I got in the car and started the ignition. Butterflies tickled at my stomach, but I knew I needed to get some answers. Though I was filled with nerves, I tried my best to back out of Josie’s drive carefully, and warned myself not to let my adrenaline take over like it had the day I went to the GP surgery. No, I needed to keep a cool head.
It was a short drive to Wetherington. The scene of Bishoptown spread beneath the hill in a patchwork of green fields and forest dotted with small cottages and local pubs. Who would think that a monster lived in this beautiful place? No one had suspected a thing, and that was the most dangerous aspect of this entire sorry story. No one had even an inkling until the day Aiden stumbled out of the woods. He had brought his own abuse to our attention, but he held the full story locked up tight inside.
If Aiden wouldn’t tell me what had happened, maybe someone else would.
I navigated the twists and turns down the driveway towards the stately home. In order for this to work, I needed to make sure I knocked on the door of the private wing of Wetherington. I had no idea if the duke and duchess were even living in the mansion at the moment. Perhaps they had nipped up to a private residence in the Highlands, or a summer cottage in Devon. DCI Stevenson hadn’t gone into much detail about the conditions of his bail.
I hesitated for a moment after lifting the handbrake. What was I doing? What if I was arrested? I scratched at the angry red rash between my thumb and forefinger as I worked up enough courage to open the door. This was for Aiden, but it was also for me. I needed to talk to someone who might have some answers.
Before I left the car, I pulled off my thick cardigan. I was already sweating. I didn’t need the extra layer, even with the winds. The gravel of the back drive was difficult to walk on, especially when carrying extra weight at the front of my body. I was completely off balance and forced to stumble my way to the back door. But I got there without anyone telling me to clear off and I knocked on the old oak wood. Three raps.
I’d expected Wetherington to be something like Downton Abbey, with a butler ready to answer the door. That wasn’t the case at all. A small, stooped woman with greying but neatly set hair opened the door. She looked me up and down, no doubt taking in my shocked expression, and her lips thinned to a tight line.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked. The words were strange coming from my mouth, especially given who I was facing, but then I wanted her know. I wanted her to know who she was looking at.
“I do,” she said. “You’d best come in.”
32
As I followed the back of her tasteful cream cashmere cardigan, it struck me that I had absolutely no idea what to call this woman. Would I call her Duchess? Or would I call her Mrs Graham-Lennox? Or what about Maeve, her actual name?
“He isn’t here,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”
The thought had entered my mind. As soon as I stepped foot over the threshold I’d wondered whether the man who took my son shared the same breathing space as I did. That was, if he had taken my son.
“I asked him to leave,” she said, stepping through an ornate doorway into a small but beautiful little sitting room adorned with antique dressers and racehorse paintings. “I couldn’t have him here in this house with me. Not after the things the police found on his computer. I’d shared a bed with that man for over fifty years, but not for another night. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“No, thank you,” I said. Since entering the house I had found myself feeling more and more like the teenager who snuck onto the property as a dare with her boyfriend. I clutched hold of my bag and stared at the beautiful antiques like a child in a posh department store. I certainly didn’t want to spill anything.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, gesturing to a floral sofa with mahogany legs.
“Thank you for letting me come inside. I didn’t expect you to.”
She laughed as she settled into a red velvet armchair across from the sofa. “I bet you didn’t.” Her make-up was perfectly applied, with pink lipstick and a little rouge on her wrinkled skin. She sat with her legs crossed, and cut the figure of a woman holding everything together. “I wanted to meet you. I’ve wanted to meet you ever since my husband was arrested. I feel somewhat responsible, you see. Though I had no idea about the lengths of my husband’s… obsession, I did have a suspicion that I constantly ignored.” She moved her hand in a vague, swatting motion. “I never knew for certain, and I never knew what was wrong, but I always suspected that my husband had a dark side. This may sound extremely trifling after what you’ve been through, but you have no idea how much pressure I have been under to maintain certain standards throughout my marriage. Divorce was not an option for me fifty years ago. So even when I realised I’d married a dud, there was no going back.”
