When I Wasn't Watching Read Online Free PDF Page B

home to the wife who didn’t understand him and she would be alone again. She lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, about to drift into sleep when the doorbell rang yet again. For a second she wondered if Ethan had returned, and wasn’t sure if she was annoyed or pleased, but it wasn’t Ethan’s knock. Funny how people had their own knocks, their own patterns and rhythms that, once you were familiar with them, heralded their presence. This was a stranger.
    Lucy opened the door to a strange woman who smiled warmly but had strangely cold eyes. Lucy knew she was a reporter even before she spoke.
    â€˜Lucy Randall? I’m from the
Sun
. I wondered if you would like to take the chance to express your opinions on the early release of Terry Prince.’
    The woman smiled. She had a sweet voice, so polite, but eyes like a snake, Lucy thought. She smiled back.
    â€˜Fuck. Off.’ Then she slammed the door in her face.
    Lucy went to go back upstairs, feeling pleased with herself until she realised that was the second time she had used the ‘f’ word that morning. She who, in the transition from council estate single parent to middle-class surgeon’s wife, had stopped using any profanity stronger than ‘damn’. It felt quite good, she decided. In a single moment of revelation that she could in fact say and do whatever she damn well wanted, Lucy turned and flung open the front door. The reporter was hovering at the end of the drive talking to a man with a digital camera and nervous expression.
    â€˜Come in,’ she said, as the woman turned to her in surprise at the about-face, then started towards her with a triumphant smile. ‘You can have all the opinions you want.’

Chapter Four
Friday
    It had been a Wednesday when she lost Jack. She had let him pedal his little trike out on the front yard while she loaded the washing machine, it never occurring to her that he was anything less than safe. He had been in her line of sight both through the kitchen window and the side door which she had left open, and when she ducked down to sort through the laundry basket, sorting the colours from the white, she must have only taken her eyes off him for two minutes at most. Yet when she stood back up he was gone.
    Lucy ran outside, calling to him, but she hadn’t started to panic at that point, not the breath-stopping, freezing panic she would feel later. She expected him to be out on the road – a cul-de-sac, so there was little chance of cars – or in a neighbour’s yard playing with their children, or even in old Mrs Clary’s kitchen, asking for biscuits.
    Ten minutes later she had been frantic, and twelve minutes later she was calling the police, her hands shaking and her voice barely comprehensible to the impatient switchboard operator on the other end of the call.
    It took them six hours to find his body, and twenty-four to discover his killer. Terry Prince, fourteen years old and a pupil at the private school her eldest son Ricky would later win a scholarship for. She had been so proud of him, especially after the way Jack's death had affected him – to the point of taking him to a psychiatrist – but the pride was shot through with the sharp stab of grief. For had Jack been alive no doubt Ricky’s presence would have guaranteed her youngest a place there too. It was a fine school. Not that she was stuck-up, for Lucy was the product of hard-working yet poor parents and the finest education an inner city state school had to offer, but like most parents she longed for better for her own offspring. Especially Jack. Not that she would ever admit it to anyone, and barely even to herself, but her youngest son was the one closest to her heart.
    Lucy had been nineteen when she had Ricky, on her own and totally unprepared, and he had been such a fretful baby. Almost as if he had known his arrival was unplanned and unwelcomed by everyone apart from Lucy herself, who