Lock Me In

by Kate Simants

  His mother’s watch.

  ‘I was unpacking some boxes,’ Nadia was saying. ‘Think it must have got mixed up in my stuff.’

  He looked up, and she was frowning, her head tipped to the side. ‘You OK, Ben?’

  Forcing a grin, he dropped the watch carelessly into his pocket, like it was nothing, just an old bit of jewellery. ‘Fine. I’m fine.’

  Nadia shrugged, taking him at his word, then muttered something vague about being busy, getting going.

  The watch sat heavy as an iron bar against Mae’s thigh. ‘Yeah sure, me too, yeah. I’m parked over there,’ he said, gesturing, ‘so—’

  ‘Oh, me too,’ she said, so there was no choice but to walk together. There followed the kind of silence that precipitated their collapse in the first place. Freeze, thaw, freeze: it was the instability that caused even formations of granite to crumble, in the end.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘did she mention any other kids to you, last night?’

  ‘No. What other kids?’

  A shrug. ‘There’s been some suggestion of kids picking on her.’

  He stopped. ‘Bullying?’

  Nadia exhaled heavily. ‘Look, no one’s used that word—’

  ‘No? What do they want us to call it, then? What’s it about, race?’

  ‘No! Look, it’s nothing like that—’

  ‘What is it then, her weight, then? Or is it because of me? Because I’m old bill. Is that it?’

  She took a step back, sighed. ‘Ben.’

  ‘She’s still my daughter. Right? I need to know, OK?’ He sounded truculent, he knew he did, but he didn’t care.

  ‘I don’t think it’s like that. You know what Bear’s like. She gives twice as good as she gets. More.’

  But Mae wasn’t listening. ‘And why am I only hearing about this now?’

  ‘Ben. Stop.’

  And then, because what was the point holding it in when it was inevitable: ‘Presumably Mike knows all about it? He been in to talk to the head yet, has he?’

  She nodded, lips a tight line, then dug in her bag for her phone, tapped something in, looked up. ‘Right. I’ve sent you the number of the person dealing with it. Call her if you want filling in, Ben. I don’t need the aggression.’ She shoved her hands into her pockets. ‘Please don’t forget the school trip, OK? The zoo. You said you would, so …’

  And then she turned and walked away.

  He took a deep breath, let it all out. ‘Nadia.’

  She ignored him. He jogged after her, drew level.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I messed up.’

  ‘To which mess are you referring?’

  He didn’t bite. ‘Last night.’

  She agreed it with a shrug but didn’t slow. Not a single calorie of warmth in her face. ‘You did.’

  ‘And it won’t happen again.’

  ‘It never does.’

  He slowed to a stroll, then stopped. Then, a few yards away, his ex-wife, with whom he’d really and truly thought he’d grow old, stopped too, and turned around. Her eyes were wet.

  ‘Where were you, when you were supposed to collect her last night? I just don’t … I don’t get it. What was important enough that you forgot?’

  Just for that second he saw a years-younger Nadia. At home, alone except for a baby constantly rooting for milk, her atom-fine fingernails like shards of glass. Mother and daughter having grown incrementally further from him by the end of every shift, never to return. He’d known how it looked: if both time and care were finite resources, it followed that his laser-beam focus on every detail on every case back then meant he had nothing left for his family. But even though he’d sworn to himself that he would back off at work, just do his contracted hours, the horror of the world he saw from inside a stab vest trumped his good intentions every time.

  This was the thing he could never have told Nadia. Everyone knew about that primal, protective force-field that some men got when their babies were born. But he’d been dealt a mutation. It was a terror. An inability to look into the wide-open face of his daughter without the fear – the absolute certainty – that if he couldn’t do his job, Bear would be doomed. If he couldn’t solve the murder, put the rapist away, find the missing woman, it meant he’d failed her. It would mean he was unable to protect her, this tiny, gossamer-haired child for whom he would die in a single heartbeat. It had been as if there were no rungs for him on the way down from that realization, until, right at the bottom, there was his wife. Desperate in the doorway of their chaotic rented flat, half-dressed and holding an arching, howling, months-old child as her chosen life partner left her alone again after a half-hour pitstop at home. Saying, I’m not doing this. This wasn’t the deal. You need to choose.

