Thorn in the Flesh Page 13

  So she travelled north, knowing she was not simply a mother searching for a lost child. No. On this third Tuesday in June – her birthday, though she had no wish to celebrate the occasion – she was travelling into the past holding onto the hope that she might find out how many people knew what had happened to her in 1985 and 1986, whether one of them could be the sender of her threatening letters and what, if any, was their relationship to the man who’d attacked her.

  If Peter knew nothing, then the Williams couple might. It was her best hope of survival. The police already thought she was wasting their time. She had no wish to involve them further in her life. It was up to her. As indeed it had always been.

  On a whim, she’d decided to take the car rather than the train to York. Once the appointment had been agreed, the agency had given her the address and from there it had been easy enough to look up the roads on the Internet. That way, she would have to concentrate on driving rather than having over two hours on a train in which to think about what the meeting might be like. It would only be the two of them, she’d been told. Not her son. Stephen wouldn’t be there. She was glad of it; there were more paths to take before that point could be reached.

  Still it was a long four hours’ journey. The M1 stretched grey and bleak before her and the miles slipped slowly by. For a while the radio was a distraction but in the end its forced cheerfulness began to make her skin prickle and she turned it off. Then only the silence kept her company. She stopped for food at one of the service stations north of Leicester and sat in her car, eating a tuna and salad sandwich she didn’t taste. It wasn’t much but it was better than sitting in the café area, where there would be people.

  In the last fifty miles, it began to rain. Not much, only a shower that turned heavy almost at once before the clouds cleared and the sun returned again. If she’d given any credence to signs or omens, this might have meant something to her, but she didn’t.

  At 2.15pm, before she’d even thought of preparing, she was passing the signs to York racecourse – wasn’t it hosting Royal Ascot this year? – and then taking the next turning which after a few minutes brought her round to the racecourse again, where the Ascot signs answered her question. She took the local traffic road past Tesco and a Park and Ride, over a small bridge and then onward for a few moments past fields on the left and a line of houses on the right.

  A few minutes later, pulling up outside the house she was looking for, she switched off the engine and checked the number. Yes, she was right. This was the one. She was here. And as unprepared as she’d been for the last nineteen years. She should have taken the train, after all. It would have given her time to think of something, anything, to say. Never mind. Too late now.

  The air outside the safety of her car was warm and almost reassuring. From somewhere she could smell roses. A glance to her left revealed two or three rose bushes in bloom – oranges, yellows and reds – at the corner of the garden next door. The Williams’ bungalow was straight in front of her. On the brick façade was a small starfish, with another starfish sign on the gate to the left that led to the garage. Beyond this, Kate could see a washing line flapping in the back garden. She straightened her shoulders and tried to breathe more calmly.

  Before she could take a single step down the path that led to the end of her journey, a door which Kate hadn’t yet spotted opened beyond the side gate, and a tall, curvy woman appeared, wearing a dark green dress covered by a blue and white striped apron. Even from where Kate was standing, she could see the crease on the woman’s forehead.

  ‘Mrs Harris?’ the woman called out, her accent distinctly northern. ‘Is that you?’

  Five minutes later, Kate was installed in a narrow sitting room running almost the length of the bungalow in front of a table bulging with biscuits and cake and dainty, triangular sandwiches. She’d had no idea that anyone cut such sandwiches any more. In the swathe of words that had carried her inside, she’d learnt that Mrs Williams’ first name was Jenny, and that she’d been married to her husband, Charles, for nearly thirty years. The man in question was a slight figure with greying hair. He nodded whenever it was necessary in Jenny Williams’ monologue. On the wall behind him loomed a large painting of York Minster. Somehow he seemed to belong there.

  ‘You see,’ Mrs Williams – call me Jenny – was saying, talking almost as if she was too terrified to stop, ‘we really appreciated what you did back then, you wouldn’t believe it. We couldn’t have children, you see, and we were so keen to give a home to someone, desperate, I suppose, if I’m being honest. So when the agency told us there was a young girl – that would be yourself, Mrs Harris – up near my home town at the university who didn’t want her baby, it seemed to us like a miracle. An answer to our prayers. We were so glad to find Stephen and when the agency accepted our application and you made no objection, it was like a dream. Something we’d always hoped for. Isn’t that right, Charles?’

  Her husband nodded in agreement and passed Kate one of the plates of biscuits.

  ‘They’re very good,’ he said quietly while his wife paused for breath. ‘Ginger. Home-made.’

  Kate took one. They tasted as light and as spicy as summer. ‘Thank you. They’re lovely.’

  Jenny blushed. ‘Oh, I’m so glad. They’re the ones I always make for the church fetes. They go down very well. Anyway, my dear, what was I saying? Ah yes, Stephen. We were thrilled to have him, of course, and as a baby too. He was no trouble. Such a quiet child. Slept through the night from only a few weeks old. And always watching what we were doing, always interested. We loved him, you see, we really loved him. Everything was fine until …’

  Kate paused and put down the white china cup she was holding. The tea inside it spilt a little on her finger and she flicked the pain away.

  The other woman sighed, and then continued, ‘… until he was old enough for school.’

