The Daughter (20 page)

“They do food in the pub,” I say. “Come back when you need to sleep.”

AFTER HE LEAVES
I try to phone Michael but he doesn't pick up. I go to the shed. It feels cold and looks messy; usually I don't notice the mess. I haven't the heart to start painting, so I tidy jumbled seeds and rose hips. But I don't dream about them that night. Instead in my dreams I see Naomi throwing broken glass at the walls of Beth's burned kitchen and laughing. The laughter wakes me, and changes into the cry of a gull, calling in the night from its perch on the roof. I lie in the dark. The landscape of the past has changed. Ketamine. Beth's break-­in. My mind goes round and round. How had I missed so much? But I know how easy it is to miss things. I hadn't seen what was happening to Ed. It could easily have been too late for him as well.

I give up the attempt to sleep again; I get up, go downstairs in the dark, and make tea. My sketchbook is on the side, but it's facedown, left open. Did Ted flick through it quickly, or study each picture in turn? Perhaps he was disappointed there are none of him. His wet coat is over the chair; the sleeves have dripped a little pool of water on the floor. I didn't hear him come in from the pub and go upstairs. I open the door to the garden and look into the black quietness. The storm that came in from the sea has already gone again. I shut the door and sit on the floor with my back to the wood burner, the mug of tea beside me. Scalpels are easy to draw; harder to capture the holding fingers, impossible to show how they were trembling.

BRISTOL, 2009

ELEVEN DAYS AFTER

Ed pulled his arm back and shook his sleeve down. He turned his head away and in the downward curve of his thin neck I saw how far away he had gone. I put my arms around him. I could feel him shivering.

“What's happened to you?”

He shrugged and moved away.

“I'm not angry.” But I didn't think he heard. It was true, though. “I want to help.”

He walked into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa, put his head back and stared at the ceiling. I sat beside him.

“Can you tell me what's been going on?”

His head lowered suddenly, brown eyes staring hotly into mine. “Don't you fucking dare tell Dad.”

“Were you using drugs from my medical bag?”

No answer.

“There aren't enough in there to do this.” I touched his inner elbow lightly as I spoke, but he gasped and wrenched his arm back. I had felt a swelling under my fingers, hot through the cotton of the shirt.

“I'm going to make a sandwich and a cup of coffee for both of us.” Perhaps this was how you did it, by pretending to be calm and sensible, although when I saw his face drawn with pain I wanted to weep. “There might be an abscess there, Ed. I could take a look in a while.”

We ate in silence, which didn't seem to bother him. He stared blankly out of the window as he chewed. Then, as we drank coffee, I began carefully.

“How are you feeling now?”

He glanced at me quickly, contemptuously. “Like shit, what do you think?”

“How long?”

“Dunno.” He shrugged.

“How often?”

“Whenever.”

But his shoulders went down as though talking was loosening something in him.

“What have you been taking?”

“Different stuff.” A pause, then a low mutter that I had to lean in to catch. “Ketamine, mostly.”

The danger he's been in makes me feel sick. “Where from?”

He looked sideways at me and then smiled scornfully: “Man in a club.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Why drugs, Ed?”

He screwed up his eyes. “Because of all the other shit.”

“What other shit?”

“Stuff.”

“Like?”

“Theo.” He said in a low voice. “Naomi.”

“Theo?” The drugs might help with the guilt he felt about Naomi, although some scars looked old, so he must've have been taking drugs even before she disappeared. How did Theo fit in?

“Leave it, Mum.” He started jigging his leg up and down.

I looked around the room as though the tools to unlock this were there somewhere, lying on the sideboard or just out of reach on a high shelf.

“It wasn't your fault she was taken. We told you that; even if you'd waited—­”

“I said leave it.”

“The money?”

He was silent.

“Ed, where did the money come from?”

The jigging got faster and faster, then he got up suddenly and went to the stairs.

“Where are you going?”

“The fucking North Pole.”

