Give Me the Child: the most gripping psychological thriller of the year

Tom’s chest heaved. ‘I know, I know.’ His voice carried on but the words were lost to me. Instead I began thinking about how things had been after Freya was born, when we’d tried and failed for another child. The doctor’s best guess had been that our bodies were in some undefined way biologically incompatible. Tom hadn’t wanted to go through IVF again or risk another episode of my prenatal psychosis, that wild paranoia which had overwhelmed me in the weeks preceding Freya, and he wouldn’t entertain the idea of adopting. What had followed was a kind of mourning for a child I’d never have, years of hopeless and, for the most part, unspoken longing. Through it all I’d at least been comforted by the notion that neither of us was to blame.

‘Biological incompatibility’ had been my ‘get out of jail free’ card. But now, the arrival of my husband’s other daughter was proof that the ‘incompatibility’ was actually something to do with me. I was the problem. And not just because of my hormones and my predilection for going crazy while pregnant, but because there was something fundamentally wrong with my reproductive system. I was the reason we’d had to resort to IVF. And now here was the proof, in the shape of Ruby Winter. Concrete evidence of the failure of my fertility.

Tom had stopped speaking and was slumped in the chair picking at his fingers. He seemed angry and distracted.

I said, ‘Why isn’t she with a relative or something?’

He looked up and glared. ‘I am a bloody relative,’ then, gathering himself, he said, ‘Sorry. There’s a grandmother, apparently, Lilly Winter’s mother, but they couldn’t get hold of her. In any case, they said Ruby asked to be taken to her dad’s.’ He shot me a pleading look. ‘Look, we’ll sort all of this out and Ruby will go and live with her gran and maybe we’ll see her at the weekends. The most important thing for now is that she’s safe, isn’t it?’

I glanced at the wall clock. It was nearly six in the morning and the little girl in our living room had just lost her mother. I pushed back my hair and forced myself to think straight. In a couple of hours’ time I would be at the institute doing my best to work with a bunch of kids who needed help. How could I possibly live with myself if I didn’t help the kid on my own doorstep?

I stood up and cleared my throat. ‘We’re not done talking about this, not even close. But for now I’m guessing there’ll be paperwork and we’ll need to show the girl to the spare room so she can get some sleep. You go back to the living room. I need a few minutes alone then I’ll follow on with some fresh tea and a glass of juice for’ – the words fell from my mouth like something bitter and unwanted – ‘your daughter.’

While Tom went through the admin with the social worker, Ruby Winter followed me up the stairs in stunned silence, still clutching the rabbit’s foot key, and my heart went out to her, this motherless, pale reed of a girl.

‘You’re safe here,’ I said.

I switched on the bedside lamp and invited her to sit on the bed beside me. Those off-colour eyes scanned my face momentarily, as if she were trying to decide whether I could be trusted. She sat, reluctantly, keeping her distance and with hands jammed between her knees, her skinny frame making only the shallowest of impressions on the mattress. We were three feet from one another now, brought together first by drink and carelessness and then by the terrible fate of her mother. Yet despite all the shock and horror she must have been feeling and my sympathy for her situation, it was as though she possessed some kind of force field which made being close to her unsettling.

I pointed to the rabbit’s foot keyring in her hand.

‘Shall I keep that safe for you? We might need it later, when one of us goes to fetch your things.’ The social worker had brought a bag of basic clothes and toiletries to tide Ruby over while the police did whatever they needed to do in the flat, but the policewoman had told us that they’d been working for several hours already and, given there were no suspicious circumstances, would probably be done by the morning.

Ruby Winter hesitated then handed me the keyring. The combination of fur and metal was warm from her hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m really terribly sorry about your mother. It’s going to take a while to sort everything out, but we will. For now it’s best if you get some sleep.’

I pulled out a toothbrush and wash cloth and a pair of pyjamas from the bag the social worker had brought. ‘Would you like me to come with you to the bathroom?’

Ruby shook her head.

While she was gone, I unpacked the few remaining bits and bobs then sat back on the bed, scooped up the rabbit’s foot keyring and held it in the palm of my hand. It really was an odd thing, the claws dirty and the skin jagged and ratty at the cut end. It had been Lilly Winter’s, I guessed. Who kept animal-part charms these days except maybe Wicca nuts or sinister middle-aged men living with their mothers? I dropped the keyring into my pocket and tried to separate the new arrival from the circumstances of her creation. It wasn’t Ruby’s fault that she’d been conceived in an act of betrayal. But it wasn’t going to be easy to forget it either.

When she returned, dressed in her PJs, I took her wash things and put them on the chest of drawers and sat in the chair at the end of the bed as she slid under the duvet. ‘Did your father tell you we have a daughter about your age? Her name’s Freya. You’ll meet her in the morning.’

