Wink Murder

by Ali Knight

  ‘Yes.’ I wait for the diatribe, the lecture that I’m putting my family before the show. It doesn’t come.

  ‘Off you go.’ Livvy almost looks happy.

  ‘I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’

  She gives me a quite beautiful smile. ‘You know they’re all bastards, don’t you?’ She pats me on the back as I leave.

  I catch a cab home and make it stop next to the alleyway near the canal. As I turn the corner by the water I can’t believe the scene that confronts me. In all my years living here I’ve never seen more than three dog walkers and some foxes use this towpath, but this afternoon there are about forty people crowded on to it. Police officers, slack-jawed local residents and reporters bustle around TV cameras, a police boat, a lighting rig not dissimilar to the one at the studio, and a woman in Hunter wellies officiously carrying a tray of teacups. The weeds and wildflowers that grow beside the tarmac have been pounded to a squelchy mess; the harsh staccato of police radios and the low thrumming of a motor boat drown out the sensational quiet of still water. A diver surfaces, pondweed trailing off one arm, and a bunch of kids ‘ooohhh’ him loudly. They’re dredging up secrets long drowned. From across the canal and through the bare trees can clearly be seen our shed, our garden, Ava’s Wendy house, the table on our patio, the barbeque grill and our house. I watch the cameras rolling, the zoom lenses homing in on bedrooms and undrawn curtains. The invasion is complete. I see Declan from the Express talking to two young men. I decide I’d better use the front door. I duck back into the alleyway, trudge around to the bridge and back to my road where I have to run the gauntlet of several reporters, my head down.

  It feels like a hundred years since I was in this house rather than a few hours. As I close the door I let out a long sigh, expecting to be sheltered from the storm outside, but as I pull off my coat and turn to hang it up a strong shove in my back sends me slamming into the wall, my bag skittering away across the floorboards. In the half-turn I manage to make I see Paul’s fist slamming into the wall as I duck.

  ‘How could you do that to me? How could you really think I killed her?’ He’s repeating this over and over. ‘Anyone else, anyone else, but not you!’ His face is a contorted mask of anger. This is the first time I’ve ever seen him lose control, really lose it. He punches the wall again and I race for the kitchen and the back door before I slow. There is no escape to be found out there. What are we going to do, fight in the garden with the country’s TV stations filming us? I turn the key to unlock the door but even as I do I know I’m never going out there. I swing round as Paul rugby tackles me to the kitchen floor. As I slam into the cold tiles Lex’s grinning face explodes in my mind. We could be the star turns on one of his reality-TV shows, acting out the ‘money shot’ as we collapse in on ourselves, our carefully constructed facade of the perfect couple with the enviable life a sham for all to see and discuss over the water cooler at the office the following day.

  ‘Paul, stop!’

  ‘You really think I killed Melody? You! You think I’m no better than Gerry.’ I’m half under the kitchen table. ‘In fact, you think I am Gerry!’ I look up at the underside of the table where we gathered for a thousand family meals. Ava has drawn spiky mountains piercing fluffy white clouds and a sun with fat rays warming a stick family walking hand in hand in the valley. A father leads a mother and two children. Here are Paul and I, fighting under a canopy showing the love and innocence of our children.

  He pins my arms to the floor. ‘Get off me!’ I shout, writhing around.

  ‘How could you do that to us!’

  Anger explodes in me as his fingers tighten on my forearms. The wink he gave me after his first bald lies to the police, the bladder-releasing fear I felt in the tunnel at Woolwich, the revelation from Eloide and the raw shock of him trying to hit me combine into a lethal cocktail and I want him off me now. I knee him as hard as I can in the balls and he pitches forward on to my neck with a groan, but I can’t get out from under his heavy weight as his knees are pressing down on my thighs.

  ‘You think I’m the copycat? Well. What about you, Kate, what about you!’ He slams my body back on to the tiles and my head hits a chair leg. I spit at him and as he releases my arm to wipe away the phlegm I bite him on the finger.

  He shrieks with outrage and pain and something closes off in him and he becomes someone else. His hands are clamped around my neck. ‘Is this how it’s done? The copycat works like this, does he?’

