Chasing Innocence

by Potter, John

  ‘Thank you.’ Boer placed his fingertips on the table. ‘You talked while she was at Delamere?’

  ‘Yes, but she hasn’t rung since. She was watching the driver in the services.’

  Boer slowly hoisted himself to his feet using Ferreira’s shoulder as leverage, looking down at the notepad and back at Adam. ‘Did you confirm the rest of the number plate?’

  ‘No, that was one of the things she was going to call about.’

  ‘And your wife’s vehicle details are correct?’ He slid the yellow sheet into the middle of the table and turned it around.

  Adam checked and nodded.

  Boer looked from Adam to Ferreira. ‘I’ll get a car over there.’

  The blinds and posters saluted as Boer left the room. Ferreira smiled across the table. ‘If you don’t mind, Adam, I would like you to tell me about your day. What you were both doing, where you were doing it. Your wife’s state of mind?’

  Adam fidgeted. ‘Well, it’s, well we…’

  She stopped him. ‘This is a witness statement Adam, so relax. If you were a suspect we would be in a different room, and I might not be so nice.’ She smiled again. ‘Now tell me what comes to mind. Start with realising your wife was missing and work from there.’

  So Adam did, beginning with his arriving opposite the alley, his search and going back to their apartment, skipping the detail of the calls they already listened to. He told her of talking to Sarah at Delamere and everything he could recall of their conversation, to his sitting in that room.

  Ferreira caught up with her notes and looked at him. ‘Why were you separated?’

  The word separated jarred. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Why were you not together when Sarah disappeared?’

  Adam’s pupils flared and his hands moved restlessly in his lap. He looked to his right and back at her.

  ‘Sarah had a few things to get, she left me in the restaurant. We had a meal you see, just before.’ He felt as if Ferreira’s eyes were burrowing into him, reaching inside.

  ‘Would you say Sarah was emotional when she left you?’

  ‘Upset? I find women often are.’

  Which earned him a raised eyebrow and a broad smile. ‘I would say you might be right.’ She let the silence play, rocking her pen between index finger and thumb.

  ‘It’s complicated.’ Adam said, trying to avoid this shifting around to Sarah’s state of mind.

  ‘Complicated? So Sarah might have been emotional when she saw the girl abducted?’

  This got a snapped reply, as it was meant to. ‘Look detective, yes, Sarah was emotional. Do I think it would impact her judgement, of course. But only to heighten her awareness. If she thought something happened then it did, I can’t say much more than that.’

  She leaned back and looked at him apologetically, and suddenly two truths dawned for Adam. There was a missing girl and Sarah was a suspect.

  ‘There’s a girl missing isn’t there?’

  Her gaze met his. ‘We don’t do anything without purpose Adam.’

  Which he took to mean yes. ‘Sarah would never harm a child. Trust me on that front.’

  Ferreira centred the notepad in front of her, deciding to wait on Boer’s return before pushing any further. ‘Let us step back through the detail we have. Once we’re sure I will fill out the statement. I suspect Detective Inspector Boer will want a few words when he gets back.’

  Adam leaned forward, elbows on the table, waiting for the first question. The process took another thirty minutes, in which she cross-examined every detail. At one point Detective Boer came back into the room. He placed a folder on the desk and wordlessly listened.

  SIXTEEN

  Adam read through the statement and signed, flipped the form and skimmed through the personal detail. He signed again then slid it back across the table.

  ‘We done, sir?’ Ferreira asked, knowing they were far from done.

  ‘A few questions, Helen.’ Boer pulled across the statement.

  Adam had been preparing to stand. He slumped back into his seat, watching Boer’s mouth move beneath the moustache as he silently read through the detail. Who still had moustaches like that?

  When Boer finished he handed Ferreira the statement and set his hands flat on the folder on the desk. Looking directly at Adam, his eyes gleamed bright like something new was illuminating them.

