Give Me the Child: the most gripping psychological thriller of the year. Mel McGrath

      As was befitting for the director of a high-profile public institution, Sir Gus MacIntyre was half gatekeeper, half cheerleader. Staff called him, variously, the Master of the Neuroverse or simply Emperor Gus, though never to his face. His bald dome and jaunty bow tie were a regular feature on the late night and Sunday morning current affairs shows and it was his media appearances, almost more than his undoubted brilliance as director, which had kept him in the public eye long enough for him to have made it onto the Queen’s Honours list and secured his place in the Establishment. He could have easily sat back on his heels in the comfort of his club but a restlessness, or maybe some chink in the armour of his ego, necessitated a continued starring role in the constant drama of busyness and hustle. His family had been big in the Colonial Service and it was a running joke that he ruled the Institute of Neuroscience as if it were an empire over which the sun never set. I liked him well enough and, as long as I continued to produce major grant-attracting, cutting-edge research, I was confident the feeling would be reciprocated.

      When I landed in his office fresh from a quick do-over in the ladies’, MacIntyre was on the phone and looked up only to wave me into a chair with an exaggerated swing, as though directing traffic in Kolkata, before returning to his conversation. He made no effort to cut short the call but the moment he put the phone down it was as if it had never happened and his attention was immediately all on me.

      ‘Ah, Caitlin,’ he said. ‘All well?’ His tone suggested a subtext. I outlined the latest at the clinic, but MacIntyre was only half listening.

      ‘We are, of course, primarily a research institute,’ he said finally, as if I needed reminding.

      ‘Is that what you wanted to see me about?’

      ‘Ah, yes, well, not quite.’ MacIntyre pulled up something on his screen and peered at it for a moment.

      ‘Are you familiar with James White at the Herald? Apparently you told him “We get the kids we deserve”.’ He looked up, adjusted his glasses, and went on, wearily: ‘That’s a little incendiary, wouldn’t you say?’

      I felt affronted. ‘At no point did I say that.’

      MacIntyre swung the screen around and there it was, in bold, stomach-turning letters on a subheading, attributed to me.

      ‘Since the other matter, I thought we both agreed that you’d keep a low profile with the press?’ MacIntyre said.

      The ‘other matter’ had begun on a cold January night fifteen years ago when a disturbed twelve-year-old named Rees Spelling had taken his sleeping brother Kai from his cot and left him under an upturned dustbin on a patch of woodland not far from his flat. The mother, who had been out scoring heroin at the time, finally realised the baby was gone, seven hours later, and questioned Rees, who denied all knowledge of his whereabouts. By then Kai was probably already dead but it took the police dogs till the following afternoon to find him. CCTV footage recovered later showed Rees carrying the baby through a nearby alleyway.

      My own dealings with Rees Spelling came a few months later. He was being kept at a secure unit in a secret location a couple of months before going to trial. The CPS had decided to charge the boy with murder and try him as an adult. I’d been called in by his defence solicitor, Dominic Harding, to decide whether or not the boy had legal capacity. Had Rees understood that by leaving his brother out in the open and covering him so that he would probably not be found, Kai would likely die? Dominic also wanted to know if, in my opinion, Rees Spelling was an ongoing danger.

      I was young then, newly qualified as a forensic psych and full of the certainties of youth. I interviewed Rees three or four times. The kid had the kind of childhood nightmares are made from. His brother, Kai, had been a colicky baby and his mother had told her elder son on many occasions that Kai was ‘doing my head in’. She’d taken to spending more and more time away, leaving Rees to look after his little brother. When Rees took Kai into the woods to die he knew that what he was doing would probably end his brother’s life but he did it in some mistaken belief that this would please his mother. I considered it unlikely that Rees posed any danger to the public in the future and I didn’t want to see the kid locked away in a young offenders’ institution, too many of which are hatcheries for career criminals. He was disturbed and needed psychological help. I said this in court and on the basis of my assessment Rees Spelling was detained in a secure psychiatric unit for a few years, then, at the age of eighteen, quietly released. Not long afterwards he abducted eighteen-month-old Kylie Drinkwater from outside a branch of Asda and abandoned her in remote woodland. A dog walker found the body weeks later.

      ‘White caught me at a bad moment, it won’t happen again,’ I said now. I didn’t want MacIntyre to know that White had found out about the clinic until I was sure of the source of the leak.

      MacIntyre listened then smiled and shifted in his seat. ‘Let’s try not to have any more bad moments then, eh?’