From the Cradle

by Louise Voss

  He followed her into a study, crammed full of smelly books – Winkler was proud that he didn’t have a single book in his own house – along with overflowing manila folders almost toppling from shelves, with posters from art exhibitions and postcards stuck all over the walls.

  Helen sat down at an iMac and navigated to Facebook. Winkler stood behind her, breathing in her scent. He wondered idly if she preferred to go on top, or if she liked it from behind.

  ‘This is the message, detective.’

  He leaned forward and read the words from the obvious nutcase who’d contacted Helen. Clearly the work of some sad sack who lived on her own with a dozen semi-feral cats and the crime channels playing all day long. Winkler’s own mum bought all of those real life mags and cut out her favourite stories – all the ones about child abuse and honeymoon murders and ritual killings by love rats and wicked stepfathers. She was always on Facebook, calling for the castration of some child murderer or the torture and slow death of a woman who’d put a cat in a wheelie bin. There were millions of them out there: Winkler had heard something on the radio about it, about how these people were ‘punishers’, how they played an important role in society but the internet had allowed them to get out of control. Helen’s troll was worse – she actually wanted to make contact with victims, maybe even believed in her twisted mind that the kids who lived happily with their parents next door were actually kidnap victims.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he said, biting down on a yawn.

  ‘Do you think there’s any truth in it?’ Helen asked. She had that wide-eyed I want to believe look but she wasn’t thick.

  ‘I’m going to look into it,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  ‘But do you think it will lead anywhere?’

  ‘Mrs Philips, I don’t want to get your hopes up. But I’m going to need you to give me your Facebook log-in details so I can make contact with this woman and try to track her down, find out who she is.’

  ‘Really? My log-in?’

  He nodded. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to go poking anyone you don’t want me to.’

  That didn’t raise a smile. But she very reluctantly said, ‘OK,’ and wrote them down for him on a scrap of paper.

  ‘It won’t take me long,’ he said. ‘As soon as I’m done, I’ll let you know and you can change your password. In the meantime, don’t make contact with her, OK?’

  She looked a bit sick, but that might have been desperation to find her daughter. He said, ‘Right, I’ll be in touch, then.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He walked back to his car, imagining how sick it would make Lennon if Winkler cracked this case. He knew Lennon was convinced that the stepsister, a foxy little piece of jailbait, was lying, that she and her boyfriend had been up to something. Well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that while the parents were out, the daughter was indulging in some heavy more-than-petting with her chavvy bloke. He also knew that Lennon had abandoned that line of inquiry. So what if the daughter had been breaking the law in her bedroom while the little kid was being snatched? Did it make any difference? Well, what if this boyfriend had something to do with it? Yeah, it was unlikely, unless he had some connection to the other two kids as well. What about the parents? Cases, like this, the parents were usually involved. Maybe there was some kind of weird connection between the three sets of parents, like … they were all members of a Satan-worshipping cult who had sacrificed their kids in return for money and success. Weirder things had happened.

  He took a look at himself in the rearview mirror, blew himself a kiss, then drove off whistling, Helen’s Facebook log-in hot in his back pocket.

  Chapter 21

  Patrick – Day 4

  Patrick transferred the bunch of lilies briefly into his armpit, and wiped his palms on his legs. He felt like a fourteen-year-old going on his first ever date, except that the excitement his teenage self would have been experiencing had been syringed out of him, to be replaced by a flat white panic. He had bought the lilies from the M&S at his local petrol station at nine that morning wondering, as he paid for them, if Gill still liked lilies. Wondering if she would still like him, and whether he even cared. He tried to see everything through her eyes – had he owned these jeans when she last saw him? Would she think he’d aged, or that the Buzzcocks retro T-shirt he wore was too young for him? She wouldn’t have seen this T-shirt before.

  Would he start mentally comparing her to Suzanne Laughland when he saw her? He twirled the unfamiliar-feeling wedding ring around the fourth finger of his left hand. He’d had to search through all the drawers of the bedside units in his mum’s spare room to find it, and then polish it with a jewellery-cleaning cloth so Gill wouldn’t be able to tell that he hadn’t worn it for over a year. Would she still be wearing hers? Why was he worrying about it?

