Say You're Sorry

by Michael Robotham

  “Are you ever going to get married again?” she asks, out of the blue.

  “I’m already married.”

  “She’s not going to take you back, Dad.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “But you could… if you wanted. That woman likes you.”

  “What woman?”

  “The one you had lunch with. She was flirting.”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “Of course she was. Women can tell.”

  “You mean you?”

  “Yes, Dad, I’m a woman and I could tell.” She pops a chip into her mouth. “If you do get remarried, I won’t be a bridesmaid.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not wearing some lame burnt-orange dress that makes me look like a lampshade.”

  “Understood.”

  The cottage is near the end of a narrow lane that leads to a bridge over Wellow River. It’s barely a bridge and barely a river. Julianne is waiting at the door. Her hair is pinned up and she’s wearing old jeans and a sweater, but still looks like she could be starring in a TV commercial for multi-vitamins or shampoo.

  Charlie accepts her hug and glances back at me, blinking through a veil of hair that has fallen over her eyes. There’s something knowing in her look—a shared secret.

  Separating, she disappears inside, climbing the stairs to her bedroom. Julianne watches her go. Relieved. Anxious.

  I’m expecting her to be angry, to slam the door on me, but instead Julianne opens her arms and hugs me.

  “She messed up.”

  “Yes.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Nothing. She made a mistake. We’ve all done that. The important thing is that she doesn’t give up. We want her to wake up tomorrow and shoot for another perfect day.”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “Not easy.”

  Julianne asks if I want a cup of tea. Normally, I’d jump at the chance to spend twenty minutes in her company, surrounded by the familiar.

  “I have to get back.”

  “To London?”

  “Oxford.”

  I can’t tell her about Natasha McBain. She’ll know soon enough. Then she’ll put two and two together and realize that I’m helping the police again and look at me the way she always does, like my personal star is shining a little less brightly than before.

  She kisses my left cheek and her lips brush against mine as she moves to my right cheek.

  “Thank you for bringing her home.”

  Charlie unlatches the window upstairs and pushes it outwards, leaning half her body through the opening.

  “There’s a story on the TV about that guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “The one you talked to in Oxford—Augie Shaw.”

  “What about him?”

  “He tried to hang himself.”

  I have this counting game.

  I start counting backwards from a hundred and tell myself that Tash will come back before I get to zero. When I get to the end, I start again. I always slow down when I get to single figures, listening between each number in case I hear footsteps or voices.

  It’s just the wind.

  She’s not coming back.

  Early morning, it’s dark inside and outside. Dark enough for the trees to look like a monstrous wave moving towards me.

  When the sun rises pale and cold, I stand on the bench and look at the brightening sky. A train passes. Without it, I might be on another planet. I might be dead. I might be the only person left in the world.

  I have no more paper to write upon. I have used up the last page. When George hosed me down, the book was under my pillow. The pages were wet and now they are buckling and curling as they dry. My pencil is just a stub, so I guess it doesn’t matter about the paper. From now on I’ll have to write in my head. Compose my lists. Gather my thoughts. File and forget.

  People say that my generation lacks imagination and that we have a short attention span. We’re also super-sized and lazy and have no decent music. This is criticism from a Boomer generation that loves telling stories about the 1960s—the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll—but who swapped their protest placards for property portfolios and pension funds. My parents are like that: small people with small lives.

  When I reached the England Indoor Age Championships and had to go to Birmingham to run, my mother didn’t come to watch me. She said running wasn’t very ladylike and suggested that I had a mutant gene that didn’t come from her side of the family. She also joked about checking my adoption papers or said that she must have shagged Seb Coe instead of my father.

  She was always talking Dad down like that. “I didn’t marry you for your looks,” she’d say, “but where are the brains you were supposed to bring to the family?”

  After I came second at the nationals for my age group my parents gave me a brand-new Raleigh bike. I was sick of running by then, but I liked my new bike. I rode everywhere, for mile after mile.

  My grandmother died that month. When I got the news I rode my bike to Abingdon Station and waited for one of the express trains to come roaring through so I could swear and scream at how wrong the world was to take my gran. That’s what I want to do now. I want to scream at the top of my lungs, but this time I want the world to hear me.

  18

  Homeopaths say that water can retain a memory; why not walls? They can be scrubbed, graffitied, painted and plastered yet somewhere beneath the layers, the memories remain.

  The guard ahead of me has pale blond hair that is combed across his forehead like he’s going to primary school. Occasionally, he glances over his shoulder, making sure I’m still following.

  “One of my colleagues found him,” he says, as we stop outside a cell. “He opened the viewing hatch and saw him hanging there. Raised the alarm.”

  The cell door opens. I’m expected to look. The guard is still talking. “My colleague wrapped his arms around the prisoner’s waist, supporting him until someone could cut him down.”

  The guard points to the far wall. “The belt was looped around that heating pipe. He must have stood on the bench.”

  The room has no windows, bare walls and a concrete floor.

  “They took him to the Radcliffe, unconscious but breathing. Could be brain damaged. Oxygen deprivation. I heard one of them paramedics talking.”

