I Thought I Knew You

by Penny Hancock

  As she lay in bed with these thoughts racing round her head, Rowan continued to snore quietly beside her. Why had he come home so late? And where had he been, instead of coming straight back from the pub? She knew he’d gone for a drink. To drown his sorrows after being interviewed by the police again the previous afternoon. And yet he had an air about him when he’d come into the bedroom. Removed. She’d seen him like this before, after he’d had a meltdown. It made her recoil from him. She couldn’t confront him when he was like this. She knew from experience he would either clam up or become defensive and angry.

  But she needed to talk to him. She wanted to hear more about what the police had asked him yesterday. She couldn’t believe they kept carting him off to the police station ‘to help with their enquiries’ as if he was their main suspect in Saul’s disappearance. And yet she could believe it. She didn’t want to give shape to her own doubts about him. It would make living with him impossible. She had to keep her faith in him. If necessary, she thought, she could help cover for him.

  Jules didn’t sleep. She stayed awake all night, images and thoughts trooping relentlessly through her mind. The fabric she’d found the day before in the Peacocks bag. The petrol receipt from Downham Market. The mud on the Timberland boots . . . Rowan didn’t know his own strength. He might have meant to teach Saul a lesson and gone too far.

  And then her thoughts did take the darker turn she’d tried to avoid. It would be easy to hide a body up in the remote parts of the Fens, where there were no houses or villages or people for miles. Rowan knew the roads out there, the long strips of tarmac that swept across miles of empty arable farmland between banks and ditches. There were secluded droves and wide expanses of water, the Ouse Washes, the Hundred Foot Drain and the Old Bedford River. People thought of London, of the city, as the hotbed of crime, but the Fens had an effect on people’s minds. The flatness, the openness that brought you face to face with yourself – it drove people crazy.

  Jules had wanted Holly to suffer for what Saul had put them through, it was true. She had wanted her to share Saffie’s pain. Had wanted Holly to admit her son’s culpability, thereby taking on some of the burden of Saffie’s trauma. But Jules hadn’t wanted her to pay as dearly as this. She didn’t want things to have gone this far. Didn’t want Rowan to have done to Saul what she was increasingly afraid he had done.

  And if after all Saul was innocent . . .

  Please, Jules thought.

  Please don’t let Rowan have done what I’m afraid to think he’s done.

  Please don’t let Saul be dead.

  15

  HOLLY

  Fatima stands in front of me, in the kitchen doorway. I walk backwards, and rest on one of the kitchen stools.

  ‘They’ve found remains,’ she says without bothering to sit down.

  Remains. The stupid images that flash through my mind are of Roman things, broken pots and fragments of mosaics from ancient times.

  ‘Somewhere out near the Ouse Washes in the Fens. The media have got wind of it, so we had to inform you before you heard anything. The forensics team are doing all they can. When they have more information, they will be in touch.’

  ‘You don’t know any more?’ The words come from far away, as if someone else has spoken them. As though they came from somebody with a mouth full of heavy alluvium mud. As though they came from a person who was already dead. ‘You don’t know anything else?’ I try again.

  ‘Initial investigations suggest they belong to a young adult male and have been there for several days.’ I can barely breathe. ‘I’m sorry, Holly. I’m so sorry, but I have to tell you that, due to the condition of what they’ve found, it’s going to be a bit tricky to extract them.’

  ‘I can’t see him?’

  ‘Not yet. There’s still some work to do before they can remove what they’ve found intact.’

  Fatima begins to recede. A rush of heat sweeps through me and stars begin to swirl about my head.

  ‘I need to take some more DNA, so if you could find something of Saul’s, a hairbrush, toothbrush, anything really . . . I’m afraid that’s all we can tell you at the moment.’ Her words are thick, muffled. She’s echoing, then fading into the distance. The last thing I hear before I pass out is her kindly voice saying, ‘Now, I’m going to stay with you. Remind me where you keep your tea . . .’

  *

  Pete’s sitting next to me. I’m lying on the sofa in the sitting room. I don’t know when he came in or how he knew.

