When I Wasn't Watching

by Kelly, Michelle

  ‘I just wanted to give you my congratulations. Although I’m guessing the Telegraph won’t be very happy with you.’

  ‘Well, I’m on to better things,’ a note of excitement crept into her voice, ‘thanks to you. I suppose,’ she went on more grudgingly, ‘I should apologise for being a bitch. How are you?’

  ‘Better, now the boy has been found. Well, take care.’

  There was a slight pause, before she replied with what sounded like genuine affection.

  ‘You too. And good luck.’

  Matt felt lighter after the call, as if another weight had been lifted. He had never wanted to hurt Carla, and was relieved it could finally end on a friendly note. Maybe things would take a turn for the better now. He thought about Lucy and allowed himself a tentative smile.

  Of course, he still had a murderer to catch.

  Ricky pushed his cereal around his bowl, not meeting Lucy’s eyes, and she had to bite her lip to keep from screaming at him, or crying, she didn’t quite know which was more likely to come out. The relief at finding him in one piece remained, as did the hope that this would somehow bring them closer, but her unformed fears for Ricky had been replaced by the more concrete possibility that he could be in serious trouble. And although he had slept in her arms for the most part last night like a small child, he had reverted back to being a sulky teenager again this morning. One that she didn’t know what to say to.

  ‘Do you want some toast?’ She winced at the utter banality of her question. Ricky shook his head without looking up. Annoyed, Lucy snatched the bowl from his hand.

  ‘Well, you’re not eating that are you? You’re just playing with it.’ She emptied the cereal into the bin and turned back to Ricky to see him hunched over himself, shoulders to his ears in a defensive posture and knew he wasn’t so much sullen as scared. Sighing, she pulled a chair out and sat next to him. He looked at her sideways, then met her eyes. The look on his face was so raw her arms went round him at once.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he mumbled into her shoulder. In spite of his height he felt frail in her arms, still a child.

  ‘So am I.’

  He wriggled out of her arms, his face red with embarrassment and she smiled to herself. Things would get back to normal, albeit slowly.

  ‘Will I go to jail?’ he blurted. Lucy shook her head slowly.

  ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. But both Matt and the lawyer said it’s highly unlikely. What you are going to have to do is talk to someone, open up a little.’ When Ricky’s expression looked mutinous, she added, ‘It’s going to be crucial if you want to convince people you didn’t mean any harm.’

  He just nodded. She wanted to say more, but didn’t want to push him, not yet. This was going to be a long, slow road. The least she could do was be present for it, without pushing him. She owed him that much.

  ‘I’m going to go and tidy my room,’ Ricky muttered. Lucy watched him go up the stairs with a mixture of both pride and anxiety and was deep in thought when the doorbell rang, startling her so that she physically flinched.

  Using the spyhole – it had become second nature these days – she saw a small, thin woman with a determined set to her mouth. There was something familiar about her that Lucy couldn’t quite recall, a memory that nagged at her and made her uneasy. Torn between curiosity and trepidation she opened the door just a few inches, peering through the gap.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Lucy Randall?’ There was something about the way the woman had said her name that made Lucy flinch, so that she forgot to correct her with ‘Wyatt’ as she usually did but instead said:

  ‘What do you want?’

  She noticed the deep expression lines on the woman’s face, that looked to be as much due to weariness as age.

  ‘Can I come in? I’m Mrs Prince.’

  Lucy looked at her, nonplussed, then as she understood exactly who was standing on her doorstep she went to slam the door, only something in the woman’s eyes stopped her. That and the way she almost whispered, ‘Please.’

  Lucy held the door open stiffly, every muscle in her body rigid, even her expression frozen.

  ‘Five minutes,’ she told the woman, recoiling from her as she stepped through the door. She made no offer for the woman to sit at either the table or to go through to the open-plan lounge, and indeed she didn’t seem to expect it but stood just inside the doorway, looking at her, Lucy thought, as if she couldn’t quite remember herself what she was doing there.

