Ben almost said okay. But he didn't.
Chapter Seventeen
He spent Christmas in the Caribbean. It was one of the plum jobs that came along every now and again, a scramble from an advertising agency who had decided to switch photographers at the last minute and needed something to show their clients early in the New Year. They sounded relieved when Ben accepted the job. Almost as relieved as he felt.
He sent Jacob a big parcel of Christmas presents, but he had no idea if he'd understand who they were from. Or if Kale would let him have them.
Before he went away he spoke to Ann Usherwood about investigating Sandra's background. The solicitor had been doubtful. She'd warned it would be expensive, and probably not tell them anything they didn't already know. 'If there was something incriminating the social services would have it on record,' she pointed out.
But Ben insisted. If it had got Quilley nearly killed, it had to be worth knowing.
He left for the shoot without having heard anything. At the last minute a heavy weight of reluctance descended and almost made him back out. He felt certain that he was letting down his guard, struck by a superstitious conviction that something disastrous would happen if he wasn't at hand to somehow prevent it. Only the fact that he wouldn't hear anything from Usherwood over Christmas anyway, and the knowledge that his professional reputation might not stand another dent, made him go.
When he came off the plane and felt the sun bake down on him he was glad he had. It was so far removed from anything he associated with Christmas—and any stinging reminders of Sarah and Jacob—that the period he'd been dreading slipped by almost without him noticing.
Even Christmas Day passed relatively painlessly. They worked in the morning then spent the rest of the day getting slowly pissed at a beach bar. By the evening Ben had even forgotten what time of the year it was.
There was no escaping New Year's Eve, though. He was back in London by then. He had been invited to several parties, more even than usual, but while he knew the reason for it and was grateful, he had no intention of going to any. He planned to lock the door, turn the clocks to the wall, then watch videos and drink until January had safely started.
But memories of other years came at him like a juggernaut.
Only four of them; that was all they had spent together. It seemed incredible that it had been so few. The best had been their second, when he and Sarah had left Jacob with her parents and gone to a New Year's Eve party in Knightsbridge. The house had been ridiculously opulent but they hadn't known many people there and had left not long after midnight.
Slightly drunk, they had returned home, gigglingly stripped off and made love on the lounge floor. Sarah had gone down on him, teasing him with hands and tongue, and when he came in a spine-arching spurt she had grinned up at him and mock-roared, 'Hap-py New Year!' The previous year's hadn't been so memorable—Jacob had come down with flu, so they'd stayed in—but looking back on it now, that was the last they would spend together, the last Sarah had been alive for, making it if anything more poignant.
It seemed at once close enough to touch, yet much further removed than a mere twelve months.
He put the vodka bottle on the floor within easy reach and chain-watched one mindless video after another.
When the phone rang it startled him out of a doze. He jumped, spilling vodka from the glass loosely balanced on his chest. The room spun as he stood up. On the TV a mass of images refused to congeal into any coherent picture. The phone continued to ring. He wished he'd thought to disconnect it. He didn't want to hear anyone wishing him a Happy New Year.
He didn't think there was any such thing.
Resenting the intrusion, he answered it. 'Yeah?' he said, deliberately surly. Sounds of a party came down the line—cheers, hooters, the cracks of party poppers.
'Ben? Is that you?'
The unexpected voice cut through the vodka. 'Dad?'
'Can you hear me?'
'Yeah. Where are you?'
'We're at some friends' house.'
Ben couldn't stop the drop of disappointment that he wasn't nearby, even while he recognised its absurdity.
'I thought I'd call and see how you were.'
'Oh…not bad. You?'
'Fine.' There was a pause. 'I just wanted to say…'
Don't. Not 'Happy New Year'. Please don't.
'…well, you know. I'm thinking of you.'
Ben felt a lump rise in his throat.
'You there, Ben?'
'Yeah.'
Somebody whooped in the background. There was a burst of laughter. He could hear someone calling his father's name. It sounded like his stepmother.
'I'd better go,' his father said, but didn't break the connection. Whoever was calling his name grew louder. 'Look after yourself.'
Ben tried to say something, but the background noise of the party had been replaced by the dialling tone. He put down the receiver.
Fireworks were being let off outside. It couldn't be long after midnight. He wiped his eyes.
'Fuck it,' he said, for no particular reason, and went over to where he'd left the vodka.
The New Year carried on from where the old had left off.
There was work, and there was going out after work, and there was going home to an empty house. January had always been his least favourite month. He told himself it was just a matter of getting through it.
One rainy Sunday afternoon he realised as he watched a video that it should have been his contact day. He'd forgotten about it. It upset him, not because he'd held out any hope of Kale letting him see Jacob, but because he was already starting to let things slide. It seemed to foreshadow the way things would be in future.
He wondered if he shouldn't stop clutching at straws, aim for something more attainable like his contact rights, as Usherwood had advised. But the same arguments still applied. Kale wasn't going to share his son, no matter what anyone said. As long as he had Jacob he would continue to do what he liked, until he ultimately did something that even the authorities couldn't ignore.
Ben hoped Jacob could survive his father's free will for that long.
