The Child Page 6

  But when I got there, it had all gone. The rubble of 63 Howard Street was behind a steel mesh fence and I could only stand and re-create it in my head. When I walked further on, I could see behind the builders’ huts to what was our garden, once. I could see the police tape, a loose end fluttering, and the dirt. But there was nothing else to see. And I walked away. A face at a window in one of the houses opposite watched me. I pushed my fists into my coat pockets and kept my head down.

  THIRTEEN

  Kate

  MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2012

  It was Monday—“Another day at the coal mine,” the Crime Man had announced to no one in particular as Kate arrived late. Not a good start to the week.

  Terry had given her the what-time-do-you-call-this? eyebrow tilt, but she’d decided to ignore it and not offer an excuse. Instead, she went to sit at her “work station,” as the management now called their desks.

  Kate looked around the newsroom to see who else was in and saw the political editor was already deep in conversation with Simon Pearson, the Editor. There was loud, laddish laughter as the political editor told an off-color story about one of the cabinet and his boss clapped him on the shoulder. He looked pleased with himself. Master of his universe, Kate noted.

  All quiet, otherwise. The muted clatter of keys and the hunched shoulders of the online slaves would keep Terry happy—and off her back, she hoped. She logged onto her computer and scanned her inbox. She’d already looked at the messages on her phone, but she hoped that in the ten minutes since she’d last glanced at them, there’d have been some reaction to the baby story. A bit of information, maybe, to give her a leg up. But nothing.

  She didn’t bother with her voicemail. People used to phone her with stories and tip-offs and they’d bounce ideas around and pass the time of day. Now it was all online. She didn’t need to physically speak to another person all day, sometimes.

  Kate yawned. The Crime Man yawned back, companionably, from across the desk.

  “By the way, Nina’s had a word with me about Terry’s latest crackdown on expenses,” he said quietly.

  Nina, the news desk secretary, was the fount of all knowledge and was loved universally by the reporters. She’d been around “since Moses published his commandments,” she told everyone and knew how to get four-star hotel bookings for reporters past the managing editor, how to cover for “her” boys when there was trouble at home or at work—“I’m sure he’s on his way,” she’d purr down the phone to an angry wife or Terry. She could also get you into a war zone with a hire car and no visa without batting an eyelid.

  “She says that Terry is ringing restaurants to make sure the staff ate there and that the total on the receipt matches their records. Death to the blanko is his goal this month. It won’t last.”

  The war on reporters’ expenses re-erupted periodically, usually when the news desk budget went bust. The blanko—a blank receipt from a hotel or restaurant that could be filled in by the reporter, rather like a blank check—was the usual target.

  Producing receipts used to be an art form in the old days—rumors abounded of children’s John Bull printing sets being used to make whole books of receipts. Coffee stains and insects were then added to give them foreign credentials.

  “Oh dear,” Kate said.

  They both stared at their screens.

  Kate wondered what an alien would make of the scene. Dozens of people sitting in isolation in front of computers, not speaking or looking at each other. It was a bit like the lost souls in Las Vegas casinos, perched for hours at the slot machines, with dead eyes, mechanically pressing buttons in the hope of a jackpot.

  Alert! News editor approaching, she thought.

  Terry had a winning smile on his face. He obviously wanted a favor. Kate pretended to be absorbed by something on her screen.

  “See you managed to get in this morning, then.” He attempted a light touch but his banter clanged to the floor.

  “Sorry, bad traffic, Terry,” she said, her fingers resting on the keys as though in mid-sentence.

  “Yeah, yeah. Terrible out there. Anyway . . .”

  Here it comes, she thought. The task of death.

  “Kate, the Editor has got his eye on one of the new young reporters and he wants you to take him under your wing.”

  She looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “My wing?” she said, tartly.

  “He’s very bright,” Terry said. Her heart sank. “Very bright” was code for “extremely irritating.”

  “And you’re the best reporter on the paper.”

