Out of Sight (18 page)

‘Yes.'

‘Was Daniel an easy child? Some kids, you know, they cry, keep you awake, interfere between you and your wife, stop you having time to yourselves.'

‘No, he was a joy.'

‘We all get fed up sometimes, however much we love 'em. Wish to hell they weren't there. Even if only for five minutes. Is that what happened?'

Patrick shook his head dumbly like an injured beast. ‘No,' he groaned. ‘No. He was the best thing ever to happen to me.'

‘Kid gets on your nerves, you think you'll teach him a lesson. Leave him in the car for a bit. Grab a moment for yourself.'

‘I didn't realise he was there. I thought – oh I don't know what I thought.'

‘You leave him in the car for five minutes. You're enjoying the peace and quiet. Makes a nice change, after all the racket, all the demands. Then you get busy and forget about him. Is that what happened?'

‘No. I wouldn't have left him there on his own, not even for a second. Never. I realise it makes no sense, but I didn't
know he was in the car. Didn't remember he was there. He must have been asleep. It's no excuse, but I was sure I'd dropped him at Christine's.'

‘Do you take drugs, Mr Hinde? Prescription or otherwise?'

‘No. I'm a homeopath.'

‘Alcohol?'

‘Sometimes. I don't think I blacked out or anything. I just forgot. I forgot my son was there.' Patrick again fought the urge to scream and go on screaming until he ceased to exist.

‘Is there anything else you'd like to bring to our attention?'

Patrick shook his head, not trusting himself to open his mouth.

‘For the record, please, Mr Hinde.'

‘No,' he whispered.

‘Very well. We'll be making further enquiries. Meanwhile, you can go home. I imagine you'll want to see your wife.'

‘You're not keeping me here?' Patrick was shocked. He had expected to be locked in a cell for the night. He wasn't sure he could cope with freedom.

‘Don't go away anywhere without informing us.'

‘You're not charging me with anything?' Patrick couldn't disguise his disappointment.

‘That'll be up to the Crown Prosecution Service. And there'll be an inquest. It'll all be explained at another time, unless you have any questions you'd like to ask now?'

Patrick shook his head, and DI Cutler got to his feet, leaving his colleague to deal with the recording machine. His tone softened and he touched Patrick lightly on the shoulder: ‘Might be an idea to talk to your priest or whatever.'

Patrick smiled politely – the idea of any kind of future in which he might do such a thing was as yet totally impenetrable – and followed Cutler down the corridor. The custody sergeant offered to call him a mini-cab. The thought of the interior of a car repelled him, but he refused courteously enough, aware that all he had to cling to at this moment was the carapace of good manners.

Patrick headed down to the seafront, still relatively busy with summer visitors at this hour. He heard, smelt and sensed the movement of the sea rather than saw it in the growing darkness. He wanted to be near it, at one with its vast instability, close to the danger that constantly girdled the everyday world of people and bars and take-aways and houses and roads and cars. How had he ever taken for granted the assumption that the world was a safe place?

He went down the steps onto the beach, his feet sliding on the hard pebbles as he threaded his way between revellers and courting couples to where the waves rolled and broke along a line of glistening shingle. The pier to his left was brightly lit, but straight ahead of him lay the bulky water, shifting and dark. The whole world was not
worth the loss of Daniel. There was nothing contained in the existence that lay behind him on the promenade, that went on gaudily up on the pier, that he could ever imagine wanting as much as he wanted the feel of Daniel now in his arms, against his chest. Nor was there any place for him except to atone for what he had done; and the rest of his life would not be enough for that. He had forfeited even the right to swim out to sea and quietly drown.

After a while, disturbed by youths nearby drunkenly yelling and cheering over the business of chucking pebbles into the sea, he made his way back up to the road, and began to walk. Once free of the crowds he gathered pace, finding physical comfort in the contact of his feet with the pavement, in the regularity of his steps; he found himself counting them, counting to sixty, seventy, before a lapse of concentration made him start again. Thus eventually he found himself in front of his house. The gravel area where usually he would park his car was empty, a fact he registered without further association. A light was on upstairs. He stared at it, trying to remember who was there.

