by Joe Heap
‘Not perfect, I’m sure, but I do my best.’
The old man chuckles once. ‘Under different circumstances, it would be nice to have a coffee and talk. I never talk to anyone any more.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that …’ Nova begins.
‘What’s he saying?’ Tony interjects.
‘Just small talk, introductions. Shall we get started?’
Tony starts his questioning, and one thing immediately becomes clear to Nova – the old man isn’t an acquaintance of the suspect. He’s the suspect’s father. Why didn’t Tony tell her that? She feels wrong-footed.
‘Do you know where your son is now, Mr Petrucci?’
‘Please, call me Luca. Only the bank calls me Mr Petrucci. Luca means “bringer of light”. Someone told me.’
‘Has he answered the question?’ Tony sounds impatient, but no more so than any interrogating officer.
‘No, hang on …’ She makes the mental switch back to Italian. ‘Do you know where your son is, Luca?’
The old man clears his throat, and Nova can hear his discomfort. He’s not being evasive – he doesn’t want to talk about this. He’s embarrassed.
‘No, I don’t know …’
Nova relays the answer back to Tony.
‘Ask him when he last saw him.’
Luca’s reply is halting. ‘I saw him … yesterday morning … he was eating breakfast. Then he went out.’
Nova goes through the details of this last encounter, establishing time and place, the fragments of their conversation. She can tell that Luca is becoming upset by the policeman’s voice and wonders if Tony can detect this, despite the language barrier.
There is a long pause after she has given Tony the answer to his last question. Then,
‘Where is the girl?’
Nova pauses, unsure if she is being asked to translate. She’s sure that Luca has enough English to understand the questions, but not to answer. She asks him.
‘I’m sorry; I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Next question: ‘Where has your son taken the girl?’
Nova asks the question.
‘I’m sorry; I don’t know where my son is.’
Tony reminds Luca that it is a crime to lie under police interrogation, and a serious crime to aid a kidnapper. Luca says he understands, but that he is doing neither. The next few questions are variations on the same question, and the answer is always a variation on the same answer.
‘I’m sorry; I don’t know what I can tell you.’
If Nova feels uncomfortable with the questioning, it’s hardly more than usual – most interrogators, in this situation, would try to force an answer. Sometimes it yields results. Sometimes people open up under pressure. The switch can be startling. But the old man isn’t changing his answer, and there’s only so far you can go. His breath is short and tight. She expects the questions to change tack.
They don’t.
‘Ask him again,’ Tony says. Nova doesn’t say anything, but she pauses. In the controlled environment of the interview room, this says all she needs to say.
‘I said ask him again.’ Tony’s voice is low.
Nova asks Luca once more.
‘I’m sorry, one more time – where is your son?’
Luca does not sigh or swear, she does not hear him move. But his answer is strained. He is about to cry, this dignified old man.
‘I do not know.’
Tony doesn’t wait for her to translate before he jumps out of his chair. The explosive movement makes Nova jump. She can’t see what he’s doing, but she thinks he’s leaning over the table.
‘Listen to me, fucker,’ Tony says, quiet but menacing, ‘I know you can understand me. Tell me where your piece-of-shit son is. Tell me where he’s gone. Tell me what he’s doing.’
Luca is silent.
‘Tell me!’ Tony yells.
Luca cries out, and from his yelps, Nova gathers that Tony has reached over the table and grabbed the old man by the ear. Luca staggers to his feet, his chair scraping back. She can hear him now – he’s sobbing.
‘Please,’ he says in English, ‘please … I do not know. Not hurt me. Not hurt me, please!’
Nova stands, reaches without sight, grabbing Tony’s arm.
‘That’s enough!’
She can hear the blood surging in her ears. She has never done this before. It’s against the rules. She can’t stop an interview like this – it’s not her place. Distantly, she remembers training on what to do if an officer acted inappropriately, but it is so long ago, and she’s never had to put it into practice. She feels Tony lean back, turn to her.
‘You don’t tell me how to do my job.’
She tries to make peace.
‘No, I know. I’m sorry. But I don’t think he knows anything.’
‘What you think,’ Tony snarls, ‘doesn’t interest me.’
He shrugs out of her grasp.
‘I’ll be reporting you for impeding an interview, Miss Safinova,’ he says in a smooth voice, then leans closer, so his breath is in her face. ‘And if the girl dies because you stopped me doing my job, you’ll be hearing from me again.’
With that, he’s gone from the interview room, and Nova is left standing there, with nothing but the quiet weeping of the old man.
Later, she sits at home and replays everything in the interview room as though she’s replaying a recording. Nova has a good memory for words. Sometimes she wishes she didn’t, that at least some of them would slip away.
She wonders about Tony, and about Kate (breaking her resolution over and over), and a new feeling creeps into her old repertoire. Not fear, exactly. Worry.
She wonders if Tony will tell Kate about the interview.
She wonders whether Kate will believe him, if he tells her that the interpreter screwed everything up.
She wonders if she should send Kate a message. Despite her resolution, Nova hasn’t deleted the architect’s contact from her phone. But what would she say? There’s nothing to say. Nothing that will change what happened.
