Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(14)
Kate was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and in AA this was frowned upon. There was no alcohol in the iced tea, but it had all the ritual of an after-work drink. But screw it, she thought. It worked for her. She went to meetings, she kept in contact with her sponsor, and she had six years of sobriety. She’d always been a drinker. It was part of police work culture to go down to the pub after work and get smashed. Both good days and bad days on the force warranted a drink, but after her world was turned on its head by the Nine Elms case, her drinking became a problem, and this affected her ability to be a responsible mother.
Jake never came to any harm, but often Kate drank so much that she was unable to function. Her parents, Glenda and Michael, would have him on weekends. They stepped in many times to look after him, and he spent several extended spells staying with them so Kate could get her act together.
Things came to a head one Friday afternoon when Jake was six. He had just started primary school in South London, and Glenda and Michael had gone away for a long weekend. Kate had been drinking during the week, nothing that she thought excessive, but that Friday afternoon she’d collapsed in the supermarket and been rushed to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. She didn’t show to pick Jake up from school, and when they tried to contact Kate and then her parents, no one was picking up. It got late, and the school called social services. Glenda and Michael rushed back home, and Jake spent only a few hours with a kind foster family, but the incident blew the lid off the problem of Kate’s drinking. She agreed to go to rehab, and Glenda and Michael were given temporary custody.
Looking back, she realized that she had been in a bad place mentally. She hadn’t taken rehab seriously. In her mind, she’d thought that Jake was just staying with her parents, like always, and they would be reunited once she paid her dues and got clean. There must be other parents who fell ill and didn’t make the school pickup. When she was discharged from rehab, three months later, she discovered Glenda and Michael had applied for permanent legal custody of Jake and won.
In the years that followed, Kate struggled to get back on track. She found herself fighting against her parents to see her son, and she launched several legal appeals to be reinstated in the police. Peter Conway’s legal team appealed his conviction, which kept the case in the headlines, and the whole media circus kept on rolling.
Kate finally made sobriety stick six years ago, when she was offered a lifeline—the job at Ashdean University. It came with a house and a complete change of scenery, and she found the life of an academic fulfilling and nonjudgmental. For so long her goal had been to be reunited with Jake, but by then he was eight years old. He was in a great school, he had friends, and he was very happy. Kate saw that Glenda and Michael had been there for him when she couldn’t, and it was in her son’s best interests to stay with them. As the years passed, she mended their relationship, and she saw Jake at every school holiday and some weekends, and they Skyped twice a week, on Wednesday and Sunday. They had a good relationship. It was to her eternal guilt and shame that her son had been taken away from her, but she held on to her sobriety and the good things for dear life.
As he got older, she saw that it was better for Jake to have Glenda drop him at school and for playdates with his friends. He wasn’t the kid with the notorious mother, the kid fathered by a serial murderer. With that distance from Kate, he was able to live a relatively normal life. He was able to be the kid who lived with his grandparents in the big house with the huge garden and a cute dog.
Jake knew that his father was a bad man who was locked away, but Peter Conway didn’t play any part in his life. Peter was forbidden to have any contact with Jake until he was sixteen. But Kate could sense trouble looming in the future. In two years, Jake would be sixteen. He had already pestered Glenda to let him join Facebook, and he was hitting those teenage years of self-awareness and questioning.
It always felt wrong that she came home alone while her son lived somewhere else, but she had to keep looking forward; she had to keep believing that the best was yet to come. Jake was going to have a wonderful life. She was determined to make it happen, even if it meant distancing herself from his formative years.
A small table next to the armchair held framed photos of Jake. There was his latest class photo and another photo of Jake in her parents’ large leafy garden with Milo, his beloved Labrador. Kate’s favorite photo was the newest, taken in late August on the beach below the house. The tide was far out in the background, and they were standing next to a huge sandcastle they’d spent all afternoon building. Jake had both his arms around her waist, and they were smiling. The sun was shining in their faces and highlighting the burst of orange they both had in the blue of their eyes.
She picked up the photo and stroked his face through the glass. Jake now came up to her shoulder. He had kind eyes and dark hair, cut in the floppy boy-band style worn by the boys in One Direction. He was a handsome kid, but he had Peter Conway’s nose, strong but slightly pointed at the end.
“Of course he’s going to look like his father; that’s nature,” said Kate out loud. “The nurture, that’s my . . . that’s my parents’ job. He’s happy. There’s no reason for him to turn bad.”
She felt her eyes fill with tears. She put the photo back and looked down at her glass of iced tea. It would be so easy to have a drink. Just one drink. She shook the thought away, and it went. She drained her iced tea and looked at Jake’s school photo, the kids in his class posing on two rows of benches with Miss Prentice, a pretty blonde in her early twenties. Jake was surrounded by his four close friends, like a little boy band in the making, and smiling, squinting at the sun.