Power surged through him, mixing with the fear and the anger and those weird memories he couldn’t place. He reached his left hand around to her neck and jerked her head back so her throat was stretched out. Then he ran his thumb up her windpipe, increasing the pressure each time. She hurt people, this woman. She’d hurt him before and she would do it again if he gave her the chance. More memories: blows raining down on a body too small to resist. Not bothering to cry because what was the point?
Now Rachel was struggling, writhing around under his grip, trying to prise his hands away with her fingers. With each of her movements, more of his old self was dislodged, crumbling away like broken cement, leaving behind only the fury, the red-hot core of him. He grabbed one of her fingers in his. The snap of bone breaking was the sound of his molten rage crackling.
45
Anne
‘How bad?’
Shannon jumps to her feet, goes back to the laptop and begins scrolling through the news reports I have up on-screen. The British sub-judice laws mean the respected papers haven’t yet reported on the crime in detail, but no such scruples operate on the internet. The first time I’d read what Child D was supposed to have done, I had to run to the bathroom to vomit. Some of the more salacious descriptions are up on my screen and I look away so I don’t have to watch what reading them does to her face.
‘Oh my God!’ She has a hand clasped to her mouth and her eyes over the top are round like marbles.
‘Baby,’ I say. ‘It might not be as bad as it seems. She could have been dead before he even . . .’
But it is no good.
‘He cooked her?’
‘Shannon, honey, don’t believe everything you read there. It’s rumour. Unsubstantiated.’
‘Oh my God.’ She is reading from the screen. ‘He tied her up, laid her on the top bench of the sauna and turned the heat up to maximum as if he was roasting a chicken.’
She stays in her seat as if the sheer force of her horror is keeping her there.
‘Why didn’t the others come down? They were having a fucking meeting a floor up. Why did nobody come stop it?’
‘He’d locked the door,’ I say. ‘David – or Ewan as he’s now called – had locked the door. At first the others thought there was something . . . well, sexual going on, so no one did anything. And then there was some sort of distraction. One of the others had a kind of mini-breakdown – cut his own arm in a desperate cry for help. By the time they realized something was seriously wrong downstairs and called the police, it was too late.’
Shannon is still scouring the news report, and I wish she’d stop. There are horrible things written there. Details about blackened features and melted skin left behind on the sauna floor.
I stand up and head towards my daughter. Reaching over her shoulder, I gently close the lid of the laptop and then, finally, I put my arms around her. At first she resists and is stiff, and for a moment the old fear returns, that I won’t be able to get through to her, that she’ll never truly allow me to love her. But then a little noise escapes her, like the sound a baby makes before it starts to cry, and she turns to face me, her whole body sagging as if she can’t bear her own weight any more, and she collapses into me and I bury my face in her coconut-smelling hair, and we stay that way for a very long time.
46
Anne
The first surprise is how modern it is. I had been expecting dark Victorian brick, the colour of dried blood. But instead it is modern, bland even. Beige. Like the low-slung buildings on the industrial estates we passed on the train coming up here. Later we will discover there is another, older wing, a former hospital, vast and forbidding, but as we walk up the path, past neatly manicured lawns and in through the double doors, we might just as easily be going to get mortgage advice from some faceless finance company or do a wholesale deal for staple guns and other office supplies. Only the imposing metal gates we drove through in our taxi from the station, manned by an unsmiling guard and flanked by impossibly high fences topped with coils of razor wire, give away the true nature of the place.
‘Put your belongings in here, please.’
Even after two days in the UK, I can’t get used to the accent. Shannon and I have finally stopped digging each other in the ribs every time someone opens their mouth, but still those blunt vowels come as a shock. The woman behind the table has a different way of talking from the people we met in London, even though we’re only two hundred miles north-west of the capital. In the States that’s practically like visiting the next town, but here distance seems to matter more.