I waited until his bedroom door shut, then I sat down and the room seemed to lower itself around me. There was a quiet ringing in the air like after an explosion, but it was inside my head. I looked at my hands on the table. The tendons shone through the skin in pale ridges; they were thinner hands now, but still strong. I had delivered babies, inserted catheters and drips, sewn torn skin, held the foreheads of my vomiting children. I clenched them tightly. I could grasp this. I had to.

HE WAS SITTING
with his back against his headboard, earphones in. His bent knees supported a book, and as I came in he began turning the pages quickly.

I sat on his bed and he moved his legs sharply away.

“Some parents might involve the school. Some might involve the school and the police.” The pages stopped turning but he didn't look up. “Lots of parents would insist on being told the details of what's been happening; I'm offering a deal.”

He pulled out his earphones and waited.

“If you agree to go to a rehabilitation unit, then we won't involve the school or the police, and as long as you talk to someone and you stop, then you needn't tell us anything about where the drugs came from or the money I saw.”

He stared at me silently. Then he looked down at the book on his lap, but his eyes weren't moving.

“Just leave school?”

“Yes, so you can go to a rehab unit.”

He lay back and closed his eyes.

I gently took his arm, pushed up his sleeve and looked at the scars. Now I could see it clearly; there was a swelling the size of a small plum tensely stretching the skin.

“Ed, this needs draining. We need to go to the emergency room.”

“You do it.”

I didn't argue; it might make him retreat from the bargain I had held out. I got a sterile set from the locked box in my car. Lynn used to joke that I carried an operating unit around with me, but I'd found it useful over the years for patients who needed very minor procedures and who couldn't get to the hospital. It was often very satisfying, but this would be different. I found antibiotics in my bag. The thought of cutting my own son's skin made me feel weak as I walked back upstairs. I washed my hands in the bathroom in water as hot as I could stand. I knew I would hurt him. I had to find a way to deal with that so I could do this properly. I dried my hands on the paper sheet in the pack and slipped on surgical gloves; as I did so, I felt myself crossing that line, mother to doctor. This was just a problem to be solved. It was straightforward; I could do it. I cleaned his arm with an iodine swab, spread the paper above and below his elbow, positioned the cardboard receiving tray, and sprayed freezing anesthetic around and over the abscess.

“This will freeze it, but it will still hurt. You'd get a better anesthetic in the hospital. You sure, Ed?”

“Do it.”

Doctor, not mother . . .

I took the scalpel and cut down sharply through the skin as it thinned over the bulging abscess.

Ed shouted as the skin split neatly apart and thick yellow pus spurted out from between the cut edges, streaming over his elbow into the tray.

“Jesus. Fuck.” His forehead was beaded with sweat as he watched the lumpy mess curdled with blood rise in the tray. “Fucking hell. That hurts.”

“Nearly done.” I felt cold sweat trickle from my armpits, and with hands that I couldn't quite stop trembling, I carefully pressed the last pus out and syringed in antiseptic. Then I packed the wound with a soft yellow wick, bound it with a dressing, and watched while he swallowed a loading dose of antibiotics, penicillin and metronidazole. Acetaminophen. Tea.

Afterward I sat on the bed and pinned my trembling hands tightly between my knees. Ed was white-­lipped.

“Don't tell Dad,” he muttered between clenched teeth.

“Of course he needs to know. He'll have to know why you're leaving school, if nothing else. He won't like it, but he'll understand. He struggled to stop smoking himself, years ago.”

“I didn't know Dad used to smoke.”

“More than cigarettes, sometimes.”

“Yeah?” Ed glanced up at me, his eyes briefly curious.

“Everyone's fallible. We all screw up sooner or later.”

“Yeah? Even perfect Theo, the perfect son?”

Ah. He looked down at the bed cover, I couldn't quite see his face, but his words were bitter. I waited for more but he didn't talk about Theo again.

“I sold them,” he muttered, his voice becoming indistinct. “For ketamine.”

He'd been selling the drugs from my bag to buy the ones he wanted; there would probably always be someone willing to exchange Demerol and temazepam for ketamine. I leaned closer as he mumbled something else. I couldn't catch what he said and then his eyes closed and he slept.

