Give Me the Child: the most gripping psychological thriller of the year

Ruby gazed at her fingers and, in the same expressionless tone, she said, ‘Only that he was a real shit.’

This was the kind of behaviour I dealt with on a daily basis at the clinic, but in the here and now, I felt oddly at a loss. ‘I’m sure she didn’t really say that. And, anyway, he isn’t.’

Ruby looked at me then shrugged as if what she had said was of no consequence. ‘I’m tired now.’

‘Of course you are,’ I said, feeling bad for having pushed her into a conversation she didn’t want to have. I went to the door. ‘Sleep now and we’ll talk later.’

Back downstairs I made another pot of tea and some toast and took a tray out to the others. The policewoman was in the middle of saying that there would have to be a post-mortem on Lilly Winter and a report would be filed with the coroner, but it was unlikely that the coroner would call an inquest. The situation at the flat had been straightforward enough. An old boiler, no batteries in the carbon monoxide detector, Lilly passed out from drink.

‘Presumably Ruby will go and live with her grandmother?’ I voiced this as a question but I hoped it was also a statement.

The social worker briefly caught Tom’s eye.

‘That’s the plan,’ Tom said.

The policewoman’s phone went. She answered it, listened briefly, then, turning to Tom, she said, ‘I’m afraid we’ll need to keep you a little longer to go over a few things – but we’re done at the flat if…’ She smiled at me. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go and fetch Ruby’s personal effects?’ She told me the address and began giving me directions.

‘That’s OK, I know the Pemberton Estate.’

‘Oh!’ the policewoman replied, her voice full of amazement, as if neither of us had any business knowing anywhere like the Pemberton.

‘It’s where I grew up,’ I said.

CHAPTER THREE

According to the police, Lilly Winter had taken over the lease on flat sixty-seven in the Ash Building, one of the red-brick hutches forming part of the original estate, from her mother, Megan Winter, who had moved into the flat from another council property near Streatham. Ruby was born at the flat while her grandmother was still the registered tenant so grandmother, mother and baby must have been living together at that point. The names didn’t mean anything to me and it seemed unlikely that we’d ever coincided. I’d left the place twenty years ago and hadn’t been back since the death of my mother. I didn’t particularly want to go back now, but I was too curious about Lilly Winter to let the opportunity pass. So I left a message on my assistant Claire’s mobile asking her to move my nine o’clock, then Tom and I had a brief discussion about what to tell Freya if she woke up while I was gone and I got in the car and headed south.

When I was growing up, in the nineties, working-class kids of all ethnic varieties lived on the Pemberton, which we called the Ends. The whole district was more than a bit scrappy and shitty. The main road south towards Croydon split the area in two and it was impossible to leave without running into a busy arterial road, as a result of which we rarely ventured far. The surrounding workers’ cottages were occupied by first-generation immigrant Jamaicans who put up cheery curtains and planted their gardens with sunflowers. A handful of elderly whites and some Asian families lived among them and a few middle-class gentrifiers had taken over flats in the villas behind the cottages, though a lot of those were still squatted. But even as kids we could tell that, in some unspecified way, the area was on the move, which made the Ends feel as if it was about to be cut off by the tide. For years there were rumours that the whole estate was to be completely redeveloped and the residents moved elsewhere. At the time, we felt like anarchists, free to run wild without consequences. With hindsight, the instability left us feeling insecure. Those of us who grew up on the Ends did our best to ignore the sense that we had drawn the short straw. We lived for music, sex and a bit of weed. Destiny’s Child, N.W.A., Public Enemy, R ’n’ B, urban, whatever. Friday and Saturday nights you’d meet your homies around the ghetto blaster, roll some joints and have yourselves a party. There were gangs and the odd gang-related ruckus but you could steer your way around them. We felt free but at the cost of knowing we didn’t matter, that kids like us were only of any consequence within the narrow confines of the Ends themselves.

At the traffic lights I made a right, skirting around the southern side of Grissold Park, then up along the wide, leafy road that ran along its western border, and turned again at the filter into a grid of half-gentrified Victorian terraced houses punctuated by shabby corner stores and fried chicken shops.

