‘Would you like to sit down?’ Trish asked, and saw Kim’s eyelids lift briefly. The eyes themselves were a wonderful blue, but they held no signs of either warmth or pleasure.
Trish knew from the file that the first symptom that had worried Kim’s teachers had been her sleepiness. At one time they had thought she must suffer from narcolepsy because she kept drifting off in lessons and during school dinners and even at play time. Now there was no sign of it, and she did not look especially tired, either, only tightly watchful, as though waiting for the test she was sure would come.
It was an expression Trish had seen too often in David’s face to misunderstand. When he’d first come to live with her, it had been almost constant. Now, to her intense relief, it was rarer. But it had taken her months to shift it at all. Could she, in the tiny amount of time available, give Kim some of the same reassurance?
‘Do you like playing with dolls?’ she asked. Kim’s blonde head shook. ‘What about painting?’
She sighed a little and then nodded, as though it seemed more sensible to humour this strange woman by agreeing to something than to go on resisting. Trish fetched paper, paints, brushes and a jam jar of water, moving as quietly as she could to avoid imposing her size and strength on the child. She brought the painting materials to the table. Kim didn’t touch them.
‘Have a go,’ Trish said.
Kim bit her lips. Her eyes crumpled. Trish waited for the burst of tears she was sure must come, but Kim fought it, swallowed, then said in a thread of a voice. ‘What do you want me to paint?’
‘Anything.’ Trish kept her voice as warm as she could. ‘Whatever you like.’
Carefully, Kim selected a small brush, dipped it in water, wiped the excess off on the edge of the jar and dabbled it gently in a jar of pink paint, again cleaning off any bits that might drip. Then she painted a diagonal from the top left of the page down to the bottom right, without once lifting her brush from the paper. The line might almost have been drawn with a ruler. Trish waited, without a word.
Kim sighed again, washed her brush in the water, reloaded it with lime green and drew another line, only about two centimetres from the first. A third line, in pale yellow, completed her painting. She washed the brush, looked in vain for a paint rag and then shook as much water as possible off the bristles before laying the brush down on the table beside the water jar.
‘I have finished,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
Trish wished she had some expertise in interpreting children’s art. To her this said nothing except that Kim was unbelievably neat, over-controlled and doing her best to provide whatever the adult in charge of her wanted.
‘You work very tidily,’ Trish commented. ‘I always make sploshes and drop bits. I couldn’t do anything like that without a ruler.’
The child’s eyelids lifted again. Now Trish thought she could see the faintest sign of pleasure. Or maybe it was just relief that Kim had passed a test.
‘Do you always paint in lines?’
Kim nodded.
‘Always the same colours?’
‘They’re my favourites,’ she whispered. Trish wanted to celebrate. This was the first unsolicited comment.
‘What other things do you like?’ she asked, hoping she wasn’t pushing too far. ‘Toys and TV programmes and food and things like that?’
The interview progressed for the next thirty minutes, during which Trish failed to elicit any facts at all. At the end of the session, Kim’s foster mother came back to the table from her seat in the corner. Kim didn’t look at her or move.
‘Thank you for talking to me,’ Trish said. ‘I hope I get a chance to see you again.’
The child continued to sit. Her foster mother held out a hand. ‘Come on, Kim. It’s time to go home.’
Kim continued to look at Trish, who eventually nodded. At once Kim slid off the chair and pushed it neatly, and without any sound at all, under the table.
Trish watched them go and waited for Andrew Stane. She knew he’d been observing the whole session with the psychiatrist who had been working on the case, and who had given up her Sunday afternoon for this unusual meeting. When Andrew came in, his round face was tight and his voice was much higher than usual.
‘What were you doing? We haven’t time for a lengthy therapeutic acquaintance, Trish. If we don’t get her to talk about her stepfather before next weekend, she’s going back.’
‘I know,’ Trish said, pressing her fingers against the ache between her eyebrows. ‘But it was clear from the file that questions about him weren’t going to get us anywhere. Did you notice how quiet she was?’
‘Most frightened children are quiet.’
‘It was more than that. When you run the video, watch the way she washes her brush. Most children slosh the bristles in the water and the shaft of the brush rattles against the glass. Kim made absolutely no sound at all. And it was the same when she tidied the chair.’
‘And what does that tell you?’
‘I’m not going to speculate. But there’s more to this than simply being told not to talk about what’s been done to her. I need to see her again. And quite often if I’m to get anywhere.’
‘Like I said, we haven’t time for a lengthy therapeutic association.’
‘I know.’ Trish fought for patience. Andrew was the gatekeeper. She needed to make him understand. ‘And I’m not a therapist anyway. But she’s so frightened of getting it wrong that I can’t do anything that might suggest the answers I want. She’d agree to anything I said, and it’s not going to help you or her to build a case on that kind of falsity.’
‘You’re right there.’
‘So, I’ll need to see her often if I’m to tease out what has been happening. The bugger of it is that I never know when I’m going to be free of court. Look, would it possible to have her here at half past four every day so that I could have half an hour with her before I go back to chambers?’
