Someone Else's Son, page 15
‘Hell no,’ Dayna said immediately. ‘They’d kill each other. You?’
Max paused. His fingers walked up on to the hillock of Dayna’s knee. ‘All the time.’ And while his hand sat there, too terrified to do anything more, he dreamt up the crazy world that was him, his father and his mother all living under the same roof again.
FRIDAY, 24 APRIL 2009
Leah followed Carrie everywhere. She sat on the edge of the bath while her friend peed.
‘There was so much blood. Spread so wide.’ Carrie’s face was paler than white. It was translucent, mapped with veins and bone. She virtually fell off the toilet and ended up on all fours on the floor. Leah was beside her, knowing that she was beyond sobbing.
‘Bed?’
Carrie nodded and allowed herself to be led to the comfort of her darkened bedroom. Leah pulled back the sheets, removed Carrie’s shoes and unfolded her on the mattress. The woman who commanded the attention of millions of viewers each week, the powerhouse that had brought justice to hundreds of families, victims, women, children who would otherwise have suffered their plight, the businesswoman who kept the show fresh, under contract, and most of all the woman who followed up on each and every one of her show guests to make certain they were receiving the help they needed from the show’s counselling team, was dissolving before her eyes. Leah pulled the sheet across her, leaving only messy hair and a cheek visible.
She sat bolt upright, her bleary eyes betraying that sleep had finally come. Leah must have been watching over her.
‘What time is it?’
‘Five,’ Leah said, looking at her watch. ‘You slept for nearly an hour. Are you thirsty?’
‘No.’ Carrie whipped back the sheets and sat on the edge of the bed. She straightened her blouse and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘There are things I need to do.’
‘All in good time,’ Leah said, supporting Carrie when she staggered, dizzy, over to the window.
‘There is no good time,’ Carrie replied. Her voice was dry and determined.
‘What things? There’s nothing for you to do right now. And Brody will help when the time’s right.’
It seemed that the mention of her ex-husband’s name set off a chain reaction. Carrie swept back her hair in a ponytail and secured it with a band lying on her dressing table. She went into the bathroom, Leah following, and doused her face in cold water. Leaning on the sink, she watched as the drips fell off her nose. She didn’t – perhaps couldn’t – look in the mirror.
‘I’m going out.’ Carrie tore off the skirt she had slept in and thrust her legs into rarely worn jeans. She rummaged in her wardrobe and pulled out a pair of shoes – not the usual heels, but a sensible pair of canvas lace-ups.
‘You probably shouldn’t . . .’ Leah ran out of the bedroom after her. Carrie was moving at speed. Voices in the kitchen became louder, although none belonged to Dennis Masters or any of his immediate team of detectives, they discovered, when Carrie burst in.
‘Where’s Dennis?’ she ordered.
A young WPC answered. ‘Gone for now, Miss Kent. We’re here to answer any questions and update you on—’
‘Right. Answer this.’ Carrie leant forward across the worktop, making the policewoman step back. ‘Who was with my son when he died? Dennis said there was a witness. I want to know who. A name and an address.’
‘I’m so sorry, Miss Kent, I don’t know, and even if I did I couldn’t . . .’
But Carrie had already left the kitchen.
‘Where are you going, Carrie? You’re not thinking straight.’ Leah was horrified to see her pull her car keys from the hall table drawer.
‘To find Dennis,’ Carrie called out. ‘To find Brody, the witness . . . anyone. To find the person who killed my son.’
She dashed down the internal steps that led to the garage. At the bottom, she punched in the security code and the steel door slowly swung open. As soon as it was wide enough, she slipped through and marched into the garage. Leah followed, swinging round the corner, struggling to keep up.
‘At least let me drive,’ Leah said as Carrie got into the car. ‘You’re in no fit state.’
‘I’m absolutely fine. I have things to take care of,’ she said unconvincingly.
‘I’m coming with you then.’ Leah got in the passenger seat.
Carrie pointed the remote control at the automatic garage door and waited for it to open, edging the car forward little by little. Leah wondered if Carrie even remembered how to drive. She was chauffeured everywhere or, at the very worst, took a cab.