  My husband is trying to strangle me. I claw at his large, firm hands but they are so tight, so determined. I can’t talk my way out of every bad situation. I’ve been struck mute, helpless. My foot bangs into Ava’s sun under the table top. Paul’s hands squeeze tighter. He’s not looking at me, just talking rapidly, but there’s such a rushing in my ears I can’t hear. I never realised that being strangled would be so painful and quick and Paul isn’t aware that he’s about to kill me. I’ll be yet more proof that those closest to us are capable of inflicting the most damage. This was how Gerry’s wife died, all those years ago. All the hours of filming, all the column inches and blogs and discussion programmes and message boards and YouTube clips to try to understand him, and Paul and I are closer to that than anybody. Was Melody staring into these eyes at her end? His face swims above me, the pain in my chest is exploding through my body. I am slipping into unconsciousness. Ava’s stick people walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

  Paul makes a noise so loud even I can hear it. He springs back, disgusted horror passing across his face. I fling my arm out and scratch him on his face, scrape marks that bring blood springing to the surface. We’re both panting. Paul starts sobbing next to me on the floor. He teetered on the abyss and backed away. We lie a tangled mess of bruises and blood as I retch and he moans.

  ‘Do you remember that pheasant shoot?’ He’s on his hands and knees, crying on our kitchen floor. I can’t even begin to speak so he carries on. ‘That back-scratching freebie from an American network?’ He shakes his head in sorrow. ‘And we had to put on all those silly green clothes and pretend like lords of the manor and shoot those birds out of the sky?’ I do remember. Inverness, five years ago, I was pregnant with Ava, and a group from suburban New Jersey were acting out Call of the Wild. ‘I thought no one in England could use a gun!’ one of them shouted, and the Scottish beaters scratched their noses. ‘I tried to wring the neck on that pheasant I shot . . . and I couldn’t do it . . .’ He looks up at me, pleading. ‘I couldn’t wring the neck of a bird small enough to carry in my hand.’ He sits back on his heels. ‘He was warm. Under his feathers.’ Disgust makes his shoulders shudder. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’ His face crumples again.

  It takes me a few moments to realise someone is knocking. Paul jumps when he hears the noise and bangs his head on the table, sinking back down cross-legged on the floor. I struggle to my feet to see Marcus opening the back door.

  ‘Kate, I think you should know . . .’ He tails off as something about the two of us makes him lose his train of thought. He stands awkwardly in the kitchen where I know he used to feel so at home. ‘They’ve found a knife in the canal.’

  Paul bows his head and groans when we both turn to look at him.

  34

  Paul goes to spend the night at John’s house. I tell him quietly that I think it would be better. He said sorry many times but we were talking from opposite ends of the room, unable to touch or comfort each other. I collect the children from Sarah’s, wondering what the blood test on the scarf will eventually reveal. I’m in limbo until then; veering between hoping and fearing that I’ve got it all wrong. I watch Crime Time by myself in the living room with the lights off. Gerry appears on the programme but I can’t even find the means to be excited or pleased that my hunch paid off. I should be, because tonight he’s calm and articulate and Marika is entranced. Shaheena texts me when the show is finished. ‘He appeared at the studio when we were already on air. Livvy is SO made up! Well done you.’ I don’t
have the energy to text her back.

  I wake in the night in a clammy sweat from a nightmare where Melody is surfing on a tsunami in her red dress towards me, her thighs taut as a sprinter’s and a triumphant grin on her face, to find the bed cold and empty.

