Before I Let You In (17 page)

For a second I considered abandoning the plan. Stealing the car was one thing – I had Eleanor’s spare keys and it would only take me a few seconds to move it once she was safely out of the way – but stealing Noah … that felt like it was going too far.

But I might not have to actually steal the car for the plan to have maximum effect. What if I just moved it? Even if Eleanor spotted it straight away, those few seconds when she realised it wasn’t where it was supposed to be would be enough, all the more so now she’d been stupid enough to leave her son in it. I had to move fast, though; if she just dumped the project inside the front doors, she might return quickly and I’d be seen. I had no explanation ready for that eventuality, but crossing the car park and slipping the key into the lock, I knew I would think of something.

Sliding into the driver’s seat and turning the key in the ignition, I could feel the adrenalin surging through my veins. All I had to do was ease the car slowly around the corner of the school to the far side of the parents’ parking. I threw a glance at the corner of the school. No sign of Eleanor anywhere. I should get out, make my escape now, but my attention was drawn to the sleeping baby in the back, his breathing gentle and silent. He looked so still and peaceful – how was it that this tiny human being was able to reduce a grown woman to the blubbering, stressed-out mess that Eleanor was becoming?

I reached out a hand to stroke his cheek. It would be so easy to uncouple his straps and lift him from his seat. I could hold him close, snuggle into that warm body. I could show him what a mother should be like; not a resentful, harried shell but someone who would give him everything he needed; someone who would never let a man control her life so completely that she would become useless without him; someone who had no need of another person’s love to make her feel real, rather than a ghost who disappeared when her husband wasn’t looking.

My fingers fumbled with the clasp of the straps, a big red button that was damn near impossible to push in all the way. I knew in that instant that my mind was made up. I was taking him away from all this negativity and betrayal. He wouldn’t grow up a spineless, cheating worm of a man like his father, or married to a needy control freak like his mother. His future would be defined by who he was, not by his fucked-up family.

And that was when he started to stir, his eyes fluttering, his eyeballs rolling back and forth in their sockets, fighting wakefulness. From beneath his dummy came a low moaning noise. I froze. It was like waking up from a dream, one that you desperately wanted to fall back into but you knew the moment was gone. My senses returned. I’d been too long as it was; my luck had been stretched thin, and if I wasn’t careful, it would snap like overloaded elastic.

Without waiting to see if he woke, I shoved open the car door and jumped out, throwing it shut behind me. Clicking the central locking system and cramming the key back into the pocket of my hoody, I jogged back to my tree to wait and watch.

37

Karen

‘How did it go?’

Karen had put her next client on hold to sneak in a phone call to Eleanor between sessions. She’d had her visit from social services that morning, and as far as Karen could tell, she seemed a lot less anxious about it than she had the other day.

‘It was fine.’ Eleanor sounded distracted but calm. ‘I told them the truth: that I’d made a stupid mistake and I’d learned my lesson. There’s no way I’ll let Noah out of my sight again. Adam has offered to cut his hours down for a few weeks and help out a bit more here, let me get a bit of rest. Things will be back to normal in no time.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Of course, why wouldn’t I? It was a stupid thing to do and I won’t let it happen again.’

Karen tried not to sound too judgemental, but she failed to keep the tone from her voice. ‘Because the other day you were convinced that someone had moved your car to try and make you think it had been stolen. Now you’re saying it was all your mistake.’

‘That’s because it was. I didn’t want to admit it the other day, not even to myself, but I made a stupid decision because I was tired. I must have thought I was parking in my usual spot but parked in a different space. When I came out and couldn’t see the car, I panicked, overreacted. It’s not a big deal.’

It had certainly seemed like a big deal on Friday, when she was hyperventilating into a brown paper bag while Karen held Noah and tried to calm her best friend down.

‘Okay, that’s great.’ There was no point in arguing now that Eleanor had made her mind up. If she wanted to believe it was a misunderstanding, that was fine – it made more sense than the wild story she had concocted on Friday about it all being an elaborate scheme by persons unknown to drive her crazy. ‘Let me know if you need anything. I have patients all day today, but if you leave a message with Molly, I can call you again between sessions.’

