Owning Jacob - SA

Chapter seventeen

He spent Christmas in the Caribbean. It was one of the plum jobs that came along every now and again, a scramble from an advertising agency who had decided to switch photographers at the last minute and needed something to show their clients early in the New Year. They sounded relieved when Ben accepted the job. Almost as relieved as he felt.

He sent Jacob a big parcel of Christmas presents, but he had no idea if he’d understand who they were from. Or if Kale would let him have them.

Before he went away he spoke to Ann Usherwood about investigating Sandra’s background. The solicitor had been doubtful. She’d warned it would be expensive, and probably not tell them anything they didn’t already know. “If there was something incriminating the social services would have it on record,” she pointed out.

But Ben insisted. If it had got Quilley nearly killed, it had to be worth knowing.

He left for the shoot without having heard anything. At the last minute a heavy weight of reluctance descended and almost made him back out. He felt certain that he was letting down his guard, struck by a superstitious conviction that something disastrous would happen if he wasn’t at hand to somehow prevent it. Only the fact that he wouldn’t hear anything from Usherwood over Christmas anyway, and the knowledge that his professional reputation might not stand another dent, made him go.

When he came off the plane and felt the sun bake down on him he was glad he had. It was so far removed from anything he associated with Christmas — and any stinging reminders of Sarah and Jacob — that the period he’d been dreading slipped by almost without him noticing.

Even Christmas Day passed relatively painlessly. They worked in the morning then spent the rest of the day getting slowly pissed at a beach bar. By the evening Ben had even forgotten what time of the year it was.

There was no escaping New Year’s Eve, though. He was back in London by then. He had been invited to several parties, more even than usual, but while he knew the reason for it and was grateful, he had no intention of going to any. He planned to lock the door, turn the clocks to the wall, then watch videos and drink until January had safely started.

But memories of other years came at him like a juggernaut.

Only four of them; that was all they had spent together. It seemed incredible that it had been so few. The best had been their second, when he and Sarah had left Jacob with her parents and gone to a New Year’s Eve party in Knightsbridge. The house had been ridiculously opulent but they hadn’t known many people there and had left not long after midnight.

Slightly drunk, they had returned home, gigglingly stripped off and made love on the lounge floor. Sarah had gone down on him, teasing him with hands and tongue, and when he came in a spine-arching spurt she had grinned up at him and mock-roared, “Hap-py New Year!” The previous year’s hadn’t been so memorable — Jacob had come down with flu, so they’d stayed in — but looking back on it now, that was the last they would spend together, the last Sarah had been alive for, making it if anything more poignant.

It seemed at once close enough to touch, yet much further removed than a mere twelve months.

He put the vodka bottle on the floor within easy reach and chain-watched one mindless video after another.

When the phone rang it startled him out of a doze. He jumped, spilling vodka from the glass loosely balanced on his chest. The room spun as he stood up. On the TV a mass of images refused to congeal into any coherent picture. The phone continued to ring. He wished he’d thought to disconnect it. He didn’t want to hear anyone wishing him a Happy New Year.

He didn’t think there was any such thing.

Resenting the intrusion, he answered it. “Yeah?” he said, deliberately surly. Sounds of a party came down the line — cheers, hooters, the cracks of party poppers.

“Ben? Is that you?”

The unexpected voice cut through the vodka. “Dad?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yeah. Where are you?”

“We’re at some friends’ house.”

Ben couldn’t stop the drop of disappointment that he wasn’t nearby, even while he recognised its absurdity.

“I thought I’d call and see how you were.”

“Oh... not bad. You?”

“Fine.” There was a pause. “I just wanted to say...”

Don’t. Not ‘Happy New Year’. Please don’t.

“...well, you know. I’m thinking of you.”

Ben felt a lump rise in his throat.

“You there, Ben?”

“Yeah.”

Somebody whooped in the background. There was a burst of laughter. He could hear someone calling his father’s name. It sounded like his stepmother.

“I’d better go,” his father said, but didn’t break the connection. Whoever was calling his name grew louder. “Look after yourself.”

Ben tried to say something, but the background noise of the party had been replaced by the dialling tone. He put down the receiver.

Fireworks were being let off outside. It couldn’t be long after midnight. He wiped his eyes.

“Fuck it,” he said, for no particular reason, and went over to where he’d left the vodka.

The New Year carried on from where the old had left off.

There was work, and there was going out after work, and there was going home to an empty house. January had always been his least favourite month. He told himself it was just a matter of getting through it.

One rainy Sunday afternoon he realised as he watched a video that it should have been his contact day. He’d forgotten about it. It upset him, not because he’d held out any hope of Kale letting him see Jacob, but because he was already starting to let things slide. It seemed to foreshadow the way things would be in future.

