The Perfect Girl (20 page)

Tessa disagreed fairly strongly, so we didn’t discuss it for fear of a row, but I didn’t like the way Maria and Philip pushed Zoe so relentlessly on the piano. As far as I could see, the poor girl never got to climb a tree or feed a chicken on that farm if she could have been practising her arpeggios. Philip wasn’t as bad as Maria, but he was guilty of it too. I don’t know why Tess excused her sister and Philip this behaviour. My best guess is that she carried around guilt about being the high-achiever, the good girl, and she felt happy because Maria might finally have a chance to match those achievements, albeit via her daughter.

The invasion of our house is strange. Where yesterday I lost the battle with the urges, compounded by the silence of the place, today I find my self-control is performing fairly well. Odd, given the circumstances, and the levels of tension that are prevalent, but welcome nevertheless.

When I take the baby upstairs to attempt to change her nappy, I waste three of the damn things before I get one on to her. It’s not easy to fit a clean outfit thing on those slippery limbs either, but I rather like the way she grabs my hand as I try. It stops the dratted tremor.

On the way downstairs, I pause by the bathroom door. I have a bottle or two of vodka stashed under the bath in there, tucked away behind the cladding. My throat wants it, my lips want it, and my head wants it. It has even stolen my heart.

As I prevaricate, the baby puts her fingers in my mouth – she’s obsessed with doing that, for what reason I cannot guess – and I pull her hand away and lick my parched lips. Come on, Richard, I tell myself. Pull yourself together. Somehow, it feels wrong to drink with her in my arms. She’s the antithesis of my grubby pre-owned path in life; she’s fresh and new and unspoiled and I will not sully her.

I move on past the bathroom and down the stairs.

Later, when Tessa is up to it, we must talk, she and I, about where she was last night, and the conversation will no doubt be as sad and bitter as so many of our others, perhaps worse.

In the meantime, I shall try to be of practical use.

‘Most Gracious Grace,’ I say to her, ‘would you care for something to eat?’

As we arrive in the kitchen, I feel strengthened by the fact that I resisted taking a drink, and I make some firm resolutions. I shall look after this baby so that the others don’t have to. I shall try to resist asking my wife where she was last night, because she has just lost her sister.

I will not let this bereaved family down, and I will not let my wife down.

I have my first small success when Grace appears to relish eating mashed banana.

As soon as Zoe Maisey and her Uncle Richard have left my office, I shut the door and look at my watch.

I have a scan booked at 11.30, and a bit later an appointment with the consultant to discuss the result. This is what they’ve described as a ‘fast-track’ service, which was not what I wanted to hear.

I can walk to the hospital from my office, so I have plenty of time to make a phone call, even though I shouldn’t.

I take a deep breath as I flick through the contacts on my phone and find DS Nick George. He’s an old school mate, and I’m wondering if he’ll do me a favour. I can’t ring anybody else, because I shouldn’t be doing this at all; I’m a potential witness.

Before I dial, I decide that this call is best made outside. As solicitors we trade in discretion, but walls have ears, and this isn’t a phone call that should be overheard.

On my way out, my secretary says, ‘In or out for the rest of the day, Sam?’

‘Out,’ I say. ‘Definitely out.’

‘He works too hard,’ I hear her say to one of the other admin staff as the doors swing shut behind me. ‘It’s supposed to be his day off today.’

They don’t know about my appointment, nobody at work does.

Nick George works in CID in Bristol. We met for a drink when I first moved here and I heard about how he’d got married and had twins via IVF and how his wife had struggled to cope with the babies when he worked nights. We’d got on well at school, never close, but friendly, and both of us ambitious. Secret swots. Our paths hadn’t crossed through work yet, but that was probably just a matter of time.

Outside, the streets are already hot. I try Nick’s number as I’m walking through the city centre, keeping to the patches of shade beside by the buildings, and he calls me back a few minutes later as I’m wandering along the edge of the canal and looking for some prettiness in the smooth surface of the water, but instead being distracted by bits of rubbish lapping the concrete edges and reflections of the corporate buildings around me.

‘What’s your interest, Sam?’ Nick asks me.

I come to a stop in the shade beside a waterside bar, where the pavement is sticky from the drinks that were spilled the night before. Beside me, a huge area has been cleared in preparation for some sort of building project. A couple of shallow puddles linger in its centre after the rain, but mostly it’s a vast expanse of dust and rubble.