I waited for a response that didn’t come. In the dim light thrown by the bedside lamp, with her tiny body and huge hair, the girl appeared otherworldly but also somehow not quite there, as though what I was looking at was a reflection of a girl rather than the girl herself.

‘Your dad told me you have a grandmother.’

Ruby Winter looked up and gave a little smile, oddly empty of feeling, then looked away.

‘She’s a bitch,’ she said flatly. Her voice was soft but with the sharpened edges of a south London accent.

‘I’m sorry you feel that,’ I said. I sensed she was testing me, hoping to catch me out. Perhaps I should have left then and allowed her to sleep but my curiosity overcame me.

‘Did your mother ever tell you anything about your dad?’

Ruby gazed at her fingers and, in the same expressionless tone, she said, ‘Only that he was a real shit.’

This was the kind of behaviour I dealt with on a daily basis at the clinic, but in the here and now, I felt oddly at a loss. ‘I’m sure she didn’t really say that. And, anyway, he isn’t.’

Ruby looked at me then shrugged as if what she had said was of no consequence. ‘I’m tired now.’

‘Of course you are,’ I said, feeling bad for having pushed her into a conversation she didn’t want to have. I went to the door. ‘Sleep now and we’ll talk later.’

Back downstairs I made another pot of tea and some toast and took a tray out to the others. The policewoman was in the middle of saying that there would have to be a post-mortem on Lilly Winter and a report would be filed with the coroner, but it was unlikely that the coroner would call an inquest. The situation at the flat had been straightforward enough. An old boiler, no batteries in the carbon monoxide detector, Lilly passed out from drink.

‘Presumably Ruby will go and live with her grandmother?’ I voiced this as a question but I hoped it was also a statement.

The social worker briefly caught Tom’s eye.

‘That’s the plan,’ Tom said.

The policewoman’s phone went. She answered it, listened briefly, then, turning to Tom, she said, ‘I’m afraid we’ll need to keep you a little longer to go over a few things – but we’re done at the flat if…’ She smiled at me. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go and fetch Ruby’s personal effects?’ She told me the address and began giving me directions.

‘That’s OK, I know the Pemberton Estate.’

‘Oh!’ the policewoman replied, her voice full of amazement, as if neither of us had any business knowing anywhere like the Pemberton.

‘It’s where I grew up,’ I said.

CHAPTER THREE

According to the police, Lilly Winter had taken over the lease on flat sixty-seven in the Ash Building, one of the red-brick hutches forming part of the original estate, from her mother, Megan Winter, who had moved into the flat from another council property near Streatham. Ruby was born at the flat while her grandmother was still the registered tenant so grandmother, mother and baby must have been living together at that point. The names didn’t mean anything to me and it seemed unlikely that we’d ever coincided. I’d left the place twenty years ago and hadn’t been back since the death of my mother. I didn’t particularly want to go back now, but I was too curious about Lilly Winter to let the opportunity pass. So I left a message on my assistant Claire’s mobile asking her to move my nine o’clock, then Tom and I had a brief discussion about what to tell Freya if she woke up while I was gone and I got in the car and headed south.

When I was growing up, in the nineties, working-class kids of all ethnic varieties lived on the Pemberton, which we called the Ends. The whole district was more than a bit scrappy and shitty. The main road south towards Croydon split the area in two and it was impossible to leave without running into a busy arterial road, as a result of which we rarely ventured far. The surrounding workers’ cottages were occupied by first-generation immigrant Jamaicans who put up cheery curtains and planted their gardens with sunflowers. A handful of elderly whites and some Asian families lived among them and a few middle-class gentrifiers had taken over flats in the villas behind the cottages, though a lot of those were still squatted. But even as kids we could tell that, in some unspecified way, the area was on the move, which made the Ends feel as if it was about to be cut off by the tide. For years there were rumours that the whole estate was to be completely redeveloped and the residents moved elsewhere. At the time, we felt like anarchists, free to run wild without consequences. With hindsight, the instability left us feeling insecure. Those of us who grew up on the Ends did our best to ignore the sense that we had drawn the short straw. We lived for music, sex and a bit of weed. Destiny’s Child, N.W.A., Public Enemy, R ’n’ B, urban, whatever. Friday and Saturday nights you’d meet your homies around the ghetto blaster, roll some joints and have yourselves a party. There were gangs and the odd gang-related ruckus but you could steer your way around them. We felt free but at the cost of knowing we didn’t matter, that kids like us were only of any consequence within the narrow confines of the Ends themselves.

At the traffic lights I made a right, skirting around the southern side of Grissold Park, then up along the wide, leafy road that ran along its western border, and turned again at the filter into a grid of half-gentrified Victorian terraced houses punctuated by shabby corner stores and fried chicken shops.

