The Perfect Girl (27 page)

Lucas stares at me full on when I ask him if he thinks his dad killed my mum, and the way he does it makes me sure that he knows the answer, but before he says anything there’s a knock on the bathroom door.

‘Everything all right in there, my lovely girls?’

It’s Richard. I don’t think he knows that Lucas is with us, and I don’t want him to, because this is our chance to talk without the others.

‘Yes, we’re fine,’ I call.

‘Do you need a hand?’

‘No. We’ll be down in a minute.’

I look back at Lucas. His expression is sort of cracked now, and he’s holding the bedspread above Grace’s face, his hand frozen in the air, while underneath him she tries to reach for it. He starts to speak, but I put my finger on my lips because I want to make sure that Richard’s gone.

After a few seconds pass, I’m confident that he has, so I say, ‘Did your dad hurt you?’

He winces, and he starts to fight back tears, so I think I know the answer to that.

I ask again, ‘Do you think your dad killed my mum?’

‘No,’ he says, and he whispers it, and now his eyes are full up with a huge, tremendous sorrow. He looks down at Grace, who’s still trying to reach the bedspread, a tiny frown puckering her so smooth forehead. A tear falls from his cheekbone on to the fabric, and darkens it.

A strange expression crosses Lucas’s eyes as he gazes at our sister, and it triggers an impulse in me to snatch the bedspread away in case he plunges it on to her face and smothers her, but before I act he lowers it gently down so that it’s within her reach and Grace’s reaction is practically ecstatic.

Lucas says, ‘I was trying to protect her.’

‘Your mum?’

‘No. Your mum.’

‘What?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘I just need to tell you it was a mistake. I killed her Zoe, but it was by mistake.’

My eyes are brimming hotly now and I feel my lips and chin collapse hopelessly and the muscles in my body seem to dissolve, and I find that I have nothing in me, no words at all that I can give back to Lucas.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘But it was an accident, I swear it was, and I’ve decided I’m going to tell them everything.’

I find myself choking with sobs, convulsed with them. I cover my hand with my mouth to mute them because they’re so violent.

Lucas picks Grace up and holds her close to him, and he sobs too. We sit there like that for what seems like for ever and then he hands Grace to me and says, ‘I’m going to miss her. She’s so perfect.’

His cheeks and upper lip and forehead are glistening with tears and snot and sweat from the heat of the day, and he stands up.

And, as he reaches for the door handle, the phrase that circulates around my mind, and makes me hold my sister to me as tightly as I possibly can, is this: ‘Lucas killed my mother.’

The consultant sits behind a desk that he’s clearly using just for the purposes of this clinic, because he’s opening and shutting drawers crossly, picking things up from the desk and slapping them back down. I’m afraid that his actions might dislodge the rimless reading glasses that are balanced precariously at the end of his nose.

‘They put things in a different place every time,’ he says. ‘Take a seat, please.’

‘Sam Locke,’ I say and we shake hands just before I sit.

I’m not used to being on this side of the desk in situations like this, and I feel as if I need to show him somehow that I consider myself his equal, even if it’s just with a handshake.

I chide myself immediately for the feeling though, because it’s not going to change anything he’s going to say to me; it’s no more than a futile attempt my pride is making to assert myself as a fellow professional, and, anyway, the doctor seems oblivious to it. He must see this twenty times a day. To him, I’m just a patient, somebody to keep at a safe professional distance, just as, I suppose, my clients are to me.

‘I only want a pen,’ he says, eyebrows raised. ‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’

I hand him a pen from my own pocket, and he scribbles something on a fat, dog-eared set of notes, bursting out of their cardboard wrapping, before he puts it to one side.

‘Right! Sorry about that. They always show everybody in too quickly. Always rushing.’

He takes a slim brown folder from a neatly stacked pile. It’s pristine, and on the front of it is my name. When he opens it, I see a letter from my GP, a referral, and only one or two other sheets of paper.

‘Aha,’ he says. ‘Yes. You’ve just had a scan.’

I nod.

‘So we need to take a look at that.’

He begins to tap at the computer keyboard. He has to watch his fingers to find the right keys.

‘Let’s hope the system is going to be kind to us today,’ he tells me. ‘There are many hurdles we can fall at when we want to access scans.’

I’m silent, I just watch him. I must not dislike him, I think, because this man is going to be looking after me. On his head there’s just a shadow of hair around the back and sides, cropped extremely close, and petering out on the crown where there’s a shine that I suspect he wouldn’t like if he could see it. His suit is an expensive one, and his tie is extravagantly knotted, and certainly made of silk; there’s a thick gold wedding band on his ring finger and an expensive watch clamped ostentatiously around his wrist. I suspect he has a lucrative private practice.

He must be feeling the heat in all that finery, I think, because I am.

‘Ah yes! Here we are,’ he announces finally. ‘Got it.’

And I see his face collapse into a frown as he studies it and I feel as if I’m watching a piece of my world detaching itself and falling into a void.

I want to tear Lucas’s eyes out.

