From the Cradle

by Louise Voss

  He prayed he was wrong.

  The kitten won’t stop meowing and its piss is leaking through the bottom of the cardboard box. But I’m sure she is going to love it. All little girls love kittens.

  She’s been very quiet since she’s been here. Barely spoken at all. When she’s not knocked out or locked away for her safety, she mostly cries. I want to see her real self, and I reckon the kitten will help. It was a stroke of luck, finding it. I was chucking away some rubbish and when I lifted the lid of the wheelie bin, there they were – three little kittens. Of course, I didn’t want three so I left the other two where they were and grabbed this one. It’s a tabby, and its head appears to be slightly too large and heavy; it flops like a newborn human baby’s.

  I picked up a paper while I was out too. So they’ve found Izzy’s body. I wondered how long it would take them. It said in the paper that the police were looking at forensic evidence and that a number of people are helping them with their enquiries.

  Poor Isabel. Shame she had to die. She was a great help to me. Little Liam too. I hope they don’t find him too quickly.

  I love children, but of all the children in the world, none are as precious as the special girl who lifts her head and looks at me with doleful eyes when I open the door of the van, which I’ve moved several times today, keeping moving so no one notices it.

  ‘Look what I brought you,’ I say, setting the box down on the pull-out table.

  ‘A kitty cat?’ Her face lights up as she registers the incessant meowing.

  ‘That’s right. A kitten. Just for you.’

  ‘What colour is it?’

  ‘Let’s open the box and see, shall we?’

  I open the lid and the cat springs out before I can get hold of it, a blur of fur and claws. I try to grab it but it scratches me and hisses pathetically. I swipe at it, knocking it to the floor, its oversized head causing it to pitch forward and roll over before skittering back to its feet.

  ‘Stop, stop.’ She’s squealing.

  The cat dashes around the floor like a cornered rat. I’m cursing it, trying to scoop it up, and I finally manage to grab it. Just as I lift it, it squirts out a geyser of shit, the foulest-smelling gunk in the history of foul smells. To add insult to injury – or should that be the other way round? – it bites my finger and scratches my wrist.

  I drop it, and before it can get away, I stamp on the wretched thing’s back.

  ‘Stop that fucking noise,’ I yell at the girl. ‘Stop it, or I’ll fucking stamp on you too.’

  She’s hyperventilating now and I regret being so harsh. The kitten is still alive, though its back must be broken. There’s shit all over its fur. What a fucking great idea that was.

  I grab it and chuck it out the door like it’s a soft toy.

  Now I have to deal with a distraught child.

  ‘Mummy, mummy,’ she sobs, taking long fragmented breaths. ‘I want my mummy.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘It’s OK. We’ll get you another kitten. I can get you one right now.’

  It’s when she starts to scream, that boiling old-style kettle noise that is so high-pitched I can only just hear it, that I have to clamp my hand over her mouth, push her into the tiny cupboard. I don’t have any choice. I can’t risk anyone hearing her. Not now.

  Not ever.

  Chapter 11

  Jerome – Day 2

  Jerome Tyson Smith stood at the window in his snow-white jockey shorts, pushing out his pecs and rubbing his abs with the flat of his hand, and gazed out over the piece-of-shit estate he called home.

  From way up here he could see the pramfaces heading home with their Iceland bags weighing down the back of their buggies. He watched an old man with two sticks make his agonizing way to the entrance of the tower block opposite. Over there, Jerome could make out a couple of his boys hanging, keeping watch. He wondered if they could feel his gaze falling down upon them like the eyes of God. That was a chunk of his power right there: his men knew, whatever they were doing, Jerome Tyson Smith was watching.

  ‘What ya doing, babe?’

  He turned and looked at the naked woman on the bed. Carla. She had a sheet draped over her, one vast boob almost spilling loose, a foot with gold-painted toenails on display.

  ‘Hey, princess,’ he said, crossing to the bed and bending down. For a moment, Carla’s eyes lit up – until he ran a hand across the warm flank of the Staffordshire terrier that sat thumping her tail against the mattress.