‘I know them.’ I think it’s best to be forthright with him from the outset, but I suppose I’m not entirely honest, because I don’t tell him that I might be a witness.

‘Not much I can tell except that the body was found outside the front of the house, in some kind of outbuilding.’

I’m relieved to hear that, because I understand immediately that it’s a scenario that could throw up a vast number of suspects, both from inside and outside the family.

It’s important to me that it could be somebody outside the family, for obvious reasons. I want to ask a thousand other questions, like if he knows the cause of death, but that would be definitively crossing a line, and I mustn’t do it.

‘You close to them?’

‘I know the sister of the woman who died.’

‘Oh dear, sorry.’

We both know the conversation is over and that it probably shouldn’t have happened at all. I ask after his wife and kids and just as I’m ready to hang up, he says, ‘I heard that you weren’t well?’

‘From who?’

‘My mum.’ His laugh is a bit embarrassed. ‘The Bideford grapevine is still thriving.’

I did tell my parents about my symptoms and about the doctor’s suspicions. They’re the only people that know. Or the only people who I thought knew. They’ve obviously been talking.

‘I’m OK.’

‘Is it true?’

And suddenly, looking out over the empty site beside me, and missing Tessa, I feel like telling somebody.

‘I have a scan today to help confirm the diagnosis. It’s complicated.’

‘Is it likely?’

‘They’re pretty sure.’

‘I’m so sorry, mate.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘Will you carry on working?’

‘For as long as I can.’

He clears his throat. ‘Drink soon?’

‘Sure. Look I’ve got to shoot off, I’ll call you.’

‘Make sure you do.’

I probably will call him.

Richard’s carrying the baby. He’s walking around the house with Grace on his hip as if he was born to it, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

It’s been a while since our friends had babies and we would occasionally carry them, and I don’t think Richard has ever had Grace in his arms before. He’s transformed into the image of a benevolent uncle and, because I’ve wronged him, I resent that he’s a spectacle of goodness today. I almost feel he’s taunting me with it.

I try to reject that thought, though, because I know that grief is a strange and unpredictable thing, and I recognise that it’s provoking great surges of anger in me. If I’m honest, what I really want is for Richard to be looking after me, and me alone.

Or do I want Sam to do that? I’m confused, and the truth could be that at this moment I want them both.

‘Katya’s resting,’ Richard says. ‘The poor girl was just about finished. I think she’s had the baby all night.’

He’s pretending not to be feeling the effects of yesterday’s binge but I’ve seen the empty ibuprofen packets in the bedroom.

We have a moment to ourselves, apart from the baby.

‘Where were you last night, Tess?’ he asks me.

‘I needed some time alone.’

He lets this comment settle, visibly hurt by it. There are arguments that we’ve had so many times that he knows the score: he’s an alcoholic, therefore I have the moral high ground. Almost always. So he makes a submissive response.

‘I was worried,’ he responds eventually. We stare at each other across the room, and Grace tries to put her fingers in his mouth.

‘Oh don’t try that again,’ he tells her, waggling her fingers. ‘You’ll find some ancient fillings or some other kind of horror in there.’

She tries again. ‘Stop it!’ he says, shaking her hand, and he laughs. Only a little, but the sound of it and the look of amusement on his face jolts me because I’m not sure when I last heard Richard laugh.

When the detectives arrive at the house, the atmosphere changes immediately. Where before we were roaming the rooms like lost souls, and the Family Liaison Officer busied herself locating the kettle, and the tea, like a mother hen, now we all become constricted, nervous, hyped up and we feel under scrutiny.

Chris responds to the detectives by putting on as good a version of his professional self as he can manage under the circumstances. Shaking hands, trying to find the words to ask practical questions. But he reminds me of a faulty robotic toy: you can see what it’s meant to be doing, but it just can’t manage it properly.

The detectives ask if there’s a suitable room that they can use for interviews.

I install them in our dining room.

In the sitting room, Zoe is curled up in a corner of the sofa, her eyes watchful and guarded behind that hair.

Beside her, Lucas looks catatonic.

Richard has taken Grace upstairs to try to settle her for a nap in our bed; I can hear him singing a nursery rhyme that I didn’t even know he knew. Katya has passed out on one of the beds in our small spare room, from shock, or exhaustion, or from an excess of whatever she indulged in last night, it’s hard to tell.

I clear the dining room table to make space for the detectives. My work had been spread out all over it, mostly admin from the surgery, and I push all that to one side, as well as another of Richard’s models-in-progress, this one at least partially constructed with all the precision and care he can be capable of.

