That Girl From Nowhere

by Dorothy Koomson

  That stops Mum. She focuses on me. ‘When did the police get your fingerprints?’ Mum asks.

  My gaze flicks to Seth, who is standing in the bay window, rooted to the spot with horror. He knew this would happen if I did it and this is the reality he doesn’t want to deal with.

  ‘We were arrested once on a protest march,’ Seth says after clearing his throat of the fear that has clogged it up. ‘We … we accepted a caution even though we didn’t do anything.’

  My mother swings towards him. ‘You! You did this? You’re the one who got my daughter’s fingerprints on record so now she’s being treated like a criminal?’

  ‘Mum, it’s not his fault. And you can’t stop this. It’s all a big misunderstanding. I didn’t do it and the police will find that out as soon as we get to the station.’

  ‘I know you didn’t do it. I did.’

  I return to looking at my husband. ‘I didn’t do this,’ I mouth at him.

  ‘I know,’ he mouths back with a nod.

  I move my head slightly, nodding towards my mother. ‘Please,’ I mouth again.

  ‘Mrs Smittson.’ Seth comes to life and goes to my mother. ‘Mrs Smittson, please, come. Come.’ He gently takes her arm and she struggles against him, wanting to come back to where I am. ‘This isn’t helping Clem,’ he says to her. He moves his head, trying to get her to focus on him so the police officers can take me. ‘Please, come here with me and I’ll drive us both to the police station.’ She finally looks at him. ‘Yes? OK? OK?’

  ‘They can’t take her,’ Mum says to Seth. She’s begging him.

  ‘It’s only questioning, not an arrest. We’ll get her back. And when we do, they won’t be able to take her again,’ Seth says. ‘OK?’

  He’s making sense to her: her body sags in resignation, and she doesn’t look at me. She probably can’t. Seth nods at me and the police officers.

  ‘We’ll see you later,’ Seth says. He takes my mother in his arms and holds her close as the plain-clothes officer asks if I’m ready to go.

  I nod instead of speaking. I’d love to pretend that the reason I don’t speak is so it can’t be used against me at some point. In reality, my mouth barely works, my throat feels like it is fused shut because I am scared. I am terrified of what is going to happen next. I am thirty-seven, I have lived long enough to know that people get sent down all the time for crimes they have not committed.

  To prove I’m innocent I’ll have to tell them that I was going to do it but I never got the chance. Is that intent to kill? To prove I’m innocent I may have to confess to what might amount to another crime, which may or may not get me into just as much trouble.

  I’m staying silent, not saying anything because I’m scared that I am going to get done for something I never got the chance to do. Is this the Universe’s way of telling me that the decision I made was the wrong one? That I shouldn’t have even thought about committing the ultimate crime, even if it was what the victim wanted.

  58

  Smitty

  I have been in this interview room for a long time on my own. I thought I would be shown to a cell but I have been put in here and a police officer stands in the corner of the room, acting as if I am not here. If I tried to leave, I’m sure he’d notice me then, but as long as I sit in this seat and do not move, he can pretend he is all alone.

  My heart almost leaps clean out of my chest when the door opens suddenly. The plain-clothes officer who asked me in for a chat earlier enters the room.

  ‘There is someone here who claims to be your solicitor and would like to see you,’ he says.

  I have a solicitor? Mum probably got one, but so soon? It’s not as if I’ve even been properly arrested, we’re all still pretending I am sitting here waiting for a nice informal chat.

  The solicitor who walks in probably didn’t jump at the chance, but I do get to my feet. I can’t help myself. It’s an automatic response to someone who carries themselves with an innate sense of authority; my knee-jerk reaction to being in the presence of my father.

  ‘All of us know that this man isn’t really your solicitor, but I’m going to let him talk to you if he encourages you to tell us the truth. It’s the best way forward.’ ‘Tell the truth’ to this thin, mean-looking man with his ill-fitting suit and pitifully uncombed hair means ‘confess whether you did it or not’, I’m sure. ‘Unless you’ve got any objections?’ the officer asks me.

  I shake my head, quickly.

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  My father extends a hand to encourage me to sit. He seems taller than I remember. Still as stately, imposing. He sits on the police side of the desk when I cautiously lower myself to the seat – the real ordeal will begin the moment I’m properly braced in this chair. The ‘being brought in for questioning’ and my mother’s reaction were nothing compared to being questioned by this man about the death of his mother. From his briefcase he produces a well-used A4 pad of yellow paper. He’s a busy man who makes a lot of notes, the stubs at the top of the page that look like the frayed edges of a badly hemmed dress tell me this. His hand slips into the inside left pocket of his expensive-looking suit and removes his pricey black Montblanc pen.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. That is how you begin a conversation with someone, whether they’re a stranger or not. No matter what the situation, you should at least greet them. ‘Hello’. The words of the Lionel Richie song unspool in my mind like a long thread of words, woven with a melody to become a symphony, a song that could have been describing parts of my life of late. Hello.

