Silent Child(14)

And now my worst fear had been confirmed. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.

“Try to stay calm, sweetheart,” cooed Jake. “Think of the baby. You need to keep your stress levels down.”

But I was thinking of the baby, the one sat in that hospital room all on his own watching cartoons. My body ached with helplessness. Whatever I did now, I could never take it away. I could never go back and stop him going to school that day. Never. I could barely breathe.

“Here we are,” said DCI Stevenson as he passed a water bottle to each of us. I noticed that he gave me mine with the cap unscrewed. I realised why when my hand extended to take the bottle, only to shake so badly that I spilled some of it onto my clothes. I wrapped both of my hands around the plastic bottle and lifted it tentatively to my lips. I had to admit that the cool liquid felt good as it trickled down my throat. DCI Stevenson opened the window behind the desk and a breeze hit the sweat on my forehead.

“Thank you,” I said. I tried my best to settle into my chair, preparing myself for the rest of the information to come from Dr Schaffer.

But it was Jake who broke the silence first. “Are you sure?” Hearing his voice was a surprise. Apart from asking me if I was all right, he’d remained fairly quiet since arriving at the hospital. “I mean… what you’re saying is…”

“We won’t be sure until Aiden is able to tell us himself, but that is what our examination suggests.” Dr Schaffer’s fingers tightened above the paper file until I saw his knuckles whiten. He released his hands and his shoulders relaxed slightly.

I closed my eyes, trying not to think about what the examination had involved. I should have been there holding his hand as the doctors poked and prodded him.

“Has he been in any distress?” I asked. “Has he been crying, screaming, scared?”

“No,” Dr Stevenson said. “He has been very calm. He shows some discomfort when touched, but he allowed us to examine him, and to wash and clothe him, too. We were very gentle and we talked through every single procedure and why we were doing it.”

“You should have waited for me.” My hands clenched around the bottle. “I should’ve been there with him.”

“I understand why you feel that way,” said DCI Stevenson in the same calm voice I remembered from all those years ago. “We asked the doctors to look for evidence on Aiden’s body. If we’d waited, some of that evidence would have been destroyed.”

“And what evidence did you find?” I snapped.

DCI Stevenson pulled at the collar on his shirt. “It was a rainy night. It seems that if there was any trace of Aiden’s kidnapper left on him, it was washed away. There was no trace in his saliva either.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. But then my mind was swimming with so much information, I didn’t know what to make of any of this. I took a long drink of water.

It was DCI Stevenson’s turn to talk. He met my eyes with the patient, steady gaze of a teacher explaining a problem to a child. “The medical examination of Aiden’s condition and the way he was found all suggest that Aiden has been confined somewhere for the last ten years. We think it was a small area with limited light. Dr Schaffer feels that the marks on Aiden’s ankles suggest he was chained for some time.”

The urge to be sick rose again, but this time I swallowed it down. Chained. Confined. Kept like an animal in a cage. I’d studied psychology at school; I knew what that did to a child. I knew about the wolf children and the girl raised in a chicken coop. They were feral and traumatised, virtually unable to function, and certainly unable to integrate into society.

“But that’s… that’s…” Jake rubbed his eyes as if in disbelief. “That’s evil. Who would do that to a child?”

“That’s what we hope to find out,” said DCI Stevenson. “Because whoever the monster is, he belongs in jail.”





7





When I was a child I had very different nightmares to the ones that plagued me as an adult. They were filled with narrow, labyrinth-like tunnels. As I walked, I’d follow a small dot of light leading the way. I really wanted to play with that dot of light because it looked appealing, all glowing and orange and sparkling. But as I walked on, the tunnel walls closed in. The bright glowing light started to dim. I’d become frantic, running for my life, no longer chasing the light, but being chased by some unknown thing. On and on I went, turning one corner and then the next, as the corridor became narrower and the ceiling lower. It squeezed closer until the walls touched my skin. Narrower and narrower it went until I was on my knees crawling through the dark.