by cass green
Frowning, she peered at him and said, ‘Can I help you?’
Then her eyes widened and she let out a sound that was half gasp, half moan. Her hands flew to cup her face for the second time in an afternoon.
‘Mum,’ said the man in a low voice that cracked, giving the word two syllables.
ELLIOTT
I’d bumped into Lee Bennett that morning.
Since I had formally apologized in that difficult, sweaty meeting back in October, I had kept my head down and tried to throw myself into the job with all I had. Two weeks off for Livi’s birth was all I took, just because I was still feeling the last remnants of a cloud over my head from all that happened in the autumn. We’d never known for sure whether it was Copeland who’d tried to run me over or thrown that brick through the window. He was dead. But I felt, deep in my gut, that I had originally accused the wrong man.
I’d somehow managed to avoid Bennett in the playground at the start and end of the day, averting my gaze if we happened to be within ten metres of each other.
The previous day I had shown some of the children in my class pictures of Livi on my iPad. There had been much cooing from the female contingent, and various helpful observations from the boys, ranging from, ‘My brother once pooed all the way up to his own head,’ to my personal favourite, ‘She looks like Noel Fielding from Bake Off.’
I was on my way into school. Tyler was, for once, queuing outside and waiting for the gates to be unlocked by Barry, the caretaker. His father was standing with him, smart in a dark grey suit. I couldn’t help thinking he looked just like someone on their way to a court hearing, as he kept pulling at the collar of his shirt as though it were choking him.
I nodded quickly and turned away and then heard Bennett say, ‘Hey … Mr, uh, Mr Little?’
Warily, I turned back to him and tried to arrange my face into something friendly and non-confrontational, remembering I’d had that exact intention before. And look how that all turned out.
‘Tyler tells me you have a baby girl,’ he grunted and then, while my brain was still trying to catch up, he stuck out his hand. ‘Congratulations.’
A little dazed, I took his hand and we shook.
I felt like I could finally trust myself to smile and it not be misunderstood.
‘Thank you, Mr Bennett,’ I said, ‘that’s really, really nice of you.’
He knuckled the top of Tyler’s head, a slight reddening on his cheeks now, and he avoided my eye.
‘You take good care of her,’ he said, then, ‘Goodbye you, be a good boy.’
I thanked him again as he turned and walked away, head lowered and hand reaching into his pocket for car keys.
‘My dad has a company car,’ said Tyler in a rush, and I beamed down at him.
‘That’s absolutely brilliant, mate,’ I said. ‘Well done, your dad.’
I was warmed through by this for the entire day.
Things had been better at home too, although Anya still seemed a little distant. Julia’s treatment had started and she seemed okay. I was really starting to feel as though the horrors of the autumn and the weird adjustment to new parenthood might finally be easing into something better and more stable.
We had a staff meeting at the end of the day and I even found myself volunteering to be the liaison teacher for a French exchange visit with a school in Calais next year, such was my good mood.
Coming out of the gates at about four, I went to check my phone and saw that there were about ten messages and several missed calls from Anya.
The messages started as Ell, I need you home NOW xx through PLEASE COME HOME!!!!!’ to WHERE THE FUCK R U????????????
I tried to call her back then but the phone just rang out, so I had no alternative but to jump on my bike and pedal as hard as I could. The car was free now that Anya wasn’t working, but I was trying to lose a few pounds put on by the stress-eating a new baby brings.
Sweat poured down my temples as I hammered those pedals and, as I came to where I could see the silver swathe of sea, a memory came back of that other day, last summer, when the End of the Summer tickets were burning a hole in my satchel and the world was a simpler place. When my wife wasn’t a murderer.
This thought curdled with all the worries about what could have happened at home. I had visions of Livi accidentally scalded with a pan of boiling water or being snatched from the back garden where Anya occasionally put the bouncy chair.
Funny that it didn’t occur to me that what I would see would be a police car.
I used my key and, coming into the house with a knotted stomach, found a scene of calm, despite the frantic nature of Anya’s messages. There were two policewomen in the living room, plainclothes, but so obviously coppers to anyone who had grown up where I did. One was East Asian and had the bearing of the more senior of the two, the other a plump brown-haired woman. They were both about my age.
Anya was standing in the middle of the room, burping Livi over her shoulder, rubbing small circles against the yellow terrycloth of the baby’s sleepsuit. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, it seemed, but when she spoke, her voice was oddly formal, clipped and polite.
‘Elliott, this is DS Jin and DC Morgan.’
I said, ‘Hello,’ to them and they murmured greetings back with frowns.
‘They need me to come down to the station to have a chat, so you need to be here for Livi.’
Anya handed me our daughter, who felt dense and a bit too hot, as though she had been pressed against her mother for some time.
‘Mr Ryland—’ began the Asian policewoman and Anya interrupted her.
‘No,’ she said, ‘he is Mr Little.’
‘Mr Little,’ said the woman, with barely suppressed irritation. ‘It’s not quite a case of asking your wife down for a chat. We have just arrested her on suspicion of murder.’
