“Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Do you know we could charge both of you for this?” I was so angry I could have throttled him.
“Do you mind, Mr. Grantham,” Bennett said, standing up, moving to the window, “if we take a look in your Anderson shelter?”
“Why? Why would you do that? I was cycling, that’s the truth, it’s the truth, I swear it.’
His mother was in the doorway now, as he knew she would be, and she had a tray of mugs in her hands. It wobbled.
“Oh my God, Lucas,” she said. “What have you done?”
“Mum, I’ve not done anything. I promise.”
“God help us,” she said. “You’ve always been secretive, God knows you have, but please tell me you’ve nothing to do with this.”
It wasn’t the display of loyalty you might have expected from a mother. Bennett and I exchanged a glance.
“Do you think you might be willing to come to the station with us for a bit more of a chat?” I asked Lucas.
He nodded, his pale eyes cast down, his cheeks flaming.
RACHEL
The hospital receptionist sent me to a ward in the old part of the building. I walked down a corridor that was long and square, an exercise in perspective, with a pair of double doors at the end. Rectangular strips of lighting hung from the ceiling at regular intervals, each one emitting a pale bloom of fluorescence, as if it were undernourished.
Old linoleum that was the color of ripe cherries covered the floor, and on each side there were private rooms where patients lay. Some were propped upright, reading or watching TV. Others were just contours under the sheets, still as a landscape, in rooms that seemed more dimly lit, as if they were advertising their role as a potential place of transition, a conduit between illness and health, or between life and death.
I saw Katrina emerge from a room at the far end of the corridor. She stepped out, then turned and closed the door gently behind her. She stood for a second or two, looking back into the room, her hand against the window. She wasn’t aware of me.
“Katrina,” I said. I hardly dared to look into the room, and when I did I saw that John looked barely alive. He lay on his back, his head was heavily bandaged, an oxygen mask was over his mouth, and what I could see of his face was swollen and disfigured by bruising. He was connected to tubes everywhere. Two nurses were tending to him.
“Hello,” Katrina said softly, and I was disarmed by her humility and vulnerability. Her face was taut with exhaustion and shock. She looked very, very young, just as she had at her house a few days earlier.
“They want to do some checks,” she said. “I was in the way.”
“How is he?”
“He has bleeding and swelling on the brain,” she said. “They hope the swelling will reduce. They say he’s stable.”
“How long will that take?”
“Nobody can say. And nobody can say what damage it’ll leave.”
I put my hand on the glass, palm pressed against it.
“Did you see what happened?” she asked me.
“Somebody threw a brick through the window and he ran out into the street after them. He was chasing them. I didn’t see what happened after that. I found him just around the corner. He was already hurt, he was lying on the ground.”
“The doctor said it looks as though he was kicked in the head repeatedly.” Her voice cracked. “Who would do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
We stood side by side like sentries, watching him, and it was long moments before we were interrupted by brisk footsteps. It was a nurse, and the soles of her shoes squeaked on the linoleum.
She gave some leaflets to Katrina. “I grabbed what I could,” she said. “The ward’s miles away and I got paged as soon as I got there so I hope they’re what you need.”
“Thank you,” said Katrina. She took the leaflets hastily, held them against her stomach. She was trying to hide them from me, but there was no point. I’d already seen enough. “Folic Acid,” I’d read as they were handed over, “an essential ingredient for making healthy babies.”
“You need rest,” said the nurse, “and you need to keep your strength up. Would you consider going home and getting some sleep? We don’t expect to see any change in him today.”
Katrina nodded, and it satisfied the nurse. “I’ll see you later no doubt,” she said. She disappeared the way she’d come, still squeaking.
“You’re pregnant,” I said. My words sounded soft, and distant, as if they’d drifted in from elsewhere, but she heard me.
“I didn’t want you to find out like this. I’m sorry.”
I turned away from her, and looked at John. The nurses were in conference, standing at the end of the bed, annotating his notes. He was motionless, apart from the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest under the sheet.
“Does he know?” I said.