  The Crime Man cleared his throat in a warning growl at the slight.

  Kate felt herself soften, despite herself. Compliments had been thin on the ground lately. Her star billing after the Widow Taylor exclusive had begun to wane. It was two years since she’d broken the story of what really happened to little Bella Elliott, the toddler who vanished from her garden. The story, with its twists and setbacks, had consumed her, and when the truth finally emerged in the pages of her newspaper, there’d been lunch with the Editor, an award, and a pay rise.

  But that moment had passed, as they always do. The Editor’s focus had moved increasingly from investigative journalism to the sort of instant news that got the online community clicking and commenting. She now found herself ever more redundant in this new world order. She could write a picture caption with the best of them, but it was hardly a job for a grown-up, she told herself, as she tried to hold on to her dignity.

  And she felt a growing paranoia every time Terry sent one of the kids on a story instead of her.

  “Saving you for the big one,” he’d say when he caught her eye. But the big one hadn’t come for a while. Now, she was being put in charge of the office crèche.

  “I’m too busy for ‘work experience,’ Terry,” she said.

  “He won’t get in your way. He’ll be learning on the job and you’ve got so much to share, Kate. Simon says . . .”

  Put your hands on your head, she thought, back in her primary school playground.

  “Where is he, then?”

  “Joe, can you come over?” Terry called across the room and a short lad with a floppy fringe and his shirt hanging out of his trousers leaped up and bounded over.

  “Hi, Kate. It’s an honor,” he said without a hint of sarcasm.

  Oh my God, he’s going to say he loves my work.

  “I love your work,” Joe said.

  “I’ll leave you two to it,” Terry said, his work apparently done.

  “But . . .” Kate spluttered.

  “Sorry, Kate. Got a call waiting,” Terry said and scuttled back to the safety of his news desk.

  Kate swallowed an expletive, indicated the chair next to her, and tried not to catch the eye of the Crime Man.

  “When did you join us, Joe?” she said.

  “A month ago. Straight from uni. I’ve always wanted to be a journalist—it’s in the blood.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “My mum’s a journo.”

  “Oh?”

  He named the Editor of the Herald on Sunday, a woman with a reputation for coarseness and brutality—the tyrant in knickers, the old guard called her. The male old guard, Kate reminded herself. Mandy Jackson had embraced the nickname, hoisting it like a war trophy as she scaled the career ladder. Any woman who rose beyond features editor was popularly deemed to have either slept her way to the top or broken balls. Kate wasn’t sure which route Mandy had taken, but she was still there, queen of the dunghill.

  And this was her little boy.

  She looked closely at Joe Jackson—his mother had clearly already been thinking about his byline when she named him—as he busied himself setting up his laptop at her right hand. He looked as if his voice hadn’t broken yet but maybe he could be useful—she wouldn’t mind a job on the Herald on Sunday.


  “What story are you doing, Kate?” he asked, sitting up expectantly with a notebook in hand to capture her golden words.

  “I’m looking at e-mails, Joe. Give me ten minutes. Why don’t you go and get us a coffee?”

  She dug in her handbag and gave him a handful of change.

  “The chief reporter’s bitch,” the Crime Man snorted after Joe had disappeared through the swing doors.

  “Shut up, Gordon. You’re just jealous you haven’t got one. What the hell am I going to do with him?”

  “Well, don’t sleep with him or Mandy will tear your head off.”

  The crassness of his remark made Kate burn, but she laughed with him, a survival technique learned early on in a world dominated by men and drink.

  “Just go along with it. You don’t have to mean it,” an older woman colleague had advised her many years ago. “The sexist jokes will never stop. You need to show them you’re as good a reporter as them. That’ll shut them up.”

  And they hadn’t all been woman-haters. She’d worked with some brilliant men but there remained the occasional dinosaur lurking in the primeval swamp. One night news editor liked to tell female reporters to “break up the knitting circle” if they were discussing a story. Another executive would ask “On the rag?” if a woman challenged an idea and laugh uproariously as if he were the new Oscar Wilde.

