The Child Who

‘Blake!’

Blake twitched.

‘Talk,’ Leo said. ‘Quickly. Your so-called reasons.’

Blake set aside his plunder. He glanced over at the door and scanned the ceiling, as though to check they were not being monitored. ‘It wasn’t personal,’ Blake said. ‘Okay?’ He smiled. ‘I like you, Leo. Always did. So just remember that this had nothing to do with—’

‘I don’t care! All I care about is my daughter!’

‘Okay, okay.’ Blake shuffled. He edged his chair a little further from the table. ‘I’m just saying, that’s all. But you wanna know why, right? And that’s the problem, Leo. You were always banging on about why.’

Leo felt his face crease.

‘Why this, why that. Wouldn’t shut up about the bloody trial.’ Blake sniffed another smile. ‘The why’s the why. Get it?’ He drew a cigarette from his pack.

‘The trial? You wrote the notes to put me off a trial?’ Leo watched Blake watching him through the flame of his lighter. ‘That doesn’t make sense. What difference would it have made to you if we’d gone to trial?’

‘What difference?’ Blake winced at the stupidity of the question.

‘A trial would have been about Daniel!’

‘Bollocks,’ said Blake, sputtering smoke. ‘It would’ve been about us. Me and Steph. Steph most of all. Why, right? You wanted everyone to find out why.’

‘For Daniel! For your stepson’s sake!’

‘Yeah, yeah. So you say.’

‘It’s true!’

‘So what if it is! Daniel wasn’t the only one with something at stake. Ask your shrink friend if you don’t believe me.’ Blake put on a voice. ‘Tell me about his past. Tell me about your past.’ He sneered, shook his head. ‘Dragging shit up is all she was doing. Looking for someone else to blame.’ Blake dragged, exhaled, dragged again. He threw the filter to the floor.

Leo watched him. ‘We were right,’ he said. ‘Weren’t we?’

Blake turned.

‘About the abuse. About what Daniel went through.’ Leo tightened his eyes. ‘You. You abused him.’

‘No!’

‘Is that why you married her? Because she had a child? Someone you could get at whenever you—’

‘No!’ Blake stood. ‘I said, no! Okay?’

Leo hesitated. ‘Who then? His father? His real father, I mean.’

Blake, slowly, settled himself. He shrugged. ‘No. Maybe. I don’t know.’

Leo waited.

Blake looked and looked away. ‘There was a bloke,’ he told the floor. ‘One in particular. One of Steph’s friends.’ He spoke the word with disdain. ‘This was after Frank left her. She kind of… fell apart. Started drinking. Started seeing blokes. Started, you know. Being with them. It was how she “got by”,’ he added, as though mimicking – ridiculing – a phrase that, in private, had become a euphemism. I coped. Isn’t that how Stephanie had put it talking to Karen?

‘So this bloke. He was a regular, shall we say. Before my time. He’d show up, have his fun, then bugger off. In a week, a month, he’d be back again. For her, Steph thought. She always told herself he was coming back for her.’ Blake met Leo’s eye. Something passed between them. Even Blake, it seemed, could comprehend the horror of what Daniel would have suffered.

‘But that’s…’ Leo forced himself to focus on Ellie. ‘I mean, if it wasn’t you…’

Blake made a face, like Leo was struggling to keep up. ‘It was Steph. Wasn’t it? She knew what was going on. She drank but she still knew. He turned up, she opened the door. You ask why and the answer points to her.’

Leo made no sound. He swallowed. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘Not necessarily. I mean, one could argue…’ He was not sure where the sentence was headed but Blake, anyway, cut it off.

‘It wasn’t just that.’ He leant in, studied his hands. ‘There was other stuff. When Daniel was a baby. Bad stuff, like…’ He glanced at Leo. ‘Bad stuff,’ he said.

The hospital visits. The trips to A & E. The times Daniel almost died.

Leo stared.

‘You read about it all the time,’ Blake said. ‘Someone gets done for something they did like a million years ago. Like the Nazis, the fucking Yids hunting them down. Not letting bygones be bygones.’

Still Leo could say nothing.

‘She was wrong. She knows she was. I’m not trying to make out it was accidental or anything but… She was ill. Sick. She saw doctors, shrinks like your mate, but all they ever did was give her pills. When she got better it was on her own. With me.’ His voice, momentarily, conveyed pride. ‘But a trial. That would have been, what? Another year?’ He gave his head a sharp shake. ‘She couldn’t have handled it. She’s barely handling things as they are.’

‘Stephanie,’ said Leo. ‘Did she…’

Blake’s head snapped up. ‘She doesn’t know. She didn’t. The notes, all that: it’s down to me. Okay?’ He looked around the room, as though speaking to whomever might be listening. ‘I wanna make that clear right now.’

Leo, watching him, found himself struck. ‘You love her.’

Blake seemed puzzled by his tone. ‘I married her,’ he said, as though that, surely, were evidence enough. ‘I’m not the hugs-and-flowers type but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do anything for her.’ His frown deepened. ‘You’re married, right? You know what it’s like. What kind of man lets something happen that he knows is gonna hurt his wife?’

Leo, to that, could offer no answer.

Blake took his silence as an accusation. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking about the boy, that I screwed him over. I would have.’ Blake straightened his shoulders. ‘I’m not denying it. He’s the guilty one, right? And Steph’s better off without the little sod if you ask me. But it would have made no difference anyway. Would it?’ Blake paused but not long enough for Leo to reply. ‘Like I said, right at the start. If he’d pleaded not guilty it would’ve been a show trial. A publicity stunt. Guilty, not guilty: whichever way you played it, Daniel was always gonna end up on a plate.’

The abuse. Maybe if they’d been able to prove Daniel was abused…

But even that, Leo knew, would not have been enough. Nothing, short of madness, would have been enough.

‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ Blake said. ‘At least my way Steph was spared.’ He took another cigarette from his pack. ‘I mean, I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘About the notes and that. Maybe, I dunno. Maybe I could have played it some other way.’ He did not, listening to himself, sound convinced.

‘You could have just said. About the trial. You could have insisted…’

‘I did insist!’ Blake glared at his failing lighter. ‘Fucking tried to anyway.’ He shook it and the lighter sparked.

‘But Daniel: Stephanie’s his mother, you’re his stepfather. You could have just told him…’

Blake scoffed. ‘Tried that too. But there ain’t no telling Daniel. Me and him, in case you hadn’t noticed, don’t exactly get along. He resents me, is what it is. Can’t handle the fact I’m cuddling his mummy.’ The cigarette was refusing to light. Blake plucked it from his lips and grimaced as he flicked it aside. ‘And as for her,’ he said. ‘She lets him do whatever he wants. That’s part of the problem, if you ask me: spoiling him like it’d make up for what happened in the past. And Danny boy: he said he liked you. Said he trusted you. Said he’d do what you told him to, which in the end meant that was that.’

It was down to him. Once again it was all down to him.

‘I’m no expert,’ Blake was saying, ‘but something about it ain’t right. The boy’s twelve. Not even old enough to know what shaving foam’s for. But stick him in front of a jury and suddenly he’s the man in charge. That ain’t right. Surely? You’re the lawyer, you tell me. Is that right?’