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

has the low MAO-A variant gene. It’s an epigenetic problem, an issue with the way a particular gene expresses itself, which can affect the production of serotonin in the brain and lead to flattened emotional responses and a tendency towards problems with impulse control. You might have noticed that Joshua doesn’t have the same fear response as most other children. He may need to go to extremes in order to feel pleasurable emotions. In fact, to feel anything at all. But I can explain it in more detail to you as we go along.’

      Emma paused just long enough for her nicotine fix then launched into a diatribe about her son’s reckless behaviour. I checked the clock. I loved my work and I was motivated by a strong sense that we could help kids like Joshua, kids who we in the brain business call ‘unsuccessful psychopaths’ because they are unable to disguise their dangerousness, but knew from experience that it would be a slow and painful process, one which could derail at any time. I steered the conversation towards more productive territory and spent a few minutes outlining what the institute proposed for the boy’s therapy programme. Most of our kids were in residential care but, since the Barrons lived nearby, I thought it might be better for Joshua if we tried him out as a day patient. We would spend the first few weeks attempting to unlock Joshua’s deep motivators, the things that really drove him, and then use them to try to modify his behaviour. Eventually we hoped to alter the neural pathways in his still malleable brain.

      ‘I do really want to emphasise that there is hope,’ I said.

      Emma Barrons shot me a baleful look. We finished up and Emma Barrons stood to go. At the door, she turned and, with an odd, damaged smile on her face, she said, ‘I didn’t really want a child, you know, but Christopher had an heir thing going on. I suppose Joshua is the price I paid for marrying money. Quite a high price, as it turned out.’

      For a moment she just stood there in the doorway working the rings on her hands. ‘I suppose that shocks you, Dr Lupo?’

      ‘Call me Caitlin. We’re going to get to know one another quite well.’

      ‘Caitlin, then.’ One side of her mouth rose up in a half-smile. ‘Do I shock you?’

      ‘Right now, Emma, absolutely nothing would shock me.’

CHAPTER FIVE

      After Emma Barrons had gone I called Tom’s mobile and left a message. He and Ruby were spending the morning with social services then with police liaison, so I knew he would be unlikely to pick up, but I wanted him to know that I was thinking about the family and to remind him that we needed to talk tonight after the girls had gone to bed. I knew he’d try to sidestep it if he could.

      What a bastard Tom was. What a complete shit. To go behind my back would have been one thing, but to do it when I was on my back. After everything I’d been through to bring our daughter into the world. After all the moral and financial support I’d given him. After all the badly cooked meals I’d laboured over so he could spend more time on Labyrinth. After all the bloody perfunctory sex.

      Oh, the moral high ground. It was a dangerous place to linger, I knew that; barren and lonely and with air so thin it’s difficult to breathe. If I allowed myself to follow the angry road and turn righteous at the top, I might feel I’d won, for an instant, only to sense a moment later that all I had really done was run away.

      For now the only way forward was to think myself into accepting what had happened. Tom had cheated on me, it was over and the woman was dead. All that remained was the girl, Ruby Winter. Once she went to live with her grandmother, our day-to-day lives would remain essentially unchanged. I figured that we’d see her some weekends, support her financially and perhaps include her in our holiday plans, but that was more or less it.

      By the time I finished my notes from the meeting with Emma Barrons it was nearly one o’clock. I was meeting Anja for lunch to discuss the grant application we were putting together to expand the clinic. On my way out, I asked Claire to take messages, then, swiping myself out of the building, I walked through the car park and out into the street.

      As I made my way along the slip road towards Holland Hill and the Wise Owl Cafe, which was where Anja and I usually had lunch when we had something to discuss other than our patients, I was struck by a sudden and wholly unexpected sense of loss. The feeling was so intense I felt nearly floored by it. For most of the girls I grew up with on the Pemberton Estate, weed, booze, coke, even crack, were no bar to pregnancy. A few were on their third child – or abortion – before my eggs had so much as asked a sperm for its phone number. I came late to the sex party but I assumed that, once I’d arrived, I’d be pretty much like anyone else. I’d find a time when starting a family seemed to make sense and I’d do it. It never occurred to me that my body would prevent me getting what I most wanted. That my flesh and blood would become the enemy.

      Tom once told me that my reproductive system was like one of those multi-layered computer games where you need to know the cheats to be able to complete the game. By ‘cheats’ he meant two rounds of IVF, the last of which, by some scientific miracle, brought us Freya. And that, for Tom, was that. The arrival of Freya was game over. We’d won. Move on.

      But you know what? Completing the game only made me want to start from the beginning and play it again. Despite the cost, despite the expense, despite all the medical advice and evidence suggesting that, had I got pregnant again, there would have been a significant chance of my ending up in the psych ward for a second time, I would have gone on. Because the heart wants what it wants. And the womb wants what it wants. And my womb and my heart both wanted more.

      And this was what floored me now. The knowledge that, while Tom was putting his foot down and refusing to give space to the idea that we might have another child, he’d gone out and made one. Just like that. From that most simple, tried and tested formula: a few drinks plus one willing woman plus nine months equals one child. And then – who could have predicted it? – one day, more than a decade later, the child he denied me would show up on our doorstep. I could forgive the cheating; I could forgive the lie. But tell me, how the hell was I supposed to forgive the child?

      By now I’d reached the Wise Owl. Anja had already arrived and was sitting at a table at the back near the air con, one hand leaving snail trails with an ice cube across the soft mound of her left arm, while the other pecked at her phone. I rearranged my features, sent the demons back under the bed and waved. Her eyes flicked up and registered me, smiled briefly, then went back to finishing up whatever she was doing on her phone.

      Anja and I had one of those close professional relationships that rarely spilled over into our personal lives. We’d trained together and run parallel careers for a time, and we could perhaps have been proper friends if the Spelling case hadn’t forced me to give up forensic work to focus on research. Anja had backed away from me a little after that. We never socialised outside the institute and I’d only ever met her husband, Marc, at institute parties. I knew he worked for a hedge fund and put in crazy hours, and that they usually went away to the Caribbean at Christmas, and that they didn’t have kids, which Anja regretted, but that was about it. From time to time, I wished we were closer. But I completely got it that we weren’t. For a while, close association with me would have been career suicide. Now, ironically I supposed, given the dive my career had taken back then, I was effectively Anja’s boss.

      I took the seat beside her, noticing that a bottle of sparkling water and two large iced glasses already sat on the table. Anja dropped her phone into a leather bag at her side and clasped her hands to signal her switch in focus.

      ‘Now, I can’t wait to hear how you got on,’ she said with a smile, which faded as she met my eye. ‘God, you look tired. Hardly surprising, I suppose.’

      For a single shocking moment, I imagined that she’d found out about Ruby Winter, but no, she’d be thinking I’d been up late finishing off the grant application.

      ‘All those bloody forms,’ I said and gave a hollow laugh.

      The waitress appeared to take our food order. Anja waited until the waitress had