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

The policewoman said you don’t smell it, you don’t hear it, you don’t taste it. If the gas leak is big enough, it only takes thirty seconds to kill you. Ruby’s mother was dead drunk, she wouldn’t have known anything about it.’ He stopped and rubbed a hand across his face as though trying to obliterate something, but I was relieved to see there were no tears. Whatever feelings were going through his heart right now, grief for Lilly Winter wasn’t among them.

      ‘Oh God, that’s horrible,’ I said.

      ‘Ruby’s room is in a separate corridor in the flat and she was sleeping with her window wide open, otherwise…’ He frowned and sat with the thought a moment, then, getting up, went over to the kettle and refilled the pot. He brought the tea over then seated himself once more in the chair beside me.

      ‘Drink this, you’ll feel better.’

      I pushed the mug away. I didn’t want to feel better. Not now. Not at five thirty in the morning with my husband’s love child in the room next door. I thought about Freya asleep upstairs, still oblivious to the existence of a half-sister, and wondered what we were about to do to her world.

      Tom’s head was in his hands now and he was rubbing at his temples with his thumbs.

      ‘What were you thinking?’

      He swung up so his face was angled towards me and let the air blow out of his lips. ‘Evidently, I wasn’t,’ he said.

      I let out a bitter laugh. Even when he wasn’t trying to be funny Tom managed to be amusing. Maybe that’s why we’d lasted as long as we had. The Tom I first met was a glossy, charming man who smelled brightly of the future. I wanted him and he wanted me. We were young and wanting one another seemed if not enough (we weren’t that stupid), then at least the largest part of the deal. Not long after we’d married, life came along. The sex, at first wild, calmed into something more manageable. But it was all OK. We got on well, rarely fought and seemed to want the same things. The years slid by. We had our daughter and moved into a house and enjoyed trips to the seaside on the weekends. We were good parents. We respected one another’s careers. When Tom left Adrenalyze to start his own company, I’d kept the joint account ticking over. He’d supported me as I’d worked long hours at the institute, cheering me from the sidelines when I’d been called as an expert witness in child psychosis. When I’d failed so publically, so devastatingly, and all I’d worked for had come tumbling down, he’d stood by me. Over the years we somehow turned into the couple other couples pretend not to envy. Unflashy, boring, steady. The couple who never got the point of counselling sessions, ‘check-ins’ or ‘date nights’. ‘Never let light in on magic,’ Tom used to say – another of his jokes. We liked it that the outlines of our marriage were blurry and out of focus. Because what is marriage, after all, but a kind of wilful blindness, an agreement to overlook the evidence, a leap of faith for which, in these days of Tinder hook-ups and casual sexting, it pays to be a little myopic?

      Tom was going on about something, but I’d stopped listening. The room had begun to feel very claustrophobic. It was as if everything was speeding inwards, converging into a single laser-like beam of almost blinding intensity. Everything has changed. From now on our lives will be different in ways neither of us can predict. Eventually, when I realised he’d fallen silent, I said, simply, ‘I’m so bloody angry I can hardly speak.’

      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