When She Was Bad (35 page)

‘He’s had a good life,’ I tell her, still holding her hand. ‘He’s been loved.’

‘Then why this?’ she says, waving a hand towards the laptop, still open on the news report that bears a photograph of a man with features that mirror her own.

I shrug.

‘It could be anything. Maybe there was something personal between him and the victim and something just snapped or, I don’t know, he’d been smoking crack or something. My fear was always that if he suppressed memories without dealing with them properly, something could trigger if not the memories themselves, then at least the feelings he had from back then. Fear, anger, confusion.’

‘But who was she? The victim, I mean.’

‘She was his new boss, apparently. Barbara describes her as a bully. Says she managed people by pitting them against each other, praising some and punishing others so in the end there was no trust left and everyone suspected everyone else of conspiring against them. That might trigger someone like David.’

‘What is the British press saying? Surely the courts will be lenient, because of his history?’

‘The press can’t report details now until the trial starts. That’s the system they have over there.’

‘So we don’t know if he was provoked. It could have been self-defence. She sounds like a prize bitch. Maybe she was goading him. She could have been, right?’

My daughter is already jumping in to defend the brother she has only just discovered, and my heart aches remembering how she was at school, in the post-therapy years, when confronted with an underdog, with someone being bullied, how upset it made her, how strident on their behalf. Over-compensating? Maybe. And perhaps she’d have done the same even without the therapy. Perhaps left to her own devices she’d have rebelled against the patterns of behaviour learned in infancy anyway and grown from bully to defender of the weak. It’s always the way with children. They drag behind them the different versions of themselves so you’re never really sure which one is real, but you love them all just the same. I want to take her in my arms and make it go away. I want to take the burden of everything I’ve just told her about herself away, so she can’t lie awake in the dead early hours and wonder just who and what she is. I want to let her think that her little brother is still the victim, more sinned against than sinning. But she deserves the truth.

‘Sweetie, it was bad. What he did to her. It was real bad.’

44
Ewan

When he’d walked through the doorway off the kitchen and seen the narrow stairs plunging into the darkness below, with another door at the end, there had been a thudding in his head, as if someone was inside his skull, hammering to get out.

‘This way,’ she’d said.

And then the kitchen door had slammed itself shut behind them, blocking out the light, and now it was pitch black and the thudding in his head was so loud as they felt their way down the steps that his whole body was vibrating with it, as if he himself was the thing hammering to get out. His chest felt like it was about to explode, and his breath tore from him, ragged and far too loud. The air down here was different than it had been in the kitchen. Several degrees colder, damp.

‘The door handle should be somewhere around here.’ Rachel’s voice ahead of him sounded as if it were coming from a long way away.

And now, along with the pain and the lack of breath, there was another sensation building, building, building inside him. Terror.
Don’t open the door. Please don’t open the door.
He didn’t know what he was afraid of and the words stayed trapped inside him along with the fear.

‘Aha, here we are. I think you’ll love the basement.’

The door creaked open.

‘The light switch should be somewhere around here, don’t worry.’

Click.
The gloom ahead was lit up by a dim, yellowish light, reflecting off some sort of wet, rocky surface. Another memory flashed into his head.
Dark. So dark. Water running down rough walls. A smell of damp stone. Cold bones.
He didn’t know where the memory had come from. Only that it made him feel weak, like he was disappearing.

‘What do you think? Not bad, hey?’ Rachel was gesturing around the dimly lit room, which turned out to be some kind of gym. A rowing machine crouched in one corner black and low, next to a treadmill, its inbuilt screen now blank. There was a shoulder press and a spin cycle and a machine for working abs. In a normal situation he would have enjoyed checking them all out, but this wasn’t normal. He wasn’t normal. Another flash of memory.
Water. Damp. A hollowness in his tummy. Pain. Pain. Pain.

Rachel was bending over a black crate by the wall. When she straightened, she was carrying something in her hands.

