by LK Fox
Even Harry couldn’t keep up this kind of tirade for long. Eventually, a look of defeat crept across his tired face. He stared into my eyes and softened. A moment later, he sighed, then came over and gripped me in his arms. ‘You’re my only daughter, Ella. You’re my little girl. We have to sort this out. You can’t protect him. Don’t you see, he’s shown he has no respect for you. What he did to you was wrong. It’s something no man can do to a girl without her permission. He can go to jail for what he did. Even if you think you wanted him, he had no right. We can get him put away. Please, let me help you. We’ll solve the problem together. Promise me you’ll think it over tonight, and we can talk again in the morning. The most important thing right now is to make the necessary arrangements for you in your current condition.’
I nodded. It was always better to agree with Harry. Lying had always been my best survival technique. ‘What are you going to say to Karen?’
I could imagine her reaction. She had gone to the Northfield mall for the afternoon to have her nails done. Hardly a day passed when she didn’t go for some kind of refurbishing session. She was like a bridge in constant need of repair.
Harry looked at me as if I’d gone mad. ‘I’m not going to tell her anything, and neither are you. God, that would be the last thing she needs to hear. Can you imagine how it would make her feel?’
I wanted to know why I couldn’t tell her. Even though I didn’t like Karen, we were closer in age, so I thought she might at least be able to understand what was going through my mind right now. She probably had a few skeletons in her closet that Harry didn’t know about anyway.
‘She mustn’t be told, Ella,’ he continued. ‘It was difficult enough when she found out I had a teenaged daughter. I can’t tell her that if we don’t do something about this she’ll become a grandmother to a bastard.’
That was a nice sentiment. The thought that I might have a child born ‘out of wedlock’ was the last thing to cross my mind. ‘Bastard’ was one of those granddad-words like ‘spinster’ and ‘courting’ that nobody used any more.
‘Is that all you care about? What she thinks?’ I replied.
I couldn’t talk to her either, and I couldn’t bother my sister because she always had her own troubles to deal with. Still, I was angry with myself for losing my temper with Harry. It made me vulnerable. I rose and walked unsteadily to the door, relying on my shaking legs to support me until I was outside.
I thought of Ryder and was torn in different directions. One part wanted to smash him in the face; another part still wanted to see him and fulfil the fantasy of us being together. Harry couldn’t understand: he hadn’t been there all the time I was alone and obsessing over a stupid stoned singer in my bedroom.
The only thing I knew for sure was that nothing in the world would make me get rid of the baby that was now growing inside me. I’d done one thing against my will. I wasn’t about to do another.
Nick
The law requires a post-mortem for all suspicious deaths.
They opened the body bag for me and let me take a look inside. The first thing I did was smell him. They must have thought it odd. But he had no smell. He’d been washed, and looked wrong. Usually, there was mint – he was addicted to those really strong mint candies. He was fully dressed and looked asleep, hair tidied, too neat. I saw his snake belt and tears flooded up. The coroner told us that he had suffocated. Possibly a foreign object introduced across the nasal passages and mouth. She wouldn’t say if she was thinking of something human, like a man’s hand. I asked for details but was told to wait for the full report.
The coroner called in a second opinion, but she still wasn’t sure. All either of them knew was that Gabriel had stopped breathing. They found a fragment of red fibre on his lower lip, a man-made material not from his football shirt, possibly from a blanket, because it had a ‘machine twist’ – that is, it had been folded over by something mechanical.
They took a sample from the Weapons of Mass Destruction cover on Gabriel’s bed, but that didn’t match either. He had worn his sweatshirt several times after its most recent wash, so the fibres could have been transferred from anywhere. As for the asphyxiation, they couldn’t tell if he’d simply suffered an unfortunate mishap, or if someone had deliberately closed off his nose and mouth. I thought they could tell things like that. You think you’re going to get an episode of CSI and instead you get an exhausted-looking doctor doing paperwork in a cluttered, over-lit room. Instead of slick decisions and barked orders, there’s confusion and disagreement.
Gabriel had been discovered by accident, lying on a piece of waterlogged waste ground behind the remains of a demolished building that was soon to become a supermarket, less than a mile from the school.
The space was fenced in with chipboard panels, but there was a section missing, and a board had been propped in place over it, half in, half out. There was a massive photograph of horses in a sunny meadow printed on the construction panels which the police thought might have attracted him. I told them Gabriel was frightened of horses.
The company that owned the site, G&D Holdings, had planning permission to build one of those buildings that promised ‘retail space and luxury lofts’. They had almost finished laying the foundations when they went into receivership. There were no workmen or guards on the site because everything was on hold while the company tried to find someone to buy it out. The rain stopped the police from finding anything of use. There were some water-filled indentations in the ground that might have been footprints, or might not.