  ‘Why? What happened then?’

  Jenny glanced at her husband as if seeking permission for what she might be about to say next and then sat back in her chair. She stared straight ahead of her, looking at no-one, as if she were seeing only the past. Kate was perfectly still.

  ‘What happened then?’ Jenny repeated. ‘Nothing. At first. Everything was fine. He seemed all right at school, though I was worried – we both were – that he wasn’t making any friends. He didn’t talk about them, just about what they’d done in class, what sports they were playing – that sort of thing. We asked if he would like to bring some of his classmates back for tea, or be taken to tea at theirs, but he always said no. Then about a month or so after he’d started school, we got the letter. The first letter.’

  Despite the impossibility of it, Kate shivered.

  ‘What letter was that?’ she said.

  ‘From the school,’ the other woman said, her voice much lower now. ‘It was about Stephen. They wanted to see us both for an interview. He’d been very disruptive in lessons, hitting other pupils, throwing the toys around. They wanted to discuss the situation with us.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Jenny glanced again at her husband, who took up the story. For the first time, Kate noticed he had a slight lisp.

  ‘We went to see them, of course,’ he said. ‘One afternoon, whilst Stephen’s class was out on the sports field. We listened to everything they had to say and we couldn’t believe it. It didn’t sound like our boy. He was so quiet, so well-behaved at home. Played by himself in his room, always reading comics, that sort of thing. Oh yes, he was always reading his comics. When they’d finished, we didn’t know what to say. They asked if anything was wrong at home which might be the cause of the problem, but there was nothing we could think of. We have a happy marriage, we always have. We didn’t know what might be wrong, but we promised the headmistress we’d do all we could to deal with it. And we tried, didn’t we, Jenny?’

  Mr Williams looked at his wife.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, a small handkerchief twisted in her fingers. ‘Over the
years that followed, all the way through primary and secondary schools, and the special school Stephen attended for a while, we tried. I swear it, Mrs Harris.’

  ‘Please,’ Kate said, reaching out and patting Jenny’s cold hand. ‘It’s Kate.’

  ‘I swear it … Kate. We did our best. But, in the end, I don’t think we were the right parents for him. He was very intelligent, too bright, you see. And we’re just so ordinary. Or at least that’s what we think when I look back now. And school, in whatever form, bored him.’ She shook her head, as if shaking away bad memories. ‘Shall I …? Would you like to see some photographs of Stephen? I’ve put the albums to one side in case you did.’

  Unable to speak, Kate nodded.

  For the next couple of hours, she pored over a small history of the childhood of her son with Jenny Williams. After a while, Mr Williams wandered out into the back garden and Kate heard the sound of a lawnmower starting up. The gentle hum of it provided a background to the story. She heard how in the end Stephen had made a few friends, but preferred being by himself. He’d changed primary schools once and secondary schools three times. At the last of these, he seemed to be doing well and settling down to his studies, Mrs Williams told her, eyes now brimming with tears, but then at the age of fourteen he’d joined up with a gang whose reputation was already known to the local police.

  ‘We couldn’t stop him,’ she said. ‘We didn’t know how to begin to control him and then one night … one night …’

  Kate put her hand on the woman’s arm and felt the warmth of her skin beneath the thin polyester.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘One night,’ Mrs Williams continued, wiping her eyes and again staring beyond Kate, to something else, ‘one night Stephen came home. He was just fifteen. It was late and I’d waited up for him although Charles had gone to bed. It’s different for a mother, I think. No matter what’s happened. I’d been sitting here on the settee with the television low, though I wasn’t watching it. I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew was the sound of the key in the back door and some muttered curses. It was two in the morning. I turned the television off and hurried into the kitchen to see if he was all right, see if I could get him anything. He was standing there in the porch swaying. I could see he was drunk, even if I hadn’t been able to smell it from his breath. His eyes were glassy too and he wasn’t focusing on me. I wondered if he was on drugs. I thought he might be. The boys he’d been out with were bad people, very bad people. You know?’

  When Kate nodded, Mrs Williams took a long, ragged breath and went on, ‘I said something to him, I don’t know, his name or maybe I asked him where he’d been, something like that. He laughed and swore at me. He’d started to do that recently and neither of us liked it. We’d told him to stop it, that we hadn’t brought him up to say such things, but it hadn’t made any difference. He just laughed at us and kept on swearing. I said the same sort of thing to him that night, with him standing there in the porch and me at the kitchen door in my dressing gown. I hadn’t even got any slippers on. It was a warm night. He swore at me again and I remember reaching out to him, though I don’t know what I could have done. That … that was when he hit me.’

  Mrs Williams paused again, and Kate held her hand. She said nothing. She knew more was to come.