  There’s a mist outside the window behind him. I cannot even see as far as the green. I stare at him. At his rounded face with its plump, cheerful cheeks and his kind, sad eyes.

  I don’t want to wake up. I don’t remember why, yet. I just know I want to stay asleep because something has happened.

  He puts his hand on my arm. ‘You’re to stay where you are,’ he says. ‘I’ll get you some tea, or would you prefer something stronger?’

  I don’t want anything; I don’t want Pete to touch me or to speak. This feeling is familiar. The world has taken on a new and distorted shape. The last time I was here was when I heard that Archie had had a heart attack and hadn’t survived. That was how they put it, when they rang me from the hospital and told me he’d collapsed, halfway across Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the early evening, near the tennis courts. Taken to the hospital with a cardiac arrest. But that he ‘hadn’t survived’.

  They phoned my mobile to tell me. I left Saul with Jules and made my way to University College Hospital. I blocked out the words ‘hadn’t survived’. Completely erased them from what I’d heard. Told myself people usually recovered from heart attacks.

  It was only when I saw him I knew.

  He was thirty-five years old.

  Saul was just ten.

  ‘They haven’t made a definitive identification,’ Pete says now.

  He’s trying to help, I know, but it’s pointless. Saul went missing on Monday; the body has been there for a few days. They know it’s a young adult male. He’s been out in the Fens for four days.

  I can work out the odds.

  I shut my eyes.

  I try not to be here anymore.

  *

  The mist has gone and a weak sun is playing through the bare branches of the trees around the green, oddly giving them a rose-gold glow. I throw back the covers. I can’t sit here all day like an invalid. As I lift myself, a searing pain shoots through my lower back and I see Rowan shoving me against the cooker, then my stumbling and falling in the kitchen.

  ‘I need some air,’ I tell Pete. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

  He asks if I’d like him to come, but I say I need to be alone.

  I walk in a daze, ignoring the pain. Past the Baptist Chapel, the church and the Salvation Army hall. The Fens are known as England’s holy land for a reason. If there’s one thing this land isn’t short of, it’s places to worship. Places to seek forgiveness from the opium-taking and the drinking and the rape and the deviance.

  I walk down the road towards the station. The polytunnels in the fields are empty, their frames blackened like the giant, burnt-out carcasses of animals. The polythene that provides protective covering for soft fruits in the summer is now rolled up into lumpen bundles that sag like body bags.

  Leaving the buildings behind, I take the straight road towards the river, envisaging, out there in the remote farm buildings, migrant workers doing gruelling hours peeling vegetables for below the minimum wage. Hidden enclaves of modern-day slavery.

  Across the level crossing, the woodland path is sludgy with leaves that have turned into thick blackened mulch since I last walked this way. The path emerges in the same exposed Fenland landscape I walked through the day after Saul went missing. Now winter is moving in. White horizon, steel-grey clouds, white light spilling through. Black crows scattered across dark soil. I take the raised path along the river. I walk north-west, heading into the path of the sinking sun. No trees. Flat all the way to Ely, all the way to the Ous
e Washes. Far away, vast acres of black solar panels gleam darkly up at the sky.

  I keep on walking towards my boy. The words echo in my ears: Remains . . . several days . . . tricky to extract them . . .

  How long?

  How can a body become that unrecognizable in under a week? Has he been devoured by eels? Rats? Has his body rotted away in the water? Or is it worse than that? Was he cut up? Mutilated? Burned? I wish I could stop the thoughts.

  I don’t know what I’m doing, but I have to keep walking. I have to move. I try not to think about Rowan bearing down on me. I don’t want to give his violence headroom. But I cannot help thinking how Saffie’s allegation has unleashed some previously dormant dark energy: blame and counter-blame, hatred and contempt. It has bubbled up and washed over all of us in a dirty, sullying tide. And buried my beautiful boy.

  After I’ve been walking for an hour or so, I come upon a traveller settlement. A few women move about pulling washing off lines. Fairground travellers? The ones who were on the green the morning Saul went off? Children sit on the steps of trailers; a couple of men fiddle with a waltzer car. One of them sits on the steps to a trailer, smoking.

