James
After
The cup of tea has a thick film of skin on its surface which looks distinctly like DC Lawrie’s orange foundation.
‘That must have been hard, James,’ she attempts to say softly, throwing in a small smile for good measure. It would seem that while I’ve been taking advantage of a ten-minute fag break, the officers have regrouped. ‘Agreeing to raise a child who wasn’t biologically yours, I can’t even imagine.’
I flick my eyes up towards the clock. ‘I’m not being rude but how is any of this important? I’ve been here for two hours. You need to be out there, not pestering me.’
‘I can assure you we’re doing all we can. Our team is out searching and we’ll inform you when any news comes in.’
‘We’ll get to the bottom of this, don’t you worry.’ DC Kennedy bends his fingers back until they crack. He hasn’t taken his eyes off me since the interview resumed, and now seems to be relishing his ‘bad cop’ role.
‘I didn’t have anything to do with this,’ I protest, perhaps a little too hard. ‘Haven’t you checked my alibi yet? I was at the hospital until gone twelve.’
‘Although you didn’t actually arrive until gone eleven, did you?’ asks Kennedy, his question more a statement. ‘And yet you say you left the house around eight.’
I take a deep breath. ‘I drove around for a while, couldn’t bear to be in the house with Lou any longer, she was in such a state. Of course I made sure she wasn’t alone. Oh God, it’s my fault, isn’t it?’ I put my head in my hands, fresh tears seeping through the cracks in my fingers. ‘But I did arrive at the hospital for just short of eleven. Check with Hannah in the canteen. I ordered a coffee.’
‘Mr Carter, we’re not accusing you of anything. Of course it’s likely, given your wife’s history and state of mind…’ DC Lawrie’s words fade away and she looks down at her hands, the first real emotion I have seen from her. ‘Not to bother,’ she says quickly, the Scottish phrase slipping from her mouth. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves right now. What we really need is some background history, your relationship with Louisa, particularly in light of using a donor. Given your comments about her obsession with him I think it would be helpful to the investigation.’
‘Yes, okay, it was hard,’ I admit, realising, perhaps for the first time, that I really want to talk about it. ‘I didn’t really want to use a sperm donor. Who does? But it was the only way to save my marriage.’
I force my mind to remember the first time the donor was mentioned. We had just undertaken a third round of IVF, our first at SureLife, a ridiculously expensive fertility clinic which had recently opened on the outskirts of Chester. After the last time, you didn’t want to test yourself at home, you wanted to wait for the official blood test.
We entered Doctor Hughes’ office which smelt of polish and hope. Doctor Hughes was renowned in his field, a leading expert. You were convinced he could help us. I held on to a shaky breath, the tips of my fingers tingling. You shifted around on the leather-clad chair to the side of me and began to tap the heel of your shoe against the office’s expensive laminate flooring. I reached out my hand and grabbed hold of your fingertips in a show of solidarity. Your skin was slippery, cold, like a dead fish.
Doctor Hughes cocked his head to the side, his face moulded into one of professionalism. ‘Your results are back.’
I looked into his eyes, everything I needed to know resting in his pupils. ‘It hasn’t worked, has it, Doctor?’
‘I’m afraid it hasn’t.’
My lungs deflated as the already small office closed in around me. Your hand slipped away from mine, your cry going beyond anything I have heard before or since. I swallowed down the bitter aftertaste of stale hope, knowing in my heart that I would never be a father, that the dream I’d carried around my whole life had been snuffed out there and then.
‘Doctor, I did everything you suggested,’ you cried, the pain in your voice excruciating to my ears. ‘I did yoga and drank pineapple juice and ate walnuts. The only thing I didn’t do was swim because I can’t. Is that why it didn’t work?’
‘Of course not. You did brilliantly.’ Doctor Hughes smiled at you, and I hated his easy way, hated how he could reassure you in a way I never could.
‘I’m sorry,’ I heard myself saying, my voice barely a whisper.
‘We can do this,’ you said, hope seeping into every syllable. ‘I believe in you.’
Happiness swelled inside of me. You still believed in me, still believed it was possible. You trusted that I could make things right, just like I always had done. I glanced over at you, a smile breaking out onto my face despite the situation. But you were staring at Doctor Hughes, your eyes burning holes into his.
You believed in him. Not me. I no longer mattered.
Doctor Hughes stared at you without speaking a word, his dark-brown eyes focusing on you and you alone. His eyelids were partially hidden under jet-black eyebrows which knitted together, revealing deep-set frown lines. ‘We can do another round,’ he explained after what seemed like for ever. ‘But I’m afraid your husband’s sperm is very low quality, meaning, even with the best treatment, the embryos may always be mediocre at best.’ He rubbed a hand over his chin, his prominent jawline and speckled grey moustache an almost physical sign of his intellect.
