Give Me the Child: the most gripping psychological thriller of the year
‘Dark, clever, terrifying’Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train*The Top Ten Bestseller*‘Gripping and moving’ Erin Kelly‘You won’t want to eat, sleep or blink’ Tammy CohenImagine your doorbell rings in the middle of the night.You open the door to the police.With them is your husband’s eleven-year-old love child. A daughter you never knew he had.Her mother has been found dead in their south London flat.She has nowhere else to go.WOULD YOU TAKE HER IN?Compulsive, dark and devastating, Give Me the Child is a uniquely skilful thriller with an unforgettable twist.
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MEL McGRATH is an Essex girl, the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling family memoir Silvertown. She won the John Llewellyn-Rhys/Mail on Sunday award for Best Writer Under 35 for her first book, Motel Nirvana. She has published three Arctic mysteries featuring the Inuit detective Edie Kiglatuk, under the name MJ McGrath, two of which, White Heat and The Bone Seeker, were longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger.
She is the co-founder and one of the moving lights of the website Killer Women, which has rapidly established itself as a key forum for crime writing in the UK. This new standalone marks a change in direction.
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2017
Copyright © Mel McGrath 2017
Mel McGrath asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008215613
Version: 2018-07-18
This one’s for my siblings.
Contents
PART ONE: Then
PART TWO: Now
My first thought when the doorbell woke me was that someone had died. Most likely Michael Walsh. I turned onto my side, pulled at the outer corners of my eyes to rid them of the residue of sleep and blinked myself awake. It was impossible to tell if it was late or early, though the bedroom was as hot and muggy as it had been when Tom and I had gone to bed. Tom was no longer beside me. Now I was alone.
We’d started drinking not long after Freya had gone upstairs. The remains of a bottle of Pinot Grigio for me, a glass or two of red for Tom. (He always said white wine was for women.) Just before nine I called The Mandarin Hut. When the crispy duck arrived I laid out two trays in the living room, opened another bottle and called Tom in from the study. I hadn’t pulled the curtains and through the pink light of the London night sky a cat’s claw of moon appeared. The two of us ate, mostly in silence, in front of the TV. A ballroom dance show came on. Maybe it was just the booze but something about the tight-muscled men and the frou-frou’d women made me feel a little sad. The cosmic dance. The grand romantic gesture. At some point even the tight-muscled men and the frou-frou’d women would find themselves slumped together on a sofa with the remains of a takeaway and wine enough to sink their sorrows, wondering how they’d got there, wouldn’t they?
Not that Tom and I really had anything to complain about except, maybe, a little malaise, a kind of falling away. After all, weren’t we still able to laugh about stuff most of the time or, if we couldn’t laugh, at least have sex and change the mood?
‘Let’s go upstairs and I’ll show you my cha-cha,’ I said, rising and holding out a hand.
Tom chuckled and pretended I was joking, then, wiping his palms along his thighs as if he were ridding them of something unpleasant, he said, ‘It’s just if I don’t crack this bloody coding thing…’
I looked out at the moon for a moment. OK, so I knew how much making a success of Labyrinth meant to Tom, and I’d got used to him shutting himself away in the two or three hours either side of midnight. But this one time, with the men and women still twirling in our minds? Just this one time?
Stupidly, I said, ‘Won’t it wait till tomorrow?’ and in an instant I saw Tom stiffen. He paused for a beat and, slapping his hands on his thighs in a gesture of busyness, he slugged down the last of his wine, rose from the sofa and went to the door. And so we left it there with the question still hanging.
