A sharp gust of wind blew at him as if it too was protesting, causing him to blink. He opened his eyes to something being waved in his face and for a moment thought it was a placard; then realised it was a microphone. A skinny redhead simpered before him, a steely look in her eyes at odds with the pretty smile.
‘How do you feel about the news that Terry Prince has been released, Councillor? Are your sympathies with the citizens of Coventry, and with the Randall family?’
Now what kind of loaded question was that? Hagard glared at the reporter, certain he had seen her before and noting the crow’s feet around those rather cold eyes. Yes, he was certain she had been here the first time around, pushing another microphone in his face, when the little boy had been murdered. It had been easier to express sympathy then of course, whereas anything he said now could be ill-advised. If he remembered rightly this woman wasn’t even from the local Telegraph or news station, or even the Birmingham Post, but a national tabloid. That was all the city needed.
Glaring again at the woman he turned on his heel and pushed his way back through the revolving doors. He was going straight to the over-priced staff eatery for a steak, chips, and fried onions, diet be damned.
Outside the red-headed reporter merely shrugged and tucked away her microphone into her handbag, jerking her head at the photographer who stood ever ready behind her. She had already got plenty of copy from members of the crowd but had thought to try her luck with Hagard when she spotted him lumbering through the doors looking ready to have a fit. His dismissal of her wasn’t a problem; she had her eyes on far more interesting prey.
Lucy peered through the nets, her stomach sinking. This was all she needed. Behind her Ricky grumbled to himself as he threw books into his bag, already late for school. Lucy had insisted on driving him, having sat him down to talk to him about the news. She knew how children – perhaps teenagers in particular – could be and could only imagine the stares and questions that Ricky would face today at school.
She was worried enough about him as it was; had caught the whiff of cigarette smoke and perhaps worse on his breath more than once in recent weeks. Typical boy behaviour, her own mother had shrugged, but not for the first time Lucy felt the lack of a father figure in her eldest son’s life. In spite of nearly a decade of bringing him up and letting Ricky call him ‘Dad’ Ethan had barely bothered with him since he had left. When Ricky had been having his ‘issues’, as they had referred to them after Jack’s death, Ethan had offered the boy no support at all.Now as she saw her ex-husband striding up her drive she bit her lip just in time to stop herself saying ‘Your father’s here’. Instead she dropped the net and took a deep breath before the door knocked.
‘It’s Ethan.’
‘What does he want?’ Ricky asked, his face folded with distaste. Lucy opened the door, not even bothering to check her reflection in the little mirror by the coat stand. In the last couple of years she had started to take a pride in her appearance again, but this morning she had woken with that heavy, lethargic feeling she remembered so well from the first years after Jack’s death. It had taken all of her willpower to drag herself out of bed and get dressed, even the fabric of her clothes feeling heavy on her skin.
‘Ethan.’
‘Lucy.’
They stared at each other for a moment, Lucy taking in his slightly rumpled appearance, his suit looking less than ironed and his jaw unshaven. It wasn’t like him, his appearance was usually immaculate. In a flash of compassion, Lucy realised he must be feeling as wretched as she did and opened the door, stepping back to let him in.
Ethan walked in and looked around his old home as if uncomfortable at being here again. He had only lived there a few months, had started his affair even before they had started making plans to move from their old home. Jack’s home.
Ethan’s eyes flitted round the room and then settled on Ricky, still standing at the kitchen table with his book bag.
‘Hey, kiddo.’
Ricky’s lip curled. He stared at Ethan until he dropped his eyes, then hoisted his bag onto his shoulder.
‘I said I’ll drive you,’ Lucy protested as he walked towards the door, but Ricky carried on, slamming it behind him. Shocked, Lucy went to go after him but Ethan laid a hand on her arm.
‘Let him go, Luce, he’s bound to be upset.’
Lucy bit back the retort that sprang to her lips at the cheek of him advising her on her eldest son, the child he had taken on as his and then walked out on. She didn’t want to open that particular can of worms.
‘Don’t call me Luce,’ she snapped instead, the unnecessary shortening of her name annoying her as much as it always had. It was two syllables, for God’s sake, hardly difficult to pronounce.
She sat down at the table, waving Ethan towards the chair opposite. He took the one next to her instead, leaning forward and taking her hands. Lucy flinched but didn’t pull away. He had slim, long hands. Clever, surgeon’s hands, that had once touched her and held her, but were now holding someone else. She looked down at them dispassionately.
‘How are you?’Lucy couldn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t want him to see the pain in them any more than she wanted to see it in his. It should be a shared pain, something they should face together, but Ethan had given that up. When she didn’t answer he started talking in a broken voice, cracking the way Ricky’s had started to now that he was hitting puberty, and Lucy looked at him properly then and saw the anguish in his eyes.
‘I really thought he wouldn’t get parole, you know? Thought they would never let him out yet. Jack would still only be eleven now.’
‘I know how old he would be.’ Lucy didn’t mean for her words to come out so harsh and yet somehow they did. She didn’t want to do this with him, didn’t want to relive the horror, and couldn’t bring herself to offer a comfort she didn’t feel.
