by Ruth Dugdall
Noah held his palm to his bloody lip, still crying. Staring at Cheryl as if the Devil had indeed appeared.
Adam gingerly went to comfort Cheryl, delighted when she didn’t stop his hand touching her wrist. He asked softly, “What’s wrong, lass? Why are you so mad at him?”
She allowed herself to be comforted, walked into his hug then turned to Noah.
“My dad’s fucking his mother,” Cheryl spat. “She’s supposed to love him. She said so!”
Noah looked up, his face contorting as upset shaded with indignation. “You’re a liar! My mum is a Christian and my dad knows everything and he’ll be after you if you say things like that. So you better watch it.”
“It’s you who’d better watch it,” she said, then her voice became muffled against Adam’s chest and whatever she said next was lost. She whimpered, still in pain, and bleeding too now.
The dead fish lay forgotten on the concrete shelf.
Down below, the warning bell rang once again.
69
Now
FACEBOOK: FIND HUMBER BOY B:
FOR ANSWERS, NOT VENGEANCE
Noah’s mum: I saw her today, HBB’s mother. She was in the high street, doing her shopping I suppose though she looked totally lost, staring into the window of Boots with her carrier bags dangling from the ends of her fingers. At first I thought she hadn’t seen me but then I realised she was doing her best to look the other way. I crossed the road to Boots, stood directly behind her to see if she had the nerve to speak to me. Our eyes met in the glass of the shop window but she didn’t turn around.
She was supposed to be looking after Noah that day, I’d trusted her. I found out at the trial that she’d spent the day in bed, spent the money I’d given her for Noah’s lunch on a bottle of vodka. Depressed, they said, plagued by migraines. And she looked depressed today too. But her son’s alive, isn’t he? What’s she got to mope about? Her son is free.
Silent Friend: She should hang her head in shame for birthing such evil.
Noah’s mum: She should. But it wasn’t just one thing that led to my son’s death. There are lots of people who let Noah down that day. I am trying to come to terms with that. But what I’m struggling with most is HBB being free.
Silent Friend: Jessica, I am sorry. I am one of those people. Which is why I won’t let you down again. I see you are asking for answers, not vengeance. But what if vengeance is the answer?
70
Ben
I wake to a vision so golden I think I must be dreaming. The sun is spying on us between the gaps in the curtains, casting a sheen over Cheryl’s pale skin and yellow hair. Our shared sweat from last night has dried like glitter on her breasts and stomach.
I don’t move, daren’t move, because this moment is so special. A girl, a beautiful one, in my bed. Maybe my face is swollen and my nose is broken but something good has happened too.
Adam pops into my head, uninvited. My brother, who loves Cheryl. The thought nudges at me – you bastard, she wrote to you in secure, she visited you. You got out years ago.
Can it be that in the end I’ve come out on top? Because she chose me, she could have left with him, but something made her stay. My nose throbs and I wonder if it could have been Adam, if he was the person who attacked me. Whoever it was wore a balaclava. I remember that. Why wear one, unless it was a face I would recognise? Or if not Adam, then someone acting on his say-so. Someone he told where to find me, maybe someone he met that day in the library. Or, could it have been Stuart? He never liked me, and he blamed me for what happened on the bridge. Yes, he would certainly break my nose with no regrets.
Cheryl stirs, opens her eyes, shades her face with her arm and sees me watching her. “That’s creepy. Stop it.”
“Sorry.” I adjust my position, roll onto my back, but she places her hand onto my bony chest and tugs me back onto my side so she can see me.
“Stop being sorry,” she says. “You’ve spent eight years being locked up. That’s enough sorry for a whole lifetime.”
“Not everyone thinks so,” I say, bitterly, and she looks at my puffy face, my swollen nose. On the pillow are flakes of dried blood.
“Then think of me as your guardian angel,” she says, touching my tender face. “My job is to protect you.”
And as she says this, her lower lip quivers, her eyes narrow and an unexpected tear falls from one eye, down her pretty face to her chin.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, though really I’m wondering if this is because she loves me. People cry for someone they love, I saw that with Noah’s mum at the trial, I see it with Issi when she talks about Michael. Does Cheryl love me?
