The eyebrows went up a notch.
‘But I did see his wife.’
‘His wife? Your mother.’
‘Not my mother, no, his wife.’
‘But you did not see your father.’
‘No.’
‘And you did see your father’s wife — not your mother — and she will confirm that you were there for the duration?’
‘No.’ He put his thumbs on his temples and pushed his fingers into his forehead, his eyes closed. ‘I stopped off at a friend’s place on the way there and on the way back.’
‘Your friend’s number?’
‘I don’t have that either.’
‘You don’t have that either. Close friends, are you?’
‘We’re not really friends.’
The officer made no comment, merely closed his eyes a second and opened them again. He disappeared off into another room shaking his head. Frank tapped his fingernails on the vinyl wood covering of the table. There were arrangements of coffee rings over the surface, playful brown bubbles. His heart was creaky in his chest. He could sleep, he could just fuck the lot of them and put his head on the table and give himself one big deep sleep.
The policeman was gone a long time, or ten minutes, it was hard to tell which. When he returned it was with his eyebrows set in a straight line. He looked at Frank’s forehead, not his eyes. He said, ‘Can you follow me, Mr Collard?’
Frank stood and walked quickly behind him, anxious to get things moving. Out of the interview room, Linus sat holding a paper cone of water. He nodded and Frank nodded back.
‘Mr Collard, I am placing you under arrest,’ the officer said.
‘What?’ Sand began again to be tipped into his belly. ‘On what grounds?’
‘For suspicion of the murder of Sal Haydon and Joyce Mackelly.’
‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘I suspect you have, which is why I am arresting you for suspicion of murder, not for murder.’
‘You can’t arrest me for going away for three days.’
The officer sighed. ‘I don’t know what small-town movies you might have seen, champ, but we’re not going to tie you to a barrel and piss on you.’
‘Did you ring my father?’
‘We did and there was no answer.’
It occurred to him that it was Sunday. ‘They’re at church — look, they’re probably at church, they’re very religious.’
He gave Frank a smile that was not friendly. ‘Well, if they get back from “church” and if we get an answer and it’s the answer we’re looking for, you can go. For now you are under arrest.’
Linus shrugged. ‘Just go with it, mate,’ he said. ‘You can always get unarrested later on.’
‘Listen to your friend there,’ said the policeman as he placed a hand gently between Frank’s shoulder blades and guided him into another room.
So he sat on the bed in a cell, which turned out to be pretty much just an office with a lock on the door and a bucket to pee into.
Everything stopped and he was close to vomiting and made it to the piss bucket just in time. It wasn’t until the smell of the booze and bile of the past few days had poisoned the air in the room that he remembered Sal, and that she was gone. That the reason he was sitting in a room, puking into a bucket, was that the general opinion was that he had done to Sal whatever it was that had been done to the Mackelly girl to make her end up as just a piece of shrapnel lying in the sand.
Sal was gone. She was small and angry and weird, and she was not there any more. He ran his hands over his face again and again. Time passed and he stayed still, trying to keep what was inside him from touching the walls of his body, trying to keep it cocooned and not thinking. But it reared again and again, Sal’s fringe in her eyes, the grub of her knees. There was no way of telling the time, he had no watch, there was no clock in the cell and no window, just a greenish electric light, like the kind you’d get in a school hallway. He watched the corners of the room for shadows but there were none. He wanted Lucy’s fingers in his hair, the way she did when he was upset, the way it gave him that guilty pleasure of feeling like a small boy.
The door opened. Bob came in. He held his fists at his sides as rocks. His skin was pale and green like he’d been pumped full of bad water. The rims of his eyes bled. There was an open cut at the side of his neck, which stained his shirt brown.
Frank didn’t stand up. He didn’t know if he could. He wondered if he might be sick again. Bob closed the door behind him. It was locked by someone outside. Bob looked at him, his head raised. Setting himself thickly against the door, he showed a surprising amount of muscle.
‘They got through to someone. Someone said you were there.’
Frank stayed still, not feeling any relief somehow. ‘I didn’t take her, mate,’ he said softly.
Bob nodded. ‘Someone did.’ He looked out of the window at the sun. ‘They were going to let me in here even if your alibi didn’t check out.’ He spoke slowly, like he might have just woken up. ‘I didn’t come here to apologise, I came here to tear you open.’ Bob looked sharply at him, the threat of violence in his bottom lip. ‘We’ve looked for three days non-stop. It’s been on the news — we had to do an interview. Vick had to. I couldn’t… you know that parents are the first suspects. Especially if they’ve had one die on them before.’
‘I’m sorry, mate.’
‘It’s like she was just picked up and taken away. It makes sense that you did something.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Why take your machete with you? Why leave without telling anyone, why leave in such a rush? You know, after you left we realised we don’t know a thing about you — we didn’t know how to find anyone who knows you. All I do know is you used to beat up your girlfriend.’
Despite everything, the words still made Frank’s face go numb. ‘You don’t have to explain yourself, mate. It’s understandable. You’re upset.’
‘I’m not explaining myself, Frank. I’m convincing myself that you didn’t do it, so that I don’t come over there and tear your throat out.’ Outside someone coughed and it occurred to Frank that they might be listening in. Bob sniffed hard. ‘But I do. I believe you. It doesn’t help me, doesn’t make the slightest difference to my situation. But I believe you.’ He turned round and rested his head on the door.
‘I didn’t take the knife with me.’ Frank’s voice was sandy. ‘It was right outside in the stump when I left.’
Bob lifted his head. ‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘It means someone else has taken it.’
‘Who?’ Bob’s eyes opened a fraction wider.
‘Maybe Sal took it with her?’
Bob looked blank.
‘There’s no reason to think that something bad has happened to her. She might have just run off. She’s into all this survival stuff. How to make a fire, catch food, bivouacs. It’s all she talks about.’
Bob was silent; as though he hadn’t heard, then he inhaled deeply again through his nose, keeping his eyes on the fluorescent light with all the shapes of dead flies in it. ‘I don’t know her very well.’
‘Sal?’
‘After Emmy died. I’ve just been shit.’
‘Well, a bloke could understand that.’
‘A seven-year-old can’t. Why should she understand it? Christ, if anything’s happened to her. If some bastard’s touched her… I had this idea you’d buried her in the vegetables. I dug in there looking for her, while the police were off somewhere. Every time I hit a bloody potato I thought, Jesus, there she is.’ Bob looked at him and shook his head.
‘Let me help you look.’
In the car Frank was put through the trauma of having to smell Bob next to him. A mix of sweat, rum and sick, but then he didn’t reckon he’d be smelling that much better. Through Bob’s gaping shirt he could see dark lines on the skin of his chest, like he’d pressed himself to a large griddle pan.