I Thought I Knew You

by Penny Hancock

  ‘That’s what she wrote in her diary,’ I say. ‘Illegal, because of their age and Saul being Freya’s stepbrother. They meant Saul, I’m sure. But Saffie still denies that it was him.’

  Pete sighs. ‘Not her stepbrother, Holly. Their teacher.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Their maths teacher. Saul’s tutor. Harry Bell.’

  20

  JULES

  Jules turned over and looked at the alarm clock. It was gone nine. After a terrible night, she had slept late for the first time in days. Her body had shut down after the traumatic news about Saul, then Saffie’s revelation on the riverbank, and Rowan’s reaction to it. Now she pushed back the duvet and went to the bedroom window. The sky was a translucent grey, weak sunlight filtering through. The fens were black now, the rich soil ploughed into perfectly even stripes that ran all the way to the horizon. She moved her gaze and looked at the bridge over the sluice, beside which she’d found Saffie and Holly the evening before. She shuddered.

  There was no sound from Saffie’s room.

  Rowan was already in the garden, directly below, measuring out the dimensions of the pool he had been planning for months now. Striding up and down, counting his paces. There was something very tight, very tense in his movements. Jules stood at the window watching him. She tried to spot whether there was anything telling in his stance. It was interesting when someone you knew intimately didn’t know you could see them. Jules knew every centimetre of Rowan. She imagined his body now, under the grey tracksuit. She thought of his arms, his strong biceps, which she had always loved, with the unlikely girlish freckles that faded towards his shoulders, where the skin became pale and smooth. She thought of the line of silky fair hair down his spine. She knew his smell, an almost biscuity smell that she had always found impossibly alluring, sometimes – when she had been angry, or let down by him – in spite of herself. She knew what his feet looked like. The way his big toes were wide and chunky, but the others tapered in a perfect gradation like a flight of stairs to the smallest one. She knew how he was as ticklish as a child and would giggle if she were to drag her fingers over the soles of his feet. She knew his hands with their muscular fingers, the golden hairs that sprouted from his knuckles and the small, fish-shaped scar on his palm that he had got cutting himself when sawing wood for the decking. She knew the parts of his body that were always warm to the touch. His inner thighs, for example, and his hands. She knew the areas that were cool, such as the front of his thighs and his upper arms. And yet, watching him from the window, she realized she didn’t know him the way she thought she did when she was close to him in bed, or moving about the house. Or standing next to him at a party, with friends, proud that he had chosen to spend his life with her.

  Now she stood apart and observed him, she saw what other people must see. He had developed bulk, and when he stood still, he held his arms in a way that made it look as if he was either about to embrace or punch someone. His legs were shorter than she always thought, his body longer, and his neck was thicker. But it wasn’t just his build, she realized. He was also nervier than she would have described him, jerking his head up and looking around every time there was a sound – a train rumbling by, or a plane passing overhead, or the sudden, distant bark of a dog from the village. He had an intense expression, his forehead creased into several folds, as he concentrated on the job at hand, as if he was working hard to force out other, more pressing, thoughts.

  He was less relaxed and laidback and amiable than he used to be. Yes, he was still a warm, affable, sociable man at times. And Jules knew, from experience, how that same side could flip, and become angry and aggressive. But she hadn’t ever known before the highly wired man she watched out there now. The man who, she suddenly realized, she hadn’t seen smile for days. Ever since she’d told him that his daughter had been raped.

  Did she still love him? Did people stop loving their partners when they knew they’d committed a heinous crime? Such as rape? Or murder? Holly had continued to love Saul. But then she’d never doubted his innocence. And the mother-child relationship was different, anyway, from the kind of relationship you had with a partner. If Rowan had been accused of rape, would Jules have been as convinced of his innocence? Would she have stood by him?

  She wasn’t sure. Or what about murder? The body found in the Fens still hadn’t been identified, as far as Jules knew, but it was almost certainly Saul’s. She shivered at the thought, pushed down the feelings that threatened to overwhelm her. Had Saul killed himself, or had he been murdered? Was it Rowan who’d killed him? And would she still love him if she discovered the answer was yes?

