Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

  The male police officer carries on looking at me but I catch the woman officer giving the solicitor a glance that says, you’re good.

  It is only much later on in the interview – I estimate we have been talking for around two hours by then – that the officers get a little rough with me. I must have hated Chloe, mustn’t I? How did I feel when I found out she was pregnant? And then, when my daughter was killed, well, that was the last straw, wasn’t it?

  ‘Tell me about your history of mental illness…’ says the male officer, flipping open a file in front of him. ‘You were sectioned, weren’t you?’

  ‘It’s hardly a history,’ I reply. ‘It was one night.’

  ‘Well, no one’s ever sectioned me,’ he snorts back.

  After he has verbally roughed me up a bit – the solicitor interjecting every now and then when he steps beyond the limits of what he is allowed to do – he leans back in his seat and folds his arms. The woman police officer takes over. They can do that, of course, work in relays. I am exhausted. You are supposed to be exhausted, I think to myself. David. I want David to come and take me home. I want to be on a sofa with him and Rees and Harry, watching rubbish television.

  ‘Laura,’ the woman officer says softly. She has a low voice and grey, expressive eyes. She is the one they bring in when you are tired. ‘There’s something I would like to show you, Laura,’ she says. Next to the television on the stand, there is a shallow cardboard box of the type you might keep papers in. The stand is close enough for her to reach out and pick up the box without rising from her chair.

  She puts the box on the table in front of us and opens the lid, then lifts out a transparent plastic bag. She places it on the table between us. The male officer says, for the benefit of the tape recorder, ‘Officer Clarke is showing the suspect a stainless steel knife with a fifteen-centimetre blade.’

  The knife wasn’t meant for Chloe. It wasn’t meant for anyone. It was a thing that I needed, a thing to hold on to, there was no intent behind it. I am so tired and so baffled. I’ve been here for hours. I want to go home. I am ready to say almost anything if only they will let me go home. Rees.

  The soft-eyed, soft-voiced officer leans forward and says, very gently, ‘Is the knife yours, Laura?’

  I nod, tears welling up in my eyes. My solicitor tenses again and places a hand over mine. Sensing that she is about to interrupt, the male officer barks, ‘Spend a lot of time up on the cliffs, do you? Would you like to tell us about it?’

  The solicitor says firmly. ‘Officers, it’s nearly ten o’clock. My client is very tired. I think we should terminate this interview now, reconvene in the morning.’

  ‘You’re keeping me here?’ I burst out.

  ‘Your client doesn’t seem to have any inkling of the seriousness of her situation, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ the male officer sniffs, sitting back in his seat and folding his arms. I hate him with a passion.

  The woman officer puts a hand up, fingers splayed in a conciliatory gesture, and says, ‘Yes, let’s reconvene at nine o’clock in the morning.’ She looks at me, leans forward. ‘Laura, just before we finish, I just want to ask you one more question, is that okay?’

  I nod, tearfully.

  ‘Is there anything you would like to tell us about your relationship with Mr Aleksander Ahmetaj?’

  ‘You don’t have to answer that, Laura,’ my solicitor jumps in. ‘These officers have already agreed you are too tired to continue questioning.’

  *

  After we have been escorted back to my cell, the solicitor turns to the Duty Officer and says, ‘I need a few minutes with my client.’

  The Duty Officer is another of the bulky-type officers. He has meaty hands with short, embedded fingernails and very pale eyes, which, for some reason, I think of as psychotic-blue. He looks at me and says, ‘You vegetarian?’ I shake my head. ‘Religious?’ I shake it again. ‘Right,’ he says, and leaves the cell.

  As soon as the door closes behind him, my solicitor looks at me and says, ‘Who is Aleksander Ahmetaj?’

  ‘They didn’t tell you?’ I ask, sitting down.

  She shakes her head. ‘They are insisting on staged disclosure. I believe I explained that before the interview.’

  ‘He’s the man who killed my daughter, in the accident.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well, I had better do some homework on him when I get home, I suppose.’ She pauses and looks at me. ‘Anything I need to know?’

