Nowhere Child Read online

  Elizabeth had promised the assessment wouldn’t take long, but Emma was terrified of the outcome. Much as she was missing Ollie, she knew he would be safe with Tom. What had kept her awake was the thought that at some point she might have to break every promise she had ever made to Tasha. Each time she closed her eyes the scene in which she was forced to say goodbye to her stepdaughter played out in her mind, and the tears wouldn’t stop, so Emma had decided to get up at 6 a.m. and do some cleaning. Nowhere needed it, but she had to do something.

  More than anything, she wished she had somebody to talk to. There was always Tom, but, good friend that he was, she didn’t feel able to open her whole heart to him – to bare her soul. And she was still a bit mad at him, even though she knew everything he had said and done was right.

  He had looked aghast when she had presented him with Ollie but he had risen to the challenge. She knew he liked babies and had always hoped he would have more. His daughter Lucy was growing up fast, and Tom was a man who should have a family around him. A pity things with that Leo girl seemed to have gone off the boil, although Tom still refused to talk about it.

  That was typical of Emma and Tom’s relationship, really. They were friends, but they held so much of themselves back. The only person Emma had ever been truly herself with was Jack. She recognised now that her relationship with Tasha’s and Ollie’s father had been emotionally undemanding, which had been precisely what she had wanted and needed at that time. They had got along just fine, and David had been a thoughtful and considerate husband, although she had acknowledged to herself that at some point during their brief marriage she had realised he was a weak man. She just hadn’t known quite how weak.

  It had been different with Jack. He saw into her soul, and the only way he had been able to stop her from seeing into his was by running away. He should have trusted her to help him deal with the mistakes he had made.

  Emma threw the cleaning sponge into the sink and dried her hands. She couldn’t talk to Jack – she had no idea where he was or how to contact him – but she couldn’t help hoping that if she poured her heart out in a note on her computer, he would read it. She didn’t know how often he sneakily logged into her computer, but she was certain that he was reading the sticky notes on her desktop. That would be his style – his way of checking on her to make sure she was okay.

  She sat down at the table and opened her laptop. As it sprang to life, she wondered what she could say – what words she could use that, to anybody else, would look like her own private musings, but to Jack would mean so much more.

  She opened a new sticky, and began to compose her note as if she were writing a journal.

  Yesterday I got Tasha back. And I lost Ollie. I never thought I would lose him again, but social services said they had to protect the children, and until they are confident that Tasha isn’t a risk, one or the other of them had to go. So now Tom has got Ollie, and I miss him so much that I keep having to wrap my arms around my body to hold myself together. I feel as if I have a wide open space inside me, hollow and empty. But Tasha can’t know this. She needs reassurance that she is just as important to me.

  Tom wants her to give evidence against Finn McGuinness, and I know that people are looking for her. His people. They contacted me. They threatened me, and Ollie. I don’t know where it’s going to end, because convicting him isn’t going to make him lie down. He’ll want revenge, and I don’t know what to do. Tom says he’ll keep us safe, but will McGuinness ever give up?

  She stopped writing. Emma had no idea whether Jack would see this. Had she been dreaming when she thought he had moved things around on her desktop? Maybe the computer did that automatically. It had given her such comfort to think that she could share her thoughts with him, but now she realised that it was probably just wishful thinking.

  19

  The prison guard stood with his back to the wall, trying – as he had been taught – to be unobtrusive. He was only here to deal with any problems that might break out. And it sometimes happened. Wives came to see their husbands, and occasionally their disappointment overflowed to the point of a punch to the head. He never blamed the women for this. Imagine finding out you’re married to a scumbag? Mind you, most of the wives already knew. But there were always a few who were shocked to find out that things weren’t quite the way they had always hoped they would be with their very own Mr Wonderful.

  Today, though, the guard kept his eyes fixed firmly on Finn McGuinness and his visitor – a young chap who had been before to see this prisoner, and the guard didn’t like the look of their body language.

  When he had taken this job, he had decided to try to learn about body language so he could spot things brewing. He had tried to learn lip-reading too, but McGuinness had grown a beard and a moustache. He barely opened his thin lips when he spoke, and his words even at close quarters were muffled by the hairs that practically covered his mouth.

  Right now he was leaning forwards, saying something to his visitor, who shot back in his chair as if he had been head-butted.

  ‘Are you sure?’ The guard could make out the words of the clean-shaven man.

  McGuinness’s eyes turned blacker than ever with a spark of anger that nobody would like to have directed their way. The young man looked a bit sick as he listened and then nodded once.

  He slid out from behind the table, unable to push his seat back because it was bolted to the floor, and said something that looked to the guard like ‘consider it done.’

  McGuinness was up to something, and the guard wished to God he knew what it was.

  20

  Emma is pacing the floor, looking at her watch every few minutes. The pug-faced Elizabeth woman came to see me again for an hour this morning, asking me questions. I presume she’s ‘assessing’ me. For some reason I felt the urge to blank her. I wanted to go back to being that kid who came here all those months ago – the kid who ignored everybody and refused to speak. Sometimes it feels safer not to care what anybody else thinks of you, and when she asked me a question I let my face settle into an uninterested sneer.