Patrick felt automatically in his jacket pocket for his keys, which had been returned to him at the police station. He drew them out and looked at them, as if trying to divine their purpose. There was something about them that he needed to remember, but couldn't. He selected the correct one and opened his front door. The house was quiet, the hall and stairs in darkness. He hesitated on the
threshold: to enter felt like a violation, yet he knew he must not run away. He closed the door behind him and stood, his head cocked, listening for some clue as to what to do next. As his sight adjusted to the dim light, he made out the bundle of coats hanging on hooks alongside the kitchen door. Overlapping the adult garments was a little anorak, the padded sleeves standing out like sausages, colourless in the darkness, though Patrick knew it to be green. The pain made him stagger, took the strength from his legs. He lowered himself onto the bottom stair, his head in his hands, trying to breathe through the successive piercing shafts that threatened to stop his heart.

He felt movement behind him. Light spilled from an open door upstairs. Belinda came and sat several stairs above him, her bare feet just visible out of the corner of his eye. He did not turn around. He could not begin to imagine how she must feel towards him. After a few minutes, she got up and retreated. The bedroom door closed again. He sat on for an hour or more, increasingly numbed and cold, until, barely awake, he stumbled up the stairs, almost on hands and knees. An instinct to be near his son drew him into Daniel's room. Fully clothed, he climbed into the little bed; eyes closed, knees drawn up to his chest, breathing in Daniel's scent with every breath, he concentrated on drawing as deeply into his own body as he could this final precious essence of his child.

Patrick awoke with the light: the blind in Daniel's room had not been lowered. At first he assumed he was not in his own bed because, as sometimes happened, Daniel hadn't settled and so Belinda had taken him into their bed, exchanging him for Patrick. But on those occasions, too big for Daniel's child bed, he slept in the guest room. Patrick then also realised that he was dressed, had not even removed his shoes. He sat up, puzzled. Then the blade twisted in his guts, his heart, his brain. He knew he had to move, had to function, or he would be turned to stone.

He instructed himself to concentrate on each first step, to recall what he would usually do. The bathroom. He must go to the bathroom. Pee. Brush his teeth. Get out of these stale clothes and have a shower. Don't think beyond that. Just do it. One foot in front of the other. The effort was enormous, as if he had been extremely ill, or was getting out of bed for the first time after major surgery. But he focused on standing up, walking through the door, lifting the lavatory seat. In the shower, he had a moment of
absence; he returned to himself with no idea of how long he had stood immobile under the streaming water. It was an act of sheer will to stretch out his hand for the soap.

Patrick put on the robe that hung on the back of the bathroom door and went down to the kitchen. He couldn't remember when he'd last eaten, and did not think that he was hungry, though he assumed he must be. His body no longer seemed capable of anything except guarding the toxic shock that had invaded his very sense of himself: should the brimming pain spill or overflow, he knew with utter certainty that he would not survive.

Carefully he went through the ordinary motions of making breakfast, then forced himself to eat and drink. Following this same impulse, when Belinda did not appear, he made a mug of coffee for her. He tried to imagine what she would want. If their roles were reversed, what would he expect of her? But his thought processes rejected even the possibility of such imaginings. The coffee had gone cold by the time he made up his mind. He made a fresh mug and took it up to her, although he knocked gently on the door before going in, something he had never done before. She was curled up in their double bed, her tangled hair spread across the pillow and her eyes open, staring sightlessly in his direction. She sat up abruptly, as if startled, and held out her hands automatically for the mug. She looked half her age, a fourteen-year-old woken after a late-night party. Patrick handed her the coffee then returned to the kitchen. Hearing the shower a little later,
he went back up to the bedroom, took out clean clothes and dressed hurriedly, careful to leave the room again before she finished in the bathroom. He did not seek to evade her, merely to show courtesy to her feelings. He knew of nothing else he could do for her now.

