Silent Child(12)

As Aiden continued to watch the television, I felt as though I were in a dream. Was I really talking to my son? Was this pasty young man the boy I’d thought had drowned all those years ago? My head was light but my heart was heavy with the implications of everything that had happened. I found myself unable to think of anything else to say.

Luckily, Dr Schaffer noticed my distress and came to my rescue. “Perhaps we could all go for a quick cup of tea while Aiden has a little rest. Then we can talk about what happens next. We would love to draw a little blood from you, Emma, and then we can establish a DNA match to corroborate the DNA test from yesterday. We also need to talk about what happens next. Someone from social services will need to speak to you.”

“I will be able to take him home, won’t I?” I asked. A fist of ice gripped my heart.

“It might just take a bit of time,” DCI Stevenson added. “With Aiden not talking we’ve no idea where he’s been for the last ten years and who he’s been with.”

Who. That word hit me like a truck. Who. Who had he been with? What did they want from him? Nausea rose to my throat, threatening to spill out onto the hospital floor. My fingers wrapped around the armrest of the chair as I attempted to compose myself.

“Where do you suspect he’s been?” I asked, saying the words slowly and carefully.

Both the doctor and the detective glanced across at Aiden and then back to me.

“I think it’s best we talk about that in private,” said DCI Stevenson.





6





Of course, after Aiden’s apparent drowning, I suffered from recurring nightmares. There were two images that haunted me as I tossed and twisted myself into the sheets at night. The first was the sight of Aiden’s red coat being pulled from the river. It was the image that the press ate up and regurgitated on the front page of every newspaper. Innocence lost. The contrast of a tiny red coat against a murky dark background, mould and dirt on the sleeves. It was a perfect image for selling newspapers. It hinted at a parent’s worst fear without being so gratuitous that they couldn’t print it.

Does anything sell newspapers better than death? Maybe sex can sell more, given the right story, but the death of a child is the very apex of morbid curiosity. In a tower of sex scandals, prostitutes, and celebrities, infanticide rules. Tragic, accidental infant death is just underneath the glory of a child’s murder. Aiden was reduced to that one image and it almost erased every preceding memory I had of him. I couldn’t think of his cute, tongue-poking-out look of concentration when reading a book without seeing the red anorak dirtied by river mud. I couldn’t picture him shimmying up the tree in our garden wearing a superman cape without the newspaper headlines revolving through my mind.

The second image was pure imagination, but it was one that I could not shake away. It was Aiden, small and pale, floating in the water. Deep under the surface of the river was my child, half-eaten by fish, bloated and rotting. I dreamed of the flow of the Ouse as it met the Humber. Rushing and gushing and pouring over rocks, between built-up grassy banks, beneath stone bridges, behind houses, chasing and churning to the sea. I saw him washed away from me. Washed away from the world.

During the investigation we’d had search and rescue experts talk about the currents and the places he could have washed up. It was irregular for a body not to resurface from a river. Out at sea, you would expect a body to disappear, but in a river, they tended to be found. That was why DCI Stevenson was assigned the case. It was only when they found Aiden’s coat that a kidnapping had been almost completely ruled out. There had been a flood and during that flood Aiden had wandered off, presumably towards the river. Not long after his disappearance they found his coat in the water. End of story. The thread of logic is all there, isn’t it?

Except this time the thread of logic was obviously wrong, because that was my child sitting in a hospital bed wearing the same expression you see on children pulled out of a wrecked building after an earthquake, or rescued from a war-torn country. Which was why I knew my nightmares were likely to come back, and what they would be about.

With Jake by my side, I followed Dr Schaffer and DCI Stevenson into a small office. Dr Schaffer sat at a desk, I was offered a chair, and DCI Stevenson shut the door behind us. That disinfectant smell of the hospital had even seeped into this room, and the tiny window behind the desk was shut, trapping us in a heady miasma of sickness. Part of me almost opened my mouth to Dr Schaffer to open the window and let in some fresh air but I decided not to bother. It would only mean more faffing about and I was impatient to get on with things.