Coat collar up, Whitemore hunkered down beside him. ‘You want to tell me what happened?’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Emma says-’
‘I don’t give a fuck what Emma says.’
‘I do,’ Whitemore said. ‘I have to. But I want to know what you say, too.’
Pitcher was silent for several minutes, passers-by stepping over his legs or grudgingly going round.
‘He’d been whingeing away,’ Pitcher said, ‘Jason. How the pants he was wearing was too tight. Scratching. His hand down his trousers, scratching, and I kept telling him to stop. He’d hurt himself. Make it worse. Then, when he went to the toilet, right, I told him to show me, you know, show me where it was hurting, point to it, like. And there was a bit of red there, I could see, so I said would he like me to put something on it, to make it better and he said yes and so…’
He stopped abruptly, tears in his eyes and shoulders shaking.
Whitemore waited.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ Pitcher said finally. ‘Honest. I never touched him. Not like… you know, like before.’
‘But you could have?’ Whitemore said.
Head down, Pitcher nodded.
‘Darren?’
‘Yes, yeah. I suppose… Yeah.’
Still neither of them moved and the rain continued to fall.
On Christmas morning Whitemore rose early, scraped the ice from the windows of the second-hand Saab he’d bought not so many weeks before, loaded up the back seat with presents, and set out for the coast. When he arrived the light was only just beginning to spread, in bands of pink and yellow, across the sky. Wanting his arrival to be a surprise, he parked some houses away.
The curtains were partly drawn and he could see the lights of the Christmas tree clearly, red, blue and green, and, as he moved across the frosted grass, he could see the twins, up already, still wearing their pyjamas, tearing into the contents of their stockings, shouting excitedly as they pulled at the shiny paper and cast it aside.
When he thought they might see him, he stepped quickly away and returned to the car, loading the presents into his arms. Back at the bungalow he placed them on the front step, up against the door, and walked away.
If he had waited, knocked on the window, rung the bell, gone inside and stayed, seen their happiness at close hand, he knew it would have been almost impossible to leave.
Emma Laurie appeared at the police station in early January, the youngest child in a buggy, the others half- hidden behind her legs. After days of endless pestering, she had allowed Pitcher back into the house, just for an hour, and then he had refused to leave. When she’d finally persuaded him to go, he had threatened to kill himself if she didn’t have him back; said that he would snatch the children and take them with him; kill them all.
‘It was wrong o’me, weren’t it? Letting him back in. I never should’ve done it. I know that, I know.’
‘It’s okay,’ Whitemore said. ‘And I wouldn’t pay too much attention to what Darren said. He was angry. Upset. Times like that, people say a lot of things they don’t necessarily mean.’
‘But if you’d seen his face… He meant it, he really did.’
Whitemore gave her his card. ‘Look, my mobile number’s there. If he comes round again, threatening you, anything like that, you call me, right? Straight away. Meantime, I’ll go and have a word with him. Okay?’
Emma smiled uncertainly, nodded thanks and ushered the children away.
After spending time in various hostels and a spell sleeping rough, Pitcher, with the help of the local housing association, had found a place to rent in Sneinton. A one-room flat with a sink and small cooker in one corner and a shared bathroom and toilet on the floor below. Whitemore sat on the single chair and Pitcher sat on the sagging bed.
‘I know why you’re here,’ Pitcher said. ‘It’s about Emma. What I said.’
‘You frightened her.’
‘I know. I lost me temper, that’s all.’ He shook his head. ‘Being there, her an’ the kids, a family, you know? An’ then her chuckin’ me out. You wouldn’t understand. Why would you? But I felt like shit. A piece of shit. An’ I meant it. What I said. Not the kids, not harmin’ them. I wouldn’t do that. But topping myself…’ He looked at Whitemore despairingly. ‘It’s what I’ll do. I swear it. I will.’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ Whitemore said.
‘Why the hell not?’
Whitemore leaned towards him and lowered his voice. ‘It’s hard, I know. And I do understand. Really, I do. But you have to keep going. Move on. Look — here — you’ve got this place, right? A flat of your own. It’s a start. A new start. Look at it like that.’
He went across to Pitcher and rested a hand on his shoulder, not knowing how convincing his half-truths and platitudes had been.
‘Ben Leonard, you talked to him before. I’ll see if I can’t get him to see you again. It might help sort a few things out. Okay? But in the meantime, whatever you do, you’re to keep away from Emma. Right, Darren? Emma and the children.’ Whitemore tightened his grip on Pitcher’s shoulder before stepping clear. ‘Keep right away.’
It was a little over a week later the call came through, waking Whitemore from his sleep. The voice was brisk, professional, a triage nurse at the Queen’s Medical Centre, accident and emergency. ‘We’ve a young woman here, Emma Laurie, she’s quite badly injured. Some kind of altercation with a partner? She insisted that I contact you, I hope that’s all right. Apparently she’s worried about the children. Three of them?’
‘Are they there with her?’
‘No. At home, apparently.’
‘On their own?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe a neighbour? I’m afraid she’s not making a lot of sense.’
Whitemore dropped the phone and finished pulling on his clothes.
The house was silent: the blood slightly tacky to the touch. One more room to go. The bathroom door was bolted from the inside and Whitemore shouldered it free. Darren Pitcher was sitting on the toilet seat, head slumped forward, one arm trailing over the bath, the other dangling towards the floor. Long, vertical cuts ran down the insides of both arms, almost from elbow to wrist, slicing through the horizontal scars from where he had harmed himself before. Blood had pooled along the bottom of the bath and around his feet. A Stanley knife rested on the bath’s edge alongside an oval of pale green soap.
Whitemore crouched down. There was a pulse, still beating faintly, at the side of Pitcher’s neck.
‘Darren? Can you hear me?’
With an effort, Pitcher raised his head. ‘See, I did it. I said I would.’ A ghost of a smile lingered in his eyes.
‘The children,’ Whitemore said. ‘Where are they?’
Pitcher’s voice was a sour whisper in his face. ‘The shed. Out back. I didn’t want them to see this.’
As Pitcher’s head slumped forward, Whitemore dialled the emergency number on his mobile phone.
Downstairs he switched on the kitchen light; there was a box of matches lying next to the stove. Unbolting the back door, he stepped outside. The shed was no more than five feet high, roughly fashioned from odd planks of wood, the roof covered with a rime of frost. The handle was cold to the touch.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said, loud enough for them to hear inside. ‘I’m just going to open the door.’
When it swung back, he ducked inside and struck a match. The three children were clinging to one another in the furthest corner, staring wide-eyed into the light.
Darren Pitcher had lost consciousness by the time the paramedics arrived and despite their efforts and those of the doctors at A amp; E, he was pronounced dead a little after six that morning. Sutured and bandaged, Emma Laurie was kept in overnight and then released. Her children had been scooped up by the social services emergency duty team and would spend a short time in care.
Tom Whitemore drove to the embankment and stood on the pedestrian bridge across the river, staring down at the dark, glassed-over surface of the water, the pale shapes of sleeping swans, heads tucked beneath their wings. Overhead, the sky was clear and pitted with stars.
When finally he arrived home, it was near dawn.