  Then I saw the look of horror on Emma’s face. What are you doing? the face said, and I almost gasped out loud at my own stupidity.

  This is where I want to be. I have to be brave and let them get to the heart of me, perhaps a place where nobody has been for a long time. Except Izzy. And maybe Andy.

  I’ve started to get jittery since she left. Tom will be here soon, and he should have some news about Andy. If he’s dead that will be something else that’s my fault. He shouldn’t have protected me. He should have let them get me. It would have saved Emma a lot of pain, that’s for sure.

  The doorbell rings and Emma runs, almost skidding on the wooden hall floor, to answer the door.

  ‘Ollie,’ she cries, and I hear a chuckle from Ollie and a shout of ‘Mummy’ followed by a disgruntled ‘Ay’. I guess she squeezed him too tightly.

  Emma is practically dancing as she makes her way into the kitchen, with a smiling Tom in her wake. Her world is complete again, and I slouch down in my chair, trying not to be noticed.

  ‘Ollie – say hi to Tasha,’ Emma says, not allowing me to stay outside of her circle. Ollie unwraps his arms from Emma’s neck and turns, reaching out to me instead.

  Emma smiles. ‘Take him, Tasha. Give him a cuddle – he gives great cuddles, don’t you Ollie?’

  I slowly push my chair back and walk round the table.

  ‘Tasha,’ Ollie shouts, reaching out further.

  I look from Emma to Tom, trying to decide if it really is all right, or whether pug-face will reappear miraculously and whip the baby out of my arms. They both nod their encouragement, and I pull his warm little body close.

  He nearly strangles me with the strength of his grip around my neck and plants a very wet kiss on my cheek, which makes me laugh out loud. I see Emma’s eyes fill with tears, as if there haven’t been enough of those, and I squash my nose into Ollie’s pudgy cheek and give him a kiss
back. I hand him back to Emma, not because I ever want to let go of him, but because I can see her hands are twitching by her sides as she tries to prevent herself from grabbing him back to squeeze him some more.

  Tom comes towards me and reaches out a hand to touch me gently on the arm.

  ‘I’ve got some news for you, Tasha. It’s about Andy.’

  I feel a shiver run up my spine. Please don’t be dead, Andy.

  ‘We’ve found him, and he’s okay. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. When he was admitted to hospital he was critical – he’d lost a lot of blood – but your intervention with the handbag was better than you could have ever dreamed. The guy who chased you found Andy, and his wife – the woman whose handbag you stole – turned out to be a doctor. Between them they managed to stem the flow of blood until the ambulance arrived. She went with him to the hospital and basically saved his life.’

  I don’t know what to say and I feel myself begin to shake. Tom reaches out to me and lowers me gently onto a chair.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s taken us a while to get the good news to you, but I wanted to be absolutely certain we had the right boy. Believe it or not there was more than one stabbing in Manchester that night.’

  Andy. My head is full of pictures of him – laughing when he brought back a warm meat and potato pie one day that he’d kept hot inside his hoodie. His top never stopped smelling of gravy after that, because of course we could never wash any clothes. We just wore the same ones until we managed to find or nick something new. Then there was the time that he stood up to that man and nearly got his throat slit. And the mental image of him begging on the street and exposing his twisted arm to get me some money nearly makes me cry.

  ‘Becky Robinson went to see him in hospital,’ Tom says. ‘She told him you’re safe and well, and he was very happy to hear that. I guess that boy really looked out for you, didn’t he?’

  I don’t know what to say. He saved my life.

  ‘He told Becky why he’d run away and he said he’d always felt bad about keeping it from you. The thing is, he’s a proud lad and he didn’t want you to feel sorry for him. But now he thinks he’d feel better if you know. Do you want me to tell you?’

  I can’t speak. I do want to know, but it’s going to hurt because I’ve always known he has suffered and I can’t stand to think of Andy’s pain. Tom waits, and finally I nod my head.

  I let Tom’s words flow around me, hearing them but not really absorbing them. He tells me how Andy’s father was a respectable businessman, so when Andy was injured over the years nobody suspected his father was hurting him – he just joked about how clumsy his son was.

  Tom carries on, and still I try not to focus on Andy’s pain.

  Later. I’ll think about it later.

  ‘His mother wasn’t able to protect him,’ Tom says, ‘She was scared herself, and I think she tried to blot it all out – to pretend it wasn’t happening.’

  He pauses, and I know the worst is yet to come. His voice becomes gentle, and quieter, and yet each word punches a hole in the barrier to my friend’s pain that I am hiding behind.

  ‘Then Andy’s sister died. She was very unhappy, and Andy thinks he should have known what she was planning to do so he could have helped her, protected her.’

  Oh, Andy.

  ‘Was the father hitting her too?’ I ask.

  ‘No. He was hurting her, but in a different way.’

  Tom doesn’t need to say more. Abuse of that kind was all too common in the world I grew up in.

  ‘Andy had no idea, and when his sister decided to take her own life he attacked his father. His arm got broken in the fight, but he just stuck it in a sling and left home the same day.’