He wondered if he shouldn’t stop clutching at straws, aim for something more attainable like his contact rights, as Usherwood had advised. But the same arguments still applied. Kale wasn’t going to share his son, no matter what anyone said. As long as he had Jacob he would continue to do what he liked, until he ultimately did something that even the authorities couldn’t ignore.

Ben hoped Jacob could survive his father’s free will for that long.

He expected to hear from Ann Usherwood soon after the New Year, but February arrived without any word from her. He had begun to regard Sandra Kale’s past as another dead end when the solicitor called him one morning.

“How soon can you get in to see me?” she asked.

He was at the studio, just about to start a shoot. His first impulse was to cancel it, then he thought about Zoe and decided against. “Not till tomorrow. Have you found something?”

“Enough to know that the social services didn’t check up as well as they should,” she told him. “Sandra Kale’s got a twelve-year-old criminal record for prostitution and drug offences. She’s been married before, to a pimp and drug pusher called Wayne Carter. It was in Portsmouth, under a different local authority, and when she divorced him she reverted back to her maiden name. Unless the social services here ran a pretty thorough check on her background — which they obviously didn’t — they could easily have missed it.”

Excitement and disbelief blew away Ben’s depression. But Usherwood hadn’t finished.

“That’s not all they missed,” she went on. “Sandra and Wayne Carter had a child, a little girl. She died from parental abuse when she was eighteen months old.”

The rain had stopped for a while, but by the time the figures began straggling out of the pub it had started to come down again. Most were men. They turned up their coat collars and bunched their shoulders against the wind-lashed downpour, apparently preferring pasted-down hair and soaked shoulders to the effeminacy of an umbrella.

Ben watched the last of the afternoon drinkers hurry away.

The street became deserted again. He cracked open one of the car windows a little to clear some of the condensation. A fine spray of rain gusted in, making him shiver. He’d turned the engine off when he’d parked twenty minutes earlier, and the warmth the heaters had built up had largely gone now.

He tucked his hands under his arms and waited. After another half-hour the pub door opened again and a woman came out. She was half hidden behind a telescopic umbrella which she struggled to keep from blowing inside out. Ben wiped the misted glass, not sure if it was her. Then a gust of wind plucked open her coat and revealed the shortness of the skirt underneath, and he knew it was.

Her umbrella blew inside out just as she reached the car. She stopped as she wrestled with it. The wind tried to tear the passenger door from Ben’s fingers as he reached across and opened it.

“Want a lift?”

Sandra Kale squinted through the rain, trying to see him.

He could tell when she realised who he was by the way her face suddenly became set. With a jerk she inverted the umbrella right side out again. Her high heels tapped on the wet pavement as she strode on as if he weren’t there.

“I can always come round to the back of the house instead,” he said.

She stopped and looked at him, trying to gauge his meaning. He was getting a twinge in his back from leaning over to hold open the door.

“There’s no point walking in this,” he said.

She stood, indecisive. Then, with a quick glance up and down the street, she folded the umbrella and got in.

She sat next to him, breathing slightly heavily as he pulled away. The inside of the car smelled of her perfume and wet cloth. Damp and cold had entered with her, but he thought he could detect her heat underneath it. Her hair, darkened to something like its natural colour by the rain, stuck to her forehead and the back of her neck. Water beaded the skin of her face like sweat.

He noticed a large bruise on one cheek, unsuccessfully disguised with make-up.

“What do you want?” she asked.

We need to talk.”

“Do we?”

“I think so.”

“I don’t. I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

“You might have when you know what I want to talk about.”

He wasn’t as confident as he tried to sound. His excitement over Ann Usherwood’s news had faded when she’d told him that an undisclosed criminal record — particularly one twelve years old — didn’t have any bearing on the current situation. It would embarrass the social services, but that was all. And while the death of Sandra’s own child was more serious, only her husband had been prosecuted. He’d been found guilty of manslaughter; the worst charge against her was neglect.

“Kale can’t be held responsible for what his wife did before she met him, in any event,” the solicitor had said. “And even if she was deemed unfit to live in the same house as another child, which frankly I can’t see, who do you think he’d pick if he was forced to make a choice between them?”

The answer to that didn’t need thinking about.

What did it take? he’d wondered, wearily. What the fuck did it take?

Usherwood had gone on to tell him how it put them in a much better position to insist on his contact rights, and asked if he wanted her to present his case to the local authority now.

“No,” he’d said. “Not yet.”

There was someone he wanted to talk to first.

He was aware of Sandra Kale’s scrutiny in the close confines of the car, but kept his own gaze on the road. They drove in silence until they reached the house. He parked and switched off the ignition.

“Say what you’ve got to say, then,” she said.

“I’d rather tell you inside.”

“You can’t come in.” Beneath the aggression she sounded almost frightened.

“If we stay here the whole street can see us. He won’t like that if he hears about it, will he?”

