‘She told me,’ he begins slowly and reluctantly, ‘that you had been sent away from Spurton Hall because you’d been hanging around with kids who were smoking and you were very sorry and very worried about how cross I was going to be.’
‘What else?’ I ask.
‘That was it, mainly.’
‘Please, Dad, what else?’ There was definitely more to it than that.
He sighs. ‘She said you were so scared of my anger that you had asked to live with her. Did you?’ He sounds upset and asks that in the hope that this show of hurt will distract me from questioning him. Which means there’s more.
‘Yes, I was thirteen and scared. What else?’
‘She … she said if I gave you a hard time, she would do everything she could to get you to live with her. It was what she wanted more than anything, but she had told you that you had to sort things out with me even though she would have you living with her in an instant. She’d even bought a big house near the sea so you could come and stay with her as I promised you could sometimes.’
‘You promised her I could stay sometimes? Why didn’t you ever tell me that? Why didn’t you let me go?’
‘I knew that wasn’t what you wanted, Fleur. I knew you didn’t really want to go and stay with her and feel like a burden. She had her life down there and she didn’t really want you to stay, she just said it to make herself feel better.’
It isn’t often my dad lies, he mostly omits things, but this is a lie. No way to style it, he is lying. He is absolutely lying. I know it like I know how to breathe. She did want me to stay with her. She did want me.
‘What else did she say?’ I ask. My mouth is all dry and my whole body is prickly, like it’s going to break out in hives or start itching uncontrollably.
‘She told me that I had to give you more freedom. To let you go on school trips and join after-school clubs and the like. She said you should be allowed to sleep over at your friends’ houses if you wanted. She said you were a good girl and that you shouldn’t suffer because of what she’d done.’
‘And what else?’
‘She … she said if I gave you those freedoms, let you be a normal teenage girl, she’d go away and leave me alone. I mean, leave us alone to get on with our lives.’
I can’t say anything. My mouth is choked, my throat is full, my chest is stuffed with the thought of Dad agreeing to that. How could he?
‘Why, Dad?’ I manage to force out. Why did you do that?
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that, Fleur. I know it’s hard to accept that she didn’t want to be around and that she used this as an excuse to try to stay away. I’m sorry, I don’t have the answer to why she did it. I just know that I had to protect you from her coming and going in your life like that.’
That’s why after the school trip I didn’t see her for four years. I never really understood why she just disappeared and stopped sending me birthday cards and stopped writing to me, and stopped replying to my attemps at contact. I’d never been given them, I found them in the bin or in Dad’s room before they were binned. But then they stopped, I never found any more and wondered why. I could never ask Dad, of course. Now I know.
She did want me. And she stopped seeing me to give me a life. Dad did let me go on school trips, he did let me stay at friends’ houses sometimes, he did say yes to me joining after-school art and drama as well as after-school gymnastics. As I got older and got used to the freedom, started to stay out a little after curfew and stuff, that’s when he started to change again. That’s when he started freaking out at what I did, that’s when I realised I wasn’t going to be allowed to go to university away from London. That’s when she wrote to me again and I found the binned letter. I didn’t get in touch, but I knew she was in touch. She came back when Dad started to break the deal he made with her. I don’t know how she knew he’d broken the deal, but I do know that she did want me.
‘Fleur, it must be so hard hearing all this when—’
I click the hang-up button, cut him off. I can’t listen to any more of him lying about her. She offered him that and he accepted it and then acted – never said, just acted – as if she didn’t give a stuff about me. Lying. Absolute lying. And her, why didn’t she tell me? She did it for me but in all these years I’ve been seeing her, why didn’t she mention why she walked away from me for a second time?
‘Papa Don’t Preach’ starts to play on my phone and ‘DAD’ flashes up on the screen.
With shaking, trembling hands I cancel the call.
Immediately ‘DAD’ flashes up again as his ringtone starts up, the phone buzzing.
I cancel that call.
‘Papa Don’t Preach’ starts again and I cut it off without even looking at the name on the screen. I scramble off the bed, smudging a couple of the not-quite-dry nails on my toes, and dash into the bathroom as the tune starts again. With one shaking hand, I push the metal plug into place in the sink and then turn the hot water tap on. With my other hand, I am cancelling the calls as they come in. Once the sink is full to the overflow hole, I look at the phone in my hand.
‘Papa Don’t Preach’ starts up again and ‘DAD’ flashes up on my screen.
‘Bye, Dad,’ I say as I drop the phone into the water. It gurgles for a moment, still playing ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ until the water obviously seeps into the electrics and the song is cut off and the vibrating stops, and the screen goes black instead of saying ‘DAD’.
I’m not going back. I thought I’d always have a home there in case it didn’t work out for me down here, but I know one thing for sure at this moment in time, I am never going back. I am never seeing my father again.
11
Tami
‘Have you ever seen a dead body, Mrs Challey?’ Detective Sergeant Harvan asks, her slender frame seeming much bigger, more threatening while she prowls around the room like a predator assessing its prey. Which would be me. There have been a few pleasantries, all there for the tape, but they were rapidly dispensed with.