I offer to make the detectives tea, as if they’re plumbers just in to service the boiler. They decline. They’re very businesslike: crisp shirts tucked into shiny leather belts. Short back and sides for both, and one with salt and pepper speckles around the ears. They remind me of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who sometimes come to the door in all their smartness.

They ask to speak to Chris first and we all wait nervously and almost silently with the Family Liaison Officer, as their voices grumble away indistinguishably for forty-five minutes, separated from us by the hallway and the shut dining room door. When Chris finally emerges, he looks strained.

They ask for Zoe next, but she doesn’t move; those eyes, which belonged first to my sister, look at me instead.

‘I want Sam to be there with me,’ she says. ‘Please can we phone Sam again?’ and I understand that I’m her go-to person right now, and the responsibility of that makes my stomach lurch.

‘You don’t need him, love. You really don’t.’

Still she won’t move from the sofa. I wonder if the police have powers to manhandle her into the dining room to answer questions.

‘Why don’t you just have a little chat with the detectives,’ says the Family Liaison Officer. She’s a dumpy woman who has a bit of a wheeze going on that I’d want to treat if she were an animal. ‘As soon as they’ve heard from you they can crack on and get to work finding out what’s happened to…’ She tails off. Zoe’s stare is ferocious.

‘It won’t do any harm,’ I’m trying to be reassuring but it’s a struggle.

‘Just do as you’re told on this occasion,’ says Chris and his words interject sharply like the crack of a whip. ‘It’s not negotiable.’

Zoe stands up abruptly, and her clothes hang off her in a ghoulish sort of way for a moment or two before she wraps her arms and her garments tight around herself again and shuffles towards the dining room. I see her slump into a chair opposite the detectives and then one of them gets up and walks around the table to shut the door behind her.

Mum was my protector. Even when she got it wrong you could never fault her for trying. I knew that, and Jason banged on about it all the time. She wouldn’t have let them interview me without Sam.

Mum was a bit taller than me, and had shiny blonde hair, which everybody admired and which she gave to me and Grace.

When I was little, she was cuddly and firm and soft, and she smelled of wood smoke and cooking. In the flat we lived in after the accident she smelled of cigarette smoke and in the Second Chance House it wasn’t a smell, but a scent, and Chris gave it to her in posh bottles that she kept in a row on her dressing table. Her frame was thinner by then too. Not cuddly, like it used to be, but she looked great because it was
so slim
, everybody said so.

On the floor of the shed her body looked and felt cold.

Now, I just have my dad, and I have Tess, and I have Richard, I have Sam and I have Chris. But I’m very much not sure of Chris; in fact all I’m sure of is how much I don’t really know him when Mum isn’t here to be a bridge between us. The only thing I’m sure of is that he called me a slut yesterday evening, and that there was darkness in his eyes.

Tess and Richard love me but they won’t defend me the way my mum would.

Sam doesn’t think I need him.

My dad isn’t here yet, and I don’t want him to come anyway.

So when I sit down in front of the investigating officers I decide that I must protect myself, and I know what I’m going to do.

The policemen look exactly the same as each other, as if you’d popped them out of a PEZ detective dispenser. I’ve met a lot of police, and these two are definitely the most businesslike. They remind me of some of the men who come to the house to meet Chris: you want to unwrap them out of their perfect suits to see if they’ve got real beating hearts and breathing lungs underneath.

‘We’re very sorry for your loss,’ one of them says.

I don’t reply at first, because I’m thinking about the Unit.

When I got to the Unit, I thought everybody was going to be thick, and I was right in a way for many of them, but only if you’re just talking about exam success. Second Chance Family type of success.

The kids on the Unit weren’t thick at all if you’re talking about being smart. They knew stuff about police interviews, and legal advice and courtrooms that nobody tells you in your before life.

Right now, I’m not being charged with a crime; I know that.

But even though I’m not being charged what’s ringing in my head is what the kids in the Unit said about giving ‘no comment’ interviews. It’s the best strategy for not letting yourself get stuffed up by something that you say. What nobody tells you is that even if you’re not under caution, even if you’re just ‘having a chat’ with the police, you can make what they just have to decide to call a ‘significant statement’, and then they can ask you about it later in a proper, recorded interview, and that interview can be quoted in court.

Ergo: no chat you have with police is a ‘safe’ chat.

Ergo: I decide to run my own ‘no comment’ defence.

