Nothing Sacred (5 page)

‘Coffee, tea?' she said, nodding at a waist-high cupboard next to me that had a kettle on it, two dirty mugs, a jar of coffee. It made the facilities in my office corridor seem luxurious.

‘Thanks, no,' I said.

She lowered herself into her chair with a sound of exertion, pointed a hand at the chair in front of the desk.

‘Thank you for seeing me,' I said again as I sat down, in case Ms Armstrong had not heard me the first time.

She nodded quickly, a little irritably. ‘I have to say I do not know what you hope to achieve,' she said, as if I was wasting both of our precious time, as if my presence was an unwanted distraction, which, I imagined, it certainly was. ‘There is very little for a lawyer to do at this stage.'

‘My client has had no contact with her children for three days,' I said. ‘I'm sure you can understand her distress.'

There was a lever-arch file on Ms Armstrong's desk and she opened it, read aloud. ‘Multiple contusions, evidence of ligatures consistent with restraint.' She looked at me. ‘I'm sure you can understand the children's distress.'

‘My client contends that she knows nothing about how these occurred,' I said. I was aware of how pompous I sounded, the typical superior lawyer lording it with elaborate diction. Ms Armstrong exuded an air of decency, of organised goodness; I did not wish to be confrontational. I softened my approach. ‘Really, she is frantic.'

Ms Armstrong closed the file and rested both elbows on her desk, wrapped one hand over another, rested her chin on them. It was an oddly masculine gesture, one that made me feel that she was not somebody to be messed with. She looked at me, took a breath.

‘It takes as much time as it takes, Mr Connell,' she said. ‘I am afraid that these children are now in the system. The system cannot be hurried.' She smiled, something rueful in her expression. ‘I am waiting for the psychiatric report. After that we can arrange contact. You might reassure your client that her children are being well looked after and that she need not worry.'

‘She does worry.'

‘Yes. Well.'

‘She worries that they are suffering irreparable psychological harm. Which would be, ultimately, your responsibility.'

Ms Armstrong nodded to herself, turned, looked out of her window briefly, turned back to me. Her demeanour had changed and I realised that I had made a mistake, that I had been wrong to issue an oblique threat; she did not deserve it, and I had lost any goodwill she might have held.

‘Mr Connell, those children have already suffered harm. Given the choice between a week's bewilderment here, or returning them home to serious physical abuse, I am happy with where they are.'

I had to admit, put like that, her position was difficult to argue with.

‘Mr Connell,' Ms Armstrong said. ‘How well do you know your client?'

‘Well enough,' I said, wrong-footed by her sudden question.

‘You know something of her history?'

‘A little.'

‘She has a history of alcoholism. Were you aware of that?'

‘Yes.'

‘Were you also aware that after waking up outside her house, the police found an empty bottle of vodka in her garden?'

I was not. I did not reply.

‘Mr Connell. Alcoholics lie. It's what they do; it's the way that they negotiate their way through life. Lie to themselves, lie to their loved ones, their children. They even lie to their lawyers.' This last said with some scorn.

‘She is sober,' I said. It even sounded feeble to me.

‘Her father was an alcoholic, too. These patterns are repeated, Mr Connell. Time and again. Cycles of abuse.'

As far as I knew, Vick had never been abused by her father. But then, it was never anything we had discussed. Our relationship had been strictly good time; we had taken care not to stray into dangerous emotional territory. I did not know what to say to Ms Armstrong, felt as if she had all of the ammunition in this exchange.

‘When will she be able to see her children?'

Ms Armstrong sighed. ‘A day, a couple of days. It shouldn't be long.'

I was achieving nothing. I moved to leave but Ms Armstrong held up a hand.

‘What puzzles me,' she said, ‘is the father. The children should be with him, but he doesn't want to know. Won't even visit them.' She looked at me, frowned. ‘Mrs Lowrie tells me that he is a good parent, that he dotes on them. That's what doesn't make sense. What is the situation there?'

Leaving Ms Armstrong, I again had to pass the room full of children. They seemed to be moving in slow motion, lethargic, stuck as they were in this institutional limbo, taken away from their families but their future not yet decided. I thought about my own childhood, my neglectful father; often in my life I had wondered why he had not given up on me, thrown me into care. I now believed that the reason he had suffered me all those years was due to guilt about what he had done to my mother, of what became of her and his part in it; as if keeping me on was his own, prolonged act of atonement.

I wondered, too, about what Ms Armstrong had told me, about Vick and her drinking. When Vick had been in my office she had been sober, I was sure of that. I knew what she was like when she had been drinking, how she behaved. But did that mean she was clean? Like Ms Armstrong said, alcoholics lied. And suffered from blackouts, during which they could move furniture, wake up outdoors. Yet I could not see Vick injuring her children; her grief and horror at what had happened had been sincere, her confusion total. Though if I was honest, there was now more than a shade of doubt in my mind about her story.

But she was an old friend, and past ties are past ties. I could not give up on her yet. Not before I had visited her ex-husband and found out just why he had washed his hands of his own children when they needed him most.

5

MS ARMSTRONG MAY
have had a point, regarding cycles of abuse, the father's misdeeds being inevitably re-enacted by the daughter. Perhaps Vick was drinking again, subjecting her children to violence; perhaps her family history meant it was practically preordained. I did not know. But what I did know was that, in cases of family abuse and violence, the perpetrator was more often than not a family member. And if it wasn't Vick, then the next suspect in line was Ryan. A model parent does not leave his children to be taken into care; he does not wash his hands of them. His behaviour did not seem right, seemed suspect. I owed it to Vick to find him, speak to him, see if I could not make some sense of what had happened to Vick and her children.

