Ralph’s Children (13 page)

‘But we’ve always done what we thought was best,’ her father continued, ‘for you and your son.’

Sam’s lovely open face came into her mind, pushing away everything else.

‘What are you telling me, Dad?’ Laurie asked at last.

‘Nothing.’ Pete shrugged. ‘Except your mum and I hate the way things get between us because you think we don’t care about Sam.’

‘Me too,’ Laurie said, with an effort. ‘I hate it too.’

‘OK.’ Her father reached for her hand and squeezed it, and they used to hug all the time before Sam, though it was hard for Laurie to remember the sweetness of those days, because
being a mum herself had changed everything, even if wasn’t the way being a mother was meant to be. ‘Shall we try a bit harder then, baby?’

She found, with surprise, that the endearment did not offend her, simply because her father had just extended what felt like a real hand of friendship, maybe even of respect.

And after he left the room, she turned off her lamp and lay in the dark again, a new set of possibilities – happier, this time, almost
golden
– rushing in. Because maybe
they were going to let Sam come home with her,
live
with them, with
her.

A picture of her son playing at the Mann came to her.

If Sam came to the Moon house, he would miss that place, wouldn’t he? The only real home he’d ever known. And his friends, too, not to mention all the stand-in mothers who knew just
how to take care of his needs.

Special needs.

Laurie stopped herself before the thoughts got out of hand. Her father hadn’t said a word about anything having to change, either for better or worse; he’d only said they should all
try a little harder to be kinder to each other. He certainly hadn’t said there was the slightest possibility that Sam should come home to this house.

Nor would he.

At least the sad resignation settling back over her was a feeling to which she was all too accustomed, and she wondered suddenly, in one of her moments of franker self-appraisal, how well she
might cope with the challenges of real change.

Given that she was, after all, a coward.

Laurie glanced at her clock.

Just over six and a half hours.

T
hey had removed Kate’s parka but not her gloves, and then they had bound her ankles together with a triple length of crêpe bandage over
her jeans above her old Todds loafers, had strapped her wrists behind her, stuck wide adhesive parcel tape over her mouth and had forced her down on to the sofa.

A flurry of brief directions before that from the men and women in their creepy, stocking-deformed faces, red overalls, latex gloves and trainers.

‘Sit still.’

‘Feet together.’

‘Hands behind your back.’

‘Shut up.’

But then, for a long time, they had spoken neither to her nor to each other, had given her no indication of what exactly they wanted from her.

‘What we want is you.’

One of the men had said that, hadn’t he, in the first minute – the bigger, brawnier-built of the two – but what had he meant? And were they waiting for someone else or
something
, or were they just using silence now to freak her more?

Succeeding.

They’d drawn the curtains so that no one could see in, leaving just enough of a break between them, Kate hazarded, to be able to see outside.

She was sitting in the centre of the sofa, her feet on the kilim rug before it. One of the males was now seated beside her to her left, one of the females to her right, their proximity making
Kate’s flesh crawl.

For the first time in her life, she knew the meaning of terror.

Of helplessness, too, and bewilderment.

‘So . . .’ the second female, standing a few feet away, addressed her suddenly. ‘I suppose you feel really defenceless, right, Kate?’

Kate stared up at her.

‘That’s how they feel.’

They?

‘By the end of the second month –’ the female beside Kate had a low, mellifluous voice – ‘they only measure about one and a quarter inches, but they already have
arms and legs.’

‘And a beating heart,’ said the standing woman.

Babies.

Embryos.

Kate’s mind floundered, fumbled, came up with nothing better than more fear.

She looked from one to the other, took in the mobile phones clipped to the waistbands of their overalls, looked up at their dark impenetrable faces, unable to stop herself from trying to seek
out features, some identification point, aware as she did so that it might be the worst possible thing to do, that
not
seeing these people’s faces might ultimately be what gave her
the best chance of getting out of this.