I closed the door quietly and took the tray and gloves downstairs. My cell went off.

“It'll be on the news.” The warning tone of Michael's voice put me on my guard. Ed's drugs. Someone must have found out, told a journalist. Thank God he's asleep or he'll think it was me. Michael was still speaking, and it took me a few seconds to understand that what he was telling me had nothing to do with drugs.

“They've found a blue pickup van, abandoned in the woods.”

 

Chapter 26

DORSET, 2011

THIRTEEN MONTHS LATER

W
hen the bath water empties it leaves behind a line of small stones that had worked their way into my shoes on the beach and pressed marks into my skin. I scoop them toward the drain; tiny residues of sea-­sharpened rock, their wet edges glint black and brown.

After my bath I go outside to phone, my voice small in the white space of the icy garden. I keep the cell phone cradled close to my mouth. Ted's window is open; he might wake and hear. As I wait for Michael to answer, the black body of a spider, suspended by a thread from the coping, swings like a beady pendulum toward the stone of the garden wall. Michael's voice lifts with surprise when he hears me.

“Ted's still here.” I push the spider with my fingertip toward the wall, and it clings to the rough surface.

“Ah.”

“He was ill after he arrived, so . . .”

“So you're looking after him,” Michael finishes.

“I've let him stay. He told me things about Naomi I didn't know. She had stolen drugs.”

There is silence for a few seconds.

“Right,” he says quietly.

“It was when she was doing an internship in Ted's animal lab. She left her bag behind one day and Ted found some vials in it.” The words come out smoothly enough, but I feel breathless as I say them.

“Why didn't he tell anyone?”

“He told a policeman at the station, but it wasn't followed up.”

The spider scuttles over the stone, searching for somewhere to hide.

“But he didn't tell you,” he says factually.

“Apparently he didn't want to burden me with something that seemed irrelevant.”

A pause, then his calm voice again: “Okay. What drugs?”

“Ketamine.”

As if on cue the air fills with the ordered fall of pealing bells. Early morning bell-­ringing practice spills innocently into the gaps and empty corners of the village, bringing with the sound a world of holidays, sunshine, striped lawns, and Sunday lunch.

“Ted used it to anesthetize experimental rats. Naomi was in the lab and had access to it. It's not a controlled drug and they trusted her.”

The spider has vanished; I must have missed the moment when it dived into a gap between the stones.

“There's a big trade in ketamine,” Michael says slowly.

“Naomi wouldn't have been involved in that. It was Ed who traded drugs, not Naomi.”

Michael continues as if I haven't spoken: “I can get a list of users.”

“A list of users? Ted says she just took a few vials for friends—­”

“Users of ketamine are usually older than Naomi,” he interrupts. “Less likely to be schoolchildren. She may have had other contacts.”

That word opens a crack into the world that Ed had visited, where shadowy figures live in a network at the dark edges of life, organized and predatory.
Contacts
. The word for the partners of a patient who has chlamydia or gonorrhea; someone unknown, with the power to maim in secret.

“At least now we know what the K in her diary stands for,” Michael says.

I'd thought it was shorthand for coursework. How naive I've been; Naomi must have thought so too, as she hugged her secrets to herself.

“I'll come to you.” Michael's voice is decisive.

“Can you?” Tears sting my eyes.

“I'll be there in two hours. It would be helpful to talk to Ted too.”

“Thank you.” I want another word that says more, something bigger, but I can't find it. I remember to warn him: “He doesn't know about us.”

“No, he mustn't know.”

Perhaps he could be withdrawn from our case if it's known we are together, or he might be dismissed. This secrecy puts a weight on our relationship, flattening it somehow. Sometimes when I'm alone I think I have imagined it completely.

After our conversation finishes, I put my hand on the wall. The surface is rough and cold. The dark crevices must be full of spiders you never see, thick with webs and trapped things. My feet leave hardened patches in the stiff white grass as I walk back to the cottage. The air is clear and cold; it will be a day of sun and ice underfoot. I let Bertie out and he rolls in the frost. His body melts the ice when he stands and shakes himself, leaving a large uneven patch of green on the white lawn. The difference in the garden excites him; he seems to like the cold penetrating to his skin. He runs in circles like a puppy.