Vick had given me Ryan's most recent address and I drove there after visiting Ms Armstrong. It was becoming dark and he was living above a shop selling white goods whose brand names I did not recognise, light from the forlorn showroom bright against the gloom of the early evening, throwing a dull shine onto the dirty pavement. The shop was on a busy road and I had to park some streets away, walk back. There was a peeling blue painted door next to the shop and I pressed a metal buzzer, listened for an answer through the grille. But either it was not working or whoever lived inside held no fear of strangers because it buzzed me in without asking my name or business. Inside the door was a pile of junk mail like autumn leaves and I stepped through them and up a dark staircase; I could feel my pupils widening in the half-light. A door opened at the top and I could see a figure silhouetted, long hair, a woman.

‘Yes?'

‘Looking for Ryan,' I said. ‘Ryan Lowrie.'

‘Ain't here.'

‘Know where he is?' I was reaching the top of the staircase and I could see that the woman was wearing a dressing gown so short that I instinctively averted my eyes.

‘Ain't seen him.'

The woman had permed hair and her roots needed attention. Her hair was two colours: blonde at the ends, brown halfway up. She wore no make-up and looked as if she had just woken, although it was almost night.

‘You ain't coming in,' she said.

I stopped near the top of the stairs, two steps below her so that I was the shorter of us. I looked up at her.

‘Know where he might be?'

‘Search me. You his friend?'

‘Kind of.'

‘Didn't think he had any.'

‘Everyone's got friends.'

She snorted like I had made a joke. ‘I'm getting ready for work. He ain't here.'

‘Must be somewhere.'

‘Everyone's somewhere,' she said, ridicule in her voice. She looked down at me and sighed. ‘Best bet's the bookies,' she said, then laughed. ‘Best bet,' she said, amused by her unintentional joke.

‘He's gambling?'

‘Ain't doing much of anything else,' she said. ‘Far's I can tell. He works, he gambles.'

I thanked her and turned on the staircase, headed back down. I stopped, turned back to her. ‘Your intercom not working?'

‘Yeah. Why?'

‘Might want to use it. Can't trust everyone.'

The woman laughed softly, although backlit by the door I could not see her expression. ‘Go on, Saint whoever-you-are,' she said. ‘Piss off. I've got to go to work.'

She closed the door and I could no longer see anything, blind on the stairway.

I had seen Ryan around, knew him by sight but had never spoken to him. But of course you cannot live in my neighbourhood without hearing things, and I knew a little about him, his history. At one time he had been an inveterate and well-known gambler and, at least latterly, not a successful one; I remembered stories of trouble with local bookies, of warnings, murmurs that he was earmarked for a fall. But that was years ago, when he was still a young man; he had straightened himself out since then, joined the army, made something of himself.

I wondered whether his history of compulsion, and his success in beating that addiction, was what had made him such a steadying influence for Vick. Nobody before had been able to handle her, but he had helped her clean up. I had been invited to their wedding but had not gone; I was not somebody who enjoyed revisiting his past and I had no fond memories of my time with Vick. Still, I had been happy to hear that she had met somebody and that her life was getting back on track. Why, then, was it now so completely derailed? Was it down to Ryan?

Where I lived it sometimes felt that bookies were the only industry keeping the shopping streets a viable economic proposal, although how long-term prosperity could be secured through exploiting the poor and desperate was a strategy I had difficulty understanding. Every third shop had odds in the window, images of horses, footballers, the seductive promise of a glamorous win. I visited three bookies, asked bored young women behind the counters whether they had seen Ryan. One of them did not know who I was talking about. The other two did, but hadn't seen him that day, although they told me that he had been in frequently over the last weeks. Something in their expressions, a softening of their professional indifference, suggested that his was a hard-luck story that touched even their seen-it-all souls.

The fourth was a shabby, carpet-tiled outfit, empty except for a black man asleep on a hard chair underneath a screen that was switched off, and an older white man pushing a vacuum cleaner. He turned it off when I walked in, said, ‘Closed.'

I nodded. ‘Just looking for someone.'

He looked at the man asleep on the chair. He was snoring. ‘Unless you're after Chambers, you're out of luck.'

‘Know Ryan Lowrie?'

‘Ryan Lowrie,' he said, peering up at the polystyrene-tiled ceiling as if looking for the answer there. He looked at me. He wore thick gold-rimmed glasses, which made his eyes seem huge. Looked like he'd been wearing them since the seventies. ‘Don't know.'

‘I think you do,' I said. ‘Just want to talk to him.'

‘And you ain't the only one,' he said. ‘Leave me out.'

‘I'm a friend,' I said. ‘Friend of his wife, Victoria.'

‘Yeah?' He wiped a watery eye with a finger, pushing his glasses to one side. He looked back at me, this time with more scrutiny. ‘He's married?'

‘Was.'

‘Things they don't tell you,' he said. ‘Why d'you want him?'

‘To do with his children,' I said. ‘Can't say any more. I'm a lawyer.'

‘That right? Don't look like one. No offence.'

‘None taken. You seen him?'

‘He was in earlier. Hit a good run.'

The man on the chair, Chambers, snored so loudly that he woke himself up. He sat up, looked around him. The man I was speaking to lifted his hand to him, said, ‘Home time, my friend.'

Chambers patted the pockets of his leather jacket, reassured himself that whatever was important to him was still there, got up, unsteadily left. We watched him leave, watched the glass door bang close behind him.

‘My clientele,' the man said softly. He did not say anything else, just stood there, one hand on his vacuum cleaner.

‘Ryan Lowrie,' I said.