Gabriel had been found lying in a length of grey plastic drainpipe that had split apart and was flooded. It looked like he had slipped and fallen into it. He had mud on his face and knees, suggesting he pitched forward, and had lost some skin on his hands and ankles, but that was most likely from rats that had attacked the water-softened parts of his body. There were unconnected pipes all over the site, and vermin had been seen massing there, driven out by the rain. Apart from that, he had no bruises, no broken bones, no torn clothes, nothing to suggest that he had met with any violence while alive. They fingerprinted the buttons on his jeans, his trainers. The coroner confirmed that the rodent bites had occurred after death, as would be expected in such cases.
The doctor kept reassuring us that he hadn’t been molested, as if we were meant to be grateful for that. But I wasn’t grateful. I just wanted an answer.
An elderly West Indian woman had spotted Gabriel from the upstairs floor of her house. Her eyesight wasn’t very good, and at first she thought it was just a pile of old clothes. She said she’d noticed him the night before. She also said that, although she was sorry for our loss, she wouldn’t speak to us directly because of her religious beliefs.
Gabriel’s clothes were sodden on both sides, and it had rained almost non-stop over the preceding twenty-four hours. Had he been killed and moved to the spot, or suffered some kind of self-inflicted accident? Redditch formed the idea that, while running away from either us or the school, Gabriel had become lost. He had entered the waste ground through the broken panel and had then tripped and fallen into the pipe in a state of panic. There was nothing I could say that would shake his conviction.
I didn’t buy any of it. It wasn’t in Gabe’s nature to go somewhere like that. He wasn’t adventurous. Why did he go there in the first place, and if he did, why would he have moved the plywood that stood across the gap back in place after entering? I was sure Redditch and his team had it all wrong.
A child doesn’t just stop breathing for no reason. There’s this thing called SADS, Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome. It’s when your electrical system takes too long to recharge following a heartbeat, but it usually happens when you’re asleep. I thought someone had covered his mouth and nose and prevented him from drawing breath.
Obviously, it’s possible to tell the difference between accidental drowning and deliberate suffocation, but the autopsy revealed no mud or water in his lungs, so he didn’t fall and ingest fluid.
I thought he could have been killed elsewhere and dumped. The second coroner placed Gabriel’s time of death at just a few minutes after I had left him, because the nuts and raisins from the breakfast chewie in his stomach hadn’t been digested much. Over three quarters of a mile in the driving rain was a lot of ground for a small boy to cover in such a short time. He said he couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure, so they recorded a verdict of accidental death. There were no foreign prints to be found at the site because the rain had churned everything up.
It didn’t make sense to me. If Gabriel had run all that way to the waste ground, why had nobody seen him, a frightened child like that on his own, soaked to the skin? His sweatshirt was bright and highly visible. And what happened to the model soldier? I saw him put it in his pocket that morning. It had vanished in the space of a few minutes. He had taken it with him, but it was nowhere to be found in the school.
I had to tell the police about it, and they weren’t pleased. It looked like I’d been deliberately holding back information. We retraced the route from the school to the waste ground and looked for it, in case it had fallen out of his pocket.
Ben suggested that perhaps another boy had stolen it. I’d already thought of that. There was a kid called Jamie that Gabriel had wanted to show the soldier to. I talked to him, but he didn’t know anything. The police questioned him again, at my insistence, so much so that his father came around and threatened both of us. Virtually the same thing happened with the school bully Neil McBride and his parents. I talked to poor old Phoebe upstairs, and she didn’t know anything, of course, but that didn’t stop the bandwagon from descending on her, and pretty soon she was confused and in tears. The dragoon became a big deal for all of us; it seemed that, if we could find that, we would have the key to the whole thing.
I started to get very angry. Following Hannah Colberton’s example, I lodged an official complaint against Redditch, which turned out to be a really bad idea. The investigation became an unholy mess, with me fighting Ben and the police while Gabriel’s body lay on a morgue slab. I felt powerless and cheated, lied to and prejudiced against.
Later, I found out why Redditch was so keen to close the whole thing up, and why he’d changed his mind about holding a press conference. It wasn’t because of our personal situation, which I’d assumed he didn’t want to turn into a hot-button topic with the press. It was because a number of primitive mistakes had been made during the investigation.
The waste ground where Gabriel was found had a deserted road running along one side of it. A patrol-car route ran right by the damaged fence. Officers had been past the spot several times. The damage to the hoarding had been reported two weeks earlier, but no repairs were carried out and nobody had thought to check inside the empty lot. They assumed the foot patrol had already covered it and found nothing.
There were lots of other screw-ups. It turned out that someone had come forward to say he’d seen Gabriel talking to a man near the school, but the cops had dismissed his statement. The witness was registered in a methadone programme and was considered unreliable, but he had nothing to gain by talking and I thought he might be telling the truth, even though he kept changing his mind about the exact location when the police drove him there.
Redditch felt I was being obstructive, and pretty soon I was. It seemed to me that there were holes in the investigation you could drive a bus through, but he wouldn’t hear any of it.