‘What are you looking at?’ The male now standing near the front door, the tougher-built one, spoke with what might possibly have been a Bristol accent, though more significantly, he
sounded aggressive. ‘Just listen, right?’

Kate nodded, made a sound of appeal behind her gag.

‘Quiet.’ The man on the sofa to her right seemed a little less hostile.

She looked straight ahead at the TV she had expected to have switched on by now; dinner in the oven, glass of red in her hand.

‘That’s better,’ the male beside her said.

Kate wondered if they were playing ‘good captor, bad captor’.

‘By the end of the third month –’ the female beside her started again – ‘they respond to touch, and nerve fibres transmitting pain are present.’

‘Though the fibres that will inhibit pain are not,’ the standing woman said.

A regular double act.

Kate recognized, even through her fear haze, a mixing of different studies of the subject she’d had good cause to research in the past.

The standing female was holding stapled papers in her right hand.

‘If abortion is carried out early enough, they call it
suction
.’ She emphasized the word, her voice quivering a little. ‘A powerful suction tube is introduced into the
womb –’ she was reading now – ‘and the suction pulls the embryo’s body apart, drags it and the placenta off the wall of the uterus and deposits them into a bottle as
waste
.’

Pro-lifers, then.

Fanatical pro-lifers.

Kate felt as if her insides were shrivelling.

‘If they wait a little longer –’ the seated female was not reading, was either better informed or rehearsed – ‘or if they’ve left a little of the
foetus
behind, they use a curette to scrape it away.’

Kate turned her head to look at her.

‘Keep your head down,’ the male near the door ordered.

Terrorists
, Kate decided, described them better than captors.

It was hard to say how that made her feel, except even more numb.

Numb was probably the only way through this.

The male beside her shifted a little, and now he, too, was holding papers. Kate chanced a glance, saw printed text but could make out no words.

‘The first thing you learn when it happens to you,’ he read, ‘is that every preconceived idea – even when it’s been founded in good faith and sincerity –
flies straight out of the window.’

Oh, dear God.

They were her
own
words, from one of her columns.

‘Nothing, when it comes to this ultimate life or death decision –’ his voice was higher than the other man’s, his reading stilted, like a schoolboy’s, and even
through the stocking his breath smelt sour, and Kate had a sense that he was nervous – ‘is black and white, nor is it grey. If we’re talking colours, it’s the blazing reds
of hell versus the gentle nursery pastels of hope or the drabness of earth and ashes.’

Was this why they were here then, in Caisleán? Because she had written in
Short-Fuse
about abortion?

That first glimmer of comprehension brought Kate no comfort.

E
verything about this game was different, had been since its inception.

Two Beasts instead of one.

Both of them brought to the group by Ralph.

A first.

And perhaps, Ralph suspected – had felt this from the start – the last.

Kate Turner, of course, had come to her attention long before Laurie Moon.

Clamouring for attention, spilling her opinions and feelings over a whole page of the
Reading Sunday News
every single week. One of life’s true coincidences taking care of any
doubts after that, proving that Turner really was a bitch and a killer.

A Beast.

A temporary assignment at the Rudolf Mann School had brought her Laurie Moon. This selfish, self-obsessed,
weak
young woman. Unfit, unworthy, to be called a mother.

It had taken time, more investigation and vastly more organization than any game they had ever played, most of it undertaken by Ralph herself, before and since bringing it to the group that
evening at the Black Rooster pub.

It had taken a long time for her to be sure that it was right, for
them.

That taking them to this kind of level was right, to such heights.

Such depths.

She had already forced herself to face the possibility that, having presided over one death, there seemed an inevitability about this deeper descent.

Ultimate sin already committed, after all. Not by her hand or theirs exactly, but still their sin, done and dusted and ready for judgement.

