Ralph’s Children

by Hilary Norman

  To murder.

  The hit had been costly in more ways than moral. Neither Simon nor Roger could afford much, but Jack had accumulated some ready cash, Pig had badly wanted to contribute, and Ralph had known it was her duty to pay the lion’s share.

  Immortal souls all down the Swanee then, she supposed.

  Hers first in line.

  Mitcham’s game had indeed changed everything. There was no going back from there, and they all knew it.

  Nothing but a trial run, as things had turned out, for the ultimate game.

  The Game

  Kate

  All this, and now fog too.

  Not a pea-souper, but bad enough, and driving the last mile to Caisleán in the dark was always a strain on the eyes, but anything more than a slight mist was enough to disorient, to blot out the familiar and give the illusion of shifting landscape.

  The relief when Kate saw in her headlights the signpost that she and Rob had erected at the junction with the long track leading to the barn over open grassy land, was considerable. Another memory, of Rob hammering that post into the ground while she had held a glass of champagne for them to share . . .

  Not that Caisleán looked in the least welcoming this evening as the Mini jolted over the last section of bumpy track and stopped.

  A black slab with a pitched roof in a grey blanketed world.

  For just a moment, Kate felt oddly unnerved.

  ‘Daft,’ she told herself out loud.

  She switched off the engine, leaving the headlamps on to light her path to the barn, fished the keys out of her bag and went to unlock the front door.

  It opened with a creak.

  Kate leaned in to flick the switch on the wall inside, and Caisleán came alive.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Edison,’ said Kate.

  She walked back to the Mini, pulled out her weekend bag and shopping, then turned off the headlights, shut and locked the doors, slipped that key into her bag and went inside.

  Kicked the front door shut behind her.

  Everything looked as it should.

  Lovely. Just as she and Rob had intended.

  Soft caramel-coloured sofa with burgundy cushions and throws, two warm kilim rugs on the stone floor that Rob had bought without her at an Istanbul market. The heavy, rustic oak dining table, chairs and old oak chest they’d found together in an Oxford auction. The tiny kitchen off to the right, the bathroom to the left. The spiral staircase up to the galleried first floor that had once been a hayloft – some of its original timbers and iron lamp hooks retained for atmosphere – where they had made their bedroom.

  Where they used to sleep together and make love and watch the stars and the dawn through the skylight over their bed.

  Kate set her bags on the floor and walked into the centre of the room.

  ‘Hello, Caisleán,’ she said softly.

  Awash, suddenly, with loneliness for Rob.

  She thought of the wine bottles in with her shopping.

  A glass would help.

  She started to turn.

  Heard them, saw them, as they emerged, moving swiftly out of the bathroom and kitchen, from the cupboard by the front door and from the back of the little house.

  ‘Hello to you, Kate,’ one of them said.

  Four terrifying figures in red overalls with black stocking masks over their heads, flattening and obscuring their faces.

  Kate opened her mouth to scream.

  ‘Please don’t,’ one of them said.

  A woman, her voice only slightly muffled by her stocking.

  ‘All right.’ Kate’s heart pounded like a jackhammer. ‘I won’t.’ Shock made her hoarse. ‘Take what you want, then please go, I won’t stop you.’

  ‘What we want,’ a second figure – a man – said, ‘is you.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Kate said.

  ‘Better sit down,’ the third – another woman – told her.

  Kate did so.

  Laurie

  It was almost one a.m. when Laurie – who’d given up on sleep and was flipping through that week’s copy of Heat – heard a quiet knocking on her door, which startled her since neither of her parents ever came into her room at night.

  ‘Come in.’

  It was her father, in dressing gown and slippers.

  ‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ Laurie closed the magazine.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Pete Moon answered.

  He asked if she minded if he sat on the edge of her bed.

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘I just want to say –’ he spoke slowly as he sat, like someone groping his way forward, which was not a bit like him – ‘that I sometimes think you’ve forgotten how much your mum and I love you.’

  Laurie said nothing, wondering where this was going.

  ‘You’re so busy hating us . . . ’

  ‘I don’t hate you, Dad.’

  Which was only half a lie, since much of the hate she’d undoubtedly often felt since conceiving Sam had been more disappointment than real hatred. Plenty of that.

  ‘I hope you know,’ Pete went on, ‘that if we thought Sam wasn’t happy, wasn’t fulfilling his potential—’

  ‘How can you know if he’s happy or not when you never see him?’ Her retort came sharply, almost automatically.

  ‘We get reports,’ her father said, ‘as you know. Which all tell us about his happy nature. Which you do too, Laurie.’

  ‘And if he wasn’t?’ she asked. ‘Happy?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Then I imagine we’d have to think about something else.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘That would be up to you,’ Pete said.

  ‘Since when has anything about Sam been up to me?’ Laurie asked.

  ‘It’s all been up to you,’ said her dad. ‘Your mother and I have always gone along with your decisions.’

  She was staggered. ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘It’s true,’ Pete insisted. ‘Fundamentally. We may not have handled things the way you would have.’