Her mouth tightened, then she got out of the car. Ben picked up his bag from the back seat and followed her. The rain was bouncing up off the pavement, and he was soaked even in the few seconds it took him to reach the house. He half expected her to slam the front door behind her, but she left it open.

He went inside and wiped the water from his face. The hallway was dark and chill. There was a sour smell he couldn’t identify. From further inside he could hear Sandra moving about. He headed towards the noise.

The hallway went past the lounge. The door was ajar.

He paused, taking in the clothing strewn on sofa and chairs, the toys and magazines on the floor. One of Jacob’s T-shirts was hanging over the back of a chair. He could remember Sarah buying it. He turned away, skirting a car wheel propped up against the wall as he went into the kitchen.

The kitchen seemed at once familiar and strange, like somewhere visited in a dream. He was used to seeing it from the outside, framed first by the window, then the viewfinder, as two-dimensional as an image on a TV screen.

The reality was both more vivid and yet somehow less real. He couldn’t quite believe he was there. I’m inside the looking glass.

He glanced through the window, but the hillside was obscured by the rain and mist, reduced to a vague shape. In the foreground, the mound of wreckage formed a darker one below it.

Sandra finished plugging in a convection heater that stood against one wall and turned to face him. She leaned back against a work surface with her fists on her hips.

“Well?”

Now he was here Ben didn’t know how to start. He put his bag on the floor.

“I want Jacob back.”

Sandra stared at him, then put her head back and gave a laugh. “Oh, is that all?”

Her expression became heavy with disdain, but there might have been an element of relief there, too. “If that’s all you wanted to say you might as well fuck off back to London. Thanks for the lift.”

The hot air from the heater hadn’t yet warmed the room, but he was already feeling stifled in his bulky coat.

“What are you frightened of?”

“I’m not frightened of anything. I just wish you’d piss off and leave us alone.”

“Leave you alone?” he said, incredulous. “All this started because you wouldn’t let me see Jacob.”

“If you’re so bothered about the little bastard you shouldn’t have given him away.”

“I didn’t know what Kale was like then.”

She dropped her arms, stepped towards him. “He’s not a fucking dog! He’s got a first name!”

Ben refused to back down. “You know what he’s doing isn’t right.”

“Do I?”

“I think so. And you don’t want Jacob here any more than I do.”

“What makes you such an expert on what I want?”

I’ve watched you.

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

She looked away. “It doesn’t make any difference anyway. What I want doesn’t matter,” she said, and the bitterness was so close to the surface he could have touched it. Abruptly, she turned back to him. “You think it’s going to do any good, coming here? You think I’d really help you? Even if I fucking could?”

“I hoped you might.”

“Well, you hoped wrong! Sorry to disappoint you.” She went to her handbag and took out a packet of cigarettes.

“Even if I can’t get Jacob back I want to make sure he’s properly looked after,” Ben said. “He needs special schooling, he needs to mix with other kids. He’s not getting any of that.”

Sandra had a cigarette clamped tightly in her mouth. She struck a match and held it to the tip. “Life’s hard, isn’t it?”

“What about all that macho shit with the weight, lifting it over Jacob’s head in the garden? What happens if he drops it?”

She looked at him sharply, but didn’t ask how he knew. The fear he’d thought he’d detected earlier flared in her eyes again for a moment. She blew smoke towards the ceiling. “John won’t drop it.”

“That’s it, is it? One slip and Jacob’s dead, but you just pretend it can’t happen?”

She shrugged.

“Wasn’t it enough letting your own daughter be killed without letting it happen again?”

Her face went white. The bruise on her cheek was like a strawberry birthmark against it. “Who told you that?”

Ben hadn’t wanted to bring it up quite so brutally, but now he had there was nothing to do but carry on. “I know you’ve been married before. And about your criminal record.” He tried to convince himself he’d nothing to feel bad about.

Sandra swayed slightly, as if she were about to faint. She closed her eyes. “This is that fucking detective, isn’t it? I wish John had killed him.”

He nearly did, Ben thought.

“Did he ask for money?”

Her face was drawn as she nodded. “He told John he’d tell the social services if he didn’t pay him. Stupid bastard.”

“So Kale beat him up.”

He thought she would shout at him again for using Kale’s surname, but she didn’t. They’d already gone beyond that. She just looked at him, as if the question didn’t deserve an answer.

He felt himself reddening. “Didn’t he know about your past until Quilley told him?”

“He knew. It didn’t matter to him, though. It never seemed to occur to him that anything could stop him getting Jacob back. He was his son, and that was it.”

“Didn’t it occur to you?”

“Of course it fucking occurred to me! But what do you think I was going to do? Tell him? I’d have been out on my ear if he’d thought I might stop him getting his precious little son back. I didn’t have one night’s sleep for months, worrying about them finding out.” The colour had come back to her cheeks, but she still looked tired. “When they didn’t I was so fucking relieved.”

“Weren’t you worried someone might recognise you on TV?”