“But if you thought he was a monster—”
“What is a monster?” she asked. “Is it a scary ghoul hiding behind the bedroom door? Is it some sort of beast with sharp fangs? No. Those things don’t exist. Monsters are men and women just like us, and they have the ability to hide their true face. No, I didn’t think I’d married a monster, I thought I’d married a homosexual. I never caught Edward looking at children in that way, I only knew that he wasn’t particularly interested in me. We managed to continue the family line, but that was about it.”
“And your kids?”
She shuffled uncomfortably and removed her glasses like she was stalling for time. “I’ve broached the subject with them. Neither remember him doing… anything.” She closed her eyes and I realised that she had removed her glasses in an attempt to distract me from the fact that she was trying not to cry.
“If you didn’t know, it isn’t your fault,” I said.
The duchess leaned back into the chair and let out a soft laugh. “And is that what the newspapers say about you? Oh, the mother is always at fault. So is the wife, really. Women are supposed to control men, isn’t that how it goes? What’s that saying again: ‘Behind every great man is a great woman’. We’re supposed to be the ones holding them up, or holding them back. Forget having our own lives. Forget our own careers and loves and losses. We’re the matriarchs.” She narrowed her eyes and clenched her hands as she said the word ‘matriarchs’. Her body slumped forward, suddenly appearing exhausted. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think James ever touched your boy. He hasn’t been particularly active for the last decade, riddled with gout and in remission from bowel cancer. My husband has not been a well man. If he ever has abused children—and I’m not certain that he has—then I would say it happened long ago. Long before your boy went missing.” She had crumpled into herself, leaning over like a wizened old crone. The woman had aged a decade just speaking to me.
“Thank you for your time.” I stood and collected my bag. For a brief moment I hesitated, searching for some words of comfort. I grasped at nothing.
The duchess did not watch as I turned around and left her crumpled up on the antique armchair in the middle of that vast, stately house.
*
Since meeting the duchess, there have been times when I see the shape of her body wilted forwards on that armchair in my dreams. She haunted me. After the investigation settled down, the Duchess of Hardwick would die less than three years after I met her on that mild October day. I attended her funeral, accompanied by Aiden. It was a quiet affair with a surprisingly small number of attendees. They talked about her strength as a mother and a wife, and how efficiently she had run the day-to-day workings of Wetherington House.
Her children decided to sell the house and the last I heard it was to be converted into a museum, with many of the antiques auctioned off at Wetherby’s.
Her husband outlived her.
*
I’d left Aiden with Rob and his parents for longer than I’d intended to, though I didn’t rush back. I needed time to contemplate Maeve Graham-Lennox’s words. I pitied her and what she had been through. Families like hers weren’t designed to deal with such gritty is
sues. For them this was scandal and it meant their high reputation ended up dragged through shit. Their reputation was everything. Would people still pay to enter Wetherington House? Perhaps they would, but there would be an air of morbid curiosity. ‘This, ladies and gentleman, is the computer where the duke stashed his kiddie porn.’ The more I thought about it, the more I realised that we are all monsters. Yes. Us. We’re monsters. We enjoy reading about these stories. We’re the voyeurs of human suffering.
As soon as I pulled into the drive at home, I had the tickling feeling in my gut that I get when something feels wrong. The front door was open, for a start. I parked the car, unclipped my seatbelt and hurried out of the car. I was almost knocked over by a blonde woman half-dragging a boy of about ten, who was crying and holding a bandaged hand. Rob hurried out after her.
“I’m so sorry about what happened,” he said. He had to jog to keep up with the woman, and had his hands out in placation.
It was only after I’d had a moment to take in the chaos that I realised I recognised the woman as Siobhan Michaels. Her son, Billy, attended the Bishoptown Primary School, and she happened to work as a manager for Sonya and Peter’s holiday cottage business.
“I hate to say it, Rob, but the papers are right. He’s a menace.”