‘Thanks, and thank you again for the other day. Sorry I was so mental.’ Eleanor tried to keep her voice light, but Karen heard it crack slightly as she said, ‘See you Friday.’

‘Love you.’ Karen signed off with their usual goodbye, but Eleanor had already hung up.

Karen’s last client that morning had been one of her more interesting ones. At the age of forty-two, he’d undergone hypnotherapy to try and find the cause of his issues with food, only to find out that when he was four years old, his mother would alternate between force-feeding him and starving him as a punishment for the smallest slight. Given that his mother had died three years previously, he had no way of knowing if this was a real or false memory, and no way of getting closure. The hypnotherapist had panicked at the implications of the discovery and swiftly referred him to Karen, and they were making slow progress using letter therapy. These were the types of cases she had always wanted to deal with – ones where she could really make a difference to a person’s life. That was all she’d ever wanted to do.

Michael arrived after that session to take her to lunch. Karen still wondered how he managed to turn up at the most perfect times, exactly when she needed him, like the proverbial lucky penny. He’d looked amazing, as he always did, and as she leaned into his dark grey suit she inhaled his aftershave, trying to imprint the scent on her mind for when she had to let him go again. The weeks went so much faster than the weekends; it felt like the twelve-month wait for one day of Christmas.

‘How’s work?’ he asked, trying – and failing – to look suave as he wound noodles around his chopsticks and they fell off for the third time in a row.

Karen laughed, motioning to the woman behind the Chinese takeaway counter. ‘Can we get a fork, please?’

The place had only three tables for a handful of eat-in customers, and the other two were empty, so she had no concerns about being overheard as she answered his question. Michael knew she couldn’t go into specifics about her patients, so they had code names for them and their situations. Her professional ethics allowed this game on the grounds that it wasn’t any different from all the scholarly articles she was permitted to publish as long as identities were concealed.

Karen nodded. ‘Mmm, okay. Travis is still referring to me as “boss” in every other condescending sentence, even though I’m not going to start my training until after Ken’s retirement. The high-class Hail Mary was a bit intense this week,’ she continued, keeping her voice neutral as she referred to Jessica Hamilton. A high-class Hail Mary was a woman who didn’t have a real problem; usually they had done something they wanted to get off their chest and used therapy as a confessional rather than a way to explore why they behaved the way they did. Changing their behaviour was usually not on the cards.

‘She still coming?’ Michael nodded his thanks to the pretty young waitress who brought his fork.

‘Yep. And she’s no closer to figuring out that the reason she hates her lover’s wife is because she feels guilty that she’s screwing a married man with children.’ Karen longed to mention Adam’s name.
You don’t have any evidence. Remember your ethics. Remember your promotion.

‘She sounds like a charmer. I’ve said it before, Karen, I just don’t get your profession. You know the exact reason this woman is beating herself up. Why can’t you just tell her?’

‘Believe me, I’d love to.’ She managed to inhale the rest of her beef noodles without any slopping down the front of her beige shirt. ‘But people refuse to believe that they might be responsible for their own disordered feelings. If I tell her straight, that means admitting she’d have to break up with him in order to fix the problem. Which she has no intention of doing. So she’ll come to her sessions and go away convinced that it can’t be
her
head that’s screwed up, because she saw a psychiatrist and it didn’t fix her.’
Or she’ll try to find another way to break up Adam and Eleanor.

‘Which works out better for Robert, I guess. How would he make his money if you fixed all his clients after one session?’

‘And how would you cope with me having to be a kept woman?’

Her voice was light-hearted, but Michael’s face darkened and neither of them said any more.

‘How’s Eleanor doing after the other day?’ he asked when he finally spoke again.

Karen grimaced. ‘I called her this morning. She sounded weird.’

‘Weirder than usual?’

‘Arse. You don’t have to be so mean about them, you know; they love you.’

He smiled. ‘Who doesn’t? You know I like them, I just think it’s weird how they depend on you so much. I mean, you’re all in your thirties; shouldn’t they be grown up by now? Eleanor’s got two kids of her own and she’s still dragging you out of work at the slightest problem.’

