Mrs Croll began to weep silently. Her shoulders shook and she pinched her nose with the tissue. Her voice was deeper when she spoke again.
‘Ben was in thrall to Sebastian, I suppose. He was the stronger, older boy. He hadn’t played with Sebastian for months and I just didn’t think. Now, it … it seems obvious.’
‘What happened after you called the hospital and the police?’
‘My husband came home. The police were fantastic. I didn’t expect them to do anything so soon, but they were right there taking details, and they helped us to look around the area and put out a description of Ben.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Stokes,’ said Gordon Jones.
Irene Clarke stood up. Daniel watched her as she smiled encouragingly and folded her hands on the lectern. She was sombre, almost penitent before Mrs Stokes.
‘Mrs Stokes, I am sorry for the great tragedy that you and your family have experienced. I only want to ask you a few brief questions. Please take your time.’
Madeline gave a small strangled cough, and nodded.
‘Had your son ever disappeared for a long period of time before?’
‘No.’
‘You said that there was a time when he played regularly with Sebastian. On any of these occasions did the boys wander outside their normal play area or go missing for any period?’
Mrs Stokes coughed and appeared to have some trouble regaining composure.
‘Mrs Stokes?’
‘No.’
‘And is it not the case that until you knew that your neighbour’s child had been arrested you did not suspect that Sebastian could have been involved in your son’s disappearance?’
Madeline looked up into the corners of the court. Fraught in the witness box, she seemed exalted, and the room a hallowed space. Tears streamed silently down her cheeks.
‘I didn’t think of him,’ she said quietly.
‘You testified that you had to stop Ben seeing Sebastian. Is it then true that Ben enjoyed playing with Sebastian?’
‘No, he was a bully, he was …’ Mrs Stokes’s fingers tightened on the lip of the witness box.
‘You didn’t like Sebastian, Mrs Stokes, that much is apparent, but did your son not ask to play with him? You described him as being in thrall to Sebastian. Was it not the case that, despite your disapproval, Ben and Sebastian were actually friends who enjoyed each other’s company?’
Mrs Stokes blew her nose and took small breaths. The judge asked if she wanted a glass of water. She shook her head and looked up at Irene.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Stokes,’ said Irene, ‘I know this is very hard. Was this not the case?’
Madeline sighed and nodded.
‘Mrs Stokes, can I ask you to speak your answers out loud?’
‘Maybe they were friends.’
Irene glanced at Daniel and then sat down. She could have gone further, he knew, but the jury were tense with sympathy for the young boy’s mother. This too Daniel respected about Irene; she could turn a witness when she had to, but she always remained kind.
The breaks were regular because of rules put in place since the Bulger trial. Daniel went to the gents as soon as court adjourned. He felt heavy and tired. His heels sounded on the marble floors. The gents were familiar to him, with their blue walls and gold taps, but they smelled of ingrained urine and futile bleach.
There was a free urinal in the far corner. Daniel exhaled as he urinated into its white porcelain.
‘All right, Danny?’
It was Detective Superintendent McCrum. His shoulder nudged Daniel’s slightly as he unzipped.
‘Sometimes you wonder …’ McCrum said, his northern accent strangely warm and welcome in the cold Victorian toilet, ‘is there no other way? I can see this trial is going to be barbaric. It’s wrong to put them through all this.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Daniel. He shook and zipped and began to wash his hands. He didn’t know how Sebastian would cope with the long days ahead and the worst still to come. ‘And we’ve only just started …’
‘I know – that poor woman,’ said McCrum.
Daniel turned away. He left without saying another word, nodding at McCrum slightly as he passed. The older man watched him go.
22
One year folded into the next like furrows of tilled earth. Minnie got the back windows fixed after the chickens pecked out all the putty. Some slates came off the roof in the wind and there was a leak which dripped slowly into a bucket on the stairs when it rained. She didn’t have the money to fix it and it went on for over a year. It was Daniel’s job to empty the bucket in the morning.
Minnie’s goat, Hector, died during Daniel’s third winter at Brampton, but the following spring she bought a nanny goat and two kids to replace him. Daniel was allowed to do the morning milking: creaming her udders and then milking her patiently, methodically. Minnie taught him how. They made a new pen for the goats and a special milking area that the other animals could not access. Minnie told Daniel that the milking area had to be kept very clean. At night they would separate kids from nanny, to allow her udders to swell. The nanny goat was called Barbara, and Daniel named the kids Brock and Liam after Newcastle United football players, although they were both female.
At night, after his bath and his homework, he would play backgammon with Minnie as she swilled her gin and he sucked chocolate éclairs. She would marvel at his ability to count without tapping the numbers on the board. Or sometimes it would be cards: knockout whist or pontoon. She would play records while they played: Elvis and Ray Charles and Bobby Darren. Daniel would shimmy his shoulders as he sliced his cards down on to the table, and she would raise her eyebrows at him and toss a crisp at Blitz.
Daniel was thirteen years old and in the first year at the William Howard Secondary School on the Longtown Road. He was captain of the football team and had won two gold medals for long-distance running, but he was still smaller and thinner than the other boys in his class. He would start his GCSEs next year. He was good at English, history and chemistry. There was a girl called Carol-Ann who was a year older than he was and she sometimes came to his house after school. She was a tomboy and he taught her how to do keepy-uppies with the football and how to look after the animals. Minnie would have her for tea if her mum was working late. Carol-Ann wasn’t his girlfriend or anything, although he had seen her breasts when her bra came off while they were swimming in the Irving River last summer.
Daniel was popular at school. He had friends because of football and he hardly got into any fights any more. But apart from Carol-Ann, no one came often to the farm. Danny was asked to birthday parties and went along to all the school dos. He had a group of friends he hung about with at school, mainly from the football, but there was no one he played with regularly after school and no friend’s home he visited more than a few times a year. After school, if there wasn’t a game or a party, he would be home with Minnie, working with the animals, picking herbs for dinner, scrubbing potatoes or kicking cans for Blitz in the back yard. And then there would be dinner and games and gin and music. Year in, year out. It was the symmetry of the days, the thankful realisation of expectation, the structure of it all. It made Daniel feel safe.
He learned how to hope. His desires had to be clipped to fit the confines of her home, like the chickens’ wings she snipped in order that they didn’t flee, but anything he could wish for in that house, Minnie gave to him.