Rowan came in at seven. The police, he said, had asked him again to assist them with their enquiries, and again thanked him and let him come home.
‘What are they thinking, Rowan?’ Jules asked, her thumb stroking the thin paper of the pieces of receipt in her jacket pocket. She knew he’d be angry at having his evening disrupted for a second time. She put his meal in front of him and he sat down at the table to eat.
‘They’ve examined the CCTV footage from the shops, and they saw the Audi was parked on the other side of the green to the bus stop at the time Saul left that morning,’ Rowan said between mouthfuls. ‘They’ve put two and two together and concluded it means I took Saul somewhere. They say the car had gone when the bus left, that it must have been driven out of the village soon after, because they have footage of it going in the direction of the main A-road towards Ely. I said, well, surprise, surprise – that must be because I drove to Ely after dropping Saffie that morning, to go to the market. To get food for the nice meal I made you both that evening.’
He didn’t mention going on somewhere else. He didn’t mention driving beyond Ely into the Fens. And yet Jules knew he had done.
‘Thank you, sweetie, for that dinner,’ Jules said, her breath catching. ‘It was kind of you to cook. Did they ask anything else?’
‘They asked if I had a Twitter account and I said that I don’t do social media. Then they asked about the DNA they found in the car. Saul’s. Some hair, some skin cells apparently.’
‘But, well, of course there’s Saul’s DNA in the car. You’ve often given him lifts in the past.’
‘Yeah, well, you know that.’
‘And you told them?’
‘Of course.’
Rowan was unwilling to talk much more other than to give Jules a curtailed version of some other questions they had asked him – and then he began to vent his rage at her. ‘If you hadn’t reported what I said to Holly, I wouldn’t be their main bloody suspect.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You told her I’d threatened Saul.’
‘But what did you expect me to do?’ Jules cried. ‘You did threaten to beat up Saul if Holly didn’t talk to him. You wanted her to confront him. I had to tell her. I had to give her the opportunity to sort him out herself. It was what you wanted.’
Rowan finished his food and pushed his plate away. ‘You didn’t have to repeat my exact words. She had a duty to talk to her son. You didn’t have to terrorize her into it by telling her I wanted to beat the living daylights out of him.’
Jules gave her husband a hard stare. The fact was, though she didn’t tell him, it was actually Saffie who had alerted the police to Rowan’s suspect behaviour, when she’d said she knew her dad would ‘go crazy’ once he knew about the rape. She bit her lip.
‘Of course I bloody felt like kicking his head in,’ Rowan said now. ‘What father wouldn’t feel like that? Most fathers would feel the same.’
Jules wanted to say, Most fathers haven’t been sent on anger management courses for punching strangers in the face, but stopped herself.
‘I’m going to bed,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk about this when you’re less stressed out.’
On the way up to her room, she looked in on Saffie. She was sleeping soundly. Jules gazed at her daughter in her stripy pyjamas, with a Michael Morpurgo book she used to read when she was little open and face down on top of her duvet. She must have fallen asleep reading it. A surge of something went through Jules’s body. A yearning to return to the days when she would have snuggled up with Saffie under her duvet and read to her. Those days weren’t even all that long ago. It was only once Saffie started secondary school that she’d objected to her mother reading to her. And now, while she slept, the child in Saffie was very present, in the curve of her cheek, in her slightly upturned mouth. In the way her eyelashes curled where they met the cheekbone. Jules bent down and kissed her gently. It was impossible to think there was a baby developing inside her daughter. How dare Saul have done this to her? To them.
And then that memory swept over Jules again. How she and Holly had joked, years ago, that Saff and Saul might one day have a baby together and how it would make up for those neither she nor Holly had been able to have. Be careful what you wish for, she thought, ruefully.
13
HOLLY
Pete phones me early the next morning on our landline. ‘Holly?’
Saul’s Nike trainers lie by the front door on their sides, untouched since he left. What was he wearing on his feet that morning? That was something the police failed to ask. Or if they did, I’ve forgotten. His coat, the one he never wears, hangs limply on its peg. He’ll be cold out there now the weather’s turned. And that thought upsets me so much, I can barely speak.
