complaint.
“He’s upstairs,” Mallory said. “He fell asleep before the doctor could see him but we gave him a tranquillizer anyway. It’s possible he’s in shock.”
“ He’s in shock?” Gwenda laughed briefly. “ I’m the one who’s in shock, I can tell you. Getting a call in the middle of the night like this! Having to come down here. I’m a respectable person. All this business with knives and burglary. I’ve never heard such a thing.”
“I understand you share your house with a partner?”
“Brian.” Gwenda noticed Mallory had taken out a pen. “Brian Conran,” she continued, and watched as the detective wrote it down. “He’s in bed. He’s not any relation to the boy. Why should he come out in the middle of the night? He’s got to be up first thing in the morning.”
“What’s his job?”
“What’s it to you?” She shrugged. “He’s a milkman.”
Mallory pulled a sheet of paper out of a file. “I see from Matthew’s record that his parents died,” he said.
“A car crash.” Gwenda swallowed. “He was eight years old. The family was living in London then. His mother and father were killed. But he’d stayed behind.”
“He was an only child?”
“No brothers or sisters. No relatives either. Nobody knew what to do with him.”
“You were related to his mother?”
“I was her half-sister. I’d only met them a few times.” Gwenda drew herself up, crossing her hands in front of her. “If you want the truth, they were never very friendly. It was all right for them, wasn’t it. A nice house in a nice neighbourhood. A nice car. Nice everything. They didn’t have any time for me. And when they died in that stupid accident… Well, I don’t know what would have happened to Matthew if it hadn’t been for me and Brian. We took him in. We had to bring him up all on our own. And what did we get for it? Nothing but trouble!”
Mallory glanced again at the report. “He had never been in trouble before,” he said. “He started missing school a year after he came to Ipswich. From there it was downhill all the way.”
“Are you blaming me?” Two pinpricks of red had appeared in Gwenda’s cheeks. “It was nothing to do with me! It was that boy, Kelvin Johnson… He lives just down the road. He’s to blame!”
It was eleven o’clock at night. It had been a long day and Mallory had heard enough. He closed the file and stood up. “Thank you for coming in, Ms Davis,” he said. “Would you like to see Matthew?”
“There’s hardly any point seeing him if he’s asleep, is there?”
“Maybe you’d like to come back in the morning then. The social services will be here. He’ll also need legal representation. But if you’re here at nine o’clock-”
“I can’t come at nine o’clock. I have to make Brian his breakfast when he gets in from his rounds. I’ll come in after that.”
“Right.”
Gwenda Davis picked herself up and left the room. Mallory watched her go. He felt nothing for her. But he couldn’t avoid a sense of great sadness for the boy who was asleep upstairs.
Matt woke up.
The room with the four metal beds was deserted. No sound came from anywhere in the building. He could feel a pillow cradling the back of his head and he wondered how long he had been here. There was no sign of a clock, but it was pitch-dark outside – he could see the night sky through the barred window. The room was softly lit. They probably never turned off the lights completely.
He tried to go back to sleep but he was wide awake. Suddenly he was seeing it all again, the events of the evening. The images flickered in front of him like cards caught in the wind. There was Kelvin, outside the railway station. Then the warehouse, the DVDs, the guard, the knife, Kelvin again with that stupid smile, the police cars, and his own hands, stained with blood. Matt squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force the memories out of his mind.
It was very warm in the room. The window was shut and the radiators were on. He could feel the heat shimmering around him. He was suddenly thirsty and looked around, wondering if he could call someone. But there was no bell to press and nobody in sight.
Then he noticed a jug of water and a tumbler on a table at the other side of the room. All he had to do was get out of bed and help himself. He lifted a hand to move the bedcovers but they were too heavy. No. That wasn’t possible. He flexed his muscles and tried to lift himself. He could hardly move. And then he realized that a doctor must have seen him while he was asleep. He had been injected with something – tranquillized. He couldn’t move.
He almost cried out. He felt the panic suffocating him. What were they going to do to him? Why had he gone to the warehouse? How had he allowed all this to happen? He sank back into the pillow, fighting the wave of despair that had risen over him. He couldn’t believe that a man had almost died for the sake of a handful of DVDs. How could he have been stupid enough to think of Kelvin as a friend? “He did it! He did it!” Kelvin was pathetic. He always had been.
The water…
The room seemed to be getting hotter and hotter, as if the police had turned up the radiators just to torment him. Matt found his whole concentration focused on the jug. He could see the perfect circle made by the water where it touched the edge of the glass. He willed himself to get up, and when that failed, he found himself willing the jug of water to come to him. He ran his tongue over his lips. His mouth was parched. For a moment, he thought he smelled something burning. The jug was so close to him – only a few metres away. He reached out to it, pulling it towards him with his mind.
The jug smashed.
It seemed to explode, almost in slow motion. For a split second the water hung in the air, its tentacles sprawling outwards. Then it splashed down on to the table, on to the pieces of glass.
Matt was stunned. He had no idea what had happened. He hadn’t broken the jug. It had broken itself. It was as if it had been hit by a bullet. Yet he hadn’t heard a shot. He hadn’t heard anything. Matt stared at the glass fragments, scattered over the table with the water pooling around, dripping on to the floor. Had the heat in the room caused it? Or was it him? Had his thirst somehow, in some inexplicable way, smashed the jug?
Exhaustion finally overcame him a second time and he fell into a deep, suffocating sleep. When he woke up the next morning, the broken glass wasn’t there. Nor was the spilled water. A single jug and a tumbler stood on the table, exactly where they had been the night before, and Matt decided that the whole experience must have been nothing more than a weird dream.
THE LEAF PROJECT
Matt, dressed in his own clothes, sat in a chair facing the four people who were examining him from the other side of a long wooden table. It was the sort of room where people got married… or perhaps divorced. Not uncomfortable, but spare and formal with wood panelling on the walls and portraits of officials – probably all dead by now – in gold frames. He was in London, although he wasn’t exactly sure where. It had been raining too hard to see much out of the car windows, and he had been driven straight to the door and shown up a flight of stairs into this modern, unattractive building. There had been no time for sightseeing.
A week had passed since Matt’s arrest, and in that time he had been interviewed, examined, assessed and, for many hours, left on his own. He had filled in papers that were like exams except that they didn’t seem to have any point. “2, 8, 14, 20… What is the next number in the sequence?” And: “How many spelling misteaks are their in this sentence?” Different men and women – doctors, psychologists – had asked him to talk about himself. He had been shown blobs on pieces of paper. “What do you see, Matthew? What does the shape make you think about?” And there had been games – word association, stuff like that.
