All the Hidden Truths

by Claire Askew

  She was aware of someone standing near to her. When she looked up, it was the grey-coated man – his mobile phone still in his hand. He too was looking up at the TV screen.

  ‘You there!’ The woman with the bloodied foot had also noticed him. ‘What do you think you’re about, photographing something like that?’

  The man turned his head, slowly – up close, there was something almost reptilian about him. He was small for a man, and slight – not much older than thirty, Ishbel would have guessed, though his mousy-coloured hair was beginning to thin.

  ‘What are you,’ the woman was saying, ‘some sort of pervert?’

  The man took a step towards them, and both Ishbel and the bandaged woman flinched. His face bloomed into a small, nasty smile.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I’m a journalist. Grant Lockley. You might have heard of me?’

  Ishbel hadn’t. She wanted very much for him to go away. She wanted to look back up at the TV, or go back to the desk and ask again about the list of names, or do something. But she also felt like she had to keep an eye on this man.

  ‘Journalist,’ the bandaged woman scoffed. ‘The worst kind of pervert.’

  Grant Lockley looked hurt.

  ‘Not so, madam,’ he said. Ishbel shook her head slightly. She felt like she was inside some sort of surreal bad dream. ‘Everyone has a job to do. This is mine.’

  The woman scoffed. Lockley didn’t speak again, but instead lifted the mobile phone and aimed it at the woman. The flash went off, and Ishbel blinked, hard. She could never believe how bright those things were: behind her eyelids, a white streak swam on her retina. When she opened her eyes again, Grant Lockley had gone, and beside her, the woman was opening and closing her mouth like a fish.

  ‘Ishbel.’

  Someone else was standing in front of her now, and she looked up. It was Greg. His face was very white. Ishbel looked at his hands, which hung by his sides in two loose cups. He clearly hadn’t noticed, but there was something brown and flaking dried onto his cuff: blood. She immediately forgot all about the grey-coated man and his phone.

  ‘Ishbel,’ he said again. ‘I need you to come with me, please. And I’m going to need you to phone Aidan. I haven’t been able to reach him.’

  Ishbel stood, and found it hurt to do so, like she’d been left outside for a long time in a hard rain, and rusted over.

  ‘She’s hurt, isn’t she.’ It wasn’t a question.

  Greg turned to face her, fully, and looked her straight in the eye. Looking back, Ishbel would realise she appreciated that – he didn’t flinch, didn’t sugar-coat. Years of experience, she supposed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Abigail was shot, Ishbel. I can tell you more, but I need you to come with me now.’

  He gestured towards the double doors. A deep, hot fear howled up inside Ishbel, and she allowed it to pick up her feet and carry her out of that room, in the wake of the boy Jack, and the paramedics, and Greg.

  To: Helen Birch

  From: Alan Gibb

  CC: Amy Kato

  Subject: Initial statement, Moira Summers

  Date: 14/05 16:09

  DI Birch,

  Please find attached the initial statement taken from Mrs Moira Summers this afternoon. I attended the search at the Summers’ property this morning and took charge of Mrs Summers while the search was ongoing. When the request came for her to attend the Royal Infirmary morgue to formally identify her son she asked that I go along with her. Having sought the necessary permission, and taking into account the fact that a FLO had not yet been assigned, I agreed. The body was formally identified as Ryan Andrew Summers and all necessary paperwork completed at 2.35 p.m. today.

  I then accompanied Mrs Summers to the station at Fettes Row and took the attached initial statement from her. She is currently still at the station. At this stage she has not been detained. I have now stepped back and have cc-d in Amy Kato who I am told has been assigned the case as FLO.

  If you want to ask me anything just give me a call and I can head back to the Command Centre at a time convenient for yourself.

