Burnt Paper Sky (30 page)

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.

My cab driver on the way home didn’t want to talk any more than I did and I was grateful for that. I sat noiseless and motionless in a corner of the back seat, seeing John’s still body and his disfigured face, thinking about his new child.

The cabbie dropped me off around the front and a uniformed police officer clambered stiffly out of his squad car to ensure that I got in safely.

Inside the house, a silence deeper than any I’d ever experienced before. A void where everything that I’d ever lived for should have been.

A buzz from my phone was a pull back to reality. A text from Laura:

I deleted it, appalled by it, by her self-absorption.

There was another text, which I hadn’t seen earlier, from Nicky:

How to reply? Faced with a decision about what to tell her, and how to tell her, I bottled. Trust is like that. Once you lose it, you begin to adjust your attitudes towards people, you put up guards, and filter the information you want them to know.

I wasn’t prepared to actively hide things from Nicky, or to be completely open with her, as I might have been three days ago. So I didn’t reply. She’d said she would call me, and I decided I would tell her everything then.

There was nothing from the police. Not a word. Part of me wanted to phone them, to ask what they’d thought of the schoolbooks, but the night’s events seemed to have raked out of me any last bits of fight that I might have had left.

They’ll phone me if there’s news, I thought, but as I thought it, it felt somehow defeatist, as if I was letting hope ebb away.

I went to Skittle, who was in his bed. I sank to the floor beside him and sat there, my hand in his fur. I shut my eyes, and let my head fall back against the wall behind me and I allowed myself to imagine a reunion with Ben. The feel of him in my arms, the expression in his eyes, the scent of his hair, the sound of his voice, the silky perfection of the moment I’d been longing for all week, and as I imagined it I wept quiet hot tears that felt as though they’d never stop.

We had the TA in an interview room at Kenneth Steele House.

His mother, her face drained of colour, had spoken to him quietly and fiercely in the hallway of their home, telling him that she’d call their family solicitor, while he shouted at her that she always thought the worst of him, that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he wasn’t being arrested.

‘Not yet,’ Bennett had muttered under his breath. ‘But it won’t be long, sonny boy.’

He’d come with us voluntarily, but odds were that we weren’t going to let him leave. We knew that, but he didn’t yet. He sat slumped in a chair looking like a bad boy. His chin was at a defiant tilt, and his pupils were pinpricks swimming in irises that were the palest blue.

We had enough to arrest him, but we were debating when to do that, because, as soon as we did, the clock would start ticking until the deadline to release him, unless we could come up with evidence or a confession.

Fraser’s view was simple: ‘I think we should caution him now.’

‘He’s come in of his own volition.’

‘I don’t want him talking when he’s not under caution and us not being able to use it in court later.’

‘Solicitor will tell him to keep schtum.’

‘It’s a risk that I think we’re going to have to take. Otherwise he could walk out of here and do a disappearing act. What’s this I hear about an Anderson shelter in the garden?’

‘Empty, boss, apart from a lawnmower and some bags of compost.’

‘What do you reckon?’

‘He was near the scene, he’s lied to us, he knows Ben well, and we’ve got the schoolbooks.’

‘Motive?’

‘Don’t know enough about him yet.’

‘What’s the mother like?’

‘Angry with him.’

‘Get Bennett to caution him, and get her in for an interview while we’re waiting for his brief. And is somebody getting hold of his lying girlfriend?’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘Good work, Jim.’

I had a spring in my step as I went back to the incident room. It might have been adrenalin fuelled, but that was good enough for me. I wanted to be thoroughly prepared for the interview, not one little pebble left unturned. I knew the real work started now because we only had twenty-four hours to charge him.

I sat down at my desk and got on with reading all the background we had on Lucas Grantham. I thought back to when I’d first met him at the school, the way he’d seemed gormless, a bit pathetic. I’d had no inkling then that he’d been lying to us, though Woodley had thought he was a bit shifty. I didn’t want to think I’d missed something I should have noticed.

But I never got to finish my research, because we had another turn-up. Nicky Forbes’s husband arrived. Unexpectedly. Asking for me.

Simon Forbes was as posh as I might have expected. I’d Googled his wine company the day before. It was high end, the website slick and impressive, and he was obviously very well connected. He was a tall bear of a man, with very dark hair that was greying at the temples and red veins on his nose, which probably came from years of wine tasting. He was dressed in corduroy trousers, a checked shirt and a tweed jacket, the kind of thing that people wore at the country shows my mum used to take us to when we were growing up.

‘It’s very kind of you to come in,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t necessary.’

I’d found somewhere to take him and we’d just sat down opposite one another.

‘What I have to tell you might be best said face to face,’ he said. ‘It’s about my wife, but it’s a very delicate situation because I have four daughters to consider.’

There was a quality of warmth about him that I hadn’t anticipated. He had a kind, patient manner that was appealing, even under the circumstances.

‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that you might have been under the impression that my wife was living at our family home in Salisbury?’

‘Entirely under that impression, because that’s what Mrs Forbes informed us.’

