Page 103 of Child's Play

He waited at the front door holding the backpack in one hand and the toast in the other.

As Jasper squirmed into his backpack, Penn ruffled his hair.

‘Have a good day, bud.’

Jasper reached up and did the same to him. ‘You too.’

Penn laughed and handed him the toast.

When his brother had first asked for the freedom of meeting his friends at the end of the road, he’d been both terrified and proud.

Unbeknown to Jasper he’d followed him for the first few mornings. He’d expected to see him munching on his jammy piece of toast as he walked, but he’d seen him meet his friends and hand the toast to his best friend, Billy.

Billy came from a family with seven brothers and sisters and very rarely got breakfast.

Most folks could learn a lot from his brother, he thought, closing the door.

With the welcome distraction of his brother gone, his thoughts turned to the day ahead, a prospect he didn’t relish one little bit.

Seventy-Four

Kim watched the woman’s every move and only when she was sitting with a coffee at a recently vacated single table did Kim stride over.

‘How lovely to see you, Veronica,’ Kim said, taking the empty seat. ‘But what the hell are you doing here?’

‘Curious,’ she said, offering no emotional reaction at all to either Kim’s tone or her question. ‘Wanted to see what had fascinated Belinda for all these years,’ she said, looking around the room. ‘Wondering why she’d keep returning to this environment.’

Kim opened her mouth to speak and then paused. There was so much she wanted to know but for a split second she’d just heard a sadness in the woman’s voice that she hadn’t heard before. And it had found its way to somewhere inside her.

How had this woman’s life turned her into the woman she was now?

‘Veronica, what the hell happened to you back then?’ she asked, gently.

‘Nothing I care to share, Inspector,’ she answered, holding tight to the barriers she’d erected around herself. Barriers that Kim herself recognised and understood, but there was something inside this woman that wanted to come out.

‘Who is it going to hurt now? There’s no one left. Tell me your side.’

Veronica met her gaze. ‘You don’t get it, do you? I don’t have a side. It wasn’t about me. It was all about my sister. Everything. Always.’

‘Okay, tell me about Belinda. What was her childhood like? Leave yourself out.’

Although judging from the TV footage they’d seen, Veronica hadn’t been left out at all.

She took a sip of her drink and Kim was surprised to see a slight tremble to her hand. All the anger and hostility towards the woman fell away. There was a human in there somewhere no matter how hard she tried to hide it. And she had suffered; somehow Kim had always sensed that.

‘I was four when Belinda was born. I was pretty average and normal and definitely old enough to hear my parents tell everyone how Belinda did “everything before Veronica did”. She spoke earlier; she walked earlier; she spelled her first word earlier. It was clear to everyone that she was clever. I remember her first day of school. My father collected me from class first and held my hand as we walked to Belinda’s class.

‘The teacher started talking to him about the extraordinary mathematical ability she’d demonstrated in just one day. She showed him the sums she’d completed, and I always remember that he dropped my hand to listen.’

The sad smile returned as she relived the memory. Kim wondered at the symbolism of that one small act for it to have remained a memory for over sixty years.

‘I watched him that night when we got home. I sat on the sofa and watched him testing her and quizzing her. My mother watched too, clapping her hands in delight when my father turned the calculator to show that Belinda was getting the answers right.’

The story was about the younger girl, but Kim’s attention was on the girl sitting on the sofa, watching.

‘Eventually, Belinda got bored and turned back to her toys. Our parents went to the kitchen and talked privately. But that was the day everything changed. From then on, my father tested her every night.’

‘Is that when Jemima was thrown out?’ Kim asked.