“You think I still look anything like I did twelve years ago?” she said, scornfully. “Christ, I wish. Anyway, by then I thought it was all over. The social services hadn’t traced me back to that stupid, doped-up little tart who let her husband beat her kid to death. I thought I’d finally put it all behind me. I’d earned a bit of limelight.” The brief animation went out of her. “Then that fucking detective turned up again.”

“How did Kale take it?” Ben asked.

She glared at him. The bruise stood out lividly on her cheek. “How do you think?”

He looked away, embarrassed.

“That was the first time he’s ever hit me.”

Ben thought about how Kale had thrown her against the fence. His disbelief must have shown. Her face hardened.

“I’d married one man who knocked me about. Do you think I was going to marry another?”

But she seemed to lack the energy to sustain any anger. She sank back against the work surface again, pulling on the cigarette as if it were a lifeline. “God, I wish I’d never heard of you or your son. Why couldn’t you just have left well alone?”

It was something Ben had asked himself often enough. He didn’t have an answer.

“I didn’t ask for this. If your husband had been...” He was about to say ‘reasonable’, but that word no longer seemed to apply even remotely to Kale. “...had been different, I’d have settled for seeing Jacob once a month.”

He wasn’t sure if that was true, though. He couldn’t think of any one point where things between him and Kale could have been otherwise. There seemed an inevitability about it, as though they were both chained by personality and events to tracks that had led to him being there, now, talking to Kale’s wife in that room. And from there — where? He had a dizzying sense of standing outside himself, looking back on something that had already happened. He felt that the conclusion had already occurred, and was simply waiting for him to catch up with it.

Then the feeling passed.

“How did you meet him?” he asked.

“Oh, please.”

“No, I’d like to know. Really.”

He meant it. He wanted to make her lower her guard, but there was also a genuine curiosity.

She looked disgusted for a moment longer, then shrugged.

“After I left Portsmouth I lived near Aldershot, not far from where he was based. I used to knock around with a lot of the soldiers. You know.”

Ben thought he probably did.

“I was working in this pub one night and two of the locals started giving me a hard time because I wouldn’t go with them. I told them to fuck off, but they’d had a bit to drink and they started getting rough. So then John comes up and tells them to pack it in. I didn’t know him, but you could tell he was a soldier. I don’t mean just the haircut. There was something about him. He just stood there and didn’t say a word while they mouthed off. It was after he’d been shot, not long before he got discharged, and his limp was pretty bad. Even so, they should have known not to mess with him. But they were pissed and he was by himself, so one of them took a swing.” She fell quiet, remembering. It brought a smile. “They wouldn’t have tried it on with anyone else for a while after that.” The smile died as she returned to the present. “They’d got more sense than you.”

Ben went to the window. It brought him closer to her. He could feel her watching him suspiciously as he looked out at the garden.

“What’s he doing out there?”

“He’s not out there, he’s at work”

“You know what I mean.”

“No I don’t.”

The denial lacked conviction. He saw her shoot a glance through the window at the garden. Her mouth was puckered to one side as she chewed the inside of her cheek. Ben felt oddly comfortable with her.

“Is he building something?” he asked.

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Because I’d like to see my next birthday.”

The smile came back, but it was short-lived. He waited.

She stabbed out the cigarette.

“He’s looking for the Pattern.”

“The what?”

“The fucking Pattern. With a capital fucking P.” She made it a mock proclamation, but there was no humour in it. “He thinks that there’s a pattern to everything. A reason for whatever happens, except we just can’t see it. He says it’s everywhere, it’s just a matter of knowing what to look for.” She waved her hand at the window. “That’s why we’ve got all that junk out there. Because if he looks at it hard enough it might show him this Pattern. He thinks it’s easier to see in anything that’s been smashed up. Nearer the surface, or something. He’s got one of those radio scanner things, so he can listen to the police wavelength for road accidents. Whenever there’s a car crash he’s always the one who goes out to bring it in. The bigger the better. There was a pile up on the motorway a while back, and he ended up having to borrow a lorry from the yard to carry all his bloody souvenirs home.”

Ben thought about Kale moving the pieces of metal around, studying each new arrangement. Something nudged his memory, and he remembered the first time he had gone to the house to collect Jacob. Kale had said something then about him not being part of ‘the pattern’. He didn’t like to think what that could have meant.

“What does he expect it to show him?” he asked.

“God knows. Something that’ll explain why everything’s happened. His son getting stolen, his wife stepping in front of a bus, him being wounded and his mates killed in Northern Ireland. Even being brought up in an orphanage. He thinks there’s got to be some reason for it all. And he thinks if he can see the Pattern it’ll tell him.”

She stared through the rain-smeared window at the distorted metal, as if hoping to see an explanation there herself.

“Was he like this when you first met him?”

