When She Was Bad (17 page)

Will whispered to the red-faced woman in charge of the sales and marketing team and then put his hand up, signalling for attention.

‘Right, guys. First off we have the obstacle race, but we don’t want you to just run through the course as you are, because that would be boring, right? So we’re going to sex things up a little bit. What we want first is for you to get into pairs within your teams.’

Sarah felt a stab of remembered trauma, a legacy from schooldays when it was social suicide to be the one singleton who had to pair up with the teacher. She grabbed Charlie.

‘Quick, for God’s sake be my partner before I have to cosy up to Mark Hamilton.’

They looked around. Amira had paired up with Chloe, Rachel with Ewan, leaving poor Paula standing alone attempting a ‘good sport’ smile.

‘Looks like it’s you and me,’ Mark Hamilton told her, trying his best to sound as if this was a delightful outcome.

‘Right,’ yelled the red-faced woman in an unmistakable Antipodean accent. ‘I haven’t introduced myself to everyone yet. My name is Yvette and I’m in charge of this bunch of reprobates.’ Cue a dutiful cheer from sales and marketing. ‘The aim of this exercise we’re about to do is to engender a sense of cooperation. Working together.’

‘Thanks so much for explaining what cooperation means,’ whispered Charlie.

‘So, one member of each team is going to complete the course while the other one shouts instructions from the side, but the complication is that the person doing the course is blindfolded.’

‘Bloindfolded,’ parroted Charlie in her ear.

‘Well, baggsy you’re the one being bloindfolded. There’s no way I’m doing that.’

‘Oh come on, Sarah. You know how crap I am at any kind of physical activity. Remember when we tried to do Ooops Upside Your Head at the Christmas party?’

‘Yes, but that was after ten pints of wine. You’re doing it, Charlie. I’m not even going to discuss it.’

Something in her voice, some edge of desperation perhaps, stopped him, mouth open ready to protest.

The race seemed never-ending. They had to take it in turns to compete, a pair from each team racing against each other. By the time Sarah and Charlie were up, second from last, their team was trailing by one to two. Amira and Chloe had won their race – just – while Paula’s reluctance to raise her voice to the company boss meant Mark Hamilton had spent a lot of time gazing blindly around, shouting, ‘Where now?’ into the ether.

‘If that wig feels slippery to the touch, it’s not going anywhere near my head,’ Charlie warned Sarah. ‘Just think of all those sweaty skulls that have already been in it.’

They were pitted against a duo of twenty-somethings from Sales and Marketing who delighted in playing to the crowd, making exaggerated limbering-up moves at the starting line and then the blindfolded one staggering about like Frankenstein’s monster while his partner cracked an imaginary whip behind his back.

‘Please God let this be over quickly,’ said Charlie as Will tied the blindfold tightly over his eyes.

‘You OK?’ Will asked, catching sight of the plaster on Charlie’s arm. ‘That looks nasty.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Charlie. ‘Extreme tin-opening injury.’

Ewan was jumping up and down on the balls of his feet.

‘There’s still time to catch up,’ he said urgently. ‘Just hold them off for this one and then Rachel and I will smash it in the next round.’

As soon as the whistle went, their opponents dropped the comedy act and revealed their competitive side.

‘Forward, forward. Hit the floor! Wriggle, wriggle, faster. Come on!’

By the time they were at the second stage – the hoops – Charlie was still attempting to find the entrance to the net tunnel.

‘Left a bit. No, sorry, I meant right.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’

‘Give me a break.’

Sarah heard the muttering but didn’t dare turn round to see who was talking. The woman in the sales team put her foot out of the hoop formation and had to go back to the beginning.

‘Go, Charlie! This is your chance! Take her!’

That was unmistakably Rachel’s voice. High-pitched and reed-thin.

Finally Charlie was out of the netting and negotiating the hoops, at which he was surprisingly adept. Come to think of it, he had very small feet for a man, which probably helped.

By the time they’d been over the climbing thing, Charlie was neck and neck with his rival. Almost against her will, Sarah found herself getting drawn into the drama of the whole thing, her voice rising as she tried to navigate Charlie towards the fancy dress. ‘Forward, forward. No – too far! Left a bit . . . a bit more. Right, pick up! PICK UP!’

Poor Charlie lumbered to a stop and swooped down on a pair of discarded sailor’s trousers.

‘On! On! On!’ came the chant from behind Sarah.

