The Child Who

by Simon Lelic

  ‘I’ve got a thick skin, I promise you,’ said Leo, even though it felt like the skin on his shoulders was about to break. ‘Really, Howard.’ He squirmed and his boss’s hands fell away. ‘I’ll be fine. It will all be fine.’

  ‘And Megan? Your little girl – Eleanor, isn’t it? Have you told them?’

  ‘What? No. Not yet. I will tonight. When I get home. I’ve hardly had a minute since I took the call. That was, what? Two-ish? And it’s already…’ Leo looked to his watch. ‘Wow. It’s getting late, Howard. I should get going. You should get going. Celia will be wondering where you are.’

  Howard regarded Leo beneath eyebrows joined at the middle. ‘Okay,’ he said. Then, slowly, he unpeeled his alabaster grin.

  2

  He goddamn nearly raped her. It was true, he nearly had. And yet, in actuality, there had been no rape. Of that Leo was thankful because the rest was more than enough.

  Felicity Forbes had been a few years younger than Leo’s daughter. Ellie was fifteen and Felicity’s twelfth birthday was approaching. It would fall, Leo calculated, on the two-month anniversary of her death. Not a vast gap in age, then, but Felicity seemed otherwise to have been a very different child. Superficially, for instance: Ellie was fair-haired, like her mother, and freckled and wiry; the Forbes girl had been auburn, sunned and stout. Podgy but not unhealthily so. In the only photograph Leo had seen of Felicity alive, she was grinning in a toothy, cheery way that seemed to vindicate entirely her parents’ choice of name. This again was a contrast with Ellie. Ellie, when it came to having her picture taken, was bashful, even resentful. Stalking her through a lens was like stalking something wild, and the reaction, if she noticed, invariably equally so.

  At their respective schools, both girls were considered middling. In Ellie’s case, however, Leo suspected – and not, he told himself, just because he was her father – a latency of potential. His daughter, clearly, was less than happy. She had changed schools when they had moved to Linden Park and possibly that was part of it. But even before the move she had lacked something that other children her age seemed to exude. Like in the photographs, for example. Ellie lacked… joy. It was a heart-wrenching thing to admit but Leo consoled himself, his wife too, that it was because Ellie thought too much. She was too bright, that was the problem. Her imagination could not easily accommodate glee because glee, in Ellie’s case, would always be tempered by the worry about what might come next. That was why her eyes so rarely hoisted her smile. That was why her obviously fierce intelligence always seemed to be held in check. But her temperament would stand her in good stead, Leo insisted. It’ll pay dividends, Meg, you’ll see.

  Felicity Forbes had hoarded no such angst. A steady Cs and Bs student, with the occasional A-minus in music and a blossoming predilection for the stage, she had spun between her schoolwork and her social life with dizzy delight. Certainly she had been outgoing, in the way the youngest in a large family is often compelled to be. Whereas Ellie was an only child, Felicity had left behind two brothers and a sister, all of whom had reportedly adored her. And it had not been just among her teachers and family members that Felicity had been popular. She had amassed a quantity of friends that Ellie, and indeed Leo himself, could never hope to. A people’s princess, the Exeter Post – the self-anointed voice of the region – had dubbed Felicity. It was a shameless reference to events three years previous but not entirely unfitting given the quantity of foliage that had adorned her school’s gates and the mass of mourners expected at her funeral. Indeed, that Felicity Forbes had so readily been beatified should hardly have come as a surprise. It was inevitable really, as much from the nature of how she had lived as the excruciating manner in which she had died.

  He goddamn nearly raped her. Nearly, which meant not quite. And yet what Daniel Blake was alleged to have done was worse than rape. It was more brutal, more venomous. It was, in the coldest terms, more clinical.

