‘God help us,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been secretive, God knows you have, but please tell me you’ve nothing to do with this.’
It wasn’t the display of loyalty you might have expected from a mother. Bennett and I exchanged a glance.
‘Do you think you might be willing to come to the station with us for a bit more of a chat?’ I asked Lucas.
He nodded, his pale eyes cast down, his cheeks flaming.
RACHEL
The hospital receptionist sent me to a ward in the old part of the building. I walked down a corridor that was long and square, an exercise in perspective, with a pair of double doors at the end. Rectangular strips of lighting hung from the ceiling at regular intervals, each one emitting a pale bloom of fluorescence, as if it were undernourished.
Old linoleum that was the colour of ripe cherries covered the floor, and on each side there were private rooms where patients lay. Some were propped upright, reading, or watching TV. Others were just contours under the sheets, still as a landscape, in rooms that seemed more dimly lit, as if they were advertising their role as a potential place of transition, a conduit between illness and health, or between life and death.
I saw Katrina emerge from a room at the far end of the corridor. She stepped out, then turned and closed the door gently behind her. She stood for a second or two, looking back into the room, her hand against the window. She wasn’t aware of me.
‘Katrina,’ I said. I hardly dared to look into the room, and when I did I saw that John looked barely alive. He lay on his back, his head was heavily bandaged, an oxygen mask was over his mouth and what I could see of his face was swollen and disfigured by bruising. He was connected to tubes everywhere. Two nurses were tending to him.
‘Hello,’ Katrina said softly and I was disarmed by her humility and vulnerability. Her face was taut with exhaustion and shock. She looked very, very young, just as she had at her house a few days earlier.
‘They want to do some checks,’ she said. ‘I was in the way.’
‘How is he?’
‘He has bleeding and swelling on the brain,’ she said. ‘They hope the swelling will reduce. They say he’s stable.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘Nobody can say. And nobody can say what damage it’ll leave.’
I put my hand on the glass, palm pressed against it.
‘Did you see what happened?’ she asked me.
‘Somebody threw a brick through the window and he ran out onto the street after them. He was chasing them. I didn’t see what happened after that. We found him just round the corner. He was already hurt, he was lying on the ground.’
‘The doctor said it looks as though he was kicked in the head repeatedly.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Who would do a thing like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
We stood side by side like sentries, watching him, and it was long moments before we were interrupted by brisk footsteps. It was a nurse, and the soles of her shoes squeaked on the linoleum.
She gave some leaflets to Katrina. ‘I grabbed what I could,’ she said. ‘The ward’s miles away and I got paged as soon as I got there so I hope they’re what you need.’
‘Thank you,’ said Katrina. She took the leaflets hastily, held them against her stomach. She was trying to hide them from me, but there was no point. I’d already seen enough. ‘Folic Acid’ I’d read as they were handed over, ‘An essential ingredient for making healthy babies’.
‘You need rest,’ said the nurse, ‘and you need to keep your strength up. Would you consider going home and getting some sleep? We don’t expect to see any change in him today.’
Katrina nodded, and it satisfied the nurse. ‘I’ll see you later no doubt,’ she said. She disappeared the way she’d come, still squeaking.
‘You’re pregnant,’ I said. My words sounded soft, and distant, as if they’d drifted in from elsewhere, but she heard me.
‘I didn’t want you to find out like this. I’m sorry.’
I turned away from her, and looked at John. The nurses were in conference, standing at the end of the bed, annotating his notes. He was motionless, apart from the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest under the sheet.
‘Does he know?’ I said.
‘No.’
Now I let my forehead fall gently onto the glass of the window. I wanted the cool, hard surface to counteract a spreading numbness in my head.
‘Congratulations.’ I said it flatly, and I didn’t mean it to sound hurtful, though it might have done.
‘He hasn’t coped,’ she said, indicating John. ‘This. Ben. Everything. It’s destroying him. He thinks this wouldn’t have happened if you and he had stayed together.’
I had to try very hard. The numbness was everywhere, threatening to make me callous. Something about her touched me though. It could have been her vulnerability, or perhaps the fact that she was carrying a new life.
‘John’s a good father,’ I said.
I put my hand out to touch her but the impulse died before I made contact and my arm dropped.
I turned and walked away and, as I did so, I noticed that my shoes weren’t squeaking on the floor, they were tapping, in a beat that was painfully slow. I counted my steps as I walked.
It was all I could do.
JIM
Addendum to DI James Clemo’s report for Dr Francesca Manelli.
Transcript recorded by Dr Francesca Manelli.
DI James Clemo and Dr Francesca Manelli in attendance.
Notes to indicate observations on DI Clemo’s state of mind or behaviour, where his remarks alone do not convey this, are in italics.
FM: I’m very interested in something you wrote when you described your childhood memory.
JC: Don’t put too much store in that.
FM: Do you mind if we discuss it?
JC: If you like.
FM: You said, and I’m just going to refer to it directly here, because the way you phrased it interested me. You said, ‘It was telling me that people aren’t always what they seem.’
JC: Yes.
FM: So does that mean that your father wasn’t who people thought he was?
JC: He was everything they thought he was, people respected him, you should have seen the turnout at his funeral, but he had another side too. People do.
FM: Was your father violent?
JC: He was a different generation.
FM: Meaning?
JC: They did things differently then.
FM: Including hurting his children?
JC: It was just a slap here and there. Did nobody give you a slap when you were growing up?
FM: I’d rather not comment on my upbringing.
JC: I bet they did. Everybody did it, before the internet started policing our lives. My dad was just part of his generation.
FM: What your sister saw, do you think what he was doing was legal?
JC: I don’t know.
FM: Did you ever speak to your sister about that incident?
JC: No. We weren’t close. She left home soon after that anyway.
FM: What do you think she witnessed?
JC: I’ve no idea. She was a hysterical teenage girl. She was always kicking off. You’re putting too much significance on this. I shouldn’t have written it. I only wrote it because it’s what you look for when you’re working, that person who’s not who you think they are. That was a stupid example, I’m not even sure I remember it right anyway. I was a kid.
I’m not sure I believe this, I think he’s obfuscating. I wait for him to continue, to fill in the silence.
JC: Look, I admired my dad. He had people’s respect because he’d earned it. He was one of the best detectives of his generation. Can we move on?
FM: How did he earn respect?
JC: He had a saying: ‘You can’t put the shit back in the donkey.’
FM: Meaning?
JC: Meaning you try not to fuck up, you don’t let things get out of your control.