That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘It’s Mum,’ she says. ‘In the group WhatsApp.’ Joe pulls out his phone and looks at it.

  Have you seen about the missing man near you? she’s written. They stare at each other, saying nothing.

  ‘If only she knew,’ Frannie says softly.

  ‘I know,’ Cathy says.

  Joe puts away his phone, ignoring his worrying mother, and looks at the piece of paper. It’s illegible. Even if it were in English, he wouldn’t be able to make out much of it. It is in four pieces, torn and soft around the edges, like a used tissue. Already the blood dashed across it has faded from red to dark brown, disturbing inkblots patterned across whatever the document once was.

  ‘È stato mandato,’ Cathy says.

  ‘Sorry?’ Joe says.

  ‘That’s what I can make out, just here …’ Cathy says. She lifts the pieces to show him. Dried blood floats off it, a burgundy grainy sand, and they stare at it. Frannie’s cheeks flush. She stands and wets some toilet paper, wiping it up carefully from the bathroom tiles. Nobody looks closely at the smear of red on the tissue, old blood reinvigorated.

  Joe is staring at the pieces of paper. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking at,’ he says. ‘We’ve done this once already. Let’s just forget it.’

  ‘Joe,’ Cathy says, while Frannie washes her hands. She cocks her head a second, listening out. Joe starts. Is that somebody on the stairs?

  ‘Look, it’s here,’ she says slowly to him. ‘You’re not being thick, don’t worry.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was,’ Joe says, though that is exactly what he thought. Cathy traces the words in front of him, looking down at the paper and then up at him, to check he has understood.

  ‘Okay – and?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t understand either,’ Frannie says reliably.

  ‘Well.’ Cathy stands and goes to the window, holding the documents in the light. Frannie catches Joe’s gaze and rolls her eyes. Joe gives a soft half-smile to his ally.

  ‘Joe?’ Lydia’s voice calls out in the corridor.

  ‘Shit,’ Joe mouths. ‘Be down in a bit,’ he shouts. He is met with silence. Lydia isn’t replying or moving. ‘Go down – I’ll be down soon.’ God, the last thing Lydia needs is this, the implosion of the closest thing she has to a family as an adult. She will refer to her upbringing casually now to him, but he was with her a few weeks ago, at her work summer party, when some distant lawyer enquired about where she’d grown up. Lydia had been vague and stiff, and had turned to him, sad eyes and shoulders, and said, ‘There is no way to bring up domestic abuse at a summer party without putting everyone on a downer.’ But then he’d watched as she deliberately calmed herself, got another drink, took off her shoes and danced with him, his Lydia. A beautiful flower that grew up through a crack in concrete.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ she says. He hears Paul say something illegible. Frannie’s gaze goes from indolent to alert, staring intently at the door.

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ she says, her footsteps finally retreating.

  ‘I know what this is,’ Cathy says to Frannie and Joe. She goes back over to them, holding it out. ‘It’s a police document.’

  ‘I’ll be by the pool, with Paul, then,’ Lydia calls, from further away.

  ‘Okay,’ Joe shouts in a panic, though he feels bad.

  Paul used to cry on walks with Joe, but only if they went at night. He couldn’t work it out. In the day, he seemed to love being walked around the country lanes, but in the night, screams. Joe tried different routes, warmer clothes. Until one day he followed Paul’s gaze and realized: he was terrified of the moon. The fucking moon! Joe had bought Paul a book all about what the moon was and read it to him, and eventually he’d clapped when he saw it, and Joe’s heart became a sunburst, the moon reflecting the light back to Paul, his nephew.

  Frannie stares at the door with big, wet eyes. She turns to Joe. ‘You’re going to have to tell Lydia. She’ll – she’ll figure out something is up.’

  ‘Frannie,’ Joe snaps.

  ‘What?’ Frannie says, her eyes round and hurt, staring at him.

  ‘Just – we’re already trying to fix this mess,’ he says tensely. ‘Stop adding to the chaos.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Just grow up,’ he says tightly.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Frannie says. Joe ignores her.