Because then, even though they’ll tell me that this could be seen as uncooperative behaviour, and it could be frowned on, etc., etc., all scare tactics, I’ll avoid the trap of delivering myself into their hands, because a ‘no comment’ interview dumps the burden of proof on the police if they want to charge you.

Why am I giving so much weight to what the kids in the Unit said? Partly it’s because as well as finding out they were cleverer than I thought they would be, I also liked and trusted them, a few of them anyway, though not all obviously, because some were proper psychos. It’s also because there’s one more thing nobody ever talks about in my life any more, and that’s how totally screwed-up unfair my verdict was.

Eva Bell robbed me of a chance at getting the ‘Not Guilty’ verdict my mum wanted because she lied to protect her brother. At the time, my mum sobbed and said ‘it’s a miscarriage of justice’ and Sam looked white and said how sorry he was, and my dad accused Mum of persuading me to make the wrong plea. In the Unit, I talked to Jason about it a bit but it was never a long chat because everybody in the Unit basically believes that they’ve been screwed over in some way so the key workers are fed up of hearing it.

When I first got out of the Unit, and we were in the flat, my mum used to talk to me about it and she was still really bitter, but since she met Chris I was never allowed to say how it was wrong. It was time to ‘put it behind me’, Mum told me. The ‘miscarriage of justice’ had no place in the Second Chance Life because it didn’t exist there. It was erased, even though the unfairness of it had burned inside me since the trial, and still does.

What I can do right now, though, is to use what I’ve learned from it; and what I’ve learned is that you can’t be too careful and you can never trust the system. Never.

It’s difficult to do what I’ve decided to do, I know that from before, because early interview is the softly, softly stage, when you feel like the police are your friends, that they understand, and it’s so tempting to talk, you even want to talk, and after the accident I told them everything, and I didn’t realise that each word was another scoop of the shovel in Project Digging My Own Grave.

So I tell myself to be strong and I put my strategy into action straight away. When the detective says, ‘We’re very sorry for your loss,’ I reply: ‘No comment.’

There’s a pause before one of them says, ‘You’re not being charged, love, we’re not taking a formal statement from you. All we’re hoping is that you can tell us a bit about what happened last night, just give us an initial account.’

When I hear that I think: Knew it, knew they were going to say ‘initial account’, but all I say is: ‘No comment.’

He puts his notebook down on the table and drops his pen on to it. Then he leans towards me. ‘You don’t need to reply “no comment” in an interview like this. We’re not asking you to account for yourself, it’s just a chat.’

‘No comment.’

‘Can you at least tell us how old you are?’

‘No comment.’

‘We gather you played the piano at a concert last night,’ says the other detective.

‘No comment.’

His eyebrows shoot up his forehead. I’m not always good at knowing when I’m annoying people but I can tell that I’m royally pissing him off now.

‘You’re very good at the piano I hear?’

‘No comment.’

‘It’s quite a thing to publicly perform at your age, isn’t it?’

It’s harder than you think to run a ‘no comment’ interview. The urge to reply, especially when questions are friendly, or flattering, is very strong. The normal answers to their questions form in your mouth but you have to swallow them back, and instead,spit out the two words that they have to pretend don’t frustrate them.

‘No comment.’

‘Would you say you’re a prodigy?’

‘No comment.’

‘Do you enjoy playing with your brother?’

That one is especially hard not to reply to, because they’ve got it wrong, and I hate it when people get things wrong. ‘Step. Brother.’ I want to say, and in my head I would add ‘imbeciles’. Jason didn’t like me correcting people, but my mum and dad never minded. It made them laugh.

‘No comment.’

I can see that I’m annoying the quiet one as well. He keeps trying tactics on me. He smiles, and then does a hard stare, and then looks quizzical as if he can’t possibly understand why I might be saying ‘no comment’.

Now he clears his throat and says, ‘You do know, Zoe, that we’re just trying to get to the bottom of what happened last night, don’t you? It would be for everybody’s good if you tell us what happened last night, because then we can focus on really finding out what happened to your mum. You’d want that for her, wouldn’t you?’

‘No comment.’

He tries not to be frustrated but a little twist of his lips tells me that he is and I have to bite my own lips so I don’t smirk.

In the Unit, if you get to smirk at the expense of the police, you would get an A star, or a sticker on your chart, or a shiny trophy, or whatever.

I don’t think the detective notices my lips twitching though, because the door of the room opens suddenly enough to make me jump and there is my actual, real dad.