Daniel was standing at the front desk when the detective superintendent came up and took him by the elbow. He was a tall man, heavy set, with grey cropped hair and despairing hazel eyes.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, slapping Daniel on the shoulder. ‘We all feel it.’
‘M’all right,’ he said. His breaths were there in his throat, like butterflies. He coughed as they escaped him.
‘Are you a Geordie?’
Daniel nodded. ‘You?’
‘Hull. Can’t tell with you sometimes, yer accent’s got London through it, hasn’t it?’
‘Been here a while.’
Sergeant Turner said that Superintendent McCrum wanted to see Daniel. He was shown into the office, which was cramped and dark, the light of the day splashing down from a small window above.
‘Bit tense in there,’ said the Superintendent as he came into the room.
Daniel didn’t mean to sigh, but when McCrum heard it, he laughed quietly in acknowledgement.
‘All we go through, but still we’re not used to this.’
Daniel coughed and nodded. For the first time he felt an affinity with the man.
‘The hardest thing I ever had to do. Watch that poor woman when she saw that little ’un – murdered in that way. Hard … Do you have children, Daniel?’
He shook his head.
‘I have two. Doesn’t bloody bear thinkin’ about, does it?’
‘The situation …’
‘The situation has changed. We’re probably going to charge him with little Ben’s murder.’
‘On what grounds? From what I have—’
‘He was witnessed fighting Ben, and we found him dead the next morning. We now have an oral report from forensics confirming little Ben’s blood on Sebastian’s shoes and clothes that were taken from the house. We’ll be asking him about this over the next few hours. We’ll be applying to a magistrate for more time if we don’t get a confession by two. We got the warrant for the family home this morning and the forensics team are still there … Who knows what else they’ll throw up?’
‘What about the CCTV footage?’
‘We’re still going through it.’
4
Daniel got up in the morning, dressed and went downstairs. Minnie was not there and he hung around in the kitchen for a few moments wondering what to do. He had not really slept. He had not returned the china butterfly when he brushed his teeth. He had hidden it in the room. He had decided that he was never going to give it back. He wanted to keep it only because she wanted him to return it. He didn’t even know why he had picked it up, but now it had value to him.
‘There you are, pet. You hungry?’
She was dragging a pail of animal feed into the hall.
‘I’ll make us some porridge and then I’ll show you round. Show you your jobs. We all have jobs to do around here.’
Daniel frowned at her. She talked as if she had a large family, but it was only her and the animals.
Minnie made porridge and cleared a space on the table so they could eat. She made a strange sound when she was eating, as if she was breathing it in. After she swallowed, she would make a tutting sound in appreciation of the taste. The noise distracted Daniel and so she finished first.
‘There’s more if you want it, pet.’
Again, he said that he was full.
‘Fine then. Let’s go to it. You don’t have wellies, do you?’
He shook his head.
‘It’s all right, I have pretty much all sizes. Come on.’
Outside, she opened the shed and he stepped inside. It smelled of damp earth. Along one wall was a row of rubber boots, large and small, just as she had said. There were ten or twelve pairs in all. Some were baby-sized and then there was a pair of giant, man-sized, green wellington boots.
‘Are these all the kids you’ve taken in?’ he asked, as he tried a pair on.
‘And then some,’ she said, bending over to tidy up one or two that had fallen on their sides. When she bent over, her skirt rode up at the back to expose her white calves.
‘How long have you been fostering then?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, love. Must be more than ten years now.’
‘D’you get sad when the kids leave?’
‘Not if they’re going to happy places. One or two’ve got adopted by nice families.’
‘Sometimes you get to go back to yer mam, though …’
‘That’s right. Sometimes, if it’s for the best.’
His boots were a little too big, but they would do. He followed Minnie as she entered the chicken run and then the shed at the top. The inside smelled of pee. Birds clucked at his feet and he thought of kicking them away, as he did with pigeons in the park, but he stopped himself.
‘I look after Hector,’ she said. ‘He’s old and he can be a bit bad-tempered. I do him as soon as I get up. Your job is to feed the chickens and to look for eggs. It’s the most important job here.
Hector’s there just ’cause I love ’im, but I make money from the chickens. I’ll show you how to feed them and then we can look for eggs. It’s easy, you’ll catch on and then you can do that every morning before school. That’ll be your job.’
The run stretched back for fifty yards. Some of it was covered, but then the rest was open. Daniel watched her as she took handfuls of feed and sprinkled it along the run. She told him to try and so he copied her, scattering the feed.
‘That’s corn,’ she said. ‘The farmer two over gives it to me for a box of eggs. Not too much of it, mind. One or two handfuls is enough. They get the kitchen scraps and then there’s the grass and weeds that they like too. How many do we have here, do you think?’
‘ ’Bout forty,’ he said.
She turned and looked at Daniel in a strange way, her mouth open a little.
‘Well done, smarty-pants. We have thirty-nine. How could you tell that?’
‘Looks to be that many.’
‘All right, now while they’re busy eating, we go and look for the eggs. Take this …’ She handed Daniel a cardboard tray. ‘You can see where they’ve been sitting,’ she said. ‘See? Look, I got one here. Lovely big one that is.’
Daniel didn’t like the farm and her house, but he found that he liked this task. He felt a brisk thump of joy as he searched for and found the eggs. They were dirty, splattered with hen shit and stuck with feathers, but he liked the eggs. He didn’t want to break them, as he wanted to break the porcelain butterfly and kick the chickens. He kept one, secreting it inside his pocket. It was a small brown one, and he felt it still warm.
When they were finished, they counted the eggs. There were twenty-six. Minnie started to move about the yard, preparing Hector’s feed and talking to the chickens that clucked around her ankles. There was a fork against the wall and Daniel picked it up. It was almost too heavy for him, but he lifted it above his head like a weightlifter. It fell to the side.
‘Careful, love,’ she said.
Daniel bent and picked it up again. She was bent over, her massive skirted bottom in the air. Holding the fork near his head, he stepped forward and pricked her on the backside with it.