  He crouched and scratched the dog’s ear. Rihanna. She gazed at him with adoration and rolled onto her back so he could tickle her belly.

  ‘Yeah, you like that, RiRi. That’s right. That’s right.’ He inserted his long fingers beneath her sparkling collar and scratched, making the staffie groan with pleasure.

  ‘Why don’t you come over and do that to me?’ Carla pouted, lowering the sheet to give him an eyeful of her admittedly glorious nipples.

  ‘Give the dog a bone, huh?’ he said. She looked hopeful. No self-respect. ‘Nah. I’m gonna take RiRi out for a patrol.’

  ‘Ah, Jerome, you love that dog more than you love me.’

  There was no point responding to that. Carla had got way too comfortable, was starting to act like his goddamn girlfriend or something. It was time to bin her. He was Jerome Tyson Smith and he just had to click his fingers and bitches came running. White, black, Asian. Private school princesses and council estate skanks. They all wanted a piece of him. One nine inch piece.

  ‘Come on RiRi,’ he said, smiling as his best and only friend jumped down to the floor and trotted over to him, little nails clacking on the hard floor. They headed for the door.

  ‘Hey Jerome,’ Carla called from the bed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That dog – it went for me earlier. Mean lil’ bitch only tried to bite me when I come out the bathroom.’

  He looked down at his dog. ‘Good girl.’

  Two minutes later Jerome and RiRi stepped out into the muggy air. They walked around the estate. He had grown up here, him and his mum and a string of men who either wanted him to call them dad or just wanted him to stay the fuck away so they could fuck his mum. A friend of his, Leonard, had told Jerome how his cousin had been molested by one of his mum’s new boyfriends, and after that the eleven-year-old Jerome had slept with a knife under his pillow and a razorblade in his pants. Fortunately, none of his mum’s friends had ever tried it on with him but one of them, a bug-eyed motherfucker, literally, called John Johnson had murdered her, strangling her in her bed while the fifteen-year-old Jerome listened to the new Beyoncé album through his headphones in the next room.

  In an alternative, fairy-tale version of Jerome’s tale, he had an aunt who lived out in the country and she would take him in and teach him about being a respectable citizen and engender him with a love of healthy pursuits and he’d end up at Oxford or some shit. But no, his Aunt Jacqui, who wasn’t really his aunt but someone his mum had gone to school with, lived in the flat next door, in the same stinking tower block, and she’d taken him in. On his second night with her he’d realized that she wanted to take him in literally and, although he’d already been with plenty of girls at school by this point, he soon understood what it meant to receive the love of a good woman – or rather, a woman who was really good at blow jobs.

  At sixteen, when he left school, she kicked him out after she discovered he’d pawned an engagement ring she’d been given when she was eighteen, that she’d somehow managed to hold onto all these years. He’d moved into another flat in the block opposite.

  He missed his mum sometimes, and even occasionally missed Jacqui and her pierced tongue, but since those days he had started to make something of himself. He was an entrepreneur. He liked watching The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den, all those shows about business, even though most of the people on those shows were sad fucking losers. Because Jerome had figured out long ago that there were only three ways to get rich quick in this city: be shit hot at music or foo
tball, become a banker or turn to crime. He couldn’t sing, was a mediocre football player and even though he’d always been the brightest kid in his class, his education wouldn’t get him a job in the tatty branch of Barclays round the corner, let alone in the City. Which left crime.

  And he’d done alright. He had kids all over the borough nicking iPods and jacking sat navs and car stereos – but that was small change next to phones. He was turning over 100 phones a day now, more on weekends, mostly iPhones and Galaxies. Candy from babies, that’s what it was. He did a little drug dealing too, but he’d figured that was much riskier and the competition fierce and vicious. He wasn’t quite ready to take on some of the big gangs yet.

  He was starting to feel like a big fish in a shitty little goldfish bowl though, swimming around in his own filth. At night, when he looked out of his window, he could see all the lights stretched out across London and he knew he wanted more. He needed to step up. And to do that, he needed more capital than the phones and stolen gadgets brought in.

