Lasting Damage

by Sophie Hannah

  Sam was torn. Part of him would have liked to take Grint to one side and ask him what was happening on the forensic front, what Selina Gane had said when Grint had interviewed her, as Sam assumed he must have. He’d have liked to know if the former owners of the house, Mr and Mrs Beater, had identified the stain on the carpet as being the same one made by their Christmas tree, or if Grint was content to take Lorraine Turner’s word for it. Sam wouldn’t have been; a couple of times he’d opened his mouth to tell Grint as much, then changed his mind. Not his patch, not his problem.

  It was time to extricate himself and return to his own far duller caseload. The more he discussed 11 Bentley Grove’s disappearing dead woman with Grint, the deeper he’d be drawn in. Interviewing Jackie Napier had been a step too far; he should have refused. Why didn’t you, then? his wife Kate would say – the most pointless question ever to be formulated, and one Kate asked regularly.

  I didn’t because I didn’t.

  As he followed Grint and Jackie up a narrow flight of grey stairs, Sam admitted to himself that he had no choice but to put Grint in touch with Simon, who, if nothing else, would be able to confirm that Connie had told the truth about the conversations she’d had with him. Simon would have formed an impression of her character, positive or negative. He wouldn’t be afraid to take a position, or several: reliable or dishonest, crazy or sane, victim or victim-maker. Good or evil. Simon dealt in larger concepts than Sam felt comfortable with, and trusted his own judgement; he was the help Grint needed. Someone who didn’t constantly equivocate. It often seemed to Sam that, while most people’s minds were like manifestos, foregrounding their beliefs and commitments, his own was more of a suggestion box, with every side of every argument stuffed into it, all clamouring for attention, each demanding equal consideration; Sam’s only role was to sort through the competing claims as impartially as possible. Maybe that was why he felt tired nearly all the time.

  He’d have to contact Simon in Spain and warn him that Grint would be in touch; it was only fair. Great. Offhand, Sam couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less than interrupt a honeymoon, especially not one that belonged to Charlie Zailer. Charlie wasn’t known for her forgiving nature.

  Sam got a shock when Grint opened the interview room door and he saw the Bowskills. Both seemed out of breath. Connie looked as if she’d been crying non-stop for the whole time she’d been alone with her husband. There were grey streaks on her trousers that hadn’t been there before. What the hell had happened? An unpleasant, sour smell hung in the air, one Sam could neither describe to himself, nor match to anything he’d smelled before.

  ‘Sam?’ Connie’s voice was thick. Her eyes were on Jackie Napier, but there was nothing to suggest she recognised her. ‘What’s going on? Is this the woman who saw what I saw?’

  If she’s lying, Sam thought, then by now the lie is as necessary for her survival as her heart and lungs are; she’ll cling to it no matter what, because she can’t envisage a life without it. Most of the liars Sam’s work brought him into contact with favoured the disposable variety – they’d put a story together and trot it out in the hope that it might net them a lighter sentence, but they knew they were talking rubbish; that was how they defined it to themselves. They weren’t emotionally attached to their invented scenarios; when you pointed out to them that you could prove they weren’t where they said they were at a particular time, they normally shrugged and said, ‘Worth a try, wasn’t it?’

  Sam steeled himself for confrontation. He sensed a powerful latent aggression in Jackie Napier, always on the lookout for a legitimate outlet. That she would lay into Connie Bowskill, verbally if not physically, seemed beyond doubt. So why the delay? Why was she staring at the Bowskills, saying nothing?

  Jackie turned to Grint, her mouth a knot of impatience. ‘Who’s this?’ She gestured towards Connie.

  Grint took a second or two to answer. ‘This isn’t the woman who showed you Selina Gane’s passport?’

  ‘I did what?’ said Connie.

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Kit turned to Sam. ‘What does he mean?’

  ‘No,’ Jackie Napier said irritably. ‘I don’t know where you got her from, but you can put her back. I’ve never seen her before in my life.’

