I Thought I Knew You

by Penny Hancock

  Then, as if on cue, after the beef Wellington and a panna cotta that Rowan had bought from Waitrose, the landline rang. It was Holly. Holly didn’t give Jules time to speak but asked straight away if Saffie had seen Saul at the bus stop that morning.

  For a few seconds, Jules felt the wind knocked out of her. She was unable to answer, astonished that Holly had the cheek to ask such a question in the circumstances.

  ‘He hasn’t come home,’ Holly was saying. ‘I wouldn’t have rung but I’m beside myself with worry. I tried to talk to him about . . . about what Saffie told us, and now he’s vanished. There’s no one else to ask.’

  Jules was tempted to slam the phone down. If Saul had gone off because he couldn’t face up to what he’d done to Saffie, then he was a coward as well as a predator.

  ‘Please,’ Holly said. ‘I’m afraid, Jules. I’m afraid he’s done something stupid.’

  Jules hesitated, then put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Rowan,’ she called.

  Rowan came back into the kitchen. ‘I know you don’t want to hear his name at the moment, but just a “yes” or “no” will do. Did you see Saul when you dropped Saff for the bus this morning?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Luckily for him,’ Rowan said.

  ‘The answer’s no,’ Jules said into the phone.

  ‘But there’s just the one bus to school, from the village?’ Holly asked.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘So he might not even have gone to school?’ Holly’s voice was desperate, but Jules wasn’t going to let that affect her. Not after witnessing Saffie’s distress just minutes ago.

  ‘I have no idea, Holly.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he have told me?’

  ‘Maybe because he’s sixteen? Maybe you need to ask yourself why Saul is looking for ways to shock you.’

  ‘I didn’t know who else to call. I don’t know his classmates, or their parents . . .’

  Jules couldn’t bear to hear any more, and before she could stop herself, she slammed down the phone.

  *

  Jules didn’t tell Holly that Rowan had insisted on driving Saffie to the bus stop and waiting to see her onto the bus, that therefore if anyone had seen Saul, it would have been Rowan. She was sure, anyway, that Holly’s concern over Saul’s not being home was due to what Pete had called Holly’s ‘separation anxiety’. What teenage boy, after all, bothered to text his mum when he stayed out with mates for a few hours longer than he’d said? Especially one like Saul, who was obviously rebelling in a way Holly refused to acknowledge.

  Jules took Saffie up a mug of hot chocolate, checked she was settled in bed and then went to snuggle up next to Rowan on the corner sofa to watch the ten o’clock news. Jules wanted to feel her husband’s large arms around her. She wanted, too, to sense something she could only experience through physical contact with her husband. His warmth. His guiltlessness.

  ‘Rowan. I know you don’t want to hear his name, but you definitely didn’t see Saul this morning when you dropped Saffie off at the bus stop?’

  ‘Why would I want to see that little prick?’

  ‘I know,’ Jules said. ‘I don’t want to set eyes on him either at the moment. It’s just . . . Holly says he hasn’t been home.’

  Rowan didn’t reply. After a while, Jules sighed and said, ‘Rowan, I think we need to talk in an adult way about what happened. Without getting upset.’ Without you knowing your daughter’s pregnant, said a voice in her head.

  ‘There isn’t an adult way to deal with a monster like Saul,’ Rowan said. ‘Animal behaviour warrants an animal response.’

  ‘I think if you continue to feel this strongly, my love, it would be better for all of us to seek some outside advice.’

  ‘Where from? Saffie doesn’t want the school or the police involved. We’ve got our hands tied!’

  Jules stopped herself from saying that Saffie hadn’t wanted Rowan involved either but that didn’t mean she was right. ‘Where did you go this morning, after you dropped Saffie?’ she asked instead. ‘You weren’t back when I left for work at nine thirty.’