  My father, Mr Julius Zebila, seems startled by this. He does not look up from his yellow pad, which is being slowly written upon by the expensive pen as he notes down the name my adoptive parents gave me, but he does stop writing for a moment.

  He has paused at the second ‘s’ of Smittson. That’s my name, who I am, but is that how he thinks of me, refers to me now in the private space of his mind, his memory, his heart? Or will I be forever Talei Zebila? Can he divide himself in two like I do sometimes? On the paper he has written my adoptive name, the name I grew up with, but maybe inside he has written Talei, and when he looks at me he sees Talei. Maybe on the outside I am Clemency Smittson, and on the inside, to him, I am Talei Zebila. That’s how it seemed to be with my biological mother.

  Maybe I am ascribing thoughts and feelings to him, when in all honesty, to him, I am nobody special. I am Clemency Smittson, a person who was born in Brighton, who grew up in a small house in Otley, who is sitting in a police station accused of a terrible crime committed against someone he actually loved.

  When we met last time (the first time), he wouldn’t look at me. He let my mother, my sister, my brother and my grandmother talk, but he said nothing. Like Ivor, he looked in my general direction and stayed silent.

  ‘Why won’t you look at me?’ I ask him in my head. ‘Am I that much of a disappointment?’

  When my first father pauses again, this time while writing the date, I know I’ve said that out loud. He stares at the pad. He’s going to get up and walk out. He’s not going to stand for being questioned, not by me.

  ‘Mrs Smittson is very upset. She is outside with a young man. They are both very upset. I told them I would make sure that you were not being ill treated. Have the police treated you well?’

  So that’s how it works: I talk, he ignores me; he talks, I am expected to answer. ‘Yes, they’ve been fine.’

  ‘Can you verify where you were seven days ago?’

  ‘Working.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes, I work alone. I was in my workshop for most of that day and night.’

  ‘Did anybody see you there?’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know. They might have looked in through the shop window and seen a light on in the workshop. Or seen me walk past from one end of the workshop to another. I don’t know what other people saw.’

  ‘This is a very serious matter.’ Stern. My father is being stern, almost harsh with me. I wonder if he is li
ke this with all of his children or only the ones who are ‘brought in for questioning’.

  ‘I know it’s serious. And I didn’t do it,’ I reply. ‘I probably can’t prove that I didn’t do it, either. I don’t know how she died so I don’t know what the murder weapon was and if I touched it. I keep trying to remember what I touched when I was in her room so I can work out what it was that did it, then I have to stop that train of thought because I can’t imagine anyone actually doing that to her or any object I might have touched doing that to her. But I can’t stop thinking about it because I need to remember what it was I touched and why that might have the police thinking it was me.’

  The man opposite me has the same colour eyes as me; the same kink in his left eyebrow as me, too. We have similar shape noses, but mine is more like my other mother’s. The first time we met, my eyes scoured their faces like a miner panning for the gold pieces of similarity between them and me.

  ‘They believe she died of a massive overdose of insulin and a combination of other drugs that became a lethal cocktail.’ That was how she wanted me to do it. To sneak into her house when it would be empty and give her the mixture of drugs she’d made me write down. By the time I got home I had memorised them, even though there were so many, and destroyed the piece of paper so that I wouldn’t have those names hanging around, ready for anyone to stumble across.

  ‘Because of her condition,’ my father continues to say, ‘they know that she did not take them herself. Someone else administered them.’

  This is his mother he is talking about. The strain of that shows in the tense lines in the deep, dark brown skin around his glossy, black-brown eyes, in the way he holds his mouth when he is not speaking. He’s only twenty years older than me, my biological mother is only seventeen years older than me. He seems older, though. That’s what losing a parent can do to you.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ I state.

  ‘I am certain you didn’t.’ He still refuses to look at me while he speaks. ‘I would not be here if I believed for one minute you did. No child of mine would commit such a crime.’

  In one hurricane-like rush, my breath leaves me as my chest is almost crushed by being legitimised by him. He is my father. I am his child. He accepts me. Really, it shouldn’t matter. I am his daughter, it shouldn’t matter whether he accepts me or not, what he says and what he doesn’t, whether he looks at me or keeps his eyes averted. It shouldn’t matter, but this small crumb of acknowledgement means another part of me has been made real, made here and present. I have another little anchor that says I am from somewhere. I am from here.

  ‘Would you like me to stay with you while they question you?’ he asks. ‘I can’t step in or act for you legally, but I can stay if you wish me to.’

  I nod. I want him, my father, to stay.

  The door to the room opens and he stands to come over to my side of the table. Still he doesn’t look at me. My gaze, however, is drawn to him, mesmerised. I am panning for more gold, desperately seeking more similarities while the police officers enter the room.

  It shouldn’t matter, I shouldn’t need him to accept me to be able to further define myself, but it does and I do.

  59

  Smitty

  They keep asking me the same things over and over: ‘Why were your fingerprints on her medication?’ ‘How many times were you in Mrs Zebila’s room?’ ‘Where were you the day she was killed?’ ‘Why did you kill her?’

