I fought both those things. I fought them because I knew I had to rely, purely and simply, on my instinct as a mother.
‘Be strong,’ Ruth had said. ‘You’re a mother. You must be strong.’
And that was enough for me. I understood in that moment, on that morning, that being a mother had given Ruth a single silken strand, strong as a spider’s web, which had tethered her to her life. It was the string that had led her, time and time again, out of the enveloping and dangerous depths of the labyrinth that was her depression. It had prevented her from slipping fatally and completely away into the dark seductive folds of melancholia, and stopped her sinking into the drowsy escape of a terminal pill overdose, or seeking a tumbling, chaotic fall from a height, and its inevitable brutal, shattering end below.
It hadn’t stopped my own mother. She’d been overwhelmed by the love she felt, by the fear it made her feel. Her emotions had drowned her sanity; such was their power.
But I was different.
I knew my son was alive, and I knew where he was.
So you might wonder what I did.
I opened a drawer in my kitchen and looked over the contents. I chose a vegetable knife. Short and sharp, easy to conceal. I put it into one of the deep pockets of my coat, blade down, beside my phone. I put the keys I’d taken into the other. Then I left my home through the studio at the back, unseen by anybody, and I began to run.
JIM
Nicky Forbes was disturbed by my proximity. She shifted, tucking her legs under the table, away from me. Her body language was pure avoidance, but I was OK with that. I’d learned to be patient.
Woodley sat on the other side of her, keeping more distance, his posture relaxed. Good lad, I thought, he’d been listening.
We’d planned to use the Reid technique in the interview. It’s not very nice, but it’s very effective. It’s a well-known technique that makes use of a good-cop, bad-cop routine, so Woodley had a role to play. As well as being my foil, he would be my eyes. He would watch her for body language that would betray her.
Nicky Forbes folded her arms over her chest.
‘Are you finished?’ I said.
She flinched slightly, a small jerk of her head away from her hand, which held her cigarette just in front of her mouth, the smoke curling between us.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘here’s how I see it.’ I kept my voice gentle, but persistent, I wanted her to listen to every word I said.
‘I think what you went through as a child was a terrible thing. I think that when you lost your brother, when you lost Charlie, you never really recovered. Did you? Then you had to bring up Rachel and she was ungrateful, wasn’t she? She never knew how much you had to suffer, or thought about how hard it was for you to keep the secret about your parents and about Charlie.’
She took a deep pull on her cigarette, her eyes on mine. I went on.
‘So when Rachel had Ben that was difficult for you, wasn’t it? You had four daughters, but that’s not the same as having a son, is it? She didn’t know how lucky she was, because for you, having a son would be like having Charlie back.
‘So I think you didn’t have a choice. I think you thought that Rachel was bad for Ben. You reckoned that she couldn’t look after him as well as you. She’s divorced after all, bearing a grudge against her husband and his new wife. That’s not a happy home. And Ben’s been unhappy in the past year; we know that from his teacher. That must have pained you. In fact I think it was really hard for you to bear.’
She gave a small, brusque shake of her head, then she ground the cigarette out in the ashtray, crossed her arms.
‘Four children is a lot, and all girls too. Were you hoping for a son, Nicky? Is that why you wanted to try for another baby this year? Your husband told me. Has it been all about replacing Charlie?’
Her eyes began to glisten with tears, but she didn’t move a muscle. I didn’t draw breath. You mustn’t, because if you do it gives them a chance to deny things, and that can make them stronger, just the act of saying it. You have to carry them on your narrative until they finish it for you, and hand you the ending you’re waiting for.
I inched my chair just a little closer to hers. Her head bowed. I leaned forward, put my elbows on my knees, and looked up at her.
‘You see, I think it was just too much for you in the end. That Rachel had Ben. You knew you could do a better job than her and you wanted a son of your own.’
She shuddered.
‘I know what it’s like to want to protect,’ I said. ‘I can understand why you did it. You’d left your own family; you didn’t want them. You wanted him. And you wanted him for the right reasons. It was a mother’s instinct, a proper mother’s instinct, wasn’t it? You knew you could do a better job than your sister.’
She covered her face with her hands, let out a moan.
I wondered if she was going to break quicker than I thought.
I could almost smell it.
RACHEL
It took me twenty-five minutes to get back there.
I stood in front of Miss May’s house, panting and soaked to the skin. The only dry parts of me were the depths of my pockets where my fingers nestled around the handle of the knife and the hard edges of the keys.
The street was empty and in front of me the slate sky was reflected in polished windowpanes that were speckled with rain, and the black wrought iron railings separating the house from the pavement looked sharp and forbidding.
I approached the house and looked at the names and buzzers beside the front door. None of them read ‘May’. I peered over the wrought iron railings that enclosed a dank courtyard at least twelve feet below ground level.
It was worth a try.
I took the steps down one at a time, slowly, stone treads slick and treacherous. The doorbell wasn’t named. I rang it. No answer.
I got out her keys and tried the Chubb key in the deadlock. It turned smoothly. In went the Yale key too, soft click, and I had to give the door a bit of a shove but it opened and I saw a dark hallway ahead, daring me to step into it.
‘Hello?’ I called. It wasn’t too late to pretend I was just returning the keys, but there was no answer.
‘Ben?’ I called. Nothing. I felt almost disabled by fear, but I forced myself to walk down the dark, narrow corridor. Filtered daylight beckoned me from the other end.
I glanced through an open door on my left. It was a bathroom, and it was immaculate: fixtures gleaming, expensive looking toiletries in a neat row. The door opposite showed me her bedroom. On the bed was a suitcase, lid open, neatly packed.
At the end of the corridor I found her living space. It was large and rectangular, the full width of the back of the house. There was a compact, neat kitchen area and small dining table at one end of it, a sitting area at the other. The room had stripped wooden floorboards and three wide, pretty windows with wooden shutters folded back, sills low and wide enough to sit on. The outside space it overlooked was little more than a light well, but there were pretty furnishings and the whole effect was of artful good taste. It was a flat I might have been envious of under different circumstances.
Standing in the centre of the room, I saw myself reflected in a mirror over the mantelpiece. I looked white as a ghost. My hair, blackened by rain, hung in damp hanks around my face, and patches under my eyes were as dark as storm clouds. My skin looked slack and undernourished, and the injury on my forehead was healed, but prominent. My eyes were darting with fear and something else as welclass="underline" there was desperation in them, and a glint of wildness.
I looked completely mad.
Doubt coursed through me.
This is what a total breakdown must be, I thought. You find yourself standing somewhere you shouldn’t be, doing something so out of character that you wonder if you’ve become somebody else entirely. You’ve lost the plot, taken a wrong turning, jumped onto a train whose destination is total lunacy.