Charlie dutifully flailed around to find the opening, only instead of stepping into them, he put them over his head, clearly imagining them to be some sort of sweater or jacket instead.

‘Aargh. Ghmph,’ he said from inside his polyester prison.

Sarah felt the adrenaline mixing with her heightened nerves and lack of sleep. She started laughing. He was so funny, staggering around with a pair of trousers on his head. Then she found she couldn’t stop.

‘Tell him what to do!’ yelled Ewan.

But Sarah couldn’t speak. Tears were running down her face as she convulsed with laughter. The giggling from behind her subsided as the sales’ team candidate started pulling on her fancy dress costume at a rate of knots and now there came irritated entreaties to ‘get a grip’. Still she couldn’t stop laughing, or perhaps she was crying. Charlie was trying to get the trousers off but his head had become stuck in one of the legs. Her knees suddenly wobbly, Sarah sat down on the damp grass. She heard Rachel say, ‘Bloody brilliant,’ in a voice that dripped with disgust as the sales woman stormed across the finish line to resounding cheers from her team.

‘Classic,’ said Amira in Sarah’s ear, but even she sounded like she was biting back disappointment.

‘Never mind, guys. Good effort,’ said Will brightly. ‘Remember, we’re all on the same side so let’s pull together. It’s all a bit of fun. Rachel and Ewan, you’re up next.’

‘Yes, but we can’t win,’ said Rachel, mock-pouting for Will’s benefit.

‘You’re all winners to me,’ he replied.

‘Fuckwit,’ said Charlie, flinging himself down next to Sarah. He looked puce-faced and flustered, his hair sticking to his forehead in damp curls. ‘If I catch an STA from those trousers, I’m going to sue.’

‘Everyone seems to be taking it very seriously,’ whispered Sarah. Now she’d calmed down, the nauseous feeling was back, clogging up her throat like something she’d accidentally swallowed and couldn’t cough back up. She thought about her boys and wondered what they were doing right this moment.

Ewan and Rachel predictably won their race, with Rachel doing the actions and Ewan bellowing commands from the sideline, his limbs in perpetual motion as if he could remotely propel her to victory. Chloe had turned her back on them to chat to Will. From the way her head was cocked to one side and the toe of one trainer was tracing a pattern in the grass, Sarah surmised there was some high-level flirting going on. Well, good luck to her. Rejection was a bitch. Sarah could still remember on her wedding day that sudden rush of relief that she never again had to go on a shitty date, never again had to feel the hot shame of having allowed herself to fall in love only to realize she’d read it all wrong. She thought about Oliver and the way he’d looked when he turned around and saw her coming down the aisle of the church, the gratitude in his face, and for a horrible moment she thought she might start crying again. Love was so tricky, with all its layers and pockets where things could get lost or tucked away so tightly you forgot they were even there.

‘They may have won the battle, but we can still win the war,’ said Will, when everyone was assembled again. ‘Am I right?’

‘Yesss!’ yelled Chloe, her voice tailing off when she realized she was the only one.

‘We were going to mix it up a bit here with an indoors activity, but the forecast is for rain later on, so we’ll carry on out here while we’re still all so pumped up.’

Sarah’s spirits, which had momentarily lifted when he’d mentioned the word ‘indoors’, came slamming down again. As they followed Will around the side of the hotel and down a sloping lawn towards a field at the bottom hidden by a hedge of tall trees, Sarah watched his broad shoulders and his easy swagger and wondered if her boys would grow up like this, so completely at home in their own skin, so uncomplicatedly happy to be themselves. Or might she in fact prefer them to be challenging and spiky, all dark depths and deep hollows?

So engrossed was she in her ruminations that Sarah failed to give a thought to what the next activity might be until they were through the gap in the hedge. She stopped in her tracks.

‘Now I know it might look daunting, but believe me, it’s not once you get up there.’

Will was grinning as if his saying it should be enough to put their minds at rest. But nothing he could say would make it better. Sarah gazed at the structure: two towers at least ten metres tall and forty metres apart, connected by a wire with ropes to hold on to on either side.

‘Don’t look so horrified – it’s Sarah, isn’t it?’ Will switched his smile in her direction as if he was adjusting the beam of an anglepoise lamp. ‘It’s really fine. And this one’s not a competition. The other team are off doing their own thing. This is all about working together. So you’ll all be wearing harnesses and be tied together with ropes so you’ll have each other’s backs. Literally. The idea is for the whole team to make it from one tower to the other. You’ll be working together with the stronger ones helping the weaker ones across, because if one goes, you all go . . . Only kidding. No one is going to go because you’re all attached also to the top wire.’