  Felicity, on her final morning, awoke to a January day that wore a frost like jewellery. Snow had been forecast but had failed to arrive and possibly it was a result of having already prepared herself for a day off school that Felicity dallied so on the walk in. It was not out of character – she was frequently late. She had, in fairness, further to go than most students; further, that is, to walk. Her family lived on the north-western boundary of the city, where the city itself was already lost to view behind wooded hills and the dilapidated halls of residence that disfigured them. Without the option of a lift most mornings, Felicity’s choice was a walk along the riverbank or a lonely wait for a bus that was more reliably unpunctual than she was. It was, Felicity had long since decided, barely a choice at all.

  She passed the Waterside Inn at twenty-five minutes past eight, according to the freeholder, already fifteen minutes later than usual. She had been a little behind on leaving the house, her parents had told the police, for no reason that they could recall. Gassing, her father had suggested, at which point the interview had been interrupted by her mother’s tears. From the walkway adjoining the pub, Felicity crossed the pedestrian bridge and followed the river south. She had to climb a stile to access the footpath, the freeholder said; the sight of her in her crimson overcoat, straddling the fence and struggling to unhook her trailing rucksack, was the last he had of her. It was the last time she was seen alive by anyone other than her killer.

  He goddamn nearly raped her. But he did not. He used a stick.

  That, at least, was the pathologist’s finding. The implement itself was never identified but the scratches – the wounds – were, apparently, unambiguous.

  He used a stick. This boy, this child: he used a stick.

  She was a flash of red clambering across a stile and next she was a corpse, trussed with a string of discarded fairy lights and bloated and blue after hours in the Exe. What happened in between could only be guessed at from the picture the investigators were left with. The pictures, in fact, because there were dozens of them. Only one in the file of the girl when she had been alive but six, for example, of her hands bound in wire. Seven, eight, nine of her ripped and muddied overcoat, which had washed up on a bank a mile downstream. Innumerable shots of Felicity herself: her face, streaked with silt; her injuries, puffed and bloodless; her fingernails, chipped and cracked – her only weapon against an attacker who had made use of anything and everything that had been to hand.

  She drowned. She was drowned, rather. That, in the end, is how she died. Held under perhaps. Set adrift, more likely, still bound in wire and with gravel in her pockets and her book-laden bag on her back. The child, the boy: he had thought of everything.

  He goddamn nearly raped her. This is what they all kept coming back to, as though rape were as bad as it could get. It had been enough, certainly, as far as the police had been concerned. Enough blood and guts with which to feed the press and more than enough to persuade the public to be forthcoming. The rest, the truth, would actually have been too much. For Leo, who had followed developments but not with the fervour – the fury – of others in the community, it was already more than he could contemplate. This boy, this child: your client. This is what he did. This is the case, then, fully disclosed. This is your cause for celebration.

  He wondered what Terry, in the office, would have said if he had known; whether his rage would have turned murderous or whether it would simply have fizzed itself flat. What possible reaction was there after all except utter deflation? Horror, yes, and anger, certainly, but both depended wholly on conviction, on being convinced that the thing you had been told had actually happened; that contrary to everything you thought you believed about the fundamental principles of humanity, evil was unbound, unlimited – capable, easily, of excelling itself.

  And his father. Gone for well over a year now but only in the most literal sense. What would he think? After Leo’s mother had left them and his own career had crumbled – had failed, really, to turn into a career at all – Matthew Curtice had bet his hope on the prospects for his son. He had a
lways been so proud of what Leo did – not of what the job in reality entailed but of his son’s profession. A chance to make a difference, he had said; to achieve something with your life. More than he had ever managed, his father told him – just after Leo had qualified and only weeks before the first of his strokes.

  What, though, would his father think now? Of Leo, of his barely concealed delight in being – how had Howard put it? – on this boy’s side.

  ‘Leo?’

  Megan was leaning through the doorway. Leo moved to shuffle away the photographs.

  ‘It’s late. Are you coming to bed?’

  Leo’s watch had twisted face down. He jangled it the right way up. ‘Lord. You should have called me. I was planning to watch the news.’

