by Jane Renshaw
‘I don’t want them to phone us.’
‘No, darling, they won’t. You don’t need to worry about that.’
‘I don’t want to see them.’
They had told her that the Johnsons were bad people and that was why Beckie wasn’t ever going to see them again. They didn’t know where Beckie was and never would. She could just forget that they existed.
Did she remember them?
Did Beckie remember what they had done to her?
Memories weren’t laid down at that age, of course. But subconsciously – yes. Beckie knew what had happened to her. Ruth had no doubt about that.
‘They might hurt us.’
‘Oh darling, no!’ She scrabbled with the belt, lifted Beckie out and pulled her into a hug. Oh my darling girl, don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened. ‘Daddy and I will never let them hurt you. Never.’
‘They might – h-hurt – you.’
Ruth hugged her close. ‘No. They’re not going to hurt any of us.’
How typical of their sweet, loving girl that her main concern should be for them and not herself. How could that family possibly have produced a child like Beckie? It was as if they had nothing to do with Beckie at all, as if by some accident she’d found herself living amongst them, a changeling in a fairy tale, until Saskia Mair had come along and rescued her.
She made her voice light and bright. ‘Let’s go for a walk, shall we?’
‘Can I take Fat Bear and Hildebrand?’
‘Of course you can.’
‘Can we play Wanderers?’
‘Yes, let’s!’
‘Fiona’s being chased by a Viking.’
As Beckie ran ahead on the path and Ruth juggled Fat Bear, Hildebrand and her phone, she reflected that she should have known Saskia wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. She should have known it would have been Deirdre’s cock-up.
At long last she got through to Alec.
‘Did you get my message?’
‘Um? No. What’s up?’
‘Nothing to panic about, but Deirdre’s cocked up and given the Johnsons our phone numbers and an email address – the Gmail one. So we’re going to have to change them. You haven’t had any dodgy calls or emails, have you, trying to get your name and address out of you?’
Long, terrible silence.
She stopped walking. She dropped the animals. ‘Alec?’
Alec reached for her – then hesitated, his fingertips just touching the denim of her jeans. She smiled at him and took his hand. What was the point in wasting anger and energy on recriminations? The important thing was what happened next.
They were sitting at Saskia Mair’s kitchen table. Beckie was in the sitting room, watching TV with Saskia’s partner and kids, two sweet little boys with big brown eyes. Beckie had shown polite enthusiasm when offered a pot of yoghurt and the opportunity to catch up on the latest doings of Shaun the Sheep, but she hadn’t seemed too sure about Saskia’s partner, a tall, lean Scandinavian type who had obviously been about to head out on a bike ride and was rather sinister in neck-to-knee black Lycra and those weird little cyclist’s shoes.
But he was obviously as lovely as Saskia. When he’d whisked the kids away to the other room, Ruth had protested weakly, ‘Oh, but you’re obviously just heading out…’ and he had assured her, ‘No no, just back actually,’ hustling the two boys away as one of them had started: ‘But Dad, you’re not –’
Thank goodness for people like him and Saskia.
Deirdre had been useless.
Kevin Patterson, the director of the Linkwood Adoption Agency, had been useless.
The police had been useless.
The only person in the world Ruth trusted right now was Saskia Mair.
‘I’m sorry,’ Alec whispered.
She shook her head. ‘It’s okay.’
Although, of course, it wasn’t. It wasn’t okay that he’d blurted out his name and address to Lorraine Johnson when she’d called him pretending to be someone from Argyll and Bute Council chasing unpaid council tax. It wasn’t okay that he’d practically foisted the information on her.
He’d related the conversation to her word for word, as she stood with her eyes open on the picture-perfect view across Loch Lomond, seeing none of it.
It had been a woman’s voice.
‘Mr McAllister? This is Ann Thomson from Argyll and Bute Council. I’m calling about your council tax account. We’ve sent out three reminders, but your account is still in arrears to the sum of –’
‘No no,’ Alec had protested. ‘I’m not McAllister.’
‘This is the mobile number in the database for Mr David McAllister.’