  ‘Sawacki, now that’s a name you don’t hear often.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, Detective. It’s Polish, my great-grandfather came here during the war.’

  Boer nodded acknowledgement. ‘Sarah Sawacki has a ring to it. Don’t you think?’

  Adam’s heart beat a little faster.

  Boer continued, ‘That name’s been bouncing around my head since I saw that report sheet. I got to thinking, I know that name. So I got the constable out there to tap it into the computer. Amazing things, hooked into all sorts. About ten seconds and your wife appeared on the screen.’

  Adam sat still as Boer opened the folder, sliding a printed photo of Sarah onto the table, which Adam had never seen. It was Sarah and it was not. His wife stood against a white background. It was her face but her eyes were somewhere else.

  Boer tapped the photo with a bony finger. ‘Straight away I remembered that face. It’s what struck me at the time. It’s like a face that says innocent but doesn’t fit with what she did. I remember that. So I got her case file printed as well. What do you think about that?’

  Adam felt cornered, almost frozen by the power Boer now seemed to possess. Ferreira sat back and watched.

  ‘Tell me Adam, fill in the detail. What did your wife do that stuck in my mind so? That made me wish I could shake her hand. That’s what I recall thinking, but I couldn’t shake her hand could I? Because it didn’t go well for her, did it?’

  Adam was torn between talking about Sarah’s past and what it might bring to life, and equally in need of sharing the burden.

  ‘It’s not what she did Detective, it’s why.’

  Ferriera blinked several times and Boer smiled. ‘Start with the why then, son.’

  Adam drew small circles on the table then looked up at Ferreira and then Boer. ‘Sarah had gym lessons when she was ten, private lessons in a local school at night, that lasted eighteen months. They weren’t chaperoned. When Sarah refused, her mother forced her to go, her father worked overtime to pay for them. Nobody even knows what happened, save for Sarah and the instructor. She literally can’t verbalise any of the detail, the words just won’t come out. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror. I guess you two may know?’

  Boer and Ferreira nodded slowly in unison, both sets of eyes staring back at him.

  ‘And the what?’ From Boer.

  ‘The day after our first wedding anniversary, four years ago. Sarah had found where the gym instructor lived, by now he was a pensioner. He’d been jailed for something else and released with a different name.’

  Adam paused, his mouth dry. Boer waited patiently and Ferreira laid her pen on the notepad. Adam continued.

  ‘I look back and there were small signs but nothing that hinted at what she was doing, or was planning to do. I had no clue. Having tracked this guy down she talked herself into his house. She asked him to apologise and he did. She thanked him, hugged him and buried a rusty carving knife to the hilt in his chest. We’re talking Sarah, forty-five kilos last Christmas and five foot two in bare feet. You can imagine the force it would have required.’

  Ferreira absently nodded. Boer looked like he was trying to recall some distant memory. ‘She didn’t kill him?’

  ‘No, she punctured a lung. She called the police from her car. He had a heart attack, from the shock I guess. The paramedics said another ten minutes and he’d have been dead. Sarah always maintained it was never about killing him. She just wanted him to know her pain. She kept saying that over and over.’

  Boer drummed his fingers against the table. ‘My memory isn’t what it was. It went to court, what ha
ppened?’

  ‘Could I get some water?’ Adam asked. His mouth felt like it was cotton-lined.

  Ferreira pushed her chair back. ‘I’ll get some. Detective?’

  Boer nodded.

  She returned with a brown round tray and six small plastic cups, sliding the tray onto the table. They all reached forward, picking a cup each. Adam knocked the first one back and reached for another. Boer sipped his slowly, savouring each mouthful as if it possessed a quality Adam had never discovered in water. Ferreira’s sat untouched by her notepad.

  Boer placed his cup on the table. ‘It went to court?’

