Split Second (6 page)

He felt overloaded; the weight was crushing him, compacting his bones and the marrow within, compressing his vital organs, lungs, liver, heart.

Val was there, and the family liaison officer, Martine. Andrew’s mother offered toast and tea. Tea, he agreed, and pulled out a chair. Val had a pad of paper in front of her, a laptop open.

‘How are you?’ his mother asked.

Andrew shrugged, rubbed at his face. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t washed.

Martine explained apologetically that the investigating team needed statements from them both. She knew it was a terrible time, but it was crucial to do it as soon after the incident as possible. She could take them to the station and bring them back. Was that okay?

Outside the station, Andrew was appalled to see Jason’s photo, the one from YouTube, and the word MURDER in dense black capitals. He wanted to run, to scuttle off and burrow somewhere. He squeezed Val’s hand. The place was deserted. Martine pressed an intercom and gave her name to gain entrance, and then they all waited by the empty front desk until someone appeared. Andrew sat and watched the screen fixed high on the wall as it switched between views of the car park, which must be behind the building, the outside approach to the main entrance and the reception area itself. Showing them on the camera: Val, preoccupied, quiet, one hand supporting her head, eyes half closed; Martine, smart and trim and alert; and himself, unfamiliar, nondescript. A bloke, just some bloke.

‘Mr Barnes? Mrs Barnes?’ Introductions, handshakes, then Martine and Val went one way and a policeman called Neville Long settled Andrew in a meeting room. It was kitted out with sofas and easy chairs, rugs and coffee tables. No posters on the walls; just prints, wispy landscapes.

Neville Long was a bulky man with a full beard and large plump hands, tiny feet, Andrew noticed, really small. Small as Val’s? Jason was a 12, bigger than Andrew, who took size 10.

‘Mr Barnes.’

‘Sorry.’ Had he missed something? ‘My concentration . . .’

‘When did you last eat?’ the man asked him.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Have some tea.’

‘I don’t . . .’

‘Try.’

He went off and came back carrying a tray with two mugs of tea and a plate of mince pies.

‘Please help yourself.’ Neville Long took a mince pie, prised it out of the foil case and bit into it. Pastry crumbs scattered on the coffee table. He adjusted a file on his knee. ‘I want to take a formal witness statement, get all this down in writing. Yes?’

Andrew nodded.

‘Then we’ll look at what you can give us in the way of detailed descriptions. Perhaps you can start by telling me in your own words exactly what you saw.’

‘I was in the shower,’ he began. He felt the lump in his throat, the band tighten on his Adam’s apple. He shifted, coughed and dragged the sounds out, every sinew in his body stretched taut, his muscles rigid. His account was halting, trying to convert the slideshow in his head into phrases and sentences. ‘And then?’ the detective kept prompting. And then? And then? And then? Until he had forced Andrew out into the snow and that ghastly mess on the ground, down the street after them and back to Jason’s anguish,
I think he’s dead
, and into the living room and Jason pale, swaying, Andrew knowing he was ill, Jason falling, blood on his coat, all the way to the quiet hospital room where his son’s body was laid out.

Neville Long asked him to describe the three attackers and he did as best as he could: their clothing, height and build, colouring, features, but what he could recall seemed pitifully little.

After that he was taken through to a small office to work with the technician on the e-fit. The man navigated through the software, constantly asking Andrew to choose between different options, everything from the arc of the eyebrows to the cast of the complexion, the width of the chin to the shape of the nostrils.

Each time the technician would drag items on to the face in the centre of the screen: ‘Like this?’ he’d ask. ‘Or better like this?’ and click and drag an alternative. It reminded Andrew of the eye test at the optician’s, and like that, he often found it hard to judge which was the best version.

‘I didn’t get a very clear look,’ he kept saying, or ‘It was just a glimpse’ and ‘I honestly can’t remember.’ His head ached with the effort of concentration and there was a sickening pulse of pain in his temples and behind his eyes.

When they had finished, he was unsure whether the three pictures were a true likeness of any of the youths. The boys felt like caricatures: the round eyes of the one who’d been by the gate too bulbous, the peaky, feral face of the one he’d seen Jason shove just a lazy shorthand for his impression of the scrappy-looking lad (poor and wild), and the girl, he could barely remember anything of her beyond the coat, he didn’t even know what colour her hair was. She looked like any of a million teenage girls and the e-fit of her was as bland as a Barbie doll.