But I want to hold him too.

Grace is still in my arms and I have squeezed her so close to me that she has started to cry. Lucas is still standing over us, looking down at us, not moving, though his hand is on the bathroom door handle.

‘What were you trying to protect my mum from?’ I ask.

‘From Dad.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was about to hurt her, and I tried to get her out of his way, because I could see him coming for her. I pushed her, because I didn’t have time to do anything else, but we were at the top of the stairs, and she fell down and hit her head. I didn’t mean it to happen, I was trying to help her. It was an accident; I swear it, Zoe. I’m sorry.’

And before I can say anything to that he unlocks the door, turns the handle and he’s gone, and the movement of the door sends a hot barrage of air into the room. I’m left sitting there in all the wet that Grace has made, just holding her while she grizzles. The force of what he’s just told me makes it feel difficult even to breathe, let alone to try to understand what’s happened, but I must.

Lucas says he’s tried to protect my mum from Chris, and he’s killed her instead. He said the same words to me that I said at my trial: ‘It was an accident.’

‘How are you getting on?’ It’s Richard, standing on the landing; it’s like he’s appeared out of nowhere. ‘Are you all right, lovey? Have you been crying again?’

‘I don’t want Chris and Lucas to take Grace,’ I tell him. I blurt that out, because it’s how I feel, but also because something tells me not to tell him what Lucas just said, and I think it’s because I don’t want it to be true.

Richard is looking at me a bit oddly, and for a moment I wonder if he was listening at the door before, whether he heard what Lucas said.

‘Is Lucas OK?’ he asks.

‘He’s fine. He was just helping me.’

He stares at my face for a second, and then his eyes fall to Grace.

‘I understand why you don’t want her to go,’ he says. He strokes Grace’s head and she reaches out her arms to him and he takes her from me.

‘I want to stop them.’

‘I don’t really think we can.’

‘But Grace belongs to me and Mum. She always has.’

‘Listen, I know it’s really, really hard, but Chris is her dad. There’s nothing we can do.’

‘Help me. I want her to stay here, just for a bit.’

Uncle Richard looks even more red and sweaty than he did this morning. He sits down on the side of the bath, holding Grace on his knee.

‘What if we offer to keep Grace for the day, just until they’ve checked into the hotel and got themselves sorted out?’ he says. ‘Then we can take her over there later.’

‘She needs a nap.’

‘Then I’ll say that. She can nap here before she goes.’

I look at Grace. She doesn’t often settle down quickly or quietly, and if that happens then Chris might just take her anyway. He’s never patient about that kind of thing.

‘I’ll put her in the buggy,’ I say. ‘If we push her around she’ll fall asleep.’

Grace has a buggy that’s padded like an emperor’s chariot. When she’s tired, she never lasts five minutes in it before nodding off, because it’s way too comfy and Mum says she likes the feeling of being in motion.

‘Can you tell Chris?’ I know he won’t listen to me, and I don’t want to say even a single word to him.

‘Leave it with me,’ Richard says.

He puts a hand on my shoulder and I feel like I can trust him, and that he’s on my side, and I suddenly understand that there’s something even more important that I should be doing: I need to find Lucas before he talks to anybody else.

The stairs make a sound like thunder as I run down them and I’m lucky because I find Lucas straight away. He’s standing in the hall, in front of the sitting room door. There’s nobody else there, and the door is semi-closed. He looks like he’s steeling himself to open it, and tell everybody what happened.

I take his arm. ‘Come with me,’ I whisper.

He shakes my hand off. He’s psyched up.

‘I have to do this.’ His words sound as if he’s having to force them out from between his clenched teeth.

‘I need you first. Please.’

I take his hand again and pull it to my mouth, and put my lips on the back of his fingers, just very gently. It’s the only thing I can think to do. I want him to feel my touch because after my First Chance Life ended I felt like nobody wanted to touch me because of what I did, because I wasn’t worth it.

They all talked and talked to me and at me about what I did and how to ‘move forward’ and guilt, and reparation, and sentences served, and future opportunities, and I understood all of that; but the reason I never felt encouraged by it, or strengthened was partly because I was sorry for what I did, so sorry that it hurt me every day, and partly because I was angry about what happened at my trial, but mostly because I felt I would never be worth anything, ever again.

‘Your self-esteem,’ Jason told me, ‘is at rock bottom, and I don’t like to see it that way.’

‘Go figure,’ I said back to him. It was at the end of our second to last session, it was nearly the last conversation we ever had; the last nice conversation, anyway.

Lucas starts to shake, and his fingers relax against my lips.

‘Once you’ve told them,’ I whisper, ‘they’ll take you away, straight away and we won’t ever get to see each other again for a very long time, maybe never. I just want to talk to you one more time before you tell them, please.’

He looks nervous of that. Or is he nervous of me, and of what I might do to him now I know what happened.

‘I want to hear your story,’ I say, because that’s the other thing I never had, the chance to tell my story without people always lecturing me around it. Sometimes I think I would have liked to tell my story to the mums and dads of the children I killed, that they might not mind so much if they heard it from me, away from court and judges and solicitors.

