said again, seeing that she wasn’t getting it.
And she nodded once and left. After that, I did what I could to ensure the children were safe. The staff at both Jack’s school and Martha’s nursery were all warned to be on high alert for anyone suspicious hanging around. I talked to classroom assistants, to the lunchtime supervisors; I made them understand just how serious it was and told them not to take chances. Anything out of the ordinary and they were to bring Jack and Martha inside immediately and call me. I kept my phone in my back pocket the whole time and, even though it was set to vibrate, I checked it unremittingly.
We also stopped walking to school. Images of cars mounting pavements, of runaway bin lorries plagued my dreams, and I kept the children away from open spaces, from busy shops, from anywhere I deemed unsafe.
Aside from going to work, I didn’t go out alone. I checked my rear-view mirror constantly. We holed up inside and I just had to hope it was enough. Hoped that I was demonstrating to whoever was watching us that I was following orders. I quit my emails to Alistair Armitage, and I kept my head down. The cap was sent for forensic testing but came back clean. Jack had said the man had worn gloves, so it was a long shot, anyway. Inspector Ledecky interviewed Jack once more, trying to glean any further information, but she got nothing of use. A white man in dark clothing with gloves, that’s all we knew. No other children in the playground could add anything further. ‘I’m sorry, Jane,’ Ledecky said, ‘but whoever’s doing this is making it very difficult for us.’ Apparently the dark saloon car on the CCTV had been one of many dark saloon cars out that night apparently and when she’d interviewed Ryan Toonen in prison, naturally all she’d got was a string of no comments.
I thought about running away.
We could leave. Disappear. Run away in the middle of the night and go to the other end of the country. Start again where no one knew us.
I fantasized about this. I fantasized about it and came up with intricate plans in my head.
Indeed, I was fantasizing about it when I got the phone call.
‘Am I speaking to Mrs Campbell?’ a voice said.
And I said, ‘You are.’
‘Then I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you.’
32
I drove through the unfamiliar streets trying to hold it together. Widnes was not a place I visited. Fifteen miles from home, it was a town I saw the signs for every time I left Liverpool, and yet, in all of the times I’d left Liverpool, I’d never had cause to go. What did I know about it? Very little. A rugby league town and the place where ex-Spice Girl, Melanie C, had once gone to school.
The satnav sent me along Speke Boulevard but after forty minutes, I was beginning to regret my choice, thinking it would have been faster to take the M62.
The woman had very kindly tried to give me directions but I began losing her words after a moment or two and told her I’d look up the postcode instead. ‘I’m not really able to concentrate,’ and she said she understood. She told me she would be there all day – until around five thirty – so I was not to rush. ‘Take your time,’ she cautioned.
I found the place and parked badly. Reversing in and out of the space, I couldn’t get it right even though it was something I usually did automatically. My nerves were shot. I left my car far too close to the car next to me. They wouldn’t be able to open the driver’s side door.
I wound my way between the other parked vehicles and headed for the area marked ‘Reception’. A sign announced that visitors were welcome by appointment only, and so I pressed the bell and I waited. A young woman unlocked the door and beckoned me in.
Inside, the walls were covered in photographs. ‘Happy in their new home’, the captions read. There was a breakdown of the cost of rehoming an animal: neutering, vaccinations, food.
I felt nauseous. My insides swam.
I gathered myself and approached the woman behind the desk. ‘You called me,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m not sure if it was you exactly who called, but someone did … earlier.’
She altered her look. Consciously tried to soften her expression. ‘Jane?’
I nodded.
‘Follow me.’
As we made our way along a hallway, in a hushed, sympathetic voice she said, ‘Like I said on the phone, the microchip numbers match so there’s really not a lot of chance that this—’
‘I need to check for myself,’ I cut in, and I stopped walking. ‘I need to know for sure … because of the distance. It’s over twenty miles from our home.’
She blinked. She got it.
We went into a side room, a kind of storage room. There were bags of food on the floor. Cat baskets stacked against the far wall. On a table in the centre, wrapped in a pink, fleece blanket – a blanket with small paw prints printed on it – lay Bonita.
Dead Bonita.
I walked towards her and the woman held back.
