Nell looked over at the baby, just visible through the bars. She’d thought after eight years and the amount of shit she’d seen, with the very base of human nature coming at her day after day, she could take this in her stride. Turned out you never got used to this, however hard you tried. She looked over at Eve, who was studying her.
‘Do you think it was in a fit of anger?’
Eve’s look told her she knew what Nell was really asking. Nell didn’t want a protracted abuse case. Not just due to the fact it would be a boatload of work for no positive outcome, but because she wanted the baby to have died quickly, loved for the brief time she’d spent on earth, not filled with fear and pain.
Eve was holding a stuffed bear, pink and almost brand new.
‘All I’m saying is this child didn’t die of her own accord. And anyway,’ she placed the bear in the bag and sealed it, ‘isn’t motive your side of things? I’m just here to put the meat on the bones, as it were.’
They both knew Eve was there to do a lot more than that, but Nell wasn’t in the mood to argue. Taking one more look at the baby, she made a move to go.
‘Georgie,’ Eve said.
Nell turned back.
‘What?’
‘The baby – her name is Georgie. I just thought I’d mention it.’
Nell watched Eve go back to work, an uneasy sense of guilt at her realisation that she hadn’t thought to ask.
Shutting the door quietly, Nell walked down the narrow corridor, turning the name over in her mind. Georgie – a name you give a girl you wished was a boy? She walked past the kitchen and paused. Small and cream, it contained a tiny table, neatly laid for breakfast, at the far end under a window; freshly washed dishes on the draining board; a baby bottle filled with powdered milk just waiting for the water.
There was a future in this room, she thought, feeling the headache spread to the right side of her head. Digging out a tired-looking sheet of pills from an inside pocket, she popped two and swallowed them dry. A future for all three of them – so what had happened to make Georgie’s mum and dad take that future from her?
Two
Nell paused outside the door to the front room, one hand pressed against the cream-painted wood. She stared at the floor, letting her mind go blank, emptying it so the first impression of the parents would be more vivid. She wanted to see what Eve had seen; to find out from the get-go if her instincts mirrored those of the pathologist.
As Nell opened the door she could see Paul in the centre of the room, seated on a threadbare sofa. Opposite him sat Kelly-Anne Wilson and Connor O’Brian on two aged and mismatched chairs.
First thought – why weren’t they sitting together? Nell had never seen bereaved parents do anything other than cling to each other, so tightly they almost appeared to be one rather than two.
Second – Connor was at least twenty years older than Kelly-Anne. Not a problem in itself, but the girl looked barely legal.
Nell took a seat next to Paul.
‘I know this is really upsetting for you,’ he was saying as the young woman silently cried, ‘and I’m sorry to have to ask these questions at a time like this.’
A time like this. If Nell had a pound for every time she’d heard those words. She scanned the room: walls, like the hallway, stained with smoke and age; crumpled cans of lager on the table; an overflowing ashtray, which, despite being next to an open window, left the air heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes. There had been no thought given to the blind hanging loose from its fittings, she concluded, or the table ringed with cup marks, or the sofa Nell now sat on. In fact, the whole room was as devoid of care as the child’s room had been full of it.
She turned back to the parents. Kelly-Anne’s face was blotched red with tears and her hair was scraped up into a high ponytail typical of the teenage girls Nell saw on the estates of Oxford. She wore a light grey vest top that had probably once been white, with a pair of pink towelling shorts, and her bare feet were curled in on themselves, as if hiding. Christ, what was she, seventeen?
Connor, however, was a man of at least forty, probably older. His face was a mass of lines, spots and bristle. Nell noted the tattoo on his arm – faded blue, picture no longer clear –clocked the scabs littering his balding scalp: steroids, or something more? He was bulky, so maybe the former, but a faint smell of cannabis made her think the latter. And there was a barely suppressed anger about him, not just directed towards her and Paul – for that was predictable; men like that wore their anger at police like a badge – but to his girlfriend sitting next to him, who shrank from it.