  There were women who visited their husbands in prison for years, standing by their sides long after they knew they were guilty of the most shocking crimes. But would Jules be able to stay with Rowan if she knew he had killed her oldest friend’s child? Even if it was in retaliation for believing he’d raped their daughter?

  She thought again of Holly and Saul. Would Holly have stopped loving her son if he had raped Saffie? But again, it was different with a son. With a child. Because Jules knew that no, Holly would never stop loving Saul whatever he had done, or might do. She would have found some explanation, some chink in her mothering, perhaps, to explain why he had transgressed. A husband, though, that was another matter altogether.

  Watching him, as he bent and measured and stood, and rubbed his back, Jules felt confused. She didn’t really want a self-cleaning swimming pool anymore. Not that it had ever been her idea. She didn’t even care that much about the patio and the deck and hot tub, or the shower with the Jacuzzi function. She didn’t want those expansive summer parties Rowan liked to throw. Yes, she had always enjoyed this extravagant side of her husband. But what she wanted, she realized, was a man who cared. And until now, all this material extravagance had seemed to represent that care. Was Rowan’s generosity any kind of substitute for a man she could trust? She wished she had a husband she could believe in, as Holly had. Someone like Pete who might not make much money but who was genuine and earnest and kind. For a few moments, she let her mind wander back to the affair she’d had with Rob. How different he had been to Rowan, and how for a short time it had felt good to be with someone mild-mannered and gentle and completely uninterested in material goods.

  But in the end, Rowan’s passion for her, and her physical attraction to him, had won her back. Love wasn’t rational, after all.

  And then the truth about Saul hit her again. And the role she believed Rowan had played in it. The reality was too much to bear.

  Jules hadn’t managed to get Saffie to say who had made her pregnant. What had this person and her daughter and her husband, between them, done to Holly’s family? And she remembered again telling Holly about Archie, on the road in the rain that day. She had even destroyed Holly’s memory of her first husband. What kind of depths had she and Rowan stooped to because of all this?

  At last she heard Rowan come in the front door, drop his boots on the mat and go into the cloakroom to wash his hands. She went down to meet him.

  ‘You made me jump,’ he said, as he came out of the cloakroom. ‘I didn’t know you were up. I’ve been busy measuring out the space for the pool for us. We’re going to need to make it deeper than I thought, to allow for the filter. And to—’

  ‘Rowan, you don’t have to keep avoiding the subject of Saul.’

  Rowan turned and walked into the kitchen. His neck was pink.

  ‘Ro?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘But perhaps we need to.’ She followed him. ‘To be honest, I don’t know why you feel so bad about it. Saffie’s the one who feels bad. For lying about him. We need to reassure her she made a mistake but what Saul did to himself had nothing to do with her.’

  ‘Did to himself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we don’t know that, do we?’ Rowan turned and snapped. ‘The police don’t know Saul killed himself?’

  Jules swa
llowed. ‘Not yet, no. What do you think, though, Rowan? What do you think has happened to him?’

  Jules followed Rowan across the kitchen towards the extension. When he turned to face her, his face was bright red.

  ‘Why are you asking me? All I’ve heard is they found a body. And that Saffie has told us Saul never did it. I don’t know any more than that. But that’s bad enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘Bad enough?’

  ‘For Holly. On top of everything else she’s gone through.’

  Jules stared at her husband. This was the first time he had shown an iota of sympathy for Holly since Saffie’s accusation. Now his words were laced with guilt, with contrition.

  ‘Rowan,’ she said, and her voice was faint. ‘It’s as if you feel guilty about something. Do you?’

  He didn’t reply, but turned his back on her again. He walked to the picture window. Stared out. He said, facing away from her, ‘I thought that boy had raped my daughter. And Holly was doing nothing about it. I couldn’t just stand by and let it happen without doing something. They needed bringing to justice . . .’

  Jules’s heart rate sped up.

  ‘Rowan, you didn’t have a meltdown, did you? You have to tell me.’

