The Child Who

5

Something detonated against the glass and Leo dived. He peered up and saw only sky, as well as what looked like a bleeding sun.

‘Jesus!’ he said and someone, somewhere within the car, echoed it. The driver? Daniel’s stepfather?

Leo straightened and tried to see beyond the haemorrhaging egg yolk. The street, a somnolent sequence of shops until the corner before, had rounded into a throng. Young men mostly, Leo thought at first, and clearly in the wrong place, directing their ire in the wrong direction. These were anarchists, anti-capitalists, fascists, anti-fascists. Something was happening, obviously, that Leo had not known about – surprising perhaps that it should occur in Exeter of all places but unsurprising that Leo was so out of touch. He had not looked at a newspaper in days; not at a story that was not somehow connected to the case. And yet, here, there: a pushchair. A mother chanting as she held her son. And over there: schoolchildren. Three, four of them; two girls, two boys; his daughter’s age and – yes – in his daughter’s uniform. Not, like Leo, caught up inadvertently but bawling and baying like the rest of the crowd. Schoolchildren. Just schoolchildren. And as Leo looked it was one of the schoolboys who threw another egg.

Again Leo ducked but the missile, this time, missed by a car’s length. Something else hit, on the roof it sounded like. In the seat behind Leo’s, Daniel’s mother screamed: a counterpoint to the baritone boom of the impact. And, ‘Jesus!’ said the voice again. It was not the driver: a policeman and trained, Leo hoped, for this sort of thing. Daniel’s stepfather, then, in the back beside the boy’s mother. Leo turned, hugging his cheek to the velour upholstery.

‘Who are these people?’ said Stephanie Blake. With her eyes drawn wide, Leo could see gaps, like wrinkles, in her makeup. She had slouched in her seat and her skirt, too short already for a visit to court, had risen halfway up her nylon-trussed thighs. ‘Vince? Vince! What’s going—’

‘What the hell is happening?’ said Vincent Blake. ‘Where the hell are you taking us?’ He was seated behind the driver so had no choice but to focus his outrage on Leo.

Something hit Blake’s window and he spun. His pinched face turned pale. The man had a nose crooked like a brawler’s and a crease, across it, extending below his eye but there seemed nothing intimidating – nothing tough – about his appearance now. He slid towards his wife, forcing her closer to the nearside door.

‘Sit tight,’ said the driver and Leo turned back to face the front. The policeman, a youthful, earnest constable, was doing his best to appear stoical but there was tension in his grip, ten to two, on the steering wheel. ‘This might get rocky,’ the young man said.

It was an understatement. The crowd through which they had already passed was only the fringe of the mob outside the courthouse. There was a cordon of yellow-clad officers along the kerb but their line was bedraggled and beginning to fray. Just as the van – Daniel’s van – turned to make its final approach, the string of policemen snapped.

The protesters swarmed. There must have been two, three, four hundred people gathered and the men in front – and it was, here, mainly men in front – led the charge. The convoy – a police car, the van, another marked unit and finally Leo with Daniel’s parents – had been moving at a brisk speed but now the lead driver had no choice but to press his brakes. The procession slowed, then stopped, and the protest turned into a siege.

A dozen men, then a dozen more, surrounded Daniel’s van. They launched kicks at its bodywork and threw fists at the glass as though the pain they would be feeling in their toes and knuckles would somehow disseminate towards their prey. Someone swung a placard but in slow motion because with the sign it would have been like trying to swing an oar through water. The man turned it instead and used the pole end as a club.

‘Daniel!’

The boy’s mother had wedged herself between the two front seats. Her scarlet nails were clawing Leo’s shoulder but when he winced she paid no heed. Her attention was on the scene ahead: on the van, which was beginning to sway. Just lightly but the momentum was building, the efforts of the protesters coalescing. They would tip it. In a moment, the van would be on its side.

Leo tried to picture the boy. Seated between two policemen, would he be reaching for one of their hands? Would he be crying, like a twelve-year-old ought?

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Blake had displaced his wife between the seats. ‘Why aren’t we moving? Just drive, will you? Just go!’

‘Vince!’ Stephanie was trying to pull her husband to her side. ‘Sit down, Vince, please!’

‘You!’ Blake said, prodding the driver. ‘Put your foot down. Just drive through them – it’s their own damn fault!’

The policeman turned. ‘Sit down, Mr Blake!’