  Alan

  View attachment:

  Initial statement (audio transcript)

  Mrs Moira Summers

  Date: 14 May

  Time of statement: 15:44

  I’d been in his room in the morning. It’s strange, I don’t go in there much, but for some reason this morning I did. It smelled – I suppose all rooms where young men are allowed to do what they like smell that way – like sweat and old food. So the first thing I did was open the window. It was warm: actual warm air came in through the window when I opened it and I remember feeling shocked that spring had arrived, all at once. After I stripped the sheets off the bed, I sat under the window and listened for a while to the jackdaws. They make that strange sound, a sort of a spark – like rolling marbles, when they hit each other. The neighbour’s garden has a big tree, and it’s full of them.

  What did I do in there, let’s see . . . Stripped the bed, carried the sheets down to the wash. I suppose you’re shocked that I still change my grown son’s sheets, but if I didn’t, he’d sleep in the same ones for a year. He’d wear them to rags. Then I think I took the dishes out. The usual: coffee mugs with bits of old milk floating on the top. Empty beer bottles, popped bottle lids. A few plates. He eats up there. I don’t see him much, especially not since his father died, and that was a good two years ago.

  I don’t go through his things. I don’t rifle. Oh God, a bad choice of words. I mean I respect his privacy. I’ve been in trouble, before now – throwing things out that weren’t meant to go. Receipts, things that looked like litter. This morning I moved some clothes off the floor, just to run the hoover round. The computer screen? It was dark – like they are when they make themselves go to sleep.

  I flurried about downstairs. I had the radio on: I always have the radio on. But I was hoovering, and the washer was going, so the first report I didn’t hear. The house seemed like it was full of sun, and I was happy. Happy, while all of what happened was happening.

  I heard the second report. I heard them say ‘Three Rivers College’, so I paid attention. Then they said shooting. At first I thought they meant filming, shooting a film. Then I understood, though at some point I went deaf – I just had the sound of blood in my ears. They still didn’t know much, but they’d set up the helpline. I couldn’t call at first. I’d gone cold all over – I was shivering, and I couldn’t feel my hands. Couldn’t dial. It took me five minutes and then it was jammed and I had to hold. There was hold music. I still can’t believe there was hold music.

  What was my thought process? I thought, My son is dead. I wished I hadn’t washed his sheets, because they would have smelled of him, and if he was dead I would want to smell him again. Then I thought, No, Ryan isn’t dead. Wouldn’t I have felt it, me, his mother? Wouldn’t some cosmic force have told me? You read about these things. Then I thought about how big that college is and how many buildings there are. All the places he might have hidden, how he’d know to hide. I thought, Maybe he was there in the engineering lab and the whole thing happened somewhere else and he sat right through it. Maybe he didn’t even know. I listened to the hold music and those were the things that I thought.

  The music stopped and I spoke to a person. A young man. I told him that my son was a student at the college and that he had gone there that morning, and I said his full name, Ryan Andrew Summers. The man said they didn’t have any names, they didn’t know who was shot and who was not shot. The only thing he told me was that I should not try to call Ryan’s phone, because he or someone else might be using it to call 999. And I mustn’t go there, to the college. Then he hung up.

  I’m hearing now, on the news, that parents did go, they did drive to the college. That they’re getting in the way of police. It’s odd: listening to that hold music all that time and I never thought, I have to go there. I never thought, Go and get your baby. What kind of mother . . . I’ve asked myse
lf this question a thousand times, I mean just today. What kind of mother have I been?

  Then the phone rang a few times. I picked it up thinking Ryan, but it wasn’t Ryan. Each time it was someone who’d heard on the news, wanted to know if he was okay. I cried at them. I wanted them to get off the line, because what if he called? But I couldn’t say it. I just cried. I put the TV on.

  It was on a loop on the 24-hour news, big red ticker along the bottom like you see in films. They said the suspected gunman was a young man who was a student there. There must be thousands of young male students at Three Rivers, but that was when I had the thought. What if it was my young male student, my boy, my Ryan? And once I’d had that thought, I couldn’t shake it – it stuck out between all the other thoughts, like a tongue. What if he’s dead? It was him. Maybe he hid? It was him. He’ll walk through that door any second, you’ll see. It was him. It was him, it was him, it was him. Just like that. It filled my head like a loud noise, like someone hammering.