  I keep answering in the same way over and over: ‘She knocked them over once and I picked them up.’ ‘A few times, I can’t remember exactly how many.’ ‘I was in my workshop, working.’ ‘I didn’t kill her.’

  My father for the most part says nothing, does nothing, simply allows them to question me.

  Suddenly, the questions are different: ‘Why did you track down the Zebilas?’

  ‘I didn’t, I met Abi Zebila by accident.’

  ‘A pretty big “accident”, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Did you know before you met them how wealthy they are, especially the deceased Mrs Zebila?’

  ‘No, I knew nothing about them. I haven’t even applied for my adoption papers. I didn’t even know their name.’

  ‘Do you have money worries?’

  ‘No. I make enough to get by.’

  ‘And your inheritance from your deceased adoptive father, Mr Smittson?’

  ‘From my dad, you mean, yes.’

  The man next to me in the expensive suit, who hasn’t reacted to anything else I have said so far, reacts to that: he sits up in his chair and lays down his expensive pen at a perfect perpendicular angle to the lines of his yellow legal pad.

  ‘Did the death of your adoptive father inspire you to look for the Zebilas?’

  ‘No. I told you, I met Abi by accident.’

  ‘How did your adoptive father’s death make you feel?’

  ‘I wish you’d stop calling him that, he was my dad. My father. My dad. You don’t have to add the other word on.’

  The detective looks at the man beside me and I can sense that the man beside me’s whole body is as stiff as a totem pole. I’m guessing he expected me to take his feelings into consideration when answering these questions.

  ‘How do you think his death made me feel? I was devastated.’

  ‘Were you a little disorientated by his death?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Maybe a little angry at the world that someone you loved was taken from you?’

  ‘Maybe, I suppose.’

  ‘Maybe a little keen on some cosmic payback because if you hadn’t been put up for adoption you wouldn’t have had to lose this wonderful man you grew close to over the years?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t do anything like that.’

  ‘Can you explain why your fingerprints were on Mrs Zebila’s medication?’

  ‘I told you, I was there once and she knocked a lot of them on to the floor. I picked them up.’

  ‘No one else in the family mentioned this happening. Who else was there at the time to verify your version of events?’

  The detective has open pores on his nose. I’m not sure what that says about him apart from the fact that his nose looks like the crater-covered surface of the moon, but it’s a piece of information that lodges itself into my brain. I’m trying to work out how to tell the truth without sounding like I am guilty.

  ‘No one,’ I eventually say.

  ‘You were alone in the house with Mrs Zebila at the time that you say you picked up her medication?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many other times were you alone in the house with her?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Can you estimate? More than two, less than twenty, say?’

  ‘About ten,’ I state. I feel the man beside me grow still. He does not know this, no one does.

  ‘Was it during one of these ten or more times you were alone in the Zebila house with the victim that your fingerprints came to be on her jewellery?’

  ‘I looked through her jewellery a few times, yes.’

  ‘It’s an impressive collection, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much do you think her collection is worth?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re a jewellery expert, you must have worked with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of items over the years. Can’t you even estimate?’

  ‘No, I don’t do valuations. It’s a very specialised skill.’

  ‘Well, if you can’t estimate, which I’m surprised by given the length of time you have worked with jewellery, I’ll tell you. It is upwards of two hundred thousand pounds. Could be closer to half a million. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘Yes. She just had it in a box in the bottom drawer. I looked at it and sorted it out but I didn’t realise it was worth so much.’

  ‘Really? I find that hard to believe when you’re such an experienced jeweller.’

/>   ‘It’s true,’ I insist. Who knew my obsession with looking at pretty jewellery and hearing stories about people would result in this line of questioning?

  ‘Just out of interest, did you have a key to the Zebila house?’

  The police rarely ask a question they don’t know the answer to. I learnt that from watching all those cop shows. They know I have a key, or they suspect I have one and they want me to confirm their suspicions. Do I brazen it out or tell the truth?

  The man next to me now looks in my direction, disturbed that I haven’t answered already and that he didn’t know I was alone in the house with his mother several times. That I went through her very expensive jewellery collection.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. And my father’s entire body swings towards me.

  ‘How did you come by this key?’

  ‘My grandmother, Mrs Zebila, gave it to me.’

  The policeman visually logs the reaction of the man next to me.

  ‘Why would the victim do that?’

  ‘Because she wanted me to have it? Because she thought it might make me feel part of the family?’ Because it would make slipping in and doing what she wanted easier. And what she wanted was for me to kill her.

  ‘But neither of you mentioned it to any other member of the family, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you kill your grandmother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you feel like killing her when you found out that it was her who called Social Services to have you put up for adoption before you were born and pressurised both of your parents to give you away?’

  ‘No, because I didn’t know she did that.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. My birth mother hinted at it, but I didn’t know my grandmother called Social Services or that she put pressure on my parents.’ My father should probably be bowing his head in shame but he isn’t. He is still staring at me, stuck back at the revelation that I have access to his house whenever I want.

  ‘Did you put pressure on your grandmother to end her life?’