Ralph’s Children

by Hilary Norman

  Of doubt, or at least confusion.

  She had seen it in his eyes before, and in Rob’s, too, when she’d mentioned the game. Though not in Bel’s, interestingly. From her often self-obsessed mother, she’d had nothing but support of the most unconditional and intelligent kind.

  As, of course, she’d had around the time of her miscarriage.

  ‘Mum’s being amazing,’ Kate had told Rob soon after the Caisleán weekend.

  ‘She adores you,’ he had said, simply. ‘Couldn’t bear to lose you.’

  ‘But she’s being so calm,’ Kate said.

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ Rob advised. ‘Try cherishing it instead.’

  They were both a little confused about their reconciliation. They knew they had been coming close to it before, when they’d argued shortly before the horrors; but they had argued, and their separation had come about in such an acutely painful way. Kate still remembered, all too clearly, longed to forget, the way Rob had changed then, the hardening of his attitude towards her – and though the blue of his eyes was soft again now, the chastening fact remained that they were only together again now because Kate had come so close to death, and because she needed help.

  And because Rob loved her. And she him.

  Surely no better reason.

  They all spoke of Laurie by her first name, as if they had known her.

  They did know a little more by now.

  She had been identified within twenty-four hours by her father, the Mann Children’s Home having notified her parents of Laurie’s no-show, and a missing person’s report having been made by afternoon that same day.

  The news story had made the national press by that Monday morning, local TV and radio news reporting it before that. Pictures of Caisleán surrounded by crime scene tape and looking somehow sordid; shots of Kate – including a honeymoon photo of her with Rob in Venice, no one having any idea how it might have been obtained – and of Laurie, Michele and Peter Moon, and of their young grandson, Sam. Quotes from Laurie’s neighbours expressing shock and disbelief, all speaking of a lovely, friendly, quiet, talented young woman – and of their surprise, too, that she had a child.

  ‘The boy is eight years old, and has Down’s syndrome.’

  Kate had heard this from Martin Blake, her new lawyer, a former colleague of her dad’s. Having continued to insist for days that as a victim she did not need a lawyer, that bringing one in seemed tantamount to raising her very own question mark over her innocence, Kate had finally accepted that she probably needed all the help she could get.

  ‘Even that word – “innocence” –’ Bel had been incensed, had told Michael as much – ‘implies she has something to prove.’

  ‘No one’s saying that,’ Michael had tried to calm her. ‘We all know Kate is completely blameless.’

  ‘Of course she’s blameless,’ Bel had shouted at him. ‘She’s the victim.’

  The fact that Sam Moon had Down’s syndrome – Martin Blake agreed – lent weight to Kate’s theory that the gang might be some kind of fanatical pro-life splinter or entirely independent group. He also said that, so far as he could ascertain, the general consensus of opinion, pending further investigation, was that the police did not exactly disbelieve her.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Kate had echoed grimly.

  ‘The problems lie, obviously, with all the physical evidence,’ Blake said.

  ‘All against me,’ Kate said.

  ‘It would be preposterous,’ Michael said, ‘if it weren’t so tragic.’

  ‘It’s barking mad,’ Bel said.

  ‘It’s their game,’ Kate said.

  * * *

  ‘The problem,’ Martin Blake pointed out to Kate at their next meeting, a few days before Christmas, ‘is that even the elements which seem to support your story can be explained away.’ His expression was apologetic. ‘Could even, theoretically, have been arranged by you.’

  ‘God,’ Kate said.

  They were alone together in Blake’s office, both feeling better able to proceed more effectively without family passions igniting every other minute.

  The room, in a modern building in Banbury Road, Oxford, was well-ordered, if not overly tidy. Unlike the law offices her father had formerly practised from in Henley, this possessed, Kate felt, no elegance or even any atmosphere to speak of, yet in a curious sense that seemed of comfort to her at present, since normality, even the commonplace, was what she craved a return to.

