by Jessica Moor
‘You can lead,’ he said to Brookes. ‘I’ll step in if it’s going off track. It’ll be less intimidating coming from a junior officer.’
‘Are we questioning him, or not?’
‘Not quite. Just leaning.’
They went into the room. Brookes was holding Noah’s written statement in his hand.
‘How’s it going, Noah?’ Whitworth said jovially. He must have overdone it a bit, because Noah looked alarmed.
‘Shouldn’t I get a lawyer?’ Noah said uncertainly. ‘If you’re interrogating me?’
Whitworth felt slightly touched at Noah’s faith in his own honesty.
‘We aren’t interrogating you, mate. Like we’ve said, this isn’t a murder investigation.’
‘But you think I did something,’ Noah said miserably. ‘I didn’t. I was in Glasgow. I was hammered. I wasn’t here.’
‘The more you tell us the truth, the more we can help you,’ Brookes said. He was standing above Noah. Whitworth could see the tableau of the interrogation as clearly as if it had been painted on to a canvas. Even the lighting was melodramatic – Brookes had turned off most of the main lights and kept on only the one directly above, casting his own face half in shadow and giving both men a devilish look. That was the idea, Whitworth supposed.
‘Why didn’t you report her missing, Noah? Eh? What was that all about?’
‘I wasn’t here.’
‘And you don’t usually talk to her when you’re away?’
‘She wasn’t answering her phone.’
‘So what?’ Something changed just a little in Brookes’s voice. ‘So you don’t make an effort to work out what’s happened to her? You weren’t worried? You didn’t ring around? You didn’t come back?’
Noah’s head was bent. Whitworth heard the noises before they assembled themselves into words, understood from them only the overwhelming sense of defeat, of what it meant when even your words were broken.
‘I thought she’d left me.’
‘And you didn’t find out for sure?’
‘Katie was like that. She didn’t do confrontation. She just closed down. You could see her working out where the exit was, but she never said anything.’
Whitworth felt a strange jolt. Perhaps it was just surprise at hearing what felt like something reasonably perceptive emerging from Noah’s mouth; perhaps it was just the recognition of something that he’d seen before. Not in his own wife, nor even in his mother. It was something he’d known in himself, from long ago, before he’d become the man he was now.
His brother had lashed out once at his dad, hit him, and hadn’t even been hit back. Whitworth would never forget the fury on Andrew’s face when his dad had left the room, the gradual realization that the fist laid on his father hadn’t made him feel a damn jot better.
But that had never been Whitworth’s way. He’d never said anything. He’d pacified, acquiesced, taken any excuse he could find to simultaneously make himself useful and leave the room.
It was only now that he was starting to understand his father, to understand how readily available that endless spring of anger was to him, too. He had assumed that it must simply be mingled with the blood. That he was, whether he liked it or not, from one of those kinds of families. That all he could offer was the strength to shield his daughter from it. If there was that rage in him, then the spring of it was so far below underground, completely hidden from daylight, and he was determined to always keep it that way. That way, there was never the ugliness of that scene, of Dad standing over Mum with a fist that had been raised and would be raised again.
That was something. As a father, that was something.
‘So you didn’t find out where she was?’
Back in the room, Whitworth. Set a good example.
‘If she wanted to go, then I’d want her to go, too. No sense in her staying where she didn’t want to be.’
Whitworth saw that Brookes was throwing him a subtle glance, and he nodded. Time to deploy their one trick card.
‘We’ve got reason to believe that Katie was living under a false identity.’
Noah looked prosaically baffled, as if he’d been given incorrect change in a shop.
‘A false identity?’ His voice was the voice of someone who’d never seen a lie through in his life, who wouldn’t know how. ‘I don’t . . . I don’t really know what you mean by that.’
‘I mean her name, Noah.’ Brookes leaned closer. ‘Did she ever say anything to you about using a false name? Did you ever see any documentation under a different name? Anything at all?’
‘No. No. It was real. She was real. You’ve made a mistake, I’m sure of it.’ Noah looked up. His face was apologetic. ‘Look, I’m really sorry, and I want to help. But I feel like maybe I ought to have a lawyer here, if you’re going to keep asking me questions.’
* * *
• • •
Whitworth’s inward swearing didn’t match Brookes’s when they returned to the corridor.
‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
‘All right, Brookes. You did a good job.’
‘Could do plenty more with that one, if you’d let me. Before you let him cry for his lawyer.’
‘Steady on.’ No point in getting angry, Whitworth knew. But boundaries mattered. Rank mattered.
Brookes took a deep breath, and in a remarkably short time he seemed to have regained his composure.
Whitworth was impressed, truth be told. He knew Brookes well enough to know that this loss of cool wasn’t a habit, but you had to expect it from time to time from a young guy who was hungry for his first big win.
‘Look how shifty he was,’ Brookes continued, his face intently focused. ‘He thought she was going to leave him. He knew she was going to leave him all alone and he’d do anything to stop her. I bet you anything.’
Something about the scenario sounded convincing. The human drama. The breathtaking pettiness, maybe.
