When She Was Bad (36 page)

‘That’s right, a few weeks,’ he agreed, without looking up. ‘He was such a sad little scrap at first. Didn’t say anything, just followed you around the room with those big eyes. And then one day Sheila had been out somewhere, I forget where, the shops or something, and she came into the kitchen and he said “Mummy”. And he smiled. And that was that, really.’

‘I’ll never forget it,’ said Sheila, and her pale-blue eyes, which had been shot through with pink when we arrived, as if she’d just been crying, now filled once again with tears.

‘People are saying he’s a monster, but he isn’t. What he did . . . what they say he did . . . Ewan just wouldn’t. Not to a woman. He was so protective of me, wasn’t he, love?’

Neil didn’t reply, just nodded and breathed a deep sigh.

Sheila was perched on a leather footstool as there wasn’t enough space in the cramped living room for anything more than the three-seater sofa where Shannon and I sat and the armchair in which Neil was slumped. You’d think I’d be the one who’d know how to deal with tears, right? I’m the professional, after all. But it was Shannon who got up and knelt down on the dusty pink carpet next to the grief-stricken woman and put an arm around her heaving shoulders and said the things a woman in Sheila’s position wanted to hear. ‘You did a good job’, ‘He wasn’t himself’, ‘It’s clear how much you loved him’.

And it was. It really was. The photographs around the living room and in the narrow hallway were all of Ewan Johnson at various stages of growing up. As an angelic, if nervous-looking young boy on his first day of school in a uniform that was several sizes too big. Slightly older, tousle-haired and grinning straight into the camera to reveal a black hole where his four front teeth should have been. A handsome teenager, sitting in a kayak, wearing a life-vest over a tanned bare chest, gazing out at the photographer through Shannon’s clear green eyes. The obligatory school prom photograph, sandwiched between Neil and Sheila, over whom he towered, with an arm around each of them, wearing a smart new suit, all of them looking proud and happy.

Photographs do lie. We all edit our own pasts, picking out what conforms best to the picture of our lives we most want to paint. But there was love there, in that modest house. We truly felt it. It was what we needed – what Shannon needed – to know.

Later, Neil admitted that Ewan had been no angel. He’d got into a few fights at school, though never too serious. Sometimes he hadn’t even been able to give a reason beyond that an ‘angry mist’ had taken him over. He’d suffered off and on from stiffness in one of his legs, clearly the legacy of his incarceration in the cellar, although Neil and Sheila had been told only that it was the result of an early injury. Boys who’d made fun of his occasional limp had more often than not ended up regretting it. Ewan hadn’t always been kind either to the besotted girls who called round all through his teens. ‘Tell her I’m not here,’ he’d hiss, running upstairs to hide in his room.

There’d been a period between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, Neil said, when the two of them had locked horns, Ewan pushing, always pushing, against his father’s authority. ‘I was stuck in the middle of them,’ Sheila said. ‘But that’s normal, isn’t it? All young lads go through a phase of trying to prove themselves to their fathers.’ He’d got drunk one time and had to have his stomach pumped. Another time Sheila had found a little bag of white pills hidden in his bedroom. Once, Neil recalled, his friends had brought him home from a party raving like a lunatic. They said he’d been smoking skunk and it had done something to his brain. He was convinced people were trying to kill him, even his own parents. Sheila had wanted to take him to the hospital, but Neil had persuaded her to wait for a few hours and luckily it had passed. Their son had never touched the stuff again.

As he hit his early twenties he’d calmed down, become less confrontational, more considerate. And he’d seemed to be doing so well at work.

Until Rachel Masters arrived.

Neil’s voice dried up as he said the name of the woman Ewan had killed, and Sheila began crying again.

‘He wasn’t in his right mind,’ she said. ‘He would never . . .’

We sat for a while, not speaking, the silence punctuated only by Sheila’s sobs, tiny hiccuping sounds that seemed to catch in the back of her throat.

I could feel Shannon building up to say something. When you’ve lived with someone a long time you get a sense for things like that. Even before she spoke, I knew what she was going to say. It was what we’d travelled all this way to find out.