In the kitchen Ted is making a cup of coffee. He looks different from when he arrived, slightly fatter maybe, and he stands more upright. He is wearing his coat and a small case is by his feet. His eyes slide away from mine, then back again, like those of a guilty child.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

He gives me the cup of coffee he has just made and spoons grains into another. He continues quickly, as if he thinks I might interrupt him before he can say what he has planned.

“She loved you.”

I don't need him to tell me this. I curl my hands around the mug and lean against the draining board. The sun streams through the glass and lies in bright divided blocks on the floor, showing up the dust and stains at the edges.

“I did so many things wrong,” he goes on, stumbling over his words in the silence.

“What, exactly?” I reach into the cupboard and then tip porridge into a pan. But I know there isn't an exactly. Everything I got wrong was somewhere in the shifting space between expecting too much and not seeing enough.

“Away, busy . . .”

How can he think it's that simple? That the reason Naomi went missing was because he was busy, as if all the other things he'd done and hadn't done didn't matter.

“What about the rules you broke?” I measure water into the oats, my hands shaking with anger. “So that she thought rules didn't matter . . .” I look at him, catching his small impatient shrug.

“If you mean Beth, I told you: Naomi didn't know. I was careful.” He adds, as if it follows, “You know, it really isn't over between us.” He moves closer, looks over my shoulder. “Why not put some milk with that? Makes it nicer.”

“Michael's coming.” I move a step away, adding a half cup more water.

“I've got an operating schedule tomorrow, so I've got to go back to see my patients. After that, I thought perhaps we—­”

“I spoke to him this morning.” I don't look at him as I stir. “He's coming to talk to us about the ketamine.”

I scrape the porridge into a bowl, and put it on the table for him.

“I'll wait, then.” He speaks slowly, watching me.

The air in the kitchen feels tight with words that aren't being said. “I'm going to work for a while,” I tell him and shut the door behind me.

IT'S THE WRONG
time of year for the flowers I need for my circle, but there may be something in the hedge in the field. My sleeve snags as I open the gate. A single frozen rosebud hangs by a blackened stem from the thorny branch that has hooked me. The outer layers must have died first, the tender inner ones later. I disentangle myself; the bud and its attached stem come off in my hand; the spider's web between the head and the stem stretches fractionally, then breaks.

Inside the shed, the rosebud defines itself on thick white paper. The petals are dark and stiff at their edges, which are folded back in tiny ragged collars; some of the petals are pink near the calyx but stained with spots and lines of mauve and deep brown. They are still tightly cupped in layers that meet at a point. If I start with pink for the petals and then overlay it with black I might get the glazed ash color. I don't want Blake's poem in my head, but as I work the words are there anyway, as if they have been waiting for me:

Oh Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Thirteen months ago her world was safe. Home, school, friends. Now I know beyond that lit circle the world was full of hidden danger, waiting for someone to step outside into the dark shadows. It would take only one person, one contact. The rest of the poem unfurls in my head.

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

I try to paint, to focus so hard that all I see are dark colors and curved shapes. If someone loved her, surely they wouldn't destroy her. I shape the outline of the bud and my mind is so full that when the door creaks open, I spin around, surprised.

“I'm sorry, I've done it again.” Michael is wearing a coat and scarf, his car keys are in his hand. He guessed I would be here and came straight across the lawn. His broad shoulders curve a little as if he is offering himself as a safe place.

I touch his face and the skin is warm under my fingers. “It's good to see you.”

He turns his lips into my hand. “You look tired. I should have come sooner, but I thought you had the boys here.”

“They left a few days ago. Come into the house or Ted will come and look for us.”

Ted has laid out knives on the draining board like in an operating theater. There are neat heaps of chopped onions, little piles of spices, sliced parsnip. As we go into the kitchen he is holding the blade tip of the knife down with one hand and seesawing the handle rapidly with the other, mincing green strands of parsley. His coat and case are nowhere in sight.

