The Child Who

unleavened even by an ABH. There was such minimal variation in their work these days that Howard, really, should hardly have had to ask. Little wonder the office was so abuzz. Little wonder Leo was.

‘Unload what you can, at least for the next week or so. Talk to Terence. Speak to me if he kicks up a fuss.’

‘If you insist, Howard. I mean, I’m sure I can handle—’

‘I’m sure you can, Leonard. But you’ll have enough on your plate, I promise you.’ Howard stopped and guided Leo round to face him.

‘Howard, is something—’

‘Are you ready, Leonard?’ His boss gripped him on both shoulders now and sought out Leo’s eyes with his.

‘Ready? Well, I—’

‘You understand what I’m asking you? You understand that this will be like nothing you have experienced before?’

‘Well, yes, certainly. I mean—’

‘He’s a murderer, Leonard. He’s twelve years old and he’s a killer.’

Leo attempted a smile. ‘An alleged killer, Howard. Don’t forget—’

Howard squeezed. Leo could feel the man’s fingernails through the polyester blend of his shirt. ‘Don’t piss about, Leonard. Enjoy the moment, certainly. Relish the attention if you must. But this little fucker killed an eleven-year-old girl.’ Leo winced, as much at his boss’s use of Terry’s terminology as at mention of the crime itself. ‘He goddamn nearly raped her. You are his representative. You, as far as the entire country will see it, are on his side. Think about that for a moment. Think about what that might mean.’

‘I’ve got a thick skin, I promise you,’ said Leo, even though it felt like the skin on his shoulders was about to break. ‘Really, Howard.’ He squirmed and his boss’s hands fell away. ‘I’ll be fine. It will all be fine.’

‘And Megan? Your little girl – Eleanor, isn’t it? Have you told them?’

‘What? No. Not yet. I will tonight. When I get home. I’ve hardly had a minute since I took the call. That was, what? Two-ish? And it’s already…’ Leo looked to his watch. ‘Wow. It’s getting late, Howard. I should get going. You should get going. Celia will be wondering where you are.’

Howard regarded Leo beneath eyebrows joined at the middle. ‘Okay,’ he said. Then, slowly, he unpeeled his alabaster grin.

2

He goddamn nearly raped her. It was true, he nearly had. And yet, in actuality, there had been no rape. Of that Leo was thankful because the rest was more than enough.

Felicity Forbes had been a few years younger than Leo’s daughter. Ellie was fifteen and Felicity’s twelfth birthday was approaching. It would fall, Leo calculated, on the two-month anniversary of her death. Not a vast gap in age, then, but Felicity seemed otherwise to have been a very different child. Superficially, for instance: Ellie was fair-haired, like her mother, and freckled and wiry; the Forbes girl had been auburn, sunned and stout. Podgy but not unhealthily so. In the only photograph Leo had seen of Felicity alive, she was grinning in a toothy, cheery way that seemed to vindicate entirely her parents’ choice of name. This again was a contrast with Ellie. Ellie, when it came to having her picture taken, was bashful, even resentful. Stalking her through a lens was like stalking something wild, and the reaction, if she noticed, invariably equally so.

At their respective schools, both girls were considered middling. In Ellie’s case, however, Leo suspected – and not, he told himself, just because he was her father – a latency of potential. His daughter, clearly, was less than happy. She had changed schools when they had moved to Linden Park and possibly that was part of it. But even before the move she had lacked something that other children her age seemed to exude. Like in the photographs, for example. Ellie lacked… joy. It was a heart-wrenching thing to admit but Leo consoled himself, his wife too, that it was because Ellie thought too much. She was too bright, that was the problem. Her imagination could not easily accommodate glee because glee, in Ellie’s case, would always be tempered by the worry about what might come next. That was why her eyes so rarely hoisted her smile. That was why her obviously fierce intelligence always seemed to be held in check. But her temperament would stand her in good stead, Leo insisted. It’ll pay dividends, Meg, you’ll see.

Felicity Forbes had hoarded no such angst. A steady Cs and Bs student, with the occasional A-minus in music and a blossoming predilection for the stage, she had spun between her schoolwork and her social life with dizzy delight. Certainly she had been outgoing, in the way the youngest in a large family is often compelled to be. Whereas Ellie was an only child, Felicity had left behind two brothers and a sister, all of whom had reportedly adored her. And it had not been just among her teachers and family members that Felicity had been popular. She had amassed a quantity of friends that Ellie, and indeed Leo himself, could never hope to. A people’s princess, the Exeter Post – the self-anointed voice of the region – had dubbed Felicity. It was a shameless reference to events three years previous but not entirely unfitting given the quantity of foliage that had adorned her school’s gates and the mass of mourners expected at her funeral. Indeed, that Felicity Forbes had so readily been beatified should hardly have come as a surprise. It was inevitable really, as much from the nature of how she had lived as the excruciating manner in which she had died.

He goddamn nearly raped her. Nearly, which meant not quite. And yet what Daniel Blake was alleged to have done was worse than rape. It was more brutal, more venomous. It was, in the coldest terms, more clinical.

Felicity, on her final morning, awoke to a January day that wore a frost like jewellery. Snow had been forecast but had failed to arrive and possibly it was a result of having already prepared herself for a day off school that Felicity dallied so on the walk in. It was not out of character – she was frequently late. She had, in fairness, further to go than most students; further, that is, to walk. Her family lived on the north-western boundary of the city, where the city itself was already lost to view behind wooded hills and the dilapidated halls of residence that disfigured them. Without the option of a lift most mornings, Felicity’s choice was a walk along the riverbank or a lonely wait for a bus that was more reliably unpunctual than she was. It was, Felicity had long since decided, barely a choice at all.

She passed the Waterside Inn at twenty-five minutes past eight, according to the freeholder, already fifteen minutes later than usual. She had been a little behind on leaving the house, her parents had told the police, for no reason that they could recall. Gassing, her father had suggested, at which point the interview had been interrupted by her mother’s tears. From the walkway adjoining the pub, Felicity crossed the pedestrian bridge and followed the river south. She had to climb a stile to access the footpath, the freeholder said; the sight of her in her crimson overcoat, straddling the fence and struggling to unhook her trailing rucksack, was the last he had of her. It was the last time she was seen alive by anyone other than her killer.

He goddamn nearly raped her. But he did not. He used a stick.

That, at least, was the pathologist’s finding. The implement itself was never identified but the scratches – the wounds – were, apparently, unambiguous.

He used a stick. This boy, this child: he used a stick.

She was a flash of red clambering across a stile and next she was a corpse, trussed with a string of discarded fairy lights and bloated and blue after hours in the Exe. What happened in between could only be guessed at from the picture the investigators were left with. The pictures, in fact, because there were dozens of them. Only one in the file of the girl when she had been alive but six, for example, of her hands bound in wire. Seven, eight, nine of her ripped and muddied overcoat, which had washed up on a bank a mile downstream. Innumerable shots of Felicity herself: her face, streaked with silt; her injuries, puffed and bloodless; her fingernails, chipped and cracked – her only weapon against an attacker who had made use of anything and everything that had been to hand.

She drowned. She was drowned, rather. That, in the end, is how she died. Held under perhaps. Set adrift, more likely, still bound in wire and with gravel in her pockets and her book-laden bag on her back. The child, the