I mean it’s not like any of this stuff is DRUGS, is it? I’m not taking anything. I don’t drink much and I only smoke at parties or whatever, and I know that you do plenty of both and so does dad, puffing away on those stupid shisha pipes at the café like nobody’s business.
Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s all different if you’re a man, isn’t it?
STUPID ME!
Thing is, if I sound angry, it’s because I am. I’m nearly twenty for crying out loud. I work, I pay taxes and I STILL do my fair share in the house. MORE than my fair share. If me wearing a particular top or hanging out with particular people makes you uncomfortable or OFFENDS you, that’s your problem, not mine, because I won’t be told what to put on my face or who to see or what music to listen to. I don’t care what your pathetic friends are telling you or what you might see online or anything. You and dad are the ones that need to change, not me.
I like my life, OK? You need to DEAL with that. If I ever seem unhappy, it’s only because you and dad and all your ridiculous rules have made me that way.
There. Did you enjoy that?
R xoxo
FIFTY-SEVEN
The boy had not smiled, not once.
He sat hard against one end of a sofa, a few feet away from the social worker, there because she had already established a meaningful relationship with the boy, as well as taking on the necessary role of appropriate adult. Helen sat in a brown corduroy armchair opposite them both. This was not the same room in which the social worker had conducted her initial interviews – there were no cupboards filled with therapeutic toys or drawing equipment – but they were in the same building. When Helen interviewed the boy’s father, as she would do in a few days’ time, it would be in a somewhat less comfortable room at the station in Streatham, where her team was based, but for this final round of conversations with the twelve-year-old and his elder brother it was important that the surroundings were familiar.
‘I like it in here,’ the boy had said when they’d come in.
‘That’s good,’ Helen had said.
‘It’s very tidy.’ The boy had nodded approvingly, ignoring a large, multicoloured beanbag and settling down instead on the sofa. ‘Our house is always such a mess.’
Helen had laughed. ‘You ought to see mine.’
‘Are you messy?’
‘I’ve got a little boy.’ Helen had taken her jacket off, laid it on the floor next to her handbag. ‘He’s very messy.’
The boy was wearing his school uniform. Helen wasn’t sure if it was because he was going to school once they’d finished or if it was simply what his mother had chosen for him to wear. It might have been the boy’s choice, of course, but Helen doubted it. His mother was waiting in an adjacent room and his father was at work. They were both – so Helen had been informed – as alarmed as they were confused by the initial inquiries by social services, and were now hugely distressed at the involvement of a Met police child abuse investigation team.
They were loving parents, they said. They had nothing to hide.
Helen would have been surprised, and not a little suspicious, to have heard anything different.
‘Do you like school, Kyle?’ she asked.
The boy scratched his head, tousling his dirty-blond hair. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Have you got lots of friends?’
‘Depends what you mean.’
‘Well, the boys you hang around with at playtime.’
The boy shook his head, serious. ‘We don’t call it playtime. That’s what you call it at baby school. We call it break.’
‘Sorry. At break, then.’
The boy shrugged. ‘There’s a few different ones. Depends if anyone’s been annoying me. I normally hang around with my brother.’
‘Isn’t he usually with the older kids, though?’
The boy sniffed and began picking at something on the arm of the sofa.
Helen looked down at the iPad on her lap. She scrolled through her notes. ‘Looks like you’re pretty good at sport. Football and swimming… bit of a star at sports day.’
Another shrug.
‘But you haven’t been doing as much sport lately, have you? Your teachers say that you’ve been pulling out of a lot of lessons and practices because you’re not feeling well, or you’ve hurt yourself.’
‘I couldn’t play football a couple of times because I’d hurt my leg.’
‘How did you hurt your leg?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘OK…’
‘Oh yeah… I think I fell over when I was running for a bus. I remember because that was when I broke my phone.’
‘Was that how you got the bruise? Here?’ Helen patted her thigh.
The boy nodded. Helen had seen photos of the bruise; purple and saucer-sized, a little bigger than those on both his arms.
‘Your teachers also say that you haven’t been doing as well in class as you used to.’
‘Which teachers?’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter which ones, but several of them. You were doing really well, they reckon.’ Helen scrolled and nodded, as though impressed at what she was seeing. ‘Top of your class in several subjects, always handing your homework in on time… but in the last few months your work’s not been anywhere near as good. And you’re not joining in as much.’
‘It’s boring,’ the boy said.
‘Really? Why wasn’t it boring before?’
‘Sometimes I just don’t feel like it, that’s all.’ He watched Helen working at her iPad. ‘What’s on there?’
‘Just my notes,’ Helen said. ‘So I don’t forget anything.’
‘I’d love one of them.’
‘They’re very useful.’
‘You know you can watch videos on them? Do you watch videos on it?’
Helen shook her head. ‘You like to watch videos?’
The boy said yes, that of course he did, and sat forward slightly. This was a subject he was obviously far happier discussing than school.
‘What do you like to watch?’
