Broken (55 page)

But his father hadn’t adored her or his small son. He had given them grief, so much grief. He had attacked his lovely young wife. Beaten her. Abused his son. He had been like a dark cloud hanging over the household.

Robert would wait patiently outside the bedroom while she had her fun. He would listen to her laughing and joking, hear the noises from the men she had fun with. Then she would bring him into the still warm bed and hug and kiss him. She would squeeze him to her naked body and make him laugh. What he’d felt for her was adoration.

The man in the bath was whimpering now and Robert felt a moment’s guilt. He glanced at his watch. The water must be freezing. He’d lost over an hour again. It was happening more and more lately.

He helped the old man up and wrapped the emaciated body in a towel. At that point his father started shouting, pushing his son away, lost in his own world.

‘Bethany, you whore, where are you?’

Robert closed his eyes in distress. ‘Stop it, Dada!’

The old man looked at him, a cunning look in his eyes.

‘She was a whore - slept with everyone. My boss, my friends, everyone.’

Robert didn’t want to hear this.

‘She used my child, you know, in her games. Used him against me. Tried to make me accept what she did with threats of taking him from me.’

The voice was old, high-pitched now. Gone was the deep threatening bellow from Robert’s childhood. Gone was the strength that had accompanied it, too. He remembered running to his mother and wrapping his arms around her legs, to try and protect her from his father. He remembered her laughter as she would pick him up and sneer in her husband’s face.

‘No one could satisfy her, she was insatiable. Man after man she would have. One after the other, sometimes two or three in an afternoon. She was a whore. A whore who looked like an angel.’

The voice was quieter now, as if Dada was talking to himself, telling himself the story. Robert wiped a sweaty hand across his face. He was sick of listening to this. Since his father had gone senile he had dragged up all their old life. The life they had lived before his mother had left them to go off with the tall man, the one with thick black hair.

The man who, it turned out, had been a pimp.

The man who had wanted her to leave her small son with her husband. But he couldn’t cope with a child because his own grief at the loss of her was still too acute, still far too painful. He didn’t know what to do with the little boy who cried constantly for his mother. Who pushed him away with pudgy hands and refused to acknowledge him. The same child who constantly tried to get out of the house so he could search for the woman who had in effect abandoned him.

Robert relived the final dreadful scene again as he had every day of his life: Bethany, her face a mask of disgust as she looked at her husband.

‘Give him to me, Johnny. I’ll take him with me. He’ll soon adapt to another life.’

But his father had refused, even though Robert was fighting him, trying as hard as he could to tear himself from arms that gripped him like steel bands and run to his mother.

‘Take him off with your pimp, Beth? Take
my son
and bring him up in your filthy world? Never! Not while I have breath in my body.’

She was laughing then, lovely head thrown back, eyes bright.

‘OK, you have him. I can have more children if I want them. I can have anything I want from life. I’ve already proved that to you. Have him. Keep him. He’s yours.’

Robert had listened to this, stricken, and over the years he had rewritten it all to make his mother the heroine. He never saw his austere father as the man who was trying to protect him. He saw instead someone who was trying to take him from his mother - the only person to ever really love him. Living with his father and his grandmother, a woman who saw him as the fruits of sin, was a bleak existence. Gone were the hugs and the leisurely mornings in his mother’s warm bed, eating toast and having sips of tea. Gone were the afternoons rifling her make-up bag and waiting for her friends to leave. Gone were the intimate baths and the love she gathered round him like a warm moist cloak.

In its place was school, prayer, and a cold, cold house. Food was plain and lukewarm, breakfast a quiet solitary affair. And John Bateman was a broken man. A broken and bitter man who looked at his young son as if he couldn’t work out where the hell he had come from.

Robert’s natural ebullience died a slow death in their company. His mother became the focus of his existence; she grew into a beautiful and longed-for stranger.

He missed the way she used to light up his life. Forgot the times she’d left him alone to fend for himself or slept leaving him beside an unguarded fire. He forgot the times she didn’t feed him properly, plying him with sweets to keep him happy while she entertained the latest man friend. Forgot the times she slapped him - hard, stinging slaps - because he wasn’t quiet enough for her. He even forgot the times he had peeped at her, sprawled naked on the sofa as a strange man assaulted her roughly and without love. He would hear the groans and run in thinking she needed help.

Or thought he had forgotten. But these memories would assail him sometimes. He would wrestle them away, forcing himself to see something different.

He forgot the times his father had walked him to school, made sure he had pocket money, taken him on long and interesting bike rides. He had been determined not to love his father and it had worked.

He also forgot the times his grandma had taken him to church and watched him proudly as he made his First Communion, his Confirmation, or read the Gospel during Midnight Mass.

They had loved him but he had forced that love away in his quest to keep his mother’s memory alive.

Robert heard the knock on the front door. Put his father naked on the bed and placed the restraining straps on his arms.

The old man looked at him pitifully. His body was like that of a victim from a concentration camp. All ribs and bruises.

‘Don’t . . . please don’t leave me.’

The voice was thin, quavering with fear. He hated the cold so much. Sometimes Robert ignored him for days at a time. Then guilt would force its way through and he would go in and deluge the old man in care and attention. Until he wet the bed again or defecated while Robert was in the room with him. Then that temper would emerge, the violent temper that made his son into a demon of anger and hatred.

This had been the pattern of their life.

Walking down the stairs, Robert picked up his can of Apple Tree room spray and he sprayed it everywhere, savouring the smell.

Enjoying the memories it evoked of his mother, of her perfume.

When he saw Kate through the glass he put a smile on his face and answered the door.

‘Hello, dear. Come in. I was just dressing my father.’