  Rowan didn’t turn round, so Jules ploughed on: ‘You did. You forgot everything you learned in anger management. You’ve done something, haven’t you?’

  You couldn’t change a person after all, Jules thought. It was true what people said.

  Rowan would always have the side that flipped and turned violent, however many anger management courses he went on. And this time, the violent side had gone much, much too far.

  When Rowan next spoke, it was so quietly Jules had to strain to hear him.

  ‘I was defending my daughter. I believed Saul had raped her. What did you expect me to do? Stand back and let the boy and his mother get away with it?’

  ‘Of course not. I expected you to support Saffie and me, and I don’t know . . . I suggested we got help.’

  ‘You wanted to drag in Rape fucking Crisis.’ He was getting that look on his face, the irate one, the irrational one.

  ‘It didn’t have to be them . . .’

  ‘Look, Jules.’ Rowan swung round. ‘No one was doing a thing about it. So I had to.’

  ‘Rowan, what did you do to Saul?’

  ‘Mum?’ Saffie had come silently into the room and was standing there in her pyjamas. ‘What are you two arguing about?’

  ‘Nothing, darling,’ Jules said. ‘How are you, sweetie? I was about to bring you a drink. Go back to bed and I’ll come in a minute.’

  Saffie gave a weak smile and turned and climbed up the stairs.

  ‘Perhaps you could leave me alone now,’ Rowan said. ‘I need to get on with the pool.’

  Jules followed Rowan outside.

  ‘You’re not walking away from this, Rowan. We need to talk. You have to tell me—’

  Jules was about to grab Rowan, turn him to face her, when the doorbell rang. She turned to see the now familiar outlines of DC Maria Shimwell and DI Venesuela in the glass.

  She opened the door, steeling herself in case they had come to take Rowan away again for further questioning or even to arrest him at last. So it took some time for her to absorb Shimwell’s words.

  ‘We have some information about an alleged case of sexual exploitation. Involving Saffie. We need to have a chat to her. We will be as gentle as possible. May we come in?’

  21

  HOLLY

  ‘Harry Bell?’ I repeat. ‘Saul’s form tutor?’ The shock of this revelation momentarily overshadows everything else. It sends my anxiety about Saul a little way away, so the pain is dulled for a while. However, it still feels as if it’s another woman, not me, whose voice is able, so rationally, to reply, ‘No, they love Saul. Or . . . some other boy whose name ends in “l” – someone who they were protecting.’

  ‘Bell,’ says Pete. ‘Harry Bell. The name that ended in an “l” in the diary.’

  This other me, the calm me, sits for a minute, trying to take this in. Trying to rearrange the facts so that this makes some kind of sense. Because nothing else does. It’s quite understandable that a couple of naive thirteen-year-olds would develop a crush on Harry Bell. I remember thinking how handsome he was, as Samantha gazed adoringly at him in the Baptist Chapel, the night of the auction. How I’d envied her that, because it was how I’d once felt towards Archie.

  ‘So they have a schoolgirl crush on their teacher. So what? Harry Bell’s married,’ I hear myself say. ‘With young kids. I’ve met him. He’s Saul’s tutor. He wanted to help find him. He’s a devoted father. And he’s got that lovely wife, Samantha, so that doesn’t explain Saffie’s pregnancy.’

  ‘Holly. The girls knew having a relationship with him was illegal. Not just because of their age but because he’s a teacher. The minute Freya said his name, alarm bells rang.’

  I think for a minute. ‘Freya wrote that he didn’t love her. He loved Saffie.’

  ‘There you go. I told Freya if Saffie was involved with a teacher, we had to know. She said she thought Mr Bell, as she calls him, did love Saffie. Because he looked at her all the time and asked her to attend his “revision sessions”. He’s the one who gave her that ghastly perfume Freya’s been borrowing.’