‘Holl, Thea has lost her maths book. She thinks she might have left it in her room. Could you take a look? If it’s there, I’ll pop in for it. I take it there’s no news?’
‘You think I wouldn’t have told you if there was?’
‘I . . .’
‘I’ll go and find Thea’s maths book,’ I say.
Despite my resentment that Pete’s gone to them, the girls’ space is a comfort to me. The smell of the perfume Freya and Saffie both wear hits me in the face as I lean over Freya’s desk. A tropical-fruit aroma. I draw it in. The horrible memory of it on Saul’s jumper after he’d been in Saffie’s house returns to me. The doubt it raised in my mind. Now I realize he smelled of it not because he’d been close enough to Saff to have picked up her perfume but because his stepsister has been wearing it. Why did I accuse him of having Saff’s scent on his jumper? Why didn’t I think of that at the time? Why let Saffie’s accusation influence everything?
The girls’ spare pyjamas are neatly folded on their pillows – a Deepa-ism that they have always observed. The rest of the room is very much as I last left it, the carpet pretty much bare, the two desks under the Velux windows tidy and uncluttered. Pete works in here sometimes, when it’s Deepa’s weekend with the girls, but he’s always careful to take his laptop and books with him when he leaves. It’s a room that looks unlived in, which makes me sad. I’d like the girls to spend more time with us. Larking about, messing things up, giving me things to do – beds to make, pillows to plump, clothes to pick up off the floor, toys to arrange on their shelves. I’d like to spend more time reading to Thea and chatting about girlish things to Freya. I’d even like to have more washing to do, to hang out and iron.
My mobile pings as I bend down to look at the girls’ things and a reminder pops up; I’m due at the TV for the appeal on the local news in an hour.
There’s not much on Thea’s little desk, a pencil case with panda- and mouse-shaped rubbers in it, pencils and pens. There are a couple of books, a Jacqueline Wilson and a Stephenie Meyer, neatly placed one upon the other. I can’t find the maths textbook. On Freya’s, there’s nail polish and remover and a bag of make-up and hair bobbles. Lots of girly stuff. There’s a pad of heart-shaped Post-its in a drawer in the side of her desk with notes scribbled on them. A struck-through name scrawled inside a love heart, pierced with arrows. ** ****, it says. I love him. She’s got a teenage crush on someone. No name visible. I hold it up to the light. It’s hard to see the name except that it ends on an upward stroke, an ‘l’, I think. Though it could be a ‘b’, or a ‘d’. Then I spot a little pink diary with a padlock. I pick it up, try to open it. It’s locked.
I rummage about to see whether Freya has left the key anywhere, tucked inside a drawer, under her pillow even, but it’s nowhere. She must have taken the key with her, keeping her diary here, away from Thea’s prying eyes, but locked up so no one else – me? – can read it. It’s against all my principles. But still fizzing with fury and upset at the world, and especially with Pete for leaving me here on my own, I decide I’m entitled to what I do next. Freya is a link between Saul and Saffie. She might know something about what really went on between her friend and her stepbrother the night Saffie claims he rap
ed her. Girls talk to one another. And Saffie and Freya are, or were, best friends. Why didn’t Pete think to grill Freya himself before he whisked her to her mother’s? He’s so afraid of upsetting his girls. But at the expense of Saul! The sense of injustice this arouses in me is what drives me to find a pair of scissors to force the lock. The scissors prove frustratingly useless. I try one angle and then another, bending the blade in the process, and in the end, still in self-righteous fury, go in search of a hammer.
The hammer’s in the shed. I fetch it and return to the attic room. Anyone looking in would be perturbed, horrified even, to observe me, senior lecturer in creative writing, MA, middle class, middle-aged, kneeling on the floor bashing at the tiny gold lock of my stepdaughter’s diary with a hammer. These are the depths I’ve been forced to stoop to in order to prove that my son is innocent. At last the lock breaks in two, spitting a piece of brass across the room, and I pull off the rest of it. Now I can turn the pages of Freya’s diary.
