The Secret Child (DI Amy Winter #2)(89)

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

‘Please. Don’t charge my son. He’s been through enough.’ Deborah’s face crumpled as she negotiated her way through the police interview the next day. Across from her sat a male and a female detective. The man was called DC Moss; the woman’s name she had already forgotten. She looked like she was in her twenties but seemed quite capable of holding such a responsible role.

‘It’s our job to gather evidence. The Crown Prosecution Service makes the decision to charge,’ DC Moss said, looking at her arm as she nursed it. ‘How are you doing with that?’

‘It’s fine,’ she replied. It was badly bruised but not broken, and right now she was only interested in protecting her son. ‘Hugh . . .’ She paused, rethinking the use of his first name. ‘Dr Curtis is behind everything. He’s the one who imprisoned those children at the institute. The rest of us were bystanders. He pushed them to their limits in the name of drug research.’

‘We’re looking into it,’ the young officer piped up, just as Deborah caught sight of the name DC Molly Baxter on her folder.

‘I’ve got paperwork, copies of all his test results. It’s in a safety-deposit box.’ Deborah watched as the officers exchanged a glance. She wasn’t stupid. She had kept the evidence as leverage in case she got caught. ‘It was all his idea to light the fire at the institute,’ she continued. ‘I pretended to go along with it so I could save Luka. Dr Curtis . . . he never had any intention of letting him go home.’

‘Yet you never saw fit to report him to the police,’ DC Moss interjected.

‘I couldn’t. My father would have gone to jail. Back then, he was my mother’s carer. She wouldn’t have been able to cope without him.’ Memories of her mother filled her with a sense of sadness. How disappointed she would be in her now, if she were still alive. Not to mention how Luka would feel when he discovered she had left Sasha to die.

‘There were five children in the Zitalin study.’ Deborah’s words were heavy with regret. ‘I didn’t know about Julian and Martha until the fire, when I read some of the paperwork Dr Curtis had told me to burn.’ She glanced at the officers across from her, then to the camera recording her every move. ‘It said that Julian had died of convulsions a month into the study and Martha . . . she died in her sleep.’ Deborah knew her father had taken pay-offs for cremating their bodies on the quiet. But where were their parents? Were they runaways? Or had they come from the children’s home Sam originated from?

Deborah thought about the orderlies. Would Christina have ended her own life if she hadn’t been pressured into keeping quiet? A pang of guilt hit her. ‘I was taken on at the same time as Stuart and Christina, just after Jamie, child number three, ran away.’ She knew Luka had found him again, and together they had conspired for revenge.

‘Dr Curtis desperately needed another child to finish the Zitalin trials. That’s where Luka came in.’

‘And child number four?’ DC Baxter piped up. ‘You mentioned there were five children.’

Deborah frowned as she recounted her words. ‘Oh, yes, number four was Sam. He died of heart failure after Luka joined us.’ That was the day they had all been bound into a secret which would span over decades. ‘Dr Curtis is a monster,’ Deborah said, her thoughts floating back to the orderlies. ‘He got Christina and Stuart to give Sam his medication so they would be implicated if anything went wrong. As for me . . . by the time I found out what he was really like, it was too late.’

‘So you felt justified in helping Luka kidnap Ellen and Toby?’ DC Baxter’s voice brought her into the present day.

Deborah picked at a thread on the cuff of her blouse. ‘I tried to help Luka live a normal life as Max. Yes, he had episodes, but I thought it was under control. That was, until Dr Curtis started popping up on television. That’s when the migraines began.’

‘Let me get this straight.’ DC Moss scratched his cheek. ‘You’re saying that Luka was driven to commit a crime because he saw Dr Curtis on TV?’

Deborah sighed. ‘It was like he was two different people. My kind and loving son Max, who supported animal-rights charities, and Luka, the little Russian boy who wanted revenge.’ She looked from one officer to the other. ‘It started with the flowers, but then he tracked down Jamie. When I found out about the kidnapping I pretended to go along with it. What choice did I have? Luka had already spent years hidden away. I couldn’t bear for him to go to jail.’ Deborah shook her head. ‘There was no stopping him once the idea took hold. I looked after Ellen when he took Toby. She suffered from nosebleeds – poor mite. I bought them toys . . . tried to make them as comfortable as I could.’

‘And the plan was for you to dump them at a breaker’s yard in Peckham?’

‘He would never have gone through with it. He knew I would never have hurt those kids.’ Deborah tried to sound convincing but, deep down, she wasn’t sure. It had taken her some time to persuade him to use Ellen’s nightdress at the building site as a substitute for the little girl herself. ‘And where were you when he needed you?’ She glared at the officers, trying to allocate blame. ‘Everybody let him down. That’s why he made that police officer jump through hoops. He liked being the one in control.’ Her gaze fell to her clasped hands resting on the table. She knew who was really to blame in all of this. Her actions had been for her own selfish gain. From the moment she had first met Luka, all she could see was her little boy, Max. Selfishly, she had taken him, moulding him into the son she had lost. But their relationship was tainted by the past, and nobody in the world could replace her secret child.