  That’s when I see him.

  He’s facing away from me, leaning over a water butt, doing something, his shirt ridden up, a few centimetres of bright white spine showing. It’s his skinny frame, the way his trousers won’t stay round his waist but slip right down, revealing the tops of his boxers. I begin to run. He’s alive. He’s there. I run along the bank, and then down over tussocks of grass, almost losing my balance, falling over myself to reach him.

  As I run, the clouds part and the landscape takes on colour. The black soil turns purple; the pewter grasses turn green. Copper light steals across the countryside and creeps towards the settlement.

  He has to know I want him back, that I never believed he raped Saffie. That he belongs to me. That Saffie simply panicked, and that’s why she lied. Tears spring to my eyes as I run. I love him. I never doubted him. I reach a ditch dividing this side of the fen from the settlement and jump over. I ignore the searing pain in my lower back and run towards him. A woman steps into my path.

  ‘Yes? What can I do for you?’ She bars my way, making it clear she doesn’t want me here. I recognize her. She’s the woman at the hoopla stall, the one I asked about Saul the first night he didn’t come home.

  ‘My son,’ I gasp, pointing beyond her.

  ‘Your son?’

  She blocks my view. She’s wearing a yellow fleece and lilac tracksuit bottoms. I can smell smoke on her breath.

  ‘There . . .’ I gesture over towards the boy and she turns her head, then looks back at me.

  ‘Your son?’ the woman repeats again.

  ‘That’s him, there. Look.’

  I go to move past her, but another woman draws up alongside her, blocking my path, and I dive to the side.

  ‘Saul!’

  The boy stands up straight. He’s stockily built. Shorter than Saul.

  He turns.

  ‘Oh . . .’

  It’s not him.

  Of course it’s not him.

  ‘What about your son?’ the second woman says. She’s thinner, with an irregular face, one eye set a little higher than the other above a narrow nose, a kinder expression than the hoopla woman.

  ‘He’s gone missing,’ I half sob. ‘I thought that was him.’

  ‘He’s the one the cops were asking us about the other day?’ the thin woman says. ‘They came asking if we’d seen him. We hadn’t. So he’s still missing. How old is he again?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Grown up, then,’ the first woman says.

  ‘Yes. No. I suppose you could say that. He’s still a child to me. He went off and didn’t come home. I thought he might have decided to walk up the river. Come into the Fens. Likes to be alone. He’s tall, six foot, thin . . . I thought . . . I thought that was him. But his hair is, well, it’s . . . longer, darker.’

  She goes to speak to a group of women on the far side of the encampment. I see them looking over towards me, talking to each other and then calling a man over to them, a big, muscular man in a white T-shirt with his tattooed arms bare despite the cold.

  ‘We haven’t seen him,’ she says, coming towards me again. ‘We’ll keep an eye out. Won’t we, Sandy? Long hair, you say? Thin? Taller than Charlie. If we see him, we’ll let you know. Give us your number. We’ll call you if he comes by.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

  ‘He’s your child,’ she says. ‘Nothing worse than something happening to your own child.’

  I look at her for a few minutes, grateful for her sympathy. Should I tell her that I’m clutching at straws? That the police have a body? I can’t say the words. I can’t bear to see the anguish she, too, would feel on my behalf if she knew.

  When I’ve left the travellers, I turn back. I’m not really going to walk as far as the Ouse Washes. I climb a stile, jump down on the other side. You can see the pumping station from here, a tall, imposing, windowless building silhouetted against the sky. And beyond it lies the lock. When I get back to the river, I’ll take the metal footbridge over the lock and head home along the road that cuts between the black fields of silty soil and passes Jules’s house and the railway line. I have to know now. I have to hear what they have discovered. I would rather confront it sooner than later. I have to get home.

