What Alice Knew

by T. A. Cotterell

  ‘Maybe she was passing?’

  ‘People usually hand-deliver flowers because they want to see the recipient.’

  I shrugged. I could hardly be responsible for the thought processes of a woman I had never met, a woman who was, by the sound of it, capable of some very wobbly thinking indeed. Pullen picked up a wooden salt cellar from the marble worktop, weighed it in his hand.

  ‘Mrs Sheahan, can you think of any other reason why you might hand-deliver flowers rather than send them, when you are standing in a flower shop on one side of Bristol and the person you want to thank lives on the other?’

  He replaced the cellar and inspected his hands for traces of salt. His message was clear. He didn’t have to watch my face as I answered because there was no answer.

  ‘Wasn’t she at UWE? If she drove there we’re pretty much on the way.’

  ‘And she wanted to see the recipient?’

  ‘Or save the delivery charge?’

  The door opened. James gave a thumbs-up. I glanced at the clock. The children needed to leave for school in twenty minutes and there was no sign of Nell. Pullen turned back to me. When he spoke his voice had a businesslike tone.

  ‘Mrs Sheahan, I am going to ask you to accompany us to the station to answer some questions.’

  ‘What?’ My surprise was totally genuine.

  ‘Because we have reason to believe you and/or your husband may have been involved in the murder of Araminta Lyall.’

  I realized immediately Pullen had known how this was going to end from the beginning. He’d just been playing me for time while they caught up with Ed. I was always going to be taken in. Nothing I said would have made any difference. I was the mule at the bottom of the MI6 pyramid, Pullen the all-seeing handler at the top. To stop myself crying, or giving myself away, I focused on the practical.

  ‘But what about the children? How are they going to get to school?’

  Pullen’s voice was equally practical, almost paternal. He was only doing his job.

  ‘Can someone give them a lift?’

  ‘Um … I don’t know.’

  My mother had brought us up not to ask for favours. I could call Bea Washington, but I didn’t want to. Her long nose would be twitching on overdrive.

  ‘Otherwise we can.’

  That settled it. I wasn’t having Nell and Arthur arriving at school in a police car, unmarked or otherwise, even if Arthur would love it.

  The next twenty minutes passed in a dream. Pullen went out to the car but DC James stood silently in the corner as I explained to the children when they came down there had been a misunderstanding and I had to go with the policemen to clear it up. They ate their breakfast in silence. Arthur was close to tears. Nell kept turning around and looking at James as if she was thinking, ‘Why is this stocky little man in our house?’ I just sat there, unable to speak. I tried to think about what I was going to say, but thoughts and events came crashing in from all sides and I couldn’t think in a straight line – which was what Ed was referring to whenever he joked about the problems of being married to an artist.

  Bea appeared in cubist-patterned leggings with go-faster fluorescent stripes, a mango hoodie and giant Nikes built for bouncing. Bea is part of the school-run-have-coffee-play-tennis-back-to-yours-for-a-gossip-and-a-salad-and-a-glass-of-wine-and-oh-go-on-then-I’m-not-driving-OMG!-it’s-time-to-pick-up-the-kids brigade. I’m not. But she’s friendly and will do anything. She even offered to pick the children up and bring them home after school ‘if that would help’. I said that was very kind but I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. Then I gave Nell and Arthur huge squeezy hugs and waved them away quickly in case I burst into tears. I’m pretty strong but everyone has their limits and I was deep into unknown territory. Anything could happen. Anything was happening. Speculation about why the police were at the Sheahans’ and why the Sheahans were at the police station would start in earnest the moment Bea touched down in gym or coffee shop.

  Pullen drove to the station, two hands on the wheel, and James sat half turned in the passenger seat, as if he was about to start a conversation or thought I was going to make a run for it when we stopped at a traffic light. There were two Costa cups squeezed into the front seat cup-holder, a ghostly outline of coffee discolouring plastic lids. I was in the back, my jeans squeaking every time I shifted on the plastic seat. I didn’t listen to their chat. It was male stuff, cop stuff. Saturday-night heroes. I was thinking about the children, how they would be taking it, and also about Ed. Somewhere across town he was in the back of a similar vehicle, or had already arrived at his destination – a word, I noted as I watched the Bristol ferry criss-crossing the harbour like a cat’s cradle, that was uncomfortably close to destiny.