I slowed and tried to quell the fluttering in my chest. Memories. My manor. Approaching the rack of brutalist tower blocks fronted by older, lower tenements of red brick and what might once have been, but were no longer, cream tiles, I was a teenager again. Furious, mouthy and secretly determined to escape. The parties and the friendships and the ‘what the fuck’ Saturday night feeling had never been quite enough. There had been an itch in me to leave and I knew it would take everything I had to make it happen. Because the trouble with the Pemberton was that if you didn’t get out fast, you didn’t get out at all.

The late July sun was steadily beating down now and, despite the early hour, the estate was already sticky in the heat, the pavements speckled with clumps of dog shit – dark matter in an expanse of Milky Way. Some kids were mooching their way to school, kicking a football along the tea-coloured grass, their elder brothers and sisters hurrying them along, weapon dogs strung in tightly beside them.

I parked up and got out, conscious of being watched – someone is always watching in the Ends. It wouldn’t do to be taken for a social worker or, worse still, a Fed. Two girls were standing at the foot of an external stairway smoking, one in wedge sandals too small for her feet, the other sporting a set of sprayed acrylics which she was tapping on the handrail. Tough kids, showing off their credentials. I headed over; they’d spread the word among whoever needed to know.

‘Hey,’ I said.

‘All right?’ the girl in the wedge sandals replied.

The girl with the acrylics looked me up and down then squinted and tipped her head. ‘You slippin’ here, man.’

‘Nuh uh. This my manor.’

‘I never seen you. Who your people?’

‘Lilly Winter. Me and her got the same baby daddy.’

The girls exchanged glances. Then the girl with the wedge sandals said, ‘You too late, innit. Feds bagged her up. Some accident, I dunno.’

‘Yeah, I heard.’

‘She not my crew.’ The girl turned to her friend. ‘The young’un, though, the gingernut?’

‘Yeah,’ said the friend. ‘Facety bitch.’

‘What I’m sayin’. Nobody give a shit if she gone the same way as her mother, and that’s the truth, innit.’

Sixty-seven Ash Building was the second to last flat on the top floor of one of the older, red-brick blocks overshadowed by the towers, and distinguished only by its tattered, unloved exterior. You didn’t have to step a foot inside to know the place was a dump. Close up, everything about number sixty-seven exuded neglect. It was the only dwelling on that floor which hadn’t been customised with door gates, a window box or some cheerful paint. Where the number had once been attached to the door two rusted screws jutted from their holes. The letter box had fallen out and the hole in the door was duct-taped over. There was grime on the windows and the blue-painted windowsill was feathery with disrepair.

Ruby’s key was an awkward fit and got stuck in the barrel. The door rattled in the jamb but remained firmly shut. I was thinking about giving it a good kick when I became aware of a woman in her early thirties who was peering around the door of number sixty-nine, dressed in a pink onesie.

‘You want something?’ The door opened wider.

‘The little girl who lives here, Ruby Winter? I’m picking up some of her things but the key…’ The woman’s face softened. She said her name was Gloria. Eastern European accent. Something familiar about her that I couldn’t put my finger on.

She came over and, waving me away, pressed her shoulder to the door. ‘You got to push hard. Council said they sort it out, but they don’t. Lilly always waking me up.’ When the door gave, Gloria righted herself and stepped over the threshold. ‘Terrible what happen. And that kid, Ruby, she got no mother.’ When I hesitated, she beckoned me with her hand, saying, ‘Come on then.’

I followed her in. The place was filthy, the smell of stale tobacco overpowering. Damp marks on the walls did a bad job of disguising the thin sheen of grease underneath, and dust and hair had accumulated into dark brown hummocks where the lino had lifted in the corners. Two doors led off the hallway. The first opened into a cramped, dark space which must have been Lilly’s bedroom. Her body had been removed, but something in me resisted entering, afraid of what I might find. A mildewed shower was visible through the other door.

At the end of the hallway was a decent-sized living room, one side of which had been sectioned off and made into a galley kitchen. On the opposite side a door led off into a passageway, presumably to Ruby’s bedroom. The walls were featureless, unless you counted the yellow tar blossoms clambering up the paintwork. A cheap grey pleather sofa sat on the far side, nearest to Ruby’s room. On the other there was a TV stand, though it looked as if someone had been in and removed the TV, leaving the cables splayed over the floor. As I picked my way across old, stained carpet tiles littered with improvised ashtrays, the butts still in them, I found myself wondering whether Tom would have rescued Ruby from all this squalor and neglect if he’d known about her – and realised I wasn’t sure. Strange how you could spend more than a decade of your life with someone, have a child together, and yet discover in the moment it takes for a policewoman to ring a doorbell that you hardly know them at all.