  Laurie was silent again, new imaginings clanging in her brain. Was this a new trick, perhaps, to stop her visits to Sam? Or maybe they were going to say they couldn’t afford Rudolf Mann any more, and where would they want to send him then?

  ‘But we’ve always done what we thought was best,’ her father continued, ‘for you and your son.’

  Sam’s lovely open face came into her mind, pushing away everything else.

  ‘What are you telling me, Dad?’ Laurie asked at last.

  ‘Nothing.’ Pete shrugged. ‘Except your mum and I hate the way things get between us because you think we don’t care about Sam.’

  ‘Me too,’ Laurie said, with an effort. ‘I hate it too.’

  ‘OK.’ Her father reached for her hand and squeezed it, and they used to hug all the time before Sam, though it was hard for Laurie to remember the sweetness of those days, because being a mum herself had changed everything, even if wasn’t the way being a mother was meant to be. ‘Shall we try a bit harder then, baby?’

  She found, with surprise, that the endearment did not offend her, simply because her father had just extended what felt like a real hand of friendship, maybe even of respect.

  And after he left the room, she turned off her lamp and lay in the dark again, a new set of possibilities – happier, this time, almost golden – rushing in. Because maybe they were going to let Sam come home with her, live with them, with her.

  A picture of her son playing at the Mann came to her.

  If Sam came to the Moon house, he would miss that place, wouldn’t he? The only real home he’d ever known. And his friends, too, not to mention all the stand-in mothers who knew just how to take care of his needs.

  Special needs.

  Laurie stopped herself before the thoughts got out of hand. Her father hadn’t said a word about anything having to change, either for better or worse; he’d only said they should all try a little harder to be kinder to each other. He certai
nly hadn’t said there was the slightest possibility that Sam should come home to this house.

  Nor would he.

  At least the sad resignation settling back over her was a feeling to which she was all too accustomed, and she wondered suddenly, in one of her moments of franker self-appraisal, how well she might cope with the challenges of real change.

  Given that she was, after all, a coward.

  Laurie glanced at her clock.

  Just over six and a half hours.

  The Game

  They had removed Kate’s parka but not her gloves, and then they had bound her ankles together with a triple length of crêpe bandage over her jeans above her old Todds loafers, had strapped her wrists behind her, stuck wide adhesive parcel tape over her mouth and had forced her down on to the sofa.

  A flurry of brief directions before that from the men and women in their creepy, stocking-deformed faces, red overalls, latex gloves and trainers.

  ‘Sit still.’

  ‘Feet together.’

  ‘Hands behind your back.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  But then, for a long time, they had spoken neither to her nor to each other, had given her no indication of what exactly they wanted from her.

  ‘What we want is you.’

  One of the men had said that, hadn’t he, in the first minute – the bigger, brawnier-built of the two – but what had he meant? And were they waiting for someone else or something, or were they just using silence now to freak her more?

  Succeeding.

  They’d drawn the curtains so that no one could see in, leaving just enough of a break between them, Kate hazarded, to be able to see outside.

  She was sitting in the centre of the sofa, her feet on the kilim rug before it. One of the males was now seated beside her to her left, one of the females to her right, their proximity making Kate’s flesh crawl.

  For the first time in her life, she knew the meaning of terror.

  Of helplessness, too, and bewilderment.

  ‘So . . .’ the second female, standing a few feet away, addressed her suddenly. ‘I suppose you feel really defenceless, right, Kate?’

  Kate stared up at her.

  ‘That’s how they feel.’

  They?

  ‘By the end of the second month –’ the female beside Kate had a low, mellifluous voice – ‘they only measure about one and a quarter inches, but they already have arms and legs.’

  ‘And a beating heart,’ said the standing woman.

  Babies.

  Embryos.

  Kate’s mind floundered, fumbled, came up with nothing better than more fear.

  She looked from one to the other, took in the mobile phones clipped to the waistbands of their overalls, looked up at their dark impenetrable faces, unable to stop herself from trying to seek out features, some identification point, aware as she did so that it might be the worst possible thing to do, that not seeing these people’s faces might ultimately be what gave her the best chance of getting out of this.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ The male now standing near the front door, the tougher-built one, spoke with what might possibly have been a Bristol accent, though more significantly, he sounded aggressive. ‘Just listen, right?’

  Kate nodded, made a sound of appeal behind her gag.

  ‘Quiet.’ The man on the sofa to her right seemed a little less hostile.

  She looked straight ahead at the TV she had expected to have switched on by now; dinner in the oven, glass of red in her hand.

  ‘That’s better,’ the male beside her said.

  Kate wondered if they were playing ‘good captor, bad captor’.

  ‘By the end of the third month –’ the female beside her started again – ‘they respond to touch, and nerve fibres transmitting pain are present.’

  ‘Though the fibres that will inhibit pain are not,’ the standing woman said.

  A regular double act.

  Kate recognized, even through her fear haze, a mixing of different studies of the subject she’d had good cause to research in the past.

  The standing female was holding stapled papers in her right hand.