‘Does your wife know you’re here?’ she asked instead and Ethan started, a flash of guilt in his eyes, though he still didn’t remove his hands.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to see how you were. To talk. She doesn’t understand.’ His voice sounded choked again and Lucy pulled back, wrenching her hands away from him. Ethan looked up at her, hurt, and Lucy realised she was suddenly angry.
‘She doesn’t understand, so you come here, to me? Because your wife doesn’t understand you?’ she laughed, and it sounded bitter even to her own ears. ‘Isn’t that what you used to say to her about me when you were fucking her behind my back?’
Ethan’s eyes grew wide and shocked and Lucy pressed her own hand to her mouth as if to stop any further outburst. She rarely, if ever, swore. And she knew it wasn’t really Ethan she was angry at. When he reached for her again she stood up, bumping her hip against the edge of the table.
‘This is hardly the time, Lucy,’ he reprimanded, regaining some of his usual composure. ‘I came here to talk about Jack.’
Lucy pressed a hand to her head, which had begun to pound, heralding one of the fierce headaches she suffered on and off. Tension headaches, her doctor called them.
‘Jack’s dead,’ she said. As she spoke the words it occurred to her that in eight years she had never spoken them aloud, had either avoided such simple statements of fact or cloaked the cold truth in less final language. Because she had never spoken to the press and avoided discussing her business with either strangers or friends, those two words, together like that, had never come from her mouth.
Now they lingered in the air between them, weighed down with eight years of guilt and grief.
Ethan winced.
‘About Terry Prince then. About this mess.’ Such an understatement. He spread his arms, belying the word. Lucy folded hers, not in anger now but as a way of holding herself upright on suddenly weak legs.
‘I’m going to have my solicitor release a statement to the press detailing how sickened we are. There must be something we can do, surely?’
She didn’t like this side of Ethan. He had always been in control,
always taken care of everything. Now he sounded lost, was sitting here in her kitchen looking at her like there was something she could do; as if she had all the answers and he was waiting for her to enlighten him.
‘They won’t lock him back up now they’ve let him go,’ she said, turning her body away from his, ‘not unless he re-offends.’
Her head was really pounding now and she wanted him to go if only so she could take some painkillers and lie down. She had phoned in sick at work this morning and now she genuinely did feel ill, a psychosomatic response perhaps. Also, she wanted to phone Ricky and check he had got to school before his first class began. He would moan at her for mollycoddling him, but the memory of those brief minutes when she had taken her eyes off her youngest son and lost him forever haunted her every time Ricky went out of the door, even now.
Ethan stood up and pushed in his chair, straightening himself even as Lucy crumpled, leaning back against the kitchen side with her head in her hands, trying to fold into herself. Her head whipped back up though when Ethan approached her.
‘Just go, please. You shouldn’t be here.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without quite knowing what he was apologising for, ‘but if you do want to talk; if there’s anything I, or we, can do…’ His voice trailed off as she turned her face away, dismissing him, and he gave up and walked towards the door. Before he opened it he heard her speak, hissing like a cat under her breath, so that he had to strain to hear her.
‘Find out where he is.’
But when Ethan looked over at her she had turned fully away with her back to him and so he left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Those last words, uttered in that low angry hissing that sounded wholly unlike any side of Lucy he had ever known, resounded through his head all day, until he felt he was going crazy.
An hour later Lucy herself wondered if she would go crazy. Two aspirin had dulled the pain in her head but failed to get rid of it completely, and the constant shrill ringing of the telephone had threatened to render them completely useless until she had given in and unplugged it. The first call, moments after Ethan had left, had been from Ricky, for once pre-empting his mother’s worrying and letting her know he was safe at school. Then two calls from reporters and one inviting her to talk on the radio, all of which Lucy hung up on without saying anything further. Then her mother, then Susan, wearing her out with well-meaning but pointless questions. Of course she wasn’t okay. No, there was absolutely nothing they could do to help. The only thing she wanted was an answer to her last question to Ethan, and she knew that was impossible.
Finally, after a call from a shrill-voiced female journalist from the Telegraph, who Lucy had none too gently slammed the phone down on, she went and lay on her bed, overwhelmed and feeling completely alone. Perhaps she shouldn’t have rebuffed Ethan’s attempts to connect but really, what was the point? They could cry on each other’s shoulders and even start campaign plans but none of it would be any use, and at the end of it all Ethan would go home to the wife who didn’t understand him and she would be alone again. She lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, about to drift into sleep when the doorbell rang yet again. For a second she wondered if Ethan had returned, and wasn’t sure if she was annoyed or pleased, but it wasn’t Ethan’s knock. Funny how people had their own knocks, their own patterns and rhythms that, once you were familiar with them, heralded their presence. This was a stranger.
Lucy opened the door to a strange woman who smiled warmly but had strangely cold eyes. Lucy knew she was a reporter even before she spoke.
‘Lucy Randall? I’m from the Sun. I wondered if you would like to take the chance to express your opinions on the early release of Terry Prince.’