The swiftness with which they had all accepted her proposal had surprised Ralph somewhat, coming so soon after their initial doubts over the decision to have Mitcham killed. Jack and Roger had
agreed to the new game so readily, she realized, partly because they genuinely shared her sense of outrage about Turner and Moon, but also because they were both naturally attracted to violence.
Simon had accepted the plan because, though Ralph believed she remained fundamentally gentle, the group had always come first with her, and both these female Beasts represented everything that set
her personal anger flowing like lava. Pig had gone along with it because the same things made him rage, and because he loved Simon.

Yet for all that, and for all that she wanted this game with the most startling passion, Ralph knew that their readiness to agree meant they’d come to accept the use of brutality to
further their aims. Which saddened her.

And thrilled her, yet again.

They had argued for a time about where the main event should take place, batting possibilities back and forth. Turner’s cottage was not, they’d all agreed,
sufficiently isolated; there might be watchful neighbours, random callers, there were too many unnecessary risks and unknown quantities attached to it. They’d considered taking over an
unoccupied rural property, anything from a vacant holiday cottage to a farm outhouse, but Caisleán had seemed like a gift.

‘Perfect,’ Roger had said.

The planning of the game had, at times, almost overwhelmed them.

‘Lucky we’ve got Jack,’ Pig had said at that first meeting. ‘A real pro.’

‘I’m a burglar, right,’ Jack had reminded him. ‘Not a murderer.’

‘
We’re
not doing a murder,’ Pig said.

‘Don’t pick nits,’ Roger told him.

Super-vigilant was what they were going to have to be, Ralph said.

‘And
then
some,’ said Jack.

Surgical gloves to be worn every second, no matter what. Littlewoods trainers on their feet, same as thousands of other men and women in the country.

‘Most important thing,’ Ralph had said during a later planning meeting, ‘is not to let the Beasts claw or bite.’

‘No releasing them –’ Jack again – ‘for peeing or crapping or drinking.’

‘Not even if they say they’re about to choke to death,’ Roger said.

Simon was pale, Pig not much better.

‘What if the husband shows up?’ he’d asked.

‘He hasn’t gone near the place since they split up,’ Ralph said, ‘so far as I know.’

‘There’s always a first time,’ Simon had said.

‘If he comes,’ said Jack, ‘he’ll wish he hadn’t.’

The jury had still been out on whether or not Rob Turner – whose first wife had taken their daughter so far away from him – might be a Beast in his own right, but for the time being
they were wavering
against
, since his break-up with Kate suggested to them that he couldn’t be all bad.

They had been relying on general surveillance and Pig’s monitoring of Turner’s phone calls to find out when she was next going up to Caisleán.

‘Only half the story, though, of course,’ Roger had said, ‘if we can’t get our second beast at the same time.’

‘Patience,’ Ralph had told them. ‘We’ll have a chance with Miss Moon every fortnight.’

Just a matter of time.

* * *

‘I
think it’s time,’ the sitting female said after a while, ‘we introduced ourselves.’

Kate shivered involuntarily.

‘I’m Roger,’ the woman said.

‘I’m Simon,’ said the standing female.

‘I’m Jack,’ the male near the front door said.,

‘And I’m Pig,’ said the man beside her.

Messed up as her head was, Kate still instantly put the names together, the strangeness of the last one – Pig – leaving little room for doubt. Characters out of a book she’d
read at school, she thought.

She chased her memory now for any obvious pro-life connections in that old novel, gave that up quickly – then remembered an old film in which a gang who hijacked a subway train had called
each other by different
colours
, which meant, she supposed, there was probably no real significance to these names either.

If she got out of this, she thought she might never watch another thriller.

‘You paying attention, Turner?’ the man by the door asked.

Jack. The most obviously nasty of the four.

‘Want a drink of water?’ the sitting male, whose breath smelt – Pig – asked her.

She hesitated.

‘She doesn’t trust us,’ the sitting female – Roger – said.

‘Just plain water,’ Pig said.

‘From your own tap,’ the standing female – Simon – added.

Kate nodded.