  I can’t get the mental image out of my mind. It’s as if it’s on a loop – Andy making himself a sling, trying to pack a bag with one arm, walking out of the kind of house I imagine he lived in, and off down the road without looking back. Over and over it plays, while Tom’s words wash over me as he tells me the rest: the father’s prison sentence; the mother’s rehab; the new home and family that they’re going to find for Andy.

  I realise that I will probably never see Andy again but I’m happy for him. He’s going to be safe too, and I know I’m never going to forget him.

  I suddenly feel so lucky. However crap my life has been, at least I had my mum for six years, then Izzy and now Emma and Ollie. And at the worst time in my life I had Andy – a boy who had never had a happy day in his life, but whose only wish was to protect me because he hadn’t been able to save his sister.

  For the first time ever, I feel as if nothing else can go wrong for me now.

  *

  Neither Tasha nor Emma looked as if they had slept a wink, as far as Tom could see. He was sorry for them and the added stress they were going through, but if they wanted to be a family then a few more hoops had to be negotiated.

  Tasha’s face as he told her the news about her friend, though, was a picture. When this was all over, perhaps he would be able to find a way for the two kids to be in touch with each other.

  Andy’s wish to protect Tasha meant he had told her one lie that Tom wasn’t going to divulge. She believed him to be fourteen, but he was actually only twelve.

  Tom was sure Andy had said he was older so Tasha would let him look after her. If she’d known he was younger, she would have thought she had to look after him, and that wasn’t what he wanted. Tom hoped that by saving Tasha the way he did, Andy might now be able to forgive himself for failing to save his sister – something that was in no way his fault.

  He was a brave lad, and braver than Tasha realised. Becky Robinson had been shocked by what she saw when she visited Andy in hospital.

  ‘Tom – he was lying in bed with bandages around his stomach, so his chest and arms were bare. He’s got loads of tiny scars all over his upper body – deep pink, shiny areas. The nurse said they’re all cigarette burns. She let slip, although she probably shouldn’t have, that as well as the broken arm at some stage his ribs have been broken too, possibly more than once.’

  Tom would personally have liked to seek out the father of this boy – a kid so brave he had risked his own life for his friend – and knock the bastard from here to next week. Of course, he couldn’t do that. But he had checked and discovered the father had been given a fifteen-year prison sentence. Not long enough, in Tom’s opinion, but it was something.

  Now, though, Tom had to push all of that to the back of his mind and focus on the issue of keeping Emma and Tasha safe from whatever he was certain Finn McGuinness was going to throw at them. The only saving grace was that Tom couldn’t think of any way that McGuinness could know that Tasha was home.

  21

  Finn McGuinness’s visitor made his way onto the busy concourse of Piccadilly Station, and straight to the public phone box. The smell of fresh bagels from the nearby shop wafted his way, drowning out the usual smells of too many bodies in one place, and his stomach rumbled. He couldn’t face food right now, though. He was about to do something that might sign his own death warrant.

  He fed money into the machine and dialled a number he had memorised, piling additional coins up ready, should they be needed.

  The ringing tone at the other end of the phone sounded strange, but he didn’t have time to think about that because it stopped after two rings and he felt beads of sweat erupt from his top lip and forehead. He wiped the hand that wasn’t holding the phone on the leg of his jeans.

  ‘Well?’ a voice said.

  ‘I’ve seen him.’

  ‘I know you have.’ He should have guessed that he couldn’t lie, or pretend things were different to how they were. ‘And?’

  ‘He’s had the word – someone from social services on his payroll, I guess.’

  ‘And the plan is?’

  The visitor hurriedly explained what he was expected to do and when, hating himself for the tremor in his voice.

  ‘If I don’t do it,’ he said, ‘that bas
tard McGuinness will have me tracked down. I’m dead if I don’t do it.’

  ‘Then do it,’ was the unexpected response.

  He couldn’t have heard that right. He had thought this was going to be his way out – his way of escaping McGuinness’s grasp – and all he would have to do was report the plan to the man on the phone, take the money on offer and then do a runner. He wanted out.

  He had thought himself so cool when he was recruited by the gang when he was just fifteen. The simple tasks he had been given to begin with had escalated to occasional acts of brutality, but nothing on this scale. And now he was being told to go through with it by the person he had thought would save him.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. He had thought this bloke was one of the good guys, but maybe he’d got it wrong.

  ‘Yes – do it. But not until I say so. I need some time – call me again in two hours.’

  The phone went dead.

  The man replaced the receiver and walked out into the concourse, the smell of the bagels now making him feel physically sick. He should have tried harder to find the girl in the first place and done what he’d been told to do. She was one homeless kid. But this was a whole different ball game, and one he really didn’t want to play.

  22

  The day Tom had spent with Emma, Ollie and Tasha had been good, and he had felt bad picking Ollie up in his arms and putting him in the child seat in the back of the car at the end of the afternoon. Emma was trying hard to put a brave face on it, and Tasha just looked guilty. The road ahead for this family was going to be fraught with difficulty, but Emma was a determined woman, and he hoped and prayed that they would make it.