“Nothing,” she says, sniffing so the tears stop. “Honestly, I’m sure it will all be okay. Now.”
And she must mean Adam, getting away from him and choosing to be with me. If she means anything else, I don’t want to know.
71
Cate
“There’s something the Risk Management meeting refused to accept, Paul. That whoever Silent Friend is, it isn’t just a stranger who’s horrified by what Ben did. It’s someone who knows him, who knew him back when he was ten.”
Drained from another sleepless night, Cate realised that she had been fooling herself for years. Deep down she had always known why Liz left. And this has led her to the conclusion that, in Ben’s case too, the answer is in the past. That it always is.
Paul mulled this over, whilst adjusting his cufflink, shaped like a black and white humbug. “I agree, that’s likely. But how are you going to uncover who that person is? You’re not a detective.”
“I don’t need to be. If I can just unpick enough of Ben’s story to find this person, before it’s too late, that’s the only way to save Ben. He’s a sitting duck and no-one but me is acknowledging that fact.”
She may have ignored the truth of her own childhood, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have clarity about Ben’s. She was one step removed, a professional. It was harder to see clearly when the subject was your own family.
“It all depends on Ben, though, doesn’t it?” said Paul. “If he’s willing to open up to you.”
“It all depends on me,” corrected Cate. “If I can make him feel safe enough to want to.”
Ben took his seat and watched as, sat at her desk, Cate took three marker pens, blue, red and green, and wrote the three boys’ names on the large sheet of paper in front of her.
NOAH
ADAM
BEN
She had hesitated over ‘Ben’, knowing it wasn’t his name then, having seen his given name repeated in the witness statements many times, but if she started to use this name in her head, or on paper, what would stop her slipping up when she was with him or in a meeting. So, Ben it was. She added ages:
NOAH, 10
ADAM, 14
BEN, 10
The relationship between the three boys had led to what took place that day, if she could only pull it apart a little it may reveal itself. She drew circles around each name, overlapping them when they shared something: friendship. Siblings. Same school.
Noah was Ben’s friend, not Adam’s.
Adam and Ben were half-brothers, same mother, different fathers.
According to the witness statements, Adam should have been in Scarborough with his dad, but he’d gone back to sea on a last-minute call.
“Why wasn’t Stuart going to take you to Scarborough?” she asked.
“He hated me,” said Ben.
“Why’s that?”
Push, one more step. Ask the question he doesn’t want to answer but hold his gaze so he knows it’s safe.
“Because I wasn’t his kid. I’m half-Icelandic.”
“How’s that, then?”
Ben leaned back in the chair, closed his eyes. “Stuart saved my dad’s life, out in the sea. And he came to say thanks. Got to know my mum. Then when I was born, with this blond hair, Stuart realised that she’d played away.”
“And does this
man know he’s your father?” Cate asked gently.
Ben opened his eyes and gazed at the ceiling, as if in prayer. “Yeah, he knows. But he lived in another country, and Stuart didn’t exactly make it easy for him to keep in touch. But even if I didn’t have his DNA, I’m Stuart’s son really. He raised me. And he hated me.”
Cate thinks about this, how the family dynamics would be forever altered by Stuart’s discovery that Ben was not his. Being a child was hard at the best of times, but feeling loved was something that could override almost anything else. Ben hadn’t received love from Stuart, and only a half-hearted attempt at it from his mother if the witness statements were accurate. The most important relationship was with Adam.
“So what was it like, back then? Was Adam a good older brother?”
“Suppose. He looked out for me.”
“Maybe. But he tormented you too, I bet. Older siblings can be a nightmare.”
Cate thought again of Liz, the unwelcome nagging thought of how she’d failed her younger sister.
“He’d push us around a bit,” Ben looked away, not willing to say more. From loyalty or because he was repressing the truth, Cate didn’t know.
“Sometimes even total strangers can be kinder than siblings,” Cate added.