  The question was, where was it going to come from?

  He and RiRi approached a couple of Jerome’s foot soldiers, Curtis and Milo. When they weren’t stealing iPhones off soft college kids they were a rap duo who totally sucked ass. He lifted his chin in greeting and the two rappers did the same.

  ‘Alright, Jerome. Alright RiRi.’

  The dog sniffed Curtis’s leg then lay down on the hot asphalt with her legs stretched out before her.

  ‘Yo, look at that,’ Curtis laughed. ‘Bitches always be lying down for the Ty Master.’

  At this, Milo made a desperate ‘cut it’ gesture at his rap-mate, but Curtis was high on something and laughed loudly at his own joke.

  Jerome took off RiRi’s chain, stepped behind Curtis and slipped it round his throat, pulling hard. Curtis made a satisfying choking sound, desperately attempting to get his fingers beneath the chain.

  ‘Apologise,’ he said calmly.

  Curtis rasped and Jerome loosened the chain a little.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jerome, man. I didn’t mean no disrespect.’

  ‘Not to me. Say sorry to Rihanna.’

  Jerome pulled the chain tighter. Milo gawped at his friend as his face turned purple. Jerome felt his biceps flex satisfyingly as he increased the pressure. Then he let go, the other man dropping to his knees, clutching his throat and gasping.

  ‘Say sorry to her.’

  Curtis crawled towards the staffie, who lifted her chin and regarded him imperiously.

  ‘I’m … sorry … Rihanna,’ the rapper said.

  They watched the dog, Curtis trembling with fear as he waited to see what the terrier would do.

  RiRi hauled herself up and trotted in the opposite direction.

  ‘Apology not accepted,’ Jerome said. The blood was pounding inside his head now. It felt good. Better than being inside Carla, better than one of Aunt Jacqui’s BJs, better even than getting paid.

  As he hauled the pleading Curtis around the back of the block, the chain swinging from his free hand, RiRi walking beside him, he remembered someone else who needed to be taught a lesson. That little rich bitch. He’d told Larry to give her the warning but hadn’t seen or heard from either of them since.

  He made a mental note to do something about it. To get a message to her. Just as soon as he’d finished with this muppet who’d dissed his dog.

  Chapter 12

  Patrick – Day 3

  The woman who opened the door of the narrow terraced two-up two-down had probably been beautiful once. It was there in the way she held herself, a sense memory from her past in which every man she encountered would look her up and down. Life had worn her down, though, as surely as the tide turns pebbles to sand. She had blonde hair with the roots showing and her eyes were dull behind thick-framed glasses.

  ‘Yeah?’ she said.

  Patrick showed her his warrant card, Carmella echoing him. Patrick said, ‘Detective Inspector Patrick Lennon. Trisha Gould? We’re looking for your son, Larry.’

  She hesitated and Patrick cut off the lie. ‘We know he’s in, Mrs Gould. We just saw him come in the door. Unless you have another teenage boy visiting.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  Carmella stepped forward. On the drive over, she had been unusually quiet and the whites of her eyes had a pink tinge as if she’d been crying or had a sleepless night. He knew he should have asked her but he was bloody useless at things like that, about delving into the touchy-feely. Gill had always laughed at how he would do anything to swerve away from conversations about emotions. If he wanted to say something important to her, tell her he was hurting about something, he would put a record on that covered the way he was feeling, hoping she would take the hint and find some magical way of making it better.

  ‘We need to talk to your son,’ Carmella said in her most no-nonsense tone, and Trisha Gould sighed and beckoned them in.

  Larry Gould was slouched on the sofa with a paperback novel in his hands. He turned his face towards them, a picture of innocence. He was seventeen, a handsome lad, with short hair and a gold earring. His expression was neutral, like he’d been expecting them. Patrick guessed that Alice must have told him they’d been asking about him.

  His mum stood behind them as Patrick said, ‘What’s the book? Any good?’