‘Did he ever ask you about his early family life? Did he try to find out where he came from?’

Did he know about me
, is what she was really asking.
Did he know what I did
?

Sheila shook her head.

‘He knew he was adopted, of course. And he knew his biological family had been very . . .’ she glanced at Shannon warily ‘. . . dysfunctional, and that’s why he was sent so far away to be adopted. Barbara, our social worker, never told us his biological family’s surname. She said it was better that we didn’t know. She didn’t say why but we guessed it was because they had been in the news. So we couldn’t look them up. Ewan asked about them a few times over the years, but not often. He knew it upset me.’

Without warning, she put her hand out to touch Shannon’s face, running her trembling fingers softly down my daughter’s cheek.

‘I’m sorry, love, it’s just that you’re so much like him. So, so lovely.’

And now in this anonymous high-security psychiatric hospital, Shannon is about to find out for herself how much alike she and her brother are, and I know she’s finding the prospect terrifying.

‘OK?’ I ask now, leaning across from my chair in the visiting room to put a hand on her knee.

She nods.

‘Will he even know who I am though, Mom? He’ll be on heavy-duty medication, right?’

I have used my professional privilege to find out all I can about Ewan Johnson’s treatment. Through contacts in the UK I learned that he had been remanded from court to this place, displaying signs of acute psychosis. From what I can gather, strong medication and daily therapy have got the psychosis under control, but now it is the possibility of self-harm that medical personnel are more concerned with. We met briefly with Ewan’s lawyer late yesterday afternoon, a tired-looking woman who played with her wedding ring as she spoke to us in the foyer of her offices, as if it were a good luck charm with which she could ward off the more distressing aspects of her job. She couldn’t or wouldn’t tell us much, citing client confidentiality, but she did confirm they’re working on a defence of diminished responsibility when his case does finally come to trial. She seemed interested in Shannon, appraising her with her purple-shadowed eyes and asking if she’d be prepared to come to give evidence in Ewan’s support if they decided to play the dysfunctional birth family card. I knew what she was thinking. My daughter would look good up there on the stand.

‘Yes, he’s on pretty serious meds,’ I confirm now. ‘But he should still be compos mentis. Just a bit slower than usual, is all.’

We are both silent, thinking about the baby who wasn’t loved enough to be called by his name, the little boy Kowalsky and Oppenheimer decided was balanced enough that a new start could paper over the cracks his mistreatment had left in his psyche.

‘Oh my God, someone’s coming.’

Shannon is half standing, unsure what to do with herself. I hear her swallow loudly. My own mouth is dry as dust, remembering the solemn-faced child I glimpsed through a panel of glass all those years ago.

The door opens and a prison guard steps inside wearing a dark-blue uniform and a stern expression. He glances at me, then at Shannon. And then at Shannon again.

‘I’ll be outside,’ he tells her. It’s as if I don’t exist.

Then he turns to go and someone else is coming through the door. Someone tall who looks at me through Shannon’s eyes as if he recognizes me. As the door softly closes behind him, he shifts his attention to Shannon and they stare at each other for a long time. I notice that Ewan Johnson has lost the chest-out stance of the photographs in Sheila and Neil’s home. His shoulders are still broad but he is thinner than he appeared on the news bulletins, his sweatshirt hanging off him as if off a clothes hanger. I have never seen anyone look so lost.

I think about what he endured in that basement. I think about the cage. I think about how he was three years old before he heard a kind word or felt a gentle human touch. And I think about the little girl who grew up aware she was doing something wrong, something bad, but not knowing exactly what or how to stop it. I think about my own mother and how she chose the liquor over me, and just how many ways it’s possible to fuck up a child so badly that ten, twenty, forty years later they’re still trying to make sense of it.

And now Shannon is properly on her feet and taking two steps across the floor and she’s opening up her arms, and her brother is falling into them like the baby he was never allowed to be.

And for this moment, just for this moment, love is all. Love is everything.

I close my eyes.

Epilogue

Julia Tomlinson-Harris had that fluttery feeling she got whenever she was nervous or excited or, as now, a mixture of both. Though there were several files open on the desk in front of her, her mind wasn’t on the reports she was supposed to be reading; instead, her gaze flicked repeatedly to the glass window between her new office and the desks on the main floor where sat the staff members she’d inherited.