  ‘Listen,’ Cathy says, a rare urgency imbuing her voice. She holds out the pieces of paper in front of her. ‘Look at this, on this one. È stato mandato, right? The edge of a seal, up here in the corner, maybe like a local police office or something? And down here, on this one – what do you make that out to be?’

  She hands it to Joe. It feels like an exam. He reads it slowly. Then again. Then a third time.

  ‘It says Plant,’ he says, as confused as if Cathy has sprouted another head right there in the hideous bathroom. ‘It says Plant?’

  ‘What?’ Frannie says, standing too.

  ‘It says Plant, and you can just make out 03/07, under the seal, 3rd of July,’ Cathy says. ‘It’s a warrant. It’s a warrant.’

  ‘What?’ Joe says.

  Cathy’s gaze swivels to Frannie. ‘This cop had a warrant for our arrest.’

  20.

  Joe

  ‘Whose arrest?’ Frannie says, frowning, and Joe is pleased she is as confused as he is, that maybe he isn’t as thick as he feels.

  ‘I don’t know. I can only make out Plant.’

  ‘Maybe it isn’t to arrest. Maybe it’s just to search?’ Joe says. ‘I don’t know, we have a lot of people in the villa over the year … maybe one of them did something.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You met him for the first time in the market?’ Cathy asks Frannie.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s got a warrant dated three days before that.’ Cathy’s words hang in the air around them. She’s staring at both of them in turn, her eyes wide.

  The messy truth is dawning on Joe. They have buried a policeman who had a warrant for one of them. ‘Frannie, who have you killed?’ he says hoarsely.

  But it is Cathy who gets to the centre of the issue. ‘Warrants aren’t issued in a vacuum,’ she says. ‘The police will know. They will know he was coming for us – for whatever reason.’

  ‘Shit,’ Joe breathes. Downstairs, he hears a commotion. More than just Lydia. There’s somebody else there. Somebody is knocking.

  Joe stops in the hallway. He’s so aware of every part of his body. What his hands are doing, his shoulders, his facial expression. He’s going to give himself away; he’s not an actor. He’s not cut out for this.

  It’s the police, the Carabinieri. Joe can see that through the glass window in the heavy wooden door. A black hat, black suit, red stripes down his trousers. There is something frighteningly official about it. The pomp and circumstance, the military undertones. He’s only glad that it is not the Polizia di Stato. That it is not the people who threatened him outside the bar on that first night.

  ‘Ciao,’ the policeman says. ‘You may be aware – maybe? We are looking for William McGovern.’ Joe takes in his lilting Italian tones. ‘We are interviewing everyone in the vicinity to see if they have any useful information.’ His cool, dark eyes scan across Joe’s face. Cathy arrives behind Joe, stopping on the penultimate step, waiting. Frannie has stayed upstairs.

  Joe tries not to let any tension set in in his body, uncurls his hands from fists, drops his shoulders. ‘I’m Mario,’ the policeman adds. ‘At the station,’ he says, ‘if I may have a word or two with you, first?’ He addresses Joe.

  ‘Right,’ Joe says. ‘I’ll come now, if I can help.’

  The Carabinieri holds the door open for him, leaving Cathy behind. ‘You come after,’ Mario says over his shoulder. She nods. Her face is so pale. None of them has slept yet. But it is almost finished, Joe is hoping, as he gets into the police officer’s car, in the back seat, like the criminal he is. They’ve disposed of the body, and they will be
interviewed by the police, and then, in a few hours, that will be that. It has to be that way. He has to tell himself it will be that way.

  21.

  Now

  Jason’s Office, early March, 5.00 p.m.

  ‘All right now, cycling past the crime, why don’t you tell me about the steps you took to mitigate things.’

  ‘I know you mean the cashpoint bungle,’ I say immediately. ‘The thing is – none of us wanted to be doing that stuff. Joe just – he felt he had to, I guess. I now know.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ I can hear the ball bearing in Jason’s pen moving up and down across his pad.

  ‘Committing other crimes. After – after the first,’ I stammer.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Jason says. ‘This is all stuff we know, remember.’ He checks his watch discreetly. Almost the end of the day. Almost ten to six. ‘I just need to finalize this.’ He looks at the window. We’re into early March and it’s getting lighter earlier in each session. ‘We need to explain your thinking.’