He hoped Val could remember more.

Would their parents recognize them, their friends? With dismay or disbelief or fury? He tried to imagine what that might feel like: to have a child gone so wrong, a child you were appalled by, ashamed of. All the hopes you had for them strangled, their actions violent and ugly and now made public.

Violence breeds violence. He knew that and understood that kids who ended up in serious trouble invariably had very dysfunctional backgrounds. There had been a baby in the neonatal ICU when Jason was born, in the next ventilator. No one seemed to visit the little girl, and Val heard the staff talking and pieced together the story. The father had beaten his wife so badly that she’d gone into premature labour. The baby, should she survive, was also deemed to be at risk. The abusive relationship had lasted many years; another child was already in care. The mother was being given support, but unless she agreed to leave the father, the baby would be taken into care with a view to adoption.

Val and Andrew had taken Jason home, one precious day after eight long, long weeks, and never known the baby’s fate. Such cases made the news. And now we are the news, he thought.

He looked at the e-fits. You killed my son, he accused them. And a swell of rage beat inside him, running over an ocean of sadness.

E
mma couldn’t believe what had happened. The man in the parka, who was a student, had tried to help and they’d stabbed him. Killed him! Just think if she had said something . . . And the other one, Luke, he might not make it. The police wanted people to give information, but all she saw was what happened on the bus and a bit after, and they had CCTV on the buses so they’d know all that. And they could talk to the driver, couldn’t they?

She worried about it all Saturday night and finally rang the number on the Sunday morning. She had to repeat herself three times before she was transferred to a second person. She walked about as she waited, to the window and back, the window and back. Alongside the station, trees feathered the sky, stark as woodcuts. She watched the frost steam in the pale sunshine.

She had to give her name and address and date of birth.

‘And you’re ringing in connection with the Jason Barnes inquiry?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I saw him on the bus.’

‘Can you speak up?’ said the man.

‘Sorry.’ She tried to talk more loudly, her hand gripping the phone hard, still walking to and fro. ‘He was on the bus when I was coming home, on Friday.’

‘Jason Barnes was?’

‘Yes. And these boys, and this girl, they were causing trouble . . . erm. Ganging up on this other boy, and Jason told them to stop.’

‘How many of them were there?’

‘Two boys and a girl.’ She remembered the girl, how pretty she was, and the big one’s round blue eyes. ‘Then they all got off.’

There was a pause; Emma wondered what to say. She felt a bit dizzy.

‘Did you see anything after that?’

‘Just them running after the other boy and Jason following them.’

He asked her how old they were and what they looked like and what they were wearing. She guessed they were seventeen or eighteen, a few years younger than her, and did her best to describe them.

‘Thanks. Can you hold for a minute?’

There was no on-hold music like they had at work when staff had to check records or refer to the handbook or get a supervisor for help. At work they played some classical instrumental music, quite perky. The sort of stuff that people dance to in costume dramas. Emma thought it would drive you bonkers while you were fretting about the flood damage or the boiler repair or your mother’s jade and gold necklace that had gone in the robbery and hearing this prancy music skip on and on.

All she could hear now while she waited were bits of conversation and a phone ringing and someone with a shocking cough. Then the man came back on.

‘Emma, thanks for calling. We’d like to arrange to come and get a full statement from you; we can do that at your house.’

‘I’m going away the day after tomorrow,’ Emma explained, ‘for Christmas.’

‘How about tomorrow?’

‘Yes, erm . . . it’d have to be after work.’

‘Fine, what time will you get home?’

‘About six.’

‘Shall we say six thirty?’

‘Yes.’

He thanked her again and she said goodbye and rang off. He hadn’t asked her the questions she’d been waiting for: the ones that kept buzzing in her head like fat bluebottles.
Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you do anything? Why did you just sit there and let it all happen?

‘That’s near you, isn’t it? Kingsway.’ Laura at work raised the tabloid so Emma could see the headline:
Samaritan Student Slain. Coma Boy Fights On.