She sits and – without opening her eyes – remembers the ghost of Kate’s face. The last shape she can remember with any clarity.
Nineteen
October
‘DO YOU WANT TEA? Coffee?’
‘No thanks – just had one.’
‘Just shout if you need me.’
Kate leaves the carpet fitters to their work in the bedroom and goes through to the study, which already has its sandy, oak-veneer floor laid. Her work computer and cork-topped architect’s desk are here, with all the file boxes from the old flat. The rest of the flat is half empty, but this room is complete. She likes working here. She often sleeps on the sofa. At the old flat, she started to feel like a prisoner. Here, she can stay inside, and it feels like a choice. Tony doesn’t seem to mind – they’ll be moving out of the old flat in a couple of weeks anyway.
It has taken such a long time to finish the flat. Kate, usually so efficient, dawdled over booking people in, and endlessly put off the jobs that she planned to do herself. She had insisted on doing as many jobs herself as possible, from cutting the skirting boards to fitting the kitchen cabinets. She said it was to save money, but it’s taken so long, she doubts this is true. She isn’t sure why. If Tony cared that they were spending so much money on rent and a mortgage at the same time, he didn’t say anything. Kate felt complicit in something, though she wasn’t sure what.
There’s a box in the corner of the study containing her paint-by-number kits. Sometimes she can smell the plastic tang of the paints, seeping through the cardboard. There is a ship at sea, a country lane in autumn, and the parrot. Kate hasn’t painted for months. She will throw them all out soon.
She turns on the computer and realizes she’s smiling. It takes her by surprise, and she wonders if she’s happy. She is busy, she decides, and that is good enough.
Kate browses through emails, then looks at a website selling Babygros and slings m
ade from bamboo (how do they do that?).
She’s not pregnant.
Not yet. But she’s ready for it now. It’s the right time.
After a while, she goes back to her emails, looking over a message from the council. To get a new food bin, she needs to show two kinds of identification. Ugh. Everything is online these days, and Kate wonders for a moment if she has anything other than the Council Tax bills. Ah – the mortgage papers. She pads through to the kitchen and makes herself a lemon verbena tea, then goes back to the study to search through their file box for the mortgage documentation. The mortgage folder is empty.
Did she do that?
No – she remembers putting everything away in the right folder. Did Tony go through this for some reason? She searches through the other folders, but doesn’t find the papers. She sits, the cold weight of the file box pressing on her lap.
Something is wrong. She searches the study and, finding nothing, bids goodbye to the carpet fitters, who have their own key, and returns to the old flat. There she searches through boxes of files, piles of paper stuck in drawers and sheaves of discarded envelopes.
She does not find the mortgage papers.
Over the next week, she searches for clues. The more she does not find what she is looking for, the more Kate is accumulating something else, one piece at a time, until she can no longer deny that she is carrying the weight of it around with her like an over-stuffed folder.
Suspicion.
It is a long time since she has thought of the square of white paper. Not directly, at least. Memories of that period of her life recur quite naturally, but she has not looked at their radiant centre for a long time, as someone who looks close but not quite at the sun.
She does not say anything to Tony. She could simply ask him where the folder is, of course, except now she has this suspicion, and it wouldn’t be fair to him, in a way, to just ask, because then she would be handing him the initiative. If he had every chance to prove his innocence, how would she ever believe him? She has to discover his innocence herself.
She thinks (though the thought does not make her anxious) that she has left Tony on his own in the old flat so often, while she slept in the new flat. At the time, she had appreciated the time apart.
She does not jump to conclusions.
But she does stop sleeping at the new flat. She comes home before he does and leaves after he leaves. She looks through his work bags, his suit jacket, and the pockets of his trousers.
At first there is nothing. She almost gives up. But by the end of the week, she has accumulated a small collection of everyday objects.
1) A receipt for a café she doesn’t recognize –
1 CFE – CAPP TALL
2 CFE – FLAT WHITE
3 KWI FRUIT TART x2
(4 ITEMS)
2) A crumpled napkin that has a red smudge in one corner.
3) A pen from a chain hotel that they have never stayed in.
4) A long strand of straight, auburn hair.
None of these objects is proof. Tony takes people to cafés for work. The smudge on the napkin could be anything – it only looks like lipstick because she’s thinking that way. The pen could have come from anywhere – she might have picked it up herself in a meeting without a second thought. The auburn hair, from the back of one of Tony’s jackets, could have come from any chair that he sat on that day.
The objects mean nothing, but they are enough to sustain Kate’s suspicion. She hates creeping around. She wants to hear his mundane explanations.
Perhaps, she reasons with herself, she needs to find something he is guilty of, to neutralize her own guilt about snooping around (though, like the square of white paper, she tries not to think directly about the source of this shame). Perhaps she believes she can’t fuck things up more than she already has.
Of course, the first place she wants to look is his wallet, for the piece of white paper. It has been almost two years, and she knows there is no chance Tony’s kept it in there all this time, but she still wants to look. His wallet is almost always in his trouser pocket. If she wants to get it, she will have to wait until he is getting ready for bed, in the bathroom. That’s too dangerous for now. Instead, she goes through his drawers in the bedroom.
