Sarah shoots me a look. Do not say anything except no comment, she counselled me. I’ve failed already. I smile apologetically at her, but she ignores me.
‘How did you injure Imran, Joanna?’
‘No comment.’
‘You pushed him pretty hard, didn’t you?’
‘No comment.’
‘And he was in the water, wasn’t he? Do you know he’s on a ventilator?’
That’s the question that does it. I can’t handle it. I can’t let this go on. These useless no comments. These accusations. It’s the truthful accusation that hurts the most.
And so I tell the lie. The same lie again.
‘I got him out of the puddle straight away,’ I say. It doesn’t really feel like a lie as the words come out. They rasp from the back to the front of my mouth, feeling urgent and correct and true.
Sarah’s eyebrows shoot up, and she reaches a hand out, as though I’m a volatile dog about to bolt. ‘A moment,’ she says, rising.
We go into a side room on our own.
‘Not a word,’ she says.
‘But –’
‘I know,’ she says, and her eyes are flashing. The whites are clean and pure looking, and I wonder if she self-medicates with eye-brightening drops, late at night, at her desk – like they might do in Suits or Law and Order – and she looks so angry that I can’t bring myself to tell her. To tell her that I have lied.
It’s okay, I am thinking. Nobody will ever know. Nobody knows. Perhaps I can mould time – the sequences of events, the pauses, as the man lay there – like they are plasticine.
We have to go back into the interview room. Sarah leads.
‘My client was not made aware of the extent of the victim’s injuries,’ she says.
I sit back down in the hard plastic chair, which is warm with my own anxiety, and close my eyes. I have no idea what any of it means. I try to block out the two doors, opening one after the other, even though they’re only a centimetre apart, and the panic strip and the soundproofing and the tape recorder and the video and the threadbare carpet and the policemen, and I hope – just hope – that if I think hard enough I will be able – just this once; oh, please, just this once – to go back.
I’ve been back in my cell for an hour when Sergeant Morris comes to collect me. ‘Out,’ she says to me through the hatch.
Sarah and the two CID officers are waiting in a new room. She still looks immaculate. If things were different, I’d ask her what she uses and how she applies it. Perhaps she uses a heat-protecting spray.
It simply says Private Room on the front of the door, just off the custody suite. Three polystyrene cups are littered around, teabags clumped stickily in the bottoms of them.
Sarