Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  When they had got out of the park scores of vehicles blocked the road, officials swarming amid the tents and trailers and other makeshift buildings. Alice was taken to one room and she was put in another and they were told this was a response to the trauma, that the people interviewing them were professional medics, grief counsellors, and even in the shock of those first days she knew this was bullshit, knew this was the beginning of WEBG’s stage-managing of events. The interviewer, a thin woman in her twenties, walked up and down the small room while insisting Shel remain seated. When she stopped, she made and held direct eye contact for several seconds before resuming her long stream of words. She introduced several phrases which would come up again and again over the following months. Shel found herself nodding, soon using some of those phrases herself. They were being coached, she told him, to speak about what had happened in a way that didn’t mean anything, using a banal, neutral set of terms, preparing them for the later periods when they would be officially interviewed, sessions that were recorded as part of the formal inquest. WEBG had made a concerted effort, from as soon as the news had reached them, to get around all responsibility and potential liability. The more she thought about it, the surer she was that every single action they took was calibrated towards this end. But again, she questioned herself; she asked him, at the cottage, later, when she felt up to talking about it, after those first few days back when they’d done all they could to push the events away, to be only with each other, as if nothing else mattered and might as well have been a dream, whether this was further evidence of paranoia, or did he really think the firm could be quite so brutally efficient?

  Through the immediate debriefing at the gates, the interviews and battery of physical and psychological evaluations, she and Alice were made to sign several documents which they were told at the time were simple, routine medical consents but which she later understood to include various non-disclosures limiting what they might say to an outside organisation. The firm’s efforts towards not only containing but in a sense adapting, rewriting what had happened, were extraordinary. Of course they should have read the full text of anything they signed, of course they should have said they wanted to defer it, but then he didn’t, he couldn’t understand the pressure they were under, he couldn’t have any idea how it felt those first days after the killing, sipping mint tea to the sound of the industrial generators, looking blankly ahead, trying not to think and then becoming incidentally aware of something in the room, something that reminded you of Jane, a pen, a stack of papers, a mug, and then standing and gripping the papers and realising that the heft of them shared some basic, banal relation to the resistance she’d felt holding the blue tarp as she and the rangers briefly carried the body.

  ________________________

  The thing with writing code, the thing that was so addictive about it, was that it actually built the product in real time. It was all making. It wasn’t just description: it was the thing itself. (Sometimes he added, embedded within the script, English language notes – reminders, clarifications, things that would jump out on a later reading. These were the only parts that weren’t directly influential, the only lines that didn’t build. In Shel’s terms, this would be the junk part.)

  When you wrote something, it happened. Two of his colleagues in particular were very earnest about this; he knew they were religious, and the appeal was obvious enough. He was surprised coding hadn’t drawn more of a religious following – perhaps it was considered idolatrous. He told himself he wasn’t interested in this, but he couldn’t deny the feeling of power was attractive. He had tried to tell Shel what it was like, but as usual he’d stumbled, backtracked, undermined and contradicted himself. It’s a thing, tactile, and it’s also a form of speech. There is nothing else like that, he said. There’s nothing provisional about it. You state the idea, in the defined terms, and then suddenly, if you’ve done it right, it exists. You jump directly there. It’s made. It’s incredible.

  Doll’s latest appointment with the doctor was scheduled for the coming weekend, Saturday morning, time that he could use, Shel told him, to work; there was no reason for him to come along too – these check-ups, as he knew, were routine and, besides, she’d note everything and repeat it all to him later. ‘John,’ she said, her shoes tapping on the floor, her coat pulled on, the collar raised, protecting her neck from the cold, ‘are you listening? Look, I’ve got to go, I’ll be late for work, I’ll see you in the evening.’

  It was still dark in the mornings when Shel left so they had the lights on in the front room and the kitchen and sometimes the corridor, the house like a little laboratory, harsh forensics exposing them as they rushed and prepared for the day ahead, bread lightly toasted, cups of filter coffee multiplying, laptops on the table, Doll needing changed and fed, Post-its stuck to the worktop and the fridge with incomplete lists, things that he was to remember to get from the supermarket and prompts for emails she was supposed to send and administrative deadlines she had to meet. She was sure 90 per cent of her time was occupied by admin.

  He didn’t notice at first the time that passed because the lights were set to read the changing glow and to dim in sympathy, a process that happened slowly, and often he only realised the lights were already off – that it was no longer dark; that the day had come out – when by reflex he had gone to press the switch, overriding the controls. He emptied out and rinsed the mugs, wiped the table, the counters, put everything away in what felt like an unnatural quiet after the bustle of the morning and now that Doll, for however short a period, was sleeping. He looked round the kitchen, peered out above the back garden covered in a thick layer of white. Reaching for the basin dishes he caught a colour on the edge of the garden, a brief movement he barely registered. He leaned forward, pressing his face almost up to the glass pane, but whatever he’d seen was now gone. A blackbird; a crow; a smudge of colour against the snow, fluttering and flying away.

