Someone Else's Son (8 page)

‘How do people exist like this?’ she asked herself. Lorraine Plummer’s name was on the potential studio list again. Last autumn’s programme about her son’s stabbing strangely hadn’t stimulated much phone-in response and, as a favour to Dennis, she’d agreed to run a follow-up show. They were popular with the viewers – the ratings confirmed this. They were living soaps; a real-life glimpse into tragedies most people were fortunate enough to never experience.

Lorraine Plummer’s second out-of-studio segment had already been cut and edited and would air within the next month. Carrie prayed, for the mother’s sake, that the show would bring in a few useful calls to Dennis’s incident room. Since the lad’s death, there had been a spate of stabbings in the area, shockingly close to her own home, Carrie realised, wondering how two vastly different communities, Hampstead and Harlesden, could exist within a few square miles.

‘Poor little sod,’ she said, clicking off the face of the dead kid. She took a second to stare at Lorraine Plummer’s image in a scanned newspaper clipping. Empty eyes, hollow cheeks, gaunt expression; most of all, she could see that the woman’s soul was gone. She knew it would never come back.

Carrie fired off a high-priority email to Leah insisting they get Lorraine Plummer on air next week. There was something about the case that chimed with the way she’d been feeling recently – the creeping void, the unsettling state of mind, the loss of control. Normal feelings for the parent of a teenager, she assumed.

To block out all the misery, Carrie picked up a silver-framed photograph of her son. Smartly dressed in a suit and his school tie, it had been taken at the end of his final year at Denningham College, just before he’d decided he wasn’t going back.

‘You silly, silly boy,’ she mouthed at his image. ‘You could have finished your GCSEs at least.’ She recalled her total horror when he announced that, as well as leaving Denningham, he was dropping half the subjects he’d spent the last few years studying.

‘What do I want with Latin and German?’ He’d leant against the kitchen counter. Carrie remembered that his hands were grubby because he’d left smeary prints on the work surface after he stormed out – the same little hands that used to wring out her heart when he was a baby with his cute dimples and cheeky giggle.

‘A place at university?’ Carrie called out after him. ‘A decent job?’ His Oxbridge chances had gone down the pan since he’d left Denningham. Three meetings with the head, countless emails, thousands of harsh words with her son had got her nowhere.

‘I don’t want to turn out to be a superior rich kid with a famous mother,’ was his closing argument. No more to be said, he spat, slamming into his bedroom.

‘And no son of mine will turn out
inferior
,’ she’d whispered, pouring shot after shot of vodka in the hope it might fill the hole in her heart.

 

She’d got him. With the footage of him flying into a rage when they’d filmed him with his two-year-old at home, with the fresh bruises on his wife and his girlfriend’s faces, with him upturning the stage furniture and security restraining him on set, there was no doubt that today’s star guest was a complete shit. Carrie despaired of society. She also loved it.

‘Look me in the eye, Vincent.’ She traversed the studio effortlessly. Security had him pinned into his chair. He was a small, weasely man. She wasn’t scared. She crouched down in front of him, half facing him and half turning to the camera that followed her closely.

‘Tell me honestly, now. Did you ever smack your little girl around?’ She paused. She knew he wouldn’t answer. Not yet. ‘Why were Social Services called out seventeen times in the first year of her life, Vincent? Why do the photographs in the police file show bruising across her back consistent with a man’s hand delivering the blow? Why do your wife and girlfriend, God help them, have faces like rotten apples? Why, I want to know,’ and Carrie stood and turned to her audience, ‘was this little babe not taken into care ages ago?’ She was shouting now; waving a photograph of the toddler above her head. She was a mother. None of this was her life, but it still hurt.

Total silence. Then one person in the audience clapped. Then another and another. Suddenly, the three hundred-strong studio audience were on their feet applauding. Too many kids had slipped through the net in recent years and the public wanted answers. When they had quietened, Carrie continued.

‘Did you or did you not hit your daughter?’

More silence.

Carrie touched her earpiece.
Give him ten more seconds
, she was told by the director. She knew they’d be on the edge of their seats backstage. She’d been hammering him for nearly an hour. He had to crack soon. Even Dennis had come in for this one. A confession was what he needed.
Camera two get closer
, Leah ordered, overriding Matt’s decision to go for a single camera viewpoint.