‘What do you say?’ she asked. ‘Skipping contest?’

She held out the thing in her hands. She was carrying a rope.

‘Don’t,’ he said. Or perhaps he just thought about saying it, because she didn’t stop coming towards him, the rope wrapped around her hands. And he remembered something, or thought he did. Cords cutting into soft skin. A bare mattress. Longing to wrap his arms around himself, just so he could feel some human warmth.

And still she came.

She wanted to hurt him. Then she’d get the others to hurt him. That’s why she’d brought him down here alone. To this dark place that smelled of cold, and where the
plop plop plop
of water on stone was like a physical pain in his heart.

The anger came out of nowhere, arriving with such force that it was as if it had been gathering inside him for his whole life, just waiting to be unleashed.

Too late, Rachel realized that something had changed. He saw her expression go from challenging to uncertain and then to something else. Scared. She turned towards the door, but he grabbed her arm.

‘Leave me al—’ Her command was cut short by his right hand clamped over her mouth from behind.

Power surged through him, mixing with the fear and the anger and those weird memories he couldn’t place. He reached his left hand around to her neck and jerked her head back so her throat was stretched out. Then he ran his thumb up her windpipe, increasing the pressure each time. She hurt people, this woman. She’d hurt him before and she would do it again if he gave her the chance. More memories:
blows raining down on a body too small to resist. Not bothering to cry because what was the point?

Now Rachel was struggling, writhing around under his grip, trying to prise his hands away with her fingers. With each of her movements, more of his old self was dislodged, crumbling away like broken cement, leaving behind only the fury, the red-hot core of him. He grabbed one of her fingers in his. The snap of bone breaking was the sound of his molten rage crackling.

45
Anne

‘How bad?’

Shannon jumps to her feet, goes back to the laptop and begins scrolling through the news reports I have up on-screen. The British sub-judice laws mean the respected papers haven’t yet reported on the crime in detail, but no such scruples operate on the internet. The first time I’d read what Child D was supposed to have done, I had to run to the bathroom to vomit. Some of the more salacious descriptions are up on my screen and I look away so I don’t have to watch what reading them does to her face.

‘Oh my God!’ She has a hand clasped to her mouth and her eyes over the top are round like marbles.

‘Baby,’ I say. ‘It might not be as bad as it seems. She could have been dead before he even . . .’

But it is no good.

‘He cooked her?’

‘Shannon, honey, don’t believe everything you read there. It’s rumour. Unsubstantiated.’

‘Oh my God.’ She is reading from the screen. ‘
He tied her up, laid her on the top bench of the sauna and turned the heat up to maximum as if he was roasting a chicken.
’

She stays in her seat as if the sheer force of her horror is keeping her there.

‘Why didn’t the others come down? They were having a fucking meeting a floor up. Why did nobody come stop it?’

‘He’d locked the door,’ I say. ‘David – or Ewan as he’s now called – had locked the door. At first the others thought there was something . . . well, sexual going on, so no one did anything. And then there was some sort of distraction. One of the others had a kind of mini-breakdown – cut his own arm in a desperate cry for help. By the time they realized something was seriously wrong downstairs and called the police, it was too late.’

Shannon is still scouring the news report, and I wish she’d stop. There are horrible things written there. Details about blackened features and melted skin left behind on the sauna floor.

I stand up and head towards my daughter. Reaching over her shoulder, I gently close the lid of the laptop and then, finally, I put my arms around her. At first she resists and is stiff, and for a moment the old fear returns, that I won’t be able to get through to her, that she’ll never truly allow me to love her. But then a little noise escapes her, like the sound a baby makes before it starts to cry, and she turns to face me, her whole body sagging as if she can’t bear her own weight any more, and she collapses into me and I bury my face in her coconut-smelling hair, and we stay that way for a very long time.