  *

  POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/24IG

  CAVENDISH LODGE PRIMARY SCHOOL

  Date: 13.07.06

  Name: Riordan Gilpatrick

  Form: Lower Kindergarten

  Average Age: 3 years 4 months

  Age: 3 years 8 months

  COMMUNICATIONS, LANGUAGE, LITERACY

  Riordan has made good progress this year with language. Always clear and fluent in his speech, he has good recall and enjoys story time. He recognises all the Letterland characters and their sounds and is now building words from their individual sounds.

  MATHEMATICAL DEVELOPMENT

  Riordan recognises numbers up to 9 and counts to 18. He can complete a 6-piece jigsaw, recognise colours and geometric shapes and sort for colour and size. Riordan enjoys playing number games and joining in songs.

  KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD

  Riordan shows interest in the world about him and likes to join in the discussions we have. He enjoys planting seeds and bulbs, baking, looking at the day’s weather for our weather chart and learning about topics such as Farms, Life Cycles and ‘People Who Help Us’.

  PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

  Riordan’s fine motor skills are excellent. He draws some lovely pictures and handles pencil or paintbrush with skill. He can thread beads and use scissors and he traces his letters carefully. Gross motor skills are also very good: he runs and jumps, enjoys pushing the prams, and likes to join in playground games.

  CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT

  Riordan just loves to dress up and role play in the Home Corner with his friends! He also likes to use his imagination with the small world toys. He is always eager to sit at our creative table and paint, draw lovely detailed pictures or make collages.

  PERSONAL, SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

  Riordan has settled well into his first year at school and made lots of friends. He socialises well and is caring towards his friends. He is a pleasure to have in the class: we shall miss him when he moves up to Kindergarten next year! I am sure he will enjoy being in Kindergarten. Well done, Riordan!

  Form Teacher: Teresa Allsopp

  Chapter 15

  Friday 23 July 2010

  ‘Nothing?’ Mum looks at Dad with a plea in her eyes, as if she expects him to spring into action to correct the injustice. ‘What do you mean, they’re doing nothing?’

  Kit and I are prepared. We knew the reaction we’d get. We foresaw the horrified gasp, the quiver of outrage in the voice. We predicted Dad’s reaction too, which we’ve not had yet, but we’re fully covered on that front, because we prophesied the time delay. Mum is the instant responder of the two of them, spewing out her panic in gusts of self-righteous accusation. It will be ten minutes – fifteen at the outside – before Dad contributes anything to the discussion. Until then, he will sit with his head bent forward and his hands laced together, trying to come to terms with yet more unwelcome evidence that life does not always behave in the way Val and Geoff Monk believe it ought to.

  Anton will continue to lie across my living room rug, propped up on one arm, talking mainly to Benji about their current favourite subject: a collection of fictional aliens called things like Humungosaur and Echo-Echo. Fran’s a multi-tasker; while making sure Benji doesn’t demolish Melrose Cottage, she will aim regular half-grumpy, half-jokey criticisms at Mum and Dad as a way of shielding them from the larger, more devastating criticism they deserve.

  In the company of my family, Kit and I are psychics who never get it wrong. The predictability of the Monks ought to be a welcome relief after everything we’ve been through. Predictably, it isn’t.

  ‘From what we can gather, there’s a disagreement internally,’ Kit tells Mum
. No one would guess from listening to him how miserable and lost he feels. Whenever my parents are around, he plays the role of their brilliant, strong, capable son-in-law; he told me once that he enjoys it – it’s the person he’d like to be. ‘Ian Grint doesn’t want to let it go, but he’s being leaned on. Heavily, or that’s the impression we’re getting from Sam Kombothekra.’

