LITMIR.BIZ

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and check he had got to school before his first class began. He would moan at her for mollycoddling him, but the memory of those brief minutes when she had taken her eyes off her youngest son and lost him forever haunted her every time Ricky went out of the door, even now.

      Ethan stood up and pushed in his chair, straightening himself even as Lucy crumpled, leaning back against the kitchen side with her head in her hands, trying to fold into herself. Her head whipped back up though when Ethan approached her.

      ‘Just go, please. You shouldn’t be here.’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without quite knowing what he was apologising for, ‘but if you do want to talk; if there’s anything I, or we, can do…’ His voice trailed off as she turned her face away, dismissing him, and he gave up and walked towards the door. Before he opened it he heard her speak, hissing like a cat under her breath, so that he had to strain to hear her.

      ‘Find out where he is.’

      But when Ethan looked over at her she had turned fully away with her back to him and so he left, closing the door quietly behind him.

      Those last words, uttered in that low angry hissing that sounded wholly unlike any side of Lucy he had ever known, resounded through his head all day, until he felt he was going crazy.

      An hour later Lucy herself wondered if she would go crazy. Two aspirin had dulled the pain in her head but failed to get rid of it completely, and the constant shrill ringing of the telephone had threatened to render them completely useless until she had given in and unplugged it. The first call, moments after Ethan had left, had been from Ricky, for once pre-empting his mother’s worrying and letting her know he was safe at school. Then two calls from reporters and one inviting her to talk on the radio, all of which Lucy hung up on without saying anything further. Then her mother, then Susan, wearing her out with well-meaning but pointless questions. Of course she wasn’t okay. No, there was absolutely nothing they could do to help. The only thing she wanted was an answer to her last question to Ethan, and she knew that was impossible.

      Finally, after a call from a shrill-voiced female journalist from the Telegraph, who Lucy had none too gently slammed the phone down on, she went and lay on her bed, overwhelmed and feeling completely alone. Perhaps she shouldn’t have rebuffed Ethan’s attempts to connect but really, what was the point? They could cry on each other’s shoulders and even start campaign plans but none of it would be any use, and at the end of it all Ethan would go home to the wife who didn’t understand him and she would be alone again. She lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, about to drift into sleep when the doorbell rang yet again. For a second she wondered if Ethan had returned, and wasn’t sure if she was annoyed or pleased, but it wasn’t Ethan’s knock. Funny how people had their own knocks, their own patterns and rhythms that, once you were familiar with them, heralded their presence. This was a stranger.

      Lucy opened the door to a strange woman who smiled warmly but had strangely cold eyes. Lucy knew she was a reporter even before she spoke.

      ‘Lucy Randall? I’m from the Sun. I wondered if you would like to take the chance to express your opinions on the early release of Terry Prince.’

      The woman smiled. She had a sweet voice, so polite, but eyes like a snake, Lucy thought. She smiled back.

      ‘Fuck. Off.’ Then she slammed the door in her face.

      Lucy went to go back upstairs, feeling pleased with herself until she realised that was the second time she had used the ‘f’ word that morning. She who, in the transition from council estate single parent to middle-class surgeon’s wife, had stopped using any profanity stronger than ‘damn’. It felt quite good, she decided. In a single moment of revelation that she could in fact say and do whatever she damn well wanted, Lucy turned and flung open the front door. The reporter was hovering at the end of the drive talking to a man with a digital camera and nervous expression.

      ‘Come in,’ she said, as the woman turned to her in surprise at the about-face, then started towards her with a triumphant smile. ‘You can have all the opinions you want.’

      Chapter Four Friday

      It had been a Wednesday when she lost Jack. She had let him pedal his little trike out on the front yard while she loaded the washing machine, it never occurring to her that he was anything less than safe. He had been in her line of sight both through the kitchen window and the side door which she had left open, and when she ducked down to sort through the laundry basket, sorting the colours from the white, she must have only taken her eyes off him for two minutes at most. Yet when she stood back up he was gone.

      Lucy ran outside, calling to him, but she hadn’t started to panic at that point, not the breath-stopping, freezing panic she would feel later. She expected him to be out on the road – a cul-de-sac, so there was little chance of cars – or in a neighbour’s yard playing with their children, or even in old Mrs Clary’s kitchen, asking for biscuits.

      Ten minutes later she had been frantic, and twelve minutes later she was calling the police, her hands shaking and her voice barely comprehensible to the impatient switchboard operator on the other end of the call.

      It took them six hours to find his body, and twenty-four to discover his killer. Terry Prince, fourteen years old and a pupil at the private school her eldest son Ricky would later win a scholarship for. She had been so proud of him, especially after the way Jack's death had affected him – to the point of taking him to a psychiatrist – but the pride was shot through with the sharp stab of grief. For had Jack been alive no doubt Ricky’s presence would have guaranteed her youngest a place there too. It was a fine school. Not that she was stuck-up, for Lucy was the product of hard-working yet poor parents and the finest education an inner city state school had to offer, but like most parents she longed for better for her own offspring. Especially Jack. Not that she would ever admit it to anyone, and barely even to herself, but her youngest son was the one closest to her heart.

      Lucy had been nineteen when she had Ricky, on her own and totally unprepared, and he had been such a fretful baby. Almost as if he had known his arrival was unplanned and unwelcomed by everyone apart from Lucy herself, who was far too frightened by impending motherhood to greet him with much joy.

      But just a few years later, now married – and to a private surgeon, no less – Jack’s arrival had been everything Ricky’s was not. Everything had seemed perfect, from conception to birth to beyond. There had been none of the crippling depression that had sunk her after Ricky and even the labour had been a breeze, after a glowing pregnancy with no sickness and only the cutest of baby bumps.

      Sometimes she would lean over Jack's cot and watch him sleeping, her heart close to bursting with love. Only along with that rush of love for her child would come a creeping fear that she tried resolutely to swallow down, but that would stick in her chest undigested: the fear that she would lose him; that such perfection was too good to be true. Although her mother had reassured her that it was normal, that she herself had been so scared her babies would cease breathing in their sleep she had stayed awake for hours, Lucy looking back knew better. She should have known; should have never let him out of her sight for even a second. Should should should. Surely the cruellest word in the English language.

      The guilt had crippled her for the first few years, weighing her down like the pressing of stones, a crushing yet excruciatingly slow death. Everyone told her it wasn’t her fault. Everyone except her loving husband of course, whose eyes were full of unspoken accusations. Everyone except her mother-in-law, who grieved copiously and loudly but never had a kind word for Lucy. But then she had never liked her, had always wondered – quite often aloud – what her clever and handsome son had seen in a teenage single mother. The atmosphere between Lucy and her husband Ethan had become so strained and weighted down with grief that she had almost been relieved when he had left her for a paediatric nurse at the hospital he worked at. A petite, pretty blonde who looked a lot like Lucy before she had become grey and faded with grief.

      The guilt had been partially replaced by rage then; rage at the world, at Ethan and herself, and of course at Terry Prince. The adolescent

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