She’d met them when she first came in that morning, but only briefly. Mark Hamilton had brought her into the main office and gathered the staff together to introduce her and make a quick speech.

The words ‘unfortunate’, ‘regrettable’ and ‘tragic’ had featured strongly in the first part of the speech, to be quickly replaced by ‘overcome’, ‘pull together’ and once even, if she remembered rightly, ‘transcend’. They were entering an exciting period, Mark informed them. ‘The future starts now.’ Then she’d shaken hands with each of the staff members and they’d told her their names, which she knew anyway from the personnel records she’d studied in depth. And since then she’d been in here, pretending to work, but really trying to get a handle on who they all were and to gauge the general mood.

That grim-faced man over there must be Charlie. Not terribly friendly, was he? Looked like he had the world on his shoulders. But then hadn’t he had some sort of breakdown on the very same day of what Mark kept referring to as ‘the unfortunate tragedy’? Slashed his own arm? Not deeply, thank the Lord, but enough to have everyone flapping about for a while. That was one of the reasons they hadn’t noticed the other two had been gone so long apparently.

‘Aren’t you a bit freaked out, going into that office? After everything that happened?’ her old assistant Naomi had asked Julia after she first announced her new job.

‘It didn’t happen in the office itself,’ Julia had reminded her. ‘And obviously Ewan Johnson isn’t there any more.’

‘Yes, but it’s kind of like stepping into a dead woman’s shoes, isn’t it? Kind of creepy.’ And she’d done a theatrical little shudder so that her narrow brown shoulders moved up and down like piano keys under her strappy top.

Julia actually hadn’t felt at all freaked out when Mark Hamilton had first approached her about taking over Rachel Masters’s job. In fact, she’d been flattered. With all the media reports both at the time of the
incident
and then again at the trial, this was by far the most high-profile recruitment department in the country – and she was the one tasked with getting it back into shape.

‘They need a safe pair of hands,’ she’d said when she handed in her notice at her old company. ‘Someone to steer them back to health.’

Mark himself had been running things since Rachel had been gone, in conjunction with Paula Hibbs. It hadn’t escaped Julia’s notice that Paula had failed to meet her eyes when she shook hands this morning. She looked so hot and flustered. What on earth was she thinking of, wearing all those layers on a day like today? The woman hadn’t exactly been welcoming. She couldn’t possibly have imagined she might be offered the job herself, could she?

But while Julia hadn’t been freaked out before starting the job, she had to admit she’d had a few
moments
since arriving this morning. In her experience, when you took over someone’s position there was nearly always a lingering sense of the previous incumbent. Even if there was no nameplate still on the door or mini-pack of tissues in the top drawer, there was usually a faint imprint of someone else’s presence – the particular height of the office chair, the list of extension numbers stuck to the telephone written in a sloping hand, not her own, and in blue ink rather than her own preferred black.

Even though six months had passed since the terrible thing that happened to Rachel Masters, Julia fancied she got a whiff, just every now and then, of a musky, smoky perfume of the kind she’d never use. There was also a coat hanger on a hook on the back of the door that Julia kept being drawn to, imagining one of Rachel’s neat fitted jackets hanging there, or a soft cashmere coat. She’d never actually met her predecessor, but obviously she’d read so much about her she almost felt like she had.

The knock on the door gave Julia a start.

‘Sorry to bother you.’

The woman who walked in was early thirties, long dark hair, big-boned. Julia’s eyes flicked to the notebook where she’d scribbled down the names of her new team. Amira. It must be.

Julia beamed at her and got a weak smile in return. Not so much a smile, in fact, as a muscle twitch at the side of her mouth. The assessment reviews in her personnel file had described her as ‘bright’ and ‘outgoing’. But Amira’s face was blank and smooth as if something elemental had rubbed it free of expression.

‘I just wanted to remind you I’ve got the afternoon off. We’re moving.’

‘That’s exciting. Where to?’

‘Back in with my mum.’