The Perfect Girl (21 page)

I’m standing just beside Philip Guerin when he and Zoe first come face to face, and my impression is that they might as well have the Grand Canyon between them because neither of them seems able to move at first, but when he finally opens his arms to her she gets up from the chair and runs into them, and the force with which she does that makes him gasp.

The first thing he says is, ‘Why is Zoe being interviewed without an adult present?’

The detectives stand up and the one on the left says, ‘We understood that Zoe is seventeen years old.’

‘It’s a grey area,’ says her father, ‘and you know that.’ He says this wearily, as if the knowledge he has about the rights of children in the legal system is something he doesn’t really care for, which is probably the case.

‘It’s perfectly acceptable,’ the detective holds his ground, ‘particularly as she’s not being charged, this is just an informal interview; and you are, sir?’

‘Her dad.’

Philip Guerin has aged since I last saw him, terribly. I heard from Maria that he hadn’t done well since the accident, that his elderly mother was turning up at the farmhouse to cook for him, and you can see that despair in the way the lines on his face have set, and his defeated posture, though that is, perhaps, also a result of the news he’s heard this morning.

In spite of that, I can’t help feeling a substantial twinge of resentment towards him because he abandoned my sister and Zoe, claiming that the outcome of their shared existence was too much for him. He absolved himself of blame, hurled accusations of hothousing Zoe at my sister, but I’d seen him do it too. I’d heard him use the full armoury of parental weapons to encourage her to play the piano: threats, copious amounts of praise when she’d done well and buckets of emotional blackmail – ‘You don’t want to let your teacher down, do you, or your mum? She’s given up so much so you can perform.’

The detective holds out his hand, says he’s sorry for Philip’s loss and they shake awkwardly, and introduce themselves formally, with Zoe’s body still sandwiched against her father.

‘I don’t want you to think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Mr Guerin,’ says the detective. ‘I understand that Zoe’s had previous experience in the justice system, but I want to reassure you that she’s not under suspicion at this time, and we’re just trying to get her account of what happened last night, so we can start to get to the bottom of it.’

And from her father’s chest, her voice distorted by his clothing, Zoe says, ‘I was asleep.’

Philip lifts his hands as if to say,
There it is, she’s told you everything
, but he doesn’t then clamp them around his daughter. As she clings to his chest with what I can only describe as ferocity, his arms simply drop to his side in a gesture that looks a whole lot like defeat, and I have a terrible feeling that he’s not going to be much help to Zoe at all.

Nick George calls me back unexpectedly, as I’m sitting down in the waiting room at the hospital. They’re running late so I’m killing time by looking up the news on my phone to see if there’s anything out there yet about Maria.

‘
BODY
FOUND
AT
STOKE
BISHOP
HOME
’ it says on Bristol 24/7.

The only development on that is on the police breaking news website, which identifies the body as female, and in her thirties. They haven’t released Maria’s name yet, but it will surely be soon.

Nick doesn’t bother with pleasantries this time. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I’m only going to tell you this one thing, and I shouldn’t even be doing that.’

I put my finger in my other ear because the receptionist is talking really loudly to an elderly man whose head is sagging, revealing the topography of the vertebrae in his neck.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘Forensics found evidence of blood spatter in the house.’

‘No!’

‘I can’t tell you any more than that, and it’ll be days before they can ascertain for certain whose blood it is, or get any other results, but I thought you should know.’

‘God.’ I let this information sink in. The police forensics team does a simple test which shows up blood and semen at a scene instantly, even if it’s been cleaned away. It’s the only test that gives a swift result. Everything else must be sent away to be examined in the lab.

‘I’ve got to go. I hope it’s not going to get too bad for the family now.’

‘Where was the blood?’

‘Ypu know can’t tell you that, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this at all.’

I want to mine him for more information, but I don’t want to push my luck. ‘Thanks Nick. I appreciate it.’

‘It’s OK. I’m sorry, you know.’

I understand that it’s my health he’s referring to, not Maria Maisey’s death. This was a sympathy call, his way of stroking my brow, a nod from one man to another man’s misfortune.

Somebody taps my shoulder. It’s a nurse, holding my notes and a hospital gown.

‘Sorry, Nick I’ve got to go but I appreciate it, mate, I really do.’

The nurse shows me into a miniature cubicle where she hands me the gown and tells me to change into it. There’s a locker in the corridor, she says, where I can leave my stuff.

I get changed and, before I put my things in the locker, I try to phone Tessa but it goes straight to voicemail. The nurse hovers. The radiologist is ready for me, she says, we should hurry up.

When it’s my turn to sit down with the detectives my hands shake. The adrenalin that got me through the last few hours has crashed and I sit with my hands under the table, on my lap, where they keep up their involuntary motion. It occurs to me that this is what it must be like for Richard.

