by LK Fox
The green amphitheatre of the garden was damp and deserted. Spiders’ webs glittered between the bushes. Holly and hawthorns lined the path into the rockery. I climbed to the top and found the oak tree halfway along the highest of the railed terraces. This was the spot Buckingham had described. I sat down on a nearby bench to wait for him. I had the best part of an hour to kill.
I was unarmed. I didn’t own a weapon of any kind. I didn’t care about hurting him any more, I just wanted to know the truth and be set free.
As I sat there, my mind went to terrible places. I imagined a scenario in which Buckingham finally decided to take a child and trolled for them online. Found out where they lived. Followed them home. Perhaps he wasn’t just looking for vulnerable children but for vulnerable parents. And if it happened once and he got away with it, perhaps he got a taste for it. And he came back to duplicate the same event, the same pleasure – and would do it over and over again.
An elderly couple emerged from the far end of the path and hurried off, making their way towards the exit. I think they had been sheltering, hoping that the rain would ease. Apart from them, the gardens were deserted.
As they left, someone else entered. I thought, The light’s dangerous. Too dark to see clearly. But that must be him. I got the sudden feeling he would be carrying a weapon. There was no other reason why he would be pressing his arm to his side in the way he was, unless he had sustained injuries from his fall.
As he passed beneath the trees I could see that he was limping; he was probably covered in bruises from the other night. He still wore his baggy pinstripe suit. The grubby red Nike cap was pulled low. Slowly making his way up to where I was seated, he kept his head down and his shoulders hunched, folding himself inward as if he was in great pain.
I waited as he made his way behind me. He had summoned me here, so I stayed silent. I wanted to turn and fully look into Buckingham’s eyes. I wanted to understand him.
He finally spoke. ‘I would like to have the soldier back, if you don’t mind.’
I said, ‘Or what?’
‘Or you will never find out what happened to your son.’
I dug into my jacket and passed back the plastic bag containing the evidence. I did so very slowly, waiting for Buckingham to reach forward and take it. I felt him lift the bag from my hand and heard him push it into a pocket.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘What happens now?’
‘First, I want you to know something. This is very important. I never set out to hurt the boy.’
I tried to pinpoint the class and location of Buckingham’s accent, but couldn’t do it. There was something strange about it – then I realised he was attempting to disguise his voice.
I said, ‘What do you mean? You killed him.’
‘I put him out for a moment with dental anaesthetic. I just needed to send him to sleep for a couple of minutes, so he wouldn’t make a fuss.’
‘What kind of dental anaesthetic?’ I asked. ‘Was it an ointment, a spray, a gas, an injection, what? How did you work out how much to use? Did you calculate his body mass?’
‘No,’ he said, seemingly surprised by the barrage of questions. ‘It was stronger than I thought. He was so much smaller than I’d expected.’
‘You’re lying. It would have left a trace in his nasal passages. The pathologist found no anaesthetic, nothing. He was completely clean.’
‘Just listen to me—’
‘This is bullshit. I don’t know why, but you’re lying.’
‘If you speak again before I’ve finished I’ll leave, and then you will never know, do you understand? Say yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘I watched as you drove up that day and tried to find a place to park. The boy in your passenger seat was wearing a blue sweatshirt just as she said he would be.’
‘She? Who are you talking about?’
‘The girl who wanted me to do this. She begged me to help her. I removed the bottle from my pocket and tore the plastic cover from the cotton-wool pad. Then I unlatched the door and waited. I knew the timing would have to be exactly right. I had spent some time rehearsing it. I decided that if it went wrong I would just get back in the car and drive off. The boy was standing by the open car door talking to you. Then he was off, heading to the kerb.’
I shifted my weight, listening to what I felt sure were lies. The story sounded too slick, too rehearsed. And from my limited knowledge of anaesthetics, the old idea of sprinkling a few drops on to cotton wool was completely wrong; it took far too long to work that way.