  Larry held it so they could see the cover. To Kill a Mockingbird.

  ‘Great book,’ Carmella said warmly. ‘Is that homework?’

  Larry looked like he was about to say yes when his mum said, ‘No, he loves reading. Always got his nose in a book,’ and Larry squirmed with embarrassment. Patrick knew that, for teenage boys like Larry, reading was considered somewhere down there with being fake – this generation had, in Patrick’s limited experience, an obsession with ‘keeping it real’ and being ‘true to yourself’.

  They sat on the armchairs opposite Larry, with his mother standing behind the sofa.

  ‘Larry, we want to ask you a couple of questions about the night of the ninth, the day before yesterday,’ Carmella said. She leaned forward, her eyes wide, transformed from the quiet, sad person she’d seemed on the way over. Patrick saw Larry’s eyes flick to her chest for a nanosecond.

  ‘You mean the night Frankie got snatched.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The teenage boy was making a tremendous effort to sit still. Patrick could almost see balls of tension and energy bouncing around inside him. Larry said, ‘You are going to find her, right? She’s such … such a sweet little kid. Alice is in bits.’

  Carmella was right on the edge of her chair and she reached out and touched Larry’s forearm. ‘You think a lot of Frankie?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’

  ‘Then maybe you can help us find her.’

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t know anything.’

  Patrick said, ‘Where were you on Sunday night?’

  Larry said, very quickly, ‘Out with my mates.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Just, you know. Hanging around. Chatting.’

  ‘You didn’t go round to see Alice?’ Carmella said. ‘She’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah, she is. But no, I didn’t go round.’

  Carmella smiled. ‘She’s a very pretty girl, isn’t she? Stunning.’

  Larry did his squirming thing again, but there was a hint of pride in his expression. That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about. ‘Yeah. She is.’

  ‘And you knew her parents were going to be out?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

  Carmella chuckled. ‘Really? We wouldn’t blame you if you went round there Larry. Whatever you got up to, we don’t care.’ As she said this she looked blatantly at his groin and he blushed. ‘If you’re worried you’re going to get into trouble because Alice is underage, I can assure you we’re not concerned about that.’

  He was bright pink now while, behind him, his mum had gone pale. ‘I didn’t go round there. And even if I had, I don�
�t see what it would have to do with Frankie disappearing. I didn’t snatch her or nothing. As if!’

  ‘We just want to know if you saw anything.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘So you were there?’ Carmella said.

  ‘No. No, like I told you. I was with my mates.’

  ‘But, Larry, a neighbour saw you there. Cycling away.’

  ‘That can’t have been me. Probably some other teenage boy on a bike.’ He tried to make a joke. ‘I hope Alice didn’t have some other bloke round there. I’ll kill her. I mean, I wouldn’t …’

  Patrick stood up and crossed the room quickly so he was standing over Larry, crowding him. ‘If you were there that night, whatever you were doing, you’re potentially an important witness. That little girl is missing. I guess you heard about Isabel Hartley? About how we found her dead yesterday? I assume you don’t want the same thing to happen to Frankie, do you?’

  Larry’s Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘Of course not. But I wasn’t there. I swear.’

  The room fell silent.

  Patrick exhaled through his nose. ‘Come on, we’re wasting our time.’ He took his business card out and flicked it onto the sofa. ‘If you remember that you were there, even if you can’t think of anything that might help us, call that number.’

  Back in the car, Patrick thumped the steering wheel with the flat of his hand and winced. There was a tangy smell in the air, the odour of a coming storm. He pictured a rippling swimming pool on a tropical island, somewhere peaceful and far away. But before he could enjoy the vision, a child’s body floated into view in his imaginary pool, eyes closed, a tiny Ophelia, and he gasped as if he were the one drowning.

  ‘I think he’ll crack if we keep leaning on him,’ Carmella said.

  Patrick shook away the image of the drowned child.

  ‘It’s not worth it. I say we forget about Larry Gould – even if he was shagging Alice that night, he probably didn’t see anything useful. Let’s follow the leads we’ve got.’