“Strangers weren’t kinder to Noah,” Ben stated.
“True.”
Many people had seen the unlikely trio that morning and said nothing, failed to intervene, despite them stealing from a shop, sneaking into a cinema and watching a certificate 18 horror film. No-one intervened on the bridge, even with Noah’s increasingly bizarre behaviour, carrying a half-dead fish. Cars had thundered past, noticing, not noticing. Not stopping, or making a call. A cyclist had to swerve to avoid Noah, by then crying on the pavement, but she was too intent on training to stop. Joggers saw Noah’s bleeding lip but didn’t want to get involved. Just one person could have changed what happened, but no-one was kind or concerned or compelled, not enough anyway. Everyone told themselves it was just kids messing about. People will always tell themselves the narrative they most want to hear, but as a probation officer, Cate was trained to fight that urge and dig to the darker corners of why Noah had died.
Cate tapped her pen onto the desk. “What I don’t get, Ben, is how the jury found Adam not guilty. Four years older than you, and I’ve seen him. I mean, he’s tall. Plus he had a bit of a reputation, didn’t he? Stealing milk, truanting from school, shoplifting. He must have been the one to lift Noah over the side of the bridge. Wasn’t he?”
“No,” said Ben. “No-one lifted Noah over. He climbed.”
72
The Day Of
Adam couldn’t stop the thought that kept bouncing back at him, every ten minutes or so, about where he should be. In this parallel universe, where his day had turned out as it should have, he had spent the day at the beach and then he was in Peaseholm park. In his mind it wasn’t raining in Scarborough, the sky there was blue without a cloud in sight, and of course his dad was in a great mood. All day he had been with Ben and Noah only in body, most of his thoughts were an hour away, up the coast, having the day he’d longed for. Even in the cinema he wasn’t really concentrating on the possessed woman watch her husband sleep as objects moved around her, instead he was in the park with his dad, cheering as the battleship guns smoked. The peach alcohol had helped, and so had the hunger and the rain. He felt strange, like he was in a dream.
And the dream, the unreality, continued when Cheryl took his hand. How did that even happen, how was it she even knew who he was? She was so pretty, so confident, that even thoughts of Scarborough seemed like nothing compared to the reality of her.
After she showed them the ugly fish she’d kissed him. He could tell it wasn’t her first kiss, she knew just what to do, and in that swimsuit it was easy for him to feel her bottom, her boobs. She let him touch her, so deeply that she bled. He felt bad about that. Things had started to go wrong then, she’d got sad. Adam tried to fool around, then he got serious. “What’s up?”
“Just today.”
He put his hand on hers. “Have I hurt you?”
“It’s not you, it’s my dad. I can’t stand being alone in the house with him, it’s awful.”
She looked like she might cry and that reminded Adam of his mum. He hated when women cried, it was pathetic, besides, Cheryl had no clue just what a bastard a father could be. Stuart would win the prize, always pissing off, never saying when he’d be back or even if. And how was their mam meant to feed them then? She couldn’t work, not after being signed off with the depression and those bastard migraines. There was only one way she could earn some brass, and that was something she’d promised the social workers to stop. The last time she’d brought a punter home, Adam had lain with a pillow over his head to hide the noise, then followed the man out. He’d waited until the bloke was almost in his car and then set about him, made sure he wouldn’t ever come back. But there were always others who would.
“So why is your dad so awful? Because he’s fishing and doesn’t care where you are?”
“That. Also because he doesn’t even think it matters what I feel. He doesn’t get that what goes on with him is about my life too. You know?”
Adam thought this sounded pathetic, but it wasn’t what Cheryl was saying, it was the way she was having to sniff back the tears, the way she looked so broken, that made him think there was something else. She reminded him of his mum even more then, and he didn’t know why.
“I thought everything was going to change. I could have had a new life. I thought Jessica was going to be my new mum. But she’s chosen him instead.” Cheryl cast Noah a narrow look, picked up a piece of gravel and tossed it at the boy’s head. Noah, feeling it land, flinched but didn’t look up. Since she’d slapped him he was frightened of her.