He saw Golding and Jenny behind her and his expression altered. Without a word he walked back inside and through to the kitchen. He was putting the kettle on when they came to join him. Turning around and looking at Kate, he said gently, ‘You know, don’t you?’

She nodded.

‘I’m glad, to be honest. I don’t think I am very well really.’ He pointed to his temple. ‘I hurt, in here.’

Against her will Kate felt sorry for him then. He looked so harmless, so forlorn, that he engendered only pity in her heart at that moment.

‘Where are the children, Robert?’

He shrugged and turned to the small window that overlooked the garden. ‘They died. So I buried them.’

Kate closed her eyes.

‘Shall I make us all a nice coffee before we go?’ Robert offered brightly.

 

Patrick lay in bed, his eyes open and his mind alert. He was tired but otherwise he felt OK. He lifted his head from the pillow and waited until the dizziness had passed before sitting up carefully.

He caught his reflection in the mirror and surveyed himself dispassionately. He was greyer, thinner in the face, looked older. The image depressed him. He put one hand to his jaw and gently squeezed the loose skin. Then he relaxed back against the pillows, registering the fact that whatever he’d thought before, he was finally getting old.

He could remember being shot now. He remembered the fear, the noise and the humiliation he had experienced. He remembered that he had evacuated himself at the final moment, from fear that he was going to die in the street like an animal.

He closed his eyes to try and blot out the images. Felt the trembling begin once more in his hands.

He knew that emotionally it was going to take time to recover. Physically, he was already on the mend. He was strong, very strong. He had proved that by his incredible survival.

But he still broke out in a sweat if he remembered that day’s events. Still shook inside and out as he remembered the stinging sensation of the bullet hitting him. The terror that he was going to die without ever telling Kate he was sorry, or Willy that he’d always cared for him like a brother.

Patrick was aware for the first time ever of his own mortality and that was a frightening thing.

He closed his eyes and tried to picture Kate. He found that if he thought about her and her calmness, he relaxed. When she touched him he felt revived, happy inside. She gave him the constancy he needed. Had given him the feeling of security he craved from a relationship. He always felt complete when he was in her company.

From the first time he’d met her, when his daughter was missing and he was terrified to think what could have happened to her, Kate had been able to calm him. It was just part of her considerable charm.

The last few years had been the happiest of his life in many respects because in her company he had finally and irrevocably relaxed. No longer worrying about what he looked like or having to consider everything he said.

They had talked all the time, travelled together, loved each other. One thing he had realised early on: he needed her in order to be happy. Without her he was adrift and he knew it. Nearly losing her had finally made him realise that he had to prioritise his life. He had to put her first.

But that could only happen after he had sorted out his Russian friend.

He knew inside that until he had paid back Boris he would never feel anything even remotely like peace. He had to get his revenge on the Russian bastard who had put him in this hospital, though it could just as easily have been his coffin.

This was personal now.

Boris needed a real kick up the arse and Patrick Kelly was just the man to give it to him. Once he had taken him out of the ball game Patrick was going to retire.

He picked up the phone and dialled nine for an outside line. He was back on form and working. His recovery was nearly complete.

 

Robert seemed changed. It was as if the fact he’d been found out had broken the brittle thread that had held him together. Even his body seemed different. It was sluggish, looked fatter, deflated somehow. He stared into Kate’s eyes.

‘It was Bethany, see. I had finally seen Bethany.’

Kate nodded; she didn’t speak.

‘I loved her so much, I really did. She put the idea into my head.’

‘Who is Bethany?’ Jenny’s voice was soft.

Still looking at Kate he answered, ‘My mother.’

‘What had your mother to do with the children?’

He closed his eyes.

‘I saw those women . . . the way they treated their children. They were like her. They had all those lovely little boys and girls and didn’t want them any more. When they could dress them up and play with them, take them out and show them off, they were happy. Once the kids had a mind of their own, an opinion, the mothers didn’t want them.

‘But I guessed what they were doing with them, you see. It was Trevor who alerted me, displaying the classic behavioural symptoms of an abused child. Sharon Pallister even told me what had been going on. She was quite upfront about it. Didn’t care. Saw the child as a way of making money. I played at friendship, but I killed her in the end. I knew I would at some point, I just didn’t know when.’

He was talking in a sing-song voice.

‘It was all down to Barker, you see. He’d taken the mothers as children and had made them into what they were. I had no choice, I had to decide what to do. If I’d put those little kids back into the same system, they would have ended up being abused by everyone. It’s how it works. At first I just wanted to attract attention to them all. Try to frighten their abusers into stopping what they were doing.’

Jenny looked at him hard. ‘So you went into Regina’s house and you took her son and left him on top of a building you knew was about to be demolished?’

Robert nodded. ‘Oh, yes. I had keys to their houses, all my girls’ houses. They didn’t know that. I took them over the course of time, just in case I needed to have a look around when they weren’t in. I’ve often done it over the years with clients. Lots of social workers do.’

He was lying, trying to justify a small offence in the face of the greater ones. Kate was amazed that he should worry about a breach of his work ethic when he had been responsible for so much more.

But he wasn’t in the same world as everyone else. He was gone from them now.

‘I liked Regina, but Suzy got to her. She was on my agenda of things to do. I should have taken her out first, but I didn’t. Suzy took those children and dragged them through the same degradation that my mother wanted for me. You see, I saw Bethany in them all. I dressed as them - I’ve often dressed as a woman. Copied their clothes, their hairdos, their walks even. You see, I knew them better than anyone. I was all they had.’ ‘Where is Bethany now?’

Robert closed his eyes again and sighed, making a small wheezing sound from his chest. He was back in time, here in this house, looking forward to seeing his mother. He had cleaned the place from top to bottom and had made a beautiful meal. Chicken salad and minted new potatoes. A large raspberry roulade and a cheese platter.