The electrically charged silence buzzed around the room, creating an almost audible white noise. My eyes fell to a silver-framed photograph of a woman and baby which sat at an angle on the doctor’s pristine desk. ‘Is that your wife and child?’ I asked.
He nodded.
My eyes glistened as I sat mesmerised by the baby; his hair the colour of a sunset, his eyes a dark brown like the doctor who sat before me. In the photo, the baby’s mother gazed down at him, a look of pure adoration on her face, her hair cascading down onto his head so it wasn’t clear where hers ended and his began. The woman and child were the mirror image of each other, almost as if they had been sculpted by hand to fit together, two halves of a whole. I noticed you eyeing up the picture, an almost primal longing in your eyes. It hurt me to see you like that so I averted my gaze and looked instead at Doctor Hughes, saw the love which poured from his eyes, bouncing off the glass and right back into his pupils. That’s when I knew what I had to do.
‘So you’re saying a success is unlikely?’
The doctor turned to me, slightly shocked, as if only just realising I was present. He ran his tongue over his teeth, his eyes smudging with what appeared to be turmoil. ‘I don’t want to take money off you if I’m not confident of a result. This is my practice and my clients are of the upmost importance to me.’
‘We’ll just do it,’ you said, sitting up in your chair and rubbing the tears from your eyes. ‘We’ll do another round. We might get lucky.’
‘No!’ I heard the sound of my voice before I even realised I’d spoken ‘No more.’
You turned on me, your eyes blazing. ‘We can afford it! James, please! Why are you saying that?’
‘And what did you say, Mr Carter?’ DC Lawrie glues her eyes to me, as if genuinely interested in my answer.
‘I told her it was too much money and I was unwilling to pay. She went crazy, said she would leave me. That I wasn’t going to stop her having a baby.’
‘And how did that make you feel?’
‘Relieved.’ I hold out my hands in front of me, my wedding band catching against the overhead strip light. ‘I knew she was going to say it, that’s why I was so cold, to force it from her. I suppose I wanted to make her feel like I had left her with no choice. Then the doctor mentioned a sperm donor and, well, she jumped on it.’
‘And you just went along with it?’ asks DC Lawrie.
‘Yes. I just wanted to make Lou’s pain go away.’
‘Seems a little too good to be true if you ask me.’ DC Kennedy’s mask slips once again, his words not marrying up with the admiration in his eyes. At this rate he’ll be getting the sack. I almost want to reach over and pull his bad cop mask back up.
‘Can’t you see?’ I say instead. ‘My wife was severely depressed, proven by how she reacted in the days that followed. If I’d allowed her to go through one more failed IVF attempt there was a serious chance she would harm herself, even take her own life.’ I let the truth hang in the air for a few moments. ‘I needed to protect her, needed her to think I had left her with no choice or she’d be for ever eaten up by guilt that she’d prevented me from having a biological child. I sacrificed my own chance of parenthood to save her.’
‘That’s very honourable, Mr Carter,’ says DC Lawrie, her perfectly plucked eyebrows furrowing together.
‘And you never had any direct dealings with this donor?’ asks DC Kennedy.
‘No. He was anonymous, and we were to him. We could choose basic things of course: hair colour, eye colour, educational status.’ I laugh, even though it’s anything but funny. ‘A catalogue dad so to speak. Will you be requesting his details now?’
DC Lawrie tilts her chin. ‘We can’t really discuss that with you, Mr Carter. Just know that we’ll be looking at all possible lines of inquiry.’ She taps her manicured nails on the desk. ‘So, what information were you given about this donor?’
‘Why are you so interested in him? You don’t seriously believe…?’ My words fall away, another lump of guilt wedging itself into my throat. ‘Do you? Do you really think he could have had something to do with this?’
DC Lawrie sucks in air. ‘Just tell us what you know about him.’
‘A university graduate,’ I say quickly, sure she already knows more about him than I do. ‘Tall, average build, blue eyes, red hair. Lou was very specific about the type of man she wanted. I had thought she’d try and choose somebody similar to me, but no.’ I pause in order to compose myself, to stop myself from getting angry. ‘She said she wanted somebody with the same physical characteristics as her, so when the baby arrived he or she would look familiar. But well… I think it was for another reason.’ I close my eyes, wanting nothing more than to speak to you, like I should have done before all of this spiralled out of control. Did you know how I felt about the donor? Did you ever stop to consider how it made me feel, watching you cradling your child while I sat on the sidelines, feeling like an outsider in my own home? Knowing that no matter what I did he would never love me as much as he loved you? And I love him, Louisa, I love our baby boy more than you can ever imagine.
‘What other reason, Mr Carter?’ DC Kennedy’s question hardens on my name.
I tell him… I tell him what I now know happened to you all those years ago.