From the Cradle (18 page)

Two hours later, Patrick stormed out of the interview room, slamming the door behind him. He went straight to the incident room, shoulder-barging the door, taking off his jacket and flinging it across the room. He picked up an empty coffee cup and chucked it against the wall, then kicked it as hard as he could.

He punched the wall.

‘Fuck!’ He yelled out with pain and frustration and fury. He whirled round and saw the three children staring at him from the wall, talking to him with their big, beautiful eyes. Frankie’s in particular seemed to be calling to him.

Help. I’m scared.

He was letting them all down. All of them, and their families. The whole community, the people he was meant to serve, meant to protect. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to the pictures on the wall. ‘I’m so sorry.’

The door opened and Suzanne came in, eyes wide.

‘Patrick, what’s wrong? I heard a commotion coming from in here.’ She saw his face. ‘Oh, please tell me Breem isn’t another de
ad end.’

He sat on a folding chair and sank his face into his hands. When he eventually lifted his head he said, ‘She has an alibi. She took great pleasure in telling us where she was when Liam was abducted. She was at work, in the factory, standing beside that conveyor belt all day with ten other women.’

‘You’ve called to check?’

He nodded wretchedly. ‘And we checked Mike’s theory, that maybe she was scouting out kids for the old family lodger, McLean. Turns out he died of cancer two years ago.’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘We’re back at square one.’ His gaze turned towards the photos of the children again. ‘Maybe I’m not the right man for this job. Maybe I shouldn’t be leading the investigation. I’m tired. So fucking tired after everything that’s happened in the last couple of years.’

Suzanne pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. ‘Patrick—’

‘Perhaps you should let Winkler take over. He’s gagging to.’

She put her hand on his forearm. It was warm. ‘No, Patrick. Don’t be so hard on yourself. You just need a break.’

‘Yeah, a long bloody holiday, preferably somewhere tropical . . .’

She smiled. ‘I don’t mean that kind of break, you idiot. I mean a break in the case. Some luck. Listen, we’ve got the photofit now, which we didn’t have this morning. We’ll go back over the lists from the Dads’ Club. We’ll talk to the travellers again. Whatever it takes. We’re going to find them. You’re going to find them, DI Lennon.’

His phone started ringing. He glanced at the screen – his mu
m –
and silenced it.

Suzanne said, ‘I have faith in you, alright?’ Her hand was still on his arm. It felt good there. ‘Now stop feeling so fucking sorry for yourself. That’s an order.’

He pulled himself straight. ‘Okay. No more feeling fucking sorry for myself.’

After she left the room, he took out his phone and saw he had a voicemail from his mum. Thinking it might be something about Bonnie, feeling that familiar lurch of anxiety in his stomach, he listened to the message.

‘Patrick, it’s me. Listen, I just had a call from the unit. It’s Gill. She’s asking to see you.’

Chapter 19
Patrick – Day 3

In the eighteen months since Gill had been locked up, Patrick had tried to visit her four times, and each time she had refused to see him. Each time, he’d been both upset and relieved. He had not set eyes on her since she stood, head bowed, in the dock, and the sight of her had shattered his heart into irreparable pieces.

Patrick realized that he could barely recall the way they had been together when they were happy. He remembered bits and pieces – arms round one another on the sofa, her whispering ‘don’t die’ urgently into his ear as he laughed and told her he had no intention of doing so. Their shared jokes and rituals. Singing
Take That
songs in the style of elderly pub singers. The way she had to turn the duvet round so the end with the poppers was always at the bottom. Taking baths together. Date nights and movies and weekly supermarket shops. Normal, happy ma
rried life.

After a year apart, he stopped wearing his wedding ring. He wondered if she still wore hers.

It still seemed impossible that everything had changed so irrevocably, so quickly.

When he thought back to it, the first warning sign had been the departure of Gill’s sense of humour, flying away on stealthy black batwings, so quietly amid all the chaos of Bonnie’s birth and first couple of months that it took him a while to realize it had gone. At the time, of course, he put it down to the veil of tiredness that had settled over them both. Neither saw much of the funny side of anything – how could they, when sleep only came in such mean
portions
? But Gill had always been so funny. It was what had made him fall in love with her; her bone-dry, intelligent, self-deprecating and surreal humour. Tiredness used to bring it out in her – after a long, tough day in court she would stagger back in through the door and within minutes they would both be roaring with laughter at her impressions of the hapless jurors or the
jobsworth
court clerks.

After the seventh consecutive day of him coming in from work to find Gill sobbing, he realized he hadn’t heard her laugh about anything in almost a month, even though the five-month-old Bonnie had a giggle that would melt the heart of Attila the Hun. Once she had stopped crying, Gill would list their daughter’s new achievements every day with just a tiny almost-sad smile, relating escapades that would previously have had her in gales of laughter.

But postnatal depression was normal, wasn’t it? They had talked about it, and the three of them went to see the GP together. Patrick carried Bonnie in her Baby Bjorn, loving the feel of her warm
fluttery
breaths on his chest as the GP got Gill to complete a checklist of symptoms: Irritability – check. Tearfulness – definitely. Inability to cope with simple daily tasks – yes. Mood swings – check. Difficulty sleeping – well, duh. Lack of appetite – the weight had dropped of
f her.

Gill cried steadily throughout the appointment, and added a couple of extra tick boxes of her own to the bottom of the list: Guilt. Hopelessness.