“No.”
Now I let my forehead fall gently onto the glass of the window. I wanted the cool, hard surface to counteract a spreading numbness in my head.
“Congratulations.” I said it flatly, and I didn’t mean it to sound hurtful, though it might have.
“He hasn’t coped,” she said, indicating John. “This. Ben. Everything. It’s destroying him. He thinks this wouldn’t have happened if you and he had stayed together.”
I had to try very hard. The numbness was everywhere, threatening to make me callous. Something about her touched me though. It could have been her vulnerability, or perhaps the fact that she was carrying a new life.
“John’s a good father,” I said.
I put my hand out to touch her, but the impulse died before I made contact and my arm dropped.
I turned and walked away, and, as I did so, I noticed that my shoes weren’t squeaking on the floor, they were tapping, in a beat that was painfully slow. I counted my steps as I walked.
It was all I could do.
JIM
Addendum to DI James Clemo’s report for Dr. Francesca Manelli
Transcript recorded by Dr. Francesca Manelli
DI James Clemo and Dr. Francesca Manelli in attendance
Notes to indicate observations on DI Clemo’s state of mind or behavior, where his remarks alone do not convey this, are in italics.
FM:
I’m very interested in something you wrote when you described your childhood memory.
JC:
Don’t put too much store in that.
FM: Do you mind if we discuss it?
JC: If you like.
FM: You said, and I’m just going to refer to it directly here, because the way you phrased it interested me. You said, “It was telling me that people aren’t always what they seem.”
JC: Yes.
FM: So does that mean that your father wasn’t who people thought he was?
JC: He was everything they thought he was, people respected him, you should have seen the turnout at his funeral, but he had another side too. People do.
FM: Was your father violent?
JC: He was a different generation.
FM: Meaning?
JC: They did things differently then.
FM: Including hurting his children?
JC: It was just a slap here and there. Did nobody give you a slap when you were growing up?
FM: I’d rather not comment on my upbringing.
JC: I bet they did. Everybody did it, before the Internet started policing our lives. My dad was just part of his generation.
FM: What your sister saw, do you think what he was doing was legal?
JC: I don’t know.
FM: Did you ever speak to your sister about that incident?
JC: No. We weren’t close. She left home soon after that anyway.
FM: What do you think she witnessed?
JC: I’ve no idea. She was a hysterical teenage girl. She was always kicking off. You’re putting too much significance on this. I shouldn’t have written it. I only wrote it because it’s what you look for when you’re working, that person who’s not who you think they are. That was a stupid example, I’m not even sure I remember it right anyway. I was a kid.
I’m not sure I believe this, I think he’s obfuscating. I wait for him to continue, to fill in the silence.
JC: Look, I admired my dad. He had people’s respect because he’d earned it. He was one of the best detectives of his generation. Can we move on?
FM: How did he earn respect?
JC: He had a saying: “You can’t put the shit back in the donkey.”
FM: Meaning?
JC: Meaning you try not to fuck up, you don’t let things get out of your control.
FM: Was it hard to grow up in his shadow?
JC: It made me want to be a detective, and to do well, if that’s what you mean.
FM: Was that a good thing?
JC: It was better than being a bum, or pimping, or boozing, or raping old ladies for kicks, or getting so shitfaced that you think it’s OK to smash your wife’s head against a wall until she loses her teeth as well as her self-respect. What do you mean “Was that a good thing?”
FM: I’m interested that my question is making you feel angry.
JC: Because it’s a joke! It’s actually insulting.
FM: I think it might mean that being a successful detective was a matter of honor for you?
JC: Yes! Yes, it was, it is, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
He’s displaying a level of anger that I feel is excessive, though he’s trying to disguise it.
FM: Would it be fair to say that at this point in the case you were under almost intolerable personal pressure in addition to the pressure the case was putting on you?
JC: You’re totally missing the point.
FM: What was the point then? Tell me.
JC: Benedict Finch was the fucking point. Finding Benedict Finch. Giving him safely back to his mother. That was the only thing that mattered. Why can’t you see that?