The contents are at first glance disappointing. She hasn’t kept it very religiously. In fact, she has barely written in it at all. The only entry seems to be irrelevant to the day.
I absolutely love him, she has written over several pages.
I turn over a few more blank weeks and then come to a centrefold. Here, she’s scrawled over the double-page spread, I love him!!!!
But he doesn’t love me. He loves Saffie. She loves him too. She says if I tell anyone, I’ll be in trouble. We all will. Because it’s illegal. It’s not fair. I wore the perfume he gave her today. She let me have some. But he still didn’t notice me the way he notices her.
I am afraid my heart is going to break. I am going to die of heartbreak!!!!!!
I sit on Freya’s smooth duvet and gaze at her writing. It’s calming to rest for a bit, letting the sun pour in from the skylight, just being. After a while – I don’t know how long – I look at Freya’s writing again. I turn it over in my mind. I unravel the last two weeks, going right back to the point at which Jules stood in my study at work and said that Saul had raped Saffie.
Girls don’t lie about rape, I’d told myself. And yet, this time I knew it couldn’t be true. Because Saul would not do such a thing. Why would Saffie lie, then? Say something so abhorrent about a boy she used to play with as a child? What would be in it for her to say my son raped her? This is what I’ve been searching for. An explanation. In my volatile state, my feelings swerve all over the place. I move from anger to sympathy in a swift arc.
Freya and Saffie are in love with the same boy. His name ends in an ‘l’. Saffie has told Freya she’ll get in trouble because it’s illegal. Saul is Freya’s stepbrother. Of course Saffie would think it illegal for Freya to have a relationship with her stepbrother. But she must’ve thought it was OK for her. Even though she’s beneath the age of consent. The point is, what this tells me is that Saffie wanted to sleep with Saul. It wasn’t rape. She loved him. And Saul loved her, according to Freya’s diary. Then when Saffie became afraid she was pregnant she must’ve panicked. Poor child, I think. Poor children. I want to weep for them. For all of them. For their naivety. For their hopeless, blind innocence.
And so I do. I hold Freya’s diary in my hand, put it to my nose, breathe in the scent, cloying, girlish, and I cry.
*
By the time I arrive at the studios, my eyes are swollen, my face puffy and red. Panic threatens to take over my earlier serenity as I sit on a slate-grey sofa in the grey reception area, waiting to be called into the studio. How much greyer could they make this space? They must have used gallons of grey paint on the walls, on the doors. Then I envisage all those shopfronts and interiors painted this same drab colour. I think of Jules’s home, painted a fashionable pigeon throughout. If the 1970s were a brown decade, we will see, when we look back on it, that the 2010s were a grey one.
*
‘OK . . . If I can drop this wire inside your jumper and clip the mic here, please . . . We’ll do a light check and then you speak into this camera.’
The newsreader finishes his bulletin and the producer nods at me. The blazing lights make my face sticky. I put up a finger and wipe a dribble of sweat from under my eye. The studio is tiny, no bigger than a cupboard, and it’s too hot. I’ve been given a grey swivel chair to sit on. My thighs inside the ‘velvet touch’ tights I’m wearing begin to perspire.
The producer advises me, when I ask, not to muddy my message by referring in any way to the rape, or anything I have found out since.
‘Keep to the point,’ she says. ‘You want your son to come home. That’s what you want to put across. If you begin to justify things or cast aspersions or make excuses, Twitter will go berserk and the tabloids will have a field day. And that will be counterproductive. Just a nice, emotional appeal for him to come home, OK? Or for anyone who might have seen him to get in touch. We’ll broadcast contact details afterwards. Straight into the camera, lovey. You can start speaking . . . now.’
‘Please,’ I say into the black eye of the camera, ‘Saul, if you’re watching this, get in touch. You are not in any trouble.’ I pause. ‘No trouble,’ I say again, glancing at the producer. She shrugs, nods ‘OK.’
I feel a fool. Saul isn’t going to watch this. He isn’t going to hear.