On the mantelpiece behind the detectives I notice a drooping vase of flowers, which I’ve forgotten to refresh. They were given to me by a grateful family at the surgery, but now they’ve become carcasses, with papery petals and shrunken stalks. Beside them hangs a watercolour that Richard and I brought back from Hong Kong, and have always cherished. Elegant and simple swathes of colour describe two pears on a branch and a small bird. The serenity of the scene is a world away from the mess we’re in.

The first thing the detective says to me is something kind: ‘We’re very sorry for your loss, Mrs Downing,’ and so then they have to wait until I stop crying. It’s usually me doing this in the surgery, waiting for the grief of others to subside after I’ve offered them a kind word in a horrible situation, so it feels strange that the tables have turned. It embarrasses me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Please,’ says the detective who first spoke, ‘take your time.’

They stare at their notepads while I wipe my tears away and, after a decent interval, when I’ve stopped snivelling loudly, they ask if I’m ready.

‘How was she killed?’ I ask them.

‘Ah, so, at this time it’s hard for us to say for sure, but your sister’s body has been taken into the care of the coroner for tests so we can establish exactly what happened,’ the slightly shorter detective replies. He has kind eyes.

‘In due course,’ adds his partner, as if I might be unreasonably expecting a fast-track service.

Of course I’m thinking then of the morgue, of shiny stainless steel, of bodies in drawers, of the clank of surgical instruments on a metal tray and the bloodless cut of a post-mortem incision. My sister is too beautiful for such treatment. I always had a protective instinct towards her, however much she resisted it, and even when she chose her own, fiercely independent path through life. I felt that instinct every day of my life, until today, when she’s managed to elude me with absolute finality.

‘Could you give us your account of what happened last night?’

‘From when?’

‘From whenever you feel you’d like to start.’ They’re exuding patience, and they’re purposely not leading my answers. This, I can tell. The account I give is up to me.

‘I went to Zoe’s concert,’ I say. ‘It started at seven-thirty but I got there at about six forty-five to learn how to use the video camera because it was my job to record the children’s performances.’

‘And did you go alone?’

I nod, hoping he won’t ask me why, and am relieved when all he does is make a note. The other man has his arms folded and his head slightly cocked to one side. He’s just listening and watching and I find that unnerving. Sam flits briefly through my mind because it occurs to me that this is his world, and I’ve never glimpsed it before.

‘Can you tell us about the concert?’ says the detective who’s writing.

Memories come to me vividly, and in sharp focus. I tell all. From the detectives’ responses I can hear that they already know about Zoe’s past conviction, and I think that either they’ve run background checks on us very quickly, or Chris has told them, and I reckon it’s more likely to be the latter.

More note-taking, then they ask me to continue talking them through the evening.

My words flow until I get to the part when we’re all back at Chris and Maria’s house, because this is private territory, and I am, just like Maria, a private person. The invasion of our family’s privacy was one of the hardest things to bear, for all of us, after Zoe’s accident.

‘Will the press report what happened?’ I ask the detectives.

‘They will report that there’s been a death,’ the listening one answers, ‘and they’ll report the progress of the investigation.’

‘What about Zoe?’

‘We won’t be broadcasting Zoe’s history.’

‘Can they?’

The answer is in the expression in his eyes: it tells me that there’s a point beyond which he has no control over what the press do.

‘We’ll do our best to make sure it doesn’t happen if it could prejudice a trial,’ he says eventually and the other man gives him a sharp look and says, ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’

‘What?’ I don’t understand at first, and it’s a thump in the gut when I realise that what they mean is that Zoe could be a suspect.

‘Let’s move on. Can you tell us about when you first arrived at the house?’

So I try, but my natural instinct to remain private means that I falter over my words and descriptions. I feel guilty when they ask me to pause while they take time to note down my words about my conversation with Tom Barlow. When they ask me why I followed him I also feel guilty when I say, ‘Because I didn’t know what he was going to do,’ and then the guilt is compounded further when I think of him at the doorway to his home, with his wife and child.

The things I’m saying about him go against my instincts that he is a good and loving man, but they also feed a suspicion that I know Chris shares: that Tom Barlow could have hurt Maria. I wonder if she met him outside the house and tried to persuade him not to publicise Zoe’s actions? Did she provoke a rage in him that he couldn’t contain after a long, hot night of despair and frustration? That is surely the version of events that looks most likely right now.

I also feel as if I need to defend my sister – old habits die hard – and so to an extent I gloss over Maria’s poolside scene by saying that she began to feel under the weather after a glass of wine, that she was tired from being up with the baby, and she never coped well with the heat, and I tell the police that I went home after Maria came out of the pool.

