“We heard that you’ve been in South Africa,” he started off easily, warming the conversation. “A research project?”
“That’s right,” Luke nodded. “It’s a lovely country.”
“When did you come back?” Thatcher asked.
“About a month ago,” Luke answered after a moment’s hesitation. “I was staying with some friends in London, and I heard about what happened to Abbie, so I came up. Tried to find my daughter.” He didn’t use her name, and I wondered dimly if he even knew it. We certainly hadn’t used it.
“You’ve been in the country for a month, but didn’t come in search of Abbie and her child until you heard about the attack?” Thatcher clarified in a voice that I was very glad not to be on the receiving end of. Luke Campbell shifted in his seat and nodded.
“So, you arrived in York, when exactly?”
“Yesterday,” he answered succinctly. “I’m staying in the hotel across the road from the train station. This morning, I started looking into the custody issue.”
“You went straight to welfare?” I asked him, confused by that particular detail. “Why?”
“The Paige I knew a few years ago is very different from the one you do,” he answered. “I didn’t think the council would deem her fit enough to look after a child.” His voice was slightly bitter, and Thatcher’s hands curled and uncurled at the accusation towards the woman we had met.
“What about Abbie?” He managed to ask without snarling. “You tried to visit the hospital?”
“They wouldn’t let me in,” he sounded offended.
“Abbie is the victim of a suspected attempted murder. Her room is under high security, and you’re not a blood relative. In fact, aside from the doctors, the only people who can go in there are Abbie and us.” Though we’d yet to go.
“You and Abbie studied together at university?” I asked, trying to direct Thatcher away from the angry rabbit hole he was circling.
“We did.”
“You’re also a horticulturalist?”
“Of a sort,” he deliberated. “My work is very different from Abbie’s.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I don’t make drugs, for one thing,” he said disapprovingly.
“You’re familiar with her studies then?” Thatcher asked.
“Some. Her name gets thrown around a lot. We’re in the same sort of circles. But like I said, it’s very different work.”
“You sound as if you don’t approve of her work,” Thatcher observed aloud.
“I don’t,” Campbell answered with a shrug. “She’s in it for the money nowadays. All drugs, chemicals.”
“She started working there before you left,” I said, trying to visualise the timeline in my head. “So, you must be familiar with some of her studies.”
“One or two. She was obsessive,” he said. “Controlling over them.”
A perfectionist, Dr Quaid called her.
“Go on,” Thatcher encouraged him.
“She had this partner, this girl she worked with. Sophie, or something.”
“Sonia,” I clarified.
“That’s her. I always felt bad for her, you know. Abbie’s not the easiest person to work with. She can be mean, demanding, in a lot of things, not just work.”
“What is she like?” Thatcher asked him. “Or what was she like when you knew her?”
“She paints this image,” Luke began, “of being so nice and nurturing, you know. The way she is with plants. But she has this streak. Competitive, manipulative. It’s why I left her in the end. She was just too cruel, sometimes. Even to Paige, especially to Sonia.”
“If that was the case,” Thatcher asked him in a worryingly calm voice, “why leave your child?”
“I didn’t think she’d keep it,” he answered with a shrug. “I thought she’d give it up for adoption. But she didn’t.”
“No, she didn’t. And yet,” Thatcher tilted his head to one side. “You didn’t come back. If you believed her to be such a strongly negative person, why not come back? Try for custody four years ago?”
Luke looked down at the table. “It’s a long story. And not,” he added, “particularly relevant to Abbie.”
Thatcher looked ready to argue with the man, looked ready to pound his head on the table, and it wasn’t hard for me to figure out why. A man who abandons a pregnant woman and his child; it was a narrative that cut close to the bone for Thatcher, and I could see him slowly losing more and more control over his emotions. I shifted my chair, the scraping sounds jolting him from his glare and cleared my throat, leaning forward to take a bit more control of the interview.
“We know that Abbie and her place of work have been the focus of some protesting in the past. Do you know anything about that?”
“I remember the first time it happened,” he said, casting his mind back and scratching his chin as he spoke. “Some protestors appeared outside her work with signs, shouting. There was a petition going around at one point too, but it didn’t last long. The second time,” he went on, “She received some threats. Letters in the post.”
“What did you make of that?”
“I wasn’t surprised,” he answered honestly. “I warned her about it, to be honest. I knew that place, the work they were doing would attract some negative attention, but she didn’t care. She was their crown jewel, you know. So long as she got the credit for her work, she didn’t care how many threats she got.”
“What about Sonia? What about her credit?”
“Barely existent. Not that Abbie ever tried to change that. Never got in touch with any of the funding or the articles and tried to correct it. She’s a narcissist,” he said simply.
Something about that wasn’t lining up. The controlling, cruel narcissist he described was a world away from the woman we had been introduced to. A woman who went to work on her day off before spending her holiday with her children. She used her cat as a password and her daughter’s birthday for her phone, gave her sister a place