‘All we want is to know you’re safe.’ I trot the words out, aware of the thousands of locals who will feel sorry for me, thanking their lucky stars this isn’t them having to make this appeal. All those families convinced this could never happen to them. All those families who believe I’ve brought up a rapist. ‘I miss you so much, and we all – me, Pete, Freya and Thea – love you. Everyone does. Come home.’
I don’t cry. The producer tells me it will add weight to my appeal, but the tears won’t come. I want to say something about the love he and Saffie felt for one another. How she must have taken fright, once she realized she thought their affair would get out there, but before I can open my mouth again, the producer says, ‘OK, that’s a wrap. You can leave now.’
I’m about to get up from the swivel chair when Saul’s face appears. Blown out of all proportion, long, straight hair falling over one half of his face, the eye that’s visible squinting into the sunlight. The photo Fatima and I found yesterday flashes onto the screens all around the studio. I shut my eyes. I can’t look at it. It’s too much like the kind of photo you see of the murdered.
Afterwards, I feel soiled by the whole experience. Exposed and degraded. Saul hates being noticed, and now his face has been blasted all over the local news into sitting rooms everywhere. I’ve stooped to my lowest point since this whole thing began.
I leave the studio and take the train home from Cambridge alone. I walk away from the station towards the village. The air is cool in my throat after the heat of the TV studio. The sun sinks over the Fens. Bare canopies of distant trees make copper-coloured sprays against the last light in the sky. The puddles turn amber, the drains almost black, sucking the lifeblood of the land out to sea. I imagine I can hear it, the water seeping away, the peat drying out, crackling, leaving the silt banks we live on. I hear Saul, before all this happened, quoting a Fenland word to me. Roddon. We live on a roddon.
There are lights on in the Baptist Chapel, as if there’s a service on. It’s a flat-fronted brick building dwarfing the rows of cottages at the edge of the village. The double doors of the chapel are, unusually for a weekday, flung open, light spilling across the road. Posters stuck to the doors advertise the Auction of Promises. The event the women were planning that fateful night in the pub. There’s the chatter of voices floating from within. I’ve never seen the place so throbbing with noise and life. I’m about to cross the road to avoid being spotted when someone steps out in front of me.
‘Hey!’ It’s Samantha. ‘Holly, I’m so desperately sorry about what’s happened to your son.’
Something about her kind face warms my heart. I remember we’d half arranged to meet, and feeling pleased and flattered; she’s at least fifteen ye
ars younger than me. I didn’t follow it up, but guess she’ll understand that given the circumstances, I’ve been preoccupied. She’s holding a cigarette, huddled into her blue coat, standing on the gravel yard to the side of the chapel.
‘You must be beside yourself. If Freddie disappeared, I’d be gutted. I couldn’t go on. I think you’re so brave.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘No, really. It’s so unfair on you, all the things people are saying about you and him and . . .’
‘What are they saying?’
She gulps. ‘Just, you know. People can be so judgemental when they’re scared. Scared it might happen to them. I’ve told them, “Look, no one knows the facts. All we know is it must be hell for you, as his mother.” I spotted you coming up the road and you looked so dejected. I was just sneaking a cheeky cigarette. That’s the only reason I was standing out here in the cold. It’s blinking freezing. Let’s go in.’
‘I’m not going in there, Samantha.’
‘Come on, it might cheer you up. Or at least take your mind off things. I got myself a spa day. You could’ve got all kinds of things – a computer overhaul, a month’s personal training, a day of doggie day care.’ She pauses, as if waiting for me to smile. ‘If you’d been earlier. You’ve missed the auction itself, but I could get you something to eat. We’re raising money for a multi-sensory room at the school.’
‘I’m very happy to donate some money. Here . . .’ I begin to rummage in my purse. The villagers are great charity-givers, always fundraising and doing marathons and triathlons for some cause or another. I know I should participate more.
‘Oh, come on,’ Samantha’s saying. ‘Stick with me – you’ll be fine.’
I hesitate for a second, then remember Samantha and her husband on the local news, helping to search for Saul. I feel ashamed at how self-centred I’ve become. And then I think, Jules will be in here, and I can tell her how I know why Saffie lied, say we can work together, now I have an explanation that makes sense.
I Thought I Knew You Page 23
