I Know You

by Louise Mullins

  She glances up at the clock on the wall. ‘Not while it was happening.’

  ‘You got somewhere you need to be?’

  We can’t hold her without charge, and we can’t caution her without a valid reason.

  ‘I’ve already told you what I saw. Now can I go?’

  She had the opportunity to tell us during her initial interview the day after Steven’s death that she’d seen his murder, but she chose not to disclose what she’d witnessed.

  ‘Why did it take you so long to speak up?’ She huffs and that seals it for me.

  ‘Withholding information is an arrestable offence preventing the due course of justice.’

  ‘I was scared.’

  ‘Of who?’

  ‘Please? I need to leave.’ A girly whine has entered her voice.

  Her social worker darts me a look, and I decide now would be a good time to take a break. Natalie nods her assent.

  ‘The time is 11.04 a.m. Interview suspended pending further enquiries.’ I hit pause on the recording device.

  Pierce offers me a sideways glance then turns to Natalie and says, ‘I’m going to go and grab us some drinks from the vending machine. What are you having?’

  ‘I’m not thirsty.’

  I stand, glance back to Natalie who is fidgeting in her seat. We lock eyes for a few seconds and she’s the first to look away. There’s more she isn’t telling us, though I expect she’ll offload her secrets in time. The key to this job is patience.

  ‘We’ll reconvene shortly.’

  I follow Pierce out to the corridor and close the door behind us. He turns and whispers, ‘What do you make of her performance?’

  ‘Her hesitation when detailing the car, followed by hasty replies suggests to me that she was partly truthful at first, then baulked and gave us a false description that completely opposes the one on record.’

  Pierce slips two coins into the vending machine and hits the button for a bottle of water. ‘So we’re looking for a small, black, sporty, automatic Volkswagen hatchback in pristine condition?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And a tall blond male?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Are you going to let it slip during the second half of our interview, or shall I?’

  *

  There is no other witness to the event itself, only the aftermath, but just insinuating there is and that their description doesn’t match Natalie’s proves beneficial. I take the seat opposite Natalie’s social worker this time, to resume the interview, giving Pierce the leading role.

  ‘You stated earlier that the man who attacked Steven was short, stocky, and dark-haired. But we have evidence opposing your description.’

  She sighs and her whole demeanour changes to one of defiance.

  ‘Tell us the truth, Natalie.’

  Her features harden as she speaks. ‘Are we done?’

  I follow her gaze to the clock then stand as she jumps off the chair and hightails it across the room.

  I bolt after her. ‘You’ve given me no option but to detain you.’ I lunge for the door to hold it shut and grab her arm, raising it to her waist, drawing it behind her, and clamping it against her lower back. Pierce has his hand clasped around her other wrist, a set of handcuffs already in his hand. ‘Natalie. I’m arresting you on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice by: Obstructing a police officer using section 89(2) of the Police Act 1996; by making a false statement using section 89 of the Criminal Justice Act 1967, and by concealing an arrestable offence using section 5 of the Criminal Law Act 1967. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

  ‘You can’t arrest me. I haven’t done anything wrong,’ she says, continuing to struggle towards the door.

  ‘You can’t leave custody unless you’re lucky enough to get bail which, if you are,’ I glance at the clock on the wall above Natalie’s head, ‘unfortunately won’t be possible to achieve until the morning.’

  ‘I’m not staying here for the night.’

  ‘It looks like you are, I’m afraid. The Magistrate’s Court closes at 5.30,’ says Pierce. ‘Interview terminated at 5.17 p.m.’ I press the button on the recording device and my chair screeches along the linoleum as I push it back against the table.

  ‘We’ll return here in the morning once you’ve had some shut eye and something to eat and drink.’

