Silent Child(12)

Dr Schaffer smiled then, and it reminded me of the smile proud parents give their nervous children at sports events. But then he glanced down at his file and let out a long, deep sigh. The worst was to come. “There is evidence of damage to Aiden’s gums, and there are lacerations on his body that are consistent with sexual abuse.”

I leaned forward and vomited a small amount of clear liquid onto the floor of the doctor’s office. Jake stroked my hair away from my forehead and helped me straighten up in the chair. DCI Stevenson quickly mopped up the sick with his handkerchief and dropped it into the waste paper bin.

“Not to worry,” Dr Schaffer said. “I needed a new bin anyway.” He forced a smile.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“It’s quite all right.”

“I’ll take this to one of the nurses,” said DCI Stevenson. “And I’m getting us all some water. I think we need it.”

I smiled thinly, grateful to him for pretending that we all needed water. Pretending that I wasn’t the only one in the room who had lost control of her bodily functions.

I’d known it was coming. Of course I had. Little boys aren’t taken away for no reason. Not long after the flood, after search and rescue had failed to find Aiden’s body, I’d gone through every possible reason for a child’s disappearance, from getting lost down a well to being sold into the sex trade. I went over it all. I saw men with moustaches holding my little boy’s hand and leading him into murky rooms. I saw money changing hands and lascivious smiles on the faces of obese predatory men. I pictured the worst, the very worst, and I felt grimy and disgusting for even thinking it. No shower could take those images away.

And now my worst fear had been confirmed. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.

“Try to stay calm, sweetheart,” cooed Jake. “Think of the baby. You need to keep your stress levels down.”

But I was thinking of the baby, the one sat in that hospital room all on his own watching cartoons. My body ached with helplessness. Whatever I did now, I could never take it away. I could never go back and stop him going to school that day. Never. I could barely breathe.

“Here we are,” said DCI Stevenson as he passed a water bottle to each of us. I noticed that he gave me mine with the cap unscrewed. I realised why when my hand extended to take the bottle, only to shake so badly that I spilled some of it onto my clothes. I wrapped both of my hands around the plastic bottle and lifted it tentatively to my lips. I had to admit that the cool liquid felt good as it trickled down my throat. DCI Stevenson opened the window behind the desk and a breeze hit the sweat on my forehead.

“Thank you,” I said. I tried my best to settle into my chair, preparing myself for the rest of the information to come from Dr Schaffer.

But it was Jake who broke the silence first. “Are you sure?” Hearing his voice was a surprise. Apart from asking me if I was all right, he’d remained fairly quiet since arriving at the hospital. “I mean… what you’re saying is…”

“We won’t be sure until Aiden is able to tell us himself, but that is what our examination suggests.” Dr Schaffer’s fingers tightened above the paper file until I saw his knuckles whiten. He released his hands and his shoulders relaxed slightly.

I closed my eyes, trying not to think about what the examination had involved. I should have been there holding his hand as the doctors poked and prodded him.

“Has he been in any distress?” I asked. “Has he been crying, screaming, scared?”

“No,” Dr Stevenson said. “He has been very calm. He shows some discomfort when touched, but he allowed us to examine him, and to wash and clothe him, too. We were very gentle and we talked through every single procedure and why we were doing it.”

“You should have waited for me.” My hands clenched around the bottle. “I should’ve been there with him.”

“I understand why you feel that way,” said DCI Stevenson in the same calm voice I remembered from all those years ago. “We asked the doctors to look for evidence on Aiden’s body. If we’d waited, some of that evidence would have been destroyed.”

“And what evidence did you find?” I snapped.

DCI Stevenson pulled at the collar on his shirt. “It was a rainy night. It seems that if there was any trace of Aiden’s kidnapper left on him, it was washed away. There was no trace in his saliva either.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. But then my mind was swimming with so much information, I didn’t know what to make of any of this. I took a long drink of water.

It was DCI Stevenson’s turn to talk. He met my eyes with the patient, steady gaze of a teacher explaining a problem to a child. “The medical examination of Aiden’s condition and the way he was found all suggest that Aiden has been confined somewhere for the last ten years. We think it was a small area with limited light. Dr Schaffer feels that the marks on Aiden’s ankles suggest he was chained for some time.”

The urge to be sick rose again, but this time I swallowed it down. Chained. Confined. Kept like an animal in a cage. I’d studied psychology at school; I knew what that did to a child. I knew about the wolf children and the girl raised in a chicken coop. They were feral and traumatised, virtually unable to function, and certainly unable to integrate into society.