Belinda soon joined him in the kitchen, sitting across from him at the table, but not looking at him directly.

‘More coffee?' he asked humbly. ‘Can I get you something to eat?'

She shook her head.

‘I'll go, if you want me to,' he offered. ‘Move out. I don't want to, but I'll do whatever you wish.'

Belinda shook her head again. For a moment, she stretched out her hands, regarding them as if she had never seen them before, then continued to sit, one hand cupped over the other, like in a pew in church. ‘I can't speak,' she said at last. ‘Just don't expect me to.'

Patrick nodded, and they sat together in silence, hardly moving, until, some time later, the telephone rang, taking their breath away. Patrick got to his feet but, reaching for the handset, was unable to imagine lifting and speaking into it. He noticed that the message light was already flashing: two missed calls. Whatever they were, it could hardly matter now. The ringing eventually stopped, and he watched the display change and show three missed calls.

Belinda stood up. ‘I'd better tell the school I won't be coming in.' She took the handset and went out, closing the door.

Patrick tried to think about the patients who were booked to see him that day. He ought to ring them, apologise, cancel all his appointments. But his mind slid sideways, couldn't keep hold of his patients' reality. They belonged in some faraway foreign country where he had once lived, too distant now to require any action from him. He heard Belinda come out of the sitting room and walk slowly upstairs, registered the sound of the bedroom door closing. He realised he was expecting that his life would now be taken over by officialdom, be dealt with by some external machinery responsible for disasters. And so he simply sat, waiting to be told what to do.

After a long while, the blinking message light seemed to summon him. He reached over to press the button and listened. The first voice was Agnès, saying thanks for such a lovely visit. The second was Geoffrey, also offering perfunctory thanks and confirming that they had got safely back to the hotel in Weybridge where they were putting up while looking at houses. Both messages had been left the previous evening. The latest call was from Geoffrey again, slightly irritable this time, wondering where everyone was, why no one had yet rung them back. Patrick was aware that he was probably supposed to tell them that Daniel was dead, but it made no sense, and he felt no urgency about doing so.

Stupefied, he remained motionless at the kitchen table. For whole moments he was able to forget why he was there, sitting at home on a weekday morning listening to distant traffic noises. Each time, when awareness rushed
back in, the waves of grief and guilt were bigger, stronger, more overwhelming. And yet, though he knew it to be true, that he had abandoned his son to die in a car on a hot July day, he still was not yet able fully to believe what he knew, let alone to inform his parents of it.

Belinda's younger sister Grace arrived an hour or so later, after hurrying down from London. Belinda let her in, and they disappeared upstairs together. When Patrick encountered her in the kitchen at lunchtime, he saw her hands shaking as she tried to cut up some fruit. She stared at him, a stockier, sharper-featured version of Belinda; her eyes were red and swollen from crying, but her face was white with fury.

‘What have you done to her?' she demanded. ‘How can you even look at her, after what you've done?'

Patrick had no answer.

DI Cutler arrived in the early afternoon, accompanied by a mournful, overweight woman in her forties. Patrick failed to retain her surname, and she anyhow suggested they call her Beverley. Belinda joined them in the sitting room, choosing to sit with Patrick on the sofa, a small act of loyalty for which he was insanely grateful. Beverley explained in painstaking detail how she was responsible for safeguarding local children and would have to review Daniel's death. Apart from offering them a booklet with a photograph of a flower on the cover to clarify any concerns they might have, and taking notes of the conversation, she then remained largely silent.

Cutler reminded Patrick that he remained under caution until they had received the preliminary report from Daniel's post-mortem, which, he informed them as gently as possible, was taking place that day. He said that their GP had confirmed that Daniel had appeared to be a perfectly healthy little boy. Cutler also told them that the police had been able to confirm Patrick's journey time thanks to Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras on part of his route, and had checked that he had not used his mobile phone; his drive to work appeared to have been entirely uneventful. He asked if Patrick could now recall more detail of what had happened before he left home the previous morning.