He expected to hear from Ann Usherwood soon after the New Year, but February arrived without any word from her. He had begun to regard Sandra Kale's past as another dead end when the solicitor called him one morning.
'How soon can you get in to see me?' she asked.
He was at the studio, just about to start a shoot. His first impulse was to cancel it, then he thought about Zoe and decided against. 'Not till tomorrow. Have you found something?'
'Enough to know that the social services didn't check up as well as they should,' she told him. 'Sandra Kale's got a twelve-year-old criminal record for prostitution and drug offences. She's been married before, to a pimp and drug pusher called Wayne Carter. It was in Portsmouth, under a different local authority, and when she divorced him she reverted back to her maiden name. Unless the social services here ran a pretty thorough check on her background—which they obviously didn't—they could easily have missed it.'
Excitement and disbelief blew away Ben's depression. But Usherwood hadn't finished.
'That's not all they missed,' she went on. 'Sandra and Wayne Carter had a child, a little girl. She died from parental abuse when she was eighteen months old.'
The rain had stopped for a while, but by the time the figures began straggling out of the pub it had started to come down again. Most were men. They turned up their coat collars and bunched their shoulders against the wind-lashed downpour, apparently preferring pasted-down hair and soaked shoulders to the effeminacy of an umbrella.
Ben watched the last of the afternoon drinkers hurry away.
The street became deserted again. He cracked open one of the car windows a little to clear some of the condensation. A fine spray of rain gusted in, making him shiver. He'd turned the engine off when he'd parked twenty minutes earlier, and the warmth the heaters had built up had largely gone now.
He tucked his hands under his arms and waited. After another half-hour the pub door opened again and a woman came out. She was half hidden behind a telescopic umbrella which she struggled to keep from blowing inside out. Ben wiped the misted glass, not sure if it was her. Then a gust of wind plucked open her coat and revealed the shortness of the skirt underneath, and he knew it was.
Her umbrella blew inside out just as she reached the car. She stopped as she wrestled with it. The wind tried to tear the passenger door from Ben's fingers as he reached across and opened it.
'Want a lift?'
Sandra Kale squinted through the rain, trying to see him.
He could tell when she realised who he was by the way her face suddenly became set. With a jerk she inverted the umbrella right side out again. Her high heels tapped on the wet pavement as she strode on as if he weren't there.
'I can always come round to the back of the house instead,' he said.
She stopped and looked at him, trying to gauge his meaning. He was getting a twinge in his back from leaning over to hold open the door.
'There's no point walking in this,' he said.
She stood, indecisive. Then, with a quick glance up and down the street, she folded the umbrella and got in.
She sat next to him, breathing slightly heavily as he pulled away. The inside of the car smelled of her perfume and wet cloth. Damp and cold had entered with her, but he thought he could detect her heat underneath it. Her hair, darkened to something like its natural colour by the rain, stuck to her forehead and the back of her neck. Water beaded the skin of her face like sweat.
He noticed a large bruise on one cheek, unsuccessfully disguised with make-up.
'What do you want?' she asked.
We need to talk.'
'Do we?'
'I think so.'
'I don't. I've got nothing to say to you.'
'You might have when you know what I want to talk about.'
He wasn't as confident as he tried to sound. His excitement over Ann Usherwood's news had faded when she'd told him that an undisclosed criminal record—particularly one twelve years old—didn't have any bearing on the current situation. It would embarrass the social services, but that was all. And while the death of Sandra's own child was more serious, only her husband had been prosecuted. He'd been found guilty of manslaughter; the worst charge against her was neglect.
'Kale can't be held responsible for what his wife did before she met him, in any event,' the solicitor had said. 'And even if she was deemed unfit to live in the same house as another child, which frankly I can't see, who do you think he'd pick if he was forced to make a choice between them?'
The answer to that didn't need thinking about.
What did it take? he'd wondered, wearily. What the fuck did it take?
Usherwood had gone on to tell him how it put them in a much better position to insist on his contact rights, and asked if he wanted her to present his case to the local authority now.
'No,' he'd said. 'Not yet.'
There was someone he wanted to talk to first.
He was aware of Sandra Kale's scrutiny in the close confines of the car, but kept his own gaze on the road. They drove in silence until they reached the house. He parked and switched off the ignition.
'Say what you've got to say, then,' she said.
'I'd rather tell you inside.'
'You can't come in.' Beneath the aggression she sounded almost frightened.
'If we stay here the whole street can see us. He won't like that if he hears about it, will he?'
Her mouth tightened, then she got out of the car. Ben picked up his bag from the back seat and followed her. The rain was bouncing up off the pavement, and he was soaked even in the few seconds it took him to reach the house. He half expected her to slam the front door behind her, but she left it open.
He went inside and wiped the water from his face. The hallway was dark and chill. There was a sour smell he couldn't identify. From further inside he could hear Sandra moving about. He headed towards the noise.
The hallway went past the lounge. The door was ajar.
He paused, taking in the clothing strewn on sofa and chairs, the toys and magazines on the floor. One of Jacob's T-shirts was hanging over the back of a chair. He could remember Sarah buying it. He turned away, skirting a car wheel propped up against the wall as he went into the kitchen.