‘Game Of Thrones.’ The answer was instant, definitive. ‘Best TV show ever.’
Helen nodded. She had never seen the programme, but knew that it was pretty violent. She also knew that it contained a fair amount of sex, but she wasn’t naïve enough to presume that this was in any way significant. Unless they were very closely monitored, most twelve-year-olds had access to sexual content far more explicit than anything they might see on television, with parents who were guilty of no more than simple carelessness.
‘There’s a lot of violence, isn’t there? In Game Of Thrones?’
‘Yeah. There’s loads of battles, so people get killed.’
‘Is that the sort of stuff you were thinking of when you did some of your drawings? There was a lot of blood and knives and things.’
The boy blinked and looked away. ‘Yeah. Like on TV.’
‘Why do you like that kind of thing so much?’
‘Because it’s funny,’ the boy said.
Helen exchanged a look with the social worker. ‘Funny?’
‘Yeah. It makes us laugh.’
‘You and…?’
‘Me and my brother, and my dad. Not my mum though, because she hates all that. Says it makes her feel sick.’
Helen sat back and let a few moments pass. The boy was still picking at the arm of the sofa. A stain, or a loose thread, or nothing at all.
‘What about when it’s just you and your dad? What kind of things do you do together?’
The boy puffed out his cheeks as though slightly bored. This was an area he had been drawn into before. ‘Watch videos… watch TV… he helps with my homework sometimes, but not if it’s maths, because he’s rubbish at that.’
Helen looked at the social worker again. It was much the same response she had got, that Helen had seen in the videos she’d watched.
Casual and apparently stress-free.
No obvious red flags.
‘I’ve g
ot a sister,’ Helen said. ‘She’s a bit younger than me… same sort of difference between us as you and your brother.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Jenny,’ Helen said. ‘I remember when we were your age, we used to play all sorts of special games that we didn’t want grown-ups to know about. Things that were just ours, you know? Most of all, we liked to have secrets. We had a code that nobody else could understand, so we could talk about things without anyone knowing. We’d sit in a corner and whisper things to each other… our things. Do you do anything like that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you have special secrets?’
‘What?’
‘You and your brother.’
The boy began scratching hard at the arm of the sofa and then stood up suddenly. He said, ‘Can I have a drink?’
‘We’re nearly finished,’ Helen said.
‘I’m thirsty, though.’
‘Just a few minutes.’
The boy let out a long sigh and began to walk around the room, just as Helen had seen him do in the video. He looked closely at random points on the walls and at the window frames. He picked up a decorative vase from a low table and examined it, his eyes everywhere but on the two women in the room with him.
‘I’ve only got a few more questions,’ Helen said. ‘Then I’ll get you a drink. A Coke or something?’
The boy trudged back towards them, then dropped with a grunt on to the beanbag. He shuffled a few feet to the right then looked from the social worker to Helen, and back.
He suddenly seemed absurdly relaxed and confident.
The social worker said, ‘Is everything OK, Kyle?’
The boy nodded, and for the first time there was the trace of a smile. He said, ‘I can see right up your skirt.’
The social worker reddened and quickly crossed her legs. She took a few seconds to compose herself, then said, ‘I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.’
‘I think you embarrassed yourself.’ The boy’s smile became a smirk. ‘Sitting there with your legs open.’
Helen said the boy’s name, but he wasn’t listening. She watched as he began waving his hand in front of his face as if trying to get rid of a terrible stench.
‘Can you smell fish?’ He began to laugh, then stopped, screwed up his face in mock-disgust and laughed again. He rolled back on the beanbag, helpless with laughter and repeating what sounded very much like a joke someone else had told him.
‘I can smell fish!’
FIFTY-EIGHT
‘I think she’s been feeling a bit ignored,’ Hendricks said.
Tanner nodded vigorously and said, ‘Too bloody right I have. Miserable bastards.’
‘I told you, I’ve been in to see you several times already,’ Thorne said. ‘But you weren’t exactly great company back then. This is the first time you’ve actually been… chatty.’ He looked across at Hendricks who was sitting on the other side of the bed and rolled his eyes.
‘Too bloody chatty if you ask me,’ Hendricks said. ‘Having said that, I’m still waiting to hear about the burly firemen.’ He shook his head. ‘Fifteen minutes I’ve been sitting here and she’s said nothing about their nice shiny helmets, nothing about the size of their hoses.’ He sighed. ‘All be lost on her, obviously.’
‘I know,’ Tanner’s voice was a little deeper than usual, slow and slurry.
Thorne looked at her. ‘You know what?’
‘I know you were here.’ She smiled. ‘I mean, I knew you were here when you were here.’
‘I don’t think so.’
There was more nodding from Tanner, who had been raised up a little in her bed. Two days on from her surgery, there were still dressings on her face and tubes attached to the back of one hand. In the other, she clutched the clicker for an infusion pump, which she was using to administer morphine to herself intravenously. She had been pushing the green button every few minutes since Thorne and Hendricks had arrived. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You and Dipak Chall. Sitting in here and rattling on about Bannerjee and the rest of them. Mumbling about meetings and flowers and whatever. Blah blah blah.’