My complaint wasn’t upheld. I felt that they were conducting the inquiry wrongly, and that a bunch of beat officers were trying to hide evidence of their own incompetence. Just to make matters more difficult, Colberton called around the following week to say that nothing she’d told me in confidence could be used as evidence, and Ben started refusing to back me up. He just buried his head in the sand and acted like the whole thing was happening to someone else.
Then Redditch turned the tables. He pulled the social services unit back in and made us suspects.
Did we give his team any reason to suspect us? People always think there’s no smoke without fire, but they attacked us because they had nothing else, and because most child victims die at the hands of relatives. They fought us in order to hide their own failures. Nobody wanted to be called incompetent.
About ten days after Gabriel’s body was found, the nightmare began in earnest. They tore our house apart, impounded our computers, interviewed our friends, wouldn’t tell us what they were up to. It seemed we were guilty until proven innocent – and they still came up with nothing. Ben grew more silent and internalised with every passing hour.
Redditch passed fresh case details to the press ‘in the public interest’, and a couple of tabloids implied the kind of things I would expect them to. I didn’t care what they said about us, but I wasn’t prepared to let them imply that we were bad parents.
Thankfully, it didn’t take long for them to lose interest, because Gabriel’s body had been found and identified, and there was no real mystery they could use to keep their readers hooked. There was no exotic puzzle to solve other than how a boy with two hardworking professional fathers had run off to meet an unfortunate but entirely accidental death.
Everybody thought the worst had finally happened, and that the entire tragic mess would gradually die down and disappear.
But as far as I was concerned, it could never simply disappear. I built chains of events in my head, dismantled them, rebuilt them again and again. There had to be some connections I’d missed. But I knew that if you started playing that game of consequences you’d end up tearing off your shoes because they were stitched together by minimum-wage workers in the Philippines. The weight of responsibility could kill you in the end.
It still doesn’t stop you from doing it.
Ella
I waited outside the antenatal centre, knowing that the next stage of my progression through the system was about to begin.
I sat on the metal bench with my hands buried deep in my pockets, watching the children on the swings. The Nigerian woman who came and sat next to me in the fire-engine-red coat and knee-boots was called Marleena Akinjide. She was one of the senior midwives and had come out to meet me at the playground because I had refused to sit inside. There was nobody in there as young as me. I didn’t want to be stared at.
Marleena offered me a bag of crisps. She had an African-cockney accent that took some getting used to. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘it’s a new flavour. Spicy sausage and onion. It tastes disgusting, but I’m not going to get a lunch break today, am I?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I just can’t go in there.’
She gave me a filthy look. ‘Honey, nobody died and made you queen. You don’t get special treatment. I get a dozen like you every week and they all have to go through the same thing. You’re making it more difficult than it needs to be.’
‘I don’t want to be difficult. My father thinks I’m a slut. My schoolfriends will dump me when they find out. My life is a mess.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Marleena sucked a crisp. ‘I know it seems hopeless now, but it’ll get better. You call up the centre and say you’re not going to have a termination even before anyone has said a word to you, but it can’t be all on your terms now.’
I told her, ‘I have rights.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Funny how everybody remembers their rights and forgets their responsibilities. You’re under age, Ella, try to remember that.’ A pigeon with one good leg and a pink stump came hobbling over for the crumbs around her shoes. Marleena kicked it out of the way. ‘Hey, you can listen to my advice, act on it and make your own choices, or you can walk away and try to deal with the whole thing by yourself, which I don’t think is a good idea, given your present state of mind. You know how I got this job?’
I stared her in the eye. ‘You falsified your immigration form.’
‘To hell with you, missy. I don’t need this shit.’
‘I have a response problem. I don’t mean it. I’m sorry.’ I bit my lip and tried aga
in. ‘I told my father I wanted to get advice before letting him stick me in a clinic.’
‘Then let me tell you. This is not a new story. I’ve been there myself. I was raped – held down and beaten – when I was fourteen, and we lived in a small village where I was expected to keep my mouth shut and have the baby, because the boy who did it was my cousin. But I told on him, and had to leave my home or get messed up good by his family. I came to this country and never saw my baby boy again.
That was the point when I started to trust Marleena. She’d been through much worse and had nothing to lose by being honest. She acted like she didn’t care whether I took her advice or not, but I was pretty sure she did, and that gave me an ally.
‘I couldn’t do that – never see my child again, I mean.’
‘Then look at your options. I have to tell you that, legally, I’m required to discuss the matter further with your family, whatever you decide. That’s something you just have to live with. I do two days a week with the Dentworth Clinic and, I’m warning you now, it has some pretty strict guidelines. If you won’t name the father and want to have the baby, you will be able to do that. But I would strongly urge you to put us in contact with him.’
‘I can’t.’ I imagined what would happen if they tracked down Ryder. I doubted he would even remember who I was. How humiliating would that be?
‘We can help find him for you.’
‘I’ll deal with it.’
‘You don’t have to be so independent. Loners don’t survive. You say it wasn’t rape—’
There it was again, the word I couldn’t bring myself to use. Letting the word in would legitimize it, and I wouldn’t allow that. ‘It’s hard for me to explain.’