  I ring Lex at 6.00 a.m., but there’s no answer. I can’t even have the satisfaction of his reaction to Paul being released. I feel the tight wool of my old polo neck scratching my chin as I lead Josh and Ava into the school playground. Livid bruises have appeared on my neck in the night and this black top, full of moths that I shook awake after long months of dark slumber, is the only thing I can find to cover them. As my face recovers my body suffers; but even after all the drama I could pass for normal. I wonder how many other women have walked through these gates with a glassy smile and the fading imprint of a male hand upon them. Josh scoots away to swap football cards with a group of boys by the bins; Ava holds my hand as I wait outside the nursery. The sun begins to warm my face, a sign of spring strengthening its grip. I’m too hot in this top, but I’m still here. Paul stepped back from the precipice – he let me go. I look around at the milling bodies, children careering wildly in circles across the concrete, and possibilities fracture inside me. Cassidy asks me if I want to help at the cake sale, Sarah waves and gives me a T sign – yes, I’d like a cuppa and a chat after drop-off. Becca starts moaning to me about night feeds, I politely try to ignore her. The bell rings and I see Josh lining up to go in. I am alone, cast adrift from the comfort and the renown of Paul’s shadow. I swallow, which is still painful after yesterday. I am rubbed raw all over, but my wounds will heal. I don’t have the fears and the defeat my mother did, I’m a different generation. I have a new career, I still have my children. The bruises will fade, my cut will scab, the love of my children will sustain me. We can, we will and we must recover from Paul’s most grievous error.

  ‘. . . so I’ve decided to cut out wheat.’ I look blankly at Becca, I think she’s been talking to me for a while. ‘Oh, Kate, I forgot to say, I found out whose dog it was.’ She watches me blink and frown. ‘You know! That day you got ill at Cassidy’s, you said a dog had been knocked over? Well, I think it’s my sister’s Pilates teacher’s Labrador. He had a beautiful black coat and was such a loving thing, I remember once in the park he came running up to Maxie and was – oh, are they coming in here?’

  ‘There’s three cars!’ Cassidy shouts.

  ‘They’re not in uniform—’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘That one’s carrying a radio.’

  ‘So many!’

  ‘Are they going to the offices?’

  ‘I hope no one’s been hurt—’

  ‘It must be something serious—’

  ‘They’re coming over here!’

  ‘Kate . . . ?’

  ‘Kate . . . oh my.’

  Cassidy and Becca back away. My adopted family of the last five minutes has proved fickle. O’Shea walks across the hopscotch game and past the climbing frame. Samuels and White and two others I don’t recognise flank her. They stride purposefully, intent on bearing down on me, but I see them in slow motion as things are happening too quickly for me to process. The dog. Can it be? Could the scarf have only dog’s blood on it? The grain of my certainty, the sand on which my suspicion was built, has started to slip away.

  ‘Mrs Kate Forman,’ O’Shea stands in front of me, ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Melody Graham.’

  I sense a collective intake of breath from about sixty mothers gathered around me. Perhaps for the only time ever in this Victorian school’s hundred-and-fifty-year history, the playground falls silent without anyone having to shout. Samuels takes out a pair of handcuffs and snaps me into them. The click echoes around the buildings that house my children. Someone grabs my elbow and O’Shea and Samuels walk side by side with me to the gate.

  ‘Oh, I knew it,’ Becca whispers.

  In films the innocent walk with their heads held high, defying those that condemn them. They’re heroes, but I walk with my eyes on the cracked concrete, the gawps from my contemporaries burning on my cheeks.

  ‘Murderer!’ a woman shouts and the crowd ripples. Samuels clutches me tighter and speeds up. Clusters of hard eyes stare. We pass the headmistress, the caretaker, a reporter on a national newspaper, phone already out of her handbag, the lollipop lady, her stick hanging as if broken by her side, and Sarah, her eyes filled with tears, who calls to me that she’ll pick my kids up after school. I manage to nod as Samuels opens the door of the car. A woman running late pulls her kids away in case they make the mistake of touching me. He holds my head quite gently as he guides me into the back seat.

  35

  O’Shea is sitting opposite me, elbows and forearms aligned with the edge of the desk. She is irritatingly calm. ‘Let me repeat, the scarf found in your house has traces of Melody’s blood on it. The knife found in the canal at the end of your garden is the same size and the blade the same shape as the one used to stab Melody. Whose scarf is it, Kate?’

  ‘It’s Paul’s.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I phoned you to tell you about the scarf!’

  O’Shea picks up another file on the desk and opens it, subduing its attempts to spring shut by holding its edges down against the table with her palms. She pulls out a photo. ‘Can you describe for me what this picture shows, please?’