  ‘Went to Ely to get stuff for dinner,’ he said. ‘So I could cook for you. You looked tired and stressed this morning. I wanted to do something to help.’ He turned to her. Put his arm about her neck, pulled her face to him and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Ro. It was lovely; I do appreciate it when you cook. Look, Rowan, don’t get angry, but I was wondering whether the way to deal with this – the rape, I mean – if we’re not involving the police, and since you don’t want to contact Rape Crisis, might be to get some counselling or family therapy. To allow Saffie to talk through what’s happened and what we all feel about it?’

  Rowan threw the TV controls down on the sofa and sat up to look at Jules. ‘The only people who need family therapy are Holly and Saul and that limp-dick Pete. He obviously doesn’t therapize himself or he would have dealt with Saul. Given him a good thrashing at the very least, if Holly hasn’t got the guts to do it. Surely as his new stepfather he should take some action? But he’s too lily-livered. They’re the ones who should be seeking therapy. They’re the ones who’ve let their son destroy my daughter.’

  ‘She’s our daughter, Rowan.’

  Jules looked at her big, tall, blond husband. He had put on weight over the years and carried a bit of a paunch these days, but he was still handsome. Still big-boned and muscly and masculine. So it tugged at her heartstrings to see that he had tears in his eyes as he repeated, ‘He’s destroyed her. I’m trying to find a way to deal with this, but I just can’t.’

  Jules leaned over and stroked the back of his head where his short hair felt soft and velvety. ‘She’s not destroyed, though, darling. You underestimate her resilience. Saffie is disturbed, and very upset by what happened. Especially at the moment. While we’re coming to terms with it. But she’s not destroyed.’

  ‘Saul has ruined her childhood,’ he muttered. ‘And it’s all I can do to stop myself going round and smashing Pete’s bloody head in for not keeping a proper eye on that boy. Have they done anything about him yet?’

  Jules didn’t reply to this. Instead, she said, ‘Rowan, what worries me is your level of anger.’

  ‘It warrants bloody anger,’ Rowan said.

  ‘And you’re sure you didn’t see Saul this morning?’ Jules asked again, compelled to reassure herself. Rowan didn’t answer this time. Instead, he got up and walked out of the room, taking a swipe at the side of the leather sofa as he did so.

  9

  HOLLY

  Saul still isn’t home by half past eleven. I’m beside myself with worry. I’ve contacted everyone I can think of, including his one old friend Zak in London, but nobody has seen him. The fair’s fallen silent. The families who’ve worked non-stop since dawn are inside their trailers or gone home to wherever they usually live. Pete, having disappeared upstairs after my outburst, comes back down.

  ‘He isn’t in yet?’ Even he looks worried now.

  ‘Should we phone the police?’

  ‘I think perhaps we should at least register our concern,’ he says. ‘I’ll do it, Holly.’

  I sit and listen to his side of the conversation, grateful that he’s trying to help.

  ‘Since this morning,’ I hear him say. ‘The last time she saw him was eight o’clock, when he set off for school . . . No. He didn’t go to his lessons. His mother checked . . .Yes . . . He had his school stuff when he left this morning. I think so.’ He turns to me. ‘Did you see him leave?’

  ‘Pete, give the phone to me.’

  I tell the policewoman I saw Saul go out of the door this morning.

  ‘And the bus stop is just over the road from us. There was a fair arriving so I didn’t see him get to it. Which is ironic, because I can usually see him from the front room in this house. I often watch him cross the road . . . just because I can.’ I don’t say I watch him to see whether anyone will talk to him.

  ‘Has he got family elsewhere? A frie
nd he might be visiting?’

  The policewoman has a high-pitched, girlish voice.

  ‘I’ve checked everyone I know. Please,’ I say. ‘He’s in some kind of danger. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘He’s not in a relationship? Been seeing a new crowd of friends? Has he been messaging anyone new on the internet?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. He’s never done this before. He always tells me where he is.’

  ‘You’re not aware of unwanted attention from anyone? He’s not been the victim of bullying or of persecution?’

  Saffie’s accusation. The bullying he endured when we first moved here, kids calling him an ‘emo’ and other things that upset him.

  ‘I . . . We had a bit of a disagreement on Sunday night,’ is all I say.

