“You heard about this little boy then?”
“Yes,” I made myself say. I was desperate he shouldn’t recognize me. I pulled my scarf up around my chin, moved my hair so that it obscured my face.
“Terrible, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is.” I pressed myself against the window, staring out as the taxi descended into the city. We were driving through deserted residential streets where the only sign of life was a mangy fox panting sickly in the shelter of an evergreen hedge.
“My wife, she says the mother’s done it. She can feel it in her bones. That’s what people are saying, you know, the mother’s done it. But you know, I don’t think she did. It’s unnatural, to do that. We had an argument about it last night, you know?”
I could sense he was trying to meet my eye in the mirror, gauge my opinion. I looked away. It was impossible to answer him.
We turned onto Cheltenham Road, abruptly in the city center now, pubs and bars all shut up on either side of us. A pair of homeless men sat on a stoop together, shrouded in blankets. They were sharing a cigarette. They had bulging red alcoholic faces and broken teeth.
“The thing is,” he said, “this is what I said to my wife . . .”
He wanted to give me his wisdom. Perhaps his wife turned away from him at this point last night, wanting to stick to her own view, perhaps he won her over with it.
“I said to her that if you’ve been called those things, accused like the mother is, you never get over it. That’s the shame of it. If she’s guilty, she deserves it; if she’s innocent, then people have done her wrong.”
We swung around the Bear Pit roundabout, the swift curve of it making my stomach quail, dirty shop windows advertising bridal wear and discount trainers blurring in front of my eyes. Yards ahead, I saw the magistrates’ court and the hospital buildings.
“I’ll get out here,” I said at a red light. “Can you stop?” Desperate to escape him, that kind man, before he saw who I was.
“Are you sure, love?” Eyes in the mirror again, a frown line above them. “Are you OK? Are you sick? You don’t look too well. Sorry, I thought you were visiting somebody, I didn’t know you were sick. Shall I take you to A & E?”
I opened the door while we were at the light, pushed some cash at him, got out. He had to drive on because the light turned green and somebody behind him landed a fist on their horn.
My scarf wound tightly up my face, my hair arranged like a pair of curtains that were mostly shut, in the plate glass outside the hospital entrance my reflection told me I looked like somebody with something to hide.
JIM
Nine o’clock Sunday morning, on Fraser’s instructions, Bennett and I were knocking at a heavy wooden door set in a stone wall on a wide sidewalk in the posh end of Sea Mills and listening to the sound of birdsong while we waited for a reply.
The woman who opened it had the same flaming red hair as Ben’s teaching assistant. She wore an extravagantly colorful kimono over a pair of pajamas and had bare legs and feet. Her toes curled in as the cold hit them. She was polite but perturbed. She was Lucas Grantham’s mother.
“He’s here but he’s still asleep,” she said, when we asked if we could have a word with him. “He got in late last night.”
“Anybody else at home?” Bennett asked her.
“No. Just us. Nobody else lives here.”
The house was unusual, built in the sixties I’d have guessed, single story, wrapped in an L-shape around a large garden. Impenetrable looking from the outside, the interior was flooded with light because almost every wall facing the garden was made of glass.
She asked us to wait in a modest-sized sitting room. There was nothing showy about this home apart from the architecture. The furnishings weren’t new and the walls were lined with shelves in cheap brown wood, which carried hundreds of books. Visible across the garden was a room at the end of the house, which looked like an artist’s studio.
In a far corner of the garden was a very large mound, covered in grass, and at one end of it was a corrugated metal door that you reached by walking down a few steps.
“Do you know what that is?” Bennett said, in a voice that told me he’d quite like to educate me.
“It’s an Anderson shelter,” I said. I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of engaging in his usual one-upmanship. I’d wanted to do this interview with Fraser, but she was still firefighting back at HQ after Emma’s confession. We’d only been out together for half an hour, but already I was tolerating Bennett at best.
When Lucas Grantham appeared, his pale skin was whiter than I remembered, freckles running over it like a nasty rash. He wore a crumpled T-shirt, which looked like he’d slept in it, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms.
His mother had dressed herself, and Bennett said, “Make us a cup of coffee, would you, love? While we have a chat with Lucas.”
I winced as I saw pride flicker in her face before she made a calculation and quelled it in the face of our authority. She left us with her son.
The three of us sat down around a low coffee table, and I pulled a photograph from my file and put it down in front of Grantham. It showed his car, crossing the suspension bridge, at 14:30 on Sunday, October 21, time and date clearly printed on the photograph.
“Fuck,” he said. “Oh fuck. I told Sal we shouldn’t have done this, I told her.”
“Done what, son?” said Bennett.
“Now you’re going to think that I’ve done something to Ben Finch. Truth is, I don’t even know him very well! I don’t. He’s a nice kid, he’s good at art, but that’s all I know!”
“Reel it back in, son,” said Bennett. “Reel it back in. Let’s start at the beginning.”
Grantham’s panic was palpable now, hands rubbing up and down along his thighs, clawing at his knees. Eyes darting from Bennett, to me, to the photograph, to the doorway where his mother might reappear.