  Through the swing gate, my feet clanking on the metal steps, I reach the bridge over the lock, the railing icy against my palm. Then up onto the second bridge, over the sluice. Here I stop, suddenly exhausted, and gaze down into the water. Perhaps I can’t face going home after all. The water falls in white sheets from the upper level into amber river water below. It smells very rich in the evening air, of mud and grass and fish, with a rotten, sludgy undertone. I don’t know how long I stay there, unable to move, but I shut my eyes and let the last of the sun’s rays fall against my eyelids, and when I open them again, it’s almost dark.

  I change my mind once more. I have to get home now. I want to be unconscious. Under the covers. To black everything out. Why did I think I’d feel better out here? There’s nowhere I will feel better. This feeling will accompany me wherever I go. Forever.

  It’s only a few metres to the other side of the bridge, but the distance seems insurmountable to me.

  I’m still there, leaning on the railings, when there’s the bang of iron and I feel vibrations under my feet and realize someone is coming up the steps of the bridge on the other side. A head appears in a purple bobble hat, and then I see that it’s Saffie, stomping towards me.

  Something bursts, a small explosion inside me. She looks so normal, in her tight, high-waisted jeans, bomber jacket and trainers. So alive, with her dark eye make-up and her pretty blonde hair poking out from under her jaunty woollen hat. So unaffected by what’s happened to Saul. She comes closer. This is the girl who is responsible, through her allegation, for the terrible thing that has happened to my son. She’s coming towards me, and the river is tumbling deeply and hungrily and lethally beneath me. And there is no one else for miles around.

  16

  JULES

  Jules got up early. The appointment with Donna Browne was later that day. At least that was something to be thankful for. Nevertheless, she felt unrested and nervy.

  ‘Saff, make sure you come straight back from school. We’re seeing Donna at five fifteen.’

  Saffie nodded silently as she stuffed her school bag with books, water bottle, mobile. The things that made her look as if she was going for a three-day hike rather than a few hours’ lessons.

  Jules watched her daughter walk down the drive. It tore at her heart and she felt dread in the pit of her stomach at all Saffie was going to have to go through that afternoon. Repeating her ordeal to Donna. And the other doctor Donna said she’d have to call in. Then the pill-taking. Then the bleeding it would bring on.

  *

  Tess rang to say they
had raised more than they expected for the school at the auction. ‘Over two thousand quid,’ she said.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘It is great, isn’t it?’

  It should be a good feeling. But Jules didn’t feel good. Not with the abortion looming. Not after seeing Holly at the Auction of Promises. Not after Rowan coming in so late with that air about him as if he’d done something he regretted.

  To stave off her rising anxiety, Jules drove to the country park for a run before work. The fear about what Rowan had done came and went as she pounded along the tracks between trees whose few remaining leaves had turned yellow, and trembled, ready to fall and join others in a mulch on the paths. Rowan, Jules thought, could not possibly have bundled Saul into his car without being spotted by one of the school kids who were waiting for the bus on the green. Then anxiety sliced in again. There were ways and means. There had been the fair that morning, blocking the edges of the green from view. The police had analysed CCTV footage and had seen the car leaving the village and heading towards Ely. Rowan had corroborated this, saying he had gone to Ely to buy the things for the meal that evening. But why had he done that, when he’d never done it before? And why had he not mentioned going to Downham Market? The thought made her feel nauseous. Rowan might have got Saul to talk to him, got him into the car somehow. Trusted that the fairground machinery and lorries would obscure them from view.

  As Jules ran, she told herself this idea was absurd. Rowan was her loving husband. He had occasionally got into brawls when drunk, but he would never do the kind of thing she was imagining. And yet her thoughts refused to be silenced. The landscape around her took on a new aspect of menace. The natural world wasn’t natural out here at all; it was a man-made construct. The corrugated sides of the windowless storage units that backed onto the country park. The lake that was really just a great big, water-filled gravel pit. The motorway just a few metres away, with its relentless roar of traffic, cars shooting past, oblivious to what went on beyond. And the Fens, flat lands that should be under water, drained, over-cultivated, ploughed and furrowed to bits. The natural order had been interfered with. Now everywhere seemed like a place where a murderer might hide a body.