  ‘I taped it for you. I looked but I didn’t see you on it.’ She said this last with a smile.

  ‘No. I wouldn’t have been yet. I mean, that’s not why I…’ He slid a smile back. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘So are you coming up? You can’t stare at those all night. You’ll give yourself nightmares.’

  Leo moved to cover the few photographs that remained on display. His bad dreams were inevitable; Megan might escape for a few more nights. ‘I’ll be up in a bit. Just a couple more minutes. Maybe I should… I’d like to check on Ellie too.’

  ‘Ellie? Ellie’s asleep.’ Megan took a step into the study. She angled her head to get a view of the file on Leo’s desk. ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Nothing. Just, you know. Paperwork.’ He prodded a protruding edge.

  Megan took another step and laid her hands on Leo’s shoulders. ‘How are you feeling?’ She kneaded and Leo exhaled, closed his eyes.

  He felt something press against his ankles. The cat, he assumed, had trailed Megan into the room and was weaving her affection in a figure of eight. It was Ellie’s cat, really: Rupert, ‘because she looks like a bear’, which to an eight-year-old had been powerful enough in its logic at the time to trump any misgivings about gender.

  ‘Tired,’ Leo said, in answer to his wife’s question. ‘But like I’ll never be able to sleep.’ He half turned and reached for Megan’s hand. ‘You?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to feel. Tired as well, I suppose, but more from the thought of it. I’m worried, Leo. I know, I know,’ she said, when Leo smiled and squeezed her hand. ‘But Ellie. That’s all it is. I’m worried for Ellie.’

  ‘Ellie’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. It’s not like any of us did this, Meg.’

  She squeezed back. ‘When are you seeing him?’

  Leo shifted and sensed the cat dart away. ‘Tomorrow. First thing. Before they start on him again.’ Megan, for an instant, looked puzzled. ‘The police,’ Leo said. ‘They’ve no intention of hanging around.’

  Megan nodded. She kissed his crown. ‘Then come upstairs. Get some sleep.’ She reached the door and held it.

  ‘I will. I’ll be up soon, I promise. Just a couple more minutes.’

  He watched Megan go. There was the sound of the front door being bolted and of the kitchen light being switched off and then of his wife’s leaden footsteps on the stairs. He waited until he was certain she had reached the landing and let his head fall into his hands.

  3

  Now, here: just say it.

  But he said nothing. He allowed the Passat to creep closer to the car in front, then broke the silence by ratcheting the handbrake. He cleared his throat, with as cheerful a timbre as he could manage, then turned to face his daughter and made a sound like he had thought of something funny.

  Ellie did not respond. She maintained her dead-eyed stare, one hand cupping her chin, the other a fist in her lap.

  Leo again cleared his throat and this time Ellie turned. ‘Can we put the radio on?’ she said, reaching.

  ‘In a minute.’ Leo moved his hand to catch his daughter’s but she was too quick on the withdrawal. ‘I actually wanted to talk to you.’ Leo let his palm settle on the gear lever instead. ‘About work,’ he continued. ‘My work, I mean.’ The traffic began to move and Leo slipped the car into gear. ‘There’s a… I have a…’ He coughed. ‘The thing is, Ellie…’

  ‘I know, Dad.’

  Leo turned. ‘You know?’ The traffic stalled and once again he applied the handbrake. ‘What do you know?’

  Ellie shrugged. ‘Felicity. The boy.’ Again the shrug – barely even that really. ‘The case.’

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘Mum told me.’

  ‘Your mother? When?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘When last night?’

  ‘You were working.’

  Leo considered. ‘Oh.’

  Quiet. Even the traffic outside seemed for a moment to be waiting on what might come next.

  ‘So what do you think?’ said Leo and the cars ahead released their brake lights. ‘Are you okay with it?’

  The shrug.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry, you know.’

  Which, of course, had precisely the wrong effect. ‘Why would I worry?’

  ‘I said you shouldn’t worry.’