I turned my attention back to the flat. Gloria was standing at the entrance to the kitchen.

‘Is same boiler as in my flat, combi. So is strange.’

‘Strange?’

‘Lilly is leaving window open a little bit. She put nail in the window frame, so no one can get in while she sleeping. But police tell me window was shut this one time.’

‘Is that what’s strange?’

‘No, I mean, is hot at night. So why is boiler on?’

‘The pilot light blew out, the police said.’

‘Oh.’

The death-boiler sat on one side of a long, narrow window in the kitchen. The cover had been removed, presumably by the police, exposing the interior, and it looked like the mechanism had been disabled. Evidently, the carbon monoxide had snaked its way undetected through the living room and down the hallway into Lilly’s room. The policewoman had said that the door leading into a small passageway which separated Ruby’s bedroom from the rest of the flat had probably saved her life. I thought about what Gloria had said and realised there was an undeniable logic to it. I was no expert in boilers but it seemed unlikely to me that a dead pilot light would have led to a massive leakage of carbon monoxide unless the boiler had been firing and the flue had been blocked. If that was the case, the policewoman hadn’t mentioned it. As Gloria said, it was hot, and everyone in the flat was asleep. No reason for the boiler to be on at all.

‘I see what you mean,’ I said. ‘It is odd, isn’t it?’

Gloria was standing at the window with her back to me, looking out across the view of tower blocks and tiled roofs. As she turned I realised where I’d seen her before.

‘You work at St John’s Primary. My daughter’s there.’ I’d seen Gloria after hours polishing the lino tiles.

I pulled Freya’s picture from my wallet.

Gloria’s eyes lit up. She seemed genuinely delighted. ‘Oh yes, I know. Very sweet girl. She want to be Pippi Long Something.’

‘Pippi Longstocking. Yes, she does!’ I smiled. We stood looking at one another for a moment, while the fine thread of female connection wove its spidery web between us.

‘You have any kids?’ I said.

Gloria pressed her lips into a tight line and my instincts told me to change the subject rather than pursue it.

‘Ruby, the girl who lived here? She’s Freya’s half-sister.’

‘They look completely different,’ Gloria said.

‘I’m guessing Ruby looked more like her mother?’ I said and Gloria nodded. ‘I never met Lilly. The police say it’s a miracle Ruby’s alive. It was that door over there and maybe the direction of the draught which saved her.’

‘Miracle,’ Gloria said.

I returned to the kitchen and went back to inspecting the boiler. Gloria followed.

‘Maybe the man make a mistake.’

I asked her what she meant.

‘Repair man, come to look boiler. I don’t know name or nothing. Maybe since two weeks? Lilly knock on my door to borrow twenty pounds to pay him.’

The breath caught in my throat. No one had mentioned a repairman. The policewoman had said only that the police inspection of the boiler revealed the pilot light had gone out – something which could have happened at any time – that there were no batteries in the carbon monoxide detector and that Lilly was dead drunk. According to police, it was a freak accident.

‘Did you report that to the police?’

Gloria let out a raw, indignant yelp. ‘Do I look like a person who talk to police?’ She looked me up and down and raised a finger to her lips. ‘Shh, immigrant like me or brown person like you is same. I don’t say nothing to no one. Pemberton has ears like elephant.’

‘All the same,’ I said, sounding like a judgemental idiot.

Gloria shot me the disapproving look I deserved and began to head for the door. I fumbled around in my pocket for something to write on, found an old receipt and a pen and scribbled down my mobile number.

‘You’re right. I wouldn’t have said anything either when I lived here. But listen, if you see the boiler man again, would you call me? Just as a favour? Or ask him to call me?’ A pause while I thought this through. ‘Best not say anything about Lilly. Just tell him I’ve got some work for him.’

Gloria hesitated for a moment, weighing this – me – up, and after a cursory inspection, folded the paper into her bra. Then she waved a hand in the air and was gone.