  The Crime Man was pretty harmless and she knew his wife. He was on a short leash at home so Kate allowed him the occasional burst for freedom.

  “Have you worked with Mandy?” she asked.

  “Yeah. She was a ball breaker.”

  • • •

  Joe arrived back with the drinks and a cake for her.

  “Thought you might like one,” he said.

  “You have it,” Kate muttered irritably. “You’ll burn off a double chocolate muffin faster than me.”

  He laughed and unpeeled the paper.

  The Editor appeared behind them—Simon Pearson had an unnerving ability to materialize without warning and Kate suspected he’d been a cat burglar in another life—and clapped Joe on the shoulder, sending a shower of crumbs over the desk.

  “Don’t make our new protégé too comfortable, Kate. He won’t find any stories eating muffins. Need to keep him hungry and get him out there.”

  Joe looked stricken as Simon left to continue his silent patrol.

  “Take no notice. It’s his way of being friendly,” she said. “You’re very privileged to have been singled out for any kind of notice at all. Anyway, let’s look busy. Have you got any story ideas? We’ve got a news meeting in half an hour and we need to come up with three good ones.”

  His face was noncommittal as if he were considering his answer but his eyes said no.

  “Well, you read the papers and see if there’s a follow-up we can do, and I’ll ring a contact who’s e-mailed me. These news meetings are bollocks, really. Bit of grandstanding for the specialists and a chance for the news editor to tell us all we’re rubbish. Welcome to journalism.”

  FOURTEEN

  Emma

  MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2012

  My yoga teacher is doing a guided relaxation, her voice purring over the tinkling of finger cymbals, lulling us into a coma. I love this bit of the class normally, but today I’m lying on my mat trying not to think about the ghosts of Howard Street. About the baby. About Professor Will.

  My head refuses to clear, despite Chloe’s exhortation, and Will materializes and fills my brain.

  He’d appeared in our lives in the eighties. Well, “appeared” doesn’t really describe it. He stormed our castle and swept Jude off her feet. It was a huge event in our lives. She didn’t normally have boyfriends when I was growing up. She used to say she’d taken a vow of celibacy and was living like a nun. And laugh. I remember looking up “celibacy” when I was about twelve and being quite shocked. I thought Jude was talking about religion but she was talking about sex. Of course, her friends howled with laughter and started calling her Sister Jude. I wasn’t included in the joke. I was still just the kid. But I knew Jude wasn’t happy being celibate. For a nun, she spent a lot of time talking about men. But it was talking, not doing. My best friend Harry said Jude needed a bloke, but I didn’t pass this on. Unwanted advice, Jude would’ve said.

  I knew something had changed, though, when I heard her singing in the bath one night. Singing “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” at the top of her voice with all the harmonies and “yeah, yeahs.” She sounded so unlike Jude that I knocked on the door and shouted through: “You sound happy!”

  “I am. Come in,” she shouted back.

  I didn’t really like seeing Jude naked—it didn’t feel right, but she said I was being a ridiculous prude and how did a child of hers grow up to be embarrassed by the human body.

  I remember sitting on the loo seat so that I didn’t have to look straight at her while she told me that a man from her past, a man she really liked when she was younger, had reappeared. I felt all hot because I thought she must mean my dad. The man we were not allowed to talk about.

  I didn’t know who he was, my dad, and I used to think that she didn’t either. When I was little, and there were dads in the books she read to me, I’d ask. I’d point at the pictures and say, “Is that my daddy?” and she’d laugh and say, “No. That’s the daddy in the book.”

  “Where’s my daddy?”

  “You haven’t got one, Emma. It’s just us.”

  I think she weeded out books with fathers in them after a while because we never seemed to read about them again.