  I laugh, a small, sardonic laugh. ‘Er, none?’

  He throws me a wry smile. ‘Right?’ If only he could meet my family, to ask them too. But I haven’t spoken to them for over a year, so he surely can’t.

  ‘Where do you go, after these sessions?’ I say suddenly.

  ‘Everyone asks eventually.’ Something about Jason’s body language is childlike, his leg kicking the underneath of his chair just once. It reminds me immediately of Paul.

  I am assaulted by another memory. A beach day last December. Paul wanted to get in the water, even though I kept showing him how cold it was, dipped his little fat hands in it repeatedly, but all he did was wrinkle up his nose and laugh.

  In the end, I took off my shoes and socks, wet sand yielding underfoot like chocolate puddings. Then I rolled my jeans up and paddled in, holding him while he shouted with joy, up there in the warmer air. It was a day much like today. March looks pretty much like December in Birmingham, like the world stops turning for three months and it just rains and rains.

  Jason has one of his feet up on the chair next to him now, and he rubs at his eyes while yawning, not covering his mouth. I like this about him, this intimacy, this earthiness. Like he doesn’t care at all how well I get to know him. He has no boundaries. Most people treat me like a leper, so it’s nice. That’s all.

  ‘Why didn’t you confess sooner?’ he says, changing the subject, and asking the first truly barbed question he’s asked me. ‘It seems there were a lot of opportunities.’

  ‘Because I only felt I could … when we reached the point of no return.’

  ‘Which was?’ Jason clicks his pen.

  ‘In the outhouse. At the bottom of our gardens.’

  Part III

  * * *

  PERVERTING THE COURSE OF JUSTICE

  22.

  Then

  Joe

  The Verona Police Headquarters is a brown-stone building right in the centre of the city. A blue Polizia car is sitting outside it when they approach.

  Inside, the station has sea-green carpets and smells of cigarettes and coffee, even in the bathroom, where Joe currently stands, in a panic. The interview is conducted by a prosecutor, not a police officer. This has rattled Joe, who has asked to use the toilet.

  He is staring at his reflection in a cracked mirror above a grey ceramic sink. Isn’t it seven years of bad luck if you smash a mirror?

  If he thinks of Frannie, he can see her features shifting underneath his, like one has been traced from the other. They used to share a bathroom and get ready together on Saturday nights. They’d narrate their outfit choices, the way they were doing their hair, their faces side by side in the mirror. They called it their Saturday Show. Cathy thought it was ridiculous.

  Joe reaches out to run a finger over the length of the crack. It’s jagged, the broken glass rugged terrain underneath his skin. Maybe one day, he thinks, looking at himself, index finger looming large in the mirror, he will forget today. This sink. This crack. Surely, in a year, maybe two, they will all forget, they will all relax.

  He meets his eyes in the mirror, then looks away. He leaves the mirror, the crack, the bad luck behind him.

  ‘So,’ the prosecutor Matteo – Matt – says to Joe. ‘Can you answer our questions?’

  The room is old-fashioned. A meeting suite that looks more like an office. A dark-wood desk in the corner with red felting stitched into it. A table in the centre with two cheap plastic chairs. A tape recorder whirring next to them. This man is a lawyer for the state. Should Joe get his own? Or would that say more than anything about his guilt?

  He meet’s Matt’s eyes. They’re a pale, ashy kind of brown, the colour of driftwood. He has a square-shaped face, an upturned nose like a child’s. Maybe early forties.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Joe says. ‘Happy to. But I don’t know how much help I can be.’

  ‘You are here on a holiday, yes?’ Matt says, upending his pen on the table with a soft click but not looking at it. He is staring intently at Joe, his other hand across his mouth, obscuring his expression.

  ‘Yes, with my sisters, that’s right.’

  ‘You have been having a nice time?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Sure … okay,’ Matt says.

  ‘The usual.’

  ‘Right, yes, yes. And what do you mean by sure and the usual?’ Matt says, putting on a faux-British accent as he says the words.