  Nadia cocked her head, waiting for the reply. ‘Well?’

  ‘Just a case,’ was what he told her in the end, and she paused, shook her head, and walked away.

  25.

  Ellie

  I woke up with the sense of a sudden fall. The shell of the familiar dream cracked and disintegrated: it was Siggy, trapped by a fire, too scared to shout for help. Dull embers of pain leapt into flame across my hand and I remembered. Matt. I grabbed my phone but there was nothing from him, or from anyone. Siggy scraped along the insides of my ribs. An ache to her, a calm I didn’t trust.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Mum was outside my door, speaking through the locked door.

  I croaked a yes and heard the sound of the top bolt sliding open. Then there was a pause.

  ‘And … it is you, yes?’

  I cleared my throat. ‘Of course.’

  From the other side of the door came the sound of the other bolt, much lower, and then the key sliding home for the third, the mortice lock under the handle.

  She walked in holding two mugs in one hand and offered one to me.

  ‘He hasn’t called, Mum.’

  ‘No.’ She sat on my bed, freshly showered and smelling of citrus, with her grey-rooted hair dripping dark marks on her violet sweatshirt.

  I sipped my coffee. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Fine. We still on for this afternoon?’

  ‘’Course,’ I said, thinking, shit. Today was Cherry Tree Day.

  Every year since I was little, Mum and I marked the twenty-seventh of November. One of Mum’s books said that it could be useful, therapeutic, to allocate some special time for the nondominant ‘alter’. The idea was that we gave Siggy time to come to the fore, to express herself. The thing was, I didn’t ‘switch’ like most people with my condition, so it never worked the way it was meant to. But Cherry Tree day became a tradition anyway, and we would spend the time talking to her like she was a separate person, like she was a friend. Wish fulfilment, after a fashion.

  We’d planted a tree in a secret place that she’d loved as a kid, beside the river, a mile or so from Hampton Court. Even when we lived in Hove we’d travel every year to visit it. The exact spot was hard to find, along what looked like a dead-end path that would have been entirely overrun without our annual trip. I doubted the tree was seen by anyone but us from year to year. To me and Mum, though, that place was sacred. But this time, I’d forgotten.

  She noticed, of course. ‘I mean, we can leave it, if you’re not keen. But—’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ I said, cutting her off.

  ‘Good.’ She shot me a thin smile, but then immediately winced. Her hand went up to her face, cupping her jaw.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  The hand stayed on her face. ‘It’s nothing.’

  She went to get up, but I stopped her. ‘Show me.’

  Taking a deep breath, she lifted her face. On her jaw, a fist-sized swelling. Pressing up and out as far as her bottom lip, the skin discoloured darker along one edge of the bone and then blooming red towards her cheek.

  Siggy tightened through the length of my backbone as I realized what I was looking at.

  ‘Look, don’t worry,’ she said, her voice low, muffled by the swelling. ‘It
was my fault. It was just – you sounded – I thought it was you.’

  ‘It wasn’t me, Mum.’

  Her watery blue eyes locked on mine. Neither of us said it, but we were thinking the same thing. If Siggy could convince Mum, who knew her better than anyone, better than even I did, it meant something had changed. It meant she was winning.

  ‘I should have known.’ She reached for my hands. I felt limp, like I’d been winded, or hit by a car. ‘But it was how she spoke. I just couldn’t tell the difference.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  Her eyes flittered shut. ‘She said, “Mummy, let me out”.’

  I went cold. ‘Just that?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Mum. What else?’

  She wouldn’t meet my eye.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘She laughed, sweetheart. Looked me in the eye and laughed.’

  I sat heavily next to her, mute. Slowly she put an arm across my shoulders, and we sat like that for a while, silent with our thoughts, until she gave me a squeeze and got up.

  ‘Come on. I’ve got to do the early, but I swapped with Brenda from eleven,’ she said, gathering her things into her bag. ‘Meet you at the bench and walk down together then, about twelve?’