  Of course, when I got a bit older, I realized that everyone had a dad, but I understood from Jude’s silence on the matter that I shouldn’t ask. So I daydreamed one. He was tall and good-looking and fun and clever and, some days, he played the guitar and, on others, he wrote books and took me on holiday to faraway places. Hilarious really because no one I knew had a dad like that. Harry’s dad was old and wore cardigans.

  But, as I got better at eavesdropping, I began picking up bits and pieces about my real father. I listened in when Jude told a neighbor over a bottle of wine about her struggle to bring up a child alone, earn a living, and pass her law exams. “No time for men for ages,” Jude complained.

  “Emma’s dad is long gone—he couldn’t wait to leave,” she’d said. “Charlie was much younger—well, he was still a baby himself.”

  I stashed away the information—I now had a name and a baby face to feed my imagination.

  Anyway, Jude sat in her bath and told me the man she’d met again was coming to the house. She said she’d spotted him on the telly news—he’d been speaking at an anti-nuclear demonstration—and had recognized him immediately.

  “After all these years, I’ve never forgotten him,” she said. She chattered on about how they knew each other at college—Jude went to Cambridge and did history. Jude was and is super clever. She’s retired now, obviously, but she used to be a lawyer specializing in human rights cases. She always used the word “lawyer”—“Solicitors are middle-aged men with tummies, doing conveyancing,” she told me. Anyway, the law wasn’t her first choice. When she left university, she joined a publishing house and was rushing round London, lunching with the beautiful people. She always sounded as though she was using italics when she said it.

  But I happened, and we had to live with Granny and Grandpa for a while. When we left, she said she needed to do something more solid, more nine-to-five instead. She got a job in an office while she studied. I remember she spent hours with her head in her books and court papers. Her bedroom had that sharp, inky, papery smell. She had to concentrate, she would tell me if I tried to ask a question about my homework or tell her about how mean Mr. Lawson was in assembly. She had to concentrate or she might miss the tiny detail that could get her client out of prison. So I went back to David Bowie in my room and talked to his po
ster on the wall.

  So, I liked this new Jude, singing in the bath. She wanted to tell me about things and she sounded young and excited. I stayed in the steamy bathroom, listening and giggling with her until my clothes felt damp and my mother was ready to emerge from the water.

  I didn’t say the “dad” word. I knew it would kill the mood and I decided to wait and see.

  When the love object came to the house, I smiled my welcome as instructed earlier by Jude.

  She’d been jumpy and nervous the whole morning, changing her clothes at least three times.

  “You look really nice,” I’d said each time she appeared in a new outfit, but she kept disappearing back upstairs to change. And I was so pleased that she was wearing the pretty turquoise earrings I’d bought for her birthday out of my pocket money.

  When “Professor Will,” as she insisted on calling him, finally knocked on the door, I thought Jude would pass out with the excitement.

  “You go, chick,” she said, taking one last look in the mirror. “And smile!”

  I loved it when she used to call me “chick,” my pet name from when I was a little girl. She’d all but abandoned it as I got older, but it still had the power to make me feel warm inside.

  Anyway, I’d only just got the door open to let him in when she wafted past me and took over.

  “Hello, Will. How lovely to see you. Will, meet Emma. My baby. Darling, this is Professor Will. My old friend from uni.”

  Will flashed me a sympathetic smile and held out his hand.

  “Hardly a baby, Jude. She’s a young woman.”

  It’s funny the things you remember. His hand felt dry and warm, and a gold ring on his thumb brushed my knuckles.

  I risked a closer look at him to check if there was any family resemblance. There wasn’t. He was all corners. Sharp nose, sharp cheekbones. Nothing like me and my pudding face. Jude used to tell me I was pretty sometimes, when we were on our own. But I wasn’t—I’m not. Pretty was shiny hair and long eyelashes and pink cheeks—like Jude. I had brown curly hair that wouldn’t lie flat and a pudding face. I hated my face. I used to stand in front of the mirror, pulling at my flesh like it was made of Plasticine until my cheeks stung. Jude said all teenage girls went through this.