  ‘But Connie saw that . . . that terrible thing! Another woman saw it too. How can the police just go on as if nothing’s happened? There must be something they can do.’ Anyone listening who wasn’t an expert on the way Mum’s mind works might think she had forgotten that she didn’t believe me at first. That’s what most people would do: say one thing, then, when they were proved wrong, say another and choose to forget that at one time they were on the wrong side. Not Val Monk; no ordinary ego-preserving self-deception for her. She explained to me and Kit on Tuesday night, when we were too exhausted from our day with Grint to argue with her, that she had nothing to rebuke herself for: she was right not to have believed me at first because nobody knew about Jackie Napier at that stage, and, without her corroboration, what I was saying couldn’t possibly have been true. Later, once we were alone, Kit said to me, ‘So, to summarise your mum’s position: she was as right not to believe you then as she is right to believe you now. Even though if it’s true now, it must have been true then as well.’ We laughed about it – actually laughed – and I thought how strange it was that in the middle of all the misery and uncertainty and fear, after a day spent being questioned by detectives who didn’t like or trust either of us, Kit and I were still able to glean some comfort from our old favourite hobby of ripping my mum to pieces.

  ‘It’s the lack of forensic evidence that’s the problem,’ Kit explains to her now. ‘They’ve gone over every inch of 11 Bentley Grove, taken up the carpets, the floorboards – essentially, they dismantled the house and sent the various parts off for analysis, and they found nothing. Well, no, they found more than nothing,’ Kit corrects himself. ‘They found nothing in a way that means something.’

  ‘Twenty billion’s more than nothing, isn’t it, Daddy?’ Benji asks Anton, tapping him on the leg with a grey plastic alien toy.

  ‘Anything’s more than nothing, mate.’ If things were normal between Kit and me, I would look at him now and send a silent message: Could this be the most profound thing Anton’s ever said?

  ‘Sam told us there are two different kinds of non-result, in forensic terms,’ Kit goes on. ‘The conclusive and the inconclusive.’

  Still with us, Anton?

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Mum says impatiently.

  ‘You can find nothing at the site of a possible crime and still not know if a crime’s been committed there or not. Or, as in this case, you can find no forensic evidence and say beyond doubt that a particular crime wasn’t committed there. Sam says there’s no way there could have been the amount of blood in that house that both Connie and Jackie Napier saw without it leaving forensic . . . detritus behind. Since it didn’t . . .’ Kit shrugs. ‘The police have nothing to work with. Forensically, they have to conclude no one was killed there. They’ve got one estate agent and two former owners of the house swearing blind that the carpet in the lounge now is the same one that’s been there for years, since before the present owner moved in. They’ve spoken to the neighbours, who told them not much, apart from that Bentley Grove’s a lovely quiet street. No known missing persons fit the description Connie and Jackie Napier gave them, and there’s no body. What can they do?’

  ‘They’re the police,’ says Mum, tight-lipped. ‘There must be something – an angle they haven’t thought of, something else they can pursue.’

  ‘Kit’s trying to explain to you that there isn’t,’ Fran tells her. I wonder if it bothers her that she’s sticking up for a man she believes to be a liar with a secret life. She hasn’t said anything about the conversation we had on Monday – not to Mum and Dad, not to Anton. They don’t know about the address in Kit’s SatNav, or his car on Street View. I didn’t ask her not to tell anyone; it’s her choice that we should all keep playing Happy Snappy Families. She’s playing her role as willingly as Kit’s playing his.

  And you, Connie? Why don’t you say something? Why don’t you tell everyone your husband might be a murderer?

  ‘Ian Grint’s no fool, Val,’ Kit tries to soothe Mum. ‘He knows Connie and this Jackie person are telling the truth. Sam thinks his bosses know it too, but look at it from their point of view. If a murder has been committed, they’ve got no body, no suspects, no evidence apart from two witness statements and no way to take it forward. Completely hamstrung, aren’t they? It’s not so bad for Grint – he’s only a DC, the buck doesn’t stop with him. His DI’s the one who’s got everything to gain by saying, “This isn’t a crime, it might just be a prank – let’s assume it is, and forget all about it.” ’

  ‘A prank?’ Mum appeals to Dad again. ‘Did you hear that, Geoff? Killing someone is a joke, now, is it? Leaving them bleeding on a carpet . . .’