Nell began to see what Eve had seen and she didn’t like it. Connor’s height and width dominated the space around them, almost erasing Kelly-Anne’s presence. It was clear that what mattered to him was the ongoing interaction with Paul, not the girlfriend sitting next to him, and certainly not the child in the bedroom.
‘If you could just tell me again how you found Georgie,’ Paul was saying. ‘How you found her …’ he paused, ‘… like that.’
Nell watched Kelly-Anne cower in on herself, tears flowing down her cheeks. When she spoke it was with the lilt of ‘Oxford’ – the raw end of it, not the silver-spoon variety.
‘Georgie had been a bit cranky – but nothing we couldn’t cope with,’ she added hurriedly, eyes wide and fixed on Nell as if their shared gender would connect them. It didn’t.
‘I’d tried to give her a bottle but she wasn’t having it, so Connor went out for Calpol, didn’t you?’ She looked to her boyfriend with lashes covered in thick mascara, clinging on despite the tears. Connor barely managed a nod in reply.
‘You can give them Calpol you know,’ Kelly-Anne said, turning back to Nell, her tone desperate.
Nell nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’
Kelly-Anne seemed to relax a little, shoulders sagging. ‘But we couldn’t get much in her so I just lay her down in her cot and left her to cry it out a bit. You can do that too, you know? It’s in the books and stuff.’
Nell nodded again. She didn’t know and likely never would, but if it was in the books, who was she to judge? She wondered how they’d met. Kelly-Anne underage and down the pub on a Friday night; Connor seeing his chance as the shots took hold; a quick fumble a few hours later, then fast forward nine months and here they were with a screaming baby in a flat provided by the council? Or was it more than that?
Nell watched the hand movements of the pair, the way she pleaded with him to hold hers, the manner in which he batted her off. Connor was an angry man, that was clear enough. But angry enough to kill a baby? Probably.
‘And what happened then?’ Paul asked the pair. It was Kelly-Anne who replied; always Kelly-Anne, Nell noted.
‘And then she stopped crying.’ Kelly-Anne gave a small shrug. ‘So we left her. I mean, that’s what was supposed to happen, wasn’t it? That’s what the books say – you leave them to cry, then they learn how to put themselves to sleep, so we thought she had.’
Nell pictured the tiny body in the cot and wondered how anything that small could learn anything from being left alone in a room screaming – other than it wasn’t loved – but she kept her mouth shut. The less she said, the more they would, and give them enough rope they might just hang themselves with it.
‘So we left her for about an hour.’ She looked to Connor with a pleading expression. ‘And then you went to check on her, didn’t you?’
When Connor raised his eyes, Nell saw no grief, just a challenge to her to prove what he was about to say was wrong.
‘Yeah.’ The strength in his body was not reflected in his voice and its pitch took Nell by surprise.
‘Go on,’ Paul said.
Connor shrugged.
‘And the kid wouldn’t wake up. I shook her and sort of pushed at her chest –’ he imitated the movement with his hands, ‘– like I’ve seen on TV and that, but I couldn’t get her to wake up.’
Connor sounded uninterested, the words rehearsed, but Nell could see from the t
witch in his knee he was nervous. She leaned forward.
‘So, you shook Georgie?’
Connor held her stare. ‘No, I gave her a little shake to wake her up.’
‘Is that usually how you wake your daughter, Mr O’Brian?’
Connor folded his arms, flexed his muscles. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘No, actually, I don’t.’
Nell watched Kelly-Anne put her hand on Connor’s arm and him shrug it away. The young woman turned to Nell, her face full of desperation.
‘He’s a good dad – he didn’t do anything to Georgie, I promise.’
‘Were you there with Mr O’Brian when he shook her?’
Before she could reply, Connor stood. His height seemed to suck the air from the room and Kelly-Anne shrank back in the face of it.
‘I didn’t bloody shake her.’ He pointed down at Kelly-Anne, red blotches on his face spreading down his neck. ‘This is all your fault, you stupid cow. If you’d just woken her when I said.’