The judge nearly always rose by four, and Trish thought she could fend off Antony for an hour after that. He was in such a good mood these days that she might not have to tell him about Kim to explain why she needed the time.
‘I’ll do my best,’ Andrew said.
All the way to the hospital, Trish thought about the child and her quietness, playing scene after scene of what might have happened through her imagination. She wished she could have talked the case through with Caro, but that was too much to hope for. Trish thought she’d settle for finding Caro even a little better than she’d been on Friday.
Will woke at five on Monday morning, and lay in bed hating his life. In adolescence he would have been able to sleep for England if his father hadn’t always been there, hoiking him out from under the duvet at dawn. Now he could barely manage four hours, and he couldn’t bear to get up until he’d heard his brother-in-law leave for the City. Rupert’s contempt was less vocal than the old man’s, but somehow worse.
At last a heavy door banged downstairs. That must be him going out. Will hauled his aching body up off the unnaturally squishy mattress to shave and dress. But he’d misjudged it. The bang must have been the newspapers arriving. He heard Rupert’s voice from halfway down the stairs.
‘The suspense is killing me. Do we have any idea when his bloody case is going to end?’
‘No,’ Susannah said wearily. ‘All Will’s said is “not more than a week or two now”. But I don’t think he really knows. Poor man.’
‘I suppose it must be worse for him.’
‘Of course it is.’ Susannah’s voice was acid. ‘I haven’t seen him this bad since Dad died. It’s far worse than when Fiona left him.’
Rupert laughed his rich banker’s laugh. ‘I’m not surprised. He was probably glad to be rid of her. She’d have driven me barking in five minutes. How could anybody that pretty be so stupid?’
‘I think she was just unhappy and bored. And she hated country life.’
‘She should’ve thought of that before she married him. Why was he s
o cut up about your father’s death? I thought they hated each other.’
Will’s jaw clicked, sending pain shooting up into both his ears. It was none of his brother-in-law’s business what he’d thought about his father. And the last thing he wanted now was anyone so sodding clever asking questions about the time the old man died. He pressed fingers to the hinges of his jaw to soothe the ache.
‘I know.’ Amazingly Susannah sounded as though she was on the brink of tears. ‘It used to worry me. But I’ve come to think it must have been because they never had a chance to make peace. They fought all the time and with Dad just dropping dead on the spot like that, Will must have been beating himself up for everything he’d ever said.’
Stop there, he thought, willing her to come to her senses. She didn’t know anything, but that didn’t mean it was safe to chatter on like this. The sooner everyone forgot the day his father died, the better.
‘I’ve been trying to get him to go and see Annabel, you know the one I was at school with who trained as a counsellor, because—’
‘No therapy’s going to help a man in Will’s position. Winning damages might, and getting back to work, but nothing else.’ Rupert’s voice had softened a little, but it crisped up again as he added, ‘Except getting out of our house. From the look in his eye whenever he can’t avoid catching mine, he’ll be as glad to go as I’ll be to see the back of him. I hope to God it’s soon.’
‘Rupert, that’s unkind.’
Uncoiling his fingers, forcing himself to keep calm and not burst into the kitchen to tell his brother-in-law what he thought of him, Will turned to creep back upstairs. He might be a charity case, but he had his dignity. There was no way he could bear to be caught eavesdropping on this particular conversation.
An hour later it seemed safe to go down again. His niece and nephew had finished reducing the kitchen to the usual battleground and were chasing each other around their rooms in search of their swimming things. As he opened the kitchen door, Susannah looked up from her shopping list to ask whether he’d be in this evening.
‘I think so,’ he said, safe in the knowledge that if she’d wanted him to babysit again she’d have given him a bit more warning. ‘Why don’t I take those sausages out of the freezer and cook them? Give you a chance to put your feet up for a change.’
She made the face that had been familiar all his life, a screwed-up expression of pitying disgust.
‘I don’t like sausages, and I’ve promised Rupe shepherd’s pie in any case. It’s his favourite.’
‘Well, don’t go and buy supermarket mince, whatever you do.’
She sighed. ‘Will, I wish you’d drop it. I’ve been feeding the family mince since I got married and it hasn’t done any of us any harm.’
‘You have no idea what kind of rubbish may have been mixed in with the meat. Susannah, you must ’
‘Leave it, Will.’
He felt like a puppy that had to be trained not to chew her best shoes.
‘Are you going to court again today?’ she asked a moment later, smiling brightly, as though the little episode had never happened.
Susannah found Will’s drooping around the house more than she could bear. If it went on much longer, she’d have to rent a cottage somewhere and take the children away for the rest of the school holidays.
Her pity for her brother was infinite; and her gratitude for the way he’d divided the proceeds of the land sale, immense. Their father had left everything to their mother, except for the farm itself and the stock, which had gone to Will. Hating farming as he always had, he’d sold the land straight away and split the money equally between the three of them. Their mother’s share was funding most of her nursing home fees, and Susannah had bought this house outright just before the property-price explosion of the late nineties, so she was well in profit. Unlike poor Will, who’d blown all his on the failed pate business.
But that didn’t make his presence in the house any easier. She didn’t know why Rupert was making such a fuss: he was out all day.
