Now she puts the mug down.
‘He told you this? The girl’s father?’
‘Her mum – Jules – she told me. She warned me if I didn’t deal with Saul myself, her husband was going to do it for me.’
‘What were her exact words? Can you remember?’
‘She said . . .’ I scroll back, trying to remember exactly what Jules said. Rowan’s threatening to beat the living daylights out of him.
I relay the phrase to Shimwell, who looks at me through her pale blue eyes.
‘That’s why I asked Saul about what Saffie had said. I was trying to protect him. Things were getting out of hand. I wanted to be able to tell Jules and Rowan that he had categorically denied it. I even thought we could get the kids to talk to each other. Through a mediator, if necessary. Anything to get Saffie to confess to us what made her lie about Saul like that, and stop Rowan taking the situation into his own hands.’
‘Do you think this . . . Rowan . . . meant it? Or was it the kind of empty threat any father might make after hearing his thirteen-year-old has been raped?’
I think of Jules, her love for Rowan. All the times I thought she ought to leave him but said nothing. If he was a genuine danger to her, I would have urged her to seek help, of course I would. But in spite of everything, he never laid a finger on her. And he made her happy. And I knew that when you love someone, you do not want to be told you’re making a terrible mistake. You don’t want to be told the man you’re with isn’t who you think he is. Jules loves Rowan. If I’d expressed my views, I would have lost her. And that was something I couldn’t bear. Can I bear it now?
‘Rowan’s been OK recently,’ I say to Shimwell.
‘Recently?’
‘He had to attend anger management classes. He used to have a temper on him. He had a caution for something – lashing out at someone. But it was years ago.’
‘And you were afraid he might assault your son, for what he believed he did to his daughter?’
‘He threatened to. Their daughter didn’t want you involved. She was adamant. And her mum – my friend – she wanted us to sort it out between ourselves. But once she’d told her husband, I could see the situation was going to escalate. I took his threat seriously. I told Saul myself about the rape claim to stop Rowan from doing so. I wanted to hear him say out loud that he didn’t do it. I thought he might have some theory as to why the girl lied. I was going to report it back to the parents. But I never believed for a minute he was guilty.’
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘All this will help with our enquiries.’ She stands up and I’m struck by how thin she is. I admire her pluckiness, taking on a job that must put her in some very risky situations when she appears so frail. ‘I’d like to check those tweets you mentioned. I’ll make a report and we’ll be in touch.’
*
As Maria Shimwell gathers her things, Venesuela comes back downstairs with Pete. ‘Has your son ever expressed suicidal thoughts?’ Venesuela asks, coming into the kitchen.
My head shoots up. ‘Why?’
‘There’s something I think you should look at on his computer.’
I follow him upstairs and into Saul’s room, where Pete is sitting at the computer, staring at the words I hate myself and want to die emblazoned across the screen.
‘It’s the title of a song,’ I say. My words feel crumbly, insubstantial, because I know what it means. ‘Isn’t it?’
Venesuela doesn’t reply. He clicks on the mouse pad and opens another window. A Nirvana fan club page. I read the posts on the alternative methods of suicide Kurt Cobain could have used if he hadn’t shot himself. Suggested overdoses, how to get the right vein when you slit your wrists, the best knots for a successful hanging. Venesuela won’t allow me respite. He clicks on ‘history’ and up pops Cobain’s suicide note, packed full of his angst-ridden self-hatred. The empathy he has for human suffering that means he can’t tolerate life anymore. Saul has always had an excess of empathy. He knew when Jules had lost a baby; he knew when I needed comforting after Archie died. Has all this empathy become intolerable to him? On top of the fact he himself has been so completely misunderstood?
‘We’ll get the crime investigation department involved straight away,’ Venesuela says. ‘They’ll instigate a search.’
He pulls something black and rectangular out of a pocket and says into it, ‘Potential suicide, young man, six foot, white, dark hair.’
Those words will ricochet around my head forever.