  The solicitor himself – a pleasant-looking, sandy-haired man in his late thirties with features that drooped in repose, but were all the more bright and pleasant when he became animated – was clearly a realist but on her side, which seemed to her what mattered most, especially since she hoped that ultimately there would be no need to prove his talent as a lawyer.

  Blake went on to catalogue the problems.

  The minor bruising – Kate’s only injuries, caused by the slaps and hog-tying – could have happened as a result of her tussle with Simon.

  ‘Though if it came to it,’ Blake said, ‘we’d have an expert witness to support our explanation and refute theirs.’

  The tyre tracks found some way from the barn and probably left by a van, which tallied with her account of the gang’s comings and goings, could have been left by any van, its driver perhaps altogether unconnected with the criminals or Kate, maybe lost and seeking an address.

  ‘Or you might have set up the tracks yourself,’ Blake said.

  ‘Not very likely,’ Kate said, ‘surely.’

  She was choosing, she was aware, not to face the incredible devastation of all that had happened and was still happening to her. Not just of being a victim and a witness to a most depraved brand of so-called ‘justice’ handed down in the name of the unborn and sinned-against mothers. In some ways, what was happening now seemed just as hard to believe; the very notion that someone might for a single moment believe that Kate could . . .

  Too much to face.

  Better, therefore, not to.

  Her missing front door keys, Martin Blake continued, had been found buried beneath the wild primrose patch where Kate had told the police she always left a spare set, proving nothing in her favour.

  ‘Likewise the kitchen window smashed by you from inside,’ said Blake.

  ‘May I ask a question?’

  ‘As many as you wish.’

  ‘Exactly why am I supposed to have set up this elaborate chamber of horrors?’

  ‘I would presume,’ the lawyer replied, ‘that any basis for accusation would be on the assumption that you were taken prisoner, but that either you used excessive force against Simon . . .’ He paused. ‘Or, even more ludicrously – lest you doubt my opinion – that you killed both Simon and Laurie Moon.’

  ‘And then set up all this evidence after they’d gone,’ Kate continued the theme. ‘Because I thought no one would believe me otherwise.’

  ‘Unless someone comes up with some other motive,’ Blake said, ‘some link, perhaps, with either Laurie Moon or the other woman.’

  ‘Which they won’t,’ Kate said, ‘because it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Quite,’ Blake said.

  The telephone, not working when Kate had tried to summon help from inside Caisleán, had been functioning perfectly by the time the police had arrived. The distress in Kate’s voice, recorded when she’d managed to make her report from outside, didn’t count for much, since she might, of course, be a good actor.

  ‘Can’t they tell if a phone line’s been cut off or tampered with?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Blake answered. ‘I have a colleague looking into that.’ He saw her frustration. ‘You must remember that you and I are playing our own game of worst case scenarios, which is an unusual approach, and one we’ve only begun because your family are getting so angry and upset on your behalf.’

  ‘Can you blame them?’ Kate asked hotly.

  ‘Not at all,’ Blake replied. ‘That’s why Michael approached me, because he thought I’d
understand your collective anxieties and do my best to shoot down any seriously off-course wild geese before anyone tries to chase them.’

  Kate laughed. ‘If I ever want to seriously dement my editor, could I please come to you for some metaphor-mixing lessons?’

  ‘Any time,’ Blake said.

  The lightness had already passed. ‘Do you think DCI Newton believes me?’

  ‘I’d say so, in all probability.’ Blake paused. ‘Though until she has more to go on, or at least some starting point in the hunt for the gang—’

  ‘I’m the only game in town,’ Kate said.

  ‘More accurately,’ the lawyer said, ‘you’re their only witness.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said slowly, ‘I need to keep my focus on that, rather than being so oversensitive. Concentrate on helping the police catch the bastards.’

  ‘That’s what we both need to focus on,’ said Blake.

  ‘Thank you,’ Kate said. ‘I think we’ve strayed from your list of problems.’

  ‘It wouldn’t do,’ Blake said wryly, ‘to be too upbeat.’