  I receive a scowl in response. She’s letting her guard down, tiredness and annoyance evident in her features. It won’t be long before she cracks. I just hope the rest and relaxation provided by a night in a cell doesn’t have the opposite effect and give her long enough to conduct a defence strategy involving memory loss or the time to invent a completely different story to the one she’s already given us. ‘I saw everything,’ she told me over the phone this morning while I was combing my short dark hair in the mirror wondering if it would be more appropriate for me to attend Steven Bennet’s memorial service wearing uniform in case someone attending knew something. Our obvious presence can often initiate anxiety in the guilty, proving useful in generating new leads of inquiry.

  Honour didn’t notice our plain-clothed formalwear. Not that I expected she would. Though it has been merely ninety-one days since her son was taken from her, I can see in her eyes the event is still as raw as ever in her mind.

  I’m lucky not to have ever experienced the death of anyone close. My parents are still alive. Both sets of grandparents died before I was born so I never knew them nor overheard the words ‘gone’ or ‘passed away’ leave my mother or father’s lips. And the only loss I’ve ever experienced was when my dog Milo disappeared.

  Of course, my missing furry friend still haunts me but it’s not the same as the one case Rawlings said that will gnaw at you. I still don’t really know what he meant by that but I think I’m close to finding out with this investigation.

  Natalie’s motive for lying will come out tomorrow morning. It must. We can’t keep her locked up any longer without a practical reason for doing so, and I can’t imagine the CPS will allow us to hold Natalie for another twenty-four hours on such a flimsy charge of justice perversion when we have no credible evidence to suspect she was an accessory to the crime itself. She’s not considered a public risk because she’s never run away, and she has no previous violent convictions. The odds are stacked against us.

  It wasn’t her. We know that. The way the knife was positioned, the direction of the wounds suggests the individual who struck him was taller than Steven. They had to use a lot of force, so would have had a lot of upper body strength, been muscular. Natalie is short and slim.

  She’s given me and Pierce a decent amount of information to go on in search of the unknown male suspect so far, which for now will have to suffice. That’s if she hasn’t invented the description of the individual.

  SINEAD

  Newport, Wales

  Mai is bouncing up and down beside the front door eager to leave the house. Brandon as always is taking as long as humanly possible to apply the shoe to his left foot. If he begins with the right, for some reason, he finds it easier. Watching him screw up his face and poke his tongue out in concentration while his small fingers fumble with the shoes is causing me to breathe hard and tap my foot. ‘Let Mummy help you.’

  ‘I do it by mine own self.’

  I sigh and check my handbag for the keys one last time.

  I locked myself out of the house a couple of weeks ago and had to sit next door with Gillian waiting for my husband to arrive with the children who were arguing and fighting and growing increasingly impatient to leave as they sat cross-legged on her sofa as each hour passed. Gillian is a petite grey-haired woman with a twenty-a-day smoking habit, a cheeky grin, and a dry sense of humour. She reminds me of my late mother. And although I adamantly protested a cup of tea, she forced me to drink two and cut a homemade vanilla sponge the size of
half a patio slab into thick slices for us to eat to keep us going until Aeron’s arrival. She’s old-fashioned in her ideals, believes that men should go out to work and women stay at home to care for the children. What she doesn’t realise is that modern living costs don’t allow for choice. For myself, and many of my female friends that is not an option. While the children are in school, I work. When they’re occupied at home, I do the housework while simultaneously tending to their every whim. I also value my independence. If my husband was injured in a vehicle collision while commuting home from a job or died in an accident at work, I’d be solely responsible for paying the mortgage. Why would I depend on my husband when the only guarantees in life are that we’re born, we pay tax, and then we die?

  I wasn’t always this cynical, but I guess life happened and I realised the happy ever afters of the fairy-tales I read as a child were just a break in the storm and not the end.

  Once we’re out of the house I strap the children into their seats and drive towards my destination, a little irritated Aeron is so quick to offer help to his family, but our own house is uncarpeted after an electrical rewire and I keep catching my bare feet on the grippers lining the floorboards upstairs. I can still feel the stabbing pain of the last nail that sunk into my flesh, leaving barely a mark to evidence its wound.