Sarah glanced across at Charlie who was muttering something under his breath. It wasn’t a prayer.

‘I can’t do this,’ she hissed at him.

He shrugged and shook his head.

‘No choice, babe,’ Amira whispered. ‘Anyway, I think it might actually be quite fun. There’s no real danger.’

‘No,’ Sarah said, her voice wobbling. ‘You don’t understand . . .’

‘Now, before we start, I just need to run through some health and safety stuff. Yawn, yawn, right?’

Mark Hamilton, who’d been staring nervously up at the climbing structure, gave a weak smile. ‘Bane of my life,’ he said.

‘So,’ Will continued, ‘I just need to make sure none of you are epileptic, diabetic, pregnant, have a heart condition or breathing problems, blah, blah, blah.’

‘Nope,’ said Rachel. ‘I checked all that in the personnel files to make sure we were all good to go.’

‘Cool,’ said Will. ‘Well, if you’ll just step this way, Katie here will give out the forms you have to sign for the insurance company to say I’ve told you the risks so if you all drop dead of heart attacks it’s not my fault. Then we’ll get you all rigged up.’

A young girl who’d just joined them raised a limp hand. She didn’t look old enough to have left school, let alone work for the same corporate events company as Will. She didn’t look old enough to be out of school, quite frankly. Maybe she was on work experience or something. Normally Sarah would have made a joke of it to Charlie but she couldn’t bring herself to speak. Her heart was hammering against her ribs as she took the form from the girl’s outstretched hand and waited for the one pen to make its way around. Her hand hovered over the paper.

‘I can’t,’ she croaked.

‘Course you can,’ said Rachel. She had that smile on but behind it her voice was snappy, as if it was on a spring-hinge, the words rat-a-tatting out.

‘There’s always someone who’s reluctant at first,’ said Will. ‘But you know I haven’t had one single group where, when we finish, everyone doesn’t say, “I’m so glad I did that.”’

Sarah could feel one of her legs shaking as if it had gone into spasm.

‘No, I can’t.’

‘Oh, come on.’ Even Charlie was losing patience. ‘The sooner we do it, the sooner we can get to the bar for a stiff drink. Look, Paula’s signed it.’

Paula nodded. She looked pale, but determined. Sarah saw her glance over at Mark Hamilton and wondered if she was trying to impress him, and if so, was it because he was her boss, or whether in some weird, unfathomable way she might actually fancy him. But the distraction was fleeting. Her attention was once again drawn to the tower she’d be expected to climb, and that wire running from it to the next one. From this angle it looked finer than cotton thread.

‘Stop overthinking it,’ said Will gently. ‘It’s OK to be scared.’

‘I’m not scared,’ said Sarah, and to her horror she began once again to cry. ‘I’m pregnant.’

24
Anne

The visit to the Egans’ family home changed the dynamic between Ed Kowalsky and me. You might expect such a shared experience to bring us closer together, but in fact the opposite was true. It was as if we’d both participated in something shameful so that, once back in our own world, we couldn’t quite meet each other’s eyes. What we’d witnessed downstairs in that basement made us somehow complicit and we avoided talking about it as much as we could. For the first time since we’d started working together I began to wish Ed had picked someone else to help him with the assessment.

I knew this case was still my ticket to a different life. But in my weaker moments, lying awake trying to summon up sleep, when images of that pulley and hook would roll backwards and forwards across my mind, I’d find myself longing to go back in time to before we set foot in that house, before I even heard of Child L. Let someone else have the glory – and the nightmares.

We knew from the police and child welfare reports that Laurie had been actively involved in both the feeding of and the punishment of her brother, but we had no idea to what extent she’d been forced into these chores, or whether indeed she just considered them to be a normal part of life.

Laurie’s parents were being kept in separate jails on different sides of town. When Ed first told me Noelle Egan had agreed to see us, I felt utterly conflicted. Professional curiosity made me thankful for the opportunity to get up close to a woman who had dissociated herself so completely from one child while retaining a maternal connection to a second. But another part of me kept remembering that dank basement that smelled like something had died in it, and the hook on the end of the rope, and the hand sanitizer on the way out. The media called her a monster and while I didn’t believe in monsters, I obviously had an issue with mothers.