I slowed and tried to quell the fluttering in my chest. Memories. My manor. Approaching the rack of brutalist tower blocks fronted by older, lower tenements of red brick and what might once have been, but were no longer, cream tiles, I was a teenager again. Furious, mouthy and secretly determined to escape. The parties and the friendships and the ‘what the fuck’ Saturday night feeling had never been quite enough. There had been an itch in me to leave and I knew it would take everything I had to make it happen. Because the trouble with the Pemberton was that if you didn’t get out fast, you didn’t get out at all.

The late July sun was steadily beating down now and, despite the early hour, the estate was already sticky in the heat, the pavements speckled with clumps of dog shit – dark matter in an expanse of Milky Way. Some kids were mooching their way to school, kicking a football along the tea-coloured grass, their elder brothers and sisters hurrying them along, weapon dogs strung in tightly beside them.

I parked up and got out, conscious of being watched – someone is always watching in the Ends. It wouldn’t do to be taken for a social worker or, worse still, a Fed. Two girls were standing at the foot of an external stairway smoking, one in wedge sandals too small for her feet, the other sporting a set of sprayed acrylics which she was tapping on the handrail. Tough kids, showing off their credentials. I headed over; they’d spread the word among whoever needed to know.

‘Hey,’ I said.

‘All right?’ the girl in the wedge sandals replied.

The girl with the acrylics looked me up and down then squinted and tipped her head. ‘You slippin’ here, man.’

‘Nuh uh. This my manor.’

‘I never seen you. Who your people?’

‘Lilly Winter. Me and her got the same baby daddy.’

The girls exchanged glances. Then the girl with the wedge sandals said, ‘You too late, innit. Feds bagged her up. Some accident, I dunno.’

‘Yeah, I heard.’

‘She not my crew.’ The girl turned to her friend. ‘The young’un, though, the gingernut?’

‘Yeah,’ said the friend. ‘Facety bitch.’

‘What I’m sayin’. Nobody give a shit if she gone the same way as her mother, and that’s the truth, innit.’

Sixty-seven Ash Building was the second to last flat on the top floor of one of the older, red-brick blocks overshadowed by the towers, and distinguished only by its tattered, unloved exterior. You didn’t have to step a foot inside to know the place was a dump. Close up, everything about number sixty-seven exuded neglect. It was the only dwelling on that floor which hadn’t been customised with door gates, a window box or some cheerful paint. Where the number had once been attached to the door two rusted screws jutted from their holes. The letter box had fallen out and the hole in the door was duct-taped over. There was grime on the windows and the blue-painted windowsill was feathery with disrepair.

Ruby’s key was an awkward fit and got stuck in the barrel. The door rattled in the jamb but remained firmly shut. I was thinking about giving it a good kick when I became aware of a woman in her early thirties who was peering around the door of number sixty-nine, dressed in a pink onesie.

‘You want something?’ The door opened wider.

‘The little girl who lives here, Ruby Winter? I’m picking up some of her things but the key…’ The woman’s face softened. She said her name was Gloria. Eastern European accent. Something familiar about her that I couldn’t put my finger on.

She came over and, waving me away, pressed her shoulder to the door. ‘You got to push hard. Council said they sort it out, but they don’t. Lilly always waking me up.’ When the door gave, Gloria righted herself and stepped over the threshold. ‘Terrible what happen. And that kid, Ruby, she got no mother.’ When I hesitated, she beckoned me with her hand, saying, ‘Come on then.’

I followed her in. The place was filthy, the smell of stale tobacco overpowering. Damp marks on the walls did a bad job of disguising the thin sheen of grease underneath, and dust and hair had accumulated into dark brown hummocks where the lino had lifted in the corners. Two doors led off the hallway. The first opened into a cramped, dark space which must have been Lilly’s bedroom. Her body had been removed, but something in me resisted entering, afraid of what I might find. A mildewed shower was visible through the other door.

At the end of the hallway was a decent-sized living room, one side of which had been sectioned off and made into a galley kitchen. On the opposite side a door led off into a passageway, presumably to Ruby’s bedroom. The walls were featureless, unless you counted the yellow tar blossoms clambering up the paintwork. A cheap grey pleather sofa sat on the far side, nearest to Ruby’s room. On the other there was a TV stand, though it looked as if someone had been in and removed the TV, leaving the cables splayed over the floor. As I picked my way across old, stained carpet tiles littered with improvised ashtrays, the butts still in them, I found myself wondering whether Tom would have rescued Ruby from all this squalor and neglect if he’d known about her – and realised I wasn’t sure. Strange how you could spend more than a decade of your life with someone, have a child together, and yet discover in the moment it takes for a policewoman to ring a doorbell that you hardly know them at all.