  ‘I wanted to come for a long time, you know,’ she said in a flat voice. As if all emotion had been drained out of her a long time ago.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ Lucy had folded her arms and stepped away from the woman, but in truth she felt no threat from her. Rather she felt she didn’t trust herself.

  ‘I didn’t think I would be welcome.’

  Lucy barked a small laugh.

  ‘And you think you are now?’ The audacity of the woman to come here, to her home! Yet, she had let her in. Something inside her was eager to know what she had to say. What she possibly thought she could achieve.

  ‘Perhaps not. But I can’t meet my maker without at least trying to atone for my son’s wrongs.’

  Lucy pulled a face at the religious language, feeling immediately uncomfortable. If the woman wanted some kind of absolution, she had come to the wrong place.

  ‘You can’t,’ she said, knowing she was perhaps being cruel but not caring. When the woman didn’t answer she stood and stared at her, taking in her appearance, her demeanour, looking perhaps for something that marked her out as the mother of a murderer. Even though of course she knew there would be nothing. With a jolt she wondered if this was how the Armstrongs had looked at her in the station last night. Because although Ben had been returned to them safe and sound they would have been thinking the worst. No doubt wondered what kind of terrible home life Ricky must have to go running away with a small child in tow.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ the woman persisted, ‘I have to try.’

  Lucy shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know what you think I can do for you. If you’ve come here asking me to forgive your son then the answer is I can’t, and I never will. They should have locked him up and left him there.’

  Rage bubbled up in her as she spoke. This woman had her son back now. He had been freed. Hers would never return, and her family were still paying for Terry Prince’s actions even now.

  As if guessing her thoughts the woman spoke again.

  ‘I don’t expect you to forgive him. I cannot forgive him myself. I’ve tried to, I’ve even prayed for it, but I can’t. My son is dead to me now.’

  Lucy blinked in surprise.

  ‘Then why,’ she said, exasperated, ‘are you here?’

  The woman looked down, a sense of shame coming from her than made Lucy instinctively step away, not wanting to engage with this woman or her problems.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I was wrong to come. I’m sorry.’ The woman turned towards the door with such a look of dejection Lucy felt sorry for her even through her anger.

  ‘Wait,’ she said, cursing herself for being so soft even as she spoke. ‘Why don’t you sit down? I can give you ten minutes, but that’s all.’ She glanced up the stairs as she spoke, grateful for once that Ricky had his music turned up so that he wouldn’t have heard the doorbell ring. She waved Mrs Prince to the table. Ten minutes. It wasn’t as if she owed the woman or had any obligation to listen to whatever it was she wanted to say.

  Mrs Prince sat, her handbag clutched in her lap, while Lucy leaned back against the counter, determined to keep some distance between them.

  ‘I’ve asked myself over and over,’ the woman began, her voice at first so quiet that Lucy had to strain to hear her, ‘if there was something I missed while Terry was growing up. Some sign, you know, that he was dangerous or unstable. But there wasn’t. Or at least, nothing concrete.’ She stopped, taking a deep breath.

  Lucy just stared at her. This wasn’t
how she had imagined it would go, if the two of them were ever to meet, and she had imagined it, especially in the beginning. Had imagined that underneath an apparently normal exterior there would be someone unbalanced, or at the very least coldly sociopathic. Someone who had shaped Terry Prince into the monster he had become. Lucy had read the reports at the time, of course, that stated Terry had always been a quiet child but was otherwise ‘normal’ – whatever that meant. No history of psychopathic behaviour, at any rate. A history of severe depression on the mother’s side – and she could believe that easily enough, looking at this hunched-over husk of a woman – but nothing that indicated the boy had any tendencies towards torture and murder. Lucy had thought, then, that the reports were bullshit. Who knew what went on behind closed doors? Not that it would have made her hate him any less, but at least if Prince had been certified insane or this woman who now sat in her kitchen had been shown to be a child abuser, she could have made some kind of sense of it all.