  The guard is gazing at something beyond the walls. “There’ll be a full investigation. No belts. No laces. That’s the rule. Somebody fucked up.”

  I need to get outside. Fresh air. It’s not until I reach the car park that I realize I’ve been holding my breath. Ruiz is waiting for me. He’s wearing a heavy woolen overcoat that looks like it survived both world wars. A boiled sweet rattles between his teeth.

  “You found the place,” I say.

  “Trained investigator.”

  He has a different car. He once drove an early-model Mercedes—his pride and joy—but it didn’t survive a collision with a motel room wall. Now he has a box-like Range Rover with a dark-green paint job.

  “It looks like a tank.”

  “Exactly.”

  We drive together to the hospital. Sinatra is in full voice on the stereo: “That Old Black Magic.” Ruiz’s musical tastes haven’t escaped from the fifties. I once asked him about the sixties and he told me that he was too busy arresting hippies to ride the peace train.

  “So you missed out on the free love.”

  “Oh, it’s never free, Professor. Never free.”

  There are police cars outside the main doors and a uniformed constable is stationed at the ICU. Tall. Good looking. Nurses keep smiling at him as they pass.

  Augie Shaw is lying half naked on a bed, handcuffed to the side-rail. The capillaries have burst in the whites of his eyes. There is a woman sitting beside him, canted forward with her head resting on the bedding, eyes closed. His mother, even more diminished than before, fading away.

  DCI Drury is talking to one of the doctors.
We wait.

  “I hate hospitals,” says Ruiz, expecting me to ask why.

  I humor him. “Why?”

  “Healthy people die in them.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Sick people get better in hospitals. Healthy people die. Think about it. That’s what you read about in the papers: people going into hospital for minor operations and dying because of stupid mistakes and overworked nurses and exhausted interns. You don’t hear about really sick people dying.”

  “That’s because they’re really sick.”

  “Exactly.”

  I don’t bother pointing out the flaw in Ruiz’s logic.

  “I should be made Minister for Health,” he adds. “I could sort out the problem with waiting lists straight away.”

  “How so?”

  “I’d stop people at the door of Accident and Emergency and quiz them on how they got injured. Food poisoning or a dog bite or a broken arm, they’ll have to wait fifteen minutes. But if they arrive with self-inflicted slashes or a Hoover nozzle stuck up their arse, it’ll be six hours.”

  “Are you sure you don’t read the Daily Mail?”

  “I’m being harsh but fair. There are too many idiots using up our health budget.”

  Drury has finished his conversation. He opens his palms, looking like a Mafia godfather. “Where have you been?”

  “I had to take my daughter home.”

  “Tell Grievous next time. He’s been running around like a lost puppy.”

  I introduce him to Ruiz and the two of them size each other up with a handshake. Drury seems less aggressive today. Perhaps he hasn’t met his normal quota of fools.

  “If it weren’t for Piper Hadley I’d be wishing that boy dead,” says Drury, talking about Augie Shaw. “Sign of a guilty man, a suicide attempt.”

  “Or a desperate one,” I say.

  The DCI pushes spare change into a machine and makes his choice. A bottle of water drops into the tray. He cracks the top and drinks noisily, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  He looks at me. “You still think Augie Shaw couldn’t have kidnapped Natasha McBain and Piper Hadley?”

  “He hasn’t the intellect or the experience.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Professor, but while you’ve been playing happy families, we were checking the registered sex offenders living in the area and running a full background check on suicide boy in there. A very interesting name came up—his old man Wesley Shaw once faced eight counts of child rape but managed to plea-bargain it down to one count of attempted unlawful penetration of a minor. And you know where he was on the night the Bingham Girls disappeared? He was working on the rides at the fairground.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He died eighteen months ago. Ran a red light and got pancaked by a bus in Stoughton Street.”

  Drury tosses the empty plastic bottle into a metal bin.

  “Wesley George Shaw. He also had a few aliases: WG Buford, David William Burford, George Westman. Born in 1960, the son of an aircraft mechanic stationed at RAF Abingdon working on fighter planes. First arrest at age twenty-four: attempted rape. Charges dropped. Second arrest: curb-crawling and engaging the services of an underage prostitute. You see where I’m going, Professor? Wesley Shaw’s name came up in the first investigation, but his old lady gave him an alibi. She lied for him.”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “She just confirmed it.”

  “But Wesley Shaw is dead.”

  “He was alive when the girls went missing. He could have kidnapped them; set the whole thing up. Augie just inherited them. Like father like son.”

  At the far end of the corridor, a door opens and Victoria Naparstek appears. Tall, pale, purposeful, her face enameled with anger. She confronts Drury, stopping inches from his face.

  “I warned you.”

  He raises his hands, but Victoria knocks them away.

  “I told you what would happen.”

  “Let’s take this somewhere else. Take a deep breath. Calm down.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down.”

  He’s gentler with her than I expect. “Somebody messed up. I’m sorry.”

  “Have you told his mother that? No. That might mean a lawsuit. Compensation. Instead, you’re going to close ranks. Collude. Get your stories straight.”