  I followed her out to the front door, where she had paused by the mirror to retouch the make-up over the bruises on her jaw. Closing the compact, she paused.

  Tucked into the rim of the mirror were all the pictures of the Cherry Tree Days. All in order: the first showing the two of us muddy-gloved and serious, standing beside the sapling we had just planted. I am six, in tiny red wellies and a woolly hat. In each one Mum is a little greyer, a little more lined, and I am growing out of my awkward adolescence and towards adulthood.

  Only one image is missing: 2006, when Mum went alone. She didn’t take a picture that time, didn’t feel like smiling for the camera, because that year, on the twenty-seventh of November, I was only just out of intensive care.

  ‘Is it a fruiting year, this year?’ she asked, touching last year’s image lightly with a fingertip. ‘Can’t ever remember.’

  ‘Me neither.’ In each photo, the tree between us is a little taller. A little thicker in the trunk and wider in the branches. Stronger.

  She sighed. ‘I’d thought maybe Matt would come with us this year.’

  I turned to face her. ‘Really?’

  ‘Why not? You seem serious enough.’

  ‘You don’t like him, Mum.’

  She looked genuinely confused. ‘Like him? Baby, I think he’s lovely. I just—’ She sighed heavily, frustrated. ‘I just want him to be careful with what he’s taking on. That’s all.’

  ‘I’m not a bloody Battersea dog.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  We said goodbye and she got up and went to the door, smiled before she left. Or tried to. There’s no such thing as a smile that can conceal fear in the eyes.

  As she closed the door, something of Siggy’s settled behind my heart: half satisfaction and half dread. Because she had seen the fear, too.

  26.

  Mae

  Mae sat in the moulded green seat, number two in a bolted-down line of six outside Matthew Corsham’s manager’s office. He was about to bother the woman at the desk again – he’d already been waiting five minutes – when the door opened and a youngish, efficient-looking woman in a crisp skirt suit emerged, patent navy-blue heels clacking on the concrete floor.

  ‘Detective,’ she said, holding out a slim hand. ‘Helen Williams, HR.’

  He gathered the folder and his backpack, shook hands and he followed her into the office. Closing the door, she gestured to a seat on the passive side of an orderly desk, onto which she then perched. On the phone she’d sounded brisk and judging by the smile that now remained unwavering throughout her recap of the situation with Matthew Corsham’s employment, he decided that his initial estimation was pretty accurate.

  ‘As I explained,’ she was saying, ‘Matthew was a freelance lab tech. We use a lot of freelance contracts these days, just a way of keeping costs down, and—’

  ‘I don’t really need to know about your management strategy,’ he said, interrupting. ‘I just want to understand why he left.’

  The smile tightened. ‘As I say, he was a freelancer, on a rolling contract. The contract came to an end.’

  ‘But it says here,’ Mae countered, flipping open the folder and scanning down Kit’s notes, ‘that his contract technically ended every week.’

  ‘Technically, yes.’

  ‘But in reality, he’d worked for you for several months. On that rolling basis.’

  A curt nod conceded it. ‘And then by mutual arrangement, we allowed the contract to default.’

  ‘Mutual … arrangement …’ Mae parroted, writing it in his notebook.

  ‘I mean, we did sort of find ways to reduce the workload down there, too. So someone had to go, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Sort … of … find … ways …’ He could do this all day. Finishing the sentence, he looked up. ‘I understand his girlfriend works here too. Do you know her?’ Kit, again, who’d dug that out. A background inspection in the form of a DBS check had been done on Ellie, and it linked back to the hospital. ‘Reads to the kids on the children’s ward, something like that?’

  She stiffened and relaxed so fast that he wasn’t entirely sure he’d read it right, but the smile didn’t move. ‘Yes. She volunteered.’

  ‘Past tense?’

  ‘Yes. She was unreliable.’

  ‘So … you’re firing her, too? Or is her one-week-stroke-three-year contract going to be, uh,’ he checked his notes, ‘mutually defaulted, or whatever?’