  He returned to his notes.

  ‘Miss Moon’s car hasn’t been found yet,’ he said. ‘Which only presents a problem in that the car might provide valuable evidence if they could locate it.’

  ‘I’m surprised no one’s suggested I’ve got it stashed away somewhere.’

  ‘I thought you were going to be positive,’ Blake said, ‘and let me play devil’s advocate.’

  Kate nodded.

  Her claim to have been locked in the bathroom, Blake went on, could not be proved because she’d got out so easily, and her insistence that there had been no lock – confirmed by Rob – was not provable since he had also had to admit that prior to the weekend of the killings he hadn’t been to the barn for months, which meant that Kate might have had the lock fitted, or even have done it herself.

  ‘I’m lousy at DIY,’ she told Blake.

  ‘So you say.’ He grinned.

  ‘Ask anyone,’ she said.

  ‘All people who love you,’ he said. ‘They don’t count.’

  ‘God,’ she said again, humour gone.

  ‘On the plus side—’

  ‘Is there one?’ Kate interrupted.

  ‘Certainly,’ Blake said. ‘We’ve already touched on the fact that the police do appear to believe that you did not know Laurie Moon.’

  ‘Hang out the flags.’ Kate shrugged. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Bizarrely enough,’ Blake went on, ‘the fact that there were two bodies in Caisleán works in our favour, since one would have been much easier to pin on you.’

  ‘Tell that to the bodies,’ said Kate.

  ‘I do have something more,’ Blake said.

  ‘A third body?’ Her irony splashed up like acid.

  ‘Something rather better.’

  ‘Go on,’ Kate said. ‘Please.’

  ‘A possible precedent. In Oxford – in Summertown, to be precise – about a year ago, a primary school teacher named Alan Mitcham, charged with armed robbery, claimed he’d been forced to commit the crime by a gang of abductors wearing black stocking masks.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Kate said. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He was convicted.’

  ‘Great.’ Kate paused. ‘I take it there’s more.’

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Mitcham was murdered in Oakwood Prison.’

  ‘I thought this was meant to be a good precedent,’ Kate said.

  ‘It is good,’ Blake said, ‘because the police seem to be looking at Mitcham’s story again with fresh eyes.’ He rubbed the side of his nose with his thumb. ‘It’s also of very great interest for another reason.’

  Kate waited.

  ‘Mitcham claimed after his arrest,’ Blake went on, ‘that the gang had used false names taken from a novel.’

  For the first time, Kate experienced a real kick of hope. ‘The Golding?’

  ‘The very same,’ said Blake. ‘Though he said there were three gang members, not four – but since their names were Jack, Roger and Pig, it’s hardly likely to be a coincidence.’

  ‘So Newton has to be starting to believe me,’ Kate said.

  ‘Let’s say things are heading in the right direction,’ Blake said.

  Ralph

  The knowledge that it was all over was even more painful than Ralph had ever anticipated it might be.

  Knowing there would be no more games.

  No more group.

  Knowing that when the time came, none of them would be able to attend Simon’s funeral, nor even, later, visit her grave in case the police were watching.

  Her grief for Simon and her fears for the others grew daily. They were so scarred, so damaged, and now they would have to go on alone, and she wondered how they would manage.

  Maybe they would be fine, maybe better than before.

  More ordinary, their lives commonplace.

  Better without her influence.

  Better without her.

  She hardly seemed to care about herself any more, felt unable to. If she didn’t eat or sleep well, or didn’t exercise, or didn’t even get out more than was absolutely necessary, there was no one to bother about her. She had been managing to continue with her part-time job and a little telephone counselling – she had to pay her bills, after all – but there was no satisfaction in any of it, which reminded her of the way her life had been before that long-ago evening at Wayland’s Smithy.

  Before the group.

  One of her great fears was that the other three might be bent on revenge. That Pig, in particular, might try to do something to avenge Simon, endangering himself and the other two. They’d agreed on as little contact as possible; not even so much as a Christmas card, and phone calls only if absolutely necessary and with great caution, but on the rare opportunity Ralph did find to communicate with any of them, she was determined to use it to discourage acts of retribution as well as she could.