“Who’s a menace?” I snapped, moving into the turmoil.
Siobhan stepped around me. “I’m sorry, Emma. I think what has happened to Aiden is awful, but I don’t think he’s safe to be around children.”
“Well, not right now, no,” I said. “He’s still healing after what happened to him. Rob, what the hell have you done?”
Rob’s face was pale and sweaty. He was grimacing and his jaw was clenched. I noticed his eyes flitting around the yard, as if searching for reporters. “It wasn’t my idea. I got ambushed, all right?”
As Siobhan climbed into her car with the crying child, I grabbed Rob by the arm and forced him to look at me. “What did your parents do?”
“I think they were trying to help. They thought if Aiden had someone to play with, it might help his… development.”
“What happened?” I asked, my stomach already sinking down to my knees.
“He stabbed the kid in the hand with the scissors.”
I let go of Rob’s arm and staggered back. “Fuck.”
“Billy kept playing with the remote control for the television. He’d keep snatching the thing out of Aiden’s hand. I told him to stop it, but it seems Siobhan has spoilt that little shit rotten because he wouldn’t listen to me. The next thing I know, the kid is pulling on Aiden’s hair. So Aiden picked up these scissors from the coffee table and stabs him in the hand. They were kids’ scissors so they didn’t do much. Just broke the skin a little.” He rolled his eyes. “You’d think the kid had been shot from his reaction.”
“Jesus, Rob. How could you think this would be a good idea?”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Just get your parents and get out,” I snapped.
“What?”
“I’m serious. You’ve done a shit job, here. It’s time for you to go.” I turned my back on him and stormed into the house.
33
After that incident I wasn’t sure if Sonya was malicious or just an idiot. Somewhere in that thick-skulled head of hers she’d thought that inviting Siobhan over to my house would kill two birds with one stone. For one thing, it set up Rob with a woman who wasn’t me. For another thing, it introduced Aiden to another kid, which I genuinely believe she thought was going to go down well and get her some brownie points as the perfect caregiver. Sonya’s endgame was Rob and Aiden under one roof, with me free to be with my ‘other family’. I was sure of it.
I didn’t tell Jake about the incident with the scissors, and I especially didn’t tell him about meeting Maeve Graham-Lennox. That, as far as I know, remained a secret between me and the duchess herself.
The next day—a grey October Tuesday—I had a call from DCI Stevenson confirming what I already knew. The duke hadn’t taken Aiden. The duke had been in hospital for long periods of time during the last ten years, there was no evidence of any kind of room that could have been used to keep Aiden captive, and he had an alibi for the day Aiden was taken. He’d been attending a shoot at a different stately home in Yorkshire with a lord who could corroborate his whereabouts. It all brought me back to the beginning. Who took my son? Who did this to him? Who broke him?
I no longer made picnics and pretended that we were eating on Mount Kilimanjaro. I didn’t show him my favourite children’s films and television shows, nor did I hold his hand if we crossed the street in the village. I certainly didn’t talk to him like he was still the little Aiden I’d known ten years ago, if that boy had even existed. I was pulling away, though I didn’t realise it at the time. Yes, the thought of Aiden’s kidnapper still out there made me feel sick, and I wanted little more than for that man to be put behind bars—if it was a man. I remember being on the phone to DCI Stevenson, begging him to look harder. Who could it be? Who was it?
I was withdrawing from them all: From Jake, from Aiden, from Rob, and from everyone else. My dreams drifted between nightmares about Aiden’s attacker, to nightmares about my parents’ car accident, to disturbing but erotic dreams about Rob and Jake. Sometimes Jake wrapped his hands around my throat and squeezed until I couldn’t breathe. I called DCI Stevenson over five times that Tuesday, leaving strange messages with some assistant at the police station: “Look into Brian who runs the White Hart”, “Have you spoken to Jeff from the farm outside Bishoptown?” There had to be something in the farms. They were sprawling with outbuildings. It seemed like a genius idea; why hadn’t I thought about the farms before? I even drove Aiden around the village to see if he reacted strangely to the buildings. Of course, looking back now it didn’t make much sense. Jeff’s farm was miles away from the woods so unless the farmer had driven Aiden to the woods and dumped him there, chances were he wasn’t the kidnapper.