Sandra shook her head without looking round. “He seemed different to most of the other squaddies I’d met, but that was all.” Her mouth twitched. “He didn’t try and drag my knickers off in the first five minutes, for a start. That was one of the things I liked about him. And he was quiet. Not shy, just quiet. Most of them tell you their life stories at the drop of a hat, but he was more interested in listening to me talk about mine. I didn’t tell him everything, not straightaway, and it wasn’t until I told him what had happened with Kirstie — my little girl — that he said anything about what had happened to him.”

She sniffed. Ben wasn’t sure if she was close to crying, or whether it was the dry heat of the kitchen. His own nose was tickling from it.

“When he found out about Kirstie he went quiet for ages. I thought I’d put him off, that he was blaming me the same as everybody else did. Then he started telling me about his son being taken from the hospital, and his wife killing herself.

“He said people like us, who’d had their lives messed up, were damaged for a reason. That was how he put it, damaged. He was as excited as I’ve ever seen him. He said we must have been meant to meet, after we’d both lost our kids and everything. He said something then about it being part of a pattern, but I can’t remember what. I just thought he was being romantic. A bit soft, but romantic.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “I was just another fucked-up piece of scrap.”

He felt a desire to put his arms around her. He kept his hands in his pockets.

“Was he as obsessed about it then?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Hang on a second, I’ll show you something.” She went out of the kitchen. He heard her go down the corridor to the lounge. There was the sound of a drawer being opened. A few seconds later she came back, carrying a large, vinyl-covered photograph album. She set it down on the work surface next to him. He could smell her perfume, the tobacco odour on her clothes, a faint musk of underarm sweat.

He took his hands back out of his pockets.

“This is John’s,” she said, opening it. She quickly flicked past the first few pages. Ben caught glimpses of a younger Kale, sitting on a motorbike, standing in a green army uniform, smiling with his arm around a pregnant young woman.

He recognised Jeanette Kale, Jacob’s mother, but Sandra had already moved on.

“Here,” she said. “He took these when he was in the Gulf. During the war.”

She moved slightly to one side so he could see. He felt the heat from her hip, almost touching his, as he came nearer.

There were four photographs, two on each page. One of them was a long-distance shot of a blazing oil well. The rest showed blasted areas of desert littered with debris. In one of them was a tank, its nearside track torn off. A charred body was folded over the blackened turret. In another was the wreckage of a helicopter, the limp rotor blades hanging like the veins of a dead leaf.

“He took these before his wife was even pregnant,” Sandra said. “Before everything went wrong for him. I don’t think he’d got a thing about wrecks back then, these were just like souvenirs, you know? It wasn’t until after we were married that he dug them out and stuck them in here.”

They weren’t the sort of souvenirs Ben would have chosen. If Kale’s obsession wasn’t yet formed, the seeds of it were evident. The pictures on the next page displayed the same morbid fascination. Most had been taken on a road instead of open desert. Military and civilian vehicles were scattered along it, burned, lying on their sides, tyres flat or melted, the bodywork crumpled like paper. In some shots the road stretched to the horizon — no sign of life on it, only the numberless wrecks. The bodies that lay among them looked insignificant.

Ben went through the rest of the album. To begin with there were ordinary snapshots included — a Middle Eastern shop with grinning British soldiers outside, what looked like the same group outside a tent pitched on sand — but these soon petered out until the photographs were solely of wreckage.

The desert was abruptly replaced by a colder, more familiar landscape. A troop carrier lay on its side in the road. Behind it were grey clouds, green hills and bushes. A shattered car, half in, half out of a bomb crater.

“That’s Northern Ireland,” Sandra said. He could feel her breath on his ear.

He turned the page. More of the same. Now, though, the photographs seemed to have been taken with more care paid to angles and light. Whereas the earlier ones had been little more than snaps, dramatic only because of their content, there was a self-consciousness about these that suggested a new intent. In one the wreckage of some vehicle was partially silhouetted against either a sunrise or a sunset. The sun reflected off some parts while turning the rest black. It was corny and badly executed, but not ineffective.

“Was this his last term over there?” Ben asked. “After Jacob had gone missing and his wife had died?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Sandra sounded more suspicious than surprised. “Why?”

“I just wondered.” He told himself he was reading too much into a few photographs. But he couldn’t shake the conviction that, whereas the early ones had been coloured by a morbid curiosity, in the last few Kale had already started looking for something.

He turned over again. There was only one photograph left. It was black-and-white and had been cut from a newspaper.

It showed two army Land Rovers, The first was on its roof. The second, behind it, had its doors open and its windscreen smashed. There were dark marks on its bodywork that looked like bullet holes.

“That was the ambush where John got shot,” Sandra told him. “He should have been in the first car, the one on its roof, because he was the corporal. But its radio wasn’t working, so he went in the other. About a mile after he’d changed the first car went over a landmine and everybody in it was killed. Then the bastards started on them with a machine gun.”

Ben closed the album.

