Хилари Боннер - The Cruellest Game

‘Come in, you stupid creature,’ I called.

But Florrie, every muscle quivering, was now sitting bolt upright by the paddock gate looking at the old stables and whimpering. She was behaving very strangely.

‘Oh, all right,’ I capitulated. ‘You win as usual.’

I walked across the lawn, shivering as I’d already removed my coat, and pushed the gate ajar a foot or two. As I approached the stables I thought I could hear something too, a faint crying sound, but pretty much dismissed it as my imagination.

I pulled open the stable door, which took quite a lot of strength as it was one of the few things in and around Highrise that Robert had never bothered to keep in repair. Indeed, he’d been planning to knock the dilapidated old building down and replace it with a summerhouse and perhaps a barbecue area, as it stood in a corner of the paddock that caught the last of the evening sun setting over the moors.

‘We could make a sort of secret garden,’ he’d said, eyes alight with enthusiasm. I’d loved the idea. Not least because, although the term meant nothing to Robert who, like his son, was no reader, The Secret Garden , Frances Hodgson Burnett’s tale of rebirth and healing in a beautiful forgotten place, had been one of my favourite books since childhood.

I shook myself. Those memories of a life I knew to be lost for ever just would not stay away. And they did me no good at all. I made myself turn my attention to the matter in hand.

As I stepped into the old stable everything seemed as normal. Inside, there was a defunct lawnmower Robert had said he would try to repair one of these days so that we had a spare, a few other bits of broken machinery, some leftover Delabole slate from when he had made the terrace at the front of the house, some timber left over from the gazebo, and a pile of fairly large pieces of oak, yet to be chopped into burnable size and transported to the log store nearer the house. They were the remains of an old tree, struck by lightning, which Robert had acquired from a neighbouring farmer after offering to pay to have it felled and taken away.

Florrie ran straight behind the oak pile, still whimpering, her tail wagging furiously. I followed her, and as I did so became quite sure that I could hear the faint sounds of some kind of living creature. I proceeded cautiously, afraid of what I might find.

If there was a wild animal in the stable, it must be injured or trapped or it would not have remained there as I approached. And a frightened wounded fox, or perhaps a badger, could be dangerous.

I tried to prepare myself. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the shock of what I was about to discover behind that woodpile. I stood frozen to the spot for several seconds, unable to believe my own eyes.

A small child, bound hand and foot and apparently barely conscious, lay naked on a piece of soiled blanket.

Time stood still for a moment. I doubt it was more than a second or two before I ran to the child. But it felt longer.

I crouched down, registering that this was a little boy. He was whimpering pathetically, his pinched bloodless face stained with grubby tears. Automatically I began to make soothing noises.

‘You’re all right now, I’ll look after you, we’ll soon get you back to your mummy,’ I said.

But when I touched him I realized he might be far from all right. The child was freezing cold, and I wondered if it was the extreme cold that had rendered him half conscious. His eyes were open but he did not seem to be focusing on anything nor able to comprehend, or perhaps even hear, what I was saying.

I tugged at the binding cord tying his hands and feet together. It was securely knotted and I could not budge it without a knife or a pair of scissors. I looked around the stable. In spite of being half full of bits of old machinery there seemed to be nothing that I could use to free the cord, not without further harming the child.

I would have to carry him into the house before releasing his bonds. I knew I should get him into the warm as quickly as possible because he must surely be suffering from hypothermia.

Wishing I hadn’t removed my Barbour in the kitchen, I took off my sweater, wrapped it round him as best I could, picked him up carefully, and pushed myself upright, holding the child close to my body and still muttering soothing remarks to him, even though I feared they were a waste of time.

Florrie kept brushing herself against my legs. I should have been telling her she was a good girl; instead I shooed her away. I was quite frantic. Where on earth had this child come from, and what was he doing lying naked in my stable?

Something else occurred to me. Perhaps the person who had so wickedly dumped this poor little boy there, naked, bound hand and foot, and quite possibly left to die in the cold, was still hiding in the stable or nearby.

I held the boy even more tightly. There seemed to be no sign of any other human presence, and certainly Florrie was giving no indication of such.

I decided not to stick around to find out. Clutching the boy to my upper body, I ran out of the stable without bothering to close the broken door behind me, and through the paddock gate into the garden.

As I ran another thought occurred to me. A thoroughly obvious one. The little boy must surely be the child who had been abducted from his Exeter garden. Little Luke Macintyre. The child half the county was searching for.

I tore across the lawn, barely looking from left to right in my haste to reach the warmth and safety of the house. It could have been that the heat from my flesh, largely in contact with his, as I was now wearing only a bra over the upper part of my body, partially revived the boy because he seemed to regain a degree of consciousness. He began to cry.

As I struggled to hold him more comfortably while still running for the back door, Florrie began to bark again. I glanced at her, and then in the direction in which she set off at a gallop.

Two uniformed figures had appeared at the side entrance to the garden. PC Jacobs and PC Bickerton, their faces displaying a mixture of horror and astonishment beneath their peaked caps, were peering over the top of the gate.

I could only imagine what the scene confronting them must have looked like. A dishevelled woman, half naked from the waist up, clutching a naked child, limbs bound with binder cord. I stopped in my tracks and opened my mouth to speak. No sound came.

PC Jacobs was the first of the three of us to find his voice.

‘Open this gate, Mrs Anderson,’ he commanded. ‘And give me that child.’

Meekly I did what he said. I hurried to the gate, turned the knob on the Yale with one hand while still holding the child in my other arm, and handed the boy over.

It was actually PC Bickerton who took the child.

‘You see to her,’ he said to Jacobs, referring presumably to me. ‘We need to get this child into the warm straight away.’

Jacobs clamped a hand on my shoulder, digging his fingers into my flesh, as if restraining me, as if he expected me to run away. As if I had anywhere to run to. Didn’t he realize, I wondered obliquely, that if I’d had anywhere to run to I would have done so already, right after finding my poor dead son, right after discovering that my husband was not the man I’d thought him to be?

I cowered before Jacobs. I was weak with shock and the cold was getting to me too.

My sweater had fallen on the grass just a few feet away. Jacobs half dragged me over to it, bent down, picked it up and handed it to me.

‘Cover yourself up,’ he ordered gruffly. I did so with pathetic gratitude.

Then still keeping his hand on my shoulder, he steered me into the house through the kitchen door, following in the footsteps of PC Bickerton who had already wrapped the little boy in some towels and my discarded Barbour and placed him on the armchair by the Aga. Bickerton was now calling for backup and the ambulance service on his radio.