  ‘It’s early days,’ she says. ‘It’s quite common for kids of his age to go off after a family argument without telling anyone for a few hours. I’ll file a report. Get back in touch if he’s not back by the morning.’

  I turn to Pete.

  ‘She says to get back in touch if he’s not here by morning,’ I say. ‘Morning! Surely that’s far too long!’

  We wait up. I pace up and down, alert to every sound – the wind rattling the letterbox, the creak of the pipes – longing for the turn of Saul’s key in the lock. Pete tries to distract us with the TV, but the inane babble of voices simply irritates me. I text Saul again. He doesn’t reply. I try ringing. His phone goes to voicemail. Bloody mobiles. They trick you into thinking you can keep tabs on your kids. By three in the morning, I tell Pete I can’t wait any longer, and silently, he dials the police again.

  ‘They’re sending someone round,’ he says.

  *

  The police arrive at 5 a.m. A man – it’s difficult to tell his age: he’s got the swagger of experience, and pockmarked olive skin – and a woman, with pale eyes and fine strawberry-blonde hair and the kind of delicate white complexion that blotches easily. They introduce themselves as Carlos Venesuela, detective inspector, and Detective Constable Maria Shimwell.

  ‘Mind if we sit?’ Venesuela asks, waving his hand over the sofa I’ve been contemplating getting rid of. Now I decide I’ll never get rid of it. It’s where I breastfed Saul and where Archie and I used to sit, my feet in his lap, to watch TV when Saul was in bed.

  The two police officers sit side by side and the woman gives me a quick, nervous smile, a pink circle appearing on her chin. I wonder if she’s allergic to things. I remember how Saul as a little boy got rashes when he ate strawberries, little pink weals appearing all up his soft arms and rounded thighs, his lips turning puce and raggedy round the edges.

  They ask questions. They ask about timings, what he was wearing, where he was going, what he said as he left. I tell them everything they need to know. Saul’s distinguishing marks – a crease in his left earlobe. Double-jointed thumbs, which he used to bend back just to horrify me. A birthmark the shape of Italy inside his right thigh.

  Any piercings, tattoos, scars? they ask.

  None. Unusual maybe, for a teenager.

  I tell them all this. I don’t tell them the way, when he was a child, the arches of his hot little feet fit exactly over my thighs as we lay on the sofa. Or that the gulley in the back of his neck used to smell of almonds. Or that when he was little, you could humour him easily, as if the laughter were sitting there waiting to spill over. Before his dad died. Before he lost his joie de vivre. I don’t tell them either, not yet, about his school refusal when we first came here, about the persecution of the other kids, the name-calling, about how hard I’ve worked to settle him in, about how he’s still a loner. That he’s sensitive and artistic and poetic and the loveliest boy you could hope to have, but how these attributes make life harder for an adolescent than others.

  They ask if they can go upstairs to Saul’s room and I lead the way.

  He’s taken his phone and iPad. But I show them his desktop computer.

  DI Venesuela sits down and asks for Saul’s password.

  ‘I . . . I’m not sure.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ he says. ‘We have ways and means. Just speeds up the process if you know it.’

  ‘I’m sorry. He’s changed it.’

  ‘OK. Well, I’ll need a bit of time,’ he says. ‘If you wouldn’t mind staying . . .’ he says to Pete.

  The woman asks me to accompany her back downstairs. She wants to have a more in-depth chat.

  ‘He hasn’t been seeing anyone new, you say?’

  I explain again that he’s a loner, that it’s something I’ve worried about since we moved here.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Two years. Just over. It was hard for him, switching secondary schools, moving from London. He hasn’t adjusted very well.’

  ‘Does he have friends in London he’s in touch with?’

  ‘Well, yes. One. I thought he might have met up with him, but he hasn’t.’

  ‘Names? Contacts? We’ll check them out again. Is there anything, anything else at all that’s changed recently that might have triggered an out-of-character running-away?’

  ‘His father died six years ago,’ I tell her. ‘And I remarried last year. But he’s always got on with Pete.’

