Hawthorn and Child (23 page)

– I’m not religious.  

– Neither am I.  

– Can I have the baby?  

– Yes.  

He didn’t move.  

– Do you have a gun?  

He didn’t answer.  

– Do you know the people in this house?  

He didn’t answer.  

– The boy. Do you know the boy?  

He didn’t answer.

– I have so many stories, he said. Turn off the light.

He used his lighter to see his way back to the child, and his fingers burned and when he put them to his mouth he tasted his own warm blood. She stared at the flame.  

– Don’t move, he shouted.  

She jumped and her face crumpled and she started to cry.  

– Shit. Not you – Child.  

He grimaced. What a name for a man.  

– I’m not moving, Moss. I haven’t moved an inch.  

– I’ll shoot the baby.

– No you won’t.

He pocketed his lighter. He pulled the knife out of his leg pocket and looked at it. If he stuck it in his waistband somehow it might look like the grip of a pistol. And it would cut him. He stuck the blade under his belt at his back, within reach of his right hand, the hilt holding it. He wondered for a second if there might be a toy gun in the boy’s room. He pulled out his lighter again and looked around. The baby was crying steady, complaining. He was able to ignore her. He wondered if there was a length of time they gave Child before they decided that he was dead, and called the telephone or switched on a loudspeaker. He couldn’t see a telephone. There was a hairbrush on the bedside table. What sort of mother leaves a newborn in the care of a kid playing computer games in another room?

The baby was soft and she cried more when he lifted her. Jesus had two younger brothers and two younger sisters. Something like that. He would watch them sleep, and carry them around, and sing to them. He liked to sing to them. When they were older they would try to make him sing to them again. But he became embarrassed for a while and would not sing. And then song became something else that he did not do. He had put so much behind him by the time he started.

– Sshhh sshhh little girl. You’re OK.

He carried her to the door.

– Have you moved?

– Not an inch.

– I’m coming out. I’m armed.

– Yeah. No problem. Take it easy.

He opened the door wider with his foot and shuffled through it. Child’s silhouette was as he’d left it, standing on the stairs with its hands laid flat on the upturned back of the sofa. All the dark seemed to fill with little ghosts. A flickering blue glow came from the street.

– You made her cry.

– Lift your hands. Both hands. You hold her with both hands, OK?

Child nodded with the glow behind him, nothing like a halo. The baby stopped crying and listened, and Moss held her out. Child’s glasses shot sparks, and the muscles of Moss’s arms ached in the quiet. The city was never like this. He paused. He stopped. He held her in mid-air.

– What?

– If I give her to you what will happen?

– I told you. I take her out. I hand her over to her mother.

– What will happen to me?

– You have a phone?

– No.

– Well. I don’t know. The negotiating guys will arrive. They’ll send in a phone or something. You can talk with them. Demand a flight to Cuba. Or a pizza. Whatever.

He withdrew her. She gurgled. She smelled awful. He would have to change her, feed her. They would wonder about that. Him and the baby. Not him only, but him and the baby.

– Come on, Moss. You give me the baby and I’ll tell them you have a gun.

His face was a shadow.

– What?

– I’ll tell them you have a gun. It’s what you want, isn’t it? Big siege. Days, maybe. Centre of attention. With a bit of luck you’ll get shot. And you’ll be the people’s hero and we’ll look like trigger-happy shits again.

It was Jesus who had beaten the boy. But he said nothing. He said nothing because he knew that there was nothing to be made of it. Of what had happened. That it had simply happened. He loved his mother, and he knew that he would cause her grief, unbearable grief, and he wished to protect her, and cause her only joy. And he knew the boy was just a boy, saying foolish things that were not true, and that the insult really was not against his mother but against him, that it was a test, an exploration of his strength, as these things are measured amongst boys. And he knew that though he could kill the boy with a thought, he did not want to kill anyone with a thought. And that the boy would love him if he beat him and was fair in the beating. So he beat him. And he was fair in the beating. And the boy loved him and was changed. Later, when he was older, Jesus would experiment with unfairness, with cruelty. But as this age, he was fair.

He held her out again. She gurgled in his arms. Her tiny fingers stretched and grasped in the half light like an upturned insect. He held her out. He couldn’t see Child’s hands. He thought he could see Child’s hands. He tipped the baby forward, rolled her, almost, and Child said something, and the baby seemed to be taken, and his hands were empty and she was gone, and Child shouted something, and something fell, and there was movement, a blur of it, and a small white shape seemed to bounce off the upturned edge of the sofa, and roll or trickle to the right, over the banister, and down through the panicking ghosts to the floor of the hall, where it stopped with a split thump like a punch.

There was silence. Nothing. The bundle didn’t move.

– Jesus fucking Christ.

Child turned on the stairs and tumbled down and wheeled and was at her side, on his knees, fumbling.

– Jesus fucking Christ, he said.

Then he said nothing else.

All the dark looked up at Moss. Jesus is appalled by man.

– Child?

Child stood and seemed to take his time going to the light switch and snapping it on. The ghosts all scattered and the dark was gone. The baby lay broken.

There was a gap.

They came out through the smallest darkness, a night that lasted nothing, and Child moaned into the cold about sleep and his dreams, and Hawthorn hummed for warmth and thought about men, various men, whom he moved about his mind like furniture.

Rivers talked to them in a corridor. A conversation Hawthorn would have preferred to have sitting down, over a coffee. With a little back and forth perhaps. A little teasing out of options. There was too much in it. His legs hurt. He scribbled in his notebook, scratched his eyebrows with the pen, brushed crumbs from his jacket, looked at his boss’s lapels. Rivers wasn’t doing options. It was probably some sort of management thing – talking to them in a noisy corridor, getting in people’s way.