‘My name’s Alec Morrison.’
‘This is the contact number associated with the account. If you’re having difficulty paying, we can arrange for you to pay in –’
‘But it’s not my account! I don’t owe any council tax, we pay by direct debit. My name is Alec Morrison. My address is Backhill Croft, Arden…’
Candy from a baby.
‘Okay,’ said Saskia. ‘I know they’ve given you a load of crap about balancing your need to know with the rights of the biological family. But I’m guessing you’ve Googled them. You’ll have found out a bunch of stuff about Jed and Ryan and Travis?’
Ruth nodded. ‘We Googled Shannon-Rose as soon as Deirdre told us her name, while we were still going through the process of adopting Beckie. And we found out all about the Johnsons and their convictions.’
Saskia made a face. She had a plain face anyway, with rather prominent eyes, and that big nose stud like a huge blackhead. Her hair was streaked with pink. ‘The official stuff, the stuff in the press – that’s not the half of it.’ She took a gulp of hot coffee. ‘I’m sorry. I should have laid it all out for you from the get-go, but to be honest… When I met you, I just wanted so much for you to take Beckie, I knew you’d be perfect for her and – I was worried that if I told you everything I knew about the Johnsons you might back out.’
‘That wouldn’t have happened,’ said Alec.
‘I realise that. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
Ruth shook her head. ‘None of this is your fault, Saskia. You mustn’t think that. We really appreciate what you’ve done for Beckie. And all the other kids like her. You’re their lifeline – literally – and I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like, what a toll it must take, fighting their corner the way you do, all those poor little…’ She took a long breath. ‘You’re amazing. You’re completely amazing – and we can never thank you enough. But you need to tell us now. You need to tell us all about the Johnsons. We have to know what we’re dealing with.’
‘Thank you for saying that.’ Saskia reached out to touch Ruth’s arm. ‘I’ll help you in any way I can.’
‘I know you will.’
Ruth jumped as the door clicked open behind her. Turning in her chair, she saw one of Saskia’s boys standing holding on to the door handle.
‘Hello, sweetie,’ said Saskia, and the boy came round the table and into her arms. ‘What’s wrong, little one?’
Ruth smiled. This was the older of the two boys. How nice, she thought suddenly, to be called ‘little one’ by your mother when you were the big one to everyone else; the older sibling who was expected to be more stoical, more sensible, more grown up.
‘Nothing,’ he muttered into Saskia’s fluffy mohair jumper. ‘I just wanted to see you.’
Saskia pushed away the blue file that had been sitting on the old pine table next to her coffee cup, as if to put distance between its contents and her own child. As she took him out of the room with her, Ruth reached over and opened the file.
On top was a photograph. A mug shot of an elderly man with protruding ears, a gaunt, grey face, tattoos on his neck, and cold eyes; literally cold, an almost colourless icy blue.
‘That’s Jed Johnson,’ said Saskia from over her shoulder. ‘Fifty-nine but looks at least a decade older. He did sixteen years for murder a wh
ile back, a gangland killing, and he’s served shorter sentences for GBH, false imprisonment, armed robbery and drug-related crimes. That’s only what they’ve managed to do him for, of course.’ She came back round the table and sat down, pulling her coffee cup towards her and cradling it. ‘He was charged with a second murder but got off on a technicality after the procurator fiscal missed a statutory deadline. No mystery where Shannon-Rose gets her tendency for violence. This didn’t come out at the Court of Session hearing for the permanence order – I guess they felt there was enough ammunition against the Johnsons without applying for the release of confidential medical records – but in the course of his many incarcerations, Jed was assessed by two different prison service psychiatrists on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. On a scale of zero to forty, one of them scored him as thirty-seven and the other thirty-nine. That means he’s right at the top of the spectrum for psychopathy.’