I waited until she’d left before going into Ruby’s room. A mattress with no bedframe lay on the floor, beside it a cheap clothes rack almost empty of clothes. There were no drawers. Ruby’s underwear was piled into an Asda bag in the corner. On a tiny plastic bedside table were some old bottles of nail varnish, a few pens, a nail file, a packet of tissues and a few loose batteries. A couple of damp and musty towels on the floor gave out a fusty, faintly fungal smell. I went about the place picking up the clothes and towels and indiscriminately jamming them into the Chinese laundry bags I’d brought from home, my heart full of contradictory feelings, resenting the girl and her mother for intruding into my life, and at the same time feeling desperately sorry for them.

CHAPTER FOUR

I left the laundry bags in the hallway back home at Dunster Road and went into the kitchen where Freya and Tom were sitting at the table having breakfast.

‘Hi, Mum!’ Freya leaped up and clasped her arms excitedly around my waist. I dropped a kiss on her head.

‘Hey, sweet pea.’ My eyes cut to Tom but he was looking away. ‘Did Dad tell you, we’ve got a visitor?’ Before I’d left we had agreed that the best way to break the news was to tell the truth and be positive about it.

Freya nodded. Something passed across her face I couldn’t read. She gave me a cheesy, pleading look. ‘Can you stay home today, Mum? Pleeease.’

I’d been dreading this question, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to give her the answer she needed and deserved. Not with a new parent meeting at the clinic and the big grant application looming.

‘I’m really sorry, darling. Dad’ll be here and I’ll try to come home as early as I can, OK?’

I was already horribly late for work as it was. I thought about taking the car but I knew Tom would want to take the girls out somewhere and he needed it more than I did. In any case, it was rush hour and probably quicker to do what I usually did and run. Plus, I could use the thinking time. So I pulled on my gear and set off, one leg following the other in a two-step so familiar now it was automatic. I’d been running for over a decade, since a therapist had suggested taking regular exercise might help ward off another episode of mental illness. It was good for the brain, she said. I knew that, though I didn’t tell her so. Actually, I could have quoted her the studies: Dr Solomon Synder at Johns Hopkins, who discovered endorphins in the seventies; Henning Boecker at the University of Bonn, whose work on the opioid receptors defined the runner’s high. All the same, I took her advice. For years now I’d used my running time between home and work as a bridge between my two selves: Cat Lupo, mother, wife, sister and mild wino, with a penchant for trashy TV and popping candy, and Dr Caitlin Lupo, specialist in child personality disorders, clinician, ex-expert witness and all-out serious person.

As my legs found their rhythm, I wondered how Cat and Caitlin had become so disconnected from each other. Who was this creature, this mother, wife, psych, who looked like me and sounded like me, but who had never once in a dozen years suspected her husband of cheating, let alone of having another child? Had I somehow wilfully closed my eyes to Tom’s betrayal? Or was I just blind to his faults? I tried to think back to the late stages of my pregnancy and the stay in the psych ward. I had never apologised for my illness because I hadn’t thought mental illness was something anyone needed to apologise for. In any case, how could I have spotted that things had become so difficult for Tom when I was myself so radically altered? Or perhaps they hadn’t been as tricky as Tom was now making out. Maybe Tom simply made the most of an opportunity. And if he’d done that once, who was to say he hadn’t done it a dozen times? For all I knew he’d been cheating on me for the whole twelve years of our marriage.

At the top of Dunster Road, I stopped for a second and glanced back at the house which had, for so long, been my unquestioned home. The safe haven which I’d worked and fought for and sweated over. For some time now, we’d needed to cast a questioning eye over the fabric of our marriage and accept it had threadbare patches. We were too wedded to the idea of being the couple who didn’t ‘do’ state-of-the-nation discussions, of always being cooler than that. But what if our coolness was just dishonesty in disguise? What had only yesterday seemed like a marriage built of bricks and mortar now felt more like a tent, and a broken tent at that. I imagined Ruby Winter lying in the spare bed, an unwanted presence, like some sinister-shaped cell which might at any moment begin stealthily to consume the healthy cells around it. And then I felt bad for the thought, because what was Ruby, after all, but a little girl who had lost her mother?