  I look back at her. ‘No,’ I say.

  After she has gone, the Duty Officer brings me a microwaved meal. I think it is supposed to be some sort of meat product with mashed potato but it is hard to tell. I prod at the brown lumps of something with my plastic fork. They slither around in their slime of dark gravy. When the Duty Officer comes to collect the white plastic tray, he looks down at the uneaten meal and back at me with a look that says, not good enough for you, love? Without my asking, he has brought a very weak cup of tea, which I drink just to demonstrate I am not a snob.

  Later, he brings in a thin blue blanket. The lighting in the cell will be dimmed, he says, but night-light will be left on all night. I lie down on the plastic mattress beneath the thin blanket and, incredibly, fall asleep for bit. I am woken by a drunk being brought into the cell next to mine in the middle of the night. He is swearing profusely. After that, I doze fitfully. I am very cold, still, but don’t feel able to ask for another blanket. Every fifteen minutes, someone clangs back the small shutter in my cell door and peers in, checking I haven’t died.

  *

  Breakfast is two slices of white toast smeared thickly with margarine, and more weak tea. I still haven’t adjusted to the smell of the cells – the stink of urine is now combined with a disinfectant tone. The drunk in the cell next door is either gone or silent. I am stiff and shuddery with the cold so force myself to eat one of the slices of toast. When my solicitor arrives, the first thing she says, while she is still flipping open her notebook, is, ‘Right, well I read up on the accident, and now I am a bit confused. Why are they asking you about your relationship with Ahmetaj when presumably you’ve never met him?’

  I look at her. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  *

  It begins high-octane, rough from the very start. The soft-eyed woman isn’t there. The male officer from the previous day and another male officer fire questions at me relentlessly. Where was I on…? They name several different dates, one after the other. Dates mean nothing to me. I get confused very rapidly. ‘Taking my son to nursery,’ I say in answer to one question and the officer snaps, ‘What? On a Sunday?’

  They begin to alternate.

  ‘Your ex says you were so jealous you drove him crazy.’

  ‘What do you do when you’re jealous, Laura?’

  ‘He says you can get quite violent. Chucked things at him.’

  ‘Tell us about the time you broke a window? How many windows was it?’

  They hardly let me answer. ‘It wasn’t,’ I say.

  ‘Wasn’t what?’

  ‘It wasn’t a window. It was, it was…’

  ‘It was what?’

  ‘It was a door.’

  ‘You broke a door?’

  ‘No, a window,’

  ‘I’m confused, which is it, a door or a window?’

  ‘Break a lot of things, do you?’ adds the second officer before I can answer.

  ‘It was a window, a window in a door. A glass window, in a door.’

  ‘Let’s move on shall we, this knife.’

  I feel as though I am on one of those fairground rides where you are spun round and the floor falls away beneath you but centrifugal force pins you upright to the wall. After two attempts, my solicitor succeeds in insisting we take a break.

  After the break, the officers seem a bit more low-key, as if they are tired too. I feel relieved. The new one, who is not as bad as the one from the night before, leans forward in his chair and rests his forearms on the table, knitting his fingers.
He looks at me with a weary air, as if he doesn’t want to be here any more than I do.

  ‘Laura,’ he says. ‘Look, we understand that you’ve been through a terrible trauma. We haven’t really talked about that, have we? Well, me and Robert here, we’re fathers too, you know. I’ve got three kiddies myself, any parent can understand, what you’ve been through, losing your little girl, well, it’s just about the worst thing ever, isn’t it?’

  The cold, the sleeplessness, the worry about David and Rees – and now…

  ‘Betty…’ says the police officer, and the sound of her name in his mouth undoes me. ‘Betty, was that short for Elizabeth?’ I shake my head. ‘Betrys,’ I manage to say, ‘it was, it was short for Betrys, the Welsh form of Beatrice. Her father is…’ my voice becomes a whisper, ‘her father grew up in Wales, he, he…’

  ‘Fantastic singers, the Welsh,’ comments the other officer.

