Gilly Macmillan - The Perfect Girl

‘Any sign?’ the Liaison Officer asks him.

‘No,’ he says, and then, ‘Oh wait, yes, I think this is it.’

It occurs to me then, as he begins to move to answer the door, that if he is guilty of something he might flee, but that immediately seems a wild, stupid thought, and something for the police to be concerned about, not me. This is not television, I tell myself, where people can just disappear in an instant, especially not with a successful business that needs running, a reasonably high public profile, and a baby and teenager in tow.

‘Lucas!’ Chris calls up the stairs. The three of us are gathered in the hall now, though there’s no sign of Richard or the kids.

‘Lucas!’

None of them answer.

‘I’ll find him,’ I say.

Chris opens the front door and there’s a driver there, smart in a crisp open-necked shirt and chinos. It’s definitely not the usual comfortable attire of the shift taxi driver, and behind him I glimpse a sleek black vehicle. Chris has called one of his work drivers, I realise; ‘taxi’ wasn’t quite an accurate description. It reminds me once more how little I’ve understood about the life he and Maria have been leading.

I run upstairs to the bathroom to see if anybody is still there with the baby. There are signs everywhere that Grace has been bathed: water on the floor and bubbles gathered around the plughole, but the room is empty of people.

‘Zoe?’ I call. ‘Richard?’

Again, no answer.

‘Lucas?’

I see that his backpack has been slung on to one of our spare beds, all zipped up.

Then I glimpse them through a window; Lucas and Zoe are out in the garden, and it looks as if they have the baby in the buggy. They’re patiently pushing her backwards and forward in the shade of our patio.

It’s a lovely sight, as if they’ve come together to form surrogate parents for Grace, and I know Maria would be happy if she could see them. I watch as they peer at Grace together, under the sunshade, and then, carefully, they begin to walk up the garden with her, although the uneven slabs and the tufts of tough, desiccated grass that protrude between them make it slow going.

I hear talking downstairs in the hall and make my way down.

‘She just conked out,’ Richard is saying, ‘absolutely blotto in my arms after her bath, so we’ve put her down in the pushchair, and we thought you might prefer to go on ahead to the hotel and get settled in and come and collect her later. Or we could bring her to you?’

Chris doesn’t look happy. He checks his watch impatiently.

‘I don’t want to be going backwards and forwards later on so how about I send the driver to work to pick up some things for me, because I need to do that anyway, and by the time he gets back she should have had an hour or so of sleep. Do we think that would work?’ he says.

‘Of course,’ I say. That sounds like a fair plan to me and, besides, I’m flat out of the energy required to make any other kind of response.

I lay Grace down, cover her with the sunshade and tilt back her chair. After that it’s just a few turns around the patio and she’s out like a light. She puts her hands up above her head, a fist by each ear, and looks really sweet. Her tummy is bare and the whole of it goes up and down as she breathes.

Lucas and me walk her down to the end of the garden, pushing the buggy carefully over the bumpy bits and we park it in the shade underneath a leafy tree that’s grown tall beside Uncle Richard’s shed.

I beckon to Lucas to follow me into the shed. It feels boiling-point hot inside, and it smells of wood shavings and paint and glue. I shut the door behind us anyway.

There’s a workbench along one side with tools and stuff on it and above that is a shelf where Richard’s models are displayed. Mostly, they’re aeroplanes made out of balsa wood, but there are also Airfix models up there, painted really perfectly, and some complicated-looking Meccano type things with engines and wires. Some of the plane models are hanging from the ceiling on transparent threads and they turn a little after we come in.

Lucas doesn’t look at any of it, instead he sinks down so that he’s sitting on the floor and then looks up at me. ‘What do you want?’ he says. ‘Don’t you hate me?’

I kneel down, right up close to him. We don’t have much time before one of the busybody adults finds us and wants to know what we’re doing.

‘Lucas,’ I say, and I take his hands, one in each of mine and I squeeze them because I want to make him concentrate on me, completely and entirely. ‘This is really, really important.’

‘I’m ready to tell them everything.’ The sobbing begins again. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘No!’ I say. ‘No you mustn’t. Not yet.’

‘I have to,’ he says and his sobs are so choking that I shake his hands to try to make him snap him out of it, but nothing works, so eventually I slap him as hard as I can around his cheek. It really stings my hand, that slap, and it knocks his head from one side to the other.

‘Lucas,’ I say. ‘Listen to me. Stop crying.’

His eyes are bloodshot and there’s still dampness around his lips and under nose. He looks wrecked. His expression has so many things going on in it, but I’m super-focused and I block everything out except for the thing that I want to say to him.

‘Does your dad know what you did?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’

‘What does he say?’

‘He says we have to protect each other. We both have to say we were asleep, and we know nothing. Nobody can prove otherwise.’

‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

‘After we went to bed last night, I couldn’t sleep. I heard you come up, and then I was lying in my bed for ages, until I heard them arguing in their bedroom. It sounded like he was bullying her, and I was afraid he was so angry about the lies you both told him that he was going to hurt her, so I got out of bed and I went and opened their door because I wanted to tell him to stop. He had hold of her, but when he saw me he let go, but then he started coming for me, and he was very angry. I stepped back on to the landing to get away from him, but he caught me and he pushed me back against the wall, by the top of the stairs. And your mum… your mum came after him, and she caught him by surprise and managed to pull him off me just for a second. She was standing between him and me, but she turned her back to him, to check that I was OK. Behind her, I could see that he recovered really quickly and he was coming to get her, so I tried to push her right out of his way, on to the ground. But when I pushed her she hit the banister post at the top of the stairs, and she sort of bounced off it, and she fell down the stairs.’

I can see it all in my head; I can see her lying broken on the stairs.

‘There was blood,’ he says. ‘She hit her head when she fell, and there was blood.’

And all this while I lay in my bed sleeping, with Chopin playing on my iPod, and Grace in my arms. That thought almost stops me in my tracks completely, almost robs me of my courage.

‘He made me clean the blood up,’ Lucas says, and he retches at the memory. ‘He made me clean it up while he carried her outside. I didn’t know he was going to put her by the bins. I’m sorry. She deserved so much better than that.’

It takes me a while to find the words to ask my next question because it’s the hardest I’ve ever had to work to keep my emotions under control. But I do it for Mum.

‘Why did you want me to delete the script?’

‘Because Dad said we have to cover up for each other. He didn’t know about the script, but I thought it would make the police suspicious of him and then he might tell them that I did it. But I want to tell them everything because I can’t take it any more.’