  Saffie didn’t want the rape reported to the police. And a little part of me, the godmother part, wonders if it’s fair on Saffie, when she’s asked her own mother not to report it. Or am I unconsciously protecting Saul by not telling them? It will certainly paint him in a negative light. However hard I plead that I don’t believe it’s true. So what do I say now? How’s it going to help them find Saul? What relevance does it have? Then Jules’s voice comes back to me: Rowan’s threatening to beat the living daylights out of him. My son has been threatened because of Saffie’s allegation. The police should know.

  ‘Recently,’ I say, ‘my son was falsely accused of rape by a girl at his school.’

  ‘I see,’ she says. ‘You’d better tell me more about this.’

  ‘Do you . . . ? Can I make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She follows me into the kitchen. I feel as if I’m seeing everything for the first time. The Matisse calendar, with Pete’s and my work schedules marked on it. Invitations and unanswered letters stuffed into the wooden letter rack that once belonged to my mother. Reminders about when to put the recycling out pinned to the cork noticeboard. Saul’s clutter on the surfaces: plastic water bottles, bike lights, a tangle of mobile charger leads. Everything’s taken on new significance. Look at us, it seems to say. We belong to a time you took for granted when everything seemed safe and predictable. You never bothered to register us until it was too late.

  ‘We need to rule out the possible connection between his disappearance and the allegation,’ DC Shimwell says. ‘Tell us everything you can. Since we’re talking about rape, we also, obviously, need to ensure we’re doing all we can to protect other women.’

  Protect other women? DC Maria Shimwell believes my son is a danger to other women. She needs to know him. She needs to see him. Instead of forming an opinion based on the allegation of a thirteen-year-old.

  ‘He was distraught when I told him what the girl said,’ I tell her. ‘Distraught that I could think such a thing of him. I work with students, teaching them about consent. He knows I have a low opinion of any kind of misogynistic behaviour.’

  ‘Why would this girl have made it up?’

  ‘I don’t know why Saffie would lie,’ I say. ‘I know victims should be given the benefit of the doubt in rape allegations. I’m passionate about it. I get enough stick for it. I’ve been trolled on Twitter for speaking out about it. But it’s just not Saul. He’s not that kind of boy.’

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ Shimwell says with a wry smile. ‘Don’t you remember the boy who tweeted, “This is not what a rapist looks like”?’

  ‘He’s my son. I’m not talking about what he looks like. It’s who he is. I know him.’

  ‘Why tell him what she said a
t all if you were so certain the girl was lying?’

  ‘It seemed only fair to hear his side,’ I say. ‘To see whether they might have been having, I don’t know, a teenage fumble . . .’

  ‘Whether he misunderstood her when she said to stop?’

  Heat rises to my face. I’ve just told her . . . I’ve dealt with scenarios like the one she’s suggesting hundreds of times.

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying. I had to check there was nothing going on between them, something Saffie might be covering up.’

  ‘And why would she cover it up?’

  She lifts up her mug. She doesn’t sip from it. I wonder if she really wanted tea to start with.

  ‘Saul . . . People avoid him at school. He’s not cool in their crowd. Perhaps it was to save face?’

  Maria Shimwell appears to brush this theory aside.

  ‘Is it possible he shocked himself by his behaviour, and when he realized you, his mother, whose opinion he clearly values, knew about it, that’s what triggered . . .’

  ‘Triggered what?’

  ‘Whatever he’s done.’

  I stare at her. What does she think he’s ‘done’?

  ‘As I say, he was shocked when I told him what Saffie had said. Horrified, in fact. And then he overheard Pete say he’d taken his daughters to their mum’s because of it. Which would have devastated him. That Pete would think they needed protecting from him.’

  She regards me for a moment. Then, ‘Why question your son about it at all?’ she asks again, ‘if you were so certain from the start the girl was lying?’

  Haven’t we been through this? Is she never going to give up?

  ‘Because,’ I burst out, at my wits’ end now, ‘Jules’s husband, the girl’s father, threatened Saul. He said he’d sort him out himself if I didn’t. I had to be seen to be doing something or I was afraid he’d keep his word.’