Paul stood and held out both hands to calm the situation. ‘Mr O’Brian, no one is saying you shook your child to hurt her. Please sit back down.’
When he didn’t move, Kelly-Anne reached up to him and tugged for him to comply. When he still didn’t sit she looked imploringly at Nell.
‘He shook her to wake her, not kill her.’
‘Why did Mr O’Brian think you should have woken the baby earlier?’
Kelly-Anne opened her mouth to speak but Connor shut her down.
‘We’re not saying anything else.’ He sat down next to Kelly-Anne and took her hand, squeezing it until she winced. ‘Take us down the station if you’ve anything else you want to ask.’
Silence fell. Paul looked to Nell and gave a quick shrug, but she wasn’t done.
‘Kelly-Anne, did you hurt your baby?’
‘Don’t answer that,’ Connor told her. Leaning across to the coffee table, he picked up a cigarette and lit it. After three short drags he gave it to a pale Kelly-Anne. Nell noted the shaking hand as she took it, the panicked look in her eyes, and waited.
‘I know what you are all thinking,’ Kelly-Anne finally said. ‘Single mum on benefits with a con as a boyfriend.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Kelly-Anne.’
But Kelly-Anne shrugged off his comment and folded her arms tight across her chest, cigarette now dangerously close to the back of the chair.
‘It’s not like they wouldn’t have checked,’ she said, voice sulky. ‘In jail twice, if you want to know.’
‘How long did you spend in jail, Mr O’Brian?’ Nell asked.
Kelly-Anne gave a bitter laugh and took a drag. ‘Second time was long enough to miss the bloody birth.’
Connor relaxed back into his chair. ‘Two months. Was just for a bit of weed, that’s all.’
‘Growing it,’ Kelly-Anne added. ‘Bloody growing the stuff he was. Stupid git.’
He threw her a warning look and the pair collapsed into silence. Had she got them wrong? Maybe it was Kelly-Anne who pulled the strings, in which case it was possible Connor was covering for her. But before she could push them further, Eve knocked on the door.
‘Can I have a word?’ Her gaze landed on Kelly-Anne before moving quickly to Connor, where it lingered, despite his cold stare back.
‘Sure.’ Nell nodded for Paul to join them, then pulled the door to. ‘What you got?’
Eve removed her blue plastic gloves. She studied her hands as she did so, before looking down at Nell, piercing blue eyes a stark contrast to her pale skin. ‘It’s definitely not a sudden infant death. There are clear signs the child was shaken.’
‘The boyfriend said he shook her trying to wake her – could that fit?’ Nell asked, looking back at the closed door.
Eve gave a short, hard laugh. ‘I’m sure he did say that. Trying to cover their tracks, no doubt. But no, the way the blood has collected suggests there was limited movement after death.’
‘What, they didn’t even pick her up?’ Paul asked, his tone full of disgust.
‘Doesn’t look like it, no.’
‘O’Brian also said he tried to resuscitate her with chest compressions – any sign that’s true?’ Nell asked.
‘Well, there are a few broken ribs, as far as I can tell, but I don’t think that was post-mortem. They most likely occurred before death. There are clear marks on her chest, which wouldn’t be apparent had the father done what he said after the infant was dead.’
‘So the shaking and broken ribs happened prior to death?’ Nell asked, just to make sure.
‘Yes, in my considered opinion that is correct.’
Nell looked at Paul, who ran his hand through his cropped hair and whistled.
‘And if you want my considered opinion,’ Eve said, throwing the gloves into a contamination bag, ‘it was the mother who did it.’
Nell stared at her. ‘What?’
‘The mother, Sergeant. The bruising is light, not consistent with a man that size.’ She nodded towards the closed door.
‘That’s quite an allegation there, Doc,’ and Paul’s expression told her what he thought of that.
Eve put down the bag and folded her arms.
‘Don’t be fooled by that little-girl-lost act, Constable.’ The pointed reference to his lower rank didn’t go unnoticed. ‘Girls like that,’ she continued, ‘can be just as brutal as the men who brutalise them.’