‘And how did things seem with the family at this point, when you left?’

‘I think everybody was tired, and a little upset. The concert, and the revelation, had been upsetting for them all. It was a complicated night.’

‘Do you think her husband was angry with her?’

I think about this one before I answer, mostly because I’m not sure. ‘I think he was upset, but he loves her, you know.’

I remember Chris wrapping his arms around her, enveloping her in a towel. I remember her burying her head into his chest.

‘He loved her,’ I say.

‘OK.’ He notes something down, but, as he does, I wonder whether I’m sure of that.

‘Do you have something to add?’ The detective watching me notices something in my expression.

‘No.’

My sister had a good life, I’m sure of it. It’s what we all wanted for her, after everything, it’s what she deserved.

‘Just one more thing,’ he says. ‘We’re asking everybody who was at the house if they would mind letting us have their phones. Just to help us crack on with ruling things out; speeds up our inquiries. Would that be OK?’

I think of all the texts between Sam and I on my phone, and all the emails too, but I try not to let those thoughts show because the officer is watching me.

‘No, that’s fine,’ I say and I get my phone out of my pocket and pass it to him.

He hands it to his colleague, who puts it in a bag, and writes my name on the outside of it. I see they already have Zoe’s.

‘Have you arrested Tom Barlow?’ I ask them, because I feel as though they should be more interested in what he did.

The detective looks at me as if he’s assessing me in some way. Then he says, ‘Mr Barlow has been interviewed, but he has a solid alibi. He did not murder your sister.’

Me and Dad sit in the garden. There’s a bench there which my mum would have had pressure-washed because it’s got lichen and bird mess on it, but we ignore that and we sit on it anyway.

Dad is wiping his eyes because tears are leaking out of them slowly and oozily, the way tar used to seep out of the old railway sleepers we had in the yard at the farm. I know he’s crying because of Mum, but I’m also used to the sight of it because it’s what used to happen after the accident when he sat for long hours at the window of our farmhouse and looked out towards the fold in the landscape that allowed you a small glimpse of the ocean.

Nobody spoke to us, you see, in the village after the accident. Even though some of them had known Dad since he was a baby. We were shut out of all the communal arrangements too. Nobody bought our produce, shared costs for oil, or anything like that any more. That’s what really broke my dad, Granny Guerin said. Not what I did but how other people treated him after it. It tore the soul out of him.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he says. ‘Out of the two of us, I never thought she’d be the one to go first.’

He’s thinking about Mum, but I don’t know what to say to that because it feels irrelevant to now, to the problem of now, which is who killed her and how scared I feel.

‘Amelia Barlow’s dad came to the concert,’ I tell him. ‘We didn’t know there was a stone for her in the churchyard.’

‘I know what he did last night but that man’s not a killer,’ my dad says.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I know his family.’

‘How does that tell you anything?’

‘He’s from good stock, Zoe.’

‘Why? Because he’s from Devon? What difference does that make to anything? Reality check, Dad, I’m from Devon and I killed people, but you never stand up for me!’

I’ve snapped. It doesn’t happen often but when it does I feel like I’m exploding with anger at all the people who won’t accept that what I did was just an accident, and I should never have gone to jail, and I get frustrated that people who are supposed to love me can’t keep up with all the things in my head, and I get angry too with the ideas themselves, the strength of them, the way that they race around and multiply and keep me up at night.

When I’m angry I am, according to Jason and my mum, my own worst enemy.

I’m standing up and facing Dad now and I know I must look ugly because I can feel that my face has contorted out of shape. If my mum were here now she’d hold my shoulders and look into my eyes and tell me to calm down, and tell me to count to ten with her and try to access my techniques for keeping in control of my emotions.

My dad just buries his face in his hands and I can’t stand it so I start to hit him. I don’t hit him hard, but my hands slap at his shoulders and the top of his head, and they keep slapping until he stands up and catches my wrists and bellows: ‘Enough! Zoe! Enough!’

And I feel my knees crumple until I’m down on the brittle grass on Tess’s lawn and it’s spiking into my shins and my forehead and my hands, and pieces of it get into my mouth.

I don’t want my dad with his leaking eyes and his permanent look of disappointment and defeat that I know I caused. I want my mum.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the twin trunks of Dad’s legs as he just stands uselessly over me, and then I hear the voice of the Family Liaison Officer saying, ‘Is everything all right, Mr Guerin?’ and my dad says, ‘No, it’s not, I don’t know what to do with her,’ and then they both help me up, but I keep my body as floppy as possible at first, because sometimes that’s the only way you can keep protesting how you feel when people have resorted to manhandling you.