  ‘If abortion is carried out early enough, they call it suction.’ She emphasized the word, her voice quivering a little. ‘A powerful suction tube is introduced into the womb –’ she was reading now – ‘and the suction pulls the embryo’s body apart, drags it and the placenta off the wall of the uterus and deposits them into a bottle as waste.’

  Pro-lifers, then.

  Fanatical pro-lifers.

  Kate felt as if her insides were shrivelling.

  ‘If they wait a little longer –’ the seated female was not reading, was either better informed or rehearsed – ‘or if they’ve left a little of the foetus behind, they use a curette to scrape it away.’

  Kate turned her head to look at her.

  ‘Keep your head down,’ the male near the door ordered.

  Terrorists, Kate decided, described them better than captors.

  It was hard to say how that made her feel, except even more numb.

  Numb was probably the only way through this.

  The male beside her shifted a little, and now he, too, was holding papers. Kate chanced a glance, saw printed text but could make out no words.

  ‘The first thing you learn when it happens to you,’ he read, ‘is that every preconceived idea – even when it’s been founded in good faith and sincerity – flies straight out of the window.’

  Oh, dear God.

  They were her own words, from one of her columns.

  ‘Nothing, when it comes to this ultimate life or death decision –’ his voice was higher than the other man’s, his reading stilted, like a schoolboy’s, and even through the stocking his breath smelt sour, and Kate had a sense that he was nervous – ‘is black and white, nor is it grey. If we’re talking colours, it’s the blazing reds of hell versus the gentle nursery pastels of hope or the drabness of earth and ashes.’

  Was this why they were here then, in Caisleán? Because she had written in Short-Fuse about abortion?

  That first glimmer of comprehension brought Kate no comfort.

  Ralph

  Everything about this game was different, had been since its inception.

  Two Beasts instead of one.

  Both of them brought to the group by Ralph.

  A first.

  And perhaps, Ralph suspected – had felt this from the start – the last.

  Kate Turner, of course, had come to her attention long before Laurie Moon.

  Clamouring for attention, spilling her opinions and feelings over a whole page of the Reading Sunday News every single week. One of life’s true coincidences taking care of any doubts after that, proving that Turner really was a bitch and a killer.

  A Beast.

  A temporary assignment at the Rudolf Mann School had brought her Laurie Moon. This selfish, self-obsessed, weak young woman. Unfit, unworthy, to be called a mother.

  It had taken time, more investigation and vastly more organization than any game they had ever played, most of it undertaken by Ralph herself, before and since bringing it to the group that evening at the Black Rooster pub.

  It had taken a long time for her to be sure that it was right, for them.

  That taking them to this kind of level was right, to such heights.

  Such depths.

  She had already forced herself to face the possibility that, having presided over one death, there seemed an inevitability about this deeper descent.

  Ultimate sin already committed, after all. Not by her hand or theirs exactly, but still their sin, done and dusted and ready for judgement.

  The swiftness with which they had all accepted her proposal had surprised Ralph somewhat, coming so soon after their initial doubts over the decision to have Mitcham killed. Jack and Roger had agreed to the new game so readily, she realized, partly because they genuinely shared her sense of outrage about Turner and Moon, but also becaus
e they were both naturally attracted to violence. Simon had accepted the plan because, though Ralph believed she remained fundamentally gentle, the group had always come first with her, and both these female Beasts represented everything that set her personal anger flowing like lava. Pig had gone along with it because the same things made him rage, and because he loved Simon.

  Yet for all that, and for all that she wanted this game with the most startling passion, Ralph knew that their readiness to agree meant they’d come to accept the use of brutality to further their aims. Which saddened her.

  And thrilled her, yet again.

  They had argued for a time about where the main event should take place, batting possibilities back and forth. Turner’s cottage was not, they’d all agreed, sufficiently isolated; there might be watchful neighbours, random callers, there were too many unnecessary risks and unknown quantities attached to it. They’d considered taking over an unoccupied rural property, anything from a vacant holiday cottage to a farm outhouse, but Caisleán had seemed like a gift.

  ‘Perfect,’ Roger had said.

  The planning of the game had, at times, almost overwhelmed them.

  ‘Lucky we’ve got Jack,’ Pig had said at that first meeting. ‘A real pro.’

  ‘I’m a burglar, right,’ Jack had reminded him. ‘Not a murderer.’

  ‘We’re not doing a murder,’ Pig said.

  ‘Don’t pick nits,’ Roger told him.

  Super-vigilant was what they were going to have to be, Ralph said.

  ‘And then some,’ said Jack.

  Surgical gloves to be worn every second, no matter what. Littlewoods trainers on their feet, same as thousands of other men and women in the country.

  ‘Most important thing,’ Ralph had said during a later planning meeting, ‘is not to let the Beasts claw or bite.’

  ‘No releasing them –’ Jack again – ‘for peeing or crapping or drinking.’

  ‘Not even if they say they’re about to choke to death,’ Roger said.

  Simon was pale, Pig not much better.

  ‘What if the husband shows up?’ he’d asked.

  ‘He hasn’t gone near the place since they split up,’ Ralph said, ‘so far as I know.’