‘Girls like that?’ Paul sounded disgusted. ‘What, young, vulnerable girls with no money, family or support?’
Eve gave him an appraising look before speaking. ‘As I said earlier, I’m not here to solve the case, just to give you clues to do so yourselves. If you wish to ignore them,’ she gave a little shrug and picked up the bag, ‘then so be it.’
She turned to go but Nell put her hand on the woman’s arm. ‘Are you sure enough for us to arrest her?’
‘No. I won’t be sure until I’ve done a full post-mortem. I’m just giving you a heads-up so you can be ahead of the game.’
‘Thanks for the consideration,’ Paul snapped back. Nell threw him a warning look.
‘Well, thank you for your time, Eve,’ she said. ‘Let me have the results ASAP, OK?’
Eve nodded and when she’d left the hallway, Paul exploded.
‘What is she on? How can she tell it was the girl, not the man, who did it?’
Nell shoved her hands in her pockets and leaned back against the wall. She wanted a cigarette, badly. ‘It is her job to know these things.’
Paul snorted his disgust and pointed his thumb back towards the door. ‘What we doing with these two, then?’
Nell shrugged. ‘Leave them until Eve gives us the green light.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. Do you really want,’ she checked her watch, ‘to book them into custody at 22:59? It’ll be 1 a.m. by the time we get to bed and I for one don’t want to hang out with a grumpy custody sergeant and a suite full of drunks when we have nothing concrete to go on. Besides, the press would have a field day if we dragged a grieving mother in with no evidence.’
Noting Paul’s look, she said, ‘So what are they going to do, Paul? It’s not like they’ve got the money to skip over to Spain and go on the run.’ Nell knew how she sounded, but the case was already getting her down and the pills hadn’t kicked in so her head was pounding. It was a dead baby, sad, tragic even, but it wasn’t the sort of case she’d wanted to work on when she joined the police. And it wasn’t as if the couple were a risk to the public. A single mother on benefits and a part-time drug dealer – a not very good one at that – what good would it do to take them down the station? It was going to be a cut-and-dry case, with little to do but watch the mother go down for it.
‘Well, I’d like it noted I disagree with this course of action. Something’s not right here and I don’t like the look of the dad.’
Nell turned to go back into the front room. ‘Noted,’ she said.
Three
Now
I feel peaceful, a feeling so alien to me over the last few months that I allow myself to be smothered by it, curling into it in an attempt to forget.
I feel his hand reach mine and take a hold. He squeezes, and I squeeze back, the spell broken.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. My heart pinches. He has nothing to be sorry for. He has only ever been my supporter, my champion, my soulmate.
I take my hand from his and turn on to my side, hands under my cheek as if in prayer. ‘You have nothing to be sorry for.’
He is staring at the ceiling, dark now after the brief car light. I stare at his profile: the solid nose, heavy brow, bristled jaw, and I mentally trace my fingers from the top of his head to his chin.
‘Do you understand why I did it?’ I study his face as I speak, trying to judge the response before it’s spoken, but he gives me nothing – just continues to stare at the ceiling as if he can find the answer there.
‘Eve has taken over my life—’ I begin, but he raises a hand to stop me.
‘No. You’ve let her do that.’
I’m so stunned for a moment I don’t speak, then I push myself up by my elbow. ‘And how’s that?’ My glare pulls his eyes to mine.
‘You can choose whether she takes over your life.’
‘My choice? All this was my choice?’
‘Yes.’ He is so definite it winds me. I fall back on the bed and roll on to my back, folding my arms against my chest.
It’s his turn to roll towards me, an olive branch I don’t want to take, but when he speaks his voice is gentle and I can’t help but lean into it.
‘Why did you write the letter?’ His voice is calm, but behind it lie a thousand more questions, the answers to which I know he doesn’t want to hear.
‘To stop Eve,’ I say. But I can feel his stare deep under my skin, breaking bones as it bores into me.
When I Lost You Page 2