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

Then she waved a hand in the air and was gone.

      I waited until she’d left before going into Ruby’s room. A mattress with no bedframe lay on the floor, beside it a cheap clothes rack almost empty of clothes. There were no drawers. Ruby’s underwear was piled into an Asda bag in the corner. On a tiny plastic bedside table were some old bottles of nail varnish, a few pens, a nail file, a packet of tissues and a few loose batteries. A couple of damp and musty towels on the floor gave out a fusty, faintly fungal smell. I went about the place picking up the clothes and towels and indiscriminately jamming them into the Chinese laundry bags I’d brought from home, my heart full of contradictory feelings, resenting the girl and her mother for intruding into my life, and at the same time feeling desperately sorry for them.

CHAPTER FOUR

      I left the laundry bags in the hallway back home at Dunster Road and went into the kitchen where Freya and Tom were sitting at the table having breakfast.

      ‘Hi, Mum!’ Freya leaped up and clasped her arms excitedly around my waist. I dropped a kiss on her head.

      ‘Hey, sweet pea.’ My eyes cut to Tom but he was looking away. ‘Did Dad tell you, we’ve got a visitor?’ Before I’d left we had agreed that the best way to break the news was to tell the truth and be positive about it.

      Freya nodded. Something passed across her face I couldn’t read. She gave me a cheesy, pleading look. ‘Can you stay home today, Mum? Pleeease.’

      I’d been dreading this question, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to give her the answer she needed and deserved. Not with a new parent meeting at the clinic and the big grant application looming.

      ‘I’m really sorry, darling. Dad’ll be here and I’ll try to come home as early as I can, OK?’

      I was already horribly late for work as it was. I thought about taking the car but I knew Tom would want to take the girls out somewhere and he needed it more than I did. In any case, it was rush hour and probably quicker to do what I usually did and run. Plus, I could use the thinking time. So I pulled on my gear and set off, one leg following the other in a two-step so familiar now it was automatic. I’d been running for over a decade, since a therapist had suggested taking regular exercise might help ward off another episode of mental illness. It was good for the brain, she said. I knew that, though I didn’t tell her so. Actually, I could have quoted her the studies: Dr Solomon Synder at Johns Hopkins, who discovered endorphins in the seventies; Henning Boecker at the University of Bonn, whose work on the opioid receptors defined the runner’s high. All the same, I took her advice. For years now I’d used my running time between home and work as a bridge between my two selves: Cat Lupo, mother, wife, sister and mild wino, with a penchant for trashy TV and popping candy, and Dr Caitlin Lupo, specialist in child personality disorders, clinician, ex-expert witness and all-out serious person.

      As my legs found their rhythm, I wondered how Cat and Caitlin had become so disconnected from each other. Who was this creature, this mother, wife, psych, who looked like me and sounded like me, but who had never once in a dozen years suspected her husband of cheating, let alone of having another child? Had I somehow wilfully closed my eyes to Tom’s betrayal? Or was I just blind to his faults? I tried to think back to the late stages of my pregnancy and the stay in the psych ward. I had never apologised for my illness because I hadn’t thought mental illness was something anyone needed to apologise for. In any case, how could I have spotted that things had become so difficult for Tom when I was myself so radically altered? Or perhaps they hadn’t been as tricky as Tom was now making out. Maybe Tom simply made the most of an opportunity. And if he’d done that once, who was to say he hadn’t done it a dozen times? For all I knew he’d been cheating on me for the whole twelve years of our marriage.

      At the top of Dunster Road, I stopped for a second and glanced back at the house which had, for so long, been my unquestioned home. The safe haven which I’d worked and fought for and sweated over. For some time now, we’d needed to cast a questioning eye over the fabric of our marriage and accept it had threadbare patches. We were too wedded to the idea of being the couple who didn’t ‘do’ state-of-the-nation discussions, of always being cooler than that. But what if our coolness was just dishonesty in disguise? What had only yesterday seemed like a marriage built of bricks and mortar now felt more like a tent, and a broken tent at that. I imagined Ruby Winter lying in the spare bed, an unwanted presence, like some sinister-shaped cell which might at any moment begin stealthily to consume the healthy cells around it. And then I felt bad for the thought, because what was Ruby, after all, but a little girl who had lost her mother?

      I arrived at the entrance to the park. The sun was already hot, and I’d forgotten my water bottle. As I headed towards the drinking fountain by the bandstand, I wondered how two intelligent, articulate people could have failed so completely to ask the hard questions. At first it was all mad, carefree sex. Then came our high-octane period when we were so focused on our careers that nothing could distract us. After that was the period of trying to get pregnant. Once Freya was born we’d both been distracted, me fragile and with a new baby and Tom putting in the hours at Adrenalyze. Was that when things had changed? Or was it when the Rees Spelling ‘boy in the wood’ case blew open and the tabloids went after me? Or did it happen later, once Tom had quit Adrenalyze to work on Labyrinth and the success he so longed for hadn’t come overnight; when our finances had got tight, we’d had to give up the part-time childminder, and Tom had been sucked into becoming a househusband, a role he’d never wanted and often complained bitterly about? So many gathering clouds we’d chosen to ignore. Now the storm had finally arrived, would we be strong enough to weather it?

      As I turned into the car park at the institute, I began to tell myself that somehow we were going to have to come back from this. If not for us, then for Freya. And that meant I was going to have to accept the new member of the family and find a way to learn to trust Tom again. Maybe not now, not today, not next week even, but soon. Because if I didn’t, or I couldn’t, the effects would ripple outwards to our daughter in ways none of us could predict. And we would all live to regret it.

      I showered and changed into my usual work uniform – navy skirt with a white blouse – then swiped my card through the reader at the research block and went down the corridor to my office. Claire wasn’t at her desk, but she’d left a thermos of coffee for me. I sat down, poured the black oily brew into a mug, and woke up my screen. It was just after ten but the heat of the day was already distracting and I felt the lack of sleep, coupled with the events of the early morning, roll over me like some dense, tropical fog. As I turned to set the fan going, a tap came on the door and Claire’s face popped round.

      ‘Good, you’re here. Leak fixed?’

      There was a momentary pause while I recalled the lie I’d told and formulated a response. ‘Thanks, yes, the emergency plumber came.’

      Claire pulled up her hair and flapped her hand over the air current to cool her neck then stopped in her tracks. ‘Are you OK? You look a bit knackered.’

      ‘Just the heat.’ I wasn’t ready to talk about the arrival of Ruby Winter with Claire yet. Or with anyone.

      ‘Did you see on the news about those stabbings? Quite near you, weren’t they? One day the whole city’s just going to, like, implode.’ There had been a spate of gang-related knife crime over the summer. Yellow boards had appeared in unexpected places, along with mournful shrines to dead teens reconfigured as ‘warriors’ and ‘the fallen’.

      I said I’d seen the news though, of course, I hadn’t.

      ‘Your rescheduled nine o’clock is here. I said ten fifteen, but she’s a bit early.’ Claire’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘You may wish to adopt the brace position. I think you’re about to hit some bumpy air.’

      I surprised myself by laughing. ‘Give me a few minutes to review the file, then show her in.’

      I