Emma picked her coffee up, nodded. Felt something tighten inside. Tried to swallow. Laura looked at her. ‘What?’

Emma felt wobbly.
The Jelly
, that’s what they’d called her at school, the whole of Year 9.
Smelly Jelly.
She tried to ignore it because people said if you reacted it would get worse, but she couldn’t help it when she blushed or was unable to talk because the girls who kept slagging her off were all staring at her. Luke had tried to ignore them; he’d looked away out of the window, but they wouldn’t let him be.

Both the Kims were in the staff lounge on break, too, and they waded in. ‘There was a girl with them, joining in. That is really sick,’ said Little Kim.

‘Girls are the worst,’ Laura said. ‘They egg them on.’

‘What was it about?’ Blonde Kim asked.

‘Doesn’t say.’ Laura was studying the paper.

‘Probably a mugging,’ said Blonde Kim.

‘I was mugged,’ said Little Kim. ‘Walking home one night when I worked at the bar. Scared the life out of me. He had a knife.’

Blonde Kim gazed at her, biscuit poised. Laura looked up.

‘He said “Give us yer phone and yer money.”’

‘Was he a druggie?’ Laura asked her.

‘Dunno,’ said Little Kim. ‘I just gave him it and he ran off. I was crying, I could hardly walk, I was shaking that bad. It was horrible.’

‘I saw them,’ Emma managed to say, her face heating up.

‘You what?’ Blonde Kim gawped.

‘Before the stabbing.’

‘Oh. My. God.’ Little Kim clutched her hands to her chest theatrically.

‘Where? What? Spit it out!’ said Laura.

Spit it out, Emma, I haven’t got all day.
One of her dad’s phrases.

‘They got on my bus. I’ve got to give a statement to the police.’

‘The police!’ Little Kim shrieked. ‘Will you have to go to court and everything?’

Emma shrugged.

‘It must have been horrible,’ Laura said. ‘What did they do?’

‘Just kicking off, you know. Threatening this boy, the one who’s in hospital.’

‘Oh, Emma,’ breathed Little Kim.

She didn’t want them going on about it, she didn’t like it. She set her cup down, still half full, and put her bag back in her locker.

‘Someone’s keen.’ Laura glanced at the clock. Another four minutes.

‘We’re not all slackers,’ Emma tried to joke, but she sounded weird, sort of bitter, and she saw the Kims raise eyebrows at each other.

They could be very cliquey and it had taken her a while to make friends here. She didn’t want to mess it up, but she couldn’t think of what to say now to put it right. Her face glowed; she hated blushing. ‘See you in a bit,’ was all she managed.

As she left and closed the door, she heard them laughing and her eyes stung. Two more days and she’d be off home for the holidays. It would all blow over and things would get back to normal.

Back at her desk, she began work. The forms and the figures, the policy numbers and dates and exclusions were a relief, a place to get lost.

Time lost meaning, hours morphed into days, minutes hung slow, poised, paused. Andrew felt there was a membrane between himself and the world. Translucent, invisible. A caul. And any real understanding, any comprehension as to what had happened was there on the other side with everyone else.

They had been to register the death – he knew that, though recalling the event clearly was impossible, like trying to make out writing that had blurred and run in the rain. Rorschach blots staining the paper where letters once processed.

He hadn’t driven, he knew that much; they wouldn’t let him drive, so Colin had taken them.

The woman studied the medical certificate from the hospital and checked the facts with them and then made out the entry in the register in her small neat italic writing. The ink was sooty black.

Andrew felt like he was underwater; everyone’s words took an inordinate amount of time to reach him and half of what they said was incomprehensible. He kept losing his place, as though the co-ordinates had been shifted, the land rippling beneath him and leaving him on a different contour line with no way-marks.

Colin must have driven home too, Val carrying the death certificate and the one for burial, though he had no memory of it.

‘Dad?’

He was on the stairs carrying holdalls up, when he heard Jason. Someone had been to the house, got clean clothes for them, toiletries. His heart burst, soared with joy, and he whirled round, seeking his son, waiting for further proof that this had just been some awful, dreadful mistake. His body hungry to hug his boy, to tell him how they had all been knocked sideways but here he was. Here he was and his life was golden and green and wide with potential.