  I looked out of the window at my adopted home. It was strange to be looking at Bristol from the back of a police car, as if the narrative of my life had been bent out of shape. Bristol is a city of stories. They are written in the names – Corn Street, Wine Street, Lewins Mead, Union Street, Horse Fair, Anchor Road, Narrow Quay. It’s an ancient port, starting point and endgame.

  The police station was in a drive-through part of town, an area I only knew from having been to a gig there with an out-of-town friend mad for a singer-songwriter who could draw a crowd of sixty. There were dingy clubs and pubs, no-brand fast-food emporia and 24/7 grocers with metal grilles and halal options. An army surplus store for men kicked out of the army or too weird to be allowed in in the first place had paint peeling from its fascia.

  When we arrived at the station I was guided into a lino-floored reception, unobtrusively flanked by Pullen and James like a real-life criminal. In the foyer an old fan turned slowly on a windowsill as if we were in some mosquito-infested outpost or remote saloon. A blank-eyed man and woman sweltered in shapeless tracksuits and baseball tops with American place names (Brooklyn, Chicago), lounging on the plastic chairs as if in a queue at a fried chicken take-out in the Deep South. Pullen pressed a buzzer and a duty sergeant unlocked the door at the end of the Formica counter. We walked deep into the bowels of the station. I deliberately hadn’t asked about Ed. I didn’t want to show any concern beyond giving off a sense they were making a terrible mistake. Besides, as I was led down a cold brick passage painted institutional cream and into a cold brick interview room also painted institutional cream, I wasn’t feeling that sorry for him. He’d got me into a place I never expected to be.

  Pullen gestured towards a chair on the far side of a metal table with rounded corners and smooth sides. The table and chairs were bolted to the floor. I looked over my shoulder. James nodded forward. I didn’t acknowledge him but went into the room.

  ‘If you wait here someone will be along in a moment. Can I get you anything? Cup of tea?’

  ‘Thank you. And a glass of water, please.’

  He nodded and left. The door clicked ominously loudly in the silence. I had heard a click like that once before.

  15 December 1986. We were having supper in the dining room at Highlands rather than the kitchen because it was nearly Christmas. Our father was in London that night. No change there. He was always in London. We didn’t really miss him, partly because we were so used to his absence and partly because even when he was with us he seemed to be absent in spirit if present in body. He was gentle and loving, softer than Mother, but he always seemed to be at an angle to the family, incapable of playing his designated role. We were having dinner when the phone rang in the hall, cutting the silence that had descended after Matt had turned the conversation towards Boy George’s cross-dressing specifically to wind up Mother.

  She was on the phone for a long time. When she returned she stared at each of us in turn, as if fixing in her mind what we looked like in the moment before our childhoods changed forever.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident. A car crash. Your father’s died.’ She looked down for a moment and swallowed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Although the words were unambiguous, for a few moments I couldn’t process
them. It must be some sort of joke. It was nearly Christmas! I felt a sudden searing emptiness, a pain I couldn’t locate. We couldn’t have Christmas without our father. He might not have been the most attentive of fathers – that was a masterpiece of understatement – but he was still our father and he brought a sort of pained hope to Highlands that didn’t exist when he wasn’t there. I looked at Matt and Bridgey. They were older. They would show me how to understand. Matt smiled weirdly. There were bubbles of saliva in the corners of his mouth. Bridgey was staring at the table, showing us the top of her head, her glasses misting.