  “This isn’t the time or the place.”

  He’s whispering to her, trying to lead her away; holding her arm, talking like they’re old friends. She shudders at his touch. Disappoints him.

  “Don’t patronize me,” she says. “Never, ever patronize me.”

  Then she leaves, storming down the corridor. The police officer on guard follows her progress, his eyes glued to her posterior.

  “What are you looking at, Constable?” barks Drury. “Keep your eyes to the front.”

  19

  St. Catherine’s School is set amid trees and boot-churned sporting fields on the northern outskirts of Abingdon, a mile from an old RAF base, which was decommissioned in the nineties.

  A lone student is sitting in the administration office. Sulking. She swings her legs beneath a vinyl chair, awaiting judgment for some indiscretion. Dressed in a gray skirt, white blouse and v-neck burgundy jumper, she looks up as we enter in a flurry of cold air. The door closes. She looks down again.

  A school secretary is seated behind sliding glass. Grievous flashes his warrant card and asks for the headmistress. The secretary misdials the number twice. All thumbs. Perhaps an unpaid parking ticket is preying on her mind.

  The headmistress, Mrs. Jacobson, is a big woman in a beige dress. Her dyed hair is brushed back and fastened with a comb. “Come, come,” she says, herding us like pre-schoolers into her office, her shoes echoing on the parquet floor.

  “This is about Piper and Natasha, isn’t it? Is there news?”

  “There have been some developments in the case,” says the young detective. “The details are confidential for operational reasons.”

  “Of course, I understand. Sit down. Coffee? Tea? Help yourself to biscuits. Such a terrible business—it took our girls a long time to recover. Some of them needed counseling, but we’re a very stoic bunch here at St. Catherine’s.”

  A spare seat is found for Ruiz, who hasn’t said a word since we arrived. Grievous picks up a chocolate biscuit, which crumbles when he takes a bite. He makes a little sound and tries to catch the falling crumbs. Mrs. Jacobson walks to the side table and comes back with a plate and a paper napkin, silently admonishing him. She settles again behind her desk.

  “Darling Piper, I can’t imagine why she’d run away. Her father is such a generous man. And her mother is so beautiful and charming.”

  “Not like the McBains?” asks Ruiz.

  The headmistress flinches. “Excuse me?”

  “Natasha’s father served a five-year stretch for armed robbery. Surely you know that.”

  “We don’t discriminate at St. Catherine’s.”

  “Neither do we,” says Ruiz.

  There is a look between them. Nothing warm.

  “We were hoping to talk to some of the teachers who taught Piper and Natasha,” I say. “And to look at their student files.”

  “I’m afraid the files are confidential, but most of their teachers are still with us. We don’t have a big turnover of staff.”

  “What about caretakers?” asks Ruiz.

  The headmistress hesitates. “If you’re referring to Mr. Stokes, he’s no longer working at St. Catherine’s.”

  “He was sacked.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

  “He took inappropriate photographs of the girls.”

  “An unfortunate incident. We did all the proper checks.”

  “Where is Mr. Stokes now?”

  She stares at Ruiz icily. “We haven’t kept in touch.”

  They hold each other’s gaze for a moment and then Mrs. Jaco
bson looks at her small gold wristwatch. “It’s lunchtime. You’ll find most of the teachers in the staff common room.”

  The schoolgirl in the waiting room is instructed to escort us. Her name is Monica and she walks with a pigeon-toed gait and sloping shoulders. We climb the stairs and follow a corridor past classrooms and science labs.

  I fall into step beside Ruiz. He’s limping more today; the legacy of an old bullet wound. He’s too proud to use a walking stick. Vain.

  “Why did you give her such a hard time?”

  “She reminded me of my old physics teacher.”

  “Is that all?”

  “You didn’t meet my physics teacher.”

  Monica knocks on the door of the common room and asks for Miss McCrudden. The English teacher is in her mid-thirties, wearing dark trousers and a blouse with a coffee stain. Her fingers are spotted with blue marker pen.

  Most of the tables are taken by groups of teachers eating sandwiches or reheated soup. We take a seat in the corner.

  Miss McCrudden looks at me nervously.

  “This isn’t an official interview. Nobody is taking notes. I’m a psychologist working with the police. I’m trying to learn whatever I can about Piper and Natasha.”

  She makes a clucking sound deep in her throat. “Such lovely girls.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You answered automatically and said they were lovely girls.”

  “They were.”

  “How were they lovely?”

  “They were very friendly.”

  “Did they have a lot of friends?”

  She hesitates. “Some.”

  “Not a lot then?”

  “Are you trying to disagree with me?”

  “I’m trying to get to the truth.”

  The teacher eyes me accusingly. “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “Yes. You see, Miss McCrudden—”

  “Call me Kirsty.”

  “Kirsty. By most accounts Natasha McBain was a bit of a tearaway. Always getting into trouble.”

  “She was high-spirited.”

  “There you go again—making excuses for her. Apologizing. Trying to soften the edges; airbrushing the truth.”