  I smell it, even as Pete says it. The nauseating, tropical aroma Saffie wore as she came downstairs the night of Tess’s drinks, with that sullen look on her face. The face of a girl who was out of her depth and terrified of telling anyone. The face Jules interpreted as her daughter in a teenage strop. The perfume she wore was the same as the one Freya had worn the night she came in with Pete. But Deepa hadn’t given it to her, as she’d claimed. Freya had borrowed it from Saffie to try and attract Harry Bell’s attention. As I absorb all these details, I have the sense of an impending storm rolling mercilessly towards me. Saul is innocent. As I always knew. But he’s also a victim of someone he trusted . . .

  ‘Freya was heartbroken initially, that he didn’t choose her,’ Pete is saying. ‘Poor deluded kid. But it looks as though things between him and Saffie didn’t stop there. I’ve told the police. They’re questioning him now.’

  ‘Harry Bell slept with Saffie? He made her pregnant?’

  Pete grimaces. ‘He’s the one they were “in love” with. And we know from what Freya told us he crossed boundaries – enough to suggest he was prepared to cross others. We’ll find out if there was more to it once the police have interviewed him. I reassured Freya that the police would make sure she and Saff were both safe, whatever she told us. Freya was frightened she’d get Saffie into trouble. It took quite a lot to get anything out of her.’ Pete pauses. ‘Holl, is this too much for you now?’ he asks. He has his arm round me, leaning back against the sofa cushions.

  ‘No, I need to know. I need to know anything else that proves Saul is, and always was, innocent. Not a rapist . . . but . . .’ The storm rolls closer. I shut my eyes.

  Pete draws a deep breath.

  ‘I should have taken more time,’ he murmurs. ‘I should have thought. Before taking the girls back to Deepa’s. I should have asked Freya whether there was anything that might motivate Saffie to lie. They were such close friends. But . . . my only defence is, Freya wouldn’t have told me anything. She was sworn to silence. And petrified, by then. Plus I didn’t want her or Thea to know about the rape allegation if I could avoid it. To protect Saul.’

  ‘How? How was it to protect Saul?’

  ‘I didn’t want the rumour to spread. Girls talk. You didn’t want them to know either, if you remember, Holly? You were adamant they shouldn’t know! You begged me not to tell them.’

  Pete’s doing his utmost to atone. Surely, I think indignantly, as a psychotherapist, he should have been able to see better than the rest of us that his own daughter was hiding something she clearly felt uncomfortable about.

  ‘I believed, when I first met you,’ I say at last, ‘that you had the skills to understand human beha
viour. And therefore you would know what was really going on inside people’s minds. It was what made me fall in love with you in the first place.’

  ‘You thought I had some kind of superhuman insight?’

  ‘You’re a psychotherapist. You’re supposed to.’

  ‘I’m just a bloke, Holly. A fallible bloke. Just skin and bones. And a bit too much flesh.’

  What Pete is good at, of course, is listening. He’s just as prone as all of us to putting his children before everything. Which is why, rather than pausing, and thinking, he hurried his daughters away from my son the minute he thought they might be at the tiniest risk. Does that make him a disloyal stepfather? Or a protective and loyal father? Pete may not be the man I thought he was. But through the mists of whisky and Xanax and liqueur and a poor night’s sleep, the thought comes to me that perhaps the man he is is better than I realized. Fallible? Yes. A little too much flesh? Yes. But working overtime to do his best by everyone. And, after all, he is the only family I have left.

  ‘I should never have left you alone during any of this,’ Pete says, as if he can indeed see inside my mind. ‘When you didn’t want me to come home the other night, I was beside myself. I thought by being torn between my girls and you, I’d destroyed us. I thought we were over. Because I knew what a hard line you take on people who let you down.’

  ‘Maybe I’m learning,’ I murmur. ‘Maybe I’ll try to change. I do need you, Pete.’

  After a while, Pete says, ‘Well, I had already decided that I would come home to you and I’d stay and look after you whether you liked it or not. I decided if you wanted to cut me off, I’d make it extremely hard for you.’

  He leans towards me, just as someone knocks loudly on the front door.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ he says.

  When he comes back, he has Fatima with him.

  ‘We’ve identified the body,’ she says.