“Who’s Sal?” I asked him.
“That’s my girlfriend.”
“The one who gave you the alibi?”
“Yeah.”
“The alibi that said that the two of you were at Sal’s flat the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-first of October?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that true?”
“No.” His face twists.
“Why did you lie, Mr. Grantham?” Bennett again.
“Because I knew what you’d think.”
“What would we think?”
“That it was me that took Ben. Of course you’d think that! I would, anybody would. That’s why Sal helped me get an alibi.”
“And did you? Did you take Ben Finch?” I took back the questioning.
“No!” He shook his head violently.
“Did you hurt Ben Finch?”
“No.”
“Did you see Ben Finch?”
“No! I swear it. I wasn’t even in the same bit of the woods as him.”
“So what were you doing?”
“I was cycling the trails at Ashton Court.”
“With anybody?”
“On my own.”
“What time did you get home?”
“About five o’clock. Sal can confirm that.”
“Sal who helped you fabricate an alibi?”
“Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Do you know we could charge both of you for this?” I was so angry I could have throttled him.
“Do you mind, Mr. Grantham,” Bennett said, standing up, moving to the window, “if we take a look in your Anderson shelter?”
“Why? Why would you do that? I was cycling, that’s the truth, it’s the truth, I swear it.’
His mother was in the doorway now, as he knew she would be, and she had a tray of mugs in her hands. It wobbled.
“Oh my God, Lucas,” she said. “What have you done?”
“Mum, I’ve not done anything. I promise.”
“God help us,” she said. “You’ve always been secretive, God knows you have, but please tell me yo
u’ve nothing to do with this.”
It wasn’t the display of loyalty you might have expected from a mother. Bennett and I exchanged a glance.
“Do you think you might be willing to come to the station with us for a bit more of a chat?” I asked Lucas.
He nodded, his pale eyes cast down, his cheeks flaming.
RACHEL
The hospital receptionist sent me to a ward in the old part of the building. I walked down a corridor that was long and square, an exercise in perspective, with a pair of double doors at the end. Rectangular strips of lighting hung from the ceiling at regular intervals, each one emitting a pale bloom of fluorescence, as if it were undernourished.
Old linoleum that was the color of ripe cherries covered the floor, and on each side there were private rooms where patients lay. Some were propped upright, reading or watching TV. Others were just contours under the sheets, still as a landscape, in rooms that seemed more dimly lit, as if they were advertising their role as a potential place of transition, a conduit between illness and health, or between life and death.
I saw Katrina emerge from a room at the far end of the corridor. She stepped out, then turned and closed the door gently behind her. She stood for a second or two, looking back into the room, her hand against the window. She wasn’t aware of me.
“Katrina,” I said. I hardly dared to look into the room, and when I did I saw that John looked barely alive. He lay on his back, his head was heavily bandaged, an oxygen mask was over his mouth, and what I could see of his face was swollen and disfigured by bruising. He was connected to tubes everywhere. Two nurses were tending to him.
“Hello,” Katrina said softly, and I was disarmed by her humility and vulnerability. Her face was taut with exhaustion and shock. She looked very, very young, just as she had at her house a few days earlier.
“They want to do some checks,” she said. “I was in the way.”
“How is he?”
“He has bleeding and swelling on the brain,” she said. “They hope the swelling will reduce. They say he’s stable.”
“How long will that take?”
“Nobody can say. And nobody can say what damage it’ll leave.”
I put my hand on the glass, palm pressed against it.
“Did you see what happened?” she asked me.
“Somebody threw a brick through the window and he ran out into the street after them. He was chasing them. I didn’t see what happened after that. I found him just around the corner. He was already hurt, he was lying on the ground.”
“The doctor said it looks as though he was kicked in the head repeatedly.” Her voice cracked. “Who would do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
We stood side by side like sentries, watching him, and it was long moments before we were interrupted by brisk footsteps. It was a nurse, and the soles of her shoes squeaked on the linoleum.
She gave some leaflets to Katrina. “I grabbed what I could,” she said. “The ward’s miles away and I got paged as soon as I got there so I hope they’re what you need.”
“Thank you,” said Katrina. She took the leaflets hastily, held them against her stomach. She was trying to hide them from me, but there was no point. I’d already seen enough. “Folic Acid,” I’d read as they were handed over, “an essential ingredient for making healthy babies.”
“You need rest,” said the nurse, “and you need to keep your strength up. Would you consider going home and getting some sleep? We don’t expect to see any change in him today.”
Katrina nodded, and it satisfied the nurse. “I’ll see you later no doubt,” she said. She disappeared the way she’d come, still squeaking.
“You’re pregnant,” I said. My words sounded soft, and distant, as if they’d drifted in from elsewhere, but she heard me.
“I didn’t want you to find out like this. I’m sorry.”
I turned away from her, and looked at John. The nurses were in conference, standing at the end of the bed, annotating his notes. He was motionless, apart from the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest under the sheet.
“Does he know?” I said.