The woman smiled. She had a sweet voice, so polite, but eyes like a snake, Lucy thought. She smiled back.
‘Fuck. Off.’ Then she slammed the door in her face.
Lucy went to go back upstairs, feeling pleased with herself until she realised that was the second time she had used the ‘f’ word that morning. She who, in the transition from council estate single parent to middle-class surgeon’s wife, had stopped using any profanity stronger than ‘damn’. It felt quite good, she decided. In a single moment of revelation that she could in fact say and do whatever she damn well wanted, Lucy turned and flung open the front door. The reporter was hovering at the end of the drive talking to a man with a digital camera and nervous expression.
‘Come in,’ she said, as the woman turned to her in surprise at the about-face, then started towards her with a triumphant smile. ‘You can have all the opinions you want.’
Chapter Four
Friday
It had been a Wednesday when she lost Jack. She had let him pedal his little trike out on the front yard while she loaded the washing machine, it never occurring to her that he was anything less than safe. He had been in her line of sight both through the kitchen window and the side door which she had left open, and when she ducked down to sort through the laundry basket, sorting the colours from the white, she must have only taken her eyes off him for two minutes at most. Yet when she stood back up he was gone.
Lucy ran outside, calling to him, but she hadn’t started to panic at that point, not the breath-stopping, freezing panic she would feel later. She expected him to be out on the road – a cul-de-sac, so there was little chance of cars – or in a neighbour’s yard playing with their children, or even in old Mrs Clary’s kitchen, asking for biscuits.
Ten minutes later she had been frantic, and twelve minutes later she was calling the police, her hands shaking and her voice barely comprehensible to the impatient switchboard operator on the other end of the call.
It took them six hours to find his body, and twenty-four to discover his killer. Terry Prince, fourteen years old and a pupil at the private school her eldest son Ricky would later win a scholarship for. She had been so proud of him, especially after the way Jack's death had affected him – to the point of taking him to a psychiatrist – but the pride was shot through with the sharp stab of grief. For had Jack been alive no doubt Ricky’s presence would have guaranteed her youngest a place there too. It was a fine school. Not that she was stuck-up, for Lucy was the product of hard-working yet poor parents and the finest education an inner city state school had to offer, but like most parents she longed for better for her own offspring. Especially Jack. Not that she would ever admit it to anyone, and barely even to herself, but her youngest son was the one closest to her heart.
Lucy had been nineteen when she had Ricky, on her own and totally unprepared, and he had been such a fretful baby. Almost as if he had known his arrival was unplanned and unwelcomed by everyone apart from Lucy herself, who was far too frightened by impending motherhood to greet him with much joy.
But just a few years later, now married – and to a private surgeon, no less – Jack’s arrival had been everything Ricky’s was not. Everything had seemed perfect, from conception to birth to beyond. There had been none of the crippling depression that had sunk her after Ricky and even the labour had been a breeze, after a glowing pregnancy with no sickness and only the cutest of baby bumps.
Sometimes she would lean over Jack's cot and watch him sleeping, her heart close to bursting with love. Only along with that rush of love for her child would come a creeping fear that she tried resolutely to swallow down, but that would stick in her chest undigested: the fear that she would lose him; that such perfection was too good to be true. Although her mother had reassured her that it was normal, that she herself had been so scared her babies would cease breathing in their sleep she had stayed awake for hours, Lucy looking back knew better. She should have known; should have never let him out of her sight for even a second. Should should should. Surely the cruellest word in the English language.
The guilt had crippled her for the first few years, weighing her down like the pressing of stones, a crushing yet excruciatingly slow death. Everyone told her it wasn’t her fault. Everyone except her lo
ving husband of course, whose eyes were full of unspoken accusations. Everyone except her mother-in-law, who grieved copiously and loudly but never had a kind word for Lucy. But then she had never liked her, had always wondered – quite often aloud – what her clever and handsome son had seen in a teenage single mother. The atmosphere between Lucy and her husband Ethan had become so strained and weighted down with grief that she had almost been relieved when he had left her for a paediatric nurse at the hospital he worked at. A petite, pretty blonde who looked a lot like Lucy before she had become grey and faded with grief.
The guilt had been partially replaced by rage then; rage at the world, at Ethan and herself, and of course at Terry Prince. The adolescent boy, a shy, quiet loner they said, who had lured Jack away, beat him and then killed him with a brick to the head as if he were nothing more than a bug to be squashed underfoot.
A psychotic break, they had said. Perhaps brought on by an absent father, an overly strict stepfather and a history of mental illness on the mother’s side. Lucy hated that, the way people would try to find a rational reason, a logical chain of events that had led Terry Prince to murder her baby in cold blood. She dreamed over and over of throttling him to death with her bare hands. But like the guilt the rage too had subsided, although neither feeling ever completely stopped gnawing at her, and a numb kind of acceptance had taken their place. She went about her daily life as if through a fog, buoyed up by a sense of surreality, only Ricky giving her a reason to get out of bed. She was both over-protective of him and somehow distant. Afraid to be too tactile, too close, as if by loving him too much she would unwittingly put him in danger.
When I Wasn't Watching Page 3