“Don’t see many of me in there, do you?” she said.

The bitterness had given way to hurt.

“When did he start bringing the scrap metal home?” he said, to get away from it.

“Almost as soon as we came here.”

She moved away. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not.

“He started looking for a job. I thought he’d get something in a garage, or somewhere. You know he’s a qualified mechanic? He can fix anything mechanical, he’s got a knack for it. That’s why he joined the Engineers. But he came home one day and said he’d got this job in the scrapyard. I didn’t mind, I thought it’d only be temporary. I didn’t even take any notice when he started bringing bits and pieces back with him. I supposed he wanted to mess around with them. Hammer them out for spares, or something, I don’t know. Then he started talking about this Pattern.”

She glared at Ben as if it were his fault. “It was bad enough before, but when he found out Steven” — Jacob, he thought — “was still alive he started bringing back twice as much. I told him the social services would have a fit if they saw it, but he didn’t take any notice. And they never went out back anyway. They had a look round the house, but that was all. I just drew the curtains when they came in the kitchen so they wouldn’t see it. Pricks.”

There was no heat in the insult. Her skirt tightened around her thighs as she leaned against the edge of the table. “Now John’s not got time for anything else. He could get a job in any garage and earn decent money, but he won’t. And he has to pay for everything he brings home. That fat bastard he works for takes it out of his wages, as if there’s enough of them to start with. He won’t listen to me any more. He hardly even talks to me. All he cares about now is his bloody wreckage. And the kid. Won’t let his precious little son out of his sight. He’s got this idea that he can help him see what the Pattern is, because of how he is with jigsaws and things.”

“That’s stupid! A lot of autistic children are good at puzzles. It isn’t anything unusual!”

“Try telling that to John,” she said, dryly. “He thinks it all ties in. Steven’s going to help him first, and once he has he’ll be able to make Steven better. Or something like that. It’s all part of the Pattern, isn’t it?” Her tone was loaded with sarcasm.

Ben remembered how Kale set pieces of metal in front of Jacob, as if waiting for his reaction. Waiting for him to help decipher whatever he thought they held. “Oh, Christ.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” Sandra said. She was smiling again, but it wasn’t a pleasant one. “He exercises until he’s sick. He tries to work himself into a state where he can ‘see’ this fucking pattern of his. I mean, he hasn’t managed it yet, obviously, so that just means he has to go at it harder. He says he’s ‘purifying’ himself. Well, that’s what he said once. He doesn’t talk about it at all now. Not to me, anyway, but you can hear him telling the boy sometimes. As if he can bloody understand him.”

“Is that why he lifts the engine over Jacob’s head? To push himself harder?”

An expression of suspicion smoothed her face, then was gone. “I suppose so,” she said, examining her nails. “I haven’t asked.”

She still hadn’t asked how he knew what Kale did in the garden, either. Ben wondered if she didn’t want to find out what else he might have seen.

“What does he do in the shed?” he asked.

The look she gave him was a mixture of fear and dislike. It was quickly replaced by resignation.

“You can see for yourself.”

She brushed past him and went to the back door. He began to follow and walked into her as she stopped suddenly.

He stepped back, blushing.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“I forgot the key.”

There was a satisfied air about her as she took a keyring from a drawer in one of the kitchen units, as though she had somehow proved something to herself. Ben felt the advantage had been subtly taken from him. A gust of rain and icy air swept into the kitchen as she opened the door.

He clutched his coat around him as he went out, conscious that Sandra hadn’t even bothered to put hers on. The garden was muddy. Broken paving slabs had been embedded in the grassless soil like stepping stones. Through the rain Ben saw the encircling wall of metal. There was more of it than he remembered.

He skirted a jagged piece of bodywork that protruded from one side of the pile. The seat where Jacob had played while Kale suspended the engine over him looked wet and abandoned. In front of it sections of broken cars had been left like parts of a dismembered animal.

Sandra unlocked the padlock and opened the shed door. It tore out of her hand and banged against the wooden side.

Ben went in after her.

There was a pungency of bitumen, pine resin and stale sweat. It was dark and cramped, forcing him to stand close to Sandra. Her hair was flattened against her head by the rain. He could feel water from his own trickling over his face and neck. He blinked it out of his eyes, trying to work out what the object that filled most of the interior was.

At first he thought it was simply an exercise machine, a multi-gym of some sort. There was an impression of a steel frame, pulleys and ponderous weights. Then he took in the straps attached to the long wooden bench and dangling from cables, the oil-covered cogs of what appeared to be gear wheels. It looked like something designed to tear apart rather than exercise.

“This is why he comes in here,” Sandra said. She was shivering. “He built it himself.”

Ben was still trying to work out what it was. He thought he knew, but couldn’t quite believe it.

“What is it?”

“It’s a rack, what’s it look like?”