I arrived at the entrance to the park. The sun was already hot, and I’d forgotten my water bottle. As I headed towards the drinking fountain by the bandstand, I wondered how two intelligent, articulate people could have failed so completely to ask the hard questions. At first it was all mad, carefree sex. Then came our high-octane period when we were so focused on our careers that nothing could distract us. After that was the period of trying to get pregnant. Once Freya was born we’d both been distracted, me fragile and with a new baby and Tom putting in the hours at Adrenalyze. Was that when things had changed? Or was it when the Rees Spelling ‘boy in the wood’ case blew open and the tabloids went after me? Or did it happen later, once Tom had quit Adrenalyze to work on Labyrinth and the success he so longed for hadn’t come overnight; when our finances had got tight, we’d had to give up the part-time childminder, and Tom had been sucked into becoming a househusband, a role he’d never wanted and often complained bitterly about? So many gathering clouds we’d chosen to ignore. Now the storm had finally arrived, would we be strong enough to weather it?

As I turned into the car park at the institute, I began to tell myself that somehow we were going to have to come back from this. If not for us, then for Freya. And that meant I was going to have to accept the new member of the family and find a way to learn to trust Tom again. Maybe not now, not today, not next week even, but soon. Because if I didn’t, or I couldn’t, the effects would ripple outwards to our daughter in ways none of us could predict. And we would all live to regret it.

I showered and changed into my usual work uniform – navy skirt with a white blouse – then swiped my card through the reader at the research block and went down the corridor to my office. Claire wasn’t at her desk, but she’d left a thermos of coffee for me. I sat down, poured the black oily brew into a mug, and woke up my screen. It was just after ten but the heat of the day was already distracting and I felt the lack of sleep, coupled with the events of the early morning, roll over me like some dense, tropical fog. As I turned to set the fan going, a tap came on the door and Claire’s face popped round.

‘Good, you’re here. Leak fixed?’

There was a momentary pause while I recalled the lie I’d told and formulated a response. ‘Thanks, yes, the emergency plumber came.’

Claire pulled up her hair and flapped her hand over the air current to cool her neck then stopped in her tracks. ‘Are you OK? You look a bit knackered.’

‘Just the heat.’ I wasn’t ready to talk about the arrival of Ruby Winter with Claire yet. Or with anyone.

‘Did you see on the news about those stabbings? Quite near you, weren’t they? One day the whole city’s just going to, like, implode.’ There had been a spate of gang-related knife crime over the summer. Yellow boards had appeared in unexpected places, along with mournful shrines to dead teens reconfigured as ‘warriors’ and ‘the fallen’.

I said I’d seen the news though, of course, I hadn’t.

‘Your rescheduled nine o’clock is here. I said ten fifteen, but she’s a bit early.’ Claire’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘You may wish to adopt the brace position. I think you’re about to hit some bumpy air.’

I surprised myself by laughing. ‘Give me a few minutes to review the file, then show her in.’

I took a few breaths to clear my head of the events of the past few hours, and turned my attention to what lay ahead. As director of the clinic, it fell to me to deliver the news that in our view, Emma Barrons’ twelve-year-old son Joshua was a psychopath. Not that I would use that word. Here at the institute the official diagnosis was CU personality disorder. Callous and unemotional. Like that sounded any better.

Joshua Barrons had been referred to the clinic from an enlightened emergency shrink after he’d tried repeatedly to flush the family kitten down the toilet. A week before, a plumber had used an optical probe to locate a blockage in the drains at the Barrons’ family home. Joshua liked the probe and wanted to see it again and maybe even get a chance to use it. He thought that flushing the kitten would be a good way to do this, and when his nanny tried to stop him, he set fire to her handbag. According to the nanny, who we’d already met, Joshua’s behaviour, though extreme, was nothing new. His exasperated mother had taken to spending weeks at their country home, leaving Joshua in London so that she could avoid dealing with him. The boy’s father, Christopher Barrons, was rarely at home and when he was, there were fights. Once or twice, the nanny reported, she’d heard the sounds of scuffling and Emma had appeared with scratches and bruising, though, so far as she knew, the father had never hit his son. There were no other children. There was no kitten now either. The nanny had dropped it off at a shelter on her way to the doctor’s office. Hearing the story, the doctor had referred Joshua to a psychiatrist.