His fists are clenched, his teeth gritted. I thank him for coming and say that I’ll see him next week. I don’t wish to be cold with him but he is challenging, and I need him to understand how important it is for him to open up completely during our discussions. Our time together is running out.
RACHEL
My cabdriver on the way home didn’t want to talk any more than I did and I was grateful for that. I sat noiseless and motionless in a corner of the backseat, seeing John’s still body and his disfigured face, thinking about his new child.
The cabbie dropped me off around the front and a uniformed police officer clambered stiffly out of his squad car to ensure that I got in safely.
Inside the house, a silence deeper than any I’d ever experienced before. A void where everything that I’d ever lived for should have been.
A buzz from my phone was a pull back to reality. A text from Laura:
Love, I’m so sorry about being pissed yesterday when John called and I’m so so sorry about what I said to you. I’m not supporting you well and I’m being a shit friend, it’s just such a big thing and I’m frightened too, but I’m here now if you need me, I promise, and I hope you’re not too angry with me.
I deleted it, appalled by it, by her self-absorption.
There was another text, which I hadn’t seen earlier, from Nicky:
How are you doing today? Fine here, and I should be able to head back to you in a day or two, I’ll call later today. Thinking of you ALL the time. xxx
How to reply? Faced with a decision about what to tell her, and how to tell her, I bottled. Trust is like that. Once you lose it, you begin to adjust your attitudes toward people, you put up guards, and filter the information you want them to know.
I wasn’t prepared to actively hide things from Nicky, or to be completely open with her, as I might have been three days ago. So I didn’t reply. She’d said she would call me, and I decided I would tell her everything then.
There was nothing from the police. Not a word. Part of me wanted to phone them, to ask what they’d thought of the schoolbook, but the night’s events seemed to have raked out of me any last bits of fight that I might have had left.
They’ll phone me if there’s news, I thought, but as I thought it, it felt somehow defeatist, as if I was letting hope ebb away.
I went to Skittle, who was in his bed. I sank to the floor beside him and sat there, my hand in his fur. I shut my eyes, and let my head fall back against the wall behind me and I allowed myself to imagine a reunion with Ben. The feel of him in my arms, the expression in his eyes, the scent of his hair, the sound of his voice, the silky perfection of the moment I’d been longing for all week, and as I imagined it I wept quiet hot tears that felt as though they’d never stop.
JIM
We had the TA in an interview room at Kenneth Steele House.
His mother, her face drained of color, had spoken to him quietly and fiercely in the hallway of their home, telling him that she’d call their family solicitor, while he shouted at her that she always thought the worst of him, that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he wasn’t being arrested.
“Not yet,” Bennett had muttered under his breath. “But it won’t be long, sonny boy.”
He’d come with us voluntarily, but odds were that we weren’t going to let him leave. We knew that, but he didn’t yet. He sat slumped in a chair looking like a bad boy. His chin was at a defiant tilt, and his pupils were pinpricks swimming in irises that were the palest blue.
We had enough to arrest him, but we were debating when to do that, because, as soon as we did, the clock would start ticking until the deadline to release him, unless we could come up with evidence or a confession.
Fraser’s view was simple: “I think we should caution him now.”
“He’s come in of his own volition.”
“I don’t want him talking when he’s not under caution and us not being able to use it in court later.”
“A solicitor will tell him to keep silent.”
“It’s a risk that I think we’re going to have to take. Otherwise he could walk out of here and do a disappearing act. What’s this I hear about an Anderson shelter in the garden?”
“Empty, boss, apart from a lawnmower and some bags of compost.”
“What do you reckon?”
“He was near the scene, he’s lied to us, he knows Ben well, and we’ve got the schoolbook.”
“Motive?”
“Don’t know enough about him yet.”
“What’s the mother like?”
“Angry with him.”
“Get Bennett to caution him, and get her in for an interview while we’re waiting for his brief. And is somebody getting hold of his lying girlfriend?”