“I want her to have a nourishing meal,” he tells Michael after they have shaken hands. “She's been looking after me and now I need to look after her.” As if he has sensed our closeness and is trying to reclaim me. He tips the onions into a pan.

Michael goes through to the sitting room. “Why don't you both come and sit down?”

Ted pulls the pan off the heat and follows us in, sits down next to me, a little too close, and puts his arm along the back of the sofa.

Michael takes the chair opposite and leans forward, intent and professional, looking at us. “When Jenny mentioned ketamine to me I ran a check. Our software enables us to access national lists of known users and dealers, and we can cross-­correlate with other crimes committed as well.”

Crimes like kidnapping, or crimes like rape and murder? I glance at Ted to see if he is thinking this too, but his head is down, absorbing the impact of Michael's words.

“I've brought some lists, starting with Bristol; when I typed
ketamine
in, about a hundred names appeared. I need you to look at them to see if any are familiar.”

“Why would they be?” asks Ted.

“A name you might have heard Naomi mention in passing, for example, or a friend of a friend of the boys.”

“I doubt she often came into contact with criminal drug users,” Ted says drily.

“Naomi stole drugs. So did Ed.” I turn to face Ted, my voice rising. How can he still believe so implicitly in his children's innocence? “Of course they could have come into contact with criminal drug users.”

There is a silence. Ted pulls his arm back. As Michael looks down at his list, his cheeks are red. I feel a flash of disappointment; he is embarrassed because I lost my temper. I look away from both of them, out of the window to the grass and the sky and the trees.

Michael hands identical papers to each of us.

“Anything that jumps out at you, for whatever reason, would be useful to hear,” he says.

Tom Abbot, Joseph Ackerman, Silas Ahmed, Jake Austin, Mike Baker . . . I read the names on the sheet. I've never seen any of them before. It's a relief and it isn't, it means we are no further forward. Ted shakes his head.

“Sorry. Nothing rings a bell.”

“I've got an even bigger list that takes in the southwest.” Michael is pulling more papers from his bag.

Ted starts reading down the new list; he reads quickly and turns the pages faster than I do. I want him to take longer, look more closely, but he's always read more quickly than me, cleanly taking what he needs from the text as though cutting it out. I read and reread, glancing at Michael, wanting to signal my gratitude, but he is reading the list as well, frowning slightly. He must be tired. I picture him going into his office earlier today, starting up the computer, printing the lists for us, driving for two hours to Dorset instead of what he normally does on Mondays. I don't know what that is, and it feels strange that I know so little about his life.

Ted has read through the new list before I finish. He puts it down.

“No luck,” he says briefly. He walks into the kitchen and starts rummaging noisily through cupboards.

I carry on reading, trying and testing each name. Nothing is familiar. Michael walks over to me and puts his hand on my shoulder. A machine whizzes from the kitchen, stops and starts again. The heat from Michael's hand burns through to my skin. I close my eyes; after a few seconds he moves back to his briefcase, and pulls out two thicker sheaves.

“I've got a national list here.”

“My God,” says Ted, reappearing with a tray of steaming mugs. “You've cast the net wide.”

Michael takes a mug of soup, and sips. “Thanks. I expect it's the same for you, when someone's sick and you're not sure why. You'd work through all the possibilities. All those blood tests and scans. Detective work.”

Ted nods. “You've got a point. Sometimes it's just finding that extra bit of information—a different pattern to the headache symptoms, for example, the smallest shift in electrolytes, or the most obscure shadow on the scan—­and there's your diagnosis.”

The soup is warm and spicy. Ted has learned how to cook. For a second I see Beth, my image of Beth, flushed with heat from the stove, stirring a pan of soup. Ted leaning over to look, kissing her neck. My eyes hurt with reading the small type. I fetch the glasses I now need for close painting, from the shed. When I come back into the room, Michael, noticing my glasses, gets up and switches on the light.