  Adam turned the cup in his hands. ‘Sarah was charged with attempted murder and we went through six months of hell for all the wrong reasons. The local press created a lot of bad feeling. Sarah was never known as a victim of the old man. She had been in trouble as a teenager. She assaulted a teacher and later two boys from her school. Then she was expelled for carrying a knife in her gym bag. The same knife, as it turned out. The press focused on her, raked up her past and cast her as some psychotic harlot. She’d struggled in relationships, she’s so…so damaged about intimacy. She never stayed in any for long. The most trouble though was from the parents of children who’d been taught by the old man. When it all came out Sarah was vilified for bringing the past back into the spotlight. Can you imagine men and woman in their fifties spraying graffiti on our house and car?’

  Boer wiped a hand across his mouth. ‘Nobody knows guilt better than a parent, Adam. Discovering your child might have been a victim of brutal abuse, that you might have put your child in that situation, it creates all kinds of reactions. Many parents deny it and go to extraordinary lengths to maintain the illusion. Sarah threatened that illusion. Now tell me, she avoided prison, the judge did something?’

  Adam nodded. ‘They wanted Sarah to testify against the old man but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t. They tried hypnosis but she blacked out, they couldn’t bring her round and she spent a night in hospital. I think that really hit home. The judge ruled the case against Sarah was not in the public’s interest. The charge was dropped and she was found guilty of GBH in a closed court. She got a lifelong restraining order, three years’ probation and spent six months in Culpho Psychiatric Hospital, then another nine as an outpatient. She was really ill by that time.’

  ‘Then you both moved here?’ asked Ferreira.

  ‘I relocated just over three years ago while she was in Culpho,’ Adam replied. ‘With the local reaction the judge suggested we consider a move, he was very understanding.’

  Boer laughed, a harsh sound in the room. ‘I would say so, a guy with a carving knife stuck in his chest written off as GBH, that’s a very understanding judge.’

  Ferreira reached forward and took a sip of her water. ‘So tell me, Adam, why you think your wife is not being irrational, is not off chasing shadows.’

  ‘Sarah is not irrational, detective. Stabbing the old guy was for her, punctuation for a time in her life. She can’t escape what he made her, it is what she is. She doesn’t chase shadows though, because mentally she can’t afford to.’

  Boer studied him. To Adam it felt like radar searching for the anomaly in his character.

  ‘I’m not going to take much more of your time, Adam. So answer me one more question honestly. Do that and you might save me a lot of wasted time and perhaps even a young girl’s life.’

  Adam waited for the question and Boer asked, ‘In your opinion Sarah would be following a child she saw taken in the High Street. Rather than, say, having seen the child, taken her because the child represented something Sarah lost, that she thinks the girl can give back to her?’

  Adam was shocked that was even on the agenda. ‘Sarah and I argued before she disappeared, detective. It was because I want a family and she doesn’t. She is petrified even part of what happened to her might happen to a child of her own. That’s what I’m worried about. It’s not whether she would harm a child, it’s the opposite. She’d follow the girl to hell to protect her, with no thought for herself. She just won’t stop.’

  Which was what Boer had already concluded, having read through Sarah’s case notes and psychiatric evaluation. Although a second opinion was always useful.

  SEVENTEEN

  Having said all she could think to say, Sarah left the phone on the gatepost just as the woman had asked. Then she spent anxious minutes waiting, trying to fathom why Simon was taking so long. She debated whether to turn back, maybe he had turned around. Or something even worse. Then headlights illuminated the road and the Rover swept past. She held back from turning the ignition as long as she dare, then rolled down onto the road as the first fat drops of rain burst across her windscreen.

  The rain quickly became a downpour that offered a welcome veil of anonymity as she followed the Rover through endless weaving lanes to a busy glistening junction, the two yellow signs working their way through the succession of lights onto a dual carriageway and then a motorway. The doubting voices in Sarah’s mind now spitefully changed tack. They no longer tempted her with whispered pleas to turn around, instead they warned her away with intricate flashes and promises of what might lie ahead.

