Simon Lelic - The Child Who

‘I don’t want to stay here,’ Daniel said. ‘Tell them whatever you have to so I don’t have to stay here. So I can go…’

‘Home?’

Daniel glanced. ‘Anywhere. Anywhere but here.’

‘Is there any reason you wouldn’t want to go home, Daniel?’

‘I didn’t say that. I didn’t say I wouldn’t go home.’

‘No. I know. But Karen – you remember Karen? – she thinks that perhaps there might be some reason why you wouldn’t want to go back there. Why, perhaps, you shouldn’t.’

Daniel’s jaw tensed. ‘What does she know?’

Leo brushed at the sugar on the chair from his biscuit. ‘She’s concerned, that’s all. We both are.’

Daniel moved his eyes without turning his head. He knew. From his expression, he clearly knew exactly what Leo was talking about.

‘Home would do,’ he said.

‘Daniel, I…’

‘I said it would do.’ The boy glared, then dropped his eyes. ‘It’s not like it used to be.’

Leo nodded. There was a silence and he could not think how to fill it.

‘This place,’ said Daniel after a moment. ‘It’s not so bad. Is it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, it’s bad, I hate it – but there are worser places. Aren’t there? They could send me somewhere worse.’

Leo stared. Why he was surprised, he did not know. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They could.’

Daniel’s face gave a peculiar twitch, as though there was something inside him he was trying to keep from slipping out. ‘Tell them what you have to,’ he said. He made to say something more but seemed not to trust himself.

‘If there’s a trial,’ said Leo, ‘if we plead not guilty… It won’t be easy. For you. For your mother.’ For Ellie, he did not say. For Megan.

Daniel nodded.

‘It will be painful. It will be drawn out. You’ll have to stay here, at least until the trial is over. And after that… After that, there are no guarantees.’

No movement this time. No sound.

‘Your barrister: he thinks you should plead guilty, Daniel. He thinks it’s your best chance of a shorter sentence.’

Daniel’s voice came in a burst. ‘What about you?’

Leo took a breath. ‘I think…’ I think it shouldn’t be my place. I think someone, somewhere in the system, is forcing me to decide so they won’t have to. ‘I think what you did was wicked,’ Leo said. He expected Daniel to look away but the boy did not. ‘But you need help, above all. I think you’ve been wronged and that someone along the line should have set it right. I think, if you plead guilty, you’d be taking on more than you deserve to.’ He paused, then added, ‘I think you’d be letting the rest of us off the hook.’

Daniel did not answer right away. ‘Do I have a chance? If I do what you say?’

And that, really, was the question.

NOT EXACTLY BEACH WEATHER IS IT LEO?

NO LIES NO EXCUSES

LAST CHANCE. DROP THE CASE

There were noshards of glass this time. That, by itself, should have been a relief. But the implication that he – whoever he was – had been following, watching, just as he had threatened and despite Leo’s vigilance, was somehow more unsettling than if the envelope had arrived barbed with razor blades. And if the intention was to alarm him – to panic him – then whoever wrote the notes could hardly have chosen a more economical turn of phrase. It was, thinking about it, almost as if… as if…

No. The thought was ridiculous. He was dealing with a lunatic. Someone deranged. There was simply no way that anyone Leo knew… That someone from work like… like… Terry, for instance. Even Terry. He was jealous, certainly, but even Terry would not stoop to this.

Closer to home, then. Who was more eager for him to drop the case than his wife? She had asked, repeatedly, and Leo had refused. They could barely have a conversation, it seemed, without Daniel becoming the theme. Maybe if Megan was even more desperate than she so often seemed? Take the man at the window, for example. Did Leo not half suspect, deep down, that the story had been a fabrication? Or, if not quite that, an exaggeration; a deliberate misrepresentation. And the phrasing. Not exactly beach weather . Hadn’t Leo, speaking to Megan, used virtually the same expression himself?

Or Ellie. What about Ellie? She had been at the beach too. And Ellie, in her quieter, more solicitous way, seemed more upset even than her mother. Leo had put it down to the incident with the ink, her troubles at school, but perhaps the last note had also been a clue. A confession. How would your daughter like it? Was that Ellie’s way of saying –

Your daughter. Your wife. For Christ’s sake, Leo!

He wrapped the note in his palm. It crumpled easily, along the scars it had suffered after Leo had tossed it, the first time he had read it, into his office bin. He felt an urge to hurl it again but instead slid open his bedside drawer and shoved it beneath his socks and his emergency cash, atop the other two notes tucked away in their envelopes. He stood and the mattress sprung and he turned towards the door.

‘Was that it?’

Ellie was at the threshold. She was sockless and damp-haired and wrapped in a dressing gown that sagged from her shoulders. She bore a towel, damp like her hair, and a book and a hairbrush. Her cheeks were flushed: from the heat of the bath water, Leo assumed, though if he had encountered her in any other guise he might have wondered whether his daughter had in fact been crying.

‘Ellie. I didn’t hear you.’ Leo stepped away from the bedside drawer and towards the doorway, resisting the urge to glance back.

‘Was that it?’ Ellie said again. ‘That thing you were reading?’

‘Sorry? Was what what?’

‘The article. I heard Mum,’ Ellie added when Leo frowned. ‘Is she going somewhere? Why was she talking about leaving?’

‘Leaving? What do you mean? Who’s leaving?’

‘I don’t know. Mum was talking to Grandma. She said something about…’ Ellie ended the sentence by shaking her head, as though she were not sure, actually, what her mother had said.

‘Ellie? Please. Start at the beginning.’

‘I heard Mum,’ his daughter said. ‘On the phone, through the floorboards. She was talking to Bernice. Something about an article.’

The article. The piece in the Gazette . Leo had seen a copy just that morning but he had thought, if he ignored it, maybe Megan would never have to know. He had reckoned, clearly, without Terry’s wife: briefed by her husband, no doubt, on Leo’s hesitancy in agreeing to the interview in the first place, and with nothing else to keep her awake at night but getting to the bottom of why. ‘But… What’s this about someone leaving?’

‘Mum called Grandma. Afterwards. She said… She definitely said something about going to stay. Or… I don’t know. Something, anyway. It was quieter so I couldn’t hear but… Are you breaking up?’ Her tone teetered as she voiced the question.

‘What?’

‘You and Mum. I mean, why else would she be—’

‘No! No one’s breaking up. Honestly, Ellie, I promise. You misheard, that’s all. I’m sure you must have misheard. She was talking about visiting, I expect.’

‘She sounded angry. Talking to Grandma. She said… What was in the article, Dad? What did it say?’

‘The article? Nothing. Nothing at all. I don’t know why you think your mother would be angry.’ Except, in truth, he did. He could just hear Megan’s voice. One minute you’re chasing the press away, the next you’re preening for the cameras. Never mind that Leo had done his best to back out of the interview. Never mind that the article, anyway, made no mention of the Forbes case. Leo, inevitably, would be at fault. But calling her mother. Leaving . There was no question: Ellie, surely, had misunderstood.