  The first one leans even further forward. I am breathing deeply. ‘Laura,’ he says, and I suddenly want him to hold me, not in a sexual way, but to comfort me. I feel he is a decent man, not like the other one. I want him to embrace me and make everything okay. ‘Why was Aleksander Ahmetaj seen standing on the doorstep of your house?’

  There is a brief intake of breath from the solicitor then she says in a low voice, ‘Don’t say anything.’ She looks at the officers and speaks firmly, ‘I would like to stop the interview now, to confer with my client.’

  ‘Request denied,’ says the other officer.

  ‘What happened when he came to your house, Laura?’

  What happened? I went down on him. I fucked the man who killed my daughter on the bed I had only ever shared with her father. The impossibility of explaining this overwhelms me and I dissolve into helpless, racking sobs.

  *

  During the lunch break, the solicitor reminds me that the police can only hold me without charge for twenty-four hours, unless they apply to a superintendent for a twelve-hour extension, but he or she will only grant that if there is a good reason.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that Aleksander Ahmetaj had been to your house?’ She is cool but polite.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Well, that explains why they wouldn’t disclose the name of your alleged co-conspirator when I asked,’ she says, matter-offactly. ‘They wanted to spring that one on you.’

  *

  After a further two hours of questioning, I am released on police bail. My conditions are that I must report to the police station in one month’s time and that in the meantime, I must have no contact with Aleksander Leotrim Ahmetaj. A conspiracy charge requires more than one suspect. You cannot conspire with yourself, not in legal terms anyway. He is my co-conspirator, but the police have a problem – they can’t find him. Later, I begin to understand that this was one of the reasons behind my arrest. A confession from me could have provided them with knowledge of Ahmetaj’s whereabouts. The solicitor tells me over the phone the next day that the police wanted to add the bail condition that I had no contact with David but that she successfully argued that was unfair as he was the father of my son and they could not reasonably prevent me from seeing Rees – and David was not a suspect, after all. They would have checked him out very thoroughly. He would have been the first person they checked.

  David and Rees and Harry all come to the police station to pick me up. David leaves the boys in the car, parked outside, while he comes into the reception area. I am standing waiting for him with my belongings and the paperwork from my arrest in a see-through plastic bag. The duty solicitor is standing next to me. As David pushes through the swing doors, our gazes meet and I break down with a gasping kind of sob and he crosses the room swiftly and pulls me into an embrace, clutching me fiercely, one arm around me and one hand on the back of my head. ‘Get me out of here,’ I whisper, and he bundles me outside. I don’t even wish the solicitor goodbye.

  Once we are in the car, he starts the engine immediately and drives back to my house as swiftly as he can within the law. Rees is beaming at me from the back. I reach my hand backwards so that I can touch his leg as David drives – Rees swings the leg happily, kicking the back of my seat. In the baby seat next to him, Harry is asleep, wearing a sleepy-suit with a folded blanket on top. When we pull up outside my house, I undo my seatbelt and open my door but then turn to see that David is not undoing his. For one sickening moment, I think that he is going to drop me off then leave, without even coming inside the house. I am aghast. What have the police said to him? ‘David,’ I say, and my voice is high and hollow, pleading, ‘We have to talk.’

  He stares at me. ‘You didn’t think I was going to leave you, did you?’ He shakes his head. ‘God, we have a lot of work to do.’

  ‘Can you get my trucks, Mummy?’ says Rees from the back.

  I turn to him. Harry stirs in his sleep, letting out a strange whimpering cry, as if he is dreaming about being denied something.

  ‘For the hotel,’ Rees says.

  I turn back to David. ‘Pack a bag for a few days,’ he says, ‘as quickly as you can. Your solicitor is convinced the press are going to turn up any minute. We can’t stay here and we can’t stay in the bungalow. I’ve got stuff for the boys in the boot but Rees needs more socks.’

  ‘My trucks! My trucks!’ shouts Rees, bouncing in his seat.

