“Yeah. Why do you ask?”
He went silent, small shake of his head. He looked nervous. He had his phone in his hand and he started to polish the screen with his sleeve. I felt like I should give him some sort of advice, but it was difficult to think what to say.
“It’s not a normal life this, having this job. You’re outside society.”
I wasn’t saying it well. I wanted him to understand what I meant, but he wasn’t looking at me, and the motion of his hand polishing the phone continued, around and around.
“Some cases make you grow up fast.” As soon as I said it, I thought it sounded patronizing, but he didn’t seem to care.
“Have you ever worked on something that’s remained unsolved?” he asked me.
“This case will be solved,” I said. “We’re close now. I swear it.”
“I know,” he said. “I just wondered.”
I thought about it. There were always things that you never got to the bottom of in cases. A dog walker who was never identified, a random white car supposed to have been at a scene, which nobody ever confessed to driving past. That was normal, though sometimes it drove police officers mad, seeking answers that they never got. They couldn’t let it go. I’d seen that happen once or twice, but I’d never worked on anything where we hadn’t got our perpetrator, and I didn’t want this to be the one. Not with a young boy’s life in the balance. Not with the worst of crimes a possibility.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Do you think she’ll cough?” Woodley asked.
“A woman like Nicola Forbes won’t hand us a confession on a plate. We’ve got our work cut out.”
We moved on cautiously through the mist and found the cottage half a mile farther along the lane. Above us you could sense the weight of huge trees looming, although only their lower branches were visible as suggestions of their might.
We parked beside a red Volkswagen Golf in front of a wooden fence that was warped and green-gray with lichen. I knew from the car’s registration that it belonged to Nicky Forbes.
We approached the cottage through a white wooden gate, and up a short garden path paved in uneven stone. Wet leaves were banked against the threshold and the path was lined with rosebushes, pruned back to their bare bones. The cottage was pretty, cream painted with a silvery thatched roof and small windows set into thick walls. It wasn’t a large place. I guessed it had maybe three bedrooms, one bathroom. Some of the curtains were drawn upstairs, but through a window beside the door I could see into a compact sitting room. The furnishings were plain and tidy. There were books lining the walls and an open fireplace. Yesterday’s papers were spread on the coffee table.
As far as I could see, there were no outbuildings at all, but with the mist reducing visibility severely, it was hard to tell.
I pulled hard on the doorbell and we heard it clanging inside.
RACHEL
Miss May peered out of the car window at a house with a glossy black door.
“This is it. Perfect. Thank you,” she said.
“Thank you for helping us with our inquiries,” Bennett said.
“It was the least I could do.”
She got out, taking a moment to straighten her coat. Her bag was still on the seat beside me. I could see her keys, but before I could move she leaned down and peered into the back of the car.
“If there’s anything I can do for you. Truly. Please let me know.”
“Thank you,” I said.
A car had pulled up behind ours, and the driver sounded the horn sharply, wanting us to move on.
“They’d better mind their manners,” said DI Bennett. I could see his narrowed eyes in the rearview mirror, watching the car behind.
I had one chance. Miss May reached for her bag but before she could get to it I picked it up.
“Here you go,” I said. I held it out to her, but as I did so I let it tilt and then fall, so that its contents tipped out onto my lap, and down into the footwells.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I said.
I leaned down and scooped up her belongings from the dark recesses, blocking her view. I stuffed most of them back into her bag. Half-eaten granola bar, purse, phone, charger, tissues, packet of painkillers, document wallet.
The keys I kept for myself. I slid them between the seat and my thigh.
Behind us, the car horn sounded again.
“Come on, ladies,” said DI Bennett.
I handed the bag back to her, careful to hold it by the top so that it didn’t gape.
“It’s all there,” I said.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
The car behind flashed its headlights.
“All there,” I said. “Bye.”
“Take care,” she said, and shut the car door.
DI Bennett accelerated away. In the side mirror, I could see her standing on the side of the road.
Her keys were digging into the underside of my thigh and I moved them into my coat pocket, careful not to let them make a sound.
It was a ten-minute drive from Clifton Village to my house. We drove along the edge of the Downs, flat, muddy, and green, dog walkers and joggers plowing around its perimeters, trees dotted across the parkland like abandoned livestock, water tower looming.
I listened closely to the police radio. I was terrified that Miss May would contact the police as soon as she tried to get into her house and realized the keys weren’t in her bag. She’d ask for DI Bennett to drive straight back there. I wished I’d taken her phone too.
We skirted around the edge of suburbia, 1930s row houses mostly, John and Katrina’s house just around the corner. A few minutes to my place. The radio was spitting out little bits of noise. Nothing about the keys so far, but panic was making me swallow, my mouth awash with warm saliva, which had a bitter, tannic edge from the police station tea.
“DI Bennett,” I said.
“What’s up, love?”
“It’s what Miss May said, about Ben’s nunny.”
“What did she say?” His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.
“Well, it’s just that she wouldn’t know about his nunny.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you.”