Vincent stared at his feet. He scuffed his toes together. ‘She were naughty,’ he eventually said. ‘Everyone smacks their kids. It ain’t a crime.’

The audience became a ripple of gasps and shock. Boos and calls of abuse rained down on to the stage. The child’s mother flew out of her seat and security barged on to the set to handle the fracas. Carrie allowed the scene to continue for a moment longer before turning personally to camera two to sign off to an ad break with her trademark gesture.

‘Super, darling,’ Leah said in a silly accent. ‘You are truly Queen of Confessions.’

Dennis also muttered a couple of words of praise before heading backstage to question Vincent further.

Carrie sat in her usual chair for the short commercial break. The audience was still restless. The set behind her was filled with security guards and angry shouts of abuse. The atmosphere crackled with tension, but she ignored it. She had her job to do; let the others take care of the rest. There was more to come after the break; another set of wrecked lives to expose.

For a moment, Carrie was overcome with tiredness – not in the physical sense, but emotionally. This unexpected feeling – and she didn’t like it – jolted her as if someone had shoved her sharply from behind. Dealing with these people was gruelling, she acknowledged that. They’d filled her life for the last ten years. If she was honest, she could do with a break from their misery, their tragedy, their hopelessness, the lot that wasn’t hers but had almost become so by default. Every show was getting harder. But ironically, without their misfortune, she would still be a regional journalist eking a living from stories that occupied half a column on page ten of the local rag.

With less than a minute to go, Carrie needed to be in control for the remainder of the show. The ratings on this next item would be sky high.

The make-up girl fussed over her cheeks.

She smiled.

It was black and white. As clear-cut as the two-tone shoes she’d chosen for the show. Work was work. Home was home.

She took a call on her mobile.

She batted the make-up girl away.

Who was this?

Her mouth fell open.

She dropped her bottle of water.

She felt the cold liquid splash her ankles.

She ran.

Leah Roffe skimmed the report. It had not been a good morning. She took off her glasses and glanced at her watch. This week’s show had been off air for an hour now and the station switchboard was still in meltdown. She frowned at Dennis. ‘I can’t make much out of these cases.’ Their usual weekly brief in readiness for future shows wasn’t providing the distraction from the earlier disaster that Leah had hoped for. She simply couldn’t concentrate.

‘Fine. I’ll hand out a few knives and handguns to the local youth, ply them with booze and drugs, and see what that nets us. I wouldn’t want your ratings to fall.’

Leah pulled a face. ‘You know what I mean.’ She shoved her glasses back on. ‘I’ll take the abortion. The boy who did it to his girlfriend.’ She poured tea, hoping that might help her mood. ‘Can we contact her parents?’

DCI Masters shrugged. ‘She’s in care. She’s only fourteen. I can get you into the home if you like. We’re working closely with her carers. She refuses to name who did it to her. The doctors say she won’t be having any more kids.’

‘Christ.’ Leah shook her head. ‘Want some tea?’ Then she fell forward on to her elbows, chin in hands. What a morning. She couldn’t believe Carrie had just walked off set during the ad break. No one knew where she’d gone and she wasn’t answering her phone. They’d had to air a repeat for the second half of the show.

Dennis screwed up his face. ‘Nope. I’m off. I have work to do. My life isn’t all glamorous TV shows and celebrity tantrums, you know.’

Leah groaned. She appreciated his help, really she did. Without his cooperation, they wouldn’t have the heads up on many of the topical cases that made the show so special. It was a symbiotic relationship. Masters’ trickier cases gained airtime, community awareness was raised, and police crime-line numbers scrolled across the screen during the show. The Met had received leads on over eighty per cent of cases since it began, and thirty per cent more crimes had been solved thanks to Carrie Kent and her unique style of reporting.
Jeremy Kyle
meets
Crimewatch
, Leah told the media. The show was unique.

Dennis stood. He made to hug Leah but stopped. ‘How’s the girlfriend?’

‘Gone.’

‘Ah. So you’re single?’

‘Just go, Den,’ Leah ordered. ‘Get out of my hair.’