– And drop by Johnson at some stage and get the sheets from those last couple of weeks. October. We need to get the story straight on that Rafsan thing.

Hawthorn glanced at Child. He was nodding.

Johnson. Sheets. Rafsan.

– And Mishazzo is your priority then. After that. We need to do it or drop it, and I’m not dropping it. So clear this crap today and then it’s Mishazzo to the end.

People were brushing past them. Someone knocked his elbow, apologized. Rivers leaned a hand on the wall and lifted a foot and did something with his sock. They were about fifteen feet from his empty office. Hawthorn’s fingers were stiff. His writing looked ridiculous.

– Thank you, gentlemen.

– Sir.

Child flung the car around and Hawthorn dozed. He thought about his father and his brother. He thought about the empty floor of his kitchen and the window that looked over roofs. He remembered or imagined, he couldn’t tell, certain sexual scenes. He looked at the doorways, then the sky. He mumbled.

– What?

– Nothing. Rivers annoys me.

Child grunted.

– He’s mostly bullshit.

– We’re all mostly bullshit.

Hawthorn yawned.

– Are we.

– We are.

They were out of their usual area. Hawthorn couldn’t remember why. He went rummaging for his notebook.

– What was all that, talking to us in the fucking corridor?

– He likes to look busy.

– And, said Child, this is Mickey Mouse, this is. Rafsan, for fuck’s sake.

Hawthorn was trying to read street signs, and his notebook.

– Where are we? Who the fuck is Rafsan?

– I think he’s over it though. You losing the driver kid. He’s decided to leave it. He has to make something happen with Mishazzo now, you know? He’s leaning that way. You think?

– I didn’t lose the driver. Who is Rafsan?

Child laughed.

– Oh, Hawthorn. You are a terrible fucking detective.

–
Johnson. Sheets. Rafsan.
What the fuck is that? And where the fuck are we?

– Copenhagen in the springtime.

They were on Waterloo Bridge.

– What are we doing down here?

– You keep the worst notes ever. And because you write things down you think you’ve understood them. And remembered them. And you haven’t. You’ve just scribbled some random fucking words and your brain has neglected to retain any single piece of information it’s received.

Hawthorn grunted. Child opened the window.

– The film place, remember? The guy in the film place.

– Right.

He thought of his father. His father would run a bath with hot water only, then let it cool down. He refused to run cold water. He liked a steamy bathroom, he said. Stupid.

– What guy in what film place?

*

– You see dead people?

– Among others. Yes.

– Like the movie?

– I’m not dead.

– No. No, you’re not dead. You’re the kid in the movie. I’d be the dead one. If we’re talking about the movie. I’m Bruce Willis. You’re the boy. What do you mean,
among others?

– I see people who are alive as well.

– Like me?

– No. People who aren’t there. Or … older versions of people. I mean younger versions of them. I see my mother sometimes. She’s alive. She’s nearly seventy. When I see her she’s my age. Or younger.

– How do you know it’s her?

– I know my own mother.

– These are the emails. There are twelve. The last one arrived yesterday, after I talked to you. Or your colleague.

He handed Hawthorn some print-outs.

– When was the first one?

– About two weeks ago.

– So they’ve been coming in pretty regularly.

– Every couple of days.

Hawthorn read one of them.

He handed it to Child and glanced through the others.

– We’ll need the long headers on these, he said.

– The what?

– At the top there. It gives the email address, but the system also gets the I.P. address. Which gives us the location of the computer it was sent from.

He looked blank.

– Your IT guys will do it for us.

– I haven’t told anyone here. Except my boss.

– OK. Well, we can be discreet about it. But it’s important that we get that information.

– OK.

He was about thirty. Skinny. He seemed very worried.

– You have no idea who this might be?

– No.

– Just to your work address?

– Yes.

– Nothing odd showing up on your Facebook or in chat or any other websites or anything?

– Nothing at all.

– You went to Poland?

– To a film festival, yes.

– He has that?

– Yes, he mentions it in one of them.

Child read it out.

–
Did you like the polish girls you raped? You like them 12 and 13? I’m fucking watching you.

Child had his glasses perched on the top of his head. Hawthorn stared at him. He’d never seen that before. Child took the glasses down and put them back on to look at the guy.

– Who knew you were going to Poland?

– Well. Anyone here, obviously. I mentioned it to some friends. It’s not like it was a secret or anything.

Child did the thing with the glasses again. Sitting them on top of his head like sunglasses. Hawthorn smiled.

– He sort of bangs on about the paedophile thing, Child said.

Hawthorn looked back at the guy. Phil.

– I’m not a paedophile.

– Why would he say that?

– Because it’s a horrible thing to say? Child nodded.

– So you have no idea who this might be?

– None at all. Really none. I have tried to work it out. But I can’t. I don’t know.

– Are you involved in politics at all?

– No.

– Do you own property?

– No, I rent. Why?

– Not involved in any legal disputes or litigation of any sort?

– No, nothing.

– Do you have a relative who might be involved in anything like that? Any sort of dispute?

– Nothing I know about.

– Any ex-girlfriends or boyfriends you think might get into something like this?

– No.

– You’re sure.

– Yes. Completely sure.

– So you have no names to give us? To check out? No suspicions about anyone?

– You’re making me feel like it’s my fault that I don’t know who it is. I just don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea.

Child nodded.

– OK. Thanks. If you could point us towards your IT guys. And we’ll get back to you when we know something.

They spent another hour there. Hawthorn wrote a lot of notes. It was warm in the building. He liked the cinema smell. As they were leaving he grabbed a programme for the LGBT Film Festival. Child rolled his eyes.

– Don’t leave that in my fucking car.

– It’s not your fucking car.

– You want to drive?

– What’s this thing with your glasses?