She took a slug of coffee. ‘Jed gets off on other people’s suffering. I could tell you a dozen horror stories, but the best documented is an incident that happened in prison. It seems Jed’s sidekick, who was also his cellmate, made the mistake of standing up to Jed when he started victimising a young prisoner. When the warder opened the cell door in the morning he found Jed sleeping like a baby, the floor awash with blood, and the cellmate close to death. There were two hundred and thirty-six separate cuts found on the man’s body. Fifty-two of which were on his penis, which was almost severed. The weapon had been the edge of a laminated sheet of tumble drier instructions taken from the prison laundry, where Jed worked at the time. The man claimed to have inflicted the injuries himself, so no action could be taken against Jed… I’m sorry, but I think you have to know this.’
Ruth, a hand to her mouth, nodded.
Saskia passed across another photograph. ‘And this is the eldest son, Ryan Johnson.’
This was another hard face, but much younger and startlingly handsome, with long dark lashes and dark eyes, dark hair slicked back 1950s-style. It could have been an actor’s press shot.
‘Ryan was still relatively small fry five years ago, but these days he’s a bit of a kingpin on the Glasgow scene – drug-dealing and prostitution, mainly. He’s extremely violent. He’s served sentences for drug-dealing and GBH. He’s been implicated in at least three murders, but there wasn’t sufficient evidence for a prosecution; what witnesses there were wouldn’t talk or, in one case, couldn’t. Not after falling to their death from a tower block.’
Ruth couldn’t speak.
Another photograph came across the table at them. ‘This is a press photograph of Ryan, Lorraine and in the background that’s Travis, the second son – this was them going into court at the start of one of Jed’s trials.’
She stared at the photograph. Lorraine Johnson was a burly woman in a black suit with badly dyed blonde hair falling over a doughy face half turned from the camera. Travis was body-builder hefty, with a ned’s fringe plastered to his forehead. ‘I think Beckie needs to see these too. In case –’
Alec squeezed her hand.
She pulled the photo closer. So this was Beckie’s grandmother. ‘What’s Lorraine Johnson like?’
Saskia grimaced. ‘Foul-mouthed, aggressive, volatile, self-righteous and self-deluding. But there’s another side to her – she’s a victim too in a way, had a horrendous childhood – abused physically and sexually – and I think she’s probably in an abusive relationship with Jed. She holds that family together, such as it is. I think she really did love Beckie. But…’ She sighed. ‘I always come back to those fresh injuries… I’m not saying it was Lorraine, I very much doubt it would have been, but Lorraine must have been aware of them. She must have known someone in the family was still hurting her. Probably Jed.’
Ruth pushed the photograph away.
‘And when Beckie was removed, she was neglected. Her nappy hadn’t been changed all day, I suspect, and she needed a wash – who knows what was going on in that household? It’s possibly the case that Lorraine was incapacitated at the time and had been relying on other members of the family to take care of Beckie, but even so…’
Rage rushed through Ruth, adrenaline surging, so she had to close her eyes and breathe and try not to imagine Beckie, as they’d first seen her as a toddler, in that little smock dress and white tights, with Lorraine or Jed or Ryan Johnson… On the day Saskia had visited the house, dirty and scared and with the signs of their abuse on her little body –
When Beckie had first come to them, that first night, she had been so quiet, so stiff in Ruth’s arms as she had carried her up to bed. She had obediently grasped the white rabbit Alec had offered her, but mechanically, without even looking at it. She had let Ruth stroke her hair back from her forehead as if it were an ordeal to be endured.
It had been months before that had changed. She would always remember the first time Beckie had initiated contact. It had been a cold January afternoon and she and Beckie had been cosy in the sitting room with the wood-burning stove roaring, and Ruth had suggested a story. Beckie had nodded. So the two of them had gone to the bookcase to select a book from Beckie’s section, Beckie sitting on the carpet, Ruth kneeling next to her, reading out the titles of the choices from the spines. ‘Well, let’s see… There’s Meg on the Moon; I Want My Hat Back; The Tiger Who Came to Tea…’ And as the familiar litany had continued, very, very gradually, her eyes still on the books, Beckie had leant in to Ruth’s side.
Ruth said, ‘We need to make sure that none of them ever come anywhere near her again.’