  For the past fortnight, Aeron has been redecorating his sister’s living room and refitting his brother’s kitchen every evening after leaving the yard. He’s not due home until nine o’clock tonight. By which point I will have already fed, run a bath for, and put the children to bed, allowing him to get away with the minimal requirements of fatherhood.

  I inhale the warm floral air through the half-open driver’s window as I navigate the slim winding road uphill. Passing the forty miles per hour sign, I glance up at my rear-view mirror and see a metallic-blue BMW charge around the corner and pelt towards me, refusing to slow for the sharp bend, its exhaust roaring. My hands instinctively grip the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles turning white. I speed up, watching in horror as his number plate disappears behind my rear bumper. I change gears fast and kick down harder onto the accelerator, but I’m shunted forward in my seat as the driver slams into the back of my car. I try to manoeuvre away, steering left and stopping on impulse, realising too late that I should have sped up sooner or turned into the wrong lane to evade impact.

  The brakes squeal and I’m thrown forward at the sound of Brandon’s terrified screaming. I smack my head on the sun visor, the seatbelt slicing across my chest as the BMW slams into the rear right wheel, shunting the car into the metal guardrail protecting a red brick property. A woman stands at a window fronting the house looking bewildered. The grating whiny noise of aluminium against steel fills my ears and I think for a moment we’re going to die, trapped within my car between a vehicle and a gate post with no way to escape as the man reverses then ploughs into us a second time, jolting my neck and spine simultaneously and forcing the airbags to release.

  Stunned and covered in white powder, I feel my chest tightening as though someone has wrapped a cord around my lungs and is squeezing it.

  If only I’d bought a car with a sunroof, hadn’t decided to go out and buy milk at this time, hadn’t chosen this road to get to the newsagent’s, had the passenger’s window open instead of mine, had time to tug on the handbrake and climb out and run to the house for help. But the maniac reverses sidelong, misses the front end of an ex-BT van as it slows to a stop in the other lane before smacking into me a third time, dragging my vehicle along the road until he grows bored or notices the van has pulled into an emergency stop space and decides to drive away, leaving me shaking and swearing inside my battered little car. I have no idea whether to chance leaving through the imploded driver’s window to remove the children from the rear-side passenger seats or if he’ll turn around at the top of the road and return to finish the job.

  Someone wants me dead. A man with blond hair, driving a metallic-blue BMW I’ve seen seven times in recent weeks. Who’s overtaken me thrice on this stretch of road; this isn’t the first time he’s tried to take my life. The difference is, today I have my children in the back, and as I look through the cracked windscreen to acknowledge that yet again there is no roadside camera to prove the attempt at my life was made, his face is imprinted on my mind. I know what he looks like and I have a witness.

  The driver of the ex-BT van has left his vehicle and he’s standing at my mangled door, arms outstretched to help me as I climb from the car, panting, shaking, speechless. He notes the children at the back, already unfastened, pulls the seat forward and grabs Brandon before reaching out to help Mai. He plants them onto the concrete and tells them to run around to the verge to meet the woman who has flung open the front door of her house and is wearing a concerned expression on her wrinkled face, while I try to regain control of my breathing.

  ‘Are any of you hurt? Do you need an ambulance?’

  The van driver gives the children a once-over then turns to me and widens his eyes. I wince and wave the question off with a trembling hand. He looks across to the woman and nods.

  ‘I’m calling the police too,’ she says, darting back into the house.

  I nod dumbly, still too shaken to form words.

  The van driver leans through the torn-up door of my car and turns on the hazards; they blink wildly to alert other road users an accident has occurred, though it’s anything but. ‘Is there anyone I can call for you?’ he says, eyes gazing intently at me then roaming to my destroyed vehicle then to the children who are walking slowly along the grass, shivering in shock. He shakes his head slightly as though he can’t quite believe we made it out alive.