*
The police leave at 6.30 a.m. They’ve looked through my Twitter feed, gone through Saul’s computer again, and they tell me they’ll be in touch the minute they hear anything. My eyes are dry and itchy from lack of sleep. Pete’s in the kitchen making me more sweet tea that I don’t want.
At eight o’clock, twenty-four hours since Saul left the house, I try to recreate the moment he went off, heading, as I thought, for the bus. Was there anything different about him? Did he reply when I said I loved him? Did he look back?
I didn’t watch him go for once. The fair with its trailers and stalls had stolen Saul’s space on the green. I didn’t want to see him pushed into the midst of the school crowd against his will. I try to visualize whether he was wearing a coat. He’d always argued he’d be too hot. Even on days when the north wind was blowing straight off the Urals. Was he carrying his school bag? Or something bulkier, fuller? Had he planned to get away? None of the details I need will come back to me.
Outside the window, on the edge of the green, where the fairground has left a little gap near the bus stop, the children are gathering, starling-like, twittering, in their black school uniforms, with their bags and their water bottles. Saffie’s there, flaunting her short black skirt, white shirt and tie so that she looks like a model in a magazine. She’s surrounded by a crowd of admiring girls, none of them quite as striking as she is. A tall boy I’ve seen before approaches her, says something to her. She turns from him and begins to walk away, saying something over her shoulder. He chases after her, and in the end she turns and shouts, and he falls about laughing. I remember from my Rape Crisis days how survivors of rape report a violation not just of their bodies but also of their whole person, their agency, of who they are. Saffie, I think, doesn’t look cowed, or ground down, or weighted by guilt, or on edge every time some boy moves close to her. The only clue that she’s less than happy in her skin is her habit of clawing obsessively at her sleeves – a little tic she’s acquired recently. But I rein in these thoughts because I am doing what I know I should not do. Generalizing. Making assumptions about how rape victims look. The way assumptions are often made in court. When the reality is that there is no blueprint for how a victim looks. Everyone is different. Everyone deals with an assault differently. You cannot judge by a person’s demeanour.
I phone work and explain to Luma that under the circumstances I can’t face going in. She’s sympathetic, tells me to take as long as I need. But then the day lies before me, long and empty.
‘No, thanks, Pete.’ I push the mug of tea away. ‘I have to go and look for him.’
‘Leave it to the police,’ Pete says. ‘They know what to do.’
‘How can they? They don’t know him.’
I’ve remembered the conversation Saul and I had the night we walked over to Jules’s house. When Saul said he loved the Fenland skies, and the swans’ nests and the muntjacs. Perhaps Saul didn’t get on the bus but took one of the tracks away from the village through farmland to the river. Walked alone into the Fens. If he’d gone into the countryside, it would be why no one had seen him.
He’d said he liked spending time on his own, that it was his choice.
That would be just like him. Wanting to be alone. After overhearing Pete saying he had to protect his girls from him. I remember what he said when I tried to get him to deny the rape once and for all: Everyone round here’s the same. All gagging for gossip to make their boring little lives more exciting. Let them have it. They’
re all fucking sickos. Saffie. Her school mates. The lot of them.
No wonder he wanted to get away.
‘I’m going out,’ I tell Pete. ‘It’s all I can do. I have to keep moving. Can you stay here in case he comes home?’
I pull on my parka, some trainers. Pete looks anxious but agrees to stay at home, says he has work to do. ‘I’ll ring the minute there’s any news,’ he promises.
I walk away from the village, over the level crossing to the cycle path that leads through the young wood of beech saplings, their leaves copper brown now, and then join the river at the old toll bridge. I start to walk north towards Ely. The path is empty. It runs along a raised flood bank from which I can see the Fens laid out flat to either side. A mile or so along the bank, over the river and beyond the railway line, Jules and Rowan’s sprawling modern home is visible, with its kitchen extension and its decking and large garden. I wonder what Jules is going through. What she’s thinking about now she’s had time to reflect on Saffie’s allegation. I’d love to go and talk to her, as I would once have done. To ask her for her advice about Saul. I imagine her reassurance. I imagine us talking the way we did in the car that night on the way to the pub. The last time we spoke to each other compassionately, as friends.
