Little Black Lies (40 page)

A window shatters as Catrin, handcuffed to the uniformed constable, follows us out. She rubs her eyes with her free hand and looks around. Her eyes settle, not on me, but on Callum. He is already in the car park, similarly restrained, standing with his minder by the police minibus. He keeps his eyes on his feet, his shoulders lifting visibly with every breath he takes.

Josh Savidge is last to leave the building. ‘Fire brigade?’ he asks.

Neil throws up his hands. ‘On its way. But guess where everyone is?’

Josh strides towards us. ‘Everyone in the bus.’ He feels in his pockets. ‘Come on. We don’t know who threw that firework and I’m not having you three out in the open.’

‘Where’re you going?’ Neil asks.

Josh doesn’t know. It’s obvious from the look on his face. ‘I’ll be on the radio,’ he tells Neil. ‘Get hold of the boss for me.’

We are dragged and coaxed on to the bus. Josh has the engine on before the rest of us are even sitting and we pull out of the car park.

‘Town hall,’ Skye suggests.

‘Bad idea,’ the constable with Callum pipes up. ‘It’ll be swarming with people tonight. You really want to throw three confessed child-killers into the mix?’

‘Holy shit.’ Josh leans on the steering wheel. We are right in the middle of the road.

‘Cathedral?’ suggests the constable cuffed to Catrin.

‘It’s locked at night,’ she says. ‘Josh, go to the Conservation. We keep a key hidden in the porch. No one will look for us there and you can hide the bus round the back.’

Josh sees some sense in this, or maybe he’s grasping at straws by this time. He releases the brake and we head towards the offices on Ross Road where Catrin works.

At the Conservation, we all file out. No one is around. Or, if they are, we can’t see them. Smoke from various bonfires has filled the atmosphere. It is as though fog has covered the whole of the Falklands and the endless fireworks sound like artillery fire.

Catrin finds the key and we all go inside. Once the doors are closed and locked, Catrin and I are uncuffed and she leads us to a conference room. It is eerily similar to the one we left behind at the police station. She pulls down the blinds and we are cut off from the world.

Callum isn’t released from his restraints. The four officers are taking no chances with a fourteen-stone former soldier. They lead him to the head of the conference table and he sits, separate from the rest of us.

‘What now?’ He still can’t look anyone in the eye, least of all me. ‘What happens next?’

What happens next is that we argue. Josh insists we wait for Stopford, for others to join us. Procedure has to be followed, he says, and we three suspects need to be interviewed separately.

Catrin pitches in, arguing that it will take too long for Stopford to get here, for him to be brought up to speed. ‘And he’s not exactly quick off the mark,’ she reminds them. ‘Splitting us up is stupid,’ she says. ‘Every time one of us says something, you’ll have to double-check it with the others. We’ll be here all night. And while we’re faffing around, Peter is out there.’

It becomes a mantra for Catrin. Every time she presses urgency upon us, she reminds us that Peter is out there, waiting for us to find him. I’m sure if I weren’t here, someone would point out that Peter is dead, and that a few hours will hardly make much difference. But I am and they don’t.

‘We’ll never secure a conviction if we mess up the interview,’ Skye warns Josh.

‘He’s confessed,’ one of the constables says. ‘The conviction is a done deal.’

‘Yeah, well I’ve had three bloody confessions in one evening,’ snaps Josh. ‘Forgive me if I can’t take them seriously any more.’

For nearly ten minutes Catrin argues, with me joining in occasionally. Josh wants backup, but his attempts to get information out of Neil back at the station come to nothing. The desk sergeant’s priority, understandably, is to stop the building burning down. Callum appears almost to have gone into a trance. Eventually, with misgivings that are practically etched on his eyeballs, Josh agrees. He wants the truth as much as anyone.

Catrin finds a tape recorder. It’s checked and switched on, we all give our names for the record, Callum last of all.

He is redder in the face than normal. He has the sort of fair skin through which every emotion he’s feeling shines. He is breathing heavily, but otherwise seems calm enough. Until you look at his hands, clenched tightly behind his back. Those hands cannot stop moving.

Josh has taken a chair at the foot of the table, opposite Callum. Ten minutes to eleven. It is completely dark outside.

‘Tell us what happened on the afternoon of November the third,’ Josh begins. ‘The afternoon Peter Grimwood went missing.’

