Simon Beckett - Owning Jacob - SA

The house was on a short terraced row with a corner shop at one end and a rubble-filled space bordered by a tall wire fence at the other. Inside it were yellow JCBs and workmen’s huts, quiet and deserted for the weekend. A lot of the houses were boarded up, waiting their turn at demolition. Others were obviously still tenanted. The number Ben was looking for had neat flowered curtains and a colourful window box on the downstairs sill. He parked outside and climbed from his car before he had chance to have second thoughts about what he was doing.

He didn’t know what he hoped to gain by visiting Jeanette Kale’s parents. He had no reason to think they would have any more time for him than Kale. Kale had lost a wife, they’d lost a daughter, and Ben was the nearest thing to a scapegoat they had. When he’d seen them interviewed on TV, though, Ron and Mary Paterson hadn’t seemed bitter. He thought they might be prepared to listen to him, if nothing else.

It wasn’t much to hang a Saturday morning on, but it was all he had.

The Patersons had moved out of London after their grandson went missing. Ben had traced them by going through the recent newspaper reports in the library until he found a reference to the town where ‘baby Steven’s’ grandparents now lived. Then he had gone through the telephone directory until he found their address. He’d considered phoning before making the journey, but in the end he’d decided not to. Over the phone it would have been too easy for them to say no.

He knocked on the door. It was grimy from the dust thrown up by the destruction of its neighbours, but the underlying blue paint was sound. They’re not going to be in, he thought, but was proved wrong by a muffled ‘It’s not locked’.

He went inside. The door opened straight into the kitchen.

The walls were covered with a yellow floral paper. In the doorway a small rubber mat covered the brown-and-cream swirl-patterned carpet. A sturdy drop-leaf table stood against the wall facing him, a potted geranium in its centre. There was a smell of old cooking, not rancid like the Kales’, but one that spoke of Yorkshire puddings and roast meats. It reminded Ben of his childhood visits to his grandparents.

An elderly man was standing by the sink. He wore brown pleated trousers and a white vest. A peeled hard-boiled egg was in one hand, while the other was cupped underneath it to catch the crumbs. He looked at Ben without saying anything, flecks of yolk around his mouth. Ben recognised him from the TV as Jeanette Kale’s father. He felt suddenly embarrassed at seeing him like that, knowing he wasn’t whoever the man had been expecting.

He hovered in the doorway, uncertainly. “I’m sorry, I heard you say it wasn’t locked. I’m Ben Murray—”

“I know who you are.” Paterson turned back to the sink and went on eating the egg. He pushed it into his mouth and delicately brushed his lips with his fingers.

“I’m sorry if I caught you by surprise.” Ben somehow felt he was the one at a disadvantage.

Small dewlaps of flesh swung under Paterson’s arms as he wiped his hands on a towel. He had the fleshy build of a once-powerful man overtaken by time. He hung the towel on a hook by the sink. “What do you want?”

Ben was already sure it was a wasted journey. “I’d like to talk to you and your wife. About Jacob.” If he says ‘Steven’ I’ll just turn around and go.

“What about him?” The man’s look was neither hostile nor encouraging. It compelled Ben to be direct. “John Kale won’t let me see him. I wondered if you could help.”

Paterson turned back to the sink. “There’s nothing we can do to help you.”

“I thought you could perhaps talk to him. Explain that I’m not trying to take Jacob from him. I just... I just want to see him every now and again.”

Jacob’s grandfather shook his head without looking around.

Ben remained by the open front door, unable to bring himself to leave but not knowing what else there was to say. A mechanical whine came from a doorway on the other side of the kitchen.

Paterson glanced at him, then went out. The noise grew louder, an electric motor of some kind. It stopped and he heard voices. There were other sounds he couldn’t identify, and then the door at the far end was pushed back. A woman in a wheelchair came through with Paterson pushing it, and Ben realised the whine had been from a chairlift.

Mary Paterson was stick thin, with hair that must once have been red but was now turning orange from the grey in it. Her eyes were beady and dark, like a bird’s as she regarded Ben.

“Shut the door,” she said.

They sat around the drop-leaf table, drinking tea. A plate of digestive biscuits had been put out next to the geranium. Ben had taken one out of politeness and then found his hand straying back of its own accord until the plate was half empty. He didn’t even like digestives.

“She left him, you see,” Mary said. She was still in her wheelchair, lower than either Ben or her husband, who sat in the hard-backed dining chairs. She looked like a wrinkled child.

“She came back to live with us a few months after Steven — after Jacob...” she corrected herself, annoyed at the slip, “...after Jacob went missing. We’d moved back up here by then. We’d only gone down to London to be near my sister, when Ron took his early redundancy. But after what happened at the hospital... well, you tell yourself it isn’t your fault, but if Jeanette hadn’t come down to stay with us...” She left the sentence unfinished. “John never said as much, but we always felt he blamed us. Partly, anyway. And then when she left him and came home that was the final straw. I don’t think he ever forgave us for that.”

“But Jacob’s your grandson. Surely you’re entitled to see him?”

She looked across at her husband. A wordless message seemed to pass between them. “So are you. But with John Kale that doesn’t make a lot of difference, does it?”

Ben didn’t know whether he was pleased to have found someone else against whom Kale was exercising his unreasonableness, or frustrated that another avenue had come to a dead end. Sympathy for the Patersons overruled either. “What has Kale said?”

“Not a thing.” Ron Paterson broke a biscuit in half over his plate, then in half again. He had put on a shirt, explaining that he had thought Ben was a friend of his when he’d knocked on the door, a widower he went shopping with every Saturday.

He noticed what he was doing to the biscuit and put it down.

“We haven’t spoken to him. Only that woman. She told me not to bother phoning again.” His lips set in a stern line.“Trout-mouthed little tart.”

“Ron,” his wife warned. His nodded acknowledgment was also an apology. She turned to Ben. “We’ve written, but we haven’t had any reply. Not that we expected one. But you still hope, don’t you?”

Not any more, Ben thought. If Kale wouldn’t even let Jacob’s grandparents see him, there was no chance for him.

“It isn’t any of my business, but why did Jeanette leave him?”

Again they shared a silent look of communication. “He’d changed,” she said. “He’d always been a quiet type. Deep. But after Stev... after Jacob disappeared he wasn’t the same. No disrespect intended, but it shattered him. Shattered them both, but in a different way. He got harder.” She frowned, shaking her head. “No, not harder exactly, that’s not right. But like he didn’t care. And Jeanette... well, she never really got over it. You’d have thought they’d have helped each other, but it went the opposite way. Perhaps Jeanette was as much to blame as John, I couldn’t say. But she needed someone to support her, to help her through it. And he didn’t do that. I suppose it was his way of coping with what had happened, but he just got more wrapped up in himself. More intense. They’d come around to see us, and he’d sit for hours, staring at nothing, not saying a word. And most of the time he was away anyway, you know, serving overseas. Jeanette was left by herself down in Aldershot So in the end she came back home.”