You can see for miles across the flat land. Land that was once under water. Swampland where communities sustained themselves among sedge and willow, on reeds, rush and peat. There is so much of it, and so much sky. The clouds part, allowing shards of pale sunlight through. The reeds along the shallows of the river turn white. I walk past the pumping station and the long drain that cuts a brown gash between the fields. Ditches that carry flood water, glittering to the edges of the land. Time carrying Saul further and further from me. Have the drains swallowed up my son? Carried him out to the Norfolk Wash? To the deep North Sea, lying beyond the Fens?
When I first visited Jules here, Saul and I had just come back from a week in Italy, one of the villages of the Cinque Terre. Everything there was vertical, soft pink and terracotta palazzos piled above our heads. Vineyards clambering up terraced cliff sides. Rock faces dropping down to clear blue water. Peaks of mountains soaring into the clouds.
I couldn’t believe the contrast. How everything in Jules’s new environment was horizontal, as if the landscape we’d seen in Italy had been tipped over on its side and rolled flat. Lines, stripes. Ploughed fields like brown corduroy spread out, the flat satin ribbons of drains, stumpy willows fraying on the banks. Telegraph wires strung across the endless sky. Railway tracks disappearing towards the horizon. I didn’t know how Jules could bear the exposure. The knowing there was nothing out there but what was in front of her eyes. Now I know even this wide-open landscape contains secrets. Its open face is deceptive.
I keep on walking. At some point, I find myself in some thin beech woods, light coming between the sparse silvery branches. A swan’s nest, a big circle of organized twigs like a basket, is built into a gap in the reeds beside the river. Is this the one Saul referred to? Did he come this way to find it again? I beat my way through the reeds, startling a small bird. The nest is empty, abandoned. There’s nothing here, no clue, no sign. A hare leaps out of the undergrowth and away from me. A heron takes flight, its broad wings dragging a shadow across the surface of the water as it sets off along the trajectory of the river.
The wind turns cold; it smells like rain. There’s the faintest hint of salt on the wind from the sea, from Hunstanton or Brancaster, from the Norfolk Wash. Dark clouds gather in a bank on the horizon and roll towards me.
I want to walk forever. But I’m walking for my own sanity. This isn’t the way to find Saul. I’ve come so far, I feel light-headed, shaky, in need of a sugar boost. I turn and make my way home, taking the long country road back towards the village that crosses the railway line north of the station, past Jules’s house. It’s too late to turn back when I realize the woman coming towards me is Jules. We can’t avoid each other on this exposed road, raised above the fields to either side. As she gets closer, her eyes meet mine, and I see she too has been crying. My instinct is to reach out, hug her, tell her I love her. That we have to work together. That our friendship is invaluable to me, even now.
‘I’m looking for Saul,’ I say as she reaches me. ‘He hasn’t come home. All night. I’m beside myself.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Holly. I’m sure he’ll be back. And I’m glad I’ve run into you.’
‘Me too.’
‘Because I have proof. That he did rape Saffie.’
I blink at her harsh tone, when I was expecting reconciliation.
‘Saffie’s pregnant.’
‘What?’ I hear the words, but they don’t make sense.
‘Saffie’s pregnant. So there’s no more doubt about what happened. I’d like you to take back what you said about Saffie being devious. That was hurtful, Holly, and it was untrue.’
Behind her, the earth is purple-black as far as the eye can see, rich alluvial soil that looks like darkest, richest cocoa. Push a sapling into it, they say, and it will spring up in seconds. Poke seedlings into that soil and you have a crop in weeks. Saffie has conceived a child. Just like that. When women twice or three times her age and desperate to conceive, as her mother was, find it so difficult.
The rain I’d seen coming reaches us in a gust, knocking into us both. Jules pulls up the hood on her mac, tightens the cords, leaving just her eyes, nose and mouth on view.