Over the years, Joshua had gone through many nannies and many diagnoses: ADHD, depression, defiance disorder… The list went on. He’d seen a psychologist and been prescribed, variously, methylphenidate, dexamfetamine, omega 3s and atomoxetine, been put on a low sugar, organic diet, and had psychotherapy. None of that had worked. The emergency shrink had done some initial tests and referred the boy to the clinic. In the report he was characterised as impulsive and immature with shallow affect, an impaired sense of empathy and a grandiose sense of himself. Left untreated, the psych thought the boy was a ticking time bomb.

Here at the clinic we specialised in kids like Joshua. During his initial assessment, we had run him through the usual preliminary tests – Hare’s psychopathy checklist and Jonason and Webster’s ‘Dirty Dozen’. Until I’d had a chance to assess him more thoroughly and run some scans I couldn’t be absolutely certain of a diagnosis, but there was little doubt in my mind. In my opinion, as well as that of the clinic’s therapeutic head, Anja De Whytte, Joshua Barrons was a manipulative, amoral, callous, impulsive and attention-seeking child whose neuropathy showed all the signs of conforming to the classic Dark Triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. He wasn’t evil, but the way his brain worked could make him seem that way.

I was prepared for a tricky conversation. For the next hour or two I’d have to put thoughts of Tom and Ruby Winter out of my mind as much as I could and focus on my patient. Joshua Barrons and his family deserved that. It was my job to do whatever I could to help him. Plus, we needed him. There were children all over the country who displayed at least some of the traits of CU disorder but to find a kid whose personality was at the extreme edge was rare. Joshua had much to teach us. And we were keen to learn from him. His was exactly the kind of case most likely to win us the grant we needed to advance the clinic’s work on kids with personality disorders of all kinds.

Joshua’s mother was thin and brittle, with the anxious, hooded eyes of a starved cat. She took the seat I offered her, scoping out the featureless walls, the shelves stacked with neuroscience journals and research files.

I’d read about the Barrons family in the file. They were rich and local. Christopher Barrons had made a mint in the London property market in the eighties and nineties, buying up workers’ cottages like those around the Pemberton, installing laminate flooring and selling them on to middle-class professionals, using the profits to accumulate an enormous portfolio of ex-local authority flats which he rented out at exorbitant rates to twenty-somethings unable to get on the property ladder themselves. A few years ago he’d been knighted, though not, presumably, for buying up publically funded housing on the cheap and using it to subsidise his private empire, though these days, of course, anything was possible.

I introduced myself and went through a few preliminaries. Emma waited for me to finish. In an immaculately clipped voice, she said, ‘My husband refuses to believe there’s anything wrong with Joshua that one of the major public schools can’t fix. He thinks if we get Joshua into Eton, our son will stop flushing kittens down the lavatory.’

I’d run into the ‘my child’s too well bred to be a psycho’ argument before and knew it for what it was: embarrassment combined with a wafer-thin sense of superiority brought in as a defence against the situation in which a woman like Emma Barrons found herself. The Barrons were used to being able to buy themselves out of almost any situation. I didn’t judge them for that; what parent doesn’t do whatever it takes for their kids? But money wasn’t the point here and that was what left Emma and Christopher Barrons at a loss.

I leaned forward and steepled my hands to give myself more professional authority.

‘And what do you think?’

I felt her pull back. A pulse thumped in her throat at the suprasternal notch. She wasn’t here to have her opinion canvased. What she wanted was exactly what we couldn’t offer her: a cure. A tiny frown appeared on her otherwise waxy face. ‘I should have thought that was rather obvious. I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘You are, and I’m very glad about that, because we’re going to help your son.’

The tiny frown returned. ‘Forgive my scepticism, Dr Lupo, but Joshua has been diagnosed any number of times by a series of private psychiatrists and prescribed dozens of pills with names I can’t pronounce, but he’s still trying to flush kittens down toilets. I’m here because I’m afraid for my child and I don’t know what else to do and because the emergency psychiatrist who looked at Joshua hinted that he would section him if I didn’t agree to come.’

I sat back and settled in for the long haul. Emma Barrons had a point. Diagnosis of paediatric mental disorders was both complex and highly controversial. Cases of child psychopathy were missed or misdiagnosed all the time, in part because it was relatively rare and in part because psychiatrists were resistant to giving kids such a devastating label. Even the most experienced psychiatrists and neurologists often got it wrong, either because they couldn’t see it or because they didn’t want to.