Leah covered her eyes as they roared out of the underground garage and up into the daylight. ‘Slow down, for Christ’s sake.’ But Carrie ignored her and ploughed relentlessly through the traffic as she headed out of Hampstead. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Brody’s place.’
Leah didn’t recognise her voice. It was as though someone else had got into Carrie’s body and was telling it what to do. There was no sign of the real Carrie who had been live on television only that morning. It was unfathomable, what had happened to time. Not even a day had passed since they were on air. Distracted by Carrie’s untimely disappearance, she’d met with the executive producer, discussed future ideas with Dennis, and taken a call from the States about a slot for Carrie on the Late Show next month. In this new, altered state, it might as well have taken place last year.
‘Do you even know where he lives?’ Leah was certain that Carrie had never actually been there. In fact, she pretty much knew that in the last nine years the pair had spoken exactly three times, usually if Max was ill.
‘I have an address on my phone.’
Carrie’s hands tightened on the wheel as the neighbourhood transformed from pleasant, expensive, desirable housing with delicatessens and boutiques and trendy Nepalese restaurants into boarded-up shops, nineteen sixties grey-fronted flats and weed-strewn petrol stations that had long since closed down.
‘Jesus,’ Leah said. ‘Are you sure you’re going the right way?’The vehicles on the road had also changed from Range Rovers and BMWs to hotted-up Fiestas and Corsas. Carrie didn’t reply. ‘You were in hospital only a few hours ago. Why don’t you at least let me—’
‘Just leave it, Leah!’
Carrie revved the engine and cut through several lanes of traffic to get to the lights. She turned left on red and sped down the road. She was going the wrong way down a one-way street. A minute later, she pulled over and broke down in tears.
‘I have no idea where I’m going.’ Her head fell on to the wheel, causing the horn to sound. Leah got out, went round to the driver’s side and eased Carrie from the car. She buckled her into the passenger seat and pulled up the satnav on her phone. A few minutes later, they were turned round, grinding their way through the traffic and heading into an even more depressing neighbourhood.
Leah’s hands shook as she drove – not entirely from grief, not entirely from uncertainty, mostly from never having seen Carrie, in the two decades she had known her, not be as strong as a rock.
‘Do you think the satnav got it wrong?’ She changed down into second gear and peered up at the tenements. ‘I don’t think we can be near Brody’s place.’
‘It’s so . . . so close . . .’ Carrie said in a way that belied an altered state, as if she could suddenly see things that she had been blind to before today. ‘All this . . . so close to where I live.’
Leah was convinced they’d entered the postcode wrong. ‘I don’t get it. This is Westmount Road.’ She pointed to a street sign, barely legible through the graffiti that was daubed over it. ‘I can’t believe Brody lives round here.’ Leah drove on. Even the car seemed hesitant as it juddered slowly in third.
Looming in the distance, like an otherworldly city – grey concrete, a mix of broken windows and boards, colourless washing flapping from tiny balconies, an occasional splash of red where someone had fixed a pot plant to a railing, more graffiti and plenty of unsavoury and downright terrifying groups of youths huddled in pockets – was the notorious estate, the place Brody had chosen to live. She didn’t understand. No wonder Carrie had decided to block it all out.
Leah pulled on the handbrake. ‘This is as close as I can park.’ She prayed Carrie would change her mind about needing to see Brody, although she could understand why she would want nothing more than to fall into his arms and be close to Max’s father, whatever their differences had been in the past.
Carrie opened the door and got out. Leah followed. Two lanky boys wearing hats pulled low and tracksuit tops were suddenly inches away from the car. They’d appeared from nowhere.
‘Wannus to look after it?’ His face was thin and mean, with spots encrusting his forehead. His eyes were cold.
‘Fuck off,’ Carrie said calmly. ‘It’s insured.’ She walked off. ‘Number three four nine.’