‘I’m afraid that she hasn’t been living at that address for just over a month. She moved out at the end of September.’

He spoke quietly and clearly while my mind frantically tried to process what this meant.

‘Do you know where your wife moved to?’

‘She’s living in the cottage where she grew up. It’s in the Pewsey Vale, about a forty-five-minute drive north of Salisbury.’

‘Did your daughters go with her?’

I wondered if this had been an acrimonious separation, if he was here to cast blame on a wife he loathed, to muddy the waters around her in advance of a custody dispute.

‘No. Nicky didn’t just leave me; she left all of us.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘The specific occasion was –’ he cleared this throat – ‘the specific catalyst for her to actually pack her bags and leave was an argument we had.’

‘What did you argue about?’

‘It’s a bit complicated, but we had recently talked about having another child.’

‘A fifth child?’

His reply bounced off my surprise.

‘Yes. I’m aware that some people might think that five children is an excessive number, but Nicky wanted to try again, and I’d previously agreed to support her wish, happily I might say, because of something she’d suffered. I felt I should support her. Do I need to explain about her background?’

‘We know about that.’

‘So you understand she has a longing for a son. To replace Charlie.’

Those words felt solid to me, like a remnant jettisoned from an explosion, a twisted shard of metal, turning in mid-air, glinting.

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You said you’d
previously
agreed to having another child, so had something changed? Did you no longer feel that way?’

He looked like a man who was having to haul up strength from a great depth.

‘My wife gives the appearance of coping, always coping, she makes a career of it, but it takes its toll. She’s become very controlling of our time. That was the source of the argument. I was trying to ask her to relax, to give us space to breathe in the house. This scheduling of the girls’ time down to the last minute affects them, and affects us too. In my view, life had become a bit joyless. We had no time to do things together as a couple, or a family, ever, and I told her that I’d begun to wonder if another baby would be too much, for both of us.’

‘How did she react?’

‘Badly. Very badly. She felt that I’d betrayed her.’

‘Did she say that?’

‘She did. She freaked out, for want of a better expression. I’ve never seen her so angry, or distraught. And I’m afraid I lost my temper, I was at the end of my tether, and I told her that I thought we might need some space from each other.’

‘And how did she react?’

‘She stormed out of the room, the expression on her face was awful, and I didn’t follow her, I let her go. Grace, our second daughter, was waiting in the hall, ready to go to a riding lesson. That’s how scheduled our lives were – we barely had time for an argument! Anyway, I didn’t want to make any more of a scene in front of Grace so I called out to Nicky that I was driving Grace to her lesson, and I cooled off a bit while I was there, and I regretted some of the things I’d said, and I hoped Nicky had too, that we might discuss things more calmly that evening. But when Grace and I got home, she’d gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Completely. She’d packed a case, and driven away. She’d told our eldest daughter to look after the two little ones until I got home but didn’t tell her why. And, unfortunately, the girls saw Nicky put her suitcase in the car, and they could see that she was very upset, so when I got back they were in a bit of a state, to put it mildly. It was a terrible shock for all of us.’

‘Have you spoken to her since?’

‘We speak a lot, but it’s very frustrating. She won’t discuss the future with me. She won’t plan or meet up to talk. She just says she needs more time. I’m trying to be patient, but I’m angry about the effect it’s having on the girls. We all love her, that’s the thing, of course we do, but we can’t always be what she wants us to be.’

If I’d judged Simon Forbes harshly at first, on the basis of his website, his profession and his appearance, then I’d been a fool. This was a sensitive, intelligent man, with apparently extraordinary reserves of patience, and he’d been hurt.

I drew breath. ‘Do you think your wife is unstable?’ I asked him.

‘She’s walked away from her children. That’s not the behaviour of somebody who’s stable.’

‘Are you here because you believe that she might be responsible for what’s happened to Ben?’

The question was painful for him, he’d had to put aside his pride to come here, and tell me this stuff, and as he struggled to formulate an answer, I watched him try to put aside his love for his wife too, but he didn’t quite manage it.

‘I wouldn’t go that far, I just thought you ought to be aware of our situation. She hasn’t even told her sister.’

‘Thank you, Mr Forbes. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’

I walked him to the main entrance; it felt like the least I could do.

Outside, on the top of the steps, waxed coat done up and leather driving gloves pulled onto thick, strong-looking fingers, he spoke again.

‘I don’t know what my wife has or hasn’t done, Inspector. I can’t guess at that. I’m just telling you what I think you should know. And in return I ask that you respect our family’s dignity as much as you possibly can. I want to avoid inflicting any further pain on our daughters. Ben’s disappearance has been extremely difficult for them as it is.’

‘Have you told your sister-in-law about this?’

‘To be honest, I assumed Nicky would have told Rachel, but when I realised that wasn’t the case, I thought I would spare her this, which is why I’m here, telling you. Rachel must be going through a living hell already.’

As soon as he’d turned his back on me, I bolted back into the building and took the stairs up to the incident room three at a time.