Callum swallows. ‘I was worried about Catrin.’ He doesn’t look at her, although she’s barely taken her eyes off him since we entered the room. ‘I knew she’d seen her photograph in the
Daily Mirror.
I knew she’d be upset. I wanted to find her, make sure she was OK.’

He glances right, meets her eyes for a second. She seems on the point of speaking, then shakes her head.

‘I followed her in my car.’ His eyes flick in my direction. ‘Up towards your place, Rachel. I didn’t think she should be on her own.’

‘What time was this?’ asks Josh.

‘A few minutes before four, I think. I know it was starting to go dark.’ He looks at Catrin as though for confirmation. She seems bewildered. Catrin, who kept an icy calm all the time I was confessing to killing my own child, has gone to pieces now that Callum has started speaking.

‘OK, carry on, please.’

‘I shouldn’t have been driving. I could feel an attack coming on.’

‘An attack?’

‘A blackout. No, that’s not quite right, I’m not epileptic or anything, but I have episodes.’

Around the room, faces are puzzled.

‘I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. I have flashbacks to what happened in the conflict. They can last for several hours, and afterwards I remember practically nothing about where I was or what I did.’

Around the table light is dawning. We’ve all heard of PTSD.

‘Can anyone corroborate these flashbacks?’

‘Dr Pirrus. I’ve been seeing her for a couple of years now. And Catrin. I nearly strangled her a few nights ago.’

At the mention of flashbacks, Catrin’s head dropped into her hands. She peers at him now, over the top of her fingers. ‘You didn’t hurt me. Not really. I hurt you much more.’

His eyes soften. ‘You don’t take shit from anyone. But imagine if I got hold of a kid…’

Alarmed glances flicker my way. I concentrate on breathing in, breathing out, knowing that if I show signs of being too upset, they’ll remove me from the room. I look at a spot on the wall, behind Catrin’s head. I try not to look at Callum, try not to think of those strong hands on my child.

‘OK, so you were driving along the Airport Road after Catrin, and you could feel an attack coming on?’

‘That’s right. But before I got to the Grimwood house, before I could even see it, Catrin’s Land Rover came charging back down the road again. I’m not sure she saw me, although she practically drove through the ditch to get past me. She sped off, leaving me facing the wrong way.’

‘I saw you,’ Catrin says.

‘I was half tempted to go home, leave you to it.’ He’s talking directly to her now. ‘Then I realized you were probably heading for the boat, and that didn’t feel like a good idea. So I carried on up the road, meaning to turn round and follow you to the harbour.’

‘A few minutes before four,’ Josh says. ‘Catrin has just put the little boy back in the garden, Rachel has seen her from the window and is running down the stairs. Carry on, please.’

‘I’m driving too fast at this stage. I’m worried about Catrin, and I’m slipping.’

‘Slipping?’ Skye this time.

‘Losing my grip. Feeling the flashback taking over.’

‘Almost four o’clock. You must have reached the house by now?’

Almost four o’clock. Callum is at the house and I’m – where? Pulling on shoes? No, I was barefoot when I ran outside that day.

‘I reached the house.’ Callum is continuing with his story. ‘Driving far too fast. Not concentrating. Peter had got into the road again. I hit him, head on. He flew up, hit the bonnet, the windscreen and then disappeared under the wheels.’

Catrin’s white face looks from Callum, to me, and back again. I don’t react. I can’t. I’m thinking,
that was quick then.
He wouldn’t have been afraid. He didn’t suffer. He probably didn’t even feel much pain. I can keep telling myself that, can’t I? There are worse ways, surely, for a little boy to die.

Callum is still talking. ‘I stopped the car, of course. I got out, but the boy was dead. I could tell straight away. If he hadn’t been, I’d have done something, called someone, I know I would. But I’ve seen enough corpses to know when someone is beyond help.’

Killed outright. If he’s going to be dead, that’s the best way, isn’t it? I realize that Skye is holding my hand. I squeeze hers, to let her know I’m grateful.

‘What did you do with him?’ asks Josh.

Callum isn’t looking at anyone as he goes on with his story. ‘Picked him up, wrapped him in a blanket from my car and put him in the gun case in the back. Then I turned round and drove back down the hill. I think I went to the harbour, still looking for Catrin, but I’m not sure about that bit.’

Exactly what I claimed I’d done. In my stupid, fabricated story, I said I put him in the boot of my car. I’m paying for that now.

