The Child Who

‘Shit!’

‘Leo?’

‘Shit!’

‘What?’

Blood.

‘Ow!’

Shit. Blood. Ow. Ow!

He stood. The others stared: at him; at the blood, when they noticed it, that was flowing from his fingers.

‘Shit,’ said Leo again. ‘Jesus, ow!’ He had dropped all the envelopes except the one that had bitten him. And it had felt exactly like that: like a mouth with razor teeth had taken a bloody great bite.

‘Christ, Leo,’ said Terry.

Jenny was standing at Leo’s side. Howard was standing, barely, at hers. From the colour of his face, the blood on the floor might have been his.

‘I’m fine,’ said Leo, turning away. ‘It’s just, I don’t know.’ He lifted the envelope. ‘A paper cut or something.’ The hole he had dug into the seal was the colour of an open wound. It sparkled, though. It grinned.

‘That’s quite a paper cut,’ someone said.

‘Here,’ said someone else and a handkerchief appeared in Leo’s eye line. ‘Let me take that,’ the same voice said but Leo snatched the envelope away. He stuffed it, blood and all, into his trouser pocket.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Thanks. I’ll just…’ He bundled his bleeding fingers in the handkerchief and tipped his head towards the door.

‘Go,’ Howard managed. ‘Please.’

Leo went. Through the doors and past the empty desks and into the nearest toilet. He spun the tap and winced as the water sunk into the wound.

His finger was shredded. There was not one cut but several: a mesh of interlinked scores that seemed colourless beneath the water but bulged red as soon as he withdrew his finger from the icy flow. Leo reached across himself for a strip of toilet paper and had to tug twice, three times, to snap it from the roll. He ended up with far more tissue than he thought he needed but it quickly became sodden around his finger. With his good hand he squeezed. He counted, waiting until the blood and the pain subsided, then shifted. Gingerly, he pulled the crumpled envelope from his pocket.

The grin was glass: crystals the size of sea salt dusted along the envelope’s rim. Incongruously, Leo thought of Ellie; of the pictures, not so long ago it seemed, that she would often bring home from school – seascapes stuck with sand or Christmas cards sprinkled with glitter. The glass on the note had been applied using the same technique, Leo realised. There was something juvenile too, it struck him, about the way the note writer had chosen to demonstrate his malice.

He had keys. He unsnagged the bunch from his pocket and used his latch key to work an opening in the envelope’s closed side. The paper seemed thick, toughened somehow – chosen, perhaps, to disguise the glass – and yielded reluctantly. Leo hacked and gained an inch, another. Blood began seeping through the toilet paper and glass fragments pattered from the envelope onto his lap. Leo ignored them, ignored the throbbing too, and finally had the note free. He shook it, unfolded it, turned it and stared.

HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT LEO

HOW WOULD YOUR DAUGHTER?

THE BOY IS GUILTY

LEAVE HIM TO ROT

13

The lobby smelt of leather and centuries-old tomes, and was infused with a luxurious hush. There was artwork on the walls and copies of Country Life and Vanity Fair fanned meticulously on the side tables. Leo, doing his best not to slump on a deep-tan, button- backed Chesterfield, felt obliged every so often to straighten his tie. His suit, wrinkled from the train journey, seemed tattier than he remembered and shapeless. Nothing like those that drifted past once in a while atop handmade, leather-soled shoes. Leo looked, he imagined, like a wide-eyed yokel, which was exactly the way he felt. Out of his depth: that was the phrase. And it was apposite in so many ways.

‘Leo!’

Leo, tapping his fingertips on his knees, had not even realised the lobby housed a lift. He raised his head and saw the wooden panels across from him had drawn stealthily apart. Beyond them was a sparkling brass interior, out of which stepped the man Leo had come to see.

‘Dale.’ Leo got quickly to his feet. He buttoned his jacket and aimed his hand at the one being propelled towards him.

Dale Baldwin-Tovey should, by rights, have been a tosser. It was the word Terry had used to describe him the last time the barrister had been engaged by their practice but, unsurprisingly perhaps, Leo had felt obliged to demur. Dale was younger than Leo and Terry both. In financial terms he was considerably more successful. He had more hair than they did in the places it mattered and less where the lack of it mattered double. His teeth were almost as impressive as Howard’s but his grin was less ostentatious. The man seemed embarrassed by his good looks and was openly so of his double-barrelled surname. Leo found him humble, engaging and almost disconcertingly bright. A tosser then, as Terry would have it, precisely because he was not.

‘You found us okay? How was the journey?’ With his hand on Leo’s shoulder, Dale guided him back towards the lift. The barrister pressed the call button and kept pressing it, as though unwilling for his guest to be kept waiting.

‘It was fine. Thank you.’

‘Good. Great. Thanks again for coming up. Sorry you had to bother but there was just no way I could leave London this week.’

Leo made a face. ‘It’s fine. Really.’ Although the truth was, he had almost cancelled. Ellie was refusing to return to school and Meg had asked Leo to speak with her. Not only had Leo not had the chance, he had barely spent more than a few snatched seconds this past week talking to Megan. His wife, he knew, was less than happy. But the case – Daniel – could not wait, which was something Megan did not seem to understand. Plus, of course, there were the notes. Leo did not trust himself not to show them to his wife and doing so, given her obvious anxiety, would not be fair, at least until Leo could decide for himself whether they were worth worrying about. Which, actually, was another reason why Leo had decided in the end to make the trip.

The lift arrived and Dale gestured Leo inside. The doors closed and Leo found himself surrounded by an army in his own likeness. The floor, a dark-wood parquet, was the only surface that did not gleam. It was Leo’s first visit to a set of London chambers and his astonishment must have shown on his face.

‘Don’t be fooled,’ said Dale. ‘The decor’s as contrived as the whiskey barrels in your local Irish pub. They want you to like coming here, that’s all – they want you to enjoy spending your money.’

Leo did his best to return Dale’s roguish grin.

They got out on the fifth floor and Dale led Leo along a corridor that did nothing to undermine the impact of the lobby. Elegant wall lights and walnut panelling channelled them into a meeting room and they sat across from each other at a table worth more, probably, than Leo’s car. There was coffee and a tray of pastries and Dale offered Leo both. When Leo declined, Dale slid the trays to one side. He clicked his pen.

‘So.’

It sounded ill-considered. More than that, it sounded naive. Arguing with his colleagues back in Exeter, a presumption of rectitude had allowed him to skirt the obvious flaws in his thinking. Dale, though, was not hostile. He clearly sympathised with Leo’s intent. Which meant Leo could not resort to bluster, nor hide behind a moralism