Buckingham was anxious to give me the details. ‘I swung myself out of the car and stepped in front of him. I turned sharply, pressing the pad over his nostrils and mouth, making sure that my coat wrapped itself around us. To anyone looking from behind, it must have seemed as if I was suddenly hugging the boy, saying goodbye. Then I dropped him into the car, straight on to the back seat.’
‘And where was I during all this?’ I asked.
‘You were revving your engine, getting impatient. Your tyres were slipping on the wet tarmac. I nearly hit you as I left. I watched you in my rear-view mirror as you headed out of the road. You were annoyed about being held up.’
‘You’re lying,’ I said quietly. ‘I saw Gabriel sitting up in the back seat. He wasn’t unconscious. You didn’t drug him.’
‘I checked that the boy was asleep and drove out of the street. I knew I didn’t have long before he woke up, possible only a minute or two, so I turned into the first empty side road I passed and pulled over. My plan was to move him to the front seat so that he would just be confused when he woke up, not frightened. I would explain that I was from the school, then make up a story about you coming to collect him from a different address.
‘I climbed out of the car and folded my seat forward. That was when I realised that something was wrong. The boy had rolled forward off the seat on to the floor. I had laid a blanket and some plastic sheeting on the seat so that he wouldn’t leave any marks. For all I knew, he might throw up or wet himself. Reaching down, I tried to lift him. He was really small, very light. There was something caught. Part of the plastic sheet had torn into a strip and become snagged on the passenger seat pocket.
‘The other end was over his face. When he’d rolled forward and fallen, he had landed in the bundled sheeting. The static electricity had stuck the plastic to his mouth and nose. It had cut off the air supply. I knew at once that he was dead. His face was almost black.
‘I looked up and saw that I had parked in front of a wall shielding a construction site from the road. I jumped out and ran along it, checking to see what was behind. The site was deserted, and one of the panels was loose. I pulled the boy out of the car, carried him a few feet to the panel and kicked it in, dropping him behind it. Then I wedged the panel back in place. Then I drove away. I drove away.’
We stood there in silence. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. I was barely holding it together. I slowly turned around to look. Buckingham’s face was hidden by the shadows of the branches, but I could see his bare arms. ‘We both have the same tattoo,’ I said dully. He pulled down his sleeve and stepped back into the dark.
‘Where did you get this miracle anaesthetic?’ I asked again.
‘What?’
‘The dental drug. What was it? Where did you get it from?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I bought it online . . . Chloroform, that’s what it was. Do you understand what I’m telling you? He was dead. Your son was dead!’
‘Chloroform,’ I repeated. ‘You’re sure about that.’
‘Yes . . .’
When Gabriel died, I did some reading, trying to understand what had happened. ‘Chloroform hasn’t been readily available for over a hundred years,’ I told him. ‘It burns like hell and it takes over five minutes to start working.’
Silence.
‘He wasn’t asleep in the car, was he? He was awake and terrified, and he panicked and you panicked and you slammed on the brakes
and he fell forward and got tangled up and you tried to stop him from screaming and alerting everyone and he choked to death. That’s what really happened, wasn’t it? It was a stupid, avoidable accident.’
I raised my eyes and saw.
Buckingham was crying. The whimpers turned into great wracking sobs. Not a man’s tears. When a man cries, the sound comes from deep within the gut.
A woman’s tears.
Ella
And, at that moment, I walked into the flickering patch of brighter light in the garden where Nick stood.
His eyes widened. He saw my face beneath the baseball cap, without the fake moustache. Apart from that, it was the same face he had seen, the face he had always seen. This time, I couldn’t stop myself from crying.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’
I cuffed at my swollen eyes with my left wrist, embarrassed to be crying. ‘You wouldn’t remember me,’ I told him. ‘I’m nobody.’
‘Show me.’
I removed my cap and looked up. My hair was dyed dark and cropped, but I knew there was no mistaking my eyes. He had seen them before and had never been able to forget them. They were Gabriel’s eyes.
