Risk of Harm Read online

  Risk of Harm

  Jane Renshaw

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, institutions and organizations are products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally.

  Text copyright © 2019 Jane Renshaw

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.

  Cover design by The Cover Collection.

  Chapter 1

  He knew these woods. Not this exact spot, maybe, not this exact elder bush or the mossy carpet under it onto which he’d been dragged two hours before, but he knew these woods in general pretty well.

  Ten metres through the trees was the track that wound its way up Cairn Hill to the viewpoint – a nice, easy, not-too-muddy walk that Beckie always enjoyed, running ahead to the next corner and stopping to wait for them, brimming with impatience, dancing and jigging from one side of the track to the other, but doing as she was told and not going out of their sight.

  He knew these woods by day. But as the air cooled and the light faded they changed. Gorse bushes softened and blurred into the bracken and the heather. Pine trees became strange, vague, unfamiliar shapes in which the wind suddenly whooshed and vortexed, and just as suddenly dropped away. The shadows in the clearing behind him advanced from the trees, and with them a family of roe deer, heads lifted every few seconds to scan the undergrowth for the wolves and bears that fifteen million years of co-evolution had left imprinted on their neurons.

  Midgies clouded the elder bush.

  Dew condensed on cooling leaves, on the soil, on the leaf litter and the moss under him where small, unseen, many-legged creatures wriggled and burrowed.

  It condensed on the stainless steel and toughened glass face of his watch as the minute hand moved from 9:15 to 9:16, and the sun left the sky.

  He and Flora had generally brought Beckie to Cairn Hill bright and early on a Saturday morning. Last time had been a few weeks ago, when they’d all been in need of a bit of de-stressing after a hellish couple of days, culminating in the assault charge against him. Just a bit further down the track, where a little bridge crossed a burn and there were oak and beech and birch trees amongst the pines, he had made Beckie stop and stand still and look around her.

  Being Here she’d called it, the game they used to play, the game he’d invented to pull her back from all those virtual screen worlds she’d been disappearing into lately.

  ‘What can you see?’ she’d chanted with him, grinning, bouncing a little in her trainers as she tipped her head back. In a few years’ time she’d probably have sighed and refused to tear herself away from her phone, but at nine she was still up for it. ‘A bird!’

  ‘Uh-huh? What kind?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ And she’d pointed at the relevant branch.

  ‘Okay. What colour is he?’

  ‘Sort of brown and grey. And… pink? Is he a chaffinch?’

  ‘Clever girl!’ from Flora.

  ‘And there’s another one, but not with the pink. I think maybe that’s a female chaffinch. His like – wife?’

  And she’d flicked a half-unsure, half-hopeful smile at him.

  He’d draped an arm across her shoulders. ‘Ten out of ten for identification. Six out of ten for scientific terminology. I think ornithologists would say mate, not wife – unless you know something they don’t about chaffinch courtship behaviour.’

  Beckie had giggled.

  ‘Maybe they do think of themselves as husband and wife,’ Flora had mused, always quick to Beckie’s defence. ‘How do you know they don’t?’

  Beckie’s grin had widened. ‘Maybe for their rings they have to get caught by ornithologists – they get caught and ringed at the same time, and that’s like their wedding –’

  As he’d rolled his eyes, Flora and Beckie had run with it, and soon the pair of them had constructed a whole soap opera world populated by Samuel Chuff, his wife Christina, eggs Harriet and Tracey, the villainous Sir Sparrow Hawk and wide-boy Del Tit, who had struck a secret deal with a timber merchant to sell the Chuffs’ tree from under them.

  When he could get a word in edgeways:

  ‘What can you smell?’

  That had descended, as usual, into toilet humour, Beckie jumping out of the circle of his arm and wafting her hand in front of her nose.

  Flora’s turn to roll her eyes.

  Finally, saved for last, Beckie’s favourite:

  ‘What can you hear?’

  She had closed her eyes and listened hard, and he had studied her face. He never got tired of looking at her, of marvelling at her, at the fact that she was theirs, their little girl, their Beckie. He could never get enough of her: the soft, baby, milk-pale curve of her cheek, the hair wisping out of her ponytail at the temples, the way she wrinkled her nose when she was concentrating, the way her smile still had that trace of uncertainty in it that was a punch to the gut.

  And he had thought what he always thought.

  ‘I can hear leaves rustling in the wind!’

  I would do anything to keep you safe.

  ‘I can hear a bird going “seep seep seep”.’

  I would give anything.

  ‘I can hear like a creaking sound! Like a door creaking in a spooky house… But it’s probably just a tree that’s got a broken branch or something and it’s rubbing against the tree trunk?’

  I would give everything.

  And he’d put his arm back round her. ‘Good listening, Beckster.’

  ‘What can you hear, Dad?’

  What can you hear?

  Did the happy ghost of an echo remain, in the cooling neural networks of his limbic system, in his hippocampus, in his temporal lobes and his amygdala?

  Did his cochlear nerve almost fire? Did his cerebral cortex almost respond?

  What can you hear?

  From where he lay, on the soft damp moss under the elder bush, he could have heard the wind in the pines; the gurgle of the water in the burn, swollen by yesterday’s rain; the scream of a buzzard in a distant treetop; the sudden tinny explosion of Daft Punk’s One More Time from the phone in his pocket.

  Chapter 2

  Flora had got up from the sofa to make the call, turning away from Beckie’s stare to look out of the big floor-to-ceiling glass doors to the garden where night was falling, the last of the light just touching the tops of the lime trees at the end of the lawn, and the shards of glass set into the high Victorian wall that separated their garden from Ailish and Iain’s. Everything had a pinky glow. Like one of those scenes from Gone with the Wind.

  After all… tomorrow… is another day!

  And she wanted to laugh, hysterically, wildly.

  She held the phone to her ear, gripping it hard to stop her hand shaking, as Neil’s voicemail recording kicked in:

  ‘Hi! This is Neil’s phone. Please leave a message if you like!’

  She couldn’t trust herself to leave another message.

  She couldn’t trust herself to sound right.

  Behind her, she could hear Caroline murmur something to Beckie, and then Beckie’s voice cutting through her:

  ‘Mum. Mum?’

  Flora set her dry lips in a smile and turned.

  Her daughter was sitting cross-legged on one of the two blue sofas that faced each other across the big glass coffee table. She had pulled her hair out of its braid and it hung in limp, dark-blonde waves. She had a strand of it twisted round her fingers. Opposite her, Caroline was nursing a cup of coffee that she wasn’t drinking. Behind them the row of copper lights above the kitchen table provided the only illumination, throwing sh
adows across the slate floor, the grey granite worktops, the slatted shelves with their artfully placed, never opened jars of artisan pasta shapes and coloured pulses.

  Beckie held herself a little straighter. Being a brave girl. ‘Maybe… he’s had – an accident.’ The last two words wobbled.

  ‘Oh darling.’ Flora tossed the phone down on the sofa next to Caroline and subsided onto Beckie’s one, folding her in her arms, breathing her in, fruity shampoo and warm skin and a faint mineral sand-and-sea tang from their day at the beach.

  Such a little bird she was, thin little rib cage fragile under her hands.

  If only Flora could shelter her from it, if only she could wrap herself around Beckie’s little body so that nothing could touch her, so that all the pain, all the grief, all the hurt coming for her could fall instead on Flora’s own shoulders.

  She swallowed. Her mouth was so dry. Her throat. Weirdly, she’d never felt further from tears. She felt as if she’d been hollowed out, all her insides, leaving just a stupid trembly dry shell of skin and bone that wasn’t her proper body, that wouldn’t obey her instructions.

  She held Beckie close and swallowed again and said lightly, ‘He’s probably just in the middle of something and has lost track of time. Or he’s left his phone somewhere so he can’t call us to let us know he’ll be late. You know what he’s like with his phone. I found it in the washing basket the other day!’

  Beckie gulped a few times more, took a long breath, rubbed her face and pulled back to stare at Flora in that penetrating way she had. ‘But why wouldn’t he use the phone in his office? And why isn’t he answering when you try to call on that number?’

  ‘Well. I don’t know, darling. Maybe he’s not in his office. Maybe he’s somewhere else in the department…’

  Caroline cut in with: ‘Do you have other numbers for the department? His colleagues?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course.’ Even to herself she sounded flat, unconvincing. ‘I could try Stephen, couldn’t I?’

  ‘Yes!’ Beckie jumped up from the sofa. ‘I can get Stephen’s office number from the website.’

  ‘I’ve got his mobile number in here, I think.’ She got up to retrieve her phone. She perched next to Caroline as she scrolled down her contacts, conscious of the tension in her friend’s body, in the beautifully manicured hands with their little shell-pink nails squeezing the coffee mug.

  It was the mug with the scruffy hare on it. Beckie had bought it for her dad’s last birthday.

  His last birthday.

  Oh God. Oh God.

  She shut her eyes – then immediately made herself open them again.

  ‘Okay?’ Caroline murmured, taking one hand from the mug to touch Flora’s arm.

  In the dim light Caroline looked about sixteen, slender in her designer jeans and sloppy pink sweatshirt, one smooth, tanned shoulder exposed.

  Caroline didn’t have children. She knew nothing about children, about what they needed. How was Caroline going to be able to look after Beckie, how was she going to keep her safe from them, if –

  If.

  There could be no if.

  She had to do this.

  Beckie had opened the laptop that sat on the kitchen table and was frowning at the screen, caught inside the overlapping circles of light that fell on the table. She was spotlit, the light burnishing her hair gold, leaching the colour from her face.

  Was it terribly wrong, to give her this false hope?

  But Flora couldn’t tell her the truth. The police might question Beckie –

  Caroline squeezed Flora’s arm. ‘Flora, okay?’

  ‘Yes. Here it is.’ She touched Stephen’s name and took a breath.

  He picked up immediately.

  ‘Oh, hi, Flora.’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Stephen. But I don’t suppose you know where Neil can have got to? He’s not home yet and he hasn’t been in touch, so… I’m just wondering if you know whether he’s working late tonight, or…’

  ‘Uh. Actually, Flora… Neil didn’t come in today.’

  She made herself frown. Draw a breath. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive. There was a bit of a fuss about it because he hadn’t let anyone know…. Uh. So, he’s uh – he’s gone AWOL, has he?’

  ‘Yes.’ She made herself look over at Beckie. ‘We just don’t know where he can have got to.’

  In the spotlight glow, Beckie was staring at her, frozen, eyes wide, upper lip caught in her bottom teeth.

  Flora couldn’t make herself smile at her.

  ‘So he was intending coming in?’ said Stephen’s voice.

  ‘Yes. At least, I assume he was… At breakfast – we had breakfast as usual. Then Beckie and I left the house – before he’d left for work – we went to the beach for the day with a friend… He never said he wasn’t going to work. He would have done, if he wasn’t – although he’s never very communicative first thing in the morning, but I’m sure he would have said if…’ She was rambling, but that was okay. That was good. No one would expect her to be calm and coherent.

  ‘Right. Okay. Look, how about I phone round and see if he mentioned his plans for today to anyone?’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Stephen, that would be great. And I – I think I need to call the police.’

  ‘That might be an idea.’

  ‘I’ll do that now. Thank you so much, Stephen.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s fine, you know, he’s probably just –’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  She ended the call and took a breath and said, ‘Okay, so he hasn’t been in to work at all today.’

  Beckie’s face collapsed and she ducked her head, covering it with both hands.

  Beckie’s first instinct, always, when she was upset or hurt or scared, was not to come running for comfort but to deal with it without bothering anyone.

  Flora flew across the room and gathered her up. Beckie clung to her, arms tight around her neck, legs wrapped around her hips, like she used to as a small child, as if she was trying to press herself inside Flora, into the empty space inside her.

  ‘Shh, shh.’ And then she was sitting on one of the sofas, cradling her daughter, finally fighting her own tears, and Caroline was saying, ‘You phone the police and I’ll start ringing round the hospitals.’

  Oh God.

  But yes. She had to.

  She had to do this.

  There was no view of the garden now because it was completely dark out there, finally. The glass doors just reflected the room, or at least an Alice Through the Looking Glass version of it – everything the same and yet different. A girl very like Beckie lay asleep on a sofa very like theirs, only she was another poor child, exhausted by tears, and the sofa was a strange, cold, dark colour that was more black than blue. The woman who looked like Caroline had harsher features, and Flora’s own looking-glass self was a monster, a fat monster crone standing there with sagging breasts and wild hair and staring, swollen eyes.

  She was trembling, shivery all over, her eyes and nose damp and sore, as if she was coming down with flu. After she’d called the police, after Beckie had fallen asleep, the floodgates had opened.

  She wiped at her eyes; blinked to clear her vision.

  There was nothing wrong with the room, with any of them. They were just tired, worried. That was all the police would see. The police would come in here, and see a mother and child in a traumatic situation, and a friend lending support.

  And the room itself was fine.

  The heart of the home, full of their ordinary lives – Beckie’s pictures on the cork board, her puzzle books on the coffee table, Flora’s new green cardigan from White Stuff chucked over the arm of one of the sofas. A book on hamsters and some DVDs in an untidy pile under the TV.

  A nice ordinary family room.

  That’s what the architect had called it when they’d had the extension put on. The ‘Kitchen/Family Room’. She could remember the words printed across the plans, in a friendly, arty font.


  Yes. She would bring them in here to the family room rather than the more formal sitting room at the front of the house. She would sit them down and they would look around them and see the handmade kitchen, the cosy sitting area with all Beckie’s things, the smiley photographs of them all, Flora and Neil and Beckie, in happier times.

  ‘Okay,’ said Caroline in a low voice. ‘Let’s do a run-through.’

  And they would look at Flora and see the monster.

  She felt as if all the Russian doll layers of her life were being pulled apart to reveal the little hard solid core of her, that very last, tiniest, crudest doll which you knew was the last one but always twisted anyway, hoping it would open to reveal something better inside.

  ‘I can’t.’ She put her face in her hands, rubbing at her damp skin. It was as if her skin itself were leaking tears.

  ‘Flora. Come on, love. Come on, it’s going to be okay.’

  Yes.

  She had to believe that.

  She had to believe that the police were never going to find that hard little doll concealed within all the other layers. They would know she used to be Ruth Morrison – the authorities had helped Alec and Ruth Morrison assume their new identities as Neil and Flora Parry – but there was no reason for anyone to question Ruth’s birth certificate or her Australian childhood.

  Nobody had in over thirty years, and nobody would now.

  Caroline pushed a tissue into her hand and she wiped her nose with it. Her skin. Her eyes. Her nose again.

  ‘Okay.’

  Together they walked through the kitchen, along the passage and into the front hall.

  Caroline opened the door to the vestibule, releasing a draught of cold air.

  It was always cold in the vestibule, even in the height of summer. She remembered wondering aloud about it to Neil when they’d first moved in.

  Because she’d known it would rile him, she’d speculated that maybe the ghosts of the previous occupants of the house lingered here, about to go out or come in. She’d been holding the stepladder, because Neil couldn’t be trusted to climb it to change the light bulb without somehow contriving to collapse the steps in on themselves and catapult himself head-first through one of the stained glass windows, like something from Laurel and Hardy.