‘That doesn’t mean it was rape,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t mean it was Saul. I’m sorry she’s pregnant. But it could be anyone’s.’
Jules looks at me aghast. ‘Are you implying Saffie sleeps around?’
I open my mouth to explain that I’m simply saying the fact she’s pregnant proves nothing about Saul, but Jules goes on. ‘Saffie’s thirteen! She hasn’t been out with anyone ever. The pregnancy tallies with the date he raped her. It’s keeping me awake at night. The enormity of it for her. The responsibility of it. She doesn’t want anyone else to know. In fact, you’re the only person, apart from Donna, who I’ve told. You’ve no idea what a burden that is.’
I pull my parka closer around me. I wonder now if the tears in Jules’s eyes are caused by the wind rather than crying.
Jules goes on. ‘Your . . . son is putting us through hell and you’ve let him walk away, scot-free, without suffering any consequences and without taking any responsibility for what he’s done.’
We’re no longer able to speak to each other without raising our voices over the rain, which is torrential now, drumming on the road, running down my face. The rumble of a train adds to the background cacophony. I turn round to watch it pass, its carriage windows lit up, yellow squares flickering in the gloom. I decide to ignore the gap she left before the word ‘son’. What epithet she thought better of applying to him.
‘Saul has nothing to do with this pregnancy,’ I say with as much dignity as I can muster. ‘He’s done something terrible to himself. Because of what’s been said about him. I wouldn’t have even questioned him if it wasn’t for Rowan’s threat. I wish now I’d had the courage to ignore that. Your husband is a brute.’
‘He was defending his daughter.’ Jules is shocked, I can tell, by my insulting Rowan.
‘Can you imagine what this has done to Saul? The police think he may have killed himself in despair at the way everyone – you, Rowan, Pete – misjudged him.’
I wonder if there’s a momentary look of concern on her brow, but if there is, it’s short-lived.
‘Perhaps he’s run off because he doesn’t want to face the consequences of raping my daughter,’ she says. ‘If he’d hung around, he’d know he’d left her pregnant at thirteen with a termination to go through. She says it’s ruined her life. Well, I think, don’t you, that he should suffer a little too? Saul’s life should be a little bit ruined as well, since he did this to her. You’ve done nothing to sort him out!’
I want to walk away from this conversation. It seems that the more each of u
s says, the more irreversible our recriminations become. We are sinking into a kind of verbal quicksand.
‘Saul isn’t a coward,’ I tell her. ‘He would never have run away from something he knew was wrong. But to know he’d been falsely accused, on top of all the other vindictive things that have been said about him at that school, that was hell for him. He couldn’t cope with it.’ I have another sudden, almost unbearable, pang of longing for Archie. ‘It would have been different if his dad were still alive. He’d have stood by Saul, helped him get through it. But Archie’s not here and I’ve never missed him more than I do right now.’
I wish in a way I hadn’t uttered this last sentence. I’m beginning to sound self-pitying, and as if I’m trying to divert the subject away from the central one. But I’ve said it, and it hangs in the air while the rain patters down on the mulch that’s formed on the verges. Jules is quiet for a few moments, her mouth open, as if she’s debating what to say next. At last she speaks again.
‘Actually,’ she says quietly, ‘I’m not sure Archie would have stood by Saul, because he cared about justice.’
‘Yes, he cared about justice. He would have known Saul was innocent. He would have fought to prove it. He knew his son.’
Jules frowns. ‘Oh, please, Holly! Stop putting Archie on a pedestal. He had other things on his mind when Saul was a child. Archie wasn’t there for Saul all the time any more than Pete is.’
‘What do you mean?’
She stops for a second; then, as if she’s made a decision, she goes on quietly, almost in a whisper, ‘How did Archie get to the hospital so quickly? When he had his heart attack? Who was with him? Did Philippa ever tell you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re saying. What’s Philippa got to do with it?’
‘You’re in denial,’ Jules says. ‘In denial about Archie, in denial about your son.’
I Thought I Knew You Page 17