  ‘I’ll get the trucks, Rees, don’t worry,’ I say. ‘What about the police?’ I ask David.

  ‘I’ve told them,’ he says. ‘It’s okay. As long as they know where you are, they are okay. Go on, quickly.’

  I let myself in – already, the house no longer feels mine. I race upstairs. In my bedroom, I avert my gaze from the bed with its mushroom-coloured satin cushions as I pull an old sports bag down from the top of the wardrobe and begin to throw clothes into it.

  *

  I am on police bail for a month. The regional papers run with it, Local Woman Arrested, and David tells me that some of the nationals run it on the inside pages, although he keeps all the newspapers away from me and I don’t feel the need to look. No one finds us in the hotel, an airy guesthouse twenty miles down the coast with a bay window in the breakfast room that looks out over a terraced garden. We stay for five days.

  David never doubts me, not for a minute. He is convinced that Chloe threw herself off the cliff – and convinced he knows why she did it at that particular point. It was because that was where he had proposed to me, all those years ago. Chloe was always pathologically jealous of me – he says he told the police that when they interviewed him after her disappearance. She questioned him in great detail about our marriage and, in the early stages of their affair, he had told her about dragging me towards the overhang. He had done it in the way in which new lovers often confide in each other details of the spouses they are betraying, as a gesture, but later, he had cause to regret telling her that particular story. It became a huge issue for them, especially after he had said that he didn’t want to remarry when our divorce became final. As their relationship disintegrated, Chloe threatened to jump from that very point on the cliff, told him he would force her into it one day. She said it more than once. Chloe had attempted suicide twice before, once with paracetamol, at the age of fifteen, and another time with painkillers, in her early twenties, after an affair with a married man ended badly. There is never any doubt in his mind as to what has happened. By the time he has finished telling me her troubled history, I am sorry for her in the way that any decent person would be, but I still cannot forgive her for falling for my husband or sending me the hate mail, and after a while, I feel I can manage these emotions, my scorn, my pity, my confusion, all at once. I can manage them because David’s confusions are even worse than mine. He is desperately sorry and guilty for Chloe’s suicide and desperately angry with her for dying, he believes, out of a desire to compete in his head with me and, worse, his daughter. It would take a more specific professional than me to unpick this one, and I don’t try.

  On our last evening in the hotel
, he and I sneak down to the bar once the boys are asleep – the receptionist operates one of those old-fashioned systems where she lets us leave the phone in the room off the hook so she can listen in and come and get us if one of the boys wakes. David and I walk into the deeply carpeted bar with its oil paintings in gilt frames on the wall and wooden surfaces polished to a deep shine. We perch on high stools at the bar, smiling at each other as we hitch ourselves on to them, acknowledging that this is the kind of thing young drinkers do, people out on a date, not people with our extensive histories.

  ‘Fancy a whisky?’ David says, studying the bottles behind the bar.

  ‘No, no thanks,’ I say quickly. ‘I’ll stick to wine.’

  He orders me a red wine and himself a large whisky, no ice, and we have peanuts as well even though we ate earlier with the boys, and a comfortable silence falls because we both know that this is our last night in this anonymous hotel-land and tomorrow we have to return to our home town and try and work out a way to live. We have all been sleeping in the same hotel room – Harry in a hotel cot and Rees on a put-you-up, David and I in twin beds next to each other. I have woken most nights, as I always do, but instead of rising have lain still, listening to the breathing of the others in the room, surrounded by it. Tomorrow, we must leave our cocoon.

  ‘I think we should go back to the bungalow,’ David says. ‘I don’t want you and Rees alone in the house.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘Where do you think she is?’ David asks, turning his glass between his hands. The question is not maudlin or self-pitying. It isn’t even sad.

  ‘I think she’s just asleep, nowhere,’ I say softly. There is no confusion about whom we are discussing.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I’ve tried not to think that, although I know it’s what you think. Asleep I can deal with, but not nowhere. How can she be nowhere?’