  ‘Yes. In the stomach. He’d never hit me before, never. He wasn’t that way, I swear he wasn’t. It was the drugs, the drink, and … everything. Anyhow, he hit me and I fell, hitting my head against the freezer. When I put my hand up to my face there was blood. I screamed and he shouted at me, swinging his hand back and smashing a pane of glass in the porch. His hand was gashed and there was more blood. So much blood. And glass everywhere too. Behind me, I could hear the door to the sitting room being flung open and the sound of Charles’ voice, then his footsteps reaching us. And then a terrible, terrible silence. That was the worst of it, Mrs Harris. The silence. I looked at Stephen. His face was pale, like a ghost. He was shaking. I felt sick. His hand was still bleeding but I remember thinking: thank goodness he didn’t cut his wrist, thank goodness he didn’t. Then he was gone, running down the gravel, over the gate and away. Charles wanted to take me to hospital but there would have been no point. I was all right, it was only a nosebleed. Nothing serious. I was more worried about Stephen. We cleared up the glass, put some sheeting over the broken pane, and waited. He didn’t come back for two days. Two days, during which I was imagining all kinds of things which could happen.’

  The sudden interruption of a dog barking next door made Mrs Williams jump and look out of the window for a moment. She clasped her hands together in her lap and coughed.

  ‘We thought about going to the police,’ she said, ‘but we didn’t want to get him into any more trouble. When he did turn up again, it looked as if he might have been sleeping rough. His jacket was streaked with dirt and I don’t think he’d taken a bath during that time. His jeans were torn too. It was evening when he crept back into the house. The local paper had just been delivered. I was so pleased to see him, you can’t imagine. But he wouldn’t let me hug him. I checked his hand. It was bundled up with something, pieces of old rag. I don’t know where he’d found them. He must have already taken out any fragments of glass as I could find nothing there and the wound was clean. Over and over again, he kept apologising for what he’d done, and swearing it wouldn’t happen any more. He said he was sorry and I wanted so much to believe him, but Charles was more cautious, telling him not to see these other boys again and making him promise there’d be no more drugs or drink. Stephen promised, of course he did. He was sorry, Mrs Harris, he was sorry.’

  Mrs Williams trailed off and on impulse Kate hugged her. Beneath her arms, the other woman felt frail, in spite of her stature.

  ‘Please, call me Kate,’ she said again, and Jenny nodded.

  ‘All right. Kate.’

  ‘What happened then?’ Kate asked after a moment or two. ‘Did he keep his promise?’

  ‘No. No, he didn’t,’ Mrs Williams said and began to cry in earnest, harsh sobs shaking her frame. ‘I’m sorry. Please, if you can just give me a minute.’

  Wrenching herself away from the chair, Mrs Williams half ran out of the room, clicking the door shut behind her. Then the sound of the bathroom fan and running water. And silence.

  Kate wondered if she should leave, but she needed to know more. She couldn’t go home yet. Getting up, she took two paces towards the door through which her hostess had disappeared, but the noise of footsteps and then the murmur of voices stopped her. Mr Williams had come back into the house. She should leave the two of them alone for a while. Instead, she turned her attention to the now abandoned photograph albums.

  There were four of them. Thick tomes, two leather-bound and two in a shinier material. When Kate picked them up, they smelt of hope and other people’s dreams. She went through them again, from the beginning and in order, as she had with Jenny Williams, but more slowly, paying more attention this time to the pictures of her son. The soft tick-tick of the mantelpiece clock was her only accompaniment.

  Her fingers moved over the small images of Stephen as a baby. Something she could barely remember herself. She saw his wispy dark blond hair, his solemn blue eyes. At first he was laid out on a rug in a garden and when she looked closer she could see the wall behind him was the bungalow itself. The starfish image was obvious. Later the background was indoors, in the room she was sitting in now, strewn with toys and books. As she turned the pages, hesitating over this unknown history, she could see the settings change: a school; a large field with what looked like swings in the far right corner; a beach with Stephen, his hair a little darker now, holding up a shell to the camera; a garden fence with an orchard behind, perhaps of apple trees. In swift time, without the years’ slow march, she watched him grow up: a small boy in his first school uniform frowning; then on what must have been a school trip to Brussels; at a birthday party with his adoptive parents who looked younger and so much hap
pier; and then, later in the sequence, lounging on the settee, his arm draped round the back and with what seemed to be some kind of computer game on his lap. Stephen looked as if he were early teens by then and next to him, ranged across the room, other boys of a similar age were lounging on the floor or leaning up against the table. None of them were looking towards whoever had taken the picture and none of them looked pleased. Disturbed in the middle of something, perhaps? Or were they only being teenagers, in whatever context, in whatever country? She didn’t know. She had no experience to call on which might tell her. She was a parent in name only.

  Now, looking at the image of her son under her fingers, his pale skin, with a hint of acne on the cheek, and fierce blue eyes, she found she was having trouble catching her breath and her skin felt hot.

  She should go. Now. She should never have come at all. It was obvious neither of these people had anything to do with her letters. She couldn’t think about it any more. Stumbling up onto her feet, she reached for her bag …

  … Just as the door to the hallway and bathroom clicked open and the parents of her son appeared. They stared at her as if she was a stranger who had appeared without warning in front of them.

  Then Mrs Williams blinked and walked two steps further into the light. Kate could see her face was still streaked with tears she must have been trying to wash away. Behind her, Mr Williams hovered, an uncertain presence in the background. Perhaps it had always been that way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I should have gone, but I …’