‘What about the name, though?’ Whitworth frowned, folding his arms. ‘I believed him about the name, didn’t you?’
‘I did,’ Brookes said, seeming to catch himself slightly. ‘I . . . yeah, no, you’re right. I did.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe the name thing’s a distraction. Maybe it’s just a database error. Maybe that really was her name. We don’t know.’
Whitworth thought of that world of names and faces which existed in the ether of a computer. Could there have been a mistake? Why the hell not? He didn’t trust all that stuff, anyway. The idea that anyone was just a few clicks away from being found and pinned down was supposed to be a boon to police officers, but the truth was that it made him shiver.
‘Look. You may well be right. Could be that your instinct’s sharper than mine and he is hiding something. Wouldn’t be the first guy to kill his girlfriend. But . . . look.’ Whitworth thought back to the CCTV from Amir’s.
He thought of Khan. Do I need to come in, DS Whitworth?
He put his hand on Brookes’s shoulder. ‘Let’s at least follow up the one solid lead we actually have. Before we go accusing a perfectly nice lad of murdering his girlfriend just because the statistics say there’s a chance of it. People aren’t numbers. It’s more complicated than that.’
21.
The refuge’s large garden was chilly in February. But, Sonia reminded herself, it was good for the boys to have somewhere to run around.
She was cold, even in her puffa coat. She scrunched herself into the corner of the grey wooden bench and let her shoulders cave in, screwing up her face as if she might trap a little bit of warmth into its creases.
‘Mum. Watch us! Mum!’
The boys seemed to be everywhere at once: leaping off the mossy slide, trampling over what Val always optimistically referred to as the ‘vegetable patch’, churning what was left of the lawn deeper into the mud with their trainers.
Lewis and Danny had everything that she loved about David in them, all his dizzying qualities. Whatever it was that David had that could make Sonia – shy-girl Sonia, always at the edge of a party – dance around the kitchen, singing at the top of her lungs – they had it, too. In their faces she saw the same devotion as when he told her that he had never met another woman like her, that she was irreplaceable.
‘I’ll die if you don’t marry me,’ he said. That was how he proposed, and how Sonia recounted it for years, a broad smile on her lips at the memory.
I’ll die if you leave me.
Sonia had repeated those words to Val on the day she arrived at the refuge.
Sonia had brought David home when she was eighteen and had been unable to suppress her proud grin. Her mum’s voice, usually free of all restraint, had been so careful when she said she hoped Sonia would be happy. Her voice was the same when Sonia had produced those two caramel-coloured babies with their silky mess of black curls and their beautiful, crumpled little faces. She had touched these babies cautiously, with just the tips of her fingers. It wasn’t that there was no love in her touch, just that there was something else as well.
David told her to take no notice of her mother. They visited less and less.
The boys were charmers; they could get away with anything. They had a silly side that was more than just being kids, the kind of joy in life that made you feel that all the colours were turned up.
They adored her just as much as their dad did, burying their faces into the front of her sweater the same way he did when he was asking forgiveness.
They even had the same quick little fists that would snap out and strike her in moments of frustration.
‘Watch us!’
The deflated tennis ball hit Sonia right in the chest, on a rib that wore the memory of being cracked. She winced, but drew her face into a smile when she saw the ease drain out of Lewis’s face.
‘Here you go!’ she called, throwing the ball back to him. Its arc through the air was distorted by its dented shape and it sliced away from him.
They started knocking it back and forth between them. Thud. Thud. Thud.
She watched as their faces relaxed and realized that she was tapping out the rhythmic thud of the broken ball on her own arm. Trying to convince her body to exist in perfect sympathy with theirs once again.
* * *
• • •
The detectives hadn’t bothered interviewing her. Not properly, anyway. The younger one had sort of brushed against a few questions without seeming very interested in the answers. He hadn’t wanted her analysis of Katie or what she had or hadn’t been going through. That was – well, not fine, but not unexpected.
‘One of the ladies mentioned something about seeing people hanging around,’ the cop said casually. ‘You don’t know anything about that, do you?’
Sonia shrugged. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen men,’ she said. ‘They’re half the world’s population, right?’
The detective laughed. ‘Right, point taken.’ But then he looked serious again. ‘But nothing that’s worried you?’
‘No,’ Sonia said firmly. She didn’t have time for this, not in her life, and definitely not in her mind. There was no time to think about anything other than her boys, and there was certainly no time for chasing ghosts.
He’d played footie with the boys for a bit, though. She had seen the adoration blossoming on their faces but pushed back the feeling. Now wasn’t then, and the cop wasn’t David.
Her analysis, for what it was worth, was that it was all a hateful, fucking waste. That it had been Katie who’d walked towards them when she’d stood waiting at the pillar box with a small hand in each of hers and her throat turned to concrete. Katie who’d made her a cup of tea at the kitchen table, Katie who had seen the shine of her eyes and hurried the boys off to sit down in front of a DVD.
In that sense, she resented Katie for dying. God knows Sonia’d had the idea of killing herself, too, but the idea had never taken flight in her head; it was always tied down by reality. For a mother, suicide isn’t on the roster of options.