“He’s embarrassed about his nunny, that’s the thing. It’s an old crib blanket, a ragged thing. He’s had it since he was a baby. He uses it to get to sleep. He would never have told her about it.”
Silence, as he negotiated a roundabout. “Couldn’t he have told her about it?” he asked. Victorian terraces now, narrow streets climbing up and down hillsides.
I leaned forward, between the front seats. “He would never tell her, that’s what I’m telling you.”
The radio sputtered again and I raised my voice to drown it out. DI Bennett parked on my street, a few doors away from my house, and turned to face me.
“Right,” he said, stringing out the word, skepticism the subtext. “Are you sure about that?”
“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do then.” His careful tone of voice made me think he wasn’t taking me seriously, that he was just humoring me. “I’ll pass that information on to the boss. Would you like me to do that?”
“Could we call it in now? I think it’s important.”
“I’m heading straight back now and I’ll let them know and that’s a promise.”
“DI Bennett, I don’t think you understand . . .”
“I’ve promised, haven’t I? Can’t do more than that. They’ll ring you if they think there’s something in it. You’d better get out, love. Don’t worry about that lot. Come on. I mean it.”
A few journalists were in front of the house, watching us. He wound down the window. “Clear off out of her way,” he shouted. “Go on. Get away.”
Another blast from the radio and I knew I had to go, or the news about the keys would surely come through.
I climbed out of the car, my head down and my hood up, and ran for it.
&nbs
p; Inside the house I stood there with the keys in my hand, and tried to think what to do. Skittle, still in his cast, wove clumsily between my legs, his tail wagging, wanting affection.
I called Kenneth Steele House and yet again I asked to be put through to Fraser, but I was told she was busy and would call me back. They assured me that they understood how urgent my request to speak to Fraser was, and that they’d pass my message on and somebody would get back to me.
Nicky answered her phone, listened in silence as I blurted the whole story out: Lucas Grantham’s arrest, Miss May in the car on the way back home, everything. “Tell the police again,” she said when I’d finished. “Call them back. Make them listen.”
In the background I heard the distinctive sound of the doorbell at the cottage.
“Where are you, Nicky? I thought you were at home.”
“I’ve got to get the door. Sorry. I’ll call you back.”
“Don’t go.”
“OK, hold on, let me just see who it is. I’ll get rid of them.”
I heard the sound of her footsteps, the click of a door opening, a male voice, then Nicky was back on the line, saying: “I’m so sorry, I really have to go,” and it went dead.
JIM
Nicky Forbes was on the phone when she opened the door. Her expression told me that we were the last people she expected to see.
She was dressed already but her face was void of makeup and she wore her paleness like a mask. She looked like she was sucking a lemon as she led us into the small kitchen and gestured to us to join her at a small table that was set against the wall.
A smoking cigarette lay in a circular ceramic ashtray that had fag ends crushed into its base. The table and chairs were a shiny orange pine, dented in places. The floor was tiled with small white squares grouted in black and the cabinets were white with a wood trim around the edge.
The room was a throwback to the 1980s, nothing had been updated for years. It wasn’t what I expected from Nicky Forbes, because I’d seen her blog, the pictures of her cooking on her AGA in a perfectly equipped and decorated modern kitchen.
The kettle had just boiled, but she didn’t offer us a drink.
“Are you a smoker, DI Clemo?” she asked, and she held out the cigarette packet that was on the table.
“No, thank you,” I said. Woodley shook his head too when she aimed the packet at him.
She dropped it back onto the table, where it landed with a slap, and retrieved her half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray.
“I gave this up years ago,” she said. “When I got pregnant with my first daughter.”
She sucked smoke in deeply, her eyes on mine, her gaze direct and challenging.
“I’m wondering why you’re here,” she said, exhaling the smoke slowly so that it billowed between us, “when my sister is in Bristol frantically trying to get hold of somebody who’ll listen to her when she tells them that she has evidence that Ben’s alive? I’m also wondering why you’re here when you have a suspect in custody? Ben’s teaching assistant? Is that right? Shouldn’t you be trying to gather some evidence against him? Maybe?”
She looked from one of us to the other, and when neither of us replied, she slammed the side of her hand on the table, a show of temper that made Woodley jump, but not me.
“What is the matter with you people?”
Her face was angry red and her manner was that of a teacher demanding an answer. It was all about control with her, I thought. This was an attempt at a display of control from somebody who had lost it. But I wasn’t worried about cracking her; I knew I was a good interviewer, very good.
When I was in my first couple of years of training I spent hours with my dad, honing my interrogation skills, role-playing until he’d caught me out with every dirty trick in the book, and then taught me how to recognize those tricks and work with them.
“You’ll hear excuses,” Dad said to me one night. I was visiting the family home and it was after dinner. Mum was washing up and Dad and I were talking in his study. The window was wide open and outside the late summer heat had just folded itself away, so we were sitting in the early gloom of a cool, velvety night. “Blokes will say that you aren’t a magician,” Dad went on, “that you can only do what you do. That’s bullshit. It’s whining. It’s for people who aren’t good enough. If you’re worth anything, you can get the truth out of anyone. But you’ve got to be good.”