  Helen Williams sighed heavily.

  Mae softened. ‘All I want to know is—’

  ‘All you want to know is, why did we not renew Matthew Corsham’s contract this time.’ She spoke with her eyes closed, as though the thought of answering the question caused her physical pain.

  He closed the folder, crossed his legs, and leaned expansively against the back of the chair. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Fine.’ She stood, went round the back of her desk, and opened a drawer. She withdrew a zip-topped plastic bag containing what looked like vials and a couple of plastic bottles, lifted it up for him, and gave it a shake.

  ‘This. This is the reason.’

  Mae stood and took it from her and read the names of the bottles.

  ‘They were discovered in his locker. We had an anonymous tip-off from someone who’d noticed him putting them in there. They thought it looked suspicious.’

  ‘Really?’ He turned one of the bottles over in his hand. It was just a glass bottle, nothing particularly fishy about it. ‘Suspicious how?’

  ‘Well, for a start, they’re not domestic volumes. That one,’ she said, gesturing to the bottle Mae was holding, ‘is a 500 ml bottle. Dosages are tiny, you’d never need a quantity like that for one person.’

  ‘All right,’ Mae said, still not getting it. ‘But what is it?’

  ‘This one,’ she said, pointing to a bottle of clear liquid, ‘is lidocaine. This is propofol, and that one you’ve got is haloperidol.’

  ‘But let’s say I primarily speak English.’

  Pointing to the items in the same order she said in clipped syllables, ‘Lidocaine is a surface anaesthetic used to numb the site of injection alongside general anaesthetic. Propofol is a non-barbiturate general anaesthetic. This one, haloperidol: the velvet hammer. Antipsychotic, muscle relaxant, tranquilizer. For use in acute presentation, for urgent sedation. Used in prisons, from what I understand.’

  ‘So it’s not a personal prescription.’

  She paused, let out a sudden laugh, then dragged her hands down her face. ‘No,’ she said wearily.

  Mae dropped his shoulders and cocked his head. ‘Hard day?’

  ‘Could say that, detective, yes.’

  ‘Ben. Hard in what way?’

  She sank into h
er chair. ‘We’ve had to review security across all our sites. Press office shitting themselves, and you don’t even want to know about that lot,’ she said, gesturing to the ceiling, the echelons above.

  ‘The brass?’

  ‘I’ve had the PCT area director leaning on me, it’s been hell.’ She sighed and glanced out of the window, and her hand fluttered to the V of her crisp, white blouse and loosened the top button. Tight, tanned skin. The twitch of a flirt at the corners of her mouth when she turned to face him again.

  He made one hundred per cent sure he looked her in the eye, and only in the eye. ‘Leaning on you about what?’

  With her enormous reluctance written into each furrow of her face, she told him the thing that would breathe sudden, unexpected life into the image Mae had been creating of Matthew Corsham, in his mind’s eye.

  ‘He’d stolen these medicines from our pharmacy.’

  Mae thought of Helen Williams’s top button – that and the insistence as he left that he should ask for her by name if he needed anything else – all the way down to the ground level, and out to his car. He thought of it as he turned the key in the ignition, and as he turned the engine off again and walked back into the building and down to the basement and Matthew Corsham’s photographic lab.

  By the time he was knocking on the door and being shown into the bright, sterile room in which Matt had worked, Helen Williams’s top button had been overtaken in his mind by something else. Something Ellie Power had told him twenty-four hours earlier.

  He is the most honest, the most grounded person you’ll ever meet.

  He is a good man, and I can rely on him.

  I can.

  A check-shirted lab tech with a little Dave Grohl beard walked him through the workspace. There were several large, white machines spaced down the centre of the room, each looking as if it had been cast in a single piece. Wheeled stools stood under the continuous desk system that skirted the entire room at waist height. There was a weird, inorganic feel to the place, like it could be any day of the year and the temperature would be the same, ditto the odourless atmosphere, the unrelenting, shadowless bright of the LED lighting. It was the opposite of what he imagined photographic labs had been twenty years previously: dark, red, chemical.