Blake fell away. He swore. He was starting forwards again when another impact tipped him back. It was not a missile this time but a body, splayed across the windscreen. Even the driver recoiled. His hands were locked to the wheel but his head was tight against his seat as he stared at the face confronting his. It belonged to a kid: a student, Leo guessed – hair bedraggled, skin pitted, expression ecstatic in righteous fury.

‘Move!’ the driver hissed. ‘Bloody move!’

He was talking to his colleagues, Leo realised – the drivers in the vehicles ahead. It was the student who obeyed. He slid from the bonnet until he was standing and then seemed somehow to convulse. His body curved and whipped forwards and something splattered against the windscreen. It was a bilious, viscous green. Leo heard himself sound his disgust.

Their car became engulfed. Leo could barely see the van now, although he could tell it was still, somehow, upright. That explained, perhaps, why the mob had transferred its attention along the fleet. The student, for instance, had gathered his friends. There was a group of five or six of them on the driver’s side, all teeth and fingers and flob. One in particular seemed enraged by Daniel’s stepfather. He was bawling, pounding against Blake’s window.

‘Is this reinforced?’ Blake said, scrabbling for safety. ‘This glass! Is it bulletproof?’

He received no answer. Beside him, Daniel’s mother was hunched and sobbing, fists bunched below her chin and knees tight to her belly. Someone – Leo could see only a thick, bare forearm – had attached themselves to the handle of her door and was tugging to try and prise it open. The door, though, held firm and the arm, its owner, seemed to fall away – until Stephanie shrieked and Leo saw, through his window, what she saw: a man growling through the glass and grasping in his reddened knuckles a piece of wood the shape and length of a baseball bat.

Leo jerked back as far from the window as his seatbelt would allow. He fumbled for the catch to free himself. He found it, or thought he did, but when he pressed it his seatbelt held firm. He looked, finally, at what he was doing and saw he was pressing the wrong button: the driver’s belt had come free but Leo’s remained clipped in place. He struggled, wrenched his body, but the more violently he moved, the tighter the seatbelt held him. And the man outside, filling the glass now, had the wood raised level with his shoulders. He had his torso turned and his feet set: ready, Leo realised, to swing.

He pressed himself deeper into his seat. He closed his eyes. He braced himself for the sound of shattering glass, for the shards to pierce his skin – but instead he heard a shout.

‘Finally!’

Leo looked: at the policeman beside him, then back at the window. He expected to see his assailant, the plank of wood on its downward path. The man, though, was gone. In his place was a curtain of yellow, drawing itself around the car. There was space, too, up ahead. A metre, then two, then road – clear road – where the car in front had pulled away.

Theirs was the last vehicle into the courtyard but the first to reach a stop and immediately Leo was out, on his feet, pacing and puffing and pressing at his temples with his palms. He could hear echoes of the scene outside the gates and the bellows of officers within. Someone nearby was swearing: at subordinates, perhaps; at a situation they had collectively failed to expect.

Daniel’s mother emerged next, followed by her husband. Stephanie was silent but Daniel’s stepfather was, indiscriminately, making his fury plain.

Leo offered Stephanie his arm. She staggered, then took it.

‘Are you okay?’

Daniel’s mother made no reply. Her head was in her handbag, a cigarette already hanging from her lips. She was shuffling manically – for a lighter, Leo assumed, and though he no longer smoked, he frisked himself for something that might help.

‘Jesus, Stephanie.’ Daniel’s stepfather, from his stance, seemed finally to have found himself a target. ‘Your family’s almost torn to pieces and all you can think about is getting yourself another fix.’ He sneered and Leo stared, until the driver stepped between them.

‘Here,’ he said, a match in his fingers aflame. Stephanie lurched but her cigarette fell. The driver lit his own and passed it to her and she dragged as though coming up for air.

‘Okay?’ said the driver this time. He looked at Stephanie, who managed a nod, and then at Leo.

Leo could only shake his head. ‘Who were all those people? Surely they weren’t all here for—’

‘Daniel!’

Leo saw the boy, beside the van and struggling against a policeman’s grip. A second officer touched his colleague’s shoulder and Daniel, with that, found himself free. Once again his mother called his name and he hurtled across the courtyard towards her. He was sobbing, Leo saw. Snot-stained and streaming, he streaked past his stepfather, who was lighting up himself now, and into his mother’s arms. The force of him nearly toppled her but she caught him, her balance too, and she squeezed as though to smother him. As she did the boy spoke but Leo could not make out the words. A single phrase, more than once, stifled by his mother’s embrace. It was only when she held him away – to wipe his eyes, to scour him for sign of harm – that Leo was able to hear.

‘I’m sorry,’ Daniel was saying: again and again and again.