Alec nodded. ‘But how are we going to do that?’ He turned to Saskia. ‘I mean – what do you think they’ll do? Are they going to try to take her, or…’
Saskia grimaced. ‘Honestly? I think they will.’
Alec suddenly stood, dropping Ruth’s hand, and walked to the sink. He ran the tap and splashed water on his face. ‘Sorry.’
Saskia got up and handed him a towel. ‘This is where the justice system falls down. These people are violent convicted criminals, Beckie suffered in this family, and they are – I’m not going to beat around the bush here – they are a danger to her and to you, yet there’s nothing the police or the courts can do about it.’
‘So what can we do about it?’ Alec was gripping the towel in both hands. ‘What do we do about it?’
Before Saskia could answer, Ruth said, ‘We go. We just go. We disappear.’
She’d done it before.
She could do it again.
8
There’s plenty room on the grass by the roadside, eh, but when I says, ‘Just stop here, son,’ Ryan keeps on going and pulls the Audi into the proper parking bit by the old wrecked farm buildings. It’s a fucking off-road vehicle that’s never been off fucking tarmac.
The place is a right mess, weeds and that all over. This is where Bekki’s been for five years? Ms Adoption Woman comes out and sees the place needs knocking down and goes Aye that’s fine then?
‘Right,’ says Jed, and he and the boys get out. Ryan leaves the engine running and the headlights on.
I get out the car.
Christ. If it wasnae for the headlights it’d be pitch black.
Safe for a wean? Out in Teuchterland in the middle of fucking nowhere?
When I get to the cottage, the door’s lying open and the lights are all on, and Jed’s raging.
‘You stupid fucking cow!’ he’s in my face. ‘I telt ye we needed to get her! I telt ye!’
Fuck it.
We’re in the front room. I can hear the boys through the house, ripping the place up, smashing stuff. It’s just an empty room we’re in.
The fuckers have gone.
Jed goes and kicks the wall.
I goes, ‘Fuck it.’
‘Aye, fuck you!’ Jed’s back in my face. ‘“Naw Jed, this needs planning but, we cannae just roll up and get her but.” Planning, is it? Planning?’
Aye, planning.
A wee flat rented away the other side of the city. C
ouldnae just take her to our bit. Jed was ‘Fuck that, let the polis come and try and take Bekki off of us again, just let those fuckers come and try it,’ but Ryan and Travis and Carly and Connor were like that: ‘Naw Da.’
Plan was, me and Carly’d disappear and stay in the wee flat with Bekki till the villa on the Costa Brava’s finished. It’s gonnae have white walls and big glass windaes and doors, and a brand new kitchen and bathrooms and en suites – Bekki’ll get the best room, mind, with a sea view and her own wee en suite – and brand new furniture, black and white and grey, all matching, and outside a massive infinity pool. Bekki and the other weans never out the sea. Life of fucking Reilly.
We’ll tell Bekki the Morrisons stole her off of us, and we didnae know where she was, but now she’s safe home and no fucker’s taking her off us ever again. If she starts with I want Mummy and Daddy, we’ll be like that: They don’t want you hen, they gave you back. They’re no your real mum and dad. We’re your real family.
‘Stupid fucking bitch!’ He pulls his head back and spits right on my lips.
I spit it right back at him and he takes a hud of my shoulders and slams me back against the wall. I knee him in the baws.
He doubles over. ‘Ah fuck. Ah fuck.’
‘Maw,’ says Travis. ‘They’re no here.’
Travis, God love him, was at the back of the queue when they were handing out the brains in the Johnson family.
It’s another fucking wee Teuchterland hovel, roses round the door maybe, but Christ, the windaes and the door are from nineteen-canteen. Like they think they’re in a fucking stately home preserved for the fucking nation, draughty shite windaes an’ all.
Needs gutting.
I ring the door again. It’s 6:30 in the morning. They cannae be out.
Door opens and a woman’s standing there. She’s up herself, long shiny hair and long legs in designer jeans.
‘I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning,’ I goes with a polite wee smile. ‘I’m hoping you can help me. I see Backhill Croft is empty now, and I’m just wondering if maybe it’s for sale?’