  ‘You never suspected a thing?’ Lucy meant her words to come out disbelieving, but was surprised to find she sounded genuinely interested. Perhaps she was, with a kind of macabre curiosity. Or like picking at a scab, even though you knew that meant the wound would fail to heal properly.

  ‘No. You don’t believe me.’ It wasn’t a question, just a quiet statement, but Lucy considered it. Then Mrs Prince jolted her again by saying, ‘What if it was your son?’

  For a moment Lucy thought the woman was mocking her; that she somehow knew that Ricky had been the one to take Benjamin Armstrong, but the woman looked pleading rather than accusing.

  What if it was, indeed, her son? If Ben had not been found in one piece, because something, some unknown evil, had prompted Ricky to do the unthinkable? Although every fibre of her being rebelled against the thought, a little voice cut through her immediate rejection of the notion. It could have been her. She could be sitting where Margaret Prince sat now, saying the same words to the Armstrongs. Because even though she would swear on anything they put in front of her that her son wasn’t capable of such an atrocity, wouldn’t Terry’s mother have said exactly the same once, before she had been proved so brutally wrong? Perhaps you could never really know your children. You thought you did, because you had given birth to them, cared for and raised them, and because you saw your own face reflected in theirs, but when it came down to it, they were strangers.

  ‘You didn’t come to court,’ Lucy remembered out loud. At the time she had assumed Terry’s mother was simply too afraid to show her face.

  ‘No,’ Mrs Prince said quietly. ‘Maybe people thought that was wrong of me – after all, I was still his mother. But I couldn’t support him after what he had done.’

  She spoke about her son in the past tense, Lucy noticed, and thought that the woman’s words at the door had not been merely for effect. She really did speak and act as though her son too had died. A feeling of sympathy crept its way into her chest. Mrs Prince, too, had lost a child. Lucy had the sudden urge to run upstairs and gather Ricky to her once again, and this time never let go of him.

  ‘I never visited him, either.’

  Lucy raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Never?’

  The woman shook her head.

  ‘No. I cut him off completely. It was selfish, really. I felt betrayed, because I had tried to do my best for him and he went and…did that. And I suppose I worried what people would think of me. So I suppose I am a bad mother after all.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Lucy found she felt desperately sorry for Mrs Prince. She seemed so lonely. For all that she was clearly a religious woman, her god didn’t seem to be offering her a great deal of comfort.

  ‘I suppose there’s nothing you can say. I just wanted you to know, that’s all. I understand that you must hate us both.’

  ‘I don’t hate you,’ Lucy said, her voice soft, ‘I feel sorry for you.’

  The woman winced. Perhaps she would prefer her hatred to her pity; according to Danielle, people often did. She referred to it as ‘killing with kindness’, a saying Lucy had always rolled her eyes at but was now beginning to understand. Still, she had no desire to hurt the woman in front of her. Her whole demeanour was of a woman who had been hurt by life, far more than she could bear. She wondered if this was how she looked to people, especially in the first years after Jack’s death. The idea that she and this woman had more in common with each other than not sent a chill up her spine. Again, she thought of Ricky. She had always believed a mother should stand by her children no matter what, but perhaps life wasn’t as clear-cut as all that.

  ‘My worst fear,’ Mrs Prince spoke into the silence, ‘is that he will do it again. That’s the first thing I thought when they said they were letting him out.’

  Lucy felt a stab of grief then, and her next words came out harsher than she intended.

  ‘Wasn’t once enough? My son is dead, Mrs Prince, whereas you just wish yours was.’

  The woman blinked, her eyes wide. Lucy sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry. Look, I think you should go. I appreciate you coming to see me, but I don’t think there’s anything either of us can say to each other that will make any difference to how we feel.’

  Mrs Prince nodded, standing up with her hands still clutching her handbag tightly in front of her like some kind of buffer.

  ‘We each have our own burdens then.’

  Lucy held the door open for her, feeling a little light-headed. This whole situation was so surreal, she didn’t know where to begin sorting out how she felt about it all. Still, as she watched Mrs Prince walk down the path with that stoop to her shoulders, Lucy couldn’t help calling her back. The woman looked over her shoulder, surprised.