ELLIOTT
There are moments in your life so strange and shocking that you have no immediate response and all you can do is flounder in a sea of confused emotion. I stood there, mouth opening and closing helplessly.
Arrested?
All three of them were looking at me, Anya with an oddly calm expression which I knew belied the panic underneath. Livi squirmed in my arms and stretched her legs out so her feet pressed into my chest, almost as if she was reminding me she was there. I kissed her downy scalp and saw a look of sorrow wash over Anya’s face. She reached out to touch the baby’s back, then drew her hand in again and reset her expression.
‘How long will this take?’ she said in a rather haughty way to the two policewomen, who exchanged loaded glances.
‘It will take as long as it takes,’ said the one called Jin and Anya nodded, crisply, and spoke to me without meeting my eyes.
‘There is some expressed milk in the freezer,’ she said, her tone entirely neutral.
Finally, I found my voice.
‘On what grounds have you arrested her?’ I asked, realizing, far, far too late, that this question should have come immediately, along with a passionate defence of my wife’s innocence. This thought sent iced water through me. Had I made things worse?
A few minutes later, they were gone. Right on cue, and maybe picking up on both the atmosphere and her mother’s absence, Olivia began to cry.
Time seemed to pass at an agonizingly slow rate that afternoon and evening.
Livi cried on and off for an hour and a half, despite all efforts to placate her. It really felt as though she understood what was going on.
I started off with all the basics: checked the nappy, offered milk. But her nappy was dry and, when I presented her with the carefully prepared bottle of Anya’s milk, she turned her head angrily and bunched her tiny fists in a way that would have been comical if everything hadn’t been so awful. I supposed these weren’t the best circumstances in which to introduce bottle feeding for the first time. Anya had been stock-piling milk in the freezer for when she went back to work, but we hadn’t quite got round to starting Livi on the bottle
.
In the end, it was a combination of me running around the room with her and playing ‘Lonely Boy’ by The Black Keys at top volume that stunned her into silence. Every time I went, ‘Whoah-oh-oh-oh …’ she blinked hard, finally, when I was sweating with the effort of it all, breaking into a heart-crushing smile.
I slumped onto the sofa with her then and had another go with the bottle. She moaned and turned her head away until I dribbled some of the now-cool milk onto my hand and let her suck at it. The fierce pull of it gave me some indication of why Anya had found breast feeding so painful at first.
This seemed to soothe her until she grudgingly allowed the plastic nipple of the bottle into her mouth for a small suck, before spitting it out again and starting to cry once more.
I didn’t dare leave the house in case Anya came back. I wanted to speak to Zoe, just to hear a friendly voice, but what could I have said? That I had no idea why my wife had been arrested? Before she left the house, Anya had made me swear, a ferocious look on her face, that I wouldn’t tell her parents yet. This felt wrong on so many levels but I decided I would honour her wishes if she was back within twenty-four hours. Otherwise, they had to be told.
As I began to pace around the house with my increasingly furious baby daughter held against my shoulder, I mentally picked over what might be happening at the police station.
What would Anya say? Might she actually confess? This thought caused a curious sensation of fear and relief at once. It would depend on what they had on her, of course.
Why now? Why arrest her all these months later?
These thoughts played on a loop around my mind. By nine in the evening, Livi had cried herself out and was lying on my chest, spent, while I stared at the television on low volume and tried not to think about how much I wanted to get up and get a drink.
When I heard the sound of an engine outside, I started to move into a more upright position and then the front door opened into the living room.
She looked drained. Her face was chalk-white and she had a milk stain on one side of her white T-shirt where she was leaking.
Without meeting my eye, she just said, ‘My tits are like hot rocks. Give …’ and held out her hands for the baby, who instantly woke and began to grizzle.
Anya sat down opposite me and latched the baby on, with a small wince. Livi instantly began to drink with little happy grunts, one little star of a hand pressed against her mother’s neck.
‘What happened?’ I said, after the silence had dragged on for a couple of moments.
She sighed and laid her head back against the sofa cushion, before closing her eyes.
‘Someone says they know,’ she said in barely a whisper. She paused, swallowing visibly. ‘About him going over.’
‘How?’ I said. ‘Were they there?’
She shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t say other than that they’d had a tip-off.’
Acidic bile rose in my throat. I could only be there for her through whatever this brought if she told me the truth. But I couldn’t confront her when she was so beaten. Knowing her, she would just clamp down and go off to bed without saying another word.
‘That why they let you go?’ I said. ‘Because it’s just their word against yours?’
She sighed and transferred the baby to the other side, forgetting to wind her in between. I didn’t say anything.
‘They have only let me go on police bail, so they can do further investigations. They kept asking me about my “relationship” with Michael Copeland and about that day. I admitted I was there, of course, but I just tried to get across what really happened.’
A silence fell and it made her look at me properly for the first time.
‘Why don’t you just say what’s on your mind, Elliott?’ Her voice was loud enough to make Livi jolt all four limbs at once, before she continued sucking.