The two women approached the estate. It appeared sealed off from the rest of the world with its ugly back turned to reality. A small opening between the ground floor flats led to an inner area the size of several tennis courts. They stopped for a moment and stared up. They were in the middle of a quadrant, bounded on all sides by five storeys of concrete.
‘No one would choose to live here,’ Leah said. The grimness of their surroundings was a temporary distraction from the day’s events and she was sure that Carrie’s irrational behaviour by coming here was fuelled by grief.
‘My ex-husband did,’ Carrie snapped back. ‘And my son when he visited his father.’ Leah understood the anger in her voice. Carrie’s mind would be forming links – Westmount estate, gangs, knives, her son killed. Brody’s choice. Blame was a natural emotion. ‘I had no idea it was like this,’ she said, breathless as they marched on.
They scanned the signs at each corner of the quadrant, showing which stinking concrete staircase they needed to go up to find flat three forty-nine. Most signs had been burnt off or spray-painted over, but eventually they found the right one and ascended three floors. They held their breath and Carrie grabbed on to Leah as they went along the concrete balcony, stepping over rubbish bags, bikes and toddlers put out to play like unwanted puppies. Leah knocked on the door of Brody’s flat.
Brody yelled out that whoever was there should just come in. He didn’t think his body would be capable of hauling itself to the door, greeting yet another team of detectives, reeling off and picking apart his son’s life until he believed that Max had never existed at all.
It took him three seconds to determine that this wasn’t the police.
‘Hello?’ Brody stood. He listened. He smelt. He felt for vibrations. Women.
Oh my fucking God were the words that told him Carrie Kent, his ex-wife, was standing in his living room surveying the devastation that he called home. That he and Max had once called home.
Brody fell back into the armchair. He didn’t give a shit what she thought. Despite this defence, despite years of imagining this most ghastly of scenarios – his ex in his flat – he was filled with the most immense swell of relief that she was actually here. And however she chose to display it, whatever public exhibition of pandemonium and journalistic mayhem the death of Carrie Kent’s only son would produce, beneath all that he knew they shared the same raw emotion: absolute and utter emptiness.
‘We failed him.’ Her words were emotionless.
‘Carrie . . .’
That was the other woman, her sidekick from the show. He’d spoken to her once or twice. Brody never forgot a voice.
‘Fine job we did of raising a son who fell in with gangs and knives and . . . and . . .’ Brody imagined Carrie staring around his flat, speechless – and that was rare – at the state of it. But she concluded with a simple, ‘Why?’
‘Why indeed.’ He heard the sofa being sat on.
‘How did this happen to us?’
‘Any of it,’ Brody replied. They both knew the comment ran deeper than that day’s misery alone.
‘I don’t think I can live without him,’ Carrie confessed.
The tone was, Brody thought, more akin to one of her beaten-down studio guests. ‘Could you live with him?’ It was confrontational, he knew, but he didn’t know what else to say. Max had cried for help and they hadn’t listened.
‘Brody—’
‘Don’t,’ he snapped at Leah. He didn’t want her interfering on such a raw day. Someone needed to see that justice was done. See that justice was done, he thought, blinking at the irony of it.
‘We have to help each other,’ Carrie continued.
‘Bit late, don’t you think?’
‘You two, please don’t do this . . .’ Leah trailed off.
‘We’re in this together, Brody. From the minute Max was created, we’ve been in this together.’ Carrie surprised them all with her clarity. ‘However far apart we might have grown.’
Brody laughed inappropriately. ‘Together? Far apart?’ he repeated. ‘Do you honestly understand any of that? Have you ever, once, in your precious, self-absorbed life that consists only of Carrie Kent and more Carrie Kent, have you ever really once considered how universally shattered and distant the three of us actually are . . . were?’
The effort was too much. His body wouldn’t take sitting down peacefully any longer. Brody paced the room, wishing he had a clear-cut aim of a vase or ornament to smash against the wall – except that he didn’t possess any ornaments or vases.
‘This isn’t the time for us to fight. We need to find out what happened. Who did this to our son.’
‘She’s right.’ Leah’s voice prevented the response Brody was about to hurl back.