“Him?” Adam was struggling to keep up with the cryptic nature of the conversation, but he was getting the gist, after all, he had problems at home too. He wanted to show Cheryl that he got her. She may be cleverer than him, out of his league, but they were on the same wavelength when it came to crap parents.
“My dad was supposed to take me to Scarborough. But when I woke he’d gone. He and Mum are always rowing, but still he should have taken me. It’s like he doesn’t even see me.”
“That’s it!” said Cheryl, suddenly animated. “They don’t even see us, me and you, we’re the same like that. It’s like we don’t exist, not unless they want something from us. Then they see whatever they want, just a fucking toy. It’s like we’re not even human.”
Four children, leaning over the bridge. A teenage boy and girl, then two ten-year-old boys, in a line according to size, staring down at the river below.
It was as if nothing existed beyond that bridge, that for them the world had stopped, right there hanging over the River Humber on a steel platform many feet in the air.
Inside each head, thoughts were humming.
Inside each heart, pain and hurt. The pain of being human, but felt more keenly for the company of other children who had the same sickness. No-one to snap them out of it when the snap comes.
73
Now
FACEBOOK: FIND HUMBER BOY B:
FOR ANSWERS, NOT VENGEANCE
Noah’s dad: This is a message from both Jessica and myself. We have been advised by the police that all posts on this page are being monitored.
Since the article in The Sun we’ve been overwhelmed by all the messages of support. But we have been concerned about some of the messages we have received, from an anonymous source, and we want to make clear that we started this site to get answers. Not to be vigilantes, or to instigate any violence.
Silent Friend: You always were pathetic, Dave.
74
Cate
Olivier stroked Cate’s leg with the tips of his fingers, from the sole of her foot to her knee, his eyes never leaving hers. “Sleep now,” he said.
Breathing in the bedroom, a light breeze rustling the
blinds. Growing darkness as night deepened.
Eyes wide open in the dark, Cate spoke. Because he couldn’t see her face, and she didn’t want his pity.
“My sister’s back. Liz left just a week before I turned eighteen, I haven’t seen her since then.”
Silence and breathing. “Are you happy to see her?”
A sigh. Cate released herself from under his hand, rolled onto her back. “I should be, but it’s complicated. She’s back because there’s going to be a court hearing. My father… ”
She stopped, thinking she’d said enough. Olivier was a police officer, this was an old story. His hand found her body again, running over her shoulders, supporting her.
“And she wants me to be a witness.”
“Well,” he said, speaking softly, “you have spoken in court many times, I imagine.”
“But not about something so personal.” She waited, but he did not speak. Olivier was letting her find her own way through the dilemma. “The other thing is, I really can’t remember. She says I knew, but if I did I really suppressed it. How can that be possible?”
“It’s very possible,” said Olivier softly. “We humans are good at telling ourselves only what we wish to hear. How many of the criminals we work with have families, parents and spouses, who will not believe the evidence before their very eyes? We are all capable of such self-deceit, I think. And you were young, Cate, so you can be forgiven for protecting yourself in this way.”
She moved closer to this man, who seemed to understand her, needing to be held once again. Wrapped inside his warmth, she could forget everything else except what the body desired.
After a leisurely Sunday brunch of scrambled egg and bagels, Olivier left, back to his hotel room where he told her he had work to do. After he’d gone, Cate retained that feeling of being wanted, of a fresh start. Though the sky was a dull grey and the weather was chilly, Cate felt nothing of the sort. She was ready for something to change, and she started by pulling the bag from the closet that contained the autumn and winter clothes that she’d stored back in the spring, digging out a light jumper in the prettiest yellow, the shade that had started to appear at the top of the ash tree in her garden as the leaves turned before falling to the ground in a firestorm of rust and red. September was almost over, summer was certainly behind them, but this new season brought a mellowing she loved. Things were changing, with the return of Liz, her relationship with Olivier. New buds of human connections, a distant promise of fresh life where she had thought the root was dead.