Jo, already on edge, lost it then, and the first tear rolled down her cheek. She nodded. As the door closed behind her visitors, Theo squirmed a little in her grip, and she realised she was holding him tight enough to make his back clammy through his clothes. She loosened her grip, and kissed him on the head. Though her thoughts were an angry swirling mess on the surface – How could they march into her house? Ask her their stupid questions? – it was the pull of a deeper, more unsettling current beneath that was causing her legs to shake. Something Jo Masters rarely experienced. Fear. Theo was her child, and no one else was going to lecture her on how to look after him. No one was going to touch him, or talk to him, or ever take him away.
Chapter 2
Her first thought, in the aftermath of the visit, was to call and delay the return to work for another day, but after ten minutes giving Theo his bottle and spooning some mashed banana between his gums, she found a degree of calm. It wasn’t even a proper day’s work – she was only popping in for a catch-up. If she didn’t show, it wouldn’t look right. Her colleagues would make their own assumptions.
Having wiped Theo’s face, and changed his nappy, she felt composed enough to search for Annabelle Pritchard online. She was listed as a ‘welfare co-ordinator’ with the Oxfordshire City Council Child Welfare Team. Jo preferred ‘Child-Snatcher’ – it seemed to fit Pritchard rather well. She didn’t know why she had let herself be caught off guard like that, but told herself the visit was indeed a formality, a simple safeguarding procedure. After several incidents of neglect in the last few years, local authorities often erred on the side of caution. Better that than catch negative publicity later. And who could blame them? There really was nothing to worry about though. What had happened outside the shop was a freak accident – nothing more – and it certainly didn’t reflect any cause for concern, or approach anything like the threshold for taking further action. She was, as everyone close to her said – and as she frequently tried to convince herself – a good mum.
The cottage she was renting was in the small village of Wolvercote, far enough from the city centre that she didn’t feel tied to the station, but still walkable on a good day through Port Meadow. As she drove Theo to Little Steps, the nursery she’d found on the Woodstock Road, he gurgled happily from the rear seat. Though she tried to block out the memory of the accident eight days earlier, it was like a stubborn tune that wouldn’t leave her, playing from the depths of her subconscious.
She’d heard the crash from the queue at the front of the minimarket – everyone had. She’d dropped the nappies and run out, seeing her own car at an angle, the front of an Audi TT buried in the rear wing. She hadn’t even found her voice to scream; she could hardly breathe as she ran on unsteady legs to Theo’s door. A young woman was climbing out of the Audi, her phone still in her hand. She looked up at Jo approaching and mumbled something about ‘single yellows’. Jo rushed right past, and flung open the back door. Theo’s cries were wild, like no sound he’d ever made before. She heard the woman say, ‘Oh my God!’
Jo felt an echo of the same sinking feeling as she stopped at the lights. The pores of her skin prickled at the memory.
The only immediate sign of damage to Theo had been a graze across his cheekbone. The doctors said later that it could have been much worse, but the baby seat’s headrest had done its job, cushioning the impact as the car jolted sideways. Still, they’d insisted on several different tests – keeping Jo in a purgatory of guilt and worry. Theo, amazingly, had stopped crying while they carried out the examinations, as if, even in his own distress, he’d recognised her emotional turmoil was greater. Though nothing turned up in the X-rays or brain images, they’d kept him in overnight as a precaution, with Jo curled up in a chair on the children’s ward beside him, eyes gritty from tears and exhaustion.
She released a deep shuddering breath as she cruised down the Woodstock Road. What she’d told Pritchard about the matter being closed wasn’t strictly true. Though the police had shown no interest in pursuing things, the insurers were still in a process of arbitration. Jo hadn’t even noticed the parking restrictions when she pulled up directly outside the shop. She hadn’t seen much at all, other than that the small car park was full. Theo was fast asleep; he needed to sleep after the broken night before, up every hour crying inexplicably. And if she parked near to the door, she’d practically be able to see him in his seat. It would be for two minutes, maybe less …
It had turned out to be more like seven – bloke at the damned checkout deciding he’d picked up the wrong hummus – and every second haunted her. Might she have made a different decision, if she hadn’t been so fucking exhausted herself? If she hadn’t been so desperate for him to get some decent sleep, and to wake up smiling rather than crying, eyes clear and shining rather than pink with fatigue? If she was a better mum, and not the sort who left her baby – her precious, defenceless, innocent, six-month-old baby – in the car while she dipped into a shop to buy nappies?
The car behind was honking its horn. The lights were green. Jo lifted a hand to apologise and drove on.
Theo had already had a couple of sessions to settle in at Little Steps and, despite some tearful protests, the staff had assured her he was perfectly happy as soon as she was out of sight. She wished she could have said the same for herself. As had so often happened in recent months, the extremes of her own emotions surprised her – the swings and lurches of her moods were not something she was used to at all. Tears came more easily, and mawkish films that would once have induced nausea now reduced her to sobbing. She’d actually had to turn off a nature programme a couple of nights earlier when it showed a lion cub being stalked by hyenas.
There was anger too, always there, like a Mr Hyde lurking and ready to attack. She really had come close to kicking the desiccated old bitch Pritchard up the arse on her way out of the door. But now, replaying the conversation from memory with her Dr Jekyll head, she wondered if actually she’d imagined the judgemental tone completely. For someone who so often had relied on calm intuition – on reading people and their motives – it was a little frightening to think so.
Today, there were no tears at all from Theo on drop-off, and so she took the nursery worker’s advice and left without making a big deal of the goodbyes. Back in her car, she felt a sudden release, then immediately on its tail, guilt. Theo was still so young. The welfare officer wasn’t the only person to express surprise at Jo going back to work so soon. Her sister-in-law Amelia, and Heidi Tan, the other mum in CID, had both suggested she needn’t rush back. And it wasn’t as though her financial position was particularly parlous even – with the inheritance, and her share of the sale of her mum’s house, she could’ve easily prolonged her maternity leave for another six months.
So what was it, pulling her back in now? She was honest enough with herself to acknowledge that she missed the hustle of police work. Some women, she knew, never looked back once they started their families. Work took the back seat, and good luck to them. Amelia was like that, taking four years out for Emma, their first child. She’d been on the way to making deputy head at a good school prior to the birth, but she’d paid the price in terms of career progression, settling for a demotion in order to continue teaching when her former role was absorbed. She’d told Jo she really didn’t mind the pressure being off, but Jo knew Amelia was no pushover, and she had always been ambitious; it must’ve stung.