‘Have the police interviewed you?’ he said instead.
‘Yes. You?’
‘Briefly. Don’t think they have much to go on.’
‘There was a witness,’ Carrie continued. ‘Do you know who it is?’
‘No.’ Brody was thoughtful.
‘I want to speak to them. I need to.’
Brody could tell she was fighting back tears. ‘Don’t you think the police are taking care of that?’ He bumped into the wall. He’d lost his bearings for a moment.
Carrie didn’t reply immediately – collecting herself, Brody thought. She wouldn’t want to cry in front of him.
‘We can’t just sit back and wait for something to happen,’ she finally said.
Even though her voice was broken – he imagined her small, frail, red-eyed on his couch – Brody could still detect the power of Carrie Kent behind her words. He knew she had connections in the Met and, if he was honest, he didn’t think he could wait for news from the police either. If they still had one thing in common, it was that they each had a need for answers in their professional lives.
‘Max brought a girl here a few times.’ Brody doubted Carrie knew.
‘Who? When?’
‘It started last autumn. He didn’t say much.’
‘Do you know her name? She might know something.’
‘No.’ Brody hadn’t pried. It was only because he caught a foreign whiff in his bedroom once or twice – a smell not of perfume, but of hairspray, make-up, laundry detergent – that he even suspected a girl had been in his flat. He’d wanted Max to tell him when he was ready.
‘I must go back to the school,’ Carrie said.
Brody knew that she thrived on action. Doing nothing wasn’t an option for her. He imagined them together again, at their house, their beloved family home, with Max pedalling round the garden on his trike. If something went wrong in their lives, Carrie leapt in to fix it. You make things right before they’ve even gone wrong, Brody used to joke.
‘Will you come with me?’ she asked.
‘Carrie, is this wise today?’ Leah sounded doubtful.
‘Yes, I’ll come,’ he said without hesitating.
The Mercedes was still in one piece when they got back to it. Leah drove while Brody sat in the passenger seat. Carrie had shown him the door, pulled out the belt for him to secure. She was surprised at how easy it came, even though they’d only had to adapt their marriage to blindness for a short while.
‘Tell me which way to go,’ Leah said. Carrie leant forward and frowned. She had no idea where they were.
‘You need to head towards the station. Take a sharp right before you get there.’ Brody spoke clearly, as if he sensed exactly which direction they were pointing. Five minutes later, they were in the school car park.
‘I’m not sure I can stand to see . . . I was here earlier. It was awful.’ Carrie buried her face in her hands and allowed a moment of comfort from Leah.
On many occasions, she had accompanied victims’ families along with her film crew to the scene of the crime – usually where a loved one had died in a car accident, or been in a pub brawl that had ended in tragedy, or been mugged or raped. The cameraman knew what to do: a wide pan of the scene, the bunches of flowers, the notes, the teddy bears, followed by a close-up cut of their immediate reaction. It was essential to capture that first horror, the raw emotion, the distilled grief. But nothing, she believed, had been as dreadful as seeing her son’s blood spread over the ground. To get through it, she had forced herself to detach, to make-believe she was filming for yet another show, that really her son hadn’t died this morning at all. This morning . . .
‘I’m sorry, you can’t go any further.’ Two policemen stepped forward at the gate that funnelled visitors in from the car park. ‘There’s been an incident.’
‘It was my son,’ Carrie whispered. ‘The incident was my son.’ Brody was between them. Carrie could sense his reluctance at their guidance, but also that he needed their hands on his sleeve. ‘This is his father. We have to see the head teacher.’ Carrie swallowed it all back down.
The policemen glanced at each other and slowly realised who she was, as if the famous Carrie Kent was now only recognisable because of tragedy. They nodded. ‘Follow me.’ One of the officers turned and led them into the drab building.
Why, oh why had Max left boarding school for this?
Jack Rushen, head of Milton Park, was deep in conversation with two other staff members. For a school that would normally be closed and empty at this hour, it was humming with low talk and crisis management. They looked stunned when they saw Carrie shaking in front of them. It was clear they didn’t know what to say.