  Holmwood House looked, from the outside, like an old folks’ home – apart from the high barbed wire-decorated perimeter fence – one of those Eighties-built institutions that appeared as though someone had designed it in Lego. The entrance sported a porch with bright green painted metal poles supporting a corrugated plastic pointed roof, and Pat thought how much Gill would hate the look of it. She liked muted colours and stylish architecture. But then, how often did she get out? Perhaps she never crossed the threshold. He had a fleeting image of what he would find when he came into her room – a hunched, prematurely aged figure, the colour leached from her waxy cheeks, dry frizzy hair, dressed in some kind of nylon tabard … He shuddered. No, surely not, that was prison. Gill wasn’t in prison, at least, not a physical one.

  As he stretched out his finger to press the door buzzer, his mouth went dry. Despite his years of police experience, he’d never been inside a secure unit before. A surprisingly perky-looking receptionist was sitting behind a melamine desk in a lobby area with a locked double door leading into the main house. She looked up when he came in, and he saw her eyes briefly flicker with appreciation when she gazed at the tattoos on his upper arms and then up at his face. It felt like a long time since a woman had done that, even though this one was in her late forties, with unbrushed straw-like hair and lipstick that had bled into the wrinkles around her lips. She was quite pretty when she smiled, though, and Pat felt slightly more at ease.

  She handed him a sheet of paper pinned to a clipboard with Holmwood’s rules and regulations on it and a dotted line at the bottom for him to sign on. He saw with dismay that one of the first rules was ‘All mobile phones to be left at Reception’.

  ‘Damn, can I really not take my phone in? I just wanted to show my w – er … visitor, some photos on it.’

  He felt immediately flustered and ashamed that he hadn’t been able to say the word ‘wife’. Why had he said ‘visitor’? He was the visitor, not Gill. Still, he’d have sounded even more of a twat if he’d said ‘my visitee’. The receptionist looked at his wedding ring and smirked very slightly, enough though to make him not feel so flattered at her initial reaction.

  ‘Sorry, you can’t,’ she said tartly. ‘You have to leave it, and all your other possessions, in one of those lockers over there.’

  Pat couldn’t help wondering if she was punishing him for being married to one of the patients. Stop it, you moron, he told himself. As if! He skim-read the rest of the rules and signed his name at the bottom, far more clearly than his usual scrawled signature: DCI Patrick Lennon. He left his thumb near the DCI in the hope that when he handed the clipboard back she noticed it. She did, and her expression switched back to the original flirtatious one, this time with added respect.

  ‘Oh – keys,’ he said, noticing another clause he’d skipped over. He put down the lilies and delved into his jeans pocket. His house keys were on a ring with one of those photographic fobs – a picture of Bonnie, her eyes shining with glee on being presented with a Peppa Pig cake on her first birthday. ‘If I take this off, I can take the fob in, right, and leave the keys?’

  The receptionist nodded. ‘Is that your little girl?�
�� she asked, reaching out a hand with long scarlet fingernails to tap the photo of Bonnie’s face. ‘She’s so cute.’

  Pat smiled – more at Bonnie than the receptionist – and put his stuff into one of the small bank of lockers in the lobby. The receptionist walked out from behind the desk, handed the lilies back to Pat, and produced a hand-held metal detector that she passed up and down the length of his body. When it passed over his crotch and beeped, she inhaled with surprise.

  ‘Is that … ?’

  He nodded, willing himself not to blush.

  ‘Well. I’m sure you know the score, Detective Inspector,’ she said. ‘We’re all set. Let me show you through to the visitors’ room.’

  She pressed four numbers on the keypad by the double door – 5786, Pat noticed – and ushered him through. He followed her down the corridor as she greeted two white-clad female colleagues with a high-pitched ‘Alright?’, which was echoed and replied to in the exact same pitch by both recipients, with the exact same words. Pat wondered if it was the requisite staff greeting. His gut twisted and he thought he would have to ask to stop and use the nearest loo, but before he could speak, the receptionist slowed and turned left, just past a large dayroom with nobody in it.