‘My name is Ella Field,’ I said. ‘We met a long time ago.’ I loosened the tie and undid the top button of my father’s shirt. I’d taken everything from Harry’s wardrobe when he was out.
He looked at me without comprehension. ‘Why did you take him?’
‘Gabriel was the child I had with you.’
‘That’s . . . not possible.’
‘Yes, Nick, it is.’ An image flickered into my head. We were inside, but there were stars glimmering above us. Light coming through the floorboards. The stale, hoppy smell of spilled beer. ‘In the back of a pub, behind the stage. You were wasted. You wouldn’t stop. I begged you to let go. I was young. Always teased at school. Everybody said I looked like a boy.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘You wouldn’t remember. You were different then. I was fifteen years old, Nick. You raped me.’ I was able to say the word at last.
‘That’s not possible,’ he said, and then, with a hand rising to his eyes, ‘Oh, Christ.’
I could see that the weight of the past, everything he had ever tried to block out, was suddenly crowding in on him. He was barely able to stand. He looked at me and saw me slipping from the scaffold at the institute. The androgynous figure on the torn-up pub sofa. The fan outside the studio.
‘They took my baby away from me, and your husband adopted him. You were living the life that was meant for me. We wanted to teach you a lesson. Buck was going to take him away and keep him for a few hours, then drive him back when it was dark. But everything went wrong.’
‘That’s why Gabriel went with you that morning,’ he said. ‘It was nothing to do with chloroform. He knew you were his mother. He trusted you. How did he know it was you?’
‘He always knew me,’ I said quietly. ‘He’d seen me dozens of times, hundreds of times, through doorways and windows, in shops and cafés and gardens. I was always there. Out of sight to everyone else except him. The mother‒child bond. I was near him so often that he cried and threw tantrums when I was away. He’d have recognised me anywhere, dressed as anyone. Children have that power. I kissed him. That was all it took. Kindness, not force.’
‘There was no coercion, no force,’ Nick said dully. ‘All you had to do was let him see you and he came straight to the car. That’s why he sat up on the back seat, and why he reached out his hand. He’d seen his mother and then his father, and was confused.’
That was when he saw that I was holding the gun. It looked small even in my hand, and not particularly lethal, a Ruger compact pistol, something that didn’t belong beneath English trees in the shifting low light. It was very shiny and so new that it still had a safety sticker on the barrel.
‘Where is Buckingham?’ he asked.
‘He’s here, where he’s always been. Here with me.’
‘He doesn’t exist, does he? The car is yours.’
‘No, it belongs to my sister Lesley,’ I explained. ‘An old BMW. She’s divorced, has kids, lives in Chiswick. I stayed with her a couple of times.’
I could see Nick recalibrating everything he thought he knew, realising he had read everything wrong. He said, ‘The flat – it’s yours?’
‘I knew you’d go back to Long Lane Elementary School on the anniversary. You had to, just as I had to. I followed you there. That’s what people do, isn’t it, return to the scene of the crime?’
‘You’d always intended to take him,’ he said, following his own line of thought. ‘It was what you most wanted to do.’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I was angry with you, but I would never have stolen him.’
‘Right, keep telling yourself that.’
‘I’m not a confident driver. I collided with your car. You climbed out and stormed over to my window. The other mothers watched as we argued. I thought I could get away before you realised what was going on. But then, the worst possible thing happened.’
‘I pulled out my phone and took a shot of your licence plate.’
‘So you had a way of tracing me.’
‘And Gabriel had the dragoon that I had given him.’
‘No,’ I corrected. ‘You just gave it back to him. My father Harry collected antique soldiers ‒ toy ones, very valuable. My favourite was one called a dragoon, but when I was little I couldn’t say the word. I called it a dragon, so that’s what it became to me. When I left his house to go to the Dentworth Clinic I took it with me. Gabriel loved it. The dragon on your arm . . . it seemed right that he should have a dragon, too.’