  Then I went out to the shed. I knew he’d been fiddling with his father’s guns – we even called them that, though they aren’t really guns. Or weren’t really. I didn’t know what he was doing, but they were starting pistols – I didn’t think they could ever do harm. And he’s a born engineer. Was. Is. I don’t know. At six he dismantled this old typewriter we had and showed us how it worked. He loved all the parts, the shapes of them. I liked him working on things. I liked him working on those guns. I can’t believe myself.

  I don’t go out there often so I didn’t really know where to look. That shed is a man’s place – it was the only real bond they had, Jackie and Ryan, and I didn’t get involved with that. It’s their place. Was. And after Jackie died I liked Ryan going out there. I wanted him to still have that. But this morning I went out and unlocked it. There’s a workbench in there, a few metal cabinets on the walls. Shelves. No sign of those guns. After a while I got on my hands and knees and looked on the floor. I got filthy. I got metal filings stuck in the skin of my hands, and I didn’t know where those filings could have come from. And I realised he’d done something. He’d done something to those guns to make them fire, and he’d taken them away, and now there had been a shooting. I got down there on the shed floor and I stayed there for a long time, I don’t know how long. Until you found me, whatever time that was. The jackdaws were still playing in the next-door tree, and I could hear the sounds of the house, kind of far off. The TV and the radio still on, and the washer, which came to the end of its cycle after a while and the noise stopped. I looked at the sun moving around the garden. I thought, maybe it wasn’t so bad. They hadn’t announced that anyone was dead, and I thought, maybe no one’s dead. Maybe he was a bad shot. But he wouldn’t be a bad shot, would he? He got single-minded that way. He’s like his dad. Was like his dad.

  I’ve never thought about death so much in my life as I have today. What does it feel like, to be hit with a bullet? I’ve tried to think of all the pains I ever felt: all the burns, the time I stepped on the plank with the nail in it. I kept thinking about childbirth, like being beaten up from inside. It never occurred to me that he might be dead as well. I kept thinking I’d need to see him soon, I’d be brought to see him. I’d have to speak to him. And what would I say, to my only son. About the kind of mother I had been.

  I could hear the phone ringing in the house. Maybe it’s Ryan, I thought, maybe he’s calling to say he’s okay, he survived. It wasn’t him, he threw the guns away. But I couldn’t get up. Or I chose not to, I don’t know. It kept ringing. Then I thought it was probably some friend or other, asking if I had heard, if he was fine, where was I, what was I going to do. I never thought it might be you, because I never thought he’d be dead, and I never thought I’d be told I’d have to go to the hospital, and I never thought I’d have to walk into that room and see my dead child lying there. I never thought I’d look down at the boy I birthed and see him dead, his face all pulled away. I barely knew him. On that table, I saw him as a grown adult man – I don’t think I ever really had before. I understood it, suddenly. The man I raised was an evil man – a man who hurts women. But why? Why would my little boy want to do that? He was never a violent sort of boy. I never would have thought in all my life . . . I thought I could just stay there, quiet as anything, not moving, and listen to the jackdaws.

  14 May, 5.50 p.m.

  Birch’s footsteps echoed through the corridor, her heels making a clop-clop sound like horses’ hooves. She was on the first floor, in the Hairdressing department: on either side she glimpsed rows of white sinks and fat black chairs through the training-room doors. All silent now. The light in the corridor was dimming, and no electric lights had yet been switched on. She glanced at her watch: almost six. She’d been here nine hours.

  Detective Chief Inspector McLeod was downstairs in the refectory, and he’d drawn all available personnel to him, like moths to a bare bulb. Birch had slipped away from the back row of the briefing after a while: he wasn’t saying anything she didn’t know, and she’d have to suffer through a private audience with him later, anyway. She needed a few minutes’ peace.

