The Child Who

He should have been braced for the frenzy at the police station. A twelve-year-old boy was helping the police with their inquiries; for the time being they were not looking for anyone else. For the stringers, TV reporters and local hacks, it was as enticing an invitation as an open bar.

Leo almost made it through. He was of average height and build and wore nothing more arresting than a high-street suit. Aside from his boxy, decade-old briefcase, he might have passed for an overdressed journalist or a face-man for the local news. The local newsmen, however, were all in attendance, having grabbed prime position by the doors. They knew Leo; Leo knew them. It was the crime reporter from the Post who spotted him first.

‘Mr Curtice! Leonard! Over here, Leonard!’

‘Excuse me,’ said Leo. ‘Thank you. Sorry. Excuse me.’ He sensed the television cameras tracking him and trained his gaze at shoulder height.

‘Leonard! Leo! Hey, Leo.’ A hand around Leo’s elbow and he turned.

‘Tim. Hi. Sorry. If you’ll excuse me. I really have to…’ Leo tried to forge ahead but the scrum enclosed him. The grip on his arm tightened.

‘What’s going on, Leo?’ Tim Cummins pressed his stubbled, fleshy face towards Leo’s. ‘Who have they got in there?’

‘I can’t comment, Tim, you know that. If you’ll excuse—’

‘Can’t comment on what, Leo? You’re not denying that this is your case?’

‘Please, Tim, I really should be—’

‘Who’s the client, Leo? Is he local? Will he be charged?’

Leo shook free his arm. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, with more force this time. He shoved and the journalists closest to him stumbled. Cummins dropped his notebook. He let it lie, raising himself instead on his tiptoes.

‘You have a daughter, right, Leo? How do you feel about what happened to the Forbes girl? How does your family feel about your involvement in this case?’

Leo felt himself flush. He did not look back but pressed his way onwards, leaking from the crowd and through the doorway.

Inside it was no less frantic. Exeter Police Station was an inert place, usually: a city-sized precinct for small-town misdemeanours where business was conducted with languid efficiency. Not today. Officers – some uniformed, others suited – streaked from doorway to doorway, bearing files or flapping pages and with an air that there was somewhere else they needed to be.

Leo’s entrance, nevertheless, did not go unnoticed. The desk sergeant was waiting. A tall man, wide too, he had his long arms locked and his hands splayed on the counter. Leo gave a twitch in the officer’s direction. It was ignored. Leo straightened his jacket and pinched his tie-knot and failed to stop himself checking across his shoulder as he started forwards. Cummins, he saw, was pressed against the glass of the door, his hands around his eyes. How do you feel? he had asked. How does your family feel? As though Leo’s family were anyone’s business but his own.

Leo approached the desk. His jacket was twisted and he shrugged a shoulder. He glanced back towards the entrance, then faced the man on reception. There was no question about who would speak first.

‘Good morning,’ Leo said. He cleared his throat. ‘I have an appointment. With a client.’

The desk sergeant drew back. ‘Your name… sir?’ The desk sergeant’s was Brian and he surely knew Leo’s.

‘Curtice,’ said Leo through a frown. ‘Leonard Curtice.’ He allowed his expression to settle. ‘I’m sorry if I’m late but there was quite a crowd on the—’

‘Sign here. Then go through there.’ The desk sergeant flicked his chin towards a set of double doors.

So this would be the way of things, Leo thought as he recrossed the lobby. Howard had warned him, just as he in turn had warned his daughter, but still he had not been prepared. It was discomfiting, he would admit. But no matter. Yes, his daughter was upset but she was, after all, only fifteen years old – she could not be expected to understand. As for the desk sergeant, the local hacks, anyone else who had assumed he had sided with Felicity’s murderer: their ignorance, surely, was their problem. At least now Leo understood. At least, now, he knew the extent of the hostility he would have to deal with.

He shifted his briefcase from left hand to right and once again adjusted his tie. He passed through the set of double doors. There was an escort waiting for him on the other side. The man nodded and the nod gave Leo heart. He called Leo ‘sir’ and without a hint of a sneer. He behaved properly, professionally, and Leo resolved to do the same. He would talk to Ellie and he would bear all the rest. Here, now, he had a job to do.

4

They were being watched. It was part of the agreement. The investigating team – the police – were excluded but the social worker, the boy’s parents: they were watching and listening to everything that was being said. Which, in practical terms, was very little: questions but no answers; prompts but no replies; a lopsided conversation, then, that had toppled, momentarily, into silence.

Leo glanced again at the security camera. He wanted to stand and to pace but standing and pacing was what the police had done, what Daniel’s parents had done, what the social worker had, after more than an hour alone with the boy, finally resorted to. So Leo sat. When his foot tapped of its own accord, he forced it flat. When his fingers took up the beat instead, he wrapped them in a fist. He was, would be, patience personified. He and Daniel: they had all day.

They had, in truth, a deadline that was fast approaching. Leo did not want to look again at his watch because the boy had caught him last time and that single glance, Leo estimated, had cost him far more than the split second it had taken. Instead, on a blank sheet of notepaper and with the pen Meg had bought for him for Felicity Forbes’s final Christmas, he drew.

A stick figure, at the base of the page. He considered giving the figure more substance but the fleshless lines, given the boy’s build, seemed appropriate. He gave it shoes, which became trainers when he added the swoosh: blue on white, just like Daniel’s. He gave it ears and on one of them he planted a full stop. The head he left hairless, except on top: here he drew a succession of spikes – sharp, as the boy’s would have been had he not spent seventeen hours without access to a tube of hair gel. Knowing how sensitive his daughter was about the freckles that spotted her own fair skin, Leo resisted dotting the stick-boy’s cheeks and ignored, too, the silvered scratch lines around his throat. Instead he drew a mouth: a line, straight across, which he stitched shut with a string of smaller lines a pen-nib apart.

‘Not a bad likeness,’ Leo said and spun the page so Daniel could see. He caught the boy’s eyes as they leapt from the piece of paper to a point on the table beside it. ‘This is you: now, here,’ Leo said. ‘And this…’ He turned the page again and worked quickly. He drew a man beside the boy: the same earring and fastened mouth; the same hair but with a gap this time on the crown. ‘This is you in twenty years’ time. Here,’ he repeated, and directed his chin around the interview room. ‘Or in a cell a bit smaller.’ To make the point he drew a box around both figures, so that the stick-man’s head brushed the ceiling, and sectioned the box with bars. Then he turned the page once more and thrust it across the table. He clicked his pen and stared at the boy. Daniel ignored the picture. With his chin tucked against his collarbone, he kept his rinsed-denim eyes fixed on the tabletop.

‘You need to talk to me, Daniel. This – ’ he used his pen to tap the picture ‘ – is what will happen if you don’t talk to me.’

Nothing.

‘I’d like you to trust me, Daniel. I’d like you to trust me but it’s not important that you do.’ He paused. ‘Shall I tell you why?’ Again he waited but the boy, unsurprisingly, gave no answer. ‘Because I couldn’t tell anyone what we discussed even if I wanted to. If I did, they’d put me right in here with you.’ He gestured once more to the page he had ripped from his notebook. ‘I’m on your side, Daniel. Not because I want to be. I’m on your side because I have to be.’

The table that divided them was drainpipe grey: unmottled, unmarked but perhaps it was that absence of anything at which to stare that continued to draw Daniel’s focus. Leo was reminded of his first impression of the boy: that Daniel, despite everything, seemed timid, almost shy – not like a killer at all.