around, pushing another microphone in his face, when the little boy had been murdered. It had been easier to express sympathy then of course, whereas anything he said now could be ill-advised. If he remembered rightly this woman wasn’t even from the local Telegraph or news station, or even the Birmingham Post, but a national tabloid. That was all the city needed.
Glaring again at the woman he turned on his heel and pushed his way back through the revolving doors. He was going straight to the over-priced staff eatery for a steak, chips, and fried onions, diet be damned.
Outside the red-headed reporter merely shrugged and tucked away her microphone into her handbag, jerking her head at the photographer who stood ever ready behind her. She had already got plenty of copy from members of the crowd but had thought to try her luck with Hagard when she spotted him lumbering through the doors looking ready to have a fit. His dismissal of her wasn’t a problem; she had her eyes on far more interesting prey.
Lucy peered through the nets, her stomach sinking. This was all she needed. Behind her Ricky grumbled to himself as he threw books into his bag, already late for school. Lucy had insisted on driving him, having sat him down to talk to him about the news. She knew how children – perhaps teenagers in particular – could be and could only imagine the stares and questions that Ricky would face today at school.
She was worried enough about him as it was; had caught the whiff of cigarette smoke and perhaps worse on his breath more than once in recent weeks. Typical boy behaviour, her own mother had shrugged, but not for the first time Lucy felt the lack of a father figure in her eldest son’s life. In spite of nearly a decade of bringing him up and letting Ricky call him ‘Dad’ Ethan had barely bothered with him since he had left. When Ricky had been having his ‘issues’, as they had referred to them after Jack’s death, Ethan had offered the boy no support at all.Now as she saw her ex-husband striding up her drive she bit her lip just in time to stop herself saying ‘Your father’s here’. Instead she dropped the net and took a deep breath before the door knocked.
‘It’s Ethan.’
‘What does he want?’ Ricky asked, his face folded with distaste. Lucy opened the door, not even bothering to check her reflection in the little mirror by the coat stand. In the last couple of years she had started to take a pride in her appearance again, but this morning she had woken with that heavy, lethargic feeling she remembered so well from the first years after Jack’s death. It had taken all of her willpower to drag herself out of bed and get dressed, even the fabric of her clothes feeling heavy on her skin.
‘Ethan.’
‘Lucy.’
They stared at each other for a moment, Lucy taking in his slightly rumpled appearance, his suit looking less than ironed and his jaw unshaven. It wasn’t like him, his appearance was usually immaculate. In a flash of compassion, Lucy realised he must be feeling as wretched as she did and opened the door, stepping back to let him in.
Ethan walked in and looked around his old home as if uncomfortable at being here again. He had only lived there a few months, had started his affair even before they had started making plans to move from their old home. Jack’s home.
Ethan’s eyes flitted round the room and then settled on Ricky, still standing at the kitchen table with his book bag.
‘Hey, kiddo.’
Ricky’s lip curled. He stared at Ethan until he dropped his eyes, then hoisted his bag onto his shoulder.
‘I said I’ll drive you,’ Lucy protested as he walked towards the door, but Ricky carried on, slamming it behind him. Shocked, Lucy went to go after him but Ethan laid a hand on her arm.
‘Let him go, Luce, he’s bound to be upset.’
Lucy bit back the retort that sprang to her lips at the cheek of him advising her on her eldest son, the child he had taken on as his and then walked out on. She didn’t want to open that particular can of worms.
‘Don’t call me Luce,’ she snapped instead, the unnecessary shortening of her name annoying her as much as it always had. It was two syllables, for God’s sake, hardly difficult to pronounce.
She sat down at the table, waving Ethan towards the chair opposite. He took the one next to her instead, leaning forward and taking her hands. Lucy flinched but didn’t pull away. He had slim, long hands. Clever, surgeon’s hands, that had once touched her and held her, but were now holding someone else. She looked down at them dispassionately.
‘How are you?’Lucy couldn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t want him to see the pain in them any more than she wanted to see it in his. It should be a shared pain, something they should face together, but Ethan had given that up. When she didn’t answer he started talking in a broken voice, cracking the way Ricky’s had started to now that he was hitting puberty, and Lucy looked at him properly then and saw the anguish in his eyes.
‘I really thought he wouldn’t get parole, you know? Thought they would never let him out yet. Jack would still only be eleven now.’
‘I know how old he would be.’ Lucy didn’t mean for her words to come out so harsh and yet somehow they did. She didn’t want to do this with him, didn’t want to relive the horror, and couldn’t bring herself to offer a comfort she didn’t feel.
‘Does your wife know you’re here?’ she asked instead and Ethan started, a flash of guilt in his eyes, though he still didn’t remove his hands.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to see how you were. To talk. She doesn’t understand.’ His voice sounded choked again and Lucy pulled back, wrenching her hands away from him. Ethan looked up at her, hurt, and Lucy realised she was suddenly angry.
‘She doesn’t understand, so you come here, to me? Because your wife doesn’t understand you?’ she laughed, and it sounded bitter even to her own ears. ‘Isn’t that what you used to say to her about me when you were fucking her behind my back?’
Ethan’s eyes grew wide and shocked and Lucy pressed her own hand to her mouth as if to stop any further outburst. She rarely, if ever, swore. And she knew it wasn’t really Ethan she was angry at. When he reached for her again she stood up, bumping her hip against the edge of the table.
‘This is hardly the time, Lucy,’ he reprimanded, regaining some of his usual composure. ‘I came here to talk about Jack.’
Lucy pressed a hand to her head, which had begun to pound, heralding one of the fierce headaches she suffered on and off. Tension headaches, her doctor called them.
‘Jack’s dead,’ she said. As she spoke the words it occurred to her that in eight years she had never spoken them aloud, had either avoided such simple statements of fact or cloaked the cold truth in less final language. Because she had never spoken to the press and avoided discussing her business with either strangers or friends, those two words, together like that, had never come from her mouth.
Now they lingered in the air between them, weighed down with eight years of guilt and grief.
Ethan winced.
‘About Terry Prince then. About this mess.’ Such an understatement. He spread his arms, belying the word. Lucy folded hers, not in anger now but as a way of holding herself upright on suddenly weak legs.
‘I’m going to have my solicitor release a statement to the press detailing how sickened we are. There must be something we can do, surely?’
She didn’t like this side of Ethan. He had always been in control, always taken care of everything. Now he sounded lost, was sitting here in her kitchen looking at her like there was something she could do; as if she had all the answers and he was waiting for her to enlighten him.
‘They won’t lock him back up now they’ve let him go,’ she said, turning her body away from his, ‘not unless he re-offends.’
Her head was really pounding now and she wanted him to go if only so she could take some painkillers and lie down. She had phoned in sick at work this morning