‘Bad idea,’ Jason said. ‘Reparation justice does recommend meetings between victims’ families and prisoners in some situations, but this doesn’t qualify as one of them.’

‘Lucas,’ I breathe the word on to his hand, terrified that we’ll be interrupted, or overheard, that I’m too late. ‘Please.’ My breath feels hotter than the day even as it spreads across his fingers.

His shaking intensifies. I play my final card. I put down my ace.

‘I understand,’ I say, ‘I promise.’

I hope I can keep this up. My impulse to punish him, attack him, rip him to shreds, bend and break his body like the kids who were in the car with me is strong, and it’s fighting a hard battle with my sensible head.

‘Where shall we go?’ he says just when I think all is lost, and he’ll confess and go to prison and Chris will disappear out of our lives with Grace, and I’ll have nothing.

I exhale with relief and tell him that there’s one place I can think of.

Chris and Philip and I are sitting more or less in silence, as the Family Liaison Officer makes many and varied attempts to engage us in small talk, or any kind of talk. She talks about cups of tea, she talks about the process of grief, she talks about the structure of police investigations, and she talks about the weather.

Chris is managing to offer her a few responses, which she leaps on to as if they were scraps thrown to a dog. I think she must have been taught to try to engage with us, to become our friend. I want to tell her that I don’t give a fig’s leaf how many times a day she has to water her geraniums in the heatwave, but instead I manage to zone her out, so that her words become a wall of white noise, against which I try to think.

Philip is in our most comfortable armchair, head back, mouth open, snoring gently. The drive, he told us, and the early start, have worn him out. I have no words to describe my anger at his selfishness.

I watch Chris out of the corner of my eye as he talks to the Family Liaison Officer. I wonder if I should say something to her about my suspicions and, if so, what. If I make them known to her, and Chris guesses who has done so, and if I’m wrong, we’ll never recover from that, and I don’t know if I’m sure enough to risk that.

In a way, I’m grateful that Chris wants to go to a hotel. It’ll give me a chance to speak to Richard about him, and to get advice from Sam. And besides, Chris isn’t behaving like a guilty man; he seems devastated.

I also can’t deny that I crave the space that he and Lucas and the baby will leave in my house, because it might give me a chance to mourn my sister, and give Zoe a chance to mourn her mother.

So when Chris stands to look out of the window, to see if his taxi has arrived, I find that I’m willing it to be there.

‘Any sign?’ the Liaison Officer asks him.

‘No,’ he says, and then, ‘Oh wait, yes, I think this is it.’

It occurs to me then, as he begins to move to answer the door, that if he is guilty of something he might flee, but that immediately seems a wild, stupid thought, and something for the police to be concerned about, not me. This is not television, I tell myself, where people can just disappear in an instant, especially not with a successful business that needs running, a reasonably high public profile, and a baby and teenager in tow.

‘Lucas!’ Chris calls up the stairs. The three of us are gathered in the hall now, though there’s no sign of Richard or the kids.

‘Lucas!’

None of them answer.

‘I’ll find him,’ I say.

Chris opens the front door and there’s a driver there, smart in a crisp open-necked shirt and chinos. It’s definitely not the usual comfortable attire of the shift taxi driver, and behind him I glimpse a sleek black vehicle. Chris has called one of his work drivers, I realise; ‘taxi’ wasn’t quite an accurate description. It reminds me once more how little I’ve understood about the life he and Maria have been leading.

I run upstairs to the bathroom to see if anybody is still there with the baby. There are signs everywhere that Grace has been bathed: water on the floor and bubbles gathered around the plughole, but the room is empty of people.

‘Zoe?’ I call. ‘Richard?’

Again, no answer.

‘Lucas?’

I see that his backpack has been slung on to one of our spare beds, all zipped up.

Then I glimpse them through a window; Lucas and Zoe are out in the garden, and it looks as if they have the baby in the buggy. They’re patiently pushing her backwards and forward in the shade of our patio.

It’s a lovely sight, as if they’ve come together to form surrogate parents for Grace, and I know Maria would be happy if she could see them. I watch as they peer at Grace together, under the sunshade, and then, carefully, they begin to walk up the garden with her, although the uneven slabs and the tufts of tough, desiccated grass that protrude between them make it slow going.

I hear talking downstairs in the hall and make my way down.

‘She just conked out,’ Richard is saying, ‘absolutely blotto in my arms after her bath, so we’ve put her down in the pushchair, and we thought you might prefer to go on ahead to the hotel and get settled in and come and collect her later. Or we could bring her to you?’

Chris doesn’t look happy. He checks his watch impatiently.

‘I don’t want to be going backwards and forwards later on so how about I send the driver to work to pick up some things for me, because I need to do that anyway, and by the time he gets back she should have had an hour or so of sleep. Do we think that would work?’ he says.

‘Of course,’ I say. That sounds like a fair plan to me and, besides, I’m flat out of the energy required to make any other kind of response.