  And it was peaceful up here, though the strong smell of industrial disinfectant hung in the air. Birch stopped walking. Beside her, running along the wall up to about waist height, there was a patch of painted plaster that was lighter than the rest. It was about a metre and a half long. Metal fixings and chewed plastic rawl plugs jutted out of the patch at intervals. There was a rectangle of tape on the floor here, and a number marker-penned onto the waxed surface inside it. This was where the radiator had been. This was where Leanne Lawrie, the ninth victim, had fallen, and been found.

  Seven hours earlier, Birch had stood here for the first time, taking an initial tour of the scene with PC David Leake. Leake had been written up as the First Officer Attending – he was PC Park’s partner, the one who’d run inside while the shooting was still going on. As he and Birch walked the first floor together, he’d stopped at the radiator – still there at that hour, covered in blood that had run in stripes through its downward grooves, and dried. A further pool of it on the floor below had moved in a slow, tarry stream towards the stairwell, betraying the building’s slight tilt.

  ‘Here,’ he’d said, pointing to the radiator, ‘there was a girl here.’

  He’d been shaking all over.

  ‘I’m sorry, David,’ Birch said. ‘I’m sorry to make you do this now. But we need to get as accurate a picture as we can of what you saw. Time is of the essence, and all that.’

  ‘I know. You said.’

  He pointed down at a vague line that had been drawn on the floor with some sort of pen – a line that would be firmed up by the tape later on.

  ‘This one had a head injury,’ he said. ‘When I got to her, I thought she’d been shot in the head. But she had a pulse. I was waiting for the ambulance sirens – I was praying for them. I was off the radio because I didn’t want Summers to know I was there. But I was calling it in, in my head – internally, I was screaming it.’

  Birch had put a hand on his arm, and felt the quiver through her fingertips. Leake was vibrating, like a struck tuning fork. He knew where they were going next.

  They’d walked down the corridor a little way, towards the two zipped body bags, and the SOCOs moving here and there around them.

  ‘These two,’ Leake said, ‘I came to next. I couldn’t find a pulse on either of them, and one of them . . .’ He pointed to the furthest away of the two covered mounds. ‘She was in really bad shape. Like, very obviously dead shape.’

  Birch had shivered slightly herself at this. She’d have the crime scene photos and autopsy reports on her desk soon enough.

  ‘Where did you go next?’ she asked. Leake turned and pointed through an open classroom door behind them – another of the hairdressing rooms, with its line of gleaming sinks.

  ‘There was a student in there,’ he said. ‘The others were all running, getting out of the fire exits. Most of them wer
e gone from this floor by the time I got up here. But there was this girl in there – she made a sound, or something, and I turned round and saw her.’

  Birch squinted in through the doorway. The morning’s strong, spring light was bouncing up off everything: those glazed sinks, the white Formica desk tops, the shiny waxed floor.

  ‘She was hurt?’

  ‘No,’ Leake said. ‘She was hiding. Or, not even really hiding. Just sitting there. As if she was unable to move.’

  Birch turned her head, calculating the line of sight from the classroom to the two body bags on the floor outside.

  ‘You think she witnessed . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ Leake said. ‘I went in, spoke to her. She had her phone in her hand. She didn’t want to speak, and didn’t want me to make any noise. She was just hissing at me to sshh. Eventually she told me her name was Irina. She’d seen these two get shot, seen Summers. She’d watched him walk off. She said she thought he was still nearby, so she didn’t want to move.’

  Birch had nodded.

  ‘I’ll need to talk to her, for sure.’

  ‘I’ll happily ID her for you,’ Leake said. ‘Long black hair, sort of wavy. Skinny girl, Eastern European accent. Lots of gold jewellery, earrings and that.’

  Birch had closed her eyes for a moment, allowed a vague mental Polaroid of this witness to form itself. Then she had looked back at Leake.

  ‘What then, David?’

  He swallowed hard.

  ‘Then . . .’ He pointed down the corridor, through the crowd of SOCOs. ‘I walked towards that door. The ladies’ loo.’

  Leake began to move, slowly, in the direction he’d pointed.