  He packed their things, dressed Doll in her layers and strapped her onto his front, then closed and locked the door, standing on the top step with his back to the garden. It was cold. He felt his breath catch sharply in his throat; his fingers slipped and dropped the keys. He turned on the step, checking for ice, and then reached back and tried the handle again. Rather than going directly to the gate and the driveway he waited, looking out on Shel’s boot prints on the path. He could hear her again, he saw her striding out, sensed her perfume static in the freezing air. Looking across the garden, it was clear something had got in from the field. This was what he’d seen from the window. He heard the quiet creak as he trod past the powder to the harder snow, stopping when he reached the prints. Hesitantly, trying not to disturb Doll, he crouched down. The prints were large and deep and spaced closely together. They were hooved. Unlikely though it seemed, it must have been a deer, stalking and lunging at a bird. A single line led through the garden, ending at the house. He looked around for any feathers or for the light impression of the bird’s feet on the snow. He looked for further deer tracks but there weren’t any. Eventually, seeing Doll’s pursed lips and the darker red of her nose, he got up, left the prints behind, opened and locked the gate, strapped her into the safety seat in the back of the car and started the engine.

  ________________________

  She was convinced, at the funeral, the second burial, that that wasn’t the real body, that Jane remained in the park. Bryan ignored each of the many messages she sent and neither he nor Selina attended the ceremony. Her feeling was that they had left her there, that Bryan hadn’t stood guard at all but had either followed them after a short delay or exited by another route. The body by that stage was surely beyond recovery, and the story about waiting by the tent, with the gun, was ridiculous, a ruse prepared for her and for Alice, who might otherwise have refused to leave.

  Before the ceremony began a small woman walked towards Shel and in her grief-struck face she saw a sunken replica of Jane. She told Shel her daughter had never been as excited about any
thing in her life. She said Jane had been fully briefed beforehand, she knew the risks and they weren’t to blame themselves. Shel watched as they lowered the coffin, noting the strain on the bearers’ arms, trying to measure this against her own experience of the weight. Was it life-like, this weight? How much would the body have lost since? In addition to Jane’s remains there would have been the preserving fluid put inside her and the corrective work done to the face, which she was told had been reconstituted, a cosmetic team building up, based on photographs, a likeness over the soft tissue. It took Jane’s brother, Edward – a tall, thin man who walked with his sister’s stoop and who had flown out immediately news of the mauling reached the family – sixty days before permission was granted to see the body, and then only briefly. It may still have been a substitution. Jane, Shel believed, was not inside. Jane had been taken apart in the park and she was put into the ground there and she remained there. Anything inside this box was simulation.

  ________________________

  She remembered what Shel wore in the morning – wide raincoat or mauve winter coat extending as she put her down, boots rapping on the floor walking away, faint scent of sea-salt perfume floating – and linked them to her leaving. She was irritated at first when Shel came home again, arrivals and departures carried by the same means. Just the sound of the boots rapping on the wood floor made her cry. He and Shel discussed this, even talked about concealing her leaving, keeping her things by the door so the exception of her clothing didn’t mark it. But the problem, once they started, was that the project would consume them. As Doll aged, she would become aware of objects further from her and start picking up subtler clues. They wouldn’t be able to display keys or bags. They’d have to avoid certain conversations, various keywords.

  She stirred, coughed, and he snapped towards her, watching her eyes peel open and a yawn split her face. He rocked her back and forth, holding her gaze and singing to her quietly. Her breathing still sounded different, he thought, shallower. He tried to soothe her with sounds, patterns. Catherine called and told him she was visiting the next day. The garlic; he was still to come up with something. He spoke quietly, almost whispering. Catherine, on the other end, whispered too. She was talking at him. She told him Doll was already picking up on what he said; he should speak to her as often as he could. She said it comes up on you so quickly, you don’t even realise when it’s happened, already they’re talking, then they’re walking, as if one carries the other up, and then they’re gone.

  In a very simple way Doll was what the world had given her, and it was obvious, but it could surprise him too. Her little body implied everything; you could start from her, only her, and from the power of what made her construct the whole of the universe again. He could only do so much, adapting the house for her, turning her head. Watching her, recording her. If it helped her – if there was even the slightest chance that it helped her – to feed her first from his right arm then his left, and to come towards her, gathering her from a new angle every time, so that she always looked towards him differently, then he would. He would do every little thing he could, of course he would.