Patrick looked over the top of Bonnie’s head at his weeping wife, her lank hair, unmade-up face, grey complexion and thought,
I don’t even recognize her any more
. For a split second, he resented Bonnie for taking away the wife he adored and replacing her with this sad, grumpy shell of a woman.

‘Have you ever suffered from depression before?’ asked the GP, scrolling through screens of Gill’s medical records.

Gill wiped her hooded eyes and nodded slowly. ‘When I was at law school,’ she whispered, looking away. ‘I took an overdose. Had to get my stomach pumped.’

The doctor, a plump Indian lady with half a dozen noisy gold bangles and a kindly face – a locum, not Gill’s regular GP –
scribbled
a note on a pad shielded by her elbow so that Gill and Pat couldn’t see what she was writing. Pat could imagine, though.

‘I didn’t know that,’ he said incredulously. ‘How could I not have known that?’

Gill turned back to face them, and her face was bleak and empty. She opened her mouth to speak and Pat waited for the shamefaced apology – not an apology for trying to top herself, but for keeping such a huge secret from him, when he thought they had no secrets.

Instead she narrowed her eyes and spoke to the doctor:

‘Could you take off those bloody bangles, please? They’re doing my fucking head in.’

Pat and the locum both gasped. ‘I’m so sorry,’ the locum said evenly, sliding off the offending bracelets. She stacked them neatly on her desk, and for a moment all three of them gazed at them, saying nothing. Pat felt numb.

Then the doctor seemed to snap out of her reverie. ‘
Mrs Lennon – ma
y I call you Gill? – I think it’s pretty clear that you are suffering from postnatal depression – PND – but what I want to be very clear about is that this is a
temporary
condition, and with the appropriate treatments you should feel completely recovered again, hopefully in a very short time. Many women go through a bout of it, especially with a first child – you must never underestimate the physical and emotional stress you have both been placed under, suddenly having responsibility for a newborn baby. Add to that the lack of sleep, pressure to be good parents, and for you, Gill, drastic hormonal changes. Personally I’m amazed that more women do not go through it.’

Pat buried his face in the fluffy crown of Bonnie’s warm fragrant head. He suddenly wanted to cry too.

Over the next month or two, Gill did start to feel better. She had a course of cognitive behavioural therapy and went on to an
ti-depressants
and she, Pat and Bonnie settled back into a new kind of routine. Bonnie was such a delight to them both that, if he was
honest
, Pat could not understand how Gill could possibly be depressed. She had all day to herself, coffee with friends, play dates with
Bonnie
, gym sessions while Bonnie was entertained in the crèche. She said she welcomed the break from the Bar, along with its endless case notes to be read and briefs to be prepared.

She didn’t cry nearly so much anymore – but then a new, and possibly even less appealing emotion took precedence, one that she didn’t want to inflict on Bonnie, so she saved it up for Pat instead. He’d just be through the door making an innocent enquiry about their day, and it would start:

‘What did I do today? Well, let’s think – I slept in till noon, had a long boozy lunch with the girls at Oxo Tower, came home, entertained my twenty-five-year old lover – what do you fucking
think
I did? I changed eight nappies, ironed a pile of clothes that can be seen from space, scraped carrot mush off the floor and fed some ducks.’

‘There’s no need to be so sarcastic,’ became Pat’s new
catchphrase
.

He tried to be patient. But he was tired too, sleep-deprived and working as hard as ever at the station during the day – harder, as he’d recently been promoted to DI and it became a matter of
principle
to be better than Winkler at his job. He felt as though he was mourning the loss of his happy marriage, his happy wife, their sex life. So he threw all his energies into work instead.

Until the day he came home and found Gill sitting on the stairs, and Bonnie half-dead in her cot.

It was four months before he went back to work after that. For the first few days he stayed with Bonnie on the paediatric ward of Kingston Hospital, watching her bruises fade and her colour slowly return. The look of bewilderment in her eyes was more heartbreaking than the bruises around her neck.

‘She had a lucky escape,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s no lasting brain damage. Good thing you weren’t doing overtime that night.’

Patrick had shuddered. He had indeed been so close to staying late that evening to pore over some witness statements, but at the last minute hunger and a burning desire to hold his baby daughter had propelled him out of the office and into his car.

Gill was arrested, sectioned, and locked in a mental ward in Hanworth. Pat had not gone to see her for three weeks. He couldn’t. Whenever he thought of that day, bile rose in his throat. It was as though he had become physically allergic to his own wife. When he did go, she refused to see him.

His mother did visit her, though. Mairead reported back that Gill was heavily sedated, under 24-hour suicide watch, and not speaking at all. Gill had been told, of course, that Bonnie had survived and would be fine, but she became hysterical whenever either Patrick or Bonnie was mentioned.

Gill’s trial took place at Kingston Crown Court. Attempted murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility. She was found guilty and sentenced to be indefinitely detained in the local secure mental hospital.

People say, of things like that, that it was ‘all a bit of a blur’, but unfortunately for Pat, it wasn’t. Every detail of the trial was etched indelibly into his brain, and snapshots would pop back up in his mind with traumatic regularity at all hours of the day or night, regardless of what he was doing. It had got a little better of late, especially seeing Bonnie so hale and hearty, seemingly happy with the arrangement of living with his parents. Time was doing its much-trumpeted healing thing. He could only hope that the same was true for Gill.

But whether it was or not, he was really glad that she had finally decided she would see him. There were things that needed to be said.