  ‘Here we go!’ she sang, opening a door into a small room like a hospital relatives’ room, pastel walls adorned with bland prints. ‘I’ll just fetch her for you. Have a seat. Won’t be a jiffy!’

  Pat sat down in a pale green velour chair that was either very new, or had just been cleaned. When Gill came into the room, he was rubbing the nap of the velour the wrong way with his forefinger and on seeing her, his first thought was that it was he who had been detained indefinitely in a secure mental unit, and she was visiting him.

  She couldn’t have looked more different to the broken wreck of his imagination. She strode into the room with her jaw set and her determined expression on, the one she had worn in court. She was dressed casually but neatly in jeans, trainers and a Superdry lumberjack shirt, and her hair even seemed to have fresh highlights in it.

  She looked exactly the same – no, Pat thought, much better than he had seen her look since Bonnie’s birth. Not happy exactly, but gone was the pale, anxious face she’d worn in the first few months of Bonnie’s life. If he had had to pick one word to describe her, it would be ‘relieved’. For a second Pat felt resentment – no wonder, she’s probably had eighteen months of unbroken sleep – and this was immediately replaced with a flood of such strong emotion that he had to stare at one of the halogen spotlights in the ceiling to stop tears flooding into his eyes.

  ‘Hi Patrick,’ she said, and he flinched. She only used to call him by his full name when she was cross with him.

  ‘Hi Gillian,’ he replied, standing up and smiling at her to let her know that he was joking by reciprocating with her own unabbreviated moniker. Nobody ever called her Gillian.

  ‘Pat,’ she corrected, and a brief return smile flickered across her face. They were at eye level with one another. Pat could hear his heart thrumming in his chest, but couldn’t tell if it was from anxiety or love. He handed her the lilies.

  ‘These are for you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, sniffing them deeply and getting a little bit of orange pollen on her nose. ‘I love lilies.’

  ‘I know.’

  Of course he knew, Pat thought. They’d had lilies at their wedding.

  ‘But you know that,’ she added, and he felt a tiny bit better. She put the lilies on a small table and turned back to him.

  ‘Are you going to give me a hug, then?’ she asked, and for the first time, he saw the vulnerability in her eyes.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and drew her into his embrace. She wrapped her arms around his chest and hugged him so tightly that he had to pant slightly to be able to breathe. She wasn’t crying, but then she’d never really been much of a crier, at least not until the PND.

  ‘Oh, honey,’ he said. She didn’t smell like his wife anymore. Not unpleasant, just different. ‘You look great,’ he added, after a couple of minutes. He pushed her gently away so he could scrutinize her, and he saw that, close up, she did look older and paler, but it was all so much better than he’d feared that at first he hadn’t been able to tell any difference.

  ‘Nice T-shirt,’ she commented with a slight smile.

  ‘Thanks. You’ve got pollen all over you,’ he said, licking his thumb and wiping it off the tip of her nose. She blushed and broke away, rubbing vigorously at her nose herself.

  ‘You expected me to be a total wreck, didn’t you?’ she blurted.

  He shrugged, a bit sheepish. ‘Maybe. Because you wouldn’t see me. I thought you must be in a bad way.’

  ‘Well. I was. It’s hardly been a barrel of laughs. But I feel a lot better than I did a year ago …’

  ‘When can you come—’ He was about to say ‘home?’, then realized that this was getting way, way ahead. He didn’t know whether he wanted her home, or whether she did either. ‘Out?’ he finished instead.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, and the slight embarrassment in her voice made Pat aware that she also knew there was a lot to discuss, before anything should be assumed regarding their future. There was a long, long silence.

  ‘Let’s sit down,’ he said. They both sat, still in silence. ‘Talk to me, Gill?’ Pat pleaded, feeling the panic rising in him again.

  Gill looked at the ceiling, and spoke in a blank matter-of-fact voice: ‘At the last review, they said there had been a noticeable improvement, but they wanted to give it another six months to make sure it wasn’t a blip. Because I tried to kill myself after I’d been in here for four months. So I was considered a danger to myself. Do you want a drink? Coke? Tea?’