‘I can only try and help if I know the truth, sweetheart,’ I said carefully. ‘I mean, everything.’ Then, ‘You know that I love you and will stand by you, whatever happens, don’t you?’
She gave a harsh, short laugh then, and got abruptly to her feet.
‘She’s only sucking for comfort now. You wind her for me. I’m going to bed.’
And with that she handed me our slightly startled daughter and began to climb the stairs.
SUMMER 2019
LIAM
The lack of sleep, after-effects of yesterday’s emotional tsunami, and the jet lag were conspiring to make this motorway drive much harder than it should have been, and it was taking every scrap of his concentration not to end up under the wheels of a juggernaut. The morning sun was high in a bright sky, but the colours were muted in comparison to what he was used to, like a filter over a lens.
It was possibly a good thing, he mused, as he clenched his buttocks in anticipation of overtaking a caravan he was fast approaching in the slow lane. Maybe he needed to spend time outside of his own head before doing whatever it was he was going to do when he got to his destination.
He reached for the bottle of water Mum had prepared for the journey and flipped back the lid with his teeth to take a drink. He gave a small involuntary smile as he noticed the pack of sandwiches she had also made, carefully checking he still liked ham and cheese as she did so.
Standing on the doorstep of his childhood home, hearing the terrible, banal, sounds of the station so nearby, he had been sweating, his head buzzing, and it had almost broken his resolve.
But it wasn’t his mother who answered the door. Instead, it was a young woman holding a wriggling toddler in her arms. She told Liam she had a forwarding address somewhere.
Soon he was heading back into Cambridge, weak with relief that he didn’t have to stay in Waterbeach.
When he had pulled up at the neat bungalow in King’s Hedges he had been eager now to see her. But the aged nature of the woman who opened that door had shocked him, despite the fact that he had tried to prepare himself. At first, she hadn’t recognized him, then it had seemed to flood her face, the knowledge of who she was looking at, and they had fallen into each other’s arms, both crying.
She was tiny, surely much shorter than she had once been, and he had to lean down to hold her shaking body.
They had sort of staggered back inside the house like a many-limbed creature and she had stood back a little, holding his arms and gazing up at him.
The slap that followed then, not that hard, across his cheek, had been almost welcome, albeit a surprise. Then she had sobbed again and pulled him towards her.
Finally they had been sitting in her tidy living room, Mum holding onto one of his hands as though afraid if she let go, he might disappear again.
‘Where have you been, Liam?’ she’d said. ‘Why did you never come back, lovey?’ Then she had said, with satisfaction, ‘I knew it. I knew you’d come back someday,’ before bursting into tears again.
Liam had taken a breath, trying to think about the words he had arranged during the thirty-odd hours he had spent in the air, rabbit-hopping the cheapest way he could get from Bangkok to London. He still hadn’t found the right ones. But now he decided there was no point in anything but the bluntest truth.
‘I had to go away, Mum,’ he said, looking into her eyes, which seemed to be roving all over his face and neck, like she was checking him all over for something.
He thought back to that night, fifteen years ago, when Anastasia’s father had come at him with the golf club. The surprise and shock of it had floored him before he had time to fight back.
The blows had rained down, on his legs, his arms, but never on his head or his back. He only understood why later. This was a beating by someone who knew with almost surgical precision what to do when you wanted someone to be in pain, but not so battered that they might die or need to be hospitalized.
When the beating had stopped, the man, whose name he only later found out was Patrick Ryland, spat on him, the hot froth of it landing on his cheek.
Then Ryland said Irene’s full name,
his dad’s, and Michael’s and gave all the details of where they worked and at what hours. He said that if Liam ever talked about what had happened at Waterbeach station, then his family would end up in a ditch with bullets in their brains. Furthermore, he was to get out of the country and not to come back unless he wanted to see his family in a news story.
Anastasia had been sitting in the parked car the whole time this had been taking place. This was something it took many years for him to process. Sometimes he feels he still hasn’t. Maybe the journey he is taking today is the proof of that.
Her father had finally stopped. Liam had been able to hear his ragged breaths as he gave him one last, half-hearted kick. He heard the sound of the car starting up then, and soon he was alone, gasping with the pain of drawing air into his lungs as his ribs screamed at him.
A van drew up a few blurry minutes later and, at first, he had been filled with hope. But then two men in balaclavas got out and a brand-new terror had stolen what little space he had to breathe. This was it. He was going to die right there.
But after a savage kick to the hip and some mumbled words about shutting his mouth, he had been thrown into the back of the van.
Curling into a pile of sheets that smelled of white spirit, he’d cradled his ribs and panted in panicked fear as the van stopped and started, jogging him about painfully against some tins of paint. After the first hour he’d tried a half-hearted attempt to open the doors, but they were locked, and anyway, the van was travelling fast now, maybe on a motorway.
Another hour later, after he’d somehow slept a little, the doors were thrust open with a harsh clang and all he caught was what sounded like the deep, melancholy bellow of a ship foghorn before a punch knocked him unconscious.