I turned my attention back to the flat. Gloria was standing at the entrance to the kitchen.

‘Is same boiler as in my flat, combi. So is strange.’

‘Strange?’

‘Lilly is leaving window open a little bit. She put nail in the window frame, so no one can get in while she sleeping. But police tell me window was shut this one time.’

‘Is that what’s strange?’

‘No, I mean, is hot at night. So why is boiler on?’

‘The pilot light blew out, the police said.’

‘Oh.’

The death-boiler sat on one side of a long, narrow window in the kitchen. The cover had been removed, presumably by the police, exposing the interior, and it looked like the mechanism had been disabled. Evidently, the carbon monoxide had snaked its way undetected through the living room and down the hallway into Lilly’s room. The policewoman had said that the door leading into a small passageway which separated Ruby’s bedroom from the rest of the flat had probably saved her life. I thought about what Gloria had said and realised there was an undeniable logic to it. I was no expert in boilers but it seemed unlikely to me that a dead pilot light would have led to a massive leakage of carbon monoxide unless the boiler had been firing and the flue had been blocked. If that was the case, the policewoman hadn’t mentioned it. As Gloria said, it was hot, and everyone in the flat was asleep. No reason for the boiler to be on at all.

‘I see what you mean,’ I said. ‘It is odd, isn’t it?’

Gloria was standing at the window with her back to me, looking out across the view of tower blocks and tiled roofs. As she turned I realised where I’d seen her before.

‘You work at St John’s Primary. My daughter’s there.’ I’d seen Gloria after hours polishing the lino tiles.

I pulled Freya’s picture from my wallet.

Gloria’s eyes lit up. She seemed genuinely delighted. ‘Oh yes, I know. Very sweet girl. She want to be Pippi Long Something.’

‘Pippi Longstocking. Yes, she does!’ I smiled. We stood looking at one another for a moment, while the fine thread of female connection wove its spidery web between us.

‘You have any kids?’ I said.

Gloria pressed her lips into a tight line and my instincts told me to change the subject rather than pursue it.

‘Ruby, the girl who lived here? She’s Freya’s half-sister.’

‘They look completely different,’ Gloria said.

‘I’m guessing Ruby looked more like her mother?’ I said and Gloria nodded. ‘I never met Lilly. The police say it’s a miracle Ruby’s alive. It was that door over there and maybe the direction of the draught which saved her.’

‘Miracle,’ Gloria said.

I returned to the kitchen and went back to inspecting the boiler. Gloria followed.

‘Maybe the man make a mistake.’

I asked her what she meant.

‘Repair man, come to look boiler. I don’t know name or nothing. Maybe since two weeks? Lilly knock on my door to borrow twenty pounds to pay him.’

The breath caught in my throat. No one had mentioned a repairman. The policewoman had said only that the police inspection of the boiler revealed the pilot light had gone out – something which could have happened at any time – that there were no batteries in the carbon monoxide detector and that Lilly was dead drunk. According to police, it was a freak accident.

‘Did you report that to the police?’

Gloria let out a raw, indignant yelp. ‘Do I look like a person who talk to police?’ She looked me up and down and raised a finger to her lips. ‘Shh, immigrant like me or brown person like you is same. I don’t say nothing to no one. Pemberton has ears like elephant.’

‘All the same,’ I said, sounding like a judgemental idiot.

Gloria shot me the disapproving look I deserved and began to head for the door. I fumbled around in my pocket for something to write on, found an old receipt and a pen and scribbled down my mobile number.

‘You’re right. I wouldn’t have said anything either when I lived here. But listen, if you see the boiler man again, would you call me? Just as a favour? Or ask him to call me?’ A pause while I thought this through. ‘Best not say anything about Lilly. Just tell him I’ve got some work for him.’

Gloria hesitated for a moment, weighing this – me – up, and after a cursory inspection, folded the paper into her bra. Then she waved a hand in the air and was gone.

I waited until she’d left before going into Ruby’s room. A mattress with no bedframe lay on the floor, beside it a cheap clothes rack almost empty of clothes. There were no drawers. Ruby’s underwear was piled into an Asda bag in the corner. On a tiny plastic bedside table were some old bottles of nail varnish, a few pens, a nail file, a packet of tissues and a few loose batteries. A couple of damp and musty towels on the floor gave out a fusty, faintly fungal smell. I went about the place picking up the clothes and towels and indiscriminately jamming them into the Chinese laundry bags I’d brought from home, my heart full of contradictory feelings, resenting the girl and her mother for intruding into my life, and at the same time feeling desperately sorry for them.

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