I started writing to Aiden as I sat in silence and watched him from the kitchen table. I angled myself so I saw him staring at the television set, watching people on daytime TV discuss matters they were unqualified to discuss, and I wrote to him to save myself talking to him. “When you were little you used to make cakes out of mud and throw them at Nana. She didn’t find it as hilarious as you did though. Do you remember? And when you were four I read The Call of the Wild to you. A few chapters every night before you went to sleep. When you were a baby you were afraid of your own nappies! You’d cry after I took the nappies off, not before. A little older than three and you were obsessed with hugging everyone and everything even if they didn’t want to be hugged: the leg of a random man in Costa; a tree in the park; the feral cat that roamed the village. You hugged them all and you didn’t care who they were or where they came from. These are all the things I know.” That was how I signed every letter, as a reminder to myself that I did remember his childhood.
“I know you,” I whispered to myself.
But it was a lie, because I didn’t know Aiden at all. He was an alien to me now. His abuse had made him a completely different person and I couldn’t forgive myself for being so afraid of him, because it’s victim-blaming, isn’t it? Victims shouldn’t have to explain their bizarre actions after trauma, but it’s so difficult for the rest of us to understand why they behave in that way. If a grown woman is raped and she doesn’t scream for help, why didn’t she scream? That’s what the jury can’t get their head around. Why didn’t she scream? Why won’t Aiden tell us who took him? Why won’t he talk at all?
The house was filled with unspoken words. My conversations with Jake had turned to pleasantries to stop us arguing about Aiden’s presence in our house. He welcomed Sonya’s offer to take Aiden with gusto, but I put my foot down. As afraid as I was of my son, I couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing him every day. Besides, he was my responsibility, for better or worse. Mothers don’t get to take back a child like it’s a toy that isn’t w
orking properly. I needed to look after him to make sure he didn’t hurt anyone. That rested on my shoulders.
And then, to top everything off, as I was sat at the kitchen table writing another of my manic letters to a son who was sitting a mere few feet away from me, I heard a voice I recognised. Amy.
The chair scraped against the kitchen tiles as I abruptly rose from my seat. I hurried into the living room and dropped onto the sofa next to Aiden. By this point I had virtually given up trying to protect Aiden from the media. He wasn’t stupid; he knew what was going on anyway, or so I thought. Though he barely reacted to anything, I noticed the way his eyes scanned the headlines. Once I caught him flipping open a newspaper to a page plastered with his face. He didn’t point or gasp or in any other way react, but I could tell that he understood what was going on.
I turned up the television. Amy sat with her legs pulled together and her hands resting on her knees like a prim little girl waiting to have her picture taken. While her expression was relatively impassive, there was a haughtiness to her chin that I recognised for what it was: anger. This Amy was nothing like the meek, mousy girl I had worked with for years, nor the girl I remembered from school. I thought about the way she had sobbed as she’d begged me for forgiveness after we thought Aiden had drowned. I remember the way her eyeliner had smudged all the way down her face. It was all phoney. This girl, this woman, in her two-piece skirt suit and deep blue blouse—an obvious choice to highlight her eyes—was an attention-seeking jealous bitch.
“Now, we’ve all been talking about the shocking case of Aiden Price,” said the grey-haired male presenter. “Not only was Aiden declared dead three years ago, he was found walking the streets in a disorientated fashion, and police believe he has been held hostage for a decade. It truly is the most shocking crime, well, certainly that I’ve ever heard of, and possibly the most tragic, too. It’s been hard to make sense of the nature of this crime, and it’s sometimes difficult to quite understand the behaviour of both Aiden and his mother. We’re joined here today by Amy Perry, a friend of Emma Price-Hewitt, and schoolteacher of Aiden Price. Thank you for joining us today.”
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