Silent Child(68)

“It’s my due date in a week,” I said. “So I have a lot to think about.”

“But you’re so small!” she noted. “When I was nine months pregnant I looked more like a cow or a beached whale. You’re…” she trailed off and smiled—to cover up her mistake?

“Lucky?” I finished. “In some ways, I suppose.”

“So. Are you all set?” she asked, changing the subject.

I frowned. “We’ve just got to put the crib together and then we’ll be done.”

“How has Aiden been handling the changes going on around the house?”

This was my moment to tell Dr Foster about the incident with the crib. But my maternal instinct held back. While I actually liked Dr Foster, I did not completely trust her. I certainly didn’t want her to recommend that my son be taken away from me.

“He’s doing okay. He’s been in the nursery and he knows what’s happening, but he still isn’t talking so there’s not much to report.”

“And his drawings?”

Violent, I thought. So much more violent than before. He drew blood on steel, blood on leaves, blood in the crib… He had worn his red colouring pencil right down and his tube of red paint was down to the last drop.

“Same as usual.” I glanced nervously across to where Aiden sat colouring on his own. Away from us. That was who Aiden was now—he was an outsider looking in.

“I have been thinking about Aiden, and I believe it’s now time to look at some other options.”

I sat up straighter. I hadn’t been told about any other options.

Dr Foster lifted her hands in a calming gesture. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing too taxing, but it is important. I want Aiden to start seeing a speech therapist to help him. Now that he’s settled into his environment, I think it’s time for us to actively help him speak.”

“Okay.”

“It’s been over two weeks and this level of mutism is unheard of. DCI Stevenson and I thought it was best that we push Aiden a little harder. Now, I don’t want to push too hard, which is why I’ve suggested a speech therapist.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Good. I’ll get my diary and give you some recommendations.”

I scratched the rash on my hand and pondered over what Dr Foster hadn’t said during our conversation. It was time for Aiden to talk, because otherwise we would never find out who took him ten years ago.

*

Bump was active that day. When your baby is kicking, the last thing you want to be doing is driving. I couldn’t wait to get us home. When we arrived, Aiden disappeared into the garage and I sloped into the kitchen for a glass of water and a biscuit.

My phone buzzed. When I checked the screen I saw Rob’s number. “Hello?”

“Emma, they’ve taken Dad in for questioning.”

“What?”

He spoke quickly, in a breathless, panicked voice. I heard movement in the background of the call and imagined Rob pacing up and down, unsure what to do with his anxious energy. “The police asked him to go down to the station for questioning. They say they’ve been reviewing CCTV footage from the day Aiden was taken and they’ve seen him walking near the bridge ten minutes before the abduction.”

“Are they serious?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe they think he saw something, but it seemed… formal, like he was a suspect. Mum’s going mad. It’s so stupid, he only went down there to take some pictures of the flood. And how the hell would he keep Aiden locked away for ten years without any of us knowing?”

“Rob, try to stay calm.”

“I’m so fucking angry, Emma.”

“I know, but that isn’t going to help anything.”

“I need to go. Mum needs me.”

I slumped into the chair at the kitchen table. Of all the possible suspects, I’d never thought to distrust Aiden’s grandfather. The man was a walking bore. But… he was a birdwatcher and a carpenter. He spent quite a lot of his time outdoors in silly sheds staring at birds. If he could build a shed, what else could he build? A cage? I shook the thoughts out of my head. No. I knew Peter. He wasn’t… But then I thought about how I’d known Amy. I’d seen how her mask had slipped, and now I knew her true face. What if the same were true for Peter?

I sipped the cool water and wished for something stronger. The baby moved, reminding me that it wouldn’t be a good idea to open the bottle of brandy we had stashed somewhere. Another unwanted Christmas present we hadn’t got round to throwing out.

Instead, I put my head in my hands, and tried to work it all out in my mind. I knew that Aiden had gone missing between 1:15 and 1:20pm. That was when Amy said she got distracted by the flood and left the classroom for five minutes. Only one of Aiden’s classmates said they saw him leave, and that was Jamie, a little boy whose father worked in the GP surgery with my late mother. Apparently Jamie had asked Aiden where he was going, and Aiden hadn’t answered.

At that time, Amy had been placing buckets under streams of water leaking through the roof along the school corridor. The head-teacher and the janitor were walking around the school building assessing each classroom. Jake was with Simon from IT looking for dry classrooms to relocate their students. According to those statements, none of them had time to take a child and hide him somewhere. I highly doubted they would have had time to take him deep into Rough Valley Forest either—though I didn’t know for certain that was where Aiden had been kept captive.