Silent Child(23)

Word had got out.

If the hospital staff and patients knew who Aiden was, that meant gossip of Aiden’s strange arrival had started to spread. But how far had it gone?

We were only two or three paces out of the glass doors when a wiry man with a hooked nose stepped into our path.

“Matthew Grey from the Yorkshire Post. Is this Aiden Price?”

Marcus stepped forward, shielding Aiden from the intrusive man, while Denise whispered to me, “Don’t say anything.”

Rob and I put our heads down and walked on, guiding Aiden gently away, but the man sidestepped Marcus and approached Aiden directly.

“Are you Aiden Price?”

“Get away from him,” I said between my teeth. This time I did take Aiden’s hand. I pulled him away from the reporter and hurried to the car with my heart beating hard and my chest tight.

This time it was only one. Next time, we wouldn’t be so lucky.





12


PC Denise Ellis put the kettle on as soon as we made it into the house.

“They’ll find out where you live soon,” she warned. “They can’t come onto the property but they’ll hang around the boundaries with cameras. We’ll do what we can to keep them away. It might be time to get a lawyer and maybe someone in public relations to help.”

I didn’t want to deal with all this. Aiden had only just taken his shoes off. I’d bought him Velcro trainers: I didn’t even know if he could tie his own shoelaces, and I didn’t want him to feel embarrassed by not knowing how. We were all crowded awkwardly in the kitchen. All I could think about was how PC Ellis had just left the teabag on the very expensive ash kitchen side and how it might stain, and how PC Hawthorne still had his boots on.

“Is that really necessary?” I asked. My hands were at it again, one rubbing over the other. “Won’t it be expensive?”

Denise stirred milk into the tea. “Yes, but you can potentially make quite a lot of money, you know. There are newspaper interviews, TV interviews, the lot. They pay well and you get to tell your story.” The stirring stopped and she looked up at me. “But don’t speak to anyone until the investigation is over. When we put the kidnapper behind bars, that’s when you can start talking to the press.”

“No one is telling this story except Aiden.”

“I know, but the press are going to hound you. What we can do, if you want, is release a statement asking for privacy at this difficult time. It never works, but then if they cross the line, you’ve warned them not to.”

She handed me a hot cup of tea and I blew on the liquid to cool it.

“They’d better leave Aiden alone,” Rob said. “They have to, don’t they? He’s a minor. He’s just a kid.”

“The problem is,” Marcus said, “they already know who Aiden is. We would usually keep his name out of the newspapers, but it was reported on during the flood. Everyone knows Aiden’s name.”

My heart sank. More than anything I wanted Aiden to have a happy, normal home after everything he’d been through. But he was already famous, and he didn’t even know it.

“We’re here to help you deal with everything.” Denise tried to smile reassuringly, but neither Rob nor I returned the smile.

The tea cooled on the table as we took Aiden around his new home. He followed us placidly with small, stiff steps. I found myself rambling as I walked through the house, desperately trying to fill the silence.

“Jake chose the carpets, he loves white and cream. He’s lovely. You’ll get to know him soon. I thought you might want to get used to the place first, though. Jake will be home soon and then you can get to know each other. He’s out buying food for us and running errands. We’ll have a stocked up house for you soon. A proper home.”

“Is anyone allowed to spill in this house?” Rob asked with an eyebrow raised, his eyes roaming across the luxurious cream throws over the sofas.

I chose to ignore him. “And that is one of my paintings. It was Jake’s idea to hang it on the wall.” I gestured to the large abstract acrylic hanging up on the corridor wall. I’d painted it shortly after the flood. It represented a great deal of pain for me, with the reds swirled into blues, but Jake had insisted that we display it. He said it was his favourite artwork of all time and I couldn’t resist his excited smile. Over time I grew to look at that painting and see his smile rather than Aiden’s coat in the water. Perhaps now that Aiden was back, I’d find something else to see in those swirls of colour.

“It’s good, Em,” Rob said.

I’d never shown him the painting before, not even in the aftermath of the flood. I’d always kept it to myself. It was only when Jake found me with a knife in one hand and red coating my arms, sat on the floor next to a pile of torn canvasses, that I had finally shown someone.

“Anyway, up here on the left is the downstairs loo.” I angled my face away from Rob to hide the way my cheeks had flushed.

“Downstairs loo, you say? Very la-di-da.”

I rolled my eyes at Rob. It wasn’t as if his parents didn’t have a nice place. He was being an inverted snob. It was cute when we’d been teenagers. I liked that rebellious streak in him, and the way he railed against his middle-class upbringing, but now it just seemed immature.