‘I suppose dinner’s out of the que—’ Dennis’s face went purple. ‘Oww,’ he wailed, rubbing his knee.

‘Serves you right.’ Leah’s mobile phone rang. She lunged at it. ‘Oh, thank
God
. Carrie, where the hell
are
you?’ Her face relaxed a little, the dozens of lines she’d acquired in the last couple of hours relenting now that she knew Carrie was alive at least. ‘It’s her,’ she whispered to Dennis unnecessarily, her hand over the mouthpiece. She rolled her eyes.

But then Leah’s face fell serious and drained of all colour as she listened. ‘Oh my God. Oh shit, no . . .’ Leah’s pupils dilated and her hand came up to her face. ‘Carrie, no . . . Where are you?’ Her voice became a whisper. ‘I’ll be right there.’ Leah grabbed her keys, her bag, and ran out of her office without saying another word.

From the moment she met him, she knew she would fall in love with him. The interview was quick but seemed to fill most of her life so far, as if it was the moment she’d been born for. He’d questioned eight other women but he could see –
see?
– he’d said, that she was perfect for the job.

‘How can you tell?’

Did he feel it too?

‘Because you let me put my own sugar in my tea,’ he replied, sliding a contract across the table. It crunched in the white granules that lay between them. ‘Take it. Read it overnight. Send it back tomorrow if you agree.’

He didn’t know that she’d spent the ten minutes of the interview staring into his sightless eyes; didn’t know that she watched the way his lips parted as he thought what to ask her next; didn’t know that she wanted to take hold of his hands, to somehow tell him that she
knew
this was right. It was a new start for the new millennium.

She smiled as she left. Some things just couldn’t be reduced to a formula.

Fiona, when she got home, signed the contract without even reading it.

Her first day working with Brody Quinell was hardly taxing for a maths graduate.

‘Blue or black?’ She let him feel the different socks.

‘These. They’re softer.’

She imagined him pulling them over his feet, snugly fitting round his ankles, the little wheeze as he bent forward to pull them up.

‘Ten pairs?’

Brody nodded. He bumped into a display of underpants.

‘Guess we should get some of these while we’re here too.’ Fiona plucked several packs off the shelves.

By the end of her first morning working with Professor Brody Quinell –
the
hottest name in statistical research, both in looks and intellect, the man whose name sent ripples of confusion through the world’s top mathematicians with his polemic papers – Fiona had pretty much restocked his underwear, bought enough toiletries to last a year, and filled his freezer with food he insisted she buy but that she wouldn’t feed to her cat.

‘I would have thought . . .’ She hesitated. He sat at the tiny kitchen table while she unpacked the groceries. ‘Didn’t you ever . . . I mean . . .’ She just wanted to look after him.

‘What? Spit it out, Fiona. If we’re to work together, then we must be entirely open with one another.’

‘Nothing,’ she replied. It’s nothing. Crazy, she told herself. Inappropriate, too, she thought. He’s my boss. Why am I feeling like this? But whatever it was that made the pit of her belly skittle like a teenager’s, she didn’t like the thought of him living in this flat. It was awful. Worse than awful. Didn’t he realise?

‘Your wife,’ Fiona began again, wondering if there was a gentler way to bring this up. ‘Did you live here together? In this flat?’

‘Hell no.’

‘Where then?’

‘Somewhere nice.’ Brody squinted, as if his lifeless eyes were trying to focus, to see the past. ‘It was a house. With a garden. We had a shed and a swing for my kid. We had beige carpet and fresh flowers on the hall table. I didn’t see it coming, all that domestic bliss.’

There was a pause; no noise apart from rustling as Fiona piled packets of cheap brand food into the freezer. She was wondering about his kid; suddenly feeling defensive. She hoped he wasn’t going to be a problem.

‘Wanna know the other thing that I couldn’t see?’

Fiona turned; she forgot and just nodded. He somehow sensed her interest.

‘I never once saw that it would all end.’

 

She finally got to go to the university – the reason she applied for the job in the first place. The mathematics faculty was set in thirty acres of landscaped grounds between Kew Gardens and Osterley Park. Fiona drove up to the security guard’s booth and showed him her new pass. He peered into the car.