Page 22 of Insomnia

I frown. No, that can’t be right. I held his arms, yes. Maybe shook him a little. But I wasn’t mean. I wasn’t.

“It wasn’t like that,” I say, but the little voice in my head that won’t shut up about numbers and Dictaphones and broken glass is already whispering,Are you sure?

“They knew you weren’t his mother because they’d just seen her dropping her children off. They said you shook the boy hard enough to make him cry.” She pauses. “The only child anyone saw crying at that time this morning was Ben Simpson.”

“Jesus, Emma.” Robert looks both annoyed and embarrassed, and I feel a stab of anger at him for being so quickly against me. I don’t really have a leg to stand on but he could at least have given me the benefit of the doubt.

“I feel awful,” I say, and it’s true. “And of course I’ll apologize to Ben. But I wasn’t horrible to him and I certainly didn’t scare him. All I did was say that he mustn’t be mean to Will and if he didn’t play nicely in future there would be repercussions.”

“You threatened a child?” Robert’s eyes widen. “I told you thatIwould speak to Michelle. We had this conversation. We agreed.”

“I didn’t threaten him and—”

“While I understand your concerns for your own child, Mrs. Averell, this sort of behavior is absolutely unacceptable.” She gives me a sharp look and I’m horrified to find that tears are pricking the edges of my eyes. Shame. Guilt. I know I shouldn’t have gone back in to speak to Ben and the thought of some busybody passerby thinking I was threatening him is awful.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“However,” she continues, “we spoke to Ben and he says you didn’t frighten him, you just told him off. We will have to tell his mother though.”

Oh, thank you, Ben, thank you.

I’m not worried about Michelle’s reaction. She sat in my office and accused me of sleeping with her husband and this is nothing next to that.

“But that’s not why we called you here.”

I look up, surprised, and then glance over at my husband, who looks equally baffled.

“This is more delicate. It’s about Will. It may go some way to explaining his subdued mood of late.” She slides Will’s blue notebook across the desk, its battered edges curling up from being carried everywhere with him. “His teacher saw this today.”

“His sketchbook?” Robert says, and we both lean forward. “What about it?”

“Please look inside.”

We glance at each other and I open it, seeing what I expect. Various attempts and dinosaurs, or squashed dogs, and animals. I look up.

“Further along. The more recent drawings.”

I turn some more pages. And then I freeze.

This can’t be right.

I think of my little boy, all quiet moodiness, hunched over his notebook and not letting us see, and my blood chills.Thisis what he was drawing?How can that be?

The picture is very childlike but drawn with concentration and care. A woman, with long hair hanging loose, and a big angry frown on her face, is leaning over a bed with a dinosaur duvet on it,just like Will’s,with a little boy beneath it. Where the boy’s eyes should be are X’s, drawn hard into the page, indenting the paper.

As my middle finger scrapes at my cuticles and my thumb bleeds again, I look back at the hunched madwoman drawn in red pen on the page.

She’s holding a pillow. Gripping it.

As if she is about to put it over his face.

“He says it’s the scary lady who’s in his room at night,” Mrs. Fincham speaks quietly. “He won’t say any more than that.”

No, no, no. No.

I flick the pages forward, my heart racing. Five and then ten, maybe more. Every page holds the same crudely drawn picture. In some, the scary, frowny face is like a huge balloon looming over the bed, but in each the scenario is exact. A terrifying madwoman about to suffocate him.

How can he know? How can he know what she did?

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