Хилари Боннер - The Cruellest Game

‘He just said I mustn’t tell anyone, that’s all,’ Sue continued.

Neither of us had sat down. We stood facing each other in the centre of a small square room, its very modern black-leather sofas and chairs lining cream walls scattered with reproduction oil paintings in big gilt frames.

The girl’s lips were trembling. She didn’t look well. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes.

Suddenly a bloody great light bulb exploded in front of me.

‘You wanted to tell me you were pregnant, didn’t you?’ I almost shouted the words. She recoiled from me, and started to cry.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, aware that it was anything but, making my voice as near to reassuring as I could manage. ‘It’s all right. That’s it, though, isn’t it? You wanted to tell me you were expecting a child and that Robbie was the father, didn’t you?’

She just carried on crying, her shoulders heaving.

‘Didn’t you?’ I repeated, still trying desperately to sound reassuring.

Sue Shaw nodded. ‘Y-yes,’ she said.

I found that my breath was coming in short sharp gasps. I hadn’t expected this in a million years. Maybe I should have done, but I hadn’t. After all, Robbie had been a quiet studious boy, though what I thought that had to do with teenage sex drives I had no idea. He’d also been a sensible boy. Surely he would have taken precautions? Obviously not.

I made soothing noises in the general direction of sobbing Sue Shaw, standing trembling before me in her girly nightwear and silly slippers, so young, so pretty, so distraught, and so bewildered.

I encouraged her to sit with me on the sofa, and put my arm around her. After a bit she quietened.

‘Did you love him, my Robbie?’ I asked softly.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, her blue eyes very wide.

‘And did he — do you think he loved you?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said again.

‘Did he know? Did Robbie know you were carrying his child?’

She nodded through the last of her waning tears.

‘I told him that morning, the day he died...’

She sniffed hugely, and I was afraid the tears were going to start flowing again before they had even properly stopped.

‘It’s all right,’ I repeated, wishing I could think of something better to say.

‘Did... did you see him that day then?’ I asked, wondering if the enormity of the question would hit her. It didn’t seem to.

‘No. I phoned him, right after I did the test. He was shocked, of course. I mean, we’d only done it about three times altogether, and only once without...’

She stopped. Colouring up again. Embarrassed by her own words. After all, I was Robbie’s mum.

‘Please tell me,’ I coaxed. ‘I want to know everything, everything you can tell me. It could be very important.’

She shrugged.

‘We only ever did it once without proper precautions, the first time,’ she went on. ‘We hadn’t meant to, you see. We hadn’t meant to do it. Swimming was cancelled suddenly because there was something wrong with the pool. We went off for a walk over the fields. It was September. The weather was so warm then, do you remember?’

There was a faraway note in her voice. She looked directly at me.

‘I remember,’ I said.

She nodded.

Without actually having said so, she left me in little doubt that she had been a virgin when she and Robbie first made love, in the open air it seemed, and I rather surprised myself with my next question.

‘Was it, was it what you expected, what you wanted?’ I asked. ‘Was it special?’

‘Oh yes, it was special.’ Briefly her face lit up, then clouded over again, as if remembering what had then transpired.

‘So when you told Robbie, what happened?’ I pressed. ‘I mean, did he have any idea before your test? You obviously did.’

‘I did, but he didn’t,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell him, or anyone, anything until I knew for sure. I got one of those test kits from the chemist, you know, and that was it. There wasn’t any doubt.’

‘So what did he say?’

‘I don’t know really. Sounds silly, but I don’t properly remember. He didn’t say a lot, I don’t think, he just sounded shocked, and, well, I was, too...’

‘Didn’t you arrange to meet? Surely you would have wanted to meet, to talk it all through properly?’

She nodded again. ‘We did want to, of course we did,’ she said. ‘But, well, Dad overheard my call, you see, and once he’d heard enough he just marched into my room, grabbed my phone and switched it off. I was at home studying for the mocks, like Robbie. I didn’t realize Dad was in the house. He’d come back from work because he’d forgotten something. I think he listened in deliberately. I knew he’d been suspicious; he’d kept asking me what was wrong with me. When he realized he went ballistic. He has such a temper on him, I thought he was going to hit me. He didn’t, though. He just said that was it. I was going to do what he said and what he wanted. And I was never to have anything to do with Robbie again.’ She paused.

‘But Robbie didn’t know any of that presumably?’

She shook her head.

‘No. I’m sure he would have tried to call me back, but I didn’t even have my phone. Dad took it from me.’

She turned away from me a bit as if she didn’t want me to see her face.

‘I keep thinking it must have been my fault that he... that he did what he did,’ she said. ‘Could learning I was pregnant really have upset him that much? Could it?’

‘No, no, I don’t believe it could,’ I told her honestly. ‘There had to be something more.’

‘I wanted to speak to him, honestly, to talk about what we were going to do; us, not my dad. I so wanted to see Robbie,’ she continued, almost as if not having heard what I’d said. ‘But Dad grounded me. I had no phone, no money, no nothing, and he told me if I stepped foot outside the front door, he’d throw me out for good...’

She stopped, seemingly unaware of the impact of her words.

Another light bulb lit up before me, almost as spectacularly as the previous one.

‘Sue, where did your father storm off to?’ I asked.

‘Well, I’m not sure, not really sure...’ she began.

‘I think you are, Sue,’ I said. ‘He went to see Robbie, didn’t he? The father of your child.’

She nodded.

‘Tell me, Sue, please tell me. Robbie is dead. Anything you know about what happened on the day of his death could be so important.’

She nodded again. ‘He told me he was going to see Robbie, yes, t-to sort him out, he said.’

I felt my whole body trembling. Could this be it? Could this be what lay behind my boy’s death? An angry dad berating the teenage father of his teenage daughter’s unborn child? Could that have been enough to tip my Robbie over the edge?

Sue started to weep extravagantly again, her shoulders heaving, her face blotchy and distorted. I wanted the rest of the story, but first I had to calm her down.

‘Hush,’ I murmured gently. ‘Hush. You must try to keep calm. You’re pregnant.’

It seemed I’d unwittingly said just the wrong thing. Sue jumped to her feet, screamed once piercingly, and then yelled at me through her tears.

‘Oh no, I’m not. No, I’m damned well not. Not any more. Dad saw to that.’

My jaw dropped. I was just wondering if I dare ask another question without sending her totally hysterical when the sitting-room door opened and in walked Michael Shaw with, I assumed, his wife.

Sue Shaw screamed once more then ran past her parents out of the room and up the stairs.

‘Leave me alone, just leave me alone,’ she yelled over her shoulder.

‘What the hell’s going on, woman?’ Michael Shaw asked me angrily. ‘What the hell are you doing in my house?’