  Seven years later, I played hockey for my school in Oxford. Matt, who was deep in his troubles at Christ Church, came to watch and afterwards took me to the Ashmolean and for tea at the Randolph, where he sniffed about ‘Scottish baronial’ and ‘grisly Victoriana’. The ceiling in the dining room seemed twice the height of a bell tower. We’d never spoken about our father before, not on the night he died nor any time afterwards. Having gingered around the subject, he said in a voice scarred by unreleased emotion,

  ‘You know, Bunny, I couldn’t believe it, even then, even knowing her. I couldn’t believe she could just walk into that room and say, “I’m afraid your father’s died”, as if he was the cat or some mad uncle we’d never met. And then she said, “I’m sorry.” Sorry? What sort of response is that? How is that going to help small children? How can she apologize when she wasn’t even there?’

  He blew a bitter smoke-ring upwards and lit another cigarette with the butt of the previous. Outside the window the rain glittered in the lamplight against the slow-moving traffic and shadowy Ionic columns of the Ashmolean. His hair was tangled. There were grey rings around his eyes. A kale-coloured scarf was tossed mock-jauntily over his shoulders, an ironic student gesture, giving an entirely false impression of how he was feeling. It didn’t seem a good sign that he remembered her exact words, or that he was still working away at his loss. God knows I’m no apologist for Mother but it can’t have been easy to work out how to react in the few seconds between putting the phone down and having to tell us, and she’d just lost her husband. If the circumstances don’t offer an excuse, then her governess-heavy and loveless childhood probably does. Don’t shoot the messenger.

  Matt stirred his coffee morosely and laid his coffee-wet spoon on the tablecloth rather than his saucer. It made a small sepia stain.

  ‘And then she sent us to bed! No big hug. No togetherness. No detail. Nothing for us to live with.’

  ‘She did come into our rooms later,’ I ventured, conscious I’d been young enough to be protected from comprehension. I was awake, trying to fix my father into my memory so he would be there for ever, when Mother came in and sat on the edge of my bed. I inched over to the wall to give her more room. What I really wanted was for her to be a real mummy like everyone else’s and to get into my bed and sleep there, all night, her body wrapped around mine, comforting me. I knew it wouldn’t happen, and I’m not certain I would have known what to do if it had. But you always hope. She didn’t, of course. She sat on a corner of my eiderdown and fiddled with my sheets, mumbling about how the bed hadn’t been made properly and when was I going to learn how to do hospital corners and, finally, just when I thought she wasn’t going to say anything at all about him and I’d almost fallen to sleep, she whispered in a cracked voice,

  ‘Your father was a good man, a kind man, and he loved you all very much. You must never forget that.’ She paused, waiting for me to speak but I couldn’t because I didn’t know what to say. I had a curious feeling she was persuading herself rather than me. I nodded on the pillow. She bent towards me as if about to kiss me, paused, and just patted my shoulder. Then she left, closing the door with a loud click behind her, leaving me prisoner of my memories and fears. That was the click I was reminded of thirty years later as I sat with my memories and fears in the Trinity Road police station, in the room with painted brick walls and industrial piping, a room that, with only a modest leap of imagination and a few more tables, could have been a too-hip-to-handle allotment-to-table restaurant in Shoreditch or Southville.

  ‘She never came into my room.’ Matt’s face was pale in the artificial light of the dining room, his cigarette-fingers yellowy brown. ‘I asked her why she hadn’t come in to see me a couple of years ago when Bridgey told me she’d gone in to see her and you.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That as I was now the head of the household she thought I’d want time and space to get my thoughts together. So she moved my bedroom away from you two and into the graveyard slot at the end of her corridor. As if that would make me an adult!’ He looked up desperately. I didn’t know it at the time but Matt was only days away from dropping out and beginning the peripatetic and forlorn existence that would wind up in a net-making business in Whitby. ‘I was thirteen, for Chrissakes! She gave me nothing to live with. She owed me that at least.’

  I was on my own in the interview room for twenty minutes before Pullen returned, long enough to count every brick on those retro-industrial walls. I didn’t, of course, that sort of thing is for lifers, or people with no interior life. Instead, after remembering the day in Oxford, I covered every moment and movement from the Saturday night Ed went to Pete’s party to the Wednesday night of my book club, when he returned from that woman’s apartment with, however accidentally or metaphorically, blood on his hands. If we screwed this up, it wouldn’t be down to me.