The kitchen seemed at once familiar and strange, like somewhere visited in a dream. He was used to seeing it from the outside, framed first by the window, then the viewfinder, as two-dimensional as an image on a TV screen.
The reality was both more vivid and yet somehow less real. He couldn't quite believe he was there. I'm inside the looking glass.
He glanced through the window, but the hillside was obscured by the rain and mist, reduced to a vague shape. In the foreground, the mound of wreckage formed a darker one below it.
Sandra finished plugging in a convection heater that stood against one wall and turned to face him. She leaned back against a work surface with her fists on her hips.
'Well?'
Now he was here Ben didn't know how to start. He put his bag on the floor.
'I want Jacob back.'
Sandra stared at him, then put her head back and gave a laugh. 'Oh, is that all ?'
Her expression became heavy with disdain, but there might have been an element of relief there, too. 'If that's all you wanted to say you might as well fuck off back to London. Thanks for the lift.'
The hot air from the heater hadn't yet warmed the room, but he was already feeling stifled in his bulky coat.
'What are you frightened of?'
'I'm not frightened of anything. I just wish you'd piss off and leave us alone.'
'Leave you alone?' he said, incredulous. 'All this started because you wouldn't let me see Jacob.'
'If you're so bothered about the little bastard you shouldn't have given him away.'
'I didn't know what Kale was like then.'
She dropped her arms, stepped towards him. 'He's not a fucking dog! He's got a first name!'
Ben refused to back down. 'You know what he's doing isn't right.'
'Do I?'
'I think so. And you don't want Jacob here any more than I do.'
'What makes you such an expert on what I want?'
I've watched you.
'Tell me I'm wrong.'
She looked away. 'It doesn't make any difference anyway. What I want doesn't matter,' she said, and the bitterness was so close to the surface he could have touched it. Abruptly, she turned back to him. 'You think it's going to do any good, coming here? You think I'd really help you? Even if I fucking could?'
'I hoped you might.'
'Well, you hoped wrong! Sorry to disappoint you.' She went to her handbag and took out a packet of cigarettes.
'Even if I can't get Jacob back I want to make sure he's properly looked after,' Ben said. 'He needs special schooling, he needs to mix with other kids. He's not getting any of that.'
Sandra had a cigarette clamped tightly in her mouth. She struck a match and held it to the tip. 'Life's hard, isn't it?'
'What about all that macho shit with the weight, lifting it over Jacob's head in the garden? What happens if he drops it?'
She looked at him sharply, but didn't ask how he knew. The fear he'd thought he'd detected earlier flared in her eyes again for a moment. She blew smoke towards the ceiling. 'John won't drop it.'
'That's it, is it? One slip and Jacob's dead, but you just pretend it can't happen?'
She shrugged.
'Wasn't it enough letting your own daughter be killed without letting it happen again?'
Her face went white. The bruise on her cheek was like a strawberry birthmark against it. 'Who told you that?'
Ben hadn't wanted to bring it up quite so brutally, but now he had there was nothing to do but carry on. 'I know you've been married before. And about your criminal record.' He tried to convince himself he'd not
hing to feel bad about.
Sandra swayed slightly, as if she were about to faint. She closed her eyes. 'This is that fucking detective, isn't it? I wish John had killed him.'
He nearly did, Ben thought.
'Did he ask for money?'
Her face was drawn as she nodded. 'He told John he'd tell the social services if he didn't pay him. Stupid bastard.'
'So Kale beat him up.'
He thought she would shout at him again for using Kale's surname, but she didn't. They'd already gone beyond that. She just looked at him, as if the question didn't deserve an answer.
He felt himself reddening. 'Didn't he know about your past until Quilley told him?'
'He knew. It didn't matter to him, though. It never seemed to occur to him that anything could stop him getting Jacob back. He was his son, and that was it.'
'Didn't it occur to you?'
'Of course it fucking occurred to me! But what do you think I was going to do? Tell him? I'd have been out on my ear if he'd thought I might stop him getting his precious little son back. I didn't have one night's sleep for months, worrying about them finding out.' The colour had come back to her cheeks, but she still looked tired. 'When they didn't I was so fucking relieved.'
'Weren't you worried someone might recognise you on TV?'
'You think I still look anything like I did twelve years ago?' she said, scornfully. 'Christ, I wish. Anyway, by then I thought it was all over. The social services hadn't traced me back to that stupid, doped-up little tart who let her husband beat her kid to death. I thought I'd finally put it all behind me. I'd earned a bit of limelight.' The brief animation went out of her. 'Then that fucking detective turned up again.'
'How did Kale take it?' Ben asked.
She glared at him. The bruise stood out lividly on her cheek. 'How do you think?'
He looked away, embarrassed.
'That was the first time he's ever hit me.'
Ben thought about how Kale had thrown her against the fence. His disbelief must have shown. Her face hardened.
'I'd married one man who knocked me about. Do you think I was going to marry another?'
But she seemed to lack the energy to sustain any anger. She sank back against the work surface again, pulling on the cigarette as if it were a lifeline. 'God, I wish I'd never heard of you or your son. Why couldn't you just have left well alone?'