  ‘But why would I?’ Ellie sat straighter. She faced her father.

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ Leo repeated. ‘That’s what I’m saying. There’s no reason for you to worry.’ A car from the outside lane was moving into his. There was no cause to but Leo jabbed at his horn anyway. ‘Look at this idiot,’ he said. His eyes twitched towards his daughter but she was clearly not to be distracted. She looked swamped, all of a sudden, in the passenger seat: a child with a grown-up-sized furrow on her brow.

  ‘What do you mean, though? Tell me, Dad. I’m not some little kid.’

  ‘Look. Ellie.’ Leo sighed and the sigh, to him, seemed clearly to convey everything his daughter needed to know.

  ‘Dad—’

  Leo lifted a hand from the steering wheel. ‘It’s a nasty business. That’s all. It was a horrific crime and there’s bound to be a lot of attention. I just wanted you to know that… that it’s to be expected. That it’s nothing to worry about. That it might be uncomfortable for a while but it will pass.’

  Ellie regarded him.

  ‘Honestly, Ellie, that’s all.’ Leo held his daughter’s gaze for as long as he dared divert his from the road ahead. Slowly, Ellie withdrew into her seat. She resumed her vigil of the passing pavement.

  Leo tried to think of something else to say that was not a condescension or a cliché or in fact an outright lie. He opened his mouth but it was his daughter who spoke first.

  ‘Did he do it?’

  Leo turned halfway, then fully. ‘What?’

  ‘Did he do it.’

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Ellie, I… You know I can’t…’

  ‘You must know. Right? You’re his lawyer. Right?’

  ‘I’m his solicitor. Which means that whether he did it or not, or whether I think he did it, is entirely beside the—’

  Ellie rolled her eyes.

  ‘Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ She spoke to the window.

  ‘You did. I saw you. You just did.’

  ‘You weren’t answering the question.’

  ‘I was! I was explaining, if you’ll let me, the role a solicitor, in circumstances such as these, is obliged, by professional necessity, to—’

  She did it again.

  ‘Ellie!’

  ‘You’re still not answering.’

  ‘I was, I—’

  ‘You sound like a teacher. You sound like Mr Smithson.’

  Which, for a moment, flummoxed him. ‘Ellie. There is nothing wrong with explaining, when an explanation is needed, how things—’

  ‘You’re dissembling.’

  It was a word he never thought he would hear from a teenager. ‘I’m what?’ He had to smile.

  ‘Dissembling. Don’t laugh. It’s a word.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘It means talking shit.’

&
nbsp; ‘Eleanor!’

  ‘What? It does. Mum used it and I looked it up and basically it means you’re talking—’

  ‘That’s enough!’

  ‘– so you don’t have to answer.’ Ellie’s voice withered into silence.

  Leo was open-mouthed. He gripped the wheel and emptied his lungs through his nostrils. Dissembling. Ha. He would have to remember that at the office this afternoon.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘What? Nothing. I was just… Nothing. You shouldn’t swear, Ellie.’

  His daughter watched him as they drove. The turn-off towards Ellie’s school was approaching and Leo signalled left. He hated this part of their journey. In the time it took him to make the detour, he would cede to his rival commuters all the ground he had worked so hard the past three miles to gain. It seemed so futile. Just like work, he had often thought. Every case, like every car, was as one-paced and nondescript as the next. If you managed to get past one, there would always be another. And another, just as long as you remained on the road. That, at least, is how it had been.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘If he did it… I mean, okay, you’re his solicitor and whatever, blah blah blah. But if he did it…’

  Leo was about to interrupt but was distracted by the brake lights on the car in front. They flickered and flicked off and then finally fixed on red.

  ‘… why are you defending him?’

  The driver ahead seemed to have stalled. There had been a gap at the junction but he – she? – had changed his mind at the last moment. The car behind Leo’s blared its frustration. Leo glanced in the rear-view mirror, then dragged a palm across his eyes.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Ellie. Sorry. What did you say?’