  Keeping her surviving children safe was the least she could do after all the harm she had already done them.

  She knew that she would never forgive herself.

  And her own hatred for Kate Turner grew stronger every day.

  Kate

  They were both beginning to accept, Kate felt, that they were truly together again, their reconciliation less tentative than it had at first been.

  They’d done a few things to mark new permanence, bought new cushions and a couple of jacquard throws for the coffee-stained sofa and armchairs, gone to the garden centre and chosen plants, then dug them in together. Sharing their home again and their daily lives, through Christmas and into the New Year, felt better than right to them both.

  She looked at herself sometimes in mirrors, assessing the damages of the past year. She’d gone to a hairdresser after Caisleán, had her hair cut shorter, and it suited her well enough. Her hazel eyes gazed almost calmly back at her, the shadows beneath them less pronounced than they had been, though her face was still thinner.

  Rob told her she was beautiful, and she told him he was handsome, and that she’d even grown fond of his beard. But then he’d startled her, early one morning, by inviting her to shave it off for him.

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ She’d felt tentative.

  ‘It reminds you, I think,’ he said, ‘of our bad times, so I want it gone.’

  ‘But you like it.’

  ‘I love you more.’

  It had been an extraordinarily intimate experience, leading to love-making, and that too was better than it had ever been, though the new bond between them seemed far more important than physical pleasure. Kate thought, perhaps, that it was she who felt that so much more, the sheer relief of coming together, the sense of safe harbour she experienced being closer than close, Rob deep inside her.

  ‘God, no,’ Rob told her. ‘Same for me, because I thought I’d lost you forever.’

  Not quite the same, then, Kate realized, because her craving for safety stemmed from those twenty or so hours spent in the
company of monsters, with a masked killer who’d thrust a condom in her face and told her how he would have liked to ‘educate’ her, a man who had cut a young woman’s throat . . .

  Not quite the same.

  Not all roses, either.

  The Caisleán ‘incident’, as some called it, had given Rob’s ex-wife a maddeningly rational excuse to keep Emmie from her father. They couldn’t possibly imagine, Penny said, that she would take any more risks with her daughter.

  ‘Not with those people still out there.’

  Kate would have liked to strangle Penny just for the reminder, then do it all over again for her unkindness to Rob. Strangle her figuratively, that was, she amended even to herself, the reality of physical violence still too bloodily fresh in her memory.

  She felt deeply altered by the Caisleán weekend in many ways.

  ‘You’re post-traumatic,’ she had been told by just about everyone from DS Ben Poulter to Richard Fireman – who had been amazingly patient about her inability to string together a decent Short-Fuse since her ordeal.

  Guest writers filling her slot for now, which ought, she supposed, to be worrying her more than it was. Not exactly hard to replace, after all, a hack who’d struck lucky with a provincial paper.

  ‘Out of work soon, if I don’t get my act together,’ Kate said to Rob.

  ‘You will,’ he told her. ‘Got to give yourself time.’

  Kate supposed he was right, that they were all on the mark too about the post-traumatic thing. She was displaying all the symptoms: anxiety, nerviness, flashbacks, nightmares and periods of depression (not at all like her PMS black moods, these were quite different, affecting her physically as well as emotionally, often making her feel ill, wanting to sleep rather than lash out). Yet at the same time, she seemed to have a desire to be kinder, was less impatient and generally less verbally antagonistic with those people she loved.

  She was also more suspicious of strangers, whether they came a little too close out in the streets, or rang the doorbell at the cottage because they wanted to read a meter or make a delivery; and with those people she’d never wholly trusted – like Delia and Sandi – she was more prickly than ever, and she thought she’d have liked to have recovered from that, like flu, but her hackles continued to rise when they met. Yet despite those abiding dislikes, her family seemed more united than at any time she could remember.