  Joe is sure that Matt is not a nice person, but, then, he thinks that about most people. He is blinking deliberately often, as though he has been told to, like somebody imitating a human. He nurses a coffee in a squat cup that rests on a white saucer. Joe has a plastic cup of water that has three melting ice cubes in it.

  ‘We’ve had a nice, relaxing break,’ Joe says tightly, the lie steaming into the room out of his mouth. His breathing is fast. He is hanging all his hope on the story they concocted being enough, like putting up a fake painting and hoping it fools people into thinking it’s real.

  ‘Here I have a photograph of Will,’ Matt says, sliding a laminated A4 piece of paper over the table to Joe. Matt has large, leathery hands that look older than his face. Hands that could definitely punch, that could cause damage. Joe looks at his own hands, surgeon’s hands, elegant hands, and thinks that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t get out of here.

  He tries not to show the physical reaction he has to seeing Will, alive, young, in Carabinieri uniform, minus the hat. A bright, white smile, an American smile. Eyes that slant downwards at their edges. Pink cheeks. Joe swallows, but his throat doesn’t seem to be working, is too dry. He takes a sip of water to cover up a cough.

  He waits a beat. He should remember this man from the market, he knows he should, but he simply deletes it from his memory. He can’t admit to it. Not now he’s here in this stuffy little room with this lawyer waiting for him to slip up. Sod it. He’ll say he wasn’t at the market.

  He looks at the prosecutor and thinks, Let Cathy and Frannie say they recall him from there, and let me remove myself. If Frannie is ever rumbled, let Joe not be – let Joe not be involved at all. He closes his eyes in self-loathing. He knows it’s dishonourable. But he also knows a lot of people would do the same.

  ‘Never seen him,’ he says, trying to smile Will’s bright, white smile at Matt. ‘Sorry.’

  Matt says nothing, his face expressionless. The only movement in the room is the rhythmic clicking of his pen and the ticking of a clock on the wall. Joe counts the seconds. Three. Four. Five.

  ‘You not recognize him?’ Matt says, inching the paper over again towards Joe.

  ‘No,’ Joe says, after three fake seconds’ thought.

  ‘What have you done – in beautiful Verona?’ Matt says conversationally.

  ‘Oh, you know. Relaxing by the pool in the villa, and in town,’ Joe says truthfully. It is nice to tell the truth, the same feeling as playing a trump card. See, it says. I’m not always a liar. He shakes his head. He’s got t
o get out of the mind-set that Matt knows him to be lying. He doesn’t. This is so routine to Matt. One interview of many. Joe doesn’t tell him about the bar. The first night. He will say it didn’t seem relevant if they ever find out. God, he can’t believe Frannie has put him in this position. That his past indiscretions against pricks with Vespa helmets might loom large.

  ‘What have you been doing over the past, say, twelve hours?’ Matt says. ‘Sightseeing? Drinking?’

  ‘We had a –’

  ‘You were out early-ish? This morning? Eleven?’

  ‘I …’ Joe hesitates.

  ‘I knocked,’ Matt says, looking Joe directly in the eye. ‘Early this morning.’

  Joe puffs air into his cheeks. Matt won’t let him finish. ‘Yes,’ he says loudly. He takes a breath and speaks more quietly. ‘I was – I was taking the car back.’ He can’t lie. There’ll be cameras at the hire-car place, paperwork.

  This is the sticky bit. He just wasn’t sure it would come up. Or wouldn’t come up so soon anyway.

  ‘Yes,’ Matt says, still staring at him. ‘And you are off home soon?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow. Avoid the queues.’

  ‘The queues right next to the airport,’ Matt says lightly. He very deliberately puts the pen down and looks at Joe. His eyebrows are drawn together, quizzical rather than suspicious. Joe is no good at this, can’t tell if Matt’s bluffing or genuinely confused. Cathy would know. Joe always says exactly what he thinks, and can’t read people who don’t.

  The late-afternoon sun slants in through the window. Joe turns his face to it, trying to look unconcerned. It could be a musty police station in the UK. The signs are in Italian and the coffee – not offered to him, grazie – smells better, but that’s all.

  ‘Yes, by the airport,’ Joe says, looking back at Matt. ‘But isn’t it always better to get those things out of the way? Save some money – we didn’t need it for the last few days?’