Give Me the Child: the most gripping psychological thriller of the year. Mel McGrath

eyed the menu.

      ‘Oh, yes.’ I’d asked for a cheese toastie and double brownies with double ice cream. ‘No, not pregnant, just fatigue munchies.’

      ‘Sounds like a band,’ Anja said, a little disappointed, then, changing the subject, ‘So, this morning, the mother? Have you told her we need her son to be one of our guinea pigs?’

      ‘Funnily enough, no.’ I hadn’t broached this with Emma yet. After the Spelling case I was terrified of putting my foot in it. There was nothing the news outlets loved better than a ‘devil children’ story and I wanted to be sure Emma could be trusted before I put our funding application at risk. ‘I’m still thinking about how best to phrase it,’ I said.

      ‘How’s about: “Your kid is a bloody nightmare but what’s great is that he’s also a funding opportunity”?’

      ‘That should do it.’

      The waitress was heading our way with the food. I unfolded a paper napkin and laid it on my lap, and by the time I looked up Anja was enthusiastically scooping tuna into her mouth. She was a woman of considerable appetites, which made her sexy in an obvious kind of way. I’d seen men follow her with their eyes without realising they were doing it. At last year’s Christmas party, Tom gawped at her cleavage.

      ‘Not my type,’ he’d said in the cab home, pulling me into an exaggerated clinch. ‘I’m-alike de dusky ladies.’ Always the joker. Ha ha, Tom.

      We dutifully addressed ourselves to the grant application while we ate, then, over coffee, chatted briefly about our other charges. There were currently five children in the unit, none as extreme as Joshua, but all deserving of our time and attention. Ayesha, the girl who’d come to us from the care system, having manoeuvred a boy into sexually assaulting one of the girls in the group home Ayesha didn’t like, was getting ready to go back to mainstream school and had found a long-term specialist foster parent. Adam, our borderline CU patient, a seven-year-old with a habit of violent tantrums, had begun to come off the drugs prescribed by another psychiatrist and was making some early progress. We went on through the list and, as we were coming to an end, I reached into my bag for my credit card, meaning to pay the bill, when my hand slipped and knocked my glass of water, which swayed then tumbled, pouring its contents across the table. I sprang up, grabbed a handful of paper napkins and began wiping and dabbing. Anja’s hand landed on my arm.

      ‘Are you all right, Cat? You seem a bit distracted.’

      Before I’d even registered the words I heard myself say, ‘It seems Tom has a daughter I didn’t know about.’

      Anja froze, then, looking at me, wide-eyed, she said, ‘Oh fuck.’

      I almost went on to talk about the strange circumstances in which Ruby had arrived. The death-boiler. The window that should have been open. But something stopped me. An obscure feeling of disloyalty crept in. Anja wasn’t the right person to be telling this to. Confused, I said nothing.

      ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’ Anja said, registering my discomfort.

      ‘No, I know. It’s fine. We’ll be fine. I’m just trying to process it all.’

      ‘Yes, yes, of course. It must have come as a shock.’ She caught the waitress’s eye and air-scribbled for the bill, which she then insisted on paying. (‘Oh, for heaven’s sakes,’ batting away my twenty-pound note, ‘it’s the least I can do.’) We wandered back to the institute along sticky asphalt, meticulously avoiding any further mention of my personal life.

      Claire had gone to lunch. A bunch of cream roses sat on my desk. No note – none necessary. A first attempt at some kind of reconciliation. An intimate little in-joke. The phrase ‘not quite white’ had been a running gag between us for years. It began as our way of dealing with Tom’s awful mother, who, when introduced to me for the first time, had taken her son to one side and said, ‘She seems very nice, but she’s not quite white, is she?’ You had to laugh. And we did. From then on, ‘not quite white’ became our little joke. A wholemeal loaf morphed into ‘not quite white bread’, brownies were ‘not quite whiteys’, a fashionably drab paint job was a ‘not quite white number’. Tom in particular relished the game, especially when it came to taking revenge on his mother, whom he loathed. When Freya came along he introduced her to his parents as ‘your not quite white granddaughter’. Predictably, Geraldine was clueless. Michael flushed purple and didn’t say anything. Afterwards, Tom and I laughed like drains.

      Neither of us was laughing now.

      The roses went in the bin.

      A little while later my office phone rang.

      ‘Dr Lupo?’ a vaguely familiar voice said. ‘James White, the Herald.’

      It was White who had first made the link between my expert evidence in the ‘boy in the woods’ case and the terrible events that followed.

      ‘You’ve got a bloody nerve.’

      ‘Please don’t hang up. It was all such a long time ago. I wonder if anyone even remembers?’

      ‘I remember. Every day.’

      White gave a little cough. ‘Well, I’m giving you an opportunity to put your views out there in a less personally charged situation, to be part of the conversation again, so to speak.’

      ‘I don’t want to be part of the conversation.’

      I sensed White was after a comment on the spate of stabbings across the city and was trying to provoke me into a reaction. My rational self told me to put the phone down but I felt a sudden urge to knock White off his perch.

      ‘Look, you must have seen some of the tabloid headlines. Monster kids, devil children. I bet you hate that.’

      ‘Of course I hate it.’

      ‘So you wouldn’t say the children in your psychopath clinic are evil then?’

      I took a breath. White had succeeded in provoking me. How had he found out about the clinic? We’d gone to some length to keep its existence quiet. On the institute’s website I was listed as the director of research into child personality disorders. No mention of psychopathy, nor any clinic.

      ‘I have no idea how you came about that information and I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me, but it would be deeply irresponsible of the Herald to print anything about the clinic. The work we do is highly sensitive. You start bandying about words like “evil” you are stigmatising vulnerable children and potentially putting them at risk from vigilante nutcases.’

      ‘In that case, give me a quote and I won’t mention it.’

      I tried to think clearly but with everything going on that wasn’t easy. And I really just wanted White off the phone. Finally, I said, ‘How’s about this? Some kids are genetically predisposed to respond to environmental stressors with violence, but it’s vanishingly rare to come across a violent child who hasn’t first witnessed violence in their environment. Kids pattern their behaviour from what they see around them.’

      ‘So you’re basically saying we get the kids we deserve?’

      I thought about this for a moment. ‘I don’t think I’d put it like that, but I guess so, perhaps.’

      I put down the phone and took some deep breaths. The brassy, citrusy smell of whatever Emma Barrons had loaded into her e-cigarette still lingered in the room. I knew what I’d just done would probably come back at me, but for now I was more worried about how White had come by his information. However I looked at it, the clinic was vulnerable. Which meant I was vulnerable. And there was nothing I could do about it.

CHAPTER SIX

      On my run home I spotted a new yellow police board outside Jamal’s. The place was one of those ratty not-actually-on-a-corner corner shops selling super-strength