In the first months after the collapse of Will’s business and the forced sale of his house, he’d been buoyed up by his need to bring a legal case against Furbishers. The phone bill had quadrupled as he’d searched for fellow sufferers, but the bill would have been cheap at twice the price for the way the campaign had kept him busy. Then had come his battle to find a solicitor to represent them all, and then, best of all, the preparation of the case itself. The conferences with important lawyers in the Temple had positively excited him. Now that he had nothing to do except go over and over everything he’d said in the witness box and castigate himself for not saying it better, his distress filled the whole house.
‘I’ll probably look in later,’ he said. ‘But there’s a mate I’ve got to phone first.’
She ruffled his hair, fighting for the affection she wanted to feel, and said, ‘Well, for heaven’s sake use the house phone this time and don’t go wasting your own money on the mobile. A few calls here or there won’t make any difference to our bill.’
Will kept the smile on his face and felt his fillings grate against each other. When she’d gone, he smoothed his hair down again, then cleared the table and stacked the crockery carefully in the dishwasher. Susannah had her own weird rules for what should go where. It had taken him an age to learn them, but she kicked up such a fuss if they were broken that it seemed worth the effort of getting it right.
Something sticky on his fingers made him look down and he saw a piece of wet, chewed toast rejected by one of the children, which must have stuck to the edge of his plate. He ran the hot tap over his hands. He wouldn’t have minded raw meat or mud, but this saliva-soaked reject from a pampered infant’s mouth felt disgusting. Even cow dung would have been preferable, and that was saying something. This small domestic life was burying him alive.
Drying his hands, he looked at the phone. He’d have given anything to use his own mobile, but it was a pay-as-you go one and he’d run out of credit. With the old-fashioned receiver clamped against his ear, he rang the number of the lab to which he’d sent the Ivyleaf sausages for testing.
‘Will, I was going to phone this morning,’ said Mark Jones, the director. Will’s heart sank. ‘There’s nothing much to tell you, I’m afraid. Certainly no trace of E. coli in any of the samples we’ve tested.’
‘What? There must be.’
‘Nope. But that doesn’t mean much. The batch your friend ate could have been contaminated locally. It’s not hard to do, after all. Happens all the time. There’s been no news of a major outbreak – I checked — so that seems the likeliest answer.’
Will could feel his shoulders slump. ‘I was so sure …’ His voice died. What was the point? He’d made enough of a fool of himself already, failing to get anything useful out of anyone at the abattoir. How was he going to tell Trish?
‘Listen, old boy,’ Mark said with enough kindness to do a lot more damage to Will’s fillings, ‘you’ve got to get over this obsession with other people’s meat products. I can see where you’re coming from, believe me, but it’s—’
‘This has nothing to do with the past,’ Will said. At that moment he even believed it. ‘One woman is in Intensive Care, another has been through a bad time after eating sausages with the same label as the ones you’re testing.’
‘But I’ve just told you—’
‘I know. But there’s more. Listen, will you? No one will tell me where the sausages are made. Why? What’s the point of keeping that secret, unless there’s something to hide?’
‘Are you absolutely sure they’re not just trying to stop you running another hare? I mean, everyone in the business must know what happened the last time you were sure you’d uncovered a food scandal.’ Mark’s voice wasn’t aggressive, just matter-of-fact. ‘Or the time before.’
‘Didn’t you find anything in the samples?’ Will was begging now, and he hated that too.
‘Only the ingredients properly mentioned on the label
, and the faintest trace of clenbuterol.’
‘Ah! I knew there had to be something. Angel Dust, by God. I didn’t know anyone was still using it in this country.’
‘It’s not that significant, Will,’ said the scientist with even more pity in his voice. ‘It was only a trace. All it means is that some of the meat in the sausage mix came from animals fed an illegal muscle-promoting drug. It’s irrelevant to your friend in hospital; it’s a beta-agonist, not a food-poisoning bacterium.’
‘I know. But it adds weight to the suspicion that the sausages come from an iffy source. What else did you find? Come on: I can tell from your voice that there’s more.’
‘Nothing but a trace of bleach,’ he said casually, ‘which probably came from some piece of equipment that hadn’t been properly rinsed.’
‘Bleach?’
‘Now don’t get excited, Will.’
‘But you know as well as I do what that could mean. Remember all those poultry cases?’
‘You’re grasping at straws, Will.’ Mark sounded head-masterly now. ‘Just because there have been a few cases in which people with pet-food licences have cleaned up unfit poultry meat with bleach and sold it on for human consumption doesn’t mean every hint of chlorine in a food product is sinister.’
‘No. But it makes you think, doesn’t it? Combined with the secrecy and the clenbuterol, anyway.’
‘Will, you’ve got to watch the paranoia,’ Mark said, still kindly. ‘You really have. And I’ve got to get back to work. Listen, old boy, I wish I’d never agreed to run these tests for you, but since I did that gives me the right to say: drop it. You’ll only land yourself in even deeper shit. And with your case due to end soon, you have a real chance to start again. Don’t screw that up by charging off on another mad crusade.’
Keep Me Alive Page 9