And it was awful, but that was how I saw my new baby. A challenge. I was beginning to think that life was set out to test me, and I was getting mightily sick of being tested. When the little one moved inside me, I winced and stroked the bulge of my bump.
“Everything all right?” Denise asked.
I hadn’t heard her approach, and her voice was something of a shock. “Just the baby moving.”
“Not long now,” she said.
“No.”
There was an awkward pause. What do you say to a woman barely a week away from her due date whose son had recently come back from the dead? There was no standard reply for that situation.
“I’m sorry it’s such a stressful time for you,” she said eventually. “But at least Aiden will have a little sister soon. I’m sure it will help a lot with his… development.”
I watched as Aiden kicked the ball back to Rob. Each kick was the same. There was no enthusiasm or energy about what he was doing. I tried to remind myself that Aiden was weaker than most sixteen-year-olds, but it was still painful to see him in a situation that should have been normal for a boy his age, behaving like it was the strangest thing in the world. The more he kicked the ball, the more that fleeting moment of hope ebbed away. He moved like a robot, drawing his foot back and kicking the ball in a slow, repetitive motion. The smile slowly faded from my face as I sat there and watched them.
The thing is, I should have been excited about having the baby and getting Aiden back. And I should have been encouraged by the fact that Aiden had chosen tojoin inwith the game. But I wasn’t any of those things. Looking at the dull blankness of Aiden’s expression, I felt nothing but fear.
ChapterTwenty-Eight
The Duke of Hardwick was pictured inThe Sun, red-faced and blotchy on his way out of York police station. Alongside it were pictures of him on holiday with his children. The media raked him through the coals, too, dragging up an old allegation of sexual assault, and photos of him attending parties with women in bikinis flanking him on either side. I couldn’t stand to see their grinning faces. The photos of him with the scantily clad women came from the 70s, and there was something about his leering grin that turned my stomach. It was like looking at photos of radio DJs in the 70s and feeling the grime of rape accusations coating your skin. Looking at those old perverts makes you want to take a shower.
But looking at a picture of the duke’s blotchy red face showed me one important point: He was old. He walked with a cane and his hair was snow white. Now, I didn’t know what kind of physical condition he was in ten years ago, but I did know that he would have needed to be fairly fit to abduct a child. Unless he had received some sort of assistance throughout the decade of my son’s incarceration. My mind wandered into the murky depths of paedophile rings. There could be more of these men. I was almost sure of it. I reached out to the photograph of the duke and clawed away his face with my nails.
He was on bail.
The Wetherington House search had proved fruitless. Aside from the duke’s computer, there was nothing else incriminating. There was no hidden dungeon. There were no secret passages or rooms that had not been scoured by the police. Or so they said. I was dubious. Surely a man with so much wealth and so many connections could afford to pay a builder to work in secrecy. But then again, as DCI Stevenson had told me during a brief telephone conversation informing me of the duke’s release, any change to Wetherington House was a ball-ache for the duke and duchess. They had to jump through more hoops than the rest of us, and it would take an awful lot of effort to build any kind of addition to the house. There was, of course, the possibility that he had used his money and influence to pay someone off, but even then he would have had to hide the whole thing from his family.
I was beginning to have doubts. The duke was a sick man. He had broken the law, perhaps multiple times, but I was no longer sure that he had taken and abused my Aiden.
I told Jake my thoughts over breakfast. We had a rare morning without any family liaison officers, as they had been called into the station for some sort of meeting. I was sure that it was to report back about us. They were spies.
“It has to be him.” Jake pushed his glasses up his nose, as he tended to do when he was anxious. “He had all those pictures on his laptop. I bet he’s so rich he can pay people off.”
I cringed. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true.”
“I can’t stand the thought of Aiden’s kidnapper out there being allowed to live his life. Free to do whatever he wants.”
“Well, if Aiden would man up and open his gob, none of this would be going on.”
I quietly seethed as I buttered my toast.
“It’s true though, isn’t it?” Jake said, clearly not understanding when to shut his own gob. “All Aiden has to do is talk.”
“I think he’s blocking it all out. I’m not sure how much he remembers at this point,” I said. “And I’m not convinced that it was the duke. He’s too old. If he did do it, he had a lot of help. Maybe someone worse used his money to set the whole thing up. Maybe it was someone in the village.” My stomach churned. I set my toast back down on the plate.
“You need to eat something,” Jake said. “The baby needs you to be healthy.”
“I know.” I picked off a corner of the crust and ate it. It tasted of nothing.
“Is the nursery all set up?” Jake asked.
“We set up most of it before… before Aiden came home. But we haven’t got all the toys and clothes out of the packaging.”
“Maybe you can do that today,” Jake suggested. “I’ve got to take the car in for its MOT, so I’ll be out and about most of the day. Besides, it’ll be a nice reminder that you have two children, not one.”
My face flushed with a mix of shame and anger. It was true that my thoughts were mostly concerned with Aiden, but it was unfair of him to actually say it out loud. The last thing I needed was to be reminded that I was already a bad mother to the little girl growing in my womb.