‘You don’t get it because you’re a man. Men don’t have these kinds of friendships. They rely on me because that’s what they’ve always done, since we were five. I’m the stable one. The sensible one. The one they can depend on.’

‘And what happens to you when they don’t need you any more?’

‘That’s not going to happen,’ she replied confidently. ‘They will always need me.’

38

Bea

Her eyes were closed but she could smell cut grass and river water. The breeze cut through her hair and she pumped her legs harder to push herself further out over the water. The branch that the rope was twisted around creaked dangerously, and Bea’s fingers gripped the swing until her knuckles turned white. She hadn’t thought too much about how she was going to get herself back on to the riverbank, not stopping to consider when she pulled the dirty old tyre swing towards her that her thirty-five-year-old body might not be as supple as her sixteen-year-old one had been. Not to mention that it was long summer days she and her friends had spent down here rather than cold autumn ones, and their forays on to the rope swing had nearly always ended by plunging into the refreshingly icy water. These days the water just looked filthy and scum-topped; it was a wonder none of them had caught E. coli.

She often came back here – although she didn’t tell the others – to relive those carefree teenage days, the days before any of them realised that bad things could happen to them.

They had found this stretch of river, with its dusty mud platform reaching out into the water and hidden by trees and bushes higher up the bank. You had to climb or slide down a narrow gap in the greenery to where half a dozen teenagers lounged on the dirt platform passing around two-litre bottles of White Lightning and lemonade bottles filled with whatever concoctions they could steal from their parents’ alcohol cupboards. The sun cast leafy patterns on their denim shorts as they took turns boosting each other on to the rope swing – it had been a branch back then; no sophisticated tyre set-up back in the old days – screaming as they tried to make the leap back on to dry land and failed.

And then there was the last time …

They hadn’t visited the river in years; they had grown up, moved on. All three of them were at university, and the boys they used to try to impress had long moved on to other girls, less educated and more fun. Adulthood had grown on them like a tumour, almost undetectable at first, and by the time they had noticed, it was terminal. They had returned home for the summer after their first year – the year Bea’s life had veered so far off course it had formed a permanently new track – with an urgency that none of them could explain. It was as though with the knowledge that bad things could happen to good people the veil had been lifted from their eyes and they were fighting it with everything they had. That summer they reverted to their adolescent selves: they took Saturday evening jobs in bars and spent their days sunbathing in Eleanor’s parents’ garden, or down by the river. The nights they had off work were passed in an alcoholic haze, just the three of them this time, wearing jeans and Doc Martens rather than as little as they could get away with. It felt to Bea as though her friends knew she was spiralling out of control and they had two choices: try to pull her back, or stick as close to her as possible while she fell.

‘Who’s going to boost me?’

The sun had begun to push its way through the clouds now, and Bea let her legs stop pumping and leaned back gently. She could hear the words as clearly as if she’d spoken them out loud only seconds ago; pictured herself stumbling to her feet, dusting off her jeans and attempting an upright position.

‘Come on, we can’t come to the river and not swing. Who’s going to boost me?’

Karen had opened one eye lazily, looked at her and closed it again.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t go swimming with the amount you’ve had to drink.’

‘You’re wrong.’ Bea poked a finger in the direction of her friend, despite Karen not being able to see her. ‘That’s eating. You can’t go swimming until two hours after you’ve eaten. There’s no law on drinking.’

‘Karen’s right, Bea.’

But Bea wasn’t listening. She was already wrapping the rope around her wrist, wedging her foot against the tree to boost herself up. She’d grown taller since the last time she was there, slimmed down a bit too, and it was easier than she’d expected to pull herself on to the seat without any help. It wedged uncomfortably between her legs and the branch above groaned almost theatrically, but she’d consumed too much alcohol to notice, or maybe just too much to care. She kicked her legs against the tree, sending herself spinning out over the river, closing her eyes to stop the alcohol surging back up into her throat. When she opened them again, the world was a blur of green and brown, the trees, the bank, the river itself all merged together so completely that she couldn’t pick out what was what any more.