‘You’re not sure about that bit?’ Skye has let my hand go. ‘You remember the accident clearly, but you don’t remember what you did immediately afterwards?’

‘Not exactly.’ He takes a deep breath, ready to try again.

‘You said a few seconds ago that you remember very little about what you do when you have a flashback,’ Skye says. ‘Just images of the conflict, you said. And yet you remember hitting Peter and putting his body in your boot?’

‘You’re going to have to hear me out, guys.’

Josh clears his throat. ‘Carry on, Callum. Let him go with it, Skye.’

‘I disposed of his body later that day,’ Callum says. ‘I’m not sure about the exact time, it all gets a bit hazy, but I know I drove up to the cliffs above Port Pleasant.’

Catrin’s head lifts, like a dog with a scent.

‘I left the road, drove as close to the edge as I could, then took Peter out of the car. I threw him over the cliff.’

Skye’s hand grabs mine again. It makes no difference, I’m telling myself. He was past being afraid by then. Past being hurt.

‘Sarge, I think I should take Rachel outside.’

‘I’m fine,’ I say, although I’m squeezing her hand so tightly I doubt she is. ‘Thank you, Skye, but I’m fine. Carry on please.’

‘Did you see him reach the bottom?’ asks Josh, after a worried glance at me.

Callum shakes his head. ‘I didn’t look. I think the tide was in. I would have assumed the water would take him away.’

I wonder if I’ve blacked out. I can see nothing. After a moment, I realize I’ve closed my eyes.

‘Why didn’t you say anything before?’ asks Josh. ‘Why come in now?’

‘Because I remembered none of it. I had no idea until I saw the footprint on your system at the station.’

‘Hang on, hang on. Footprint?’

They are just voices now, swirling around in the darkness.

‘I went to the police station earlier today. There were a couple of officers in the back room but they had to attend to something and I was left alone. I looked on your computer, Skye, and found the footprint you’d lifted from outside Rachel’s house. I recognized it immediately as mine. But I’d only been wearing those boots the afternoon Peter disappeared, so that meant I had to have got out of the car, even though I couldn’t remember doing it.’

I have a sense of heads nodding, following the argument.

‘When I saw that print, I knew I must have killed Peter that day, and blanked it from my mind. I went straight outside to my car, fully expecting to find him in the lock-up box. He wasn’t, of course, and neither was the blanket.’

No, he was lying on the beach, broken by rocks. Oh God, what if he wasn’t dead? What if he was clinging to life down there, crying for – not me, he wouldn’t cry for me.

‘Rachel, are you OK?’

Skye’s question brings me back to myself a little. I open my eyes and nod. The four officers are all looking at me. Catrin’s eyes are on Callum. His are staring somewhere into the middle distance.

‘I do think you should be waiting outside,’ Josh tries.

I shake my head at him. I’m going nowhere.

Something has occurred to Skye. ‘Callum, I understand why you’re worried, but there’s nothing in any of that to suggest you killed him.’

‘I agree.’ Josh isn’t looking any happier than Skye. ‘If I understand correctly, you don’t actually remember any of this, you just surmised it after you saw the footprint on our system and your missing blanket.’

Callum’s eyes are fixed on the tabletop now. I cannot share the relief of the officers around me. Neither can Catrin, I see. We both know there’s more to come.

‘I went to the beach this afternoon,’ he says. ‘The one where the child’s body would have landed.’

We wait.

‘I found him.’

I can’t help the sob slipping out. Across the table, Catrin’s face has creased in misery. I think I see her reach out towards me, but then her hand pulls back sharply.

‘You found him? He’s on the beach? He’s there still?’ Josh demands.

Callum lets his head fall forward and back up again. My baby is still on that beach. I try not to see it. Try to make my mind go blank. Those skinny little limbs, that pale, perfect skin.

Josh is giving instructions to the two constables. ‘We need to get down there. Quick as you can. Call as soon as you find him.’

‘Wait.’ Catrin’s face is as white as the walls.

Josh isn’t having it. ‘No, I’m not waiting any longer. Off you go, both of you. Let me know as soon as you find anything.’

‘Be careful,’ Catrin calls after them. ‘That cliff is steep enough in the daylight. Take good torches and watch your step.’

The second the door slams behind them she turns to Callum. ‘What did you see, on the beach? Tell me exactly what you saw.’