  The solicitor sits forward shoulder to shoulder with me. Even he can’t resist a gander. I touch the computer printout, hoping my body heat might reassemble the image. It’s me, Josh and Ava grinning stupidly at the camera from a clifftop. We’re wrapped up in thick coats and wellingtons. My children stand either side of me and we’re leaning into a strong wind, my face partly obscured by a messy tumble of hair. Round my neck is Paul’s scarf. I hear my solicitor exhale. I thought Paul was being kind when he offered me that cashmere ribbon of warmth. ‘I’ve got a hat,’ he’d said as he opened the boot of the car to get out his coat. ‘It’s colder than we thought, take this scarf.’ He’d held out his arms and looped the scarf over my head, pulling me towards him. We’d held hands as we’d swayed like drunks in the strong south-westerly to the viewpoint, determined to get some fresh air before hunkering down in the pub for the afternoon. The photo was taken at February half-term on the Devon cliffs where Paul wants his ashes scattered.

  ‘Since no answer is forthcoming, I will describe the photo,’ O’Shea says to the tape machine. ‘Kate Forman is photographed wearing the scarf stained with Melody Graham’s blood.’

  O’Shea turns over a piece of paper on the table. ‘Monday evening, the eighth of March, where were you?’

  ‘I’ve already told you, I was at home.’

  ‘How many cars do you own, Kate?’

  ‘Why does that matter?’

  ‘Paul took one car that night, but you own another, don’t you? Don’t you, Kate? It doesn’t sit in the drive, you park it in the street.’

  ‘Can I have a cigarette?’

  ‘There’s no smoking in police stations, I’m afraid, Kate.’ Samuels leaves the room and O’Shea turns to the tape machine, saying, ‘DS Samuels leaves the room,’ before turning back to me. ‘Did you take the car that night?’

  ‘And leave my kids alone?’

  ‘It happens all the time.’

  ‘No, I did not take that car and leave my kids alone in the house!’

  ‘Tell me about your work, Kate.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, you were part of the production team on Inside-Out.’

  ‘I had a minor role and I worked entirely from home.’

  ‘But you must know Gerry Bonacorsi very well.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I’ve hardly ever met him.’

  ‘But you met him at Cheltenham Races just this week. It was you who persuaded him to appear – yet again – on television. On Crime Time. Your work number is in his phone. One of only two numbers, I understand.’ I run my hand across my chee
k. I’m caught. ‘Did he impress you, Kate? Did he give you ideas? He seems to have impressed everyone else. He’s the new hero of the hour, for reasons I can’t fathom. I’m no fan of the justice system but they were right to keep him in for a long stretch. Just because he can spin a good story in a comfy accent, well I’m not so easily taken in . . .’ she pulls on her starchy cuff, irritated that she let her feelings be known ‘. . . by him or by you. You’ve seen hours of footage, heard him banging on and on’ – at this she rolls her eyes to the ceiling in a sarcastic flourish – ‘about his life, his passions, his temper. You were in the perfect position to carry out a copycat murder.’

  ‘This is ridiculous. Why on earth would I kill her? And why would I kill her in that way? It’s too obvious! Why would I chuck the knife in the canal behind my house when there would have been a hundred London bins to throw it in on my way home? Same for the scarf. Why would I keep such an incriminating thing in my house?’

  ‘DS Samuels re-enters the room,’ O’Shea says. Samuels leans against the wall and shoves his hands in his pockets. ‘Why don’t you tell us?’ O’Shea continues. ‘I think you kept the scarf and told us about it to frame Paul.’

  ‘This is madness!’

  ‘Because that’s the perfect revenge, isn’t it, Kate?’ O’Shea is sitting forward now, speaking quietly. She’s put too much fabric conditioner in her clothes wash and an unpleasant waft of violets hits me. ‘You kill your husband’s lover but that’s not enough, you want to make sure that he really suffers, that he really understands what he’s put you through—’

  ‘Everything you’re accusing me of equally applies to Paul. Why isn’t he in here?’

  ‘Paul has an alibi.’

  ‘Yeah, I gave it to him!’

  O’Shea doesn’t take her eyes off me. ‘Turns out your husband has another woman who’ll vouch for him.’ She notes my frown. ‘Paul Forman claims that he was with Portia Wetherall after he left the pub that evening.’