Simon Lelic - The Child Who

Not logical, then. Not remotely. But even with such a brittle thread he was able to bind what Daniel had inflicted on Felicity with what was being done to his daughter. And was that not, after all, the real reason he was here? To assuage his guilt. To displace it with anger. To cast Daniel in the same light as the man who had taken Ellie and excuse his failure to face up to the boy he had once considered his ward. Because if Leo had been wrong to feel sorry for the boy – if he accepted that he had been wrong – how much easier would it be to accept that the fate awaiting Daniel was right?

He was looking for his daughter. It was what he told himself. It was true because it would always be true and if there was a chance he would find her then that was all the logic, brittle or otherwise, he needed.

He saw nothing. The riverside, unsurprisingly, was deserted. But it was not quite so cut off as Leo had expected, even this far from the city centre. There was road noise, for instance, faint but incessant. And on the hills to the north, buildings were visible: student dorms, mainly, with only the majority of the windows shrouded. There were dog tracks in the mud; horse prints, too. People used this path, though perhaps less these days than before.

At a bench, Leo paused. He did not sit but read: that Tom had ‘fucked Natasha’, that ‘exstacy’ ruled, that Exeter was a ‘shitwhole’, that Plymouth FC played like ‘flids’. The bench was a noticeboard, though most of what was written, to Leo’s eye, was undecipherable. He imagined Daniel seated sideways, scratching some remark on the plasticised wood. Although, given the boy’s state of mind, a comment seemed somehow too constructive. There were gouges – chiselled scores that seemed estimable only by their depth – and these were more likely to have been Daniel’s work. Perhaps that was what he had been doing, here, until Felicity passed, the day that had cost them their lives.

He was a killer. His life be damned. Would Leo wish to spare the man who had taken Ellie should the choice ever – please, God – be his to make? Would Leo urge mercy, understanding, compassion when the victim was his daughter and not a stranger’s? Would he care about why then?

Maybe not.

Certainly not.

But it was different. Wasn’t it?

It was different because Daniel was a child. Not old enough, in the eyes of a government he was too young to choose, to buy cigarettes, have sex, get a tattoo: to make any mistake but the most heinous. And, more than a child, he was a victim. He had been failed and failed again. That he had killed had been not just his crime but his parents’, his schoolteachers’, his social workers’, his peers’. To greater and lesser degrees, of course, but was condemnation, in this context, anything other than self-exoneration? Why should Daniel pay the price, exclusively, without understanding, when he had pulled the trigger on a gun someone else had placed in his hand?

And yet.

And yet, this man who had Ellie: what was he but a child grown up? A victim himself, probably, but one who had managed to survive in the world a little longer. Not sane, clearly, but not in care, not cared for. Someone else who has fallen through the gaps but further, harder. Should it therefore have been his parents who were held to account? Or his parents’ parents? At some point, surely, there was a line to be drawn.

Maybe the victims should decide. Felicity’s parents, in the girl’s case; Leo, Megan in Ellie’s. That seemed right. It seemed just. Except Leo knew what he would choose were he ever to be placed in that position. He knew what he would have done to the man, would do to him himself were he afforded the opportunity. Everything society wished on Daniel – what the crowds outside the courtroom were clamouring for; what the newspapers in their columnising sought to incite – he would visit tenfold on this man, whoever he was, whatever his story, however he might seek to explain why . And such would be Leo’s right. It would be right . Given how good it would surely feel, how could it be anything but?

From the bench, Leo edged closer to the bank. The water, below him, was as grey and impenetrable as stone. It did not seem to be moving but Leo knew enough by now not to be fooled. He knew what the river might swallow, how reluctant it was to discharge what it caught.

He continued his walk, careful of his footing on the uneven ground but not as careful, perhaps, as he might have been. He did not want to fall. It would not matter, particularly, if he did.

There was the sound of something flapping, cracking, in the wind. Leo turned, spooked, but there was nothing behind him but where he had come from. The sound came again and this time he caught its bearing. There: the tree. An ash, ashen and cankered, its only foliage a strip of blue and white barrier tape left behind by the police. It leapt, then wilted, then leapt again.

He had arrived.

The place – the scene – was as empty of life as any other he had passed that morning. Of life, or otherwise. Everything except the remnant of tape had been swept aside by the wind, washed down by the rain. It was clearer here than it perhaps should have been. No litter or junk as further up the river; nothing that had not already been bagged and consigned to an evidence room.

Leo wiped at his eyes. It was this wind, he told himself. He turned against it and wiped his eyes once more.

Back then. Or head on? It was hard to decide when there were no pros, no cons, nothing on which to balance reason. And anyway his reason felt used up. Worse, it felt useless. Left, right, this way, that. He was floundering, whichever way he turned. He had been floundering, in truth, since his father had died. Looking back when he should have been looking forwards. Looking in when he should have been looking out. Doubting what he had accomplished and ensuring, in doing so, that the one thing he had achieved would crumble, soon enough, into nothing.

What was he doing here – really ? What, in his search, did he actually expect to find?

A way out.

Escape.

The freedom to cast Daniel aside.

There was the hope, of course, that the boy’s life would be the price of his daughter’s. That it would be enough for him – whoever he was, this faceless stranger with a beard. That Daniel pleading guilty would be the key to his daughter’s chains.

But he did not believe it. If he did, he would have made the exchange in an instant. Take him. Take my limbs too if that’s the price, just give me back my heart.

Not hope, then. It was, he realised, fear that was driving his search – his flight, rather, from a truth he had carried with him all along.

Ellie was lost. Daniel was too. In failing one, Leo had sacrificed them both.

The morning, on any other day,would have seemed a blessing. The sun sat bold in a cloudless sky, softening the breeze and warming the colours of the breaking season. A new beginning, was how a churchman had put it in his thought for the day: ‘The morning after the nightmare before.’ And it was indeed as though the city, the country, sensed it had been purged; rinsed clean of something distasteful.