“No.”
Now I let my forehead fall gently onto the glass of the window. I wanted the cool, hard surface to counteract a spreading numbness in my head.
“Congratulations.” I said it flatly, and I didn’t mean it to sound hurtful, though it might have.
“He hasn’t coped,” she said, indicating John. “This. Ben. Everything. It’s destroying him. He thinks this wouldn’t have happened if you and he had stayed together.”
I had to try very hard. The numbness was everywhere, threatening to make me callous. Something about her touched me though. It could have been her vulnerability, or perhaps the fact that she was carrying a new life.
“John’s a good father,” I said.
I put my hand out to touch her, but the impulse died before I made contact and my arm dropped.
I turned and walked away, and, as I did so, I noticed that my shoes weren’t squeaking on the floor, they were tapping, in a beat that was painfully slow. I counted my steps as I walked.
It was all I could do.
JIM
Addendum to DI James Clemo’s report for Dr. Francesca Manelli
Transcript recorded by Dr. Francesca Manelli
DI James Clemo and Dr. Francesca Manelli in attendance
Notes to indicate observations on DI Clemo’s state of mind or behavior, where his remarks alone do not convey this, are in italics.
FM: I’m very interested in something you wrote when you described your childhood memory.
JC: Don’t put too much store in that.
FM: Do you mind if we discuss it?
JC: If you like.
FM: You said, and I’m just going to refer to it directly here, because the way you phrased it interested me. You said, “It was telling me that people aren’t always what they seem.”
JC: Yes.
FM: So does that mean that your father wasn’t who people thought he was?
JC: He was everything they thought he was, people respected him, you should have seen the turnout at his funeral, but he had another side too. People do.
FM: Was your father violent?
JC: He was a different generation.
FM: Meaning?
JC: They did things differently then.
FM: Including hurting his children?
JC: It was just a slap here and there. Did nobody give you a slap when you were growing up?
FM: I’d rather not comment on my upbringing.
JC: I bet they did. Everybody did it, before the Internet started policing our lives. My dad was just part of his generation.
FM: What your sister saw, do you think what he was doing was legal?
JC: I don’t know.
FM: Did you ever speak to your sister about that incident?
JC: No. We weren’t close. She left home soon after that anyway.
FM: What do you think she witnessed?
JC: I’ve no idea. She was a hysterical teenage girl. She was always kicking off. You’re putting too much significance on this. I shouldn’t have written it. I only wrote it because it’s what you look for when you’re working, that person who’s not who you think they are. That was a stupid example, I’m not even sure I remember it right anyway. I was a kid.
I’m not sure I believe this, I think he’s obfuscating. I wait for him to continue, to fill in the silence.
JC: Look, I admired my dad. He had people’s respect because he’d earned it. He was one of the best detectives of his generation. Can we move on?
FM: How did he earn respect?
JC: He had a saying: “You can’t put the shit back in the donkey.”
FM: Meaning?
JC: Meaning you try not to fuck up, you don’t let things get out of your control.
FM: Was it hard to grow up in his shadow?
JC: It made me want to be a detective, and
to do well, if that’s what you mean.
FM: Was that a good thing?
JC: It was better than being a bum, or pimping, or boozing, or raping old ladies for kicks, or getting so shitfaced that you think it’s OK to smash your wife’s head against a wall until she loses her teeth as well as her self-respect. What do you mean “Was that a good thing?”
FM: I’m interested that my question is making you feel angry.
JC: Because it’s a joke! It’s actually insulting.
FM: I think it might mean that being a successful detective was a matter of honor for you?
JC: Yes! Yes, it was, it is, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
He’s displaying a level of anger that I feel is excessive, though he’s trying to disguise it.
FM: Would it be fair to say that at this point in the case you were under almost intolerable personal pressure in addition to the pressure the case was putting on you?
JC: You’re totally missing the point.
FM: What was the point then? Tell me.
JC: Benedict Finch was the fucking point. Finding Benedict Finch. Giving him safely back to his mother. That was the only thing that mattered. Why can’t you see that?
His fists are clenched, his teeth gritted. I thank him for coming and say that I’ll see him next week. I don’t wish to be cold with him but he is challenging, and I need him to understand how important it is for him to open up completely during our discussions. Our time together is running out.
RACHEL
My cabdriver on the way home didn’t want to talk any more than I did and I was grateful for that. I sat noiseless and motionless in a corner of the backseat, seeing John’s still body and his disfigured face, thinking about his new child.
The cabbie dropped me off around the front and a uniformed police officer clambered stiffly out of his squad car to ensure that I got in safely.
Inside the house, a silence deeper than any I’d ever experienced before. A void where everything that I’d ever lived for should have been.
A buzz from my phone was a pull back to reality. A text from Laura:
Love, I’m so sorry about being pissed yesterday when John called and I’m so so sorry about what I said to you. I’m not supporting you well and I’m being a shit friend, it’s just such a big thing and I’m frightened too, but I’m here now if you need me, I promise, and I hope you’re not too angry with me.
What She Knew Page 27