When She Was Bad(43)

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ It was the first time I’d ever heard Ed swear.

‘Yep,’ said the cop.

The basement was a squarish room, probably around five metres by six. The floor was that grey concrete that starts to go greenish after a while. The walls were grey also. The smell was damp cut with decay and something darker and more rancid.

‘These are getting on for half a metre thick,’ said Cavanagh, patting the walls almost proudly. ‘Two layers of bricks with a thick insulating membrane between them for soundproofing. Guy was a regular self-builder.’

But Ed and I weren’t paying attention to the walls, or to the eight narrow steps that led down to where the outsized policeman was standing. Both of us were fixated on one thing.

The cage.

It took up over half of the floorspace in the basement and was just under adult height, with black bars up the sides and across the top. A wide wooden plank ran horizontally across the middle section of the top with a pulley and rope attached. At one end of the rope was a large hook. As I stared at it, something foul-tasting shot into my mouth and I tried not to gag. The only other things in the cage were a toddler-sized cot with the side down, a hard wooden chair and, at the far end, a large metal bin with a lid.

‘Kid used to wear this harness kind of thing that wrapped around him and kept his arms by his sides with a ring on the back that the hook clipped into.’

Sergeant Cavanagh could almost have been a tour guide in a museum and I wondered why it was that Laurie’s room had so affected him, while this horror show in the basement left him seemingly unmoved. Was it just because of his own children at home – so easily relatable to the little girl we’d met in the meeting room at the university medical facility – but a world away from the poor creature in the cage? Was it the depth of the boy’s suffering that set him outside the cop’s radius of empathy, like the blank-eyed refugees I see these days on the television news?

‘They never let him out,’ said Ed. He looked pale in the harsh overhead light and I remembered with a start that he was also dealing with the boy. David. Child D. We never spoke of this other assessment being run simultaneously. Ed felt it better that we kept the two completely separate until our reports were made, ostensibly so that Dan Oppenheimer and I couldn’t be swayed by each other’s opinions but also, I now believe, so that he would be the only one with full knowledge of the case, the only one qualified to write up the account. The result was that I’d forgotten how close he was to the things we were seeing now.

‘Nope.’ Cavenagh was matter-of-fact. ‘This was it. The full extent of the kid’s life. Going from the cot to the chair.’

‘No toilet?’

‘Diapers. Used to sling ’em into that bin every coupla days. Place absolutely stank when we found him. When you think of what it’s like upstairs – everything all covered in plastic and lined up so neatly – and down here the place is crawling with flies and maggots. You know they used to scrape all their leftover food into a bucket and bring it down. He ate it with his hands.’

‘The feeding rota on the fridge door,’ I said, thinking out loud. ‘So Laurie would have been down here pretty regularly.’

‘Sure. Sure,’ Sergeant Cavanagh agreed. ‘Plus obviously you know they had her help out with the punishments.’

I’d seen the initial police reports and the accounts of the child welfare officers who’d interviewed Laurie after the gruesome discovery was made. The boy was found with marks all over his puny body. Some looked like they’d been made with a stick of some sort; others were burn marks – as from a heated hair device, the medical report had said. I thought now about Noelle Egan’s dark glossy curls and shivered. And right at the top of one of his scrawny arms was a perfect bite mark scored purple into his flesh, and of such a size that it could only have been made, said the report, by a young child.





23

Sarah



‘You don’t have to go.’

Oliver had a hand on each of her shoulders to hold her in place and was gazing into her eyes. He looked worried.

‘Don’t kiss. Oh yuck, you’re going to kiss. Disgusting.’ Sam made vomiting noises behind Oliver’s back.

‘Mummy, stay,’ said Joe, clinging to Sarah’s leg.

‘I do have to go, we’ve already discussed it.’

‘No. It’s not reasonable. It’s the weekend, for God’s sake. We hardly see each other as it is. And you look awful. When was the last time you had a proper night’s sleep?’

‘You’re just fed up because you’ve got to look after the kids all weekend instead of going to poker at Jimmy’s tonight.’