  The south fell away and the northern shires made themselves known. Towns and cities counted down. Thirty-five, fifteen and one and then they were gone. Names she knew, places she had never been. A single wearing question constantly clamouring for attention: Where? The uncertainty of not knowing was exhausting. Are we there yet? Child voices in her mind.

  The oncoming headlights endlessly flared across the rain-spotted windscreen and the rhythm of the wipers became cathartic. Each blink of heavy eyes was an excuse for them to stay closed. Twice they had, jolting open to a surge of adrenalin. She opened the window but the rain peppered the side of her face and crawled down her neck. She settled for the air-con blasting cold across her body, uncomfortable but vital. The fuel gauge was now hovering precariously above the short stretch of red. Soon the amber light would glow on the console and her journey would be thirty miles from its end.

  A glimmer of hope as the Rover indicated and they finally left the motorway, turning down a slip road to a roundabout and onto a dual carriageway, her hands tightly gripping the wheel, shoulders hunched and eyes wide. The road’s surface changed, making the percussion of the tyres almost deafening

  The gauge dipped into the red and the console flashed orange as they crested a rise and Sarah’s destination did finally open before her like a vista from science fiction. A horizon of glowing sky made dirty pink by the dense landscape of shimmering lights beneath it. A line of high towering funnels spewing thick smoke that merged pink as it reached the cloudy haze. The vista grew in her windscreen, the funnels growing to giants before the Rover finally turned off. She indulged in closed eyes as they waited at lights beneath the arches of a viaduct. It was over two hours since the farmhouse and four since she’d left Delamere.

  Her Toyota was now one car behind the Rover as they edged through late night traffic, passing bars and restaurants into outlying suburbia, lone pubs on street corners, dormant warehouses and shuttered shops covered in graffiti, a brightly lit petrol station with a high red canopy. They filtered right and down a shallow descent beneath a bridge and out the other side, into streets of houses that led to streets of houses, winding roads, speed bumps and silent schools. They came to a T-junction and Sarah’s heart tripped giddily. She watched the Rover turn left and immediately right, passing a pub on the corner. She waited as the car in front dithered turning right. She pulled out and then right, past the pub, seeing his brake lights up ahead. He signalled and turned right again and she followed. Thinking to herself, this must be it. The car ahead turned onto a drive, but already her mind was registering something wrong. Sarah passed and pulled over several houses along, immediately turning in her seat to watch for Simon’s profile.

  A woman, short and round and partially lit by a porch light, climbed out of the car. A newspaper held above
her head as she trotted to the porch. Where were the two yellow signs? They were gone, this was not a Rover and that was not Simon. She screamed loud and hard, punched the wheel and screamed again. The sound shrill and despairing, filling the car and trailing away, lost to the rain tapping chaotically on the roof.

  Something inside Sarah swung free, momentarily knocked loose. It was the same feeling as opening a newspaper and seeing a grainy picture of a young boy’s face, the same sense of disconnection she felt after the news of her mother’s unexpected death. She closed her eyes, dizzy with exhaustion and utter frustration. She had lost him.

  In some part of her mind the sound of rain reminded her of tap dancing, a long distant memory from a childhood before, thinking of home, of going home. Simon was going home. She would not be defeated, not by simply losing her prey. She forced herself to be calm. He had to be almost home, you would not weave through those annoying turns and speed bumps if you had no need to.

  She tapped her fingers in time to the rain, playing the last minutes through her mind’s eye. She had turned left and then immediately right, passing the pub and following the brake lights. Had she seen any other cars? She did not think so. So he must have turned again after the pub. She hoped.

  Sarah swung the car around and then turned left at the junction back towards the pub. There was a street opposite she had not seen before, it had to be where the Rover had gone. She turned into the road and peered into every drive, doing her best to ignore the amber light on the console. There was no sign of the Rover. Following her instincts she turned right at the end, into a road lined by grey brick terraces and then into a square. If she could not find the Rover here she would go back to the petrol station, refuel and buy a local map. She would then cross-section the whole area – even if it took the whole night.