‘Is it her?’ she asked quietly from behind me.
‘She looks different. Bigger.’
The woman gave a helpless kind of shrug and looked at the floor. ‘She’s stiffened,’ she said uneasily. ‘It changes their features.’
I pulled the blanket from her neck a little. It was definitely her. It was Bonita. There was blood on her shoulder and her lips were pulled back, baring her teeth. Her left eye bulged madly. My pretty little fearless cat looked like a bad taxidermy project.
‘I didn’t think to bring a blanket,’ I said quietly.
The woman told me I could keep the one she was wrapped in. ‘It belonged to the gentleman who brought her in.’
‘I don’t understand how she got all the way to Widnes,’ I said vaguely.
And the woman said she didn’t either. ‘Although they do sometimes climb inside work vans,’ she added, talking, I think, just to fill the silence. ‘We’ve heard of cats being found over three hundred miles away.’
‘Alive though,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she conceded. ‘The cats were found alive.’
‘Do I have to fill out any forms?’
‘No, you can just take her. Would you like a minute on your own with her first? I can give you some privacy if that would help.’
I shook my head. ‘The man who brought her in?’
‘He didn’t run her over,’ she said quickly, and she looked at me suddenly quite stricken.
‘I’d like to thank him if possible.’
‘Oh,’ and she let out a small breath. ‘Sometimes owners … sometimes they can get pretty angry, so we’re not obliged to give out details.’
‘I’m not angry,’ I said. ‘I’m grateful.’
Still she seemed unsure.
‘I want to thank him,’ I explained. ‘This man took the trouble to bring Bonita to you. We could have spent weeks … months … years waiting for her to come home. And the kids wouldn’t have understood. This’ – I motioned to her lifeless, stiffened body – ‘as distressing as it is, has to be better than thinking she was locked up somewhere, alone, dying.’
She held the door for me as I carried out Bonita’s body and placed her carefully in the boot of the car. I pulled the blanket over her head and then changed my mind, tucking it around her neck instead to make her more cosy. For some reason, I’d elected to bring along her cat basket, but we wouldn’t be needing it now so I took it back inside. A donation of sorts.
I handed it over and in return the woman passed me a strip of paper. On it was a phone number.
‘Name’s Rodney,’
she said.
Rodney said he’d hoped I’d call.
He thought it was important that we meet.
As the woman at the shelter had implied, they had a policy of not giving out the numbers of people who’d brought in dead pets, but apparently Rodney had specifically asked that an exception be made in this instance. He gave me ‘old person’s’ directions to his house: number 189, just around the bend, the one after the house with the peeling paint and the red truck in the driveway. If I found myself outside the house with the overgrown pampas grass and the yellow wheelbarrow in the garden, I’d gone too far.
I looked around as I got out of the car. It was a suburban estate, built, I guessed, sometime in the sixties. The houses were identical bungalows, row after row; the place had an Edward Scissorhands feel. Rodney was out of the house as soon as I pulled up to the kerb. He’d clearly been watching out for me.
He approached and shook my hand. ‘Sorry for your loss,’ he said formally, and he touched the peak of his flat cap.
Beneath a rainproof jacket, he wore a brushed-cotton shirt with a tie, and on his feet were rubber-soled, sensible shoes. At first glance he looked like your average busybody, but closer inspection revealed a kindness in his eyes. There was real warmth.
‘It happened over there,’ he said, pointing to a bungalow diagonally opposite. The house had vertical blinds in every window so you couldn’t see inside.
‘Did you see it?’
He shook his head. ‘I’d been watching her though. One minute she was sat there, cleaning and primping herself, as cats do, and the next she was in the road. I’d say it was quick, if that helps. Instant in fact, because by the time I’d got my coat and cap on she was already gone … Driver didn’t stop. They use this road as a rat run.’
‘You were very kind to take her to the shelter.’
‘I’m a cat person myself.’
‘The lady at the shelter said it was your blanket. The pink one? Would you like me to return it when I’ve washed it?’
‘You keep it, love,’ he said. ‘Bury her in it if you like. But … I suppose you probably have your own you’d like to use.’
I told him I’d like to use his blanket and he seemed pleased by this.