‘You heard what we were saying?’
Tanner moaned and Thorne heard the beep as she pushed the green button again. He was not overly concerned, because he knew that the pump was fitted with an interval breaker, designed to prevent the patient from giving herself more of the drug than was needed. He looked at Hendricks and shook his head. It was apparent to both of them that she’d had more than enough already.
‘Anyway, I was busy,’ she said. ‘Susan and I had things to talk about.’
‘How did that go?’ Hendricks asked.
Tanner turned to look at him. ‘Please don’t talk to me as if I’m an imbecile, Philip. I didn’t land on my head when I jumped out of that window. I’m well aware that Susan’s dead and that I only saw her because of the drugs, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t feel very real at the time.’
‘Sorry,’ Hendricks said. He looked towards the window and dipped his head, like a chided schoolboy.
‘Oh, Christ.’ Tanner tried to sit up, moaning in pain with the effort.
Thorne reached for her hand. ‘What?’
‘The cat. What happened to Susan’s cat?’
‘The cat’s fine,’ Thorne said. ‘I told you when we came in.’
‘She’s with your neighbour,’ Hendricks said.
Tanner let out a long breath, stabbed at the green button again. ‘You need to make sure that woman’s all right to take care of her for a while, that she knows what kind of food to give her. I’ll sort it all out when I get home. Well, obviously I won’t be home for a while… God knows when that’ll be, but when I get out of here, I mean. She needs to know what kind of food to give her.’
‘Cat food?’ Hendricks said.
‘She’s very fussy, you know?’
Thorne nodded. Tanner had said all this once already. ‘You don’t need to worry about any of this stuff,’ he said. ‘Just concentrate on getting back on your feet. The good news is that there’s no major damage to your lungs, so now you just have to give everything time to heal properly, get started on your physio —’
‘She saved me, you know? The cat.’
‘Right.’ Thorne caught the look on Hendricks’s face, sensed a sarcastic remark coming and softly shushed him.
‘She woke me up.’ Tanner slowly lifted the hand to which the drips were attached. She brought it to her chest and gently kneaded with her fingers. Then she screwed her eyes shut and shook her head, confused. She turned to Thorne. ‘Why didn’t the smoke alarms go off?’
Thorne looked away for a few moments. Some of the fruit Chall had brought was still there in a bowl on the bedside table, alongside a good many cards and the gift that Thorne had delivered several days earlier. He didn’t know if she’d seen it yet. ‘They took the batteries out,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘They were in the house. Before.’
Tanner nodded and pushed the control for the morphine pump. ‘The Asian and the Irishman.’
‘I presume so,’ Thorne said.
‘Well, that’s one thing Susan can’t blame me for,’ Tanner said. ‘Her stupid idea to leave a spare key under that plant pot. I never got round to moving it.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Too many other things to do.’ Tanner was shaking her head, grimacing as the words tumbled out. ‘I had to replace the carpet for a start and sort the bills out. I had to decide what to do with all her clothes and I was trying to deal with her mum and dad and then those two went missing off the Tube and you know what they did to her eyes?’ She turned to look at Thorne. ‘Tom? Do you know what was left of them?’
Thorne reached for her hand again; a fist tightly wrapped around the morphine pump.
‘Holes. That was all, holes.’ She snatched her hand away from Thorne’s. She said nothing for half a minute. Her eyelids fluttered and finally closed softly, and she said, ‘Fucker
s.’
Hendricks folded his arms, as though disgusted. ‘Well, I’m not sure if those drugs are helping with the pain, but they certainly aren’t doing a lot for your vocabulary.’
They watched her for another minute or so. It looked as though she was asleep, but just as they were about to stand up and leave, she said, ‘And you can fuck off as well, Philip.’
Waiting for the lift, Hendricks said, ‘She’s off her tits.’
‘I reckon it suits her.’ Thorne pushed the button again. ‘She should do it more often.’
Hendricks nodded. ‘Maybe I should take her down Old Compton Street one night, when she’s up and about again.’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘We’ll do a few poppers, go mental.’
‘You think she’ll remember? When she comes off the drugs. What she’s like now, I mean… the things she’s coming out with.’
‘Depends,’ Hendricks said. ‘I’m a bit hazy after a couple of pints on a night out with you.’ He looked at Thorne. ‘Why?’
Thorne shook his head. ‘Just not sure she’d like it, that’s all. You know how… buttoned up she normally is.’
The lift arrived and they stood aside to let its occupants out.
‘So, how’s it all going? Your pair of honour killers.’
‘It’s going backwards,’ Thorne said. ‘We rattled a few bars, but it didn’t really get us anywhere.’
They walked into the lift and Hendricks pushed the button.
‘So?’
‘So, I thought I might go to the next meeting, see if I can rattle them a bit harder.’
‘By doing what?’
As the lift door closed, Thorne started to tell him.
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