  It was unbearable, sometimes, and impossible to predict, these moments of collapse from somewhere inside the overriding exhaustion, sparked by something as innocuous as an unexpected glance at a bottle she fed from, or from the appearance out of place of one of her tiny socks, dropped from the laundry onto the floor. He would turn away, try to be reasonable, tell himself it goes on, it all goes on, she will grow, she will probably, in some broad sense, be okay. And then the little opening inside the single sock, the shadow, the intimation of its depth, would be enough to bring him down again, back into hopelessness and impossibility, into the certainty that whatever happened she would be hurt, she would finally be hurt, and he just wouldn’t be able to accept that. Feeling like this, in one of these spells, necessarily brief, he would look around him at the immediate space with a kind of bald and naked wonder. Over the carpet was the footprint then the whole form of every person who had stood there. Figures stretched from the prints and marks over the reflective finish on the countertops. Every word spoken billowed out as waves. He stared at it for as long, perhaps, as a single second, before a new piece of information – the brush of his knee against a chair leg, an itch on his back, a mild stirring of hunger – re-established balance and brought him back to his habitual self, a perspective from which the previous thoughts – one, two moments ago – appeared completely ludicrous.

  ________________________

  Of course I think back to what happened; I think about it all the time. The first days afterwards were some of the strangest of my life. Almost the first thing Dr Andrews did, at the gates, when we finally made it out of Westenra, was put a needle in my arm. We hadn’t even washed. Joseph must have called ahead because they were waiting for us. A team actually entered the park and escorted us from a couple of kilometres in. They had vitamin capsules and saline solution; they were immediately solicitous, the questions quickly sliding from what did we need to what did we know. People were clustered and jostling and staring at us. I didn’t know what they’d been told. I was exhausted, severely dehydrated and probably, in retrospect, would judge that my recall wasn’t unimpeachable, that my defensiveness might have coloured what I saw.

  One group was around me and another around Alice and very carefully, very effectively, like it was practised and they knew exactly what they were doing, they led us in different directions, increasingly further from each other. This was the last I saw of Alice directly for three weeks. Four days at the park gates tested and interviewed, kept in different rooms, monitored round the clock. Unable to sleep through the night, I became hysterical, demanding to see her, demanding to know what was happening, what this was all for. I thought something terrible had happened to her too. Later, when I glimpsed her through the window, walking over the track now quickly drying out in the blazing sun, the fading puddles on the red ground glimmering, flanked by staff on both sides, I felt a thrilling, anxious, unbearable expectation that Jane would appear immediately behind her.

  They told us only that everything we saw was done to protect us and that it would all be explained later. We had to submit our phones and laptops, and when I got mine back I saw the engineers had adapted the settings, that in order to make a call I had to go through an authorisation process, and when I sent a message it was delayed, everything checked over before being released. Alice and I had our respective numbers blocked so we couldn’t talk to each other. They asked me the same stupid, irrelevant questions again and again. I just wanted to be out, to be home, to have this nightmare over, and as I knew it wasn’t going to happen for at least another few days I tried to sleep as much as I could, long, disturbed drifts in the afternoon, waking with a bitter taste in the back of my throat, the feeling of a fever developing, the air-con always turned up just a little too high. Why were we being kept apart? What did they think we knew? I almost laughed when I considered, much later than I should have done, that they might actually have suspected us, not necessarily of doing something awful to Jane but maybe of being guilty of gross negligence, and that in keeping us apart they were stopping us from coordinating our stories. Maybe they had something, I thought. Maybe they were right; maybe we really were guilty. Jane, in the last week, had been increasingly withdrawn, and it was tempting to posit some kind of foreknowledge on her part, which is ridiculous. I told them it was my fault and they barely flinched, told them the only reason we stayed so long was because of me.

  I considered what kind of story they might have imagined, whether it might have passed their minds that Alice and I did it, that we tore Jane open by ourselves, with our hands. I watched them and tried to conceive of them thinking this, tried to see it in the way their eyes held us. The first reports they would have had came directly from the rangers who met us inside. How had we reacted? How had it looked to them? How had we seemed? I remembered very little, only that none of my answers were satisfact
ory, that the rangers were insistent there was something else, something we still weren’t telling them. It seemed extraordinary to me to really imagine this, to think that when they first came upon us in the park, guarding the body, they considered the possibility that Alice and I were not only responsible for this scene but that we had instantly generated a story to cover it up. It seemed almost as unlikely that we could have invented a story as that we could have murdered her. Two scientists traumatised in a micro-park, acting outside our minds, then collaborating, speaking quietly close together, compiling a long story to try to fool the authorities and cover up what we’d done.

  What exactly had we heard? What did we see? What did we think it was, coming towards us, that last week in the park? All our data was copied; all of it was taken from us. All records of the prints and the animals’ shrieking was removed, forensics, I imagined, cross-referencing everything, putting the data against the evidence taken from what wasn’t a crime scene, because there was no explicit human error, no culpability other than what I’d attributed to myself in my myopia, but was still a sealed site marking where someone had died. I kept expecting the air transport to arrive. Whenever I heard a particularly heavy engine I’d look out, relieved but also confused. Where were they? What had they done with Jane’s body? They waved my questions away, told me not to worry, told me it was all being taken care of, that an expert team was going through everything. Did that mean she was already out? I said. Then where is her body? Where is Bryan? They changed topic; there was another test that couldn’t wait; something else had come up.