From the Cradle
Authors: Louise Voss,Mark Edwards
OTHER TITLES BY LOUISE VOSS AND MARK EDWARDS
Killing Cupid
Catch Your Death
All Fall Down
Forward Slash
OTHER TITLES BY MARK EDWARDS
The Magpies
What You Wish For
Because She Loves Me
OTHER TITLES BY LOUISE VOSS
To Be Someone
Are You My Mother?
Lifesaver
Games People Play
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Louise Voss and Mark Edwards
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477825273
ISBN-10: 1477825274
Cover design by bürosüd
o
Munich,
www.buerosued.de
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940618
Contents
Prologue
It was an emotional nuclear explosion. A few seconds of innocent calm, perhaps a faint falling whizz, the silence as Patrick opened the front door and everything was too quiet . . . Knowing instantly that something was wrong, but not yet having a clue as to how much, how complete and irrevocable that wrongness was.
It had been a particularly long day. Detective Inspector
Patrick
Lennon had been stuck in a windowless interview room for seven hours with an uncooperative drug-addled thug called Dean Kervin, who had a face like a potato that had been boiled several days earlier. Despite the fact that several witnesses and two CCTV cameras had seen Dean smash the window of the sporting goods outlet and beat the security guard to death, he was
stubbornly
denying it. All he kept repeating was ‘It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there.’
Patrick had been desperate all day for some fresh air and a non-stewed coffee, but what was really keeping him going was the thought of walking back into his warm, baby-scented home, and the sticky embrace of his five-month-old daughter Bonnie. A glass of wine in one hand, Bonnie cradled in the crook of his other arm, then a Chinese takeaway in front of a movie with Gill, once Bonnie was fast asleep. He had almost laughed at the thought that such an image would be so welcoming. His teenage self would have ripped the piss out of him so mercilessly – wine and babies? A takeaway in front of the telly? Pathetic.
No. Not pathetic. Happiness, security, the purity of family. What life was all about.
The only spanner in the works on the domestic front was that Gill had been very down recently. Everyone knew it was hard, staying at home all day with a tiny baby, especially when you’d had a responsible and demanding career. Gill was a
barrister
, never happier than when she was tearing apart – eviscerating with words – some lowlife like potato-faced Dean. She did it with such aplomb. Patrick hoped she’d soon regain her spark. Sociable and friendly though she naturally was outside of court, the whole NCT cabal thing, gangs of breastfeeding mums taking over coffee shops and attending baby-music classes, just didn’t do it for her. She had tried, but every time came home complaining that if she had to listen to any more chat about mustardy nappies she would scream . . .
Patrick smiled at the thought as he reversed their bronze Toyota Prius – something else that his teenage self would’ve had a word or two about – into the short driveway of their boxy little townhouse in West Molesey. When he was trying to impress people, he told them he lived ‘near Hampton Court’, whereas in truth West Molesey was a mile and a half away, the poor sibling of the much grander East
Molesey
with its conservation area and plethora of
two-million-pound
properties. He thought that he had never been so happy to be home. He had even stopped at Tesco Metro and bought a bottle of wine and a bunch of gerbera daisies, Gill’s fav
ourites.
Later, he’d wonder if he’d known it from the second his key turned in the lock, or if he’d imagined that he knew.
What he did instantly pick up on, though, was the silence. They were surely at home, because the buggy was in the hallway, and all the lights were on. Had they just popped round to a neighbour’s? Unlikely. The neighbours in their little close had turned out, disappointingly, to be remarkably unfriendly, and Gill hadn’t made any friends in the immediate vicinity. Usually Radio 2 was blaring away, the TV showing
CBeebies
with the sound switched off. The tumble dryer churning, kettle boiling, the familiar noises of Gill clattering around in the kitchen, starting dinner for her and Patrick. There were none of these sounds.
‘Hello?’ Patrick called as he stepped inside and closed the front door behind him. ‘Gill?’
Nothing. Patrick frowned. He took off his leather jacket, hung the car keys on the key rack in the cupboard by the door and put the flowers and wine carefully onto the hall floor. They must be out, he thought – then hesitated. Something told him that they weren’t out. Gooseflesh swept up and down his body, even though he had no reason at that stage to fear anything.
