The Child Who Read Online Free PDF

Daniel’s parents had done, what the social worker had, after more than an hour alone with the boy, finally resorted to. So Leo sat. When his foot tapped of its own accord, he forced it flat. When his fingers took up the beat instead, he wrapped them in a fist. He was, would be, patience personified. He and Daniel: they had all day.
    They had, in truth, a deadline that was fast approaching. Leo did not want to look again at his watch because the boy had caught him last time and that single glance, Leo estimated, had cost him far more than the split second it had taken. Instead, on a blank sheet of notepaper and with the pen Meg had bought for him for Felicity Forbes’s final Christmas, he drew.
    A stick figure, at the base of the page. He considered giving the figure more substance but the fleshless lines, given the boy’s build, seemed appropriate. He gave it shoes, which became trainers when he added the swoosh: blue on white, just like Daniel’s. He gave it ears and on one of them he planted a full stop. The head he left hairless, except on top: here he drew a succession of spikes – sharp, as the boy’s would have been had he not spent seventeen hours without access to a tube of hair gel. Knowing how sensitive his daughter was about the freckles that spotted her own fair skin, Leo resisted dotting the stick-boy’s cheeks and ignored, too, the silvered scratch lines around his throat. Instead he drew a mouth: a line, straight across, which he stitched shut with a string of smaller lines a pen-nib apart.
    ‘Not a bad likeness,’ Leo said and spun the page so Daniel could see. He caught the boy’s eyes as they leapt from the piece of paper to a point on the table beside it. ‘This is you: now, here,’ Leo said. ‘And this . . .’ He turned the page again and worked quickly. He drew a man beside the boy: the same earring and fastened mouth; the same hair but with a gap this time on the crown. ‘This is you in twenty years’ time. Here,’ he repeated, and directed his chin around the interview room. ‘Or in a cell a bit smaller.’ To make the point he drew a box around both figures, so that the stick-man’s head brushed the ceiling, and sectioned the box with bars. Then he turned the page once more and thrust it across the table. He clicked his pen and stared at the boy. Daniel ignored the picture. With his chin tucked against his collarbone, he kept his rinsed-denim eyes fixed on the tabletop.
    ‘You need to talk to me, Daniel. This – ’ he used his pen to tap the picture ‘ – is what will happen if you don’t talk to me.’
    Nothing.
    ‘I’d like you to trust me, Daniel. I’d like you to trust me but it’s not important that you do.’ He paused. ‘Shall I tell you why?’ Again he waited but the boy, unsurprisingly, gave no answer. ‘Because I couldn’t tell anyone what we discussed even if I wanted to. If I did, they’d put me right in here with you.’ He gestured once more to the page he had ripped from his notebook. ‘I’m on your side, Daniel. Not because I want to be. I’m on your side because I have to be.’
    The table that divided them was drainpipe grey: unmottled, unmarked but perhaps it was that absence of anything at which to stare that continued to draw Daniel’s focus. Leo was reminded of his first impression of the boy: that Daniel, despite everything, seemed timid, almost shy – not like a killer at all.
    ‘You could tell me . . . I don’t know. That you’d robbed a bank. The NatWest on the high street, say. You could tell me and I’d have to keep it secret. Or that you’d stolen a car. A Porsche, say. A Lexus. You . . .’ Leo was about to carry on but something about the boy stopped him. He had moved. Had he moved?
    ‘What?’ Leo said. He waited. What, he was about to say again but the boy spoke first.
    ‘No way.’
    Leo fought an impulse to lean forward.
    ‘No way? What do you mean, no way?’
    ‘No way I’d steal a Lexus.’
    Leo swallowed. He nodded.