I shake my head. Thankfully I never have, hopefully, I never will. ‘No.’ I am nervous for some reason. I suspect they know something I should know, that this ‘chat’ is a lot more formal than was hinted at.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about Mirabelle Kemini?’ The way she casually says that, like it’s every day that someone I care about is deliberately killed, murdered.
‘No,’ I say. I didn’t even see her body before the funeral. Fleur and I asked the funeral director to take care of that because we could not do it; neither of us was strong enough. We bought a simple white gown, we described how we wanted her hair and her make-up, how it was necessary to hide any sign of what had happened to her, but neither of us could stand to look at her like that. The funeral director was very understanding, she took photos and slipped them into sealed envelopes in case either of us changed our minds. I haven’t. I don’t know about Fleur.
‘Since you haven’t seen a dead body, shall I talk you through what they look like?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t, thank you.’
‘It’s not like in the movies.’ She is behind me, controlling the situation, my responses, by not sitting still. I am being kept off-balance, on edge. ‘It’s not all clean and somehow quite beautiful. In the case of Mirabelle Kemini, who, as you know, was strangled while being drowned, it was particularly gruesome.’
‘I don’t want to know any more,’ I protest.
From the corner of my right eye, I see Harvan give Wade a nod. He reaches out for the yellow cardboard folder that lies on the table between him and me, and opens it. I see the corner of what is inside: photographs. They aren’t going to show me pictures of her, are they? Are they?
I have not known a terror like this. I do not want to see this. I do not want that in my head for the rest of my life, imprinted on the insides of my eyelids, there to greet me every time I try to sleep.
‘If you show me those photographs I?
??ll walk out of here right now,’ I say, panicked. ‘I don’t have to be here, you said so yourself.’
Harvan and Wade exchange looks, wondering if I am serious.
‘I don’t care if you have to arrest me to get me back here, I don’t want to see them.’ I am ready to run if I need to.
Her hand is heavy on my shoulder, causing me to jump. ‘Relax, Mrs Challey, calm down.’ She speaks like she is used to calming children, she manipulates her tone like she knows which frequency will lull people. ‘We won’t show you the pictures, there’s no need. I’ll tell you instead.’
‘No.’
‘If you were to look at her body, you would note her upper arms, shoulders and neck are black with bruising – these came out some time after death, when her body was completely cold. Our forensic team tell me she was obviously pushed down into the bath first, probably hitting her head on the bath before the killer’s hands slipped around her neck. Then she was probably thrown around like a rag doll while being constantly pushed under the water.’ I can picture it and I don’t want to. I don’t want to imagine Mirabelle being treated like that. ‘Are you listening, Mrs Challey, or do you have no need to since you were there?’
‘I wasn’t there and I don’t want to listen any more.’
‘Mirabelle was a fighter, though. She didn’t go quietly. Her lungs and stomach were filled with water so forensics believe she must have been yelling pretty loudly while fending off the strangulation. The fingernails on her hands were ripped and torn, so she was obviously clawing at the tiles and the bath edge, trying to cling on, trying to hold onto life. Her heels and her calves were severely bruised from kicking. The amount of water on the floor means she probably got away from her killer quite a few times and it was just being in the bath that had her at a disadvantage. She was a fighter, Mrs Challey, she didn’t go quietly or easily. But you already know that, since you were there.’
‘I wasn’t. I’ve told you already, I wasn’t there.’ What she has told me is lodged in my mind, playing itself over and over. Her fight, her screams, the non-stop sound of splashing water.
Harvan comes back to the table, back to her seat, and carefully tucks herself in close to the table so that she and Wade are level, a united wall of the law. ‘You weren’t there, you say?’
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘Then what’s this?’ she asks, placing a small clear plastic bag on the table. I look down at the bag. I’m about to say it is a plastic bag and what has it got to do with anything when I see what is inside it: my wedding ring, with its unusual wavy edge where Scott’s ring fits into it, creating the ultimate symbol of marriage.
I haven’t realised until the ring is in front of me that I have been playing with the space where my wedding ring should be, tracing the wedding ring indentation with my finger. I have periodically looked for it out of general interest, but I accepted it as lost – probably quite symbolic of where we were with our relationship – and would turn up when I was looking for something else.
‘For the benefit of the tape, I am showing Mrs Challey a platinum wedding band with the inscription “TB 4 SC” and numerals “21.10.98”.’
Are you thinking about your ring? Cora asked out of the blue, the first time I noticed it was missing.
‘Is this your wedding ring, Mrs Challey?’ Wade asks.
I stare at the ring, my heart beat slowly increasing until it is galloping in my chest, running and running as I have the urge to do now. ‘It looks like it,’ I say to him.
‘Have you recently lost your wedding ring, Mrs Challey?’ Harvan asks.
I am in trouble.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Aren’t you even a little bit curious as to where we found this?’ Harvan asks.
‘Not even a little bit?’ Wade adds.
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In Mirabelle Kemini’s house,’ they say together.
I am in real trouble.
‘I recognised it straightaway, especially with the inscription. Obviously Wade didn’t.’ She rests her hand on Wade’s shoulder. ‘Men don’t notice things like that, do they?’
‘Some men do,’ I reply.