‘Gill, where are you?’ he repeated uneasily, and walked towards the back of the house, down the hall to the kitchen. As he passed the foot of the stairs, a movement made him jump out of his skin.
Gill was sitting on the third stair, an expression on her face the like of which he had never seen on anyone in his life. Her usually pink face was waxy and drained, and her eyes were two dead pools of horror. She was clutching Bonnie’s favourite toy, a knitted Peppa Pig, and rocking soundlessly back and forth.
Patrick gasped, and grabbed her by the shoulders, half-hug, half-challenge. ‘Gill! Sweetheart, what’s the matter!’ He fell to his knees on the stairs in front of her and held her tightly, rocking with her. ‘What’s happened? Has someone died?’
That was Patrick’s first thought – because if something had been wrong with Bonnie, Gill wouldn’t have been sitting on the stairs, she’d be sitting by the cot.
Gill didn’t reply. She didn’t acknowledge him, or even seem to realize that he was there. ‘Talk to me, darling, what’s happened? Gill, please!’
She seemed to Patrick to be half her normal size, diminished by shock and this awful, inchoate grief.
‘Where’s Bonnie?’
Gill immediately stopped rocking. Stopped breathing, clamped her mouth closed, those sensual lips that Patrick had fallen in love with before he even properly met her. She closed her eyes and tightened her fingers into Peppa Pig’s soft pink body.
Then she started moaning. The sound grew in pitch and intensity from moan to groan to bellow and then, opening her mouth again, up into a roar of primal pain that bounced up the walls and sucked every shred of peace out of the house, forever.
Patrick jumped up, a sob already escaping from his throat. ‘Oh my God. Gill, where is she? What’s happened?
WHERE
IS SHE?
’
He pushed his wife to one side and even though it had just been a light push, she toppled sideways and fell down the two remaining stairs to the floor, where she lay motionless, still making the same unearthly howling noise. He raced up the narrow staircase, legs like a marathon runner approaching the final mile, the breath jagged in his chest, and tore round the banister and into Bonnie’s tiny bedroom.
At first he thought that there was a doll lying in her place in the cot; a strange, swollen, purple doll. He took a step into the room and realized that the doll
was
Bonnie. Her limbs were twisted into unnatural shapes and she had clear marks around her throat.
Fingermarks
.
With a roar louder than his wife’s, Patrick released the side of the cot and bent over his lifeless daughter, gasping air into his lungs so that he could try and breathe it into her tiny still ones. With two gentle, shaking fingers he massaged her sternum, praying that he was doing it right, trying desperately to remember the correct steps from the baby CPR course that Gill had insisted they both attend in her pregnancy.
Push, push, breathe. Push, push, breathe
. Bonnie was still purple. She was still warm. That was good.
Push, push, breathe
. His tears dripped onto her closed eyelids.
Push, push, breathe
.
He didn’t know how long he did it for. Time spun into a horrible vortex that seemed to be dragging him down further and further until finally there was the tiniest mew. Bonnie’s eyes opened a crack, and closed again. Her chest, not much bigger than a bag of sugar, heaved very slightly.
Patrick flung himself backwards against the bedroom wall, hyperventilating and sobbing. He grabbed his mobile out of his back pocket, dialled 999, howled for an ambulance. Everything for the next half hour was a blur of movement; cradling
Bonnie
, rubbing her back to keep her baby breaths coming, wondering if she was brain damaged, crying, letting the ambulance men in, watching them clamp a tiny oxygen mask over his da
ughter’s face.
It was while they were doing this that Patrick walked on shaky legs over to his wife, who was still curled in a foetal position on the hall floor, moaning and clutching Bonnie’s toy.
He put his arms around her, lifted her up to a sitting position, cradled her close to him in the same way he had just done to his daughter. She smelled metallic, of fear and sweat. He picked a stray long brown hair off the shoulder of her sweater, and waited till his breath was regular enough to speak. He put his lips to h
er ear:
‘Gillian Louise Lennon, I am arresting you for the attempted murder of Bonnie Elizabeth Lennon. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may be taken down and used as evidence in a court of law . . .’