‘You gave it to him . . .’
‘Yes, I tied it on to his first blanket and it stayed with him because he cried whenever anyone tried to take it away. He still had it with him that day in the car. I didn’t want to let it go, but after the collision it was too dangerous to hold on to. I needed to put it somewhere safe. I went back to the institute, where I’d left it. My sister works there. When I fell off the scaffolding, I thought I’d broken my neck.’ I pulled open my jacket and showed him the bandage I had inexpertly wrapped around my collarbone. ‘Whenever I was panicked, Buckingham calmed me down. He showed me how to think clearly.’
‘Buckingham was someone you created.’
‘No,’ I replied angrily. ‘He helped me. He talked to me. He was the only one who cared. You have no idea how lonely I was.’
‘You couldn’t admit what you were planning to do, even to yourself, so you made him up—’
‘People always said I looked more like a boy than a girl. I couldn’t do it alone. I couldn’t do everything, go everywhere—’
‘Buckingham.’ Nick shook his head. ‘Like the Duke of Buckingham, the name of the pub where we met. It was staring me in the face all along. You wanted me to make the connection, didn’t you? How could I not have seen it?’
‘It wasn’t me,’ I explained, ‘It was his mistake, it was Buck—’ Nick wasn’t listening to me, he didn’t understand that I could never hurt a child.
‘Whose mistake, Ella? There’s no one else here.’
I shook my head violently. ‘I thought if someone else carried it out, someone stronger—’ My head was starting to ache. He had saved me. Without him, I would never have been able to act as I did. He was—’
‘There was no one else, Ella, there was only you. You have to admit it now. There’s no more time for lies.’
‘I can’t – I can’t—’
‘Give me the gun.’
‘I can’t—’ I screamed.
And I fired.
The blow knocked him over on to his back. I stepped forward, standing over him, and slowly pushed my sleeve back up. He looked up at me, trying to understand.
‘I always loved your tattoo. It took me a long time to figure out what it was. I once saw a Komodo dragon at the zoo.’ I felt calmer now that I was in control again. ‘It moves in behin
d its prey. It will bite a water buffalo on the shin to inject it with a bacterial venom. Then it follows the animal for weeks, waiting for it to lose power and die. I suppose, to some, that seems a cowardly way of killing, but to me it’s the right way to survive. That was when I understood why you had the tattoo. I inked the same dragon on to my arm as a reminder of what I needed to do to defeat my enemies.’
‘Enough of this,’ said Buck, hissing in my ear. ‘Just kill him.’
I hit him in the chest, but there wasn’t any blood so I fired again. And again.
Nick
I honestly didn’t think she would shoot me, but at some point she just gave up and fired. Twice.
The noise was unbelievable. The bang echoed everywhere, and a flock of pigeons smashed through the tree branches, taking off into the low clouds. For a few moments, it didn’t feel as if I’d been hit. I tried to back away, but I was wearing trainers with no grip to their soles. With nothing to hold me upright, I went over the side of the terrace. The wet leaves were beneath my feet, and there was no way of stopping my slide.
I dropped into the undergrowth, twisting so that I landed on the outside of my arm, where the muscles were. I’d read somewhere that you don’t break bones that way. I landed hard on my back on the terrace below.
She walked down and slowly raised the gun again. I was still trying to get up when she fired a third time. Her aim was wide. The fourth shot was more accurate, and caught me in the chest. She cried out, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying.
I lay on my back, my ears singing, my right leg twisted beneath me. I couldn’t breathe. She arrived at my side and said something, but I could only see her mouth moving.
She’d changed her hair. Lost weight in her face. But her eyes couldn’t lie – they had seen too much and were haunted, but were still the same. I didn’t understand what she was doing here in front of me. She was from my old life. The bad year, the one I’d scratched out and replaced with years of decency and goodness. I’d seen her in many other places, but I couldn’t remember where.