She wasn’t looking forward to finding a way of telling her boys that Katie was dead, a way of pre-digesting it for them like a mother bird so that she could spit it out into easy sense. Besides, she had started to realize, she always somehow ended up telling her boys the wrong thing.
She’d have to find a way to explain that in court, too, to make enough sense of it that the judge could gobble it all up without needing to chew too much.
‘Why can’t you both just say sorry to each other? It doesn’t matter who started it.’
There was her boy, her little Lewis, wheeling out his best six-year-old morality. ‘You need to try and see each other’s side of the story.’
If time had slowed down to allow it, and if Sonia’s mouth hadn’t been too swollen to speak, she would have praised her boy. Because he was right, of course. There were things more important than being right, that was what she had tried to teach him. Things like being kind and gentle and honest and brave.
But she regretted teaching him about bravery. She regretted telling him that if he saw something that wasn’t fair, he needed to stand up to it. Because now his small body was between Sonia and the fist. The fist continued towards Sonia, but the impact absorbed into the body of her boy.
Lewis didn’t have her solidity. When David punched Sonia, her flesh would yield a little, absorb and accept the blow. She might be flung back, but she wouldn’t be conquered by it.
But when David hit Lewis, his body was no match for the force that confronted it. He seemed to fly through the air.
There was a beat. A silence. A moment when no one moved.
Then Sonia flung herself at David in a way that she had never moved before, didn’t even know that she was capable of moving. Her nails seemed to grow into talons as she scratched at his face. She didn’t even recognize the noises that were coming out of her. It was what it meant to be human, mother, woman, to tear him to pieces.
If she could have killed him, she would have.
A neighbour called the police. They pulled her off him and held her down and ground her face into the floor and snatched her boys away, as if she were the monster.
Perhaps she was. Because, in that hanging moment when no one moved, Sonia had looked into the future and seen a life in which the boys carried bruises on their skin, and she smiled and lied and told them that Daddy loved them really.
And that was far too easy to believe.
* * *
• • •
‘All right, Sonia?’
Sonia turned to see Val coming through the sliding doors in a flurry of fussy little movements. Sonia moved her mouth into a smile and slid over on the grubby wooden bench. She imagined the line of dark grime carving into the seat of her jeans.
‘Lovely to see them enjoying themselves,’ Val said, nodding towards the boys and plumping down heavily on the bench. Sonia could hear the pacification in Val’s voice, and something else as well, something that had more of a systematic reek to it.
Lovely to see they’re not broken beyond repair.
Sonia wanted to say something sarcastic, but she was so used to controlling the impulse, for the boys’ sake, that it took little effort to squash it back.
‘Yeah,’ she said instead. ‘Yeah, they’re doing well.’
‘Good.’ Val settled back into herself, looking like she was casting around for a tactful way to change the subject. Then, ‘Have the police interviewed you yet?’
Sonia frowned. ‘Yeah, of course. Way back when he was arrested. Why, is there supposed to be another one? Nobody told me about . . .’
Val’s cheeks reddened slightly. ‘Oh, no, sorry, Sonia. I didn’t mean about that. I mean . . .’ She pointed one scarlet-tipped, pudgy finger towards the refuge. ‘I mean these police. I mean about K
atie.’
‘Oh.’ Sonia folded her arms and crossed her legs, knowing that the move made her look confrontational, even though she was only trying to stop her embarrassment and disappointment from leaking out of her and getting all over Val. ‘Oh, yeah. For about two minutes.’
‘Two minutes?’
Danny kicked the tennis ball hard towards them. It hit Val square in the shin, leaving a dusty brown mark on her black polyester trouser leg. ‘Oh . . . ow!’
Her boy froze.
‘Don’t worry, Lewis,’ Val added hastily. ‘No harm done.’ She gave a wide, wide smile. Sonia could see that it wasn’t a real smile, but that wasn’t the point. They both knew that.
Gradually, Danny’s body defossilized.
‘Sorry,’ he said, his voice uncertain at first.
‘Good boy,’ Sonia said. ‘Well done for saying sorry.’
‘No harm done,’ Val said again, and, finally relaxing, Danny’s movements became fluid again and he sped off across the grass.
‘Sorry, Sonia,’ Val resumed. ‘Did you say two minutes?’
‘If that,’ Sonia replied, thinking back to her talk with the younger detective.
He’d just asked her to confirm the last time she’d spoken to Katie. When she’d said she didn’t remember for sure, but it hadn’t been on the day Katie died, he hadn’t really pushed the matter.
Sonia had been slightly surprised by that – in her head, she had been practising her soft, gentle voice and squaring up for a fight. She had felt sad for him. That the death of a young girl was clearly routine for him, young as he was.
She had said as much. He had smiled and said it was okay, but Sonia could see for herself that it wasn’t.
The kindness, the caring, had been instinctive for her, a behaviour learned from years of broadening her shoulders in accordance with expectations. For a minute, in his plain clothes, he’d been just a boy, not a cop.