  But then, when I’d combed all the events backwards and forwards and sideways like a baldy desperately trying to tease a few sparse hairs across his crown and Pullen still hadn’t reappeared, I found myself exploring a different possibility. Maybe that’s why they leave you as long as they do, to allow you time to consider all the options. Because suddenly I found myself wondering if we wouldn’t be better off if I just came out with it. Why didn’t I just explain the whole thing was a terrible accident and we – Ed – hadn’t owned up on account of a completely understandable fear no one would believe him? It could only be a couple of years for manslaughter, tops, possibly suspended after a Les Misérables-sized chorus queued up to vouch for his good character and insist their lives and cots would have been immeasurably emptier without him. Surely that was better than living forever – FOREVER – in this suffocating atmosphere of lies and fear?

  But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go through with it unilaterally. If I sang, that would be it. Our marriage would be over. Whether he got ten months or ten years, Ed would never forgive me. He would never come back. When Ed was set on a course, that was it, nothing could shift him.

  There was another reason why I couldn’t do it, a bigger and better reason. I couldn’t turn him in because I believed him. I trusted him. Whatever did or didn’t happen in that flat that night or any other night, I knew he didn’t murder that woman. Murder requires intent, the mens rea, and there was no way Ed would ever intend to kill someone. No matter how mad or bad the situation, he would never have killed her to save himself. It just wasn’t credible. Nothing Pullen or anyone else could say could make me change my mind. And if I believed him, if I believed in him, I had to go through with this. Ed was a man who saved lives. He was a man who gave life, he didn’t take it. And they weren’t charging him with adultery.

  The door opened. DI Pullen was holding a styrofoam cup of milky tea in one hand and a paper cone filled with water in the other. He didn’t apologize for leaving me so long, even after I gave a theatrical glance at my watch. It was important to let him know the innocent don’t like having their time wasted. I gave the cone an ironic look – whoever thought that was a sensible design? – and drank it in a single swoop. Another man, not James, had followed Pullen in. He had small black eyes and curly hair over his collar and a moustache which ran under his long thin nose like a water rat. I thought moustaches, like squash players, had run out of road at the end of the 1970s. ‘Never trust a man with a moustache,’ my mother had said by way of explanation when she sacked the gardener,
Oakham, for sleeping with Kelly, the second wife of old Peter, who’d run the village shop and pulled pints part-time in the Leg of Mutton and Cauliflower in the village since my mother was in short skirts.

  Pullen perfunctorily introduced the moustache – ‘This is Philips’ – no rank offered. He wore a grey suit with the widest lapels since Abba won the Eurovision, trousers flaring east–west, and a tight waistcoat, top and bottom buttons undone. A kipper tie with a vast Windsor knot was flying half-mast. Philips nodded but made no attempt to shake my half-proffered hand, which hung momentarily in mid-air, limp and uncertain. The incongruity of his suit and low-slung way he stared at me made me uneasy. This was a man who wouldn’t trust his own shadow. Pullen grunted.

  ‘Vending machine.’

  ‘Stay, you get real tea,’ Philips added without a flicker of humour.

  Pullen sat down opposite me. Philips leant against the wall. I reminded myself these men were capable of putting Ed away for a very long time for a crime he didn’t commit. It was essential I focused on that.

  Pullen felt in his pocket and pulled out an old-style tape recorder. Was that budget cuts or was he telling me he was an old-style gumshoe, a detective who would nose his way to the truth through thinking about clues, motives, coincidences, without any help from new-fangled technology? He laboriously adjusted the microphone so it was pointing towards me and clicked the recorder to ‘record’. He started by repeating the questions he’d asked me at home. Why did I think Ms Lyall had sent Ed flowers?

  ‘I can only assume because my husband had helped her by fixing her plumbing on the morning after he’d stayed at her flat and she was kind enough to thank him with flowers. She didn’t need to, he certainly didn’t expect it given whatever he did was pretty minor, but it seems she did. I’ve told you that.’

  ‘Mr Philips would like to hear.’

  ‘I’ve just told him.’

  I didn’t mean it to come out quite like that, so arrogant and adversarial, but it was their decision to bring me in.