There were small straps for wrists and ankles, and a larger harness that had a forehead band and a chinstrap. Each was joined by cables to the weights, which hung like steel fruit at the head and foot of the bench, and were connected in turn to the heavy gear wheels. Sandra ran her fingers lightly over the frame. Her nails were bitten and ragged.

“He fastens himself into it and takes the brake off the weights. The gears stop them just smashing straight to the floor, but once they’ve gone past a notch you can’t pull them back. He’s worked it so the further they go the heavier they get. The only way you can stop them’s by that.” She pointed to a mechanism at the top end of the bench. It had a smaller set of weights, and was attached to the head harness. “It’s a clutch, or something. But you have to use your neck to lift those weights off the floor far enough for it to trip in.”

“Jesus.”

“John lets it go as far as he can, and then just holds it there. Tries to keep himself at breaking point for as long as he can. When he first built it and I came and saw what he was doing I panicked and made him lose concentration. It nearly killed him. When he managed to get out he threw up and told me never to come in here again. I thought he was going to hit me, but he didn’t. Not then.” There was a deadness in the way she said it. “I’ve never watched him since, but I can tell by how long he stays in here and what he looks like when he comes out that he’s taking it further and further. One of these days...” She didn’t finish.

Ben tried to imagine what it would feel like to be strapped into the machine. “Why does he do it?”

“To help him see the Pattern. Why else?” She hugged herself and rubbed her arms. “He thinks the pain focuses his mind. All part of being ‘pure’. Can’t be impure if we want to see the Pattern, can we?”

He stared at the sweat-stained straps. In places the edges of them were marked with what looked like dried blood. “Are you sure he isn’t just trying to punish himself?”

Sandra looked at the rack as though she were frightened of it. “I’m not sure about anything.” She turned away suddenly. “Let’s go in. I’m freezing.”

As they went out he noticed the shotgun lying on a shelf to one side of the door. He remembered what it had done to the dog’s head. At least he keeps the place locked, he thought as he watched Sandra snap the heavy padlock shut. He followed her back to the house.

The kitchen began misting up as soon as they closed the door. They were both soaked, but at least he’d had a coat on. Her clothes were stuck to her. The outline of her bra was etched under her sweater. Her nipples stood out through both layers of fabric.

“You’re dripping all over the carpet,” she told him. “If you’re going to stay you might as well take your coat off.”

He did, draping it over his bag.

She handed him a towel. “Here.”

It was already damp and didn’t look too clean, but he took it anyway. Sandra rubbed her hair vigorously with another.

“I’m wet through.” Without any coyness she pulled off her sweater and dropped it on a chair. The skin of her arms, chest and stomach was pale and covered with goose bumps. Her white bra was semi-transparent.

“Don’t mind, do you?” she asked, pushing her wet hair back with her fingers so that it hung behind her ears. Her heavy breasts lifted with the movement.

“No.” He tried to remember what he’d been going to say next. “Look—”

“Coffee?”

“Uh, please.”

There was a small roll of flesh above the waistband of her skirt. She went to the sink and filled the kettle. To the left of her spine below her bra strap was a mole the size of a small fingernail. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d watched her through the long lens.

He made himself look through the window at the scrap metal.

“Why only wrecked cars?”

“What?”

She pushed the kettle plug into the socket with a firm jab from the palm of her hand. A muscle jumped down the side of her ribs.

“All the scrap. Why is it just cars? Why not bits of fridges and washing machines as well?”

“Because a car wreck’s violent. One minute it was driving around, the next it’s junk. And somebody with it. He thinks each piece he brings home is some sort of memento of that somebody’s life being smashed.”

She had turned to face him, but for a moment she seemed to forget he was there. Then she came back from wherever she’d been and smiled.

“I can’t see the point in looking for reasons,” she said. “Things happen, don’t they? You just have to make the most of what you’ve got.”

Ben didn’t say anything because she had started walking towards him. She didn’t take her eyes from his. The smile was still on her mouth. She came close and stood in front of him. He was surprised at how small she was. He could feel the fabric of her bra brushing his shirt. The weight of her breasts was an implied threat.

She rested her hands flat on his chest. They felt cold, then the heat of them came through.

“What have you got?” she asked, looking up at him.

She began to slide one hand lower. It burned a slow path down his stomach. There was a thrumming in his head, twinning the one in his crotch. Her hand reached it, pressed against it, and a vibration went through him as though she had struck a tuning fork. He stepped back slightly for balance and something crunched under his shoe.

He looked down. One of Jacob’s puzzles was crushed under his heel. Tiny silver balls had spilled from the broken plastic. He lifted his foot and more of them escaped, running like beads of mercury across the dirty carpet.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sandra told him. “John’s bought him loads of them. They’re all over the place.”

But Ben felt something shifting inside him, something that had nothing to do with the pressure of her hand. He took another step backwards. She looked surprised, then her expression grew closed at whatever she saw in his face. Her hand fell to her side.