  ‘Mum, for God’s sake.’ Fran makes a face that suggests mental impairment. ‘Kit’s saying that the police think there was no killing – the prank was getting someone to lie down in a load of red paint, or tomato ketchup . . .’

  ‘I know the difference between blood and paint,’ I say.

  ‘What sort of prank is that?’ Mum demands. ‘It’s not very funny, is it? What woman in her right mind would ruin a lovely dress by lying in paint?’

  ‘Sam and Grint both think the prank theory’s as daft as we all think it is,’ says Kit. ‘Someone higher up the Cambridge police ladder suggested it when they found out that whoever hacked into the website and changed the virtual tour changed it back again half an hour later. I don’t really understand why that’s significant, and I’m not sure Sam and Ian Grint do either, but there’s not a lot any of us can do. The decision’s been made.’

  ‘And you’re just going to sit back and do nothing?’ Mum stares at me in horror. ‘Pretend it never happened? What about your responsibility to that poor woman, whoever she is?’

  ‘What can Connie do?’ Kit asks.

  ‘I could apply for a job as Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire police,’ I suggest.

  ‘Where’s the cake, Daddy?’ Benji asks Anton. ‘When are we going to give Connie her presents?’

  I have no idea what he’s talking about. Then I remember that this is supposed to be my birthday party. Today is my birthday. Like all Monk family celebrations, it began at 5.45 p.m. and will finish at 7.15 p.m., so that Benji can be in bed by 8.

  ‘First thing Monday morning, Kit, you phone the police,’ says Dad. Welcome to the conversation. ‘You tell them you think it’s a disgrace – you want answers and you want them now. You want to know what they’re planning to do, and they’d damn well better be planning to do something.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Mum nods her support.

  ‘If they mess you around, you threaten to go to the press. If they still don’t pull their finger out, you put your money where your mouth is. The minute it hits the local papers, the minute Cambridge residents know about this and start to panic, there’ll be nowhere for DC Ian Grint and his chums to hide.’

  ‘Dad, what are you talking about?’ Fran laughs. ‘Local residents won’t start to panic. You make it sound as if there’s a maniac on a killing spree, roaming the streets of Cambridge. Would you panic, if you heard that someone had been killed in Little Holling, if you had no reason to think you were in danger?’

  ‘That would never happen,’ Mum says. ‘That’s why we live in Little Holling – because it’s safe and no one’s likely to murder us in our homes.’

  ‘Cambridge isn’t exactly Rwanda, is it, and someone seems to have been murdered there,’ Fran fires back at her.

  ‘Cambridge is a city, with . . . people from all over the place living in it. No one knows anyone in a city, there’s no sense of community. Nothing like what Connie saw would happen here,
and if it did, the police would investigate it properly.’

  ‘Define “here”.’ Fran looks to me for support. I look away. I can’t risk getting into any kind of argument with Mum, in case I get carried away and accidentally mention that if ever a murder is committed in Little Holling, it will very likely be of her, by me. ‘Cambridge isn’t that far away. I’m sure it’s got quite a low murder rate, because people who live there are generally quite intelligent and have better things to do than kill each other. Whereas in the Culver Valley . . .’

  ‘The Culver Valley’s one of the safest places in England,’ Dad says.

  ‘Are you kidding me? Anton, tell him! Don’t you two read the local papers? In Spilling and Silsford in the last few years, there have been . . .’ Fran stops. Benji is tugging at her arm. ‘Yes, darling? What?’

  ‘What’s a murder? Is it when someone dies, when they’re a hundred?’

  ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Mum wails at Fran. ‘Poor little Benji. It’s nothing for you to worry about, angel. We all go to heaven when we die and it’s lovely in heaven – isn’t it, Grandad?’