When She Was Bad(106)

And it was. It really was. The photographs around the living room and in the narrow hallway were all of Ewan Johnson at various stages of growing up. As an angelic, if nervous-looking young boy on his first day of school in a uniform that was several sizes too big. Slightly older, tousle-haired and grinning straight into the camera to reveal a black hole where his four front teeth should have been. A handsome teenager, sitting in a kayak, wearing a life-vest over a tanned bare chest, gazing out at the photographer through Shannon’s clear green eyes. The obligatory school prom photograph, sandwiched between Neil and Sheila, over whom he towered, with an arm around each of them, wearing a smart new suit, all of them looking proud and happy.

Photographs do lie. We all edit our own pasts, picking out what conforms best to the picture of our lives we most want to paint. But there was love there, in that modest house. We truly felt it. It was what we needed – what Shannon needed – to know.

Later, Neil admitted that Ewan had been no angel. He’d got into a few fights at school, though never too serious. Sometimes he hadn’t even been able to give a reason beyond that an ‘angry mist’ had taken him over. He’d suffered off and on from stiffness in one of his legs, clearly the legacy of his incarceration in the cellar, although Neil and Sheila had been told only that it was the result of an early injury. Boys who’d made fun of his occasional limp had more often than not ended up regretting it. Ewan hadn’t always been kind either to the besotted girls who called round all through his teens. ‘Tell her I’m not here,’ he’d hiss, running upstairs to hide in his room.

There’d been a period between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, Neil said, when the two of them had locked horns, Ewan pushing, always pushing, against his father’s authority. ‘I was stuck in the middle of them,’ Sheila said. ‘But that’s normal, isn’t it? All young lads go through a phase of trying to prove themselves to their fathers.’ He’d got drunk one time and had to have his stomach pumped. Another time Sheila had found a little bag of white pills hidden in his bedroom. Once, Neil recalled, his friends had brought him home from a party raving like a lunatic. They said he’d been smoking skunk and it had done something to his brain. He was convinced people were trying to kill him, even his own parents. Sheila had wanted to take him to the hospital, but Neil had persuaded her to wait for a few hours and luckily it had passed. Their son had never touched the stuff again.

As he hit his early twenties he’d calmed down, become less confrontational, more considerate. And he’d seemed to be doing so well at work.

Until Rachel Masters arrived.

Neil’s voice dried up as he said the name of the woman Ewan had killed, and Sheila began crying again.

‘He wasn’t in his right mind,’ she said. ‘He would never . . .’

We sat for a while, not speaking, the silence punctuated only by Sheila’s sobs, tiny hiccuping sounds that seemed to catch in the back of her throat.

I could feel Shannon building up to say something. When you’ve lived with someone a long time you get a sense for things like that. Even before she spoke, I knew what she was going to say. It was what we’d travelled all this way to find out.

‘Did he ever ask you about his early family life? Did he try to find out where he came from?’

Did he know about me, is what she was really asking. Did he know what I did?

Sheila shook her head.

‘He knew he was adopted, of course. And he knew his biological family had been very . . .’ she glanced at Shannon warily ‘. . . dysfunctional, and that’s why he was sent so far away to be adopted. Barbara, our social worker, never told us his biological family’s surname. She said it was better that we didn’t know. She didn’t say why but we guessed it was because they had been in the news. So we couldn’t look them up. Ewan asked about them a few times over the years, but not often. He knew it upset me.’

Without warning, she put her hand out to touch Shannon’s face, running her trembling fingers softly down my daughter’s cheek.

‘I’m sorry, love, it’s just that you’re so much like him. So, so lovely.’

And now in this anonymous high-security psychiatric hospital, Shannon is about to find out for herself how much alike she and her brother are, and I know she’s finding the prospect terrifying.

‘OK?’ I ask now, leaning across from my chair in the visiting room to put a hand on her knee.

She nods.

‘Will he even know who I am though, Mom? He’ll be on heavy-duty medication, right?’

I have used my professional privilege to find out all I can about Ewan Johnson’s treatment. Through contacts in the UK I learned that he had been remanded from court to this place, displaying signs of acute psychosis. From what I can gather, strong medication and daily therapy have got the psychosis under control, but now it is the possibility of self-harm that medical personnel are more concerned with. We met briefly with Ewan’s lawyer late yesterday afternoon, a tired-looking woman who played with her wedding ring as she spoke to us in the foyer of her offices, as if it were a good luck charm with which she could ward off the more distressing aspects of her job. She couldn’t or wouldn’t tell us much, citing client confidentiality, but she did confirm they’re working on a defence of diminished responsibility when his case does finally come to trial. She seemed interested in Shannon, appraising her with her purple-shadowed eyes and asking if she’d be prepared to come to give evidence in Ewan’s support if they decided to play the dysfunctional birth family card. I knew what she was thinking. My daughter would look good up there on the stand.