She finds nothing out of the ordinary. She doesn’t know what she expects to find. There are condoms in the bedside table, but they have been there for months. They haven’t been using contraception, so it would be more suspicious if the condoms were gone.
His work is the only thing that reassures her, a multipurpose alibi. Perhaps the piece of white paper was evidence – something secret, something she couldn’t see, something that he was protecting her from, and not himself. But what kind of evidence would be kept in his wallet? What kind of secret would be written on a piece of paper?
She knows that if she wants real answers, she must look at his bank account, but that’s easier said than done. They have a shared joint account and a solo account each, but Tony doesn’t get paper statements – he does everything online. There’s no way she can get his password and details to log into the account.
At one point, Kate would have made up something about the water bill (which is charged to his account) and he would have shown her the account. But now she’s not so sure. She doesn’t want him to suspect her suspicion.
When they got the mortgage for the new flat, they had to submit twelve months of statements from their personal accounts. Tony had gone to the bank and had them print out the statements. Kate put them all together with the mortgage paperwork and sent them off.
No.
No, that’s not how it happened. Tony had sent them off. He had waited until Kate filled out her forms and added her bank statements, then he’d taken the bundle, gone to the bank to get his own statements, had put everything together and sent it off.
Kate hadn’t thought anything of it. The mortgage was approved online, and the documents were sent back to them two weeks later. She hadn’t even looked at them – Tony had taken the papers and put them somewhere. At the time, she had assumed he was putting them in the file box.
Somewhere in the house, he has hidden those bank statements. She is sure of it. She needs to find them.
It’s easier said than done. Kate searches under the bed, in Tony’s work papers, through the police training manuals that he keeps on the shelf. The statements aren’t in any of them, and she starts to wonder if he threw the file in the bin. But it is supporting documentation for their mortgage – even once it was approved, Tony is far too cautious, too meticulous, to have thrown that out.
She is searching in the old study – the boxroom half empty now, full of furniture they’ll be getting rid of – and takes the bottom drawer out of the bureau to make it easier to search through. That’s when she sees it – not in the drawer itself, but in the cobwebbed space under the drawer at the bottom of the bureau.
The square of white paper.
She picks the paper up, feeling an odd certainty.
The square isn’t folded how she thought it was – not in half, then quarters, but into a tiny envelope. Her hands are shaking as she undoes it.
White powder spills out of the white paper.
There’s not much of it – less than a sachet of sugar. She raises a finger and dabs the powder on her tongue. Not sugar – there is a faint vinegary smell, then it’s gone. Kate rubs her tongue on the roof of her mouth, feeling the spot where it has gone numb.
She sets the paper square down, dusting her hands off as though she’s baking. She looks inside the bureau, finding nothing. Then she turns over the drawer she took out. Taped to the underside is a double-thickness black bag. Carefully, she tears the plastic.
A dozen white squares spill out.
Under them, sealed in zip-lock kitchen bags, are several kilos of the white powder.
By the time Tony comes home from work, Kate is sitting at the kitchen table, with the handful of white squares spread in front of her. She hasn’t ha
d a drink. She made herself peppermint tea instead. It’s something to hold at least, to stop him seeing how much her hands are shaking. She could have phoned the police. But she hasn’t.
‘Home at last!’ he shouts from the hall. ‘Did you see my message? I thought we could have the leftover tomato sauce with some …’
He trails off as he comes into the kitchen and sees Kate at the table. His eyes dart between her and the paper squares.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks. His voice is smooth, flat – a featureless kind of voice, no handholds, unscalable.
‘What am I doing?’ she says, and her voice is so small. How can her voice be so small? She is so tall, so broad, so outsized, yet her voice betrays her. He doesn’t say anything for a long time. He turns his back to her, walks over to the window, and looks for a while at whatever is happening on the street below. She glances back down at the paper squares in front of her.
He turns and walks back to the table.
‘How dare you—’
‘Clear out the drawers in my own home?’
‘How dare you spy on me!’ He advances, and she stands up from the table, still holding her drink protectively. Before she knows what Tony is doing, his hand darts up, dashing the mug from her hands. The hot water splashes over Kate’s shoulder, scalding her, and the mug falls, smashing on the tiles.
‘How dare you,’ he says again. ‘Those sachets are police evidence. Evidence that you’ve contaminated.’
For a moment, doubt creeps in. Kate quells it. She prepared herself for this.
‘The police don’t hide evidence in their own homes. In their own wallets.’
Tony does not reply. She can smell the anger rising off him in waves. He doesn’t look angry, though – his face is blank. But his body is bunched up, as though he’s ready to throw himself at her. The pain from the tea brings tears to her eyes, and her breath comes in hot bursts. She’s getting ready to run – to run around him, to run out of the kitchen and the flat, to run somewhere safe. She makes the move and—
Something hits Kate in the face.
Tony.
She staggers back, clutching her cheek.