  I should speak to my husband before arriving home in a police car and frightening him half to death, but I can’t find the right way of explaining this to him, the man who looks at me as though expecting me to crumble in a heap on the floor in front of him, traumatised. Except I’m not. And that I think is what worries the police officer when he arrives, alone, to take my statement and offer us a lift back to the house after the paramedics give us the all-clear.

  The uniformed officer gives Brandon a tight smile, which he returns at the same time as clenching his sister’s hand in his. ‘It’s going to be okay, lad.’

  I hold them and squeeze their bodies tight against my own. Seated between them at the back of the police car, I feel removed from my surroundings as though an invisible wall has been slid around me, separating me from my bare arms around my children, the car I’m seated inside, and the tree-lined streets as we’re driven home to sanctuary.

  Aeron didn’t believe me when I told him I was being followed, nor that I’d been honked at, yelled at, or cut up and overtaken several times since purchasing the car that’s now being driven by a recovery truck to a garage, so my insurance company can confirm it’s been written off. But he will now.

  The officer follows me inside the house. Aeron rushes towards us. He goes to embrace me but I shrug him off. He grabs the kids in a hug and sits down with them cradled against him waiting for me to break the news.

  ‘Thank fucking god you’re okay,’ he says. Then he turns to the police officer and says, ‘Tea?’ He’s clearly unable to think of anything else to do.

  I turn my head, my neck too stiff to shake now that my cortisol levels are declining. The constable refuses tea before sitting beside me to take my statement while the information is fresh in my mind. Although, I doubt I could forget such an awful experience.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ he says, ‘how many people do when they’ve gone through something traumatic.’

  I know, I think but don’t reply.

  ‘I have to ask this,’ he says, midway through writing up the incident report on his phone, ‘but is there anyone you can think of who may want to harm you?’

  Aeron steps up then, clearly annoyed. ‘My wife is a good person. She isn’t the kind of woman to provoke a madman. This is obviously a bout of extreme road rage against the
wrong person. She’s done an advanced driving course, you know.’

  I nod, a fireball of pain shooting up my neck as I do. But I’ve already considered the possibility it could be more than that. Someone from my past who wants to seek revenge, and not as I’d first assumed, a case of mistaken identity.

  ‘The van driver who witnessed the incident has given me the first three digits of the number plate. Along with your description of the male suspect there’s every chance one of my colleagues will be able to find the individual responsible for causing the accident.’ He smiles weakly in reassurance, adding, ‘I’ll contact your insurer on your behalf just as soon as we discover who he is.’

  Aeron gives me a look that says, ‘Why have you not told him about the other incidents that might be related?’ but says nothing until he’s followed the police officer to the door and closed it behind him. Then he turns to Brandon and asks if he’s alright, but he’s already singing along to the repetitive ‘Shark Song’ thumping through the headphones attached to his Kindle Fire and can’t hear him. Mai shuffles over to where I sit on the sofa, plants her arms around my sore neck and leans her head on my chest. I give Aeron a look that says, ‘we’ll discuss it later,’ and he slinks off down the passageway to the kitchen to re-boil the kettle he must have already flicked the switch on three times, but still hasn’t used the now stale water from it to make tea with.

  I bought the car with the money left over from the final loan repayment which I used to secure a deposit on the house. I took my time and chose a vehicle with good online reviews, and paid extra for a twelve-month warranty, naively assuming my actions wouldn’t have a rebound effect on my life. But while Mai nuzzles my cheek with her damp face and I brush my fingers through her tear-soaked hair, intending to wipe away the worry on her features, I can’t help but reflect on the past few months, trying to reason a more logical explanation for the deliberate crash – no one hits your vehicle three times unless intending to do so – angry and afraid for my children, knowing the man had struck my car without a thought to the possibility they might be in there, with me. Unless that was why he’d chosen this day on that stretch of road to strike, knowing Brandon and Mai were in the back of the car. I go over every previous incident that has happened over the last four months since purchasing the vehicle, trying to unpick a potential motive and drawing only one terrifying conclusion.