Two cut-glass tumblers sat squat on the table between us, two whiskeys. My dad shut the window and switched on his desk lamp. The shade glowed dark emerald and dropped a rectangle of light onto the surface of his desk.
He sat back down. “Again,” he said.
In the kitchen of Nicky Forbes’s cottage I took a chair and pulled it close to her, so we were practically knee to knee.
RACHEL
So here’s the thing.
What do you do when it’s just you? When you know something and nobody will listen? When you want to do something, but you don’t know how dangerous it is, or how much you will be risking? When you have only minutes to decide?
I was used to making decisions about my life that were based on my complicated relationships with others.
Do I need to name them? Most of us have them. They’re generic. They could include your resentment of parents, or a sibling, or your desire to please your family, or a husband, or your fear of losing him. They could include your ambition, or your perception of what parenthood should be. I could go on.
But, at nine a.m. on Monday, October 29, all those things fell away. There was just me, and I had a choice. I could believe what was written about me, that I was worse than useless, incapable of a sensible or moral decision, and I could obey DCI Fraser’s request, and wait quietly at home for news.
Or I could act. I could take the certainty I felt and do something. On my own. Again. Because I was sure.
Don’t think that self-doubt didn’t course through my veins and threaten to weaken me. Don’t think that I didn’t consider the possible risks of acting alone. The risk for Ben, and for myself.
I fought both those things. I fought them because I knew I had to rely, purely and simply, on my instinct as a mother.
“Be strong,” Ruth had said. “You’re a mother. You must be strong.”
And that was enough for me. I understood in that moment, on that morning, that being a mother had given Ruth a single silken strand, strong as a spider’s web, which had tethered her to her life. It was the string that had led her, time and time again, out of the enveloping and dangerous depths of the labyrinth that was her depression. It had prevented her from slipping fatally and completely away into the dark seductive folds of melancholia, and stopped her sinking into the drowsy escape of a terminal pill overdose, or seeking a tumbling, chaotic fall from a height and its inevitable brutal, shattering end below.
It hadn’t stopped my own mother. She’d been overwhelmed by the love she felt, by the fear it made her feel. Her emotions had drowned her sanity; such was their power.
But I was different.
I knew my son was alive, and I knew where he was.
So you might wonder what I did.
I opened a drawer in my kitchen and looked over the contents. I chose a vegetable knife. Short and sharp, easy to conceal. I put it into one of the deep pockets of my coat, blade down, beside my phone. I put the keys I’d taken into the other. Then I left my home through the studio at the back, unseen by anybody, and I began to run.
JIM
Nicky Forbes was disturbed by my proximity. She shifted, tucking her legs under the table, away from me. Her body language was pure avoidance, but I was OK with that. I’d learned to be patient.
Woodley sat on the other side of her, keeping more distance, his posture relaxed. Good lad, I thought, he’d been listening.
We’d planned to use the Reid technique in the interview. It’s not very nice, but it’s very effective. It’s a well-known technique that makes use of a good-cop, bad-cop routine, so Wo
odley had a role to play. As well as being my foil, he would be my eyes. He would watch her for body language that would betray her.
Nicky Forbes folded her arms over her chest.
“Are you finished?” I said.
She flinched slightly, a small jerk of her head away from her hand, which held her cigarette just in front of her mouth, the smoke curling between us.
“The thing is,” I said, “here’s how I see it.” I kept my voice gentle, but persistent, I wanted her to listen to every word I said.
“I think what you went through as a child was a terrible thing. I think that when you lost your brother, when you lost Charlie, you never really recovered. Did you? Then you had to bring up Rachel and she was ungrateful, wasn’t she? She never knew how much you had to suffer, or thought about how hard it was for you to keep the secret about your parents and about Charlie.”
She took a deep pull on her cigarette, her eyes on mine. I went on.
“So when Rachel had Ben, that was difficult for you, wasn’t it? You had four daughters, but that’s not the same as having a son, is it? She didn’t know how lucky she was, because for you, having a son would be like having Charlie back.
“So I think you didn’t have a choice. I think you thought that Rachel was bad for Ben. You reckoned that she couldn’t look after him as well as you. She’s divorced, after all, bearing a grudge against her husband and his new wife. That’s not a happy home. And Ben’s been unhappy in the past year; we know that from his teacher. That must have pained you. In fact I think it was really hard for you to bear.”
She gave a small, brusque shake of her head, then she ground the cigarette out in the ashtray, crossed her arms.
“Four children is a lot, and all girls too. Were you hoping for a son, Nicky? Is that why you wanted to try for another baby this year? Your husband told me. Has it been all about replacing Charlie?”
Her eyes began to glisten with tears, but she didn’t move a muscle. I didn’t draw breath. You mustn’t, because if you do it gives them a chance to deny things, and that can make them stronger, just the act of saying it. You have to carry them on your narrative until they finish it for you, and hand you the ending you’re waiting for.
What She Knew Page 31