‘Well, not our Wade here. But I, I recognised it because it is so unusual. And then, of course, there is the unusual inscription. Not your wedding date, I gather. What is it? First date? A special birthday? First declaration of love? First fuck?’
I say nothing, she does not need to know what it is.
‘Come on, Mrs Challey, you can share that little titbit of information with us. We’re like old friends.’
My legs start to jiggle with anxiety and I have to place my hands upon them to stop them.
‘You do disappoint me. Well, when your ring was found, I thought, “Now, what would Mrs Challey’s wedding ring be doing at a crime scene?”’
‘I wasn’t there.’ At least I don’t think I was.
‘Your ring says otherwise,’ Wade replies.
‘Wade made an interesting point that as you’ve been friends with Ms Kemini for some time, maybe you dropped it on one of the many other occasions that you’d visited her.’
I look gratefully at him, he returns a blank stare.
‘But I remembered that you were wearing it when you came in to talk to us, which was the same time I warned you to stay away from her.’
I am in real trouble.
‘That’s a strange little habit you have.’ She nods to my hands. ‘Always playing with your ring. I remember noticing it the first time we met.’ I take my hands and knit them together in my lap. ‘You were doing it at the cemetery, even though you didn’t have a ring on.’
‘If it was only the ring, we might not be convinced there’s a problem,’ Wade says.
‘But then there are female-sized footprints on the tiled floor of the corridor,’ says Harvan.
‘And the black hairs found snagged in the velvet trim of the silk dressing gown found on the floor of Ms Kemini’s bathroom.’
‘I’m sure you won’t mind offering your footprints to help eliminate you from our enquiries. And your hair for DNA analysis.’
They are silent then, their double-act suspended while they await my defence, while they give me the opportunity to explain myself.
‘I think I’d better get a solicitor,’ I say. I don’t remember if I was there or not, that’s the problem. That’s why my heart is speeding out of control and I know I am in trouble. The night she died was the night I drank two bottles of expensive wine on an empty stomach and tortured mind. The most I’d drunk in a long time. It was the night before the morning I woke up fully clothed with pieces of gravel lodged into the soles of my bare feet and cuts, scrapes and bruises on my hands, forearms and chest. It was around the time I last remember having my ring. These are all the solid facts I have about that time, but the rest, the salient, important parts, I still can’t remember. Fragments of that night come to me in flashes – like my arms around her, like shouting at her, fighting her off – but nothing solid. Nothing is coherent or fixed, the events slip away from me like jelly through the holes in my mind. In normal circumstances, that would be fine. At this moment, I am in trouble.
‘What happened to “I have nothing to hide, so I don’t need a solicitor”?’ Wade asks. I’d think he was being snide if I didn’t know he was serious.
‘No, no, that was Mr Challey who said that,’ Harvan corrects. ‘He’s the other criminal in the Challey household who also made protestations of innocence.’
I am innocent. I know I wouldn’t do that. Drunk or not, enraged or not, I couldn’t – wouldn’t – do that. I wish I could remember, then I could tell them everything and all of this would go away.
‘We always have to wonder about the guilt of a person who refuses to co-operate and decides they suddenly need a solicitor,’ Harvan says conversationally to either Wade or me, I’m not sure who.
I link my hands together more tightly, to hold myself together. My hands look like I’m praying – Harvan w
ill notice that. She’ll think I’m internally praying, asking for forgiveness and deliverance. I’m not. I immediately separate my fingers. Instead, I lower my head and pick at my cuticles. They are toughened and rough-edged, and do not give no matter how hard I push at them. I concentrate on my hands because it is not a good idea to speak. Where did I hear someone say that a person shouldn’t ask a question they don’t already know the answer to? I really shouldn’t answer a question that I don’t already know the answer to, either.
‘What are your solicitor’s details so we can call them?’ Wade asks.
I don’t have a solicitor. Why would I need a solicitor? I work from home, I look after my children, I lived with my husband, I bought my house a lifetime ago. Who lives the kind of life where you need to know your solicitor’s name at the drop of a hat? Who lives the kind of life where they end up in a police station three times in less than a month? Me.
‘That’s OK, Wade,’ Harvan says, ‘we don’t need Mrs Challey’s solicitor’s details. She can go.’ She turns to me. ‘You can go.’ She returns her look to Wade. ‘We know Mrs Challey has a nice life here, she wouldn’t dream of going anywhere until we can eliminate her from our enquiries. You know, when we have that court order compelling her to give us a DNA sample, and her footprints, we’ll probably have to arrest her to get them. I hope it’s not in front of her children, like we had to with Mr Challey.’ She shakes her head. ‘Those poor children. They’ll be so confused about why we have to keep arresting their parents. I wouldn’t be surprised if social services were involved.’
In the silence that follows, I keep picking at my nails, my head still lowered. I know what she is trying to do. And it’s almost worked. I felt my hackles rise, my muscles tense, ready to go for her, ready to agree to anything if she’d just leave the girls out of it. But, she has to do this. If she had more evidence – proof – she would have arrested me already. I have to stay silent. I have to not react. Even if she is trying to use my biggest weakness against me.