  ‘Thank you for coming. It means a lot.’ Lucy realised she meant it, that her words were not just an empty platitude, and was gratified to see Mrs Prince looked to be holding herself a little straighter as she walked away. Or perhaps she was just imagining it. Nevertheless the woman’s visit had given her a modicum of closure, whereas she doubted Mrs Prince would ever get even that much unless Terry was to die, and perhaps not even then. Shuddering at her morbid thoughts she went upstairs to Ricky, assembling a fake smile on her face that he saw through straight away.

  ‘What’s up, Mum?’ He looked panicked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Lucy said, because she didn’t know how he would react to Mrs Prince having been in their house and she was reluctant to get into a conversation about it when she didn’t know how she herself felt. ‘I was just seeing how you are.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ he said, and then, ‘I was thinking about that man, how he got burned. It’s sick, isn’t it?’

  Lucy nodded, deciding it would be best not to admit that in her darkest moment she had suspected Ricky himself.

  Matt found he was whistling as he carried a coffee back to his desk. Not that he was happy exactly, not with Ricky’s future still uncertain, which was hardly conducive to him and Lucy being able to move on from it all, and with a murder investigation now firmly laid at his feet; but still there had been a weight lifted from his shoulders. As grisly as Murray’s death had been, a known criminal getting killed didn’t incite the same kind of horror as the possibility of a murdered child, and with Benjamin found the atmosphere around the whole station was decidedly lighter.

  He was reading through the statements East Midlands had taken from Murray’s old associates when Scott’s head appeared round the door.

  ‘We’ve got the Murray case then?’

  Matt waved him into the office, pushing the reports over to him.

  ‘Looks like it. The DI that would have headed the case went to question the obvious suspect – the dealer now banged up at the courtesy of Her Majesty – and reckons the bloke was telling the truth.’

  ‘Well, he’s hardly going to admit it, is he?’ Scott looked doubtful.

  ‘Well, no,’ Matt conceded, ‘but the DI was convinced he knew nothing about it. Mainly because the guy in question seemed
pretty pissed off that someone else had got there first.’

  ‘So we’re looking at it coming down to the address leak.’ Scott didn’t sound as if he had expected anything else, and indeed Matt had had a gut feeling the moment the report of the attack had come in that this one would be his. It would have been so much simpler if it had just been a disgruntled drug dealer. At least it would have been an end to all the drama kicked up by Prince’s release. He leaned back, stretching his arms over his head. So much pent up tension had left him longing to go for a run. There was a certain freedom to pounding the asphalt that helped clear his head, and it had been far too long.

  Then something Scott said jerked him out of his reverie.

  ‘We’re looking for a dark car, according to this neighbour’s report. Saw it driving away at about the right time. Amazing isn’t it, how someone can get torched on his own doorstep and the neighbours are oblivious?’

  ‘A dark car,’ Matt repeated. He had read the reports, and yet hearing Scott say it aloud triggered something that had been nagging away at him. Was it too much to expect that a second hunch in as many days could also be right?

  ‘Yeah. Doesn’t narrow it down much does it? Could be anyone; the Randall case has stirred up a lot of bad feeling. When we get a lead on who was behind the social media page, that might give us a clue.’

  ‘Unlikely to be the same person,’ Matt murmured. The more he thought about his hunch, the more it made sense. He stood up abruptly.

  ‘Can you hold the fort for half an hour? I need to check something.’

  Matt shrugged on his jacket and left Scott staring after him nonplussed. He needed to go and talk to Lucy.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Ricky’s voice floated down the stairs ahead of him as Lucy shrugged on her jacket.

  ‘Just down to the grocer’s. We need potatoes.’

  Ricky gave her the first real smile she had seen from him for days.

  ‘Home-made chips?’

  ‘Home-made chips,’ she confirmed, then suppressed a howl of exasperation as the doorbell went yet again. Why couldn’t people just leave her alone?