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 boy, a shy, quiet loner they said, who had lured Jack away, beat him and then killed him with a brick to the head as if he were nothing more than a bug to be squashed underfoot.
A psychotic break, they had said. Perhaps brought on by an absent father, an overly strict stepfather and a history of mental illness on the mother’s side. Lucy hated that, the way people would try to find a rational reason, a logical chain of events that had led Terry Prince to murder her baby in cold blood. She dreamed over and over of throttling him to death with her bare hands. But like the guilt the rage too had subsided, although neither feeling ever completely stopped gnawing at her, and a numb kind of acceptance had taken their place. She went about her daily life as if through a fog, buoyed up by a sense of surreality, only Ricky giving her a reason to get out of bed. She was both over-protective of him and somehow distant. Afraid to be too tactile, too close, as if by loving him too much she would unwittingly put him in danger.
‘What were you thinking?’
Danielle Wyatt dropped the paper onto the table as if it were a particularly smelly diaper, her fingers curling away from it even before she had let it go.
Lucy had no time to defend herself before Ricky did it for her, glaring at his usually beloved grandmother.
‘I think it’s awesome. It’s about time Mum stuck up for herself. Maybe now they’ll lock that piece of shit back up.’
‘Stop swearing,’ both women said simultaneously, before Lucy straightened her back and looked her mother in the eye.
‘It needs saying, Mum, and it needed saying now. Okay, I was angry, but don’t I have a right to be?’
Danielle’s face softened. Even she had to admit to herself that it was better Lucy was like this, fired up by righteous ire, than retreating further into the shell she had built around herself since Jack died. Even before that, she had often thought privately. Remembering Lucy’s attempt to be the perfect wife to Ethan, to conform to what he and his family wanted, as if she wasn’t good enough. Even seeming to accept it when Ethan ran off with someone else. It was good to see a glimpse of the old Lucy, of the spunky young woman she had been before Ethan, before Jack, but this was a step too far. This was dangerous.
‘It’s inflammatory, Lucy, it could stir up no end of trouble. There have already been protests; I saw them on the news.’ Danielle saw everything on the news, or through her twitching living-room curtains. If she didn’t know everything that was going on in the world around her, she didn’t feel safe.
‘Good,’ Lucy said defiantly, but her eyes strayed towards the newspaper lying like a time bomb on her mother’s Cath Kidston tablecloth. The picture of her took up most of the front page and the nervous-looking photographer had managed to capture the anger in her eyes, the firm set to the jaw, so that she looked like a crusading Amazon, with her light brown hair tumbling around her face. It was a good picture, she thought with a touch of pride.
There was no doubting that the headline the Sun had chosen to run above it, however, was nothing short of incendiary. ‘If the government won’t do something I will.’ Not that Lucy had any real idea what, if anything, she could do, but it had felt good to sound off to the whippet of