46
Anne

The first surprise is how modern it is. I had been expecting dark Victorian brick, the colour of dried blood. But instead it is modern, bland even. Beige. Like the low-slung buildings on the industrial estates we passed on the train coming up here. Later we will discover there is another, older wing, a former hospital, vast and forbidding, but as we walk up the path, past neatly manicured lawns and in through the double doors, we might just as easily be going to get mortgage advice from some faceless finance company or do a wholesale deal for staple guns and other office supplies. Only the imposing metal gates we drove through in our taxi from the station, manned by an unsmiling guard and flanked by impossibly high fences topped with coils of razor wire, give away the true nature of the place.

‘Put your belongings in here, please.’

Even after two days in the UK, I can’t get used to the accent. Shannon and I have finally stopped digging each other in the ribs every time someone opens their mouth, but still those blunt vowels come as a shock. The woman behind the table has a different way of talking from the people we met in London, even though we’re only two hundred miles north-west of the capital. In the States that’s practically like visiting the next town, but here distance seems to matter more.

Shannon and I dutifully place our bags and coats in the plastic trays as if we’re going through airport security, except that this time they are stored in lockers instead of given back to us. Suddenly relieved of my outerwear, I feel bizarrely like I’m going to a party or a social function and have checked my coat in at the door. But then we are searched and patted and questioned, and then questioned again for over half an hour, and we fill in form after form and it no longer feels like a party but the worst journey ever, assailed by bureaucracy every step of the way, and a building sense of menace with every fresh signature.

Finally we are escorted down newly painted corridors with soft magnolia walls and pale-green doors. We could be in any respectable but anonymous motel. Except that from far away I can hear the desolate sound of a man crying. Shannon takes my hand. Presses it tightly, as if it is me who needs bolstering. I am shocked by the miracle of her. This strong, courageous woman. My daughter.

We are ushered into a visiting room. It has a low coffee table, four comfortable chairs and opaque blinds at the window that shut off the outside world.

‘Ewan will be along shortly,’ says our escort, a short, bearded man with thin greying hair greased back from his face, and eyes so close together they seem almost to be touching. He makes it sound as if we have just popped in for a cup of tea.

‘Oh God, I’m so nervous,’ says Shannon when the man has left us alone. ‘What if he hates me? He has every right to. I’m part of the reason he’s ended up here.’

‘Shannon, you were four years old,’ I remind her.

We’ve had this conversation so many times I dream about it in my sleep. Since making her momentous discovery five months ago, Shannon has read everything she can get her hands on about her family background, trying to understand. To my amazement and vast relief she has never blamed me for not telling her the full truth. She now admits that she always knew there was something very dark crouching in her past but she preferred not to confront it. She says she used to resent the way I encouraged her to talk about everything, the constant question, ‘How did that make you feel?’ Yet now she realizes why I did it. She remembers how, as a child, she used to have what she calls ‘blanks’. When something was too confusing or scary to cope with, she’d just check out of her own head and allow her body to go on to autopilot. By forcing her to relive those moments, analysing what was happening at the time, and why she was reacting the way she was, she gradually learned to anticipate the triggers and deal with them in a way that, she’s convinced, her little brother couldn’t.

‘He was frightened of everything when he first arrived,’ Sheila, Ewan’s adoptive mother, told us when we visited them yesterday morning at their neat, ordinary house on the outskirts of Coventry.

‘At first we worried that we’d taken on too much with him. I mean, we knew he’d had a difficult past. We knew there’d been abuse and neglect. We were prepared for that, or at least we thought we were. But we didn’t expect him to be scared of us. That came as a shock.’

‘So how long did it take him to settle in?’ Shannon asked and I knew she was itching to get to the bit where David was finally allowed to be happy.

‘It was a few weeks, I think, wasn’t it, love?’ Sheila turned to her husband, Neil, a heavyset man with a drinker’s deep-purple cheeks, who studied his hands the whole time we were visiting, as if he might find written there the answers he needed to know.