Simon Lelic - The Child Who

‘So this bloke. He was a regular, shall we say. Before my time. He’d show up, have his fun, then bugger off. In a week, a month, he’d be back again. For her, Steph thought. She always told herself he was coming back for her.’ Blake met Leo’s eye. Something passed between them. Even Blake, it seemed, could comprehend the horror of what Daniel would have suffered.

‘But that’s…’ Leo forced himself to focus on Ellie. ‘I mean, if it wasn’t you…’

Blake made a face, like Leo was struggling to keep up. ‘It was Steph. Wasn’t it? She knew what was going on. She drank but she still knew. He turned up, she opened the door. You ask why and the answer points to her.’

Leo made no sound. He swallowed. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘Not necessarily. I mean, one could argue…’ He was not sure where the sentence was headed but Blake, anyway, cut it off.

‘It wasn’t just that.’ He leant in, studied his hands. ‘There was other stuff. When Daniel was a baby. Bad stuff, like…’ He glanced at Leo. ‘Bad stuff,’ he said.

The hospital visits. The trips to A & E. The times Daniel almost died.

Leo stared.

‘You read about it all the time,’ Blake said. ‘Someone gets done for something they did like a million years ago. Like the Nazis, the fucking Yids hunting them down. Not letting bygones be bygones.’

Still Leo could say nothing.

‘She was wrong. She knows she was. I’m not trying to make out it was accidental or anything but… She was ill. Sick. She saw doctors, shrinks like your mate, but all they ever did was give her pills. When she got better it was on her own. With me.’ His voice, momentarily, conveyed pride. ‘But a trial. That would have been, what? Another year?’ He gave his head a sharp shake. ‘She couldn’t have handled it. She’s barely handling things as they are.’

‘Stephanie,’ said Leo. ‘Did she…’

Blake’s head snapped up. ‘She doesn’t know. She didn’t. The notes, all that: it’s down to me. Okay?’ He looked around the room, as though speaking to whomever might be listening. ‘I wanna make that clear right now.’

Leo, watching him, found himself struck. ‘You love her.’

Blake seemed puzzled by his tone. ‘I married her,’ he said, as though that, surely, were evidence enough. ‘I’m not the hugs-and-flowers type but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do anything for her.’ His frown deepened. ‘You’re married, right? You know what it’s like. What kind of man lets something happen that he knows is gonna hurt his wife?’

Leo, to that, could offer no answer.

Blake took his silence as an accusation. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking about the boy, that I screwed him over. I would have.’ Blake straightened his shoulders. ‘I’m not denying it. He’s the guilty one, right? And Steph’s better off without the little sod if you ask me. But it would have made no difference anyway. Would it?’ Blake paused but not long enough for Leo to reply. ‘Like I said, right at the start. If he’d pleaded not guilty it would’ve been a show trial. A publicity stunt. Guilty, not guilty: whichever way you played it, Daniel was always gonna end up on a plate.’

The abuse. Maybe if they’d been able to prove Daniel was abused…

But even that, Leo knew, would not have been enough. Nothing, short of madness, would have been enough.

‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ Blake said. ‘At least my way Steph was spared.’ He took another cigarette from his pack. ‘I mean, I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘About the notes and that. Maybe, I dunno. Maybe I could have played it some other way.’ He did not, listening to himself, sound convinced.

‘You could have just said. About the trial. You could have insisted…’

‘I did insist!’ Blake glared at his failing lighter. ‘Fucking tried to anyway.’ He shook it and the lighter sparked.

‘But Daniel: Stephanie’s his mother, you’re his stepfather. You could have just told him…’

Blake scoffed. ‘Tried that too. But there ain’t no telling Daniel. Me and him, in case you hadn’t noticed, don’t exactly get along. He resents me, is what it is. Can’t handle the fact I’m cuddling his mummy.’ The cigarette was refusing to light. Blake plucked it from his lips and grimaced as he flicked it aside. ‘And as for her,’ he said. ‘She lets him do whatever he wants. That’s part of the problem, if you ask me: spoiling him like it’d make up for what happened in the past. And Danny boy: he said he liked you. Said he trusted you. Said he’d do what you told him to, which in the end meant that was that.’

It was down to him. Once again it was all down to him.

‘I’m no expert,’ Blake was saying, ‘but something about it ain’t right. The boy’s twelve. Not even old enough to know what shaving foam’s for. But stick him in front of a jury and suddenly he’s the man in charge. That ain’t right. Surely? You’re the lawyer, you tell me. Is that right?’

Leo could only shake his head. Once he started, though, he found he could not stop. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe you . You sent the notes. You said you did.’

‘S’right. And I said I was sorry. They were only meant to rattle you, mate. Give you a nudge, that’s all.’

‘And my daughter’s hair? Her blood . What was that supposed to do?’

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t deserve a daughter. Isn’t that how you put it? Explain the hair, Blake. Explain the blood!’ Leo was standing now, leaning towards Blake over the table.

Blake tried to slide away his chair but its rear legs caught and the chair tilted. ‘Hey. Calm down. I honestly have no idea what you’re—’

Leo was around the table and upon him. He gripped Blake’s collar and bore his weight as the chair beneath him fell away. ‘The note! The final note! It was written in Ellie’s blood! They tested it! They confirmed it! What’s your story for explaining that!’

Blake stuttered. He shook his head. ‘Honestly! Leo! I haven’t got the foggiest—’

‘If you wrote one, you wrote them all! And you couldn’t have written that one unless… unless…’

Leo’s eyes locked. He saw the notes in their envelopes in his bedside drawer. He saw his balled-up socks and his stash of emergency twenties. He saw Ellie’s blood. He saw her hair. He saw the words on that final note and he saw that the words, all along, had held the truth: who had written them, and why.

She does not need to lookto be able to see it. She tries, though, to view it through her husband’s eyes, to reconcile the image with what they both, probably, would have expected.

The woman is thin. That much is programmed into her DNA. Not a worrying, wiry thin, however. Just the wrong side, in Megan’s mind, of a size ten. A pound or two extra would not hurt, particularly on those narrow hips, but overall she appears fit, healthy.

Her hair has been dyed dark. It has been cropped, too, into a boyish cut that Megan does not care for but hair grows, styles change. She recalls some of the hairstyles she wore when she was young. The perms, for instance. My God, the perms.

The pallor has gone. There is a depth of colour to her freckles that worried Megan at first. In this country, she reasoned, only people who spend most of their time outdoors develop such tone to their skin. Gardeners, for instance. Street sweepers. Street sleepers. But she convinced herself, in the end, that the colour was a good thing. A lack of it, after all, would have worried her more. And anyway the shot, from the fullness of the trees, appears to have been taken in the summer. Last summer. Which made it recent, when Megan first saw it.