“Well,” she said, looking away. She self-consciously folded her arms across her breasts. “Sorry if I’m not good enough for you. I expect you’re too used to models.”

Ben couldn’t think of anything he could say that would make things any better. The kettle clicked off, its steam adding to the fog on the window. He moved further away, careful not to step on any of the silver balls. He tried to reassemble his reason for being there.

“I’m going to tell the social services that I don’t think your husband’s mentally fit to look after Jacob,” he said.

Sandra went to where her sweater was discarded on the chair. “Do what you like.”

“All that stuff in the shed. He’s self-destructive. I’m not going to let anything happen to Jacob because he’s got some fixation.”

“Bully for you.” She felt the wet sweater and dropped it back down with a grimace of annoyance. She picked up a sweat-shirt from another chair.

“Will you back me up?” She paused in the act of pulling on the sweatshirt and stared at him. “Back you up? Don’t be fucking stupid!”

“You’ve just told me what he’s like.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m going to say he’s some sort of nutter so you can get his son taken off him.”

“He needs help.”

She laughed, harshly. “Don’t we all!” She jerked the sweatshirt over her head. “And don’t pretend you’re bothered about John. You don’t give a shit about him. You’re only worried about the kid.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

She raised a shoulder indifferently. “He’ll just have to take his chances with the rest of us. And since that’s all you came for you can fuck off. I’ve got to get tea ready.”

Ben went to his bag and took out the photographs of her and the men in the bedroom. Her expression became hunted as he held them out.

“What are they?”

When he didn’t answer she came forward and took them. She stared at the first one, then quickly at the next few. She flung them at him.

“You bastard! You fucking!”

He thought she was going to hit him, but she let her arms fall. She hung her head.

“I hope you enjoyed watching. You fucking shit.”

His cheek was stinging from the edge of one of the photographs. He put his fingers to it. They came away coloured with blood. He groped in his pocket for a tissue. His arms seemed sluggish. He felt he was moving through a mire of shame.

“So what are you going to do with them?” she asked. “Do a Quilley? Blackmail me into saying John wants locking up?”

He held the tissue to the cut. “I only want you to tell the social services what you’ve told me.”

“So you can get Jacob taken away? What do you think he’d do to me if I did that?”

“What will he do if he finds out you’ve been sleeping with other men while he’s at work? And taking money for it?”

She covered her eyes. Something inside Ben was curling up and withering. He did his best to ignore it.

“They probably won’t take Jacob off him, anyway.” You fucking hypocrite. “But if somebody doesn’t do something, sooner or later he’s going to kill one of them. Either Jacob or himself. You’ll lose him then, either way.”

Her throat was jumping in little spasms. She wiped her hand across her cheeks, dragging the skin like a rubber mask. Streaks of mascara followed her fingers.

“You think you can leave things behind,” she said. You think you’ve got away from them, but you never do. You take it all with you. When I met John I thought...” She didn’t finish. The smeared mascara made her face look like something left out too long in the rain. “We haven’t had sex in a year.”

I don’t want to hear this, Ben thought, but he didn’t move. He owed her that much.

She stared at the photographs scattered on the floor. “Not since before all this started. He isn’t interested any more. He’s like one of these bloody monks. Sex is ‘impure’, it’ll stop him seeing his Pattern. Specially with someone like me. He doesn’t say as much, but I can tell by the way he looks at me. I’m a cheap tart. More pricks than a pin-cushion, that’s me. So one day I thought, right, if that’s what he thinks I am, I will be. The next time a bloke in the pub made a pass at me I said okay. And after I’d done it once there was no reason not to do it again, was there? The money came in handy. That’s something else John isn’t interested in. We could have sold the story to the newspapers for a fucking fortune, but oh no! That would have been ‘impure’ too, wouldn’t it?”

The flare of indignation died. She raised one shoulder in a shrug. “I let blokes come around every now and again. Not many, because most of them are too frightened of John. But there are some who get a kick out of it. Sometimes I even kid myself it’s me they want. You’d think I’d have learned by now. Even John was only after something he thought he saw in me, and now he doesn’t even want that any more.”

She looked Ben up and down. He felt burned by the contempt he saw. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? I’m only a fucking whore. I should be used to selling myself.”

He pulled to mind an image of Jacob sitting beneath the suspended, mud-smeared engine, imagined it dropping. He tried to crush his conscience with it. “Will you help me?”

Sandra stared dully at the photographs on the floor. She looked old and beaten. “Do I have any choice?”

“We can keep whatever you say confidential. He doesn’t have to know.”

“Just get out.”

He picked up his bag and coat.

She was still standing among the photographs when he left.

When he got into the car he realised he was still holding the tissue he’d used to staunch his cheek. The blood on it formed a Rorschach pattern of spots and swirls. He screwed it up and thrust it into his pocket without trying to see what it told him.