  Pat felt as though someone had sucked the air out of his lungs, although the news didn’t come as a complete surprise. He had wondered if this was the case, because she’d been in there so long. They only kept you in secure units if you were a danger to yourself or a danger to others, and Gill was clearly not going to be a danger to anybody else.

  ‘No thanks, unless you happen to have any Jack Daniels handy … Oh Gill. I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ Her hand touched the arm of his chair without touching his skin, and he noticed that she was still wearing her wedding ring. He had to swallow the lump in his throat that had risen again.

  ‘You did bring photos of Bonnie, didn’t you?’ she asked abruptly

  ‘I’ve got tons on my phone, and videos – but they took it off me when I got here. I’m sorry, I should’ve realized they’d do that.’ Pat extracted the key fob from his jacket pocket, thinking that he ought to stop apologizing, and held the key-ring out to her. ‘Got one on here, though, but it’s from her birthday and so not that recent …’

  When he saw the eagerness in her eyes, he wondered how on earth she could have coped for eighteen months without seeing a single picture of Bonnie. ‘Have you seen any?’ he asked, unable to contain his curiosity.

  ‘No,’ she said brusquely, gazing at the tiny photo of Bonnie with her small silky pigtails. Last time Gill had seen her, Bonnie had had very little hair, certainly not enough to put in pigtails. ‘How could I have?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe your mum brought some in?’

  ‘I haven’t seen my mum either.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Pat was shocked. He himself hadn’t heard anything from Gill’s parents, and his occasional emails went ignored. He had assumed it was because they were too devastated by what Gill had done. He hadn’t imagined that they had not been allowed to see her either.

  ‘I can’t explain it, Pat, but it was better for me when I was ill to cut myself off completely, just to try and start again. I couldn’t bear to see anyone.’

  She did not take her eyes off the key fob, gently stroking Bonnie’s Perspex face. ‘Oh God, she’s so beautiful.’ Her voice cracked.

  ‘I know,’ Pat said, trying to contain himself. Seeing Gill appear so relativel
y normal was almost harder than what he’d steeled himself for, and reminded him with a painful jab of what they had all lost over the past year and a half. Bonnie had been without a mother. When he’d imagined Gill as a nervous wreck, incapable of cleaning her own teeth, he’d consoled himself with the knowledge that Bonnie no longer had a functional mother. And he’d been right, if she’d tried to kill herself. But that was a year ago, and now he was confronted with the fact that Gill had been here ever since, still Gill, healing slowly and depriving him and Bonnie of their rightful family.

  ‘Shit, this is hard,’ he said. ‘She’s started to ask about you, you know. Not properly, of course, she only has a few words. But she says “Mummy?” to most people around her at some point or another. Even me.’

  Gill didn’t reply, just stared at the key fob. After a long silence, she eventually spoke, tension vibrating in her voice. ‘Can we talk about something else, something that’s not about Bonnie, or this place? How’s work?’

  ‘Work’s OK. Bit tricky …’ He’d been about to say ‘juggling everything’ but managed to stop himself. He didn’t want her to think he was having a go.

  ‘Any juicy cases?’ For a second, she sounded like the Gill he remembered, and his heart gave a small nostalgic flip.

  ‘Grim one at the moment. Three kids, all under four, kidnapped in the last month from houses in the Teddington area. One found dead in a traveller camp, no sign of the other two. Only one lead so far, that woman called Denise Breem who was implicated in the Caspar Doyle case but nothing ever pinned on her. But she seems to have a solid alibi.’

  Gill made a face. ‘I wondered if you might be involved in that – I read about it. We’re allowed a newspaper sometimes, and the odd bit of supervised internet access, if we’re very good … The Child Catcher. I remember Breem from that case. Trafficking ring, do you think?’

  ‘Could be. We know that at least one of the kids was taken by a woman.’

  At that moment in the corridor outside they both heard a terrible screaming and wailing. The door burst open, an alarm went off, and a young, emaciated woman with a half-unravelled knitted sweater in pink wool and bandages on both wrists literally ricocheted off the doorframe into the room, like a human pinball, trailing a long pink wool thread behind her. She headed straight for Gill, shouting at the top of her lungs: