Watch Over Me: A psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist Read online

  Watch Over Me

  Jane Renshaw

  Revised Edition 2019

  INKUBATOR BOOKS

  www.inkubatorbooks.com

  First published as “Risk of Harm” by Jane Renshaw (2019)

  ALL SCOTTISH SLANG TERMS ARE EXPLAINED IN THE GLOSSARY AT THE BACK OF THE BOOK.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Free Thriller

  From Jane

  Glossary of Scottish Slang

  Rights Info

  Prologue

  She thought at first that it was a cruel practical joke. That the blood must be tomato ketchup from the kitchen cupboard. That the shaft of the arrow must be a stick-on plastic fake from Bonzo’s, that awful shop in Edinburgh, just off the Royal Mile, where you could buy itching powder and whoopee cushions and disgustingly realistic dog mess.

  Her daughter lay on the grass in the orchard, on her back, her arms flung out to either side. Her favourite yellow T-shirt was spattered with red spots and the collar area was saturated – that was going to need a good long soak. Her hair, especially at the left temple, was sticky with the stuff, and it was streaked all down her face. They’d really gone to town with it around the eye, presumably to hide the place where the fake arrow was meant to penetrate. The whole of the socket area was concealed under gloopy red goo, which was very silly and dangerous. She hoped they’d covered the eye with something first.

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’ she exclaimed.

  The girl who had summoned her was still sobbing convincingly. The other sat on the grass, ignoring the bow lying next to her, watching a blackbird that was hopping about on a coil of old rope under a tree. She didn’t say a word. Didn’t make a sound.

  And the first, sickening shiver of doubt ran through her.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ she said again, briskly, dropping to her knees in the long grass, clutching her daughter’s upper arms and shaking them a little. ‘Come on now! This really is going too far.’

  The thin arms flopped in her grip like a rag doll’s.

  She recognised the arrow. It was made not of plastic but of splintery wood, with green flight feathers slotted into the end. Her husband, against her wishes, had bought six arrows and a bow last Christmas. It had been the only one of the presents he’d wrapped, sitting at the kitchen table complaining about the awkward shape while she fumed inwardly. A bow-and-arrow set, for a child?

  How stupid.

  How irresponsible.

  But she hadn’t stopped him. She hadn’t snatched it from him, ripped the paper away, snapped the bow in half and put the arrows in the fire.

  It was blood.

  The red gloop concealing the eye was blood, starting to clot in the fierce July sun.

  With fingers that did not, miraculously, shake, she carefully wiped it away so she could see what was underneath, all the time repeating, steadily, ‘All right, darling, all right.’

  The splintery wooden shaft had gone straight into the open eye. Watery jelly had leaked out with the blood, and she thought suddenly of the bull’s eye she had had to deal with in physics class, long ago.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  All her mother’s instincts screamed at her to get it out, to get that thing out of her daughter’s eye, but she knew that that would be the wrong thing to do.

  Only maybe two-thirds of the arrow shaft was visible.

  The rest of it was inside her head.

  They needed a doctor. They needed a surgeon.

  They needed an ambulance.

  She shouted, finally, she emptied her lungs, she roared at the bright blue summer sky that was just a sky, a wide, bright, indifferent sky, because there could be no God. She roared until her husband came, until he came running, with the awkward gait of someone who never ran, to where their daughter lay dead in the orchard.

  1

  Ruth stood at the gate looking up the path to the cottage, trying to see it with Deirdre Jack’s eyes. Deirdre would be here in forty-five minutes. She was only maybe a decade or so older than Ruth – early to mid fifties – but Ruth was always conscious of a great gulf between them, like the gulf that had separated her from the teachers at school when she was a child, a great moral gulf that she had no hope of ever crossing.

  No.

  No.

  Ruth had been a quiet little mouse of a girl at school. A sweet little mouse who scuttled about the classroom doing good deeds, like helping the slow ones with their reading, and slipping her pocket money and toys into poor children’s desks. Sweet little Ruth had been conscious of no such gulf because none had existed. And adult Ruth was completely at ease with Deirdre. They had a lot in common.

  But it didn’t help that Deirdre looked like a Botticelli angel. She had a long delicate face, a full bottom lip and pale, wistful eyes. Short, neat, greyish-gold hair that curled a little on her forehead.

  A Botticelli angel in crumpled linen and Fairtrade cotton scarves.

  Hopefully she would like the idea of a cottage in the middle of nowhere, just a mile from the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond, with half an acre of garden and a paddock crying out for a pony. Hopefully she would like the rather unkempt garden, with its long grass and lichen-covered apple trees, its tangle of hawthorn and wild roses, dotted now with glossy red hips. Ruth would have to remember to say that they left it wild to be ecofriendly.

  And she would have to prime Alec so he didn’t guffaw at this and say something like, ‘It’s called wilful neglect.’

  Alec, of course, wasn’t in the least overawed by Deirdre. Deirdre was an idealist-by-proxy, he’d decided, having discovered – by simply asking straight out – that she didn’t have any adopted children herself. Her excuse, as Alec called it, was that one of her own children had Asperger’s. He said Deirdre was the type who banged on about the state of society but assiduously avoided her neighbours; who bewailed the fate of the rainforest but hadn’t a clue where her garden furniture came from; who shook her head over the lack of adoptive parents but had never for one moment contemplated becoming one herself.

  Okay, so maybe he was right, and maybe there was no reason for Ruth to be at all worried, but she couldn’t help it.

  Deirdre scared the shit out of her.

  And she was so tired, her brain dangerously sluggish. She’d lain awake most of last night while Alec had slept like a baby next to her and high winds had howled round the cottage, groaned in the chimney, whispered in her head:

  They’re going to find out. They’re going to find out.

  But why should they
?

  How could they?

  Deirdre wouldn’t be coming at all today if Ruth hadn’t passed their suitability tests with flying colours. All the screening had already been done. Every time she’d stepped into that aggressively cheerful little room at the Linkwood Adoption Agency, all red walls and big Impressionist prints, she’d braced herself for Deirdre to greet her not with a smile but with a look of barely concealed disgust and a cold ‘I’m sorry, but something has come up in the background checks’ – but that had never happened.

  Of course it hadn’t.

  There was no way they could possibly know that the Ruth Innes who had married Alec Morrison fourteen years ago had died in a house fire in Melrose, along with her mother, stepfather and two brothers, when she was six years old. Not unless they’d taken the details off her birth certificate and used them to trawl through the death records.

  And they obviously hadn’t done so, or this wouldn’t be happening. The home visit was just the final step in the process; the rubber-stamping of the approval of Alec and Ruth Morrison as potential adopters.

  She looked down the little single-track road. After the night’s high winds, the tarmac was carpeted with a fresh fall of coppery beech leaves – all colours of copper, from newly polished to dull and tarnished. The huge old beech trees along one side of the road arched their pale, thick branches up and up against the bright china blue of the sky, and on the other side a stubbly field rose from the hedge up the slope to the plantation. There was no sound, except for a bird somewhere in the wood, chattering a complaint.

  It was beautiful.

  It was going to be fine.

  Deirdre Jack could have no concerns about Ruth or she’d already have voiced them. Her main worry was probably the carbon footprint she was leaving in coming all the way out here from Glasgow – although Alec would say she probably felt carbon footprints didn’t apply to people with socially responsible jobs. Maybe she was enjoying the drive. Singing along to Emmylou Harris or Nanci Griffith. Looking forward to spending a pleasant morning in pleasant company.

  Deirdre was coming not to interrogate them again but to check out their home, the environment in which they were proposing to bring up a child.

  Which was beautiful.

  Which was perfect.

  Wasn’t it?

  It was going to be fine?

  She looked up at the sky, an unbroken blue apart from one high wispy little cloud.

  Did all this baseless worrying have at its root her desperation to adopt a child, her fear that she was going to be knocked back at the final hurdle, or was it her brain’s way of telling her that this wasn’t right? That this wasn’t what she wanted at all?

  She walked a little way along the road. Amongst the beech leaves were scatterings of crushed beech nuts where tyres had run over them. All the trees that would never be. She stooped to pick up an intact nut and close her hand on it, its spikes prickling her palm.

  And now she was there at her side.

  Ruth had known she would come, her face turned up to her with a smile – rosy cheeks, a woolly red hat, blue and green stripy-gloved hands full of the brightest leaves for the collage they’d make later at the kitchen table.

  ‘Darling,’ she whispered, like a madwoman. ‘No. No more.’

  She had only ever confided in one person about her daydreams of this unborn, unnamed child – and that one person had been Sara, the woman she’d been paired with by the agency, who had adopted three children through them. She’d been so lovely, Sara, a woman made to be a mother if anyone was, and Ruth had found herself confessing that she fantasised, regularly, about an unconceived, unborn, never-to-be child.

  Sara had smiled, and nodded, and told her she used to do the same.

  ‘I’m so scared,’ Ruth had gulped. ‘I’m so scared I won’t love the little girl we adopt as I would have loved my own.’ Scared about other things too, of course, but those fears she would never, ever blurt out to anyone, let alone a virtual stranger.

  Sara had grabbed Ruth’s hand. ‘Oh no no no, you mustn’t worry about that! She will be your own, and you’ll love her so much. You’ll love her as you’ve never loved anyone in your life. You’ll love her just as much, maybe even more than if she’d been biologically yours.’

  But those were just words, a politically correct recitation of what you were meant to feel.

  Maybe it was fifteen years of living with Alec, or maybe it was the pragmatism that nurses seemed to have inbuilt or to develop, but she had a horrible suspicion that blood ties mattered. They were the basis of life, after all, of evolution, of animal behaviour. Human behaviour. Her own experience of the neonatal unit had shown her just how strong, how primeval, was the bond between a mother and her child. Her own child. Her own flesh and blood child.

  The little stranger who was out in the world somewhere waiting for Ruth, waiting to be loved as every child deserved to be loved, was counting on her to love her like a flesh and blood mother would.

  ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go.’

  She threw the beech nut to the verge. And her never-to-be little girl flung out her arms and ran, full tilt, red wellies kicking through the leaves, running away from her down the road without a backward glance.

  ‘Go.’

  Stupid stupid stupid, to be crying. To be thinking that if there was a heaven, if by some remote chance it existed, surely there must be a place in it for her own child, a place where all the never-to-be children waited for their mothers.

  So stupid.

  But as the little figure blurred and faded, as she found a tissue in her pocket and blew her nose and laughed at herself, as she looked back at the road, at nothing, she let her never-to-be mother’s love fill her heart and spill over and speak itself aloud, just once, to the empty air:

  ‘I would have loved you… I would have loved you mo–’

  But before the last word had quite left her lips, she had put a hand to her mouth to stop it. The woman Deirdre was about to meet would never think that. Ruth Morrison would be horrified at the very thought that an adopted child could be any less loved than a biological one. Less wanted. Less valued. Less worthy.

  Such a possibility would never even cross Ruth Morrison’s mind.

  2

  ‘Right, let’s make a start, then,’ goes the sheriff woman. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. This Court of Session is sitting to determine an application for a permanence order, with authority to adopt, by Glasgow City Council in respect of the child Bekki Johnson. The application is opposed by the child’s grandparents, Jed and Lorraine Johnson.’ She takes off her glasses, looks right at me and starts on about what a permanence order is, like I’m a daftie, like I dinnae even know what it is I’m fucking fighting.

  I know what a permanence order is. It’s the fucking system saying Bekki’s gonnae be adopted by fucking randoms and there’s nothing we can do about it.

  Our fucking Bekki.

  The sheriff bumps her gums, blah fucking blah, and then Mair gets up, in her white silk shirt and wee black skirt and I’m-so-down-with-the-kids nose stud. If it wasnae for Bekki, I’d swing for her so I would.

  She goes to the box thingmie like a sheep pen in front of the sheriff’s bench. She sits on the chair inside it and puts her papers down in front of her, like she’s so fucking professional.

  ‘Ms Mair.’ The lawyer who’s for the Council gets up. The lawyers have this big table in the middle of the courtroom court room with computers and that. ‘Could you describe for the sheriff what your role has been in this case?’ Bastard’s English. Fwah fwah fwah.

  ‘I’m the social worker assigned to Bekki Johnson’s case. I’m the author of the permanence order report, Lady Semple, which I think you have there…’ The smug face on her, like Bekki’s an exam question she’s aced.

  Sheriff goes, ‘Yes, thank you, Ms Mair. A very clear, comprehensive report it is too.’

  Aye, a very clear, comprehensive load of shite.

  Fwah: ‘Perhaps you could give
us some brief background on Bekki and her family situation, Ms Mair?’

  Mair: ‘Bekki is now two years and eight months old. She’s a bright, healthy child, but I would also describe her as unusually quiet and undemanding for her age. She has been assessed by medical doctors and a psychiatrist – I think you have also had those reports, Lady Semple. They found her to show no signs of physical or cognitive impairment, but there were some indications of impairments in developmental functioning and emotional well-being, in particular symptoms of anxiety, excessive shyness and withdrawal. Immediately following her removal from the family, she was found to be malnourished and was diagnosed with a vitamin C deficiency. There were also some dozen or so cuts and bruises to her arms, legs and torso. She’s now living with foster parents. There has been no contact with her mother, Shannon-Rose Johnson, or any of her biological family, under the terms of the emergency child protection order granted by this court in July of this year, following Bekki’s removal into Local Authority care, as there was felt to be a significant risk of harm.’

  I dinnae lose it.

  I give Bekki’s Shrek a cuddle and shake my head, like I’m that disbelieving the bitch has the brass neck.

  Fwah moves back to the table and leans over his computer screen. ‘The mother is a paranoid schizophrenic, I believe?’