Jackson took this for cunning rather than ignorance. ‘If you don’t know the answer to that, you should fire your solicitor. At the very least he should have established why you were being questioned.’
‘He did . . . sort of. The cops said one of the things in my rucksack belonged to a bloke who was part of a murder inquiry. It scared the shit out of me because they wouldn’t say what it was. But it has to be the Nokia, right? You wouldn’t be asking about it otherwise.’
She nodded.
‘I knew it ... I fucking
Jackson wondered who he was more afraid of.
‘You promised you wouldn’t,’ he said with a spurt of anger.
‘I promised I wouldn’t repeat information about your health and sexual history,’ she reminded him. ‘Did the five men have something to do with the mobile?’
He stared at her with a look of indecision on his face, but if his intention had been to unburden himself he was thwarted by the return of his mother. He spotted her face at the glass panel in the door and clammed up immediately, muttering that she’d want to know why the door was closed. Jackson stood up to open it, greeting the woman with a firm handshake and explaining her presence by saying she was the doctor who’d first treated Ben.
‘I dropped in to see how he was doing,’ she said.
Mrs Sykes’s response was as limp as her handshake. ‘That’s nice.’ She stooped to retrieve the headphones from the floor, as if her job in life was to clear up after people. ‘He likes his music,’ she murmured, plugging them into the console and handing them back to her son.
Jackson watched her resume her seat while the boy clamped the headphones over his ears again. Neither showed any interest in continuing their conversations with her, nor in talking to each other, and Jackson had a feeling that she and Trevor Monaghan might have misunderstood the relationship between them. Perhaps it wasn’t the son who was blanking the mother, but the mother who’d developed devices to distance herself from the demands of a child she’d never wanted.
*
Before she left, Jackson sought out Trevor Monaghan again to ask if Ben had been routinely tested for STDs. He nodded. ‘It’s pretty much standard when we don’t know anything about a patient. We couldn’t find any needle marks on him but you can never be too careful with HIV and hepatitis.’ ‘And?’ ‘Clean as a whistle. Is he worried he’s got an infection?’ Jackson gave a neutral shrug. ‘Did you do a rectal examination?’ He studied her curiously. ‘What’s he been telling you?’
‘Answer my question first,’ she urged. ‘I thought that in view of his age, and the fact he’s a runaway, you might have checked. He doesn’t appear to know about it if you did.’
‘He wouldn’t. I asked Anna Pelotski to take a look while he was still comatose. She didn’t find anything to suggest penetration . . . no old scarring . . . no fissures.’ Monaghan paused. ‘Has he told you differently?’
‘Yes.’
Monaghan shrugged. ‘He accused his stepfather to one of the nurses, said Mr Sykes buggered him whenever he was in the mood, which is why he doesn’t want to go back if the man remains in the house. I can’t say categorically that it never happened – we’d be talking about something that happened a year ago, and he may not have suffered any physical damage from it – but I suspect it’s a ruse to get his mother to himself again.’
‘He told me he was gang-raped by five men last month.’
‘Then he’s having you on. In his condition, Anna would have found open sores, and he’d still be hurting.’
‘What about longer ago . . . say, three or four months?’
Monaghan was doubtful. ‘Five men . . . one after the other . . . all hyped up . . . and no obvious scarring? Can’t see it, Jacks.’
She nodded. ‘So why invent a story like that? What does he hope to achieve by it?’
‘Confusion,’ said Monaghan with a touch of irony. ‘He’s adept at manipulation, that kid.’
Seventeen
FOR NO REASON THAT he felt it necessary to explain, Acland had taken to accompanying Jackson whenever she went out. Released by Jones (this time on police bail) under condition that he reside at the Bell and keep himself available for questioning, he seemed to have an inbuilt radar that told him precisely what the doctor’s movements were. While she was in the pub, front or back, he kept to his room, but every time she went to her car, day or night, she found him standing beside it. If the sortie involved a house call to a patient, he remained on the pavement outside; if it was appropriate to walk with her, he did.
Daisy, who had begun to find his attentions to her partner difficult to cope with, said he was acting as if he’d made Jackson responsible for his bail conditions. ‘It’s not your job to ensure he behaves himself,’ she said crossly. ‘Tell him to get a life and leave you alone.’
‘I quite enjoy having him along,’ said Jackson unwarily. ‘He’s no bother.’
But Daisy liked that even less. ‘I might as well not exist for all the attention either of you shows
*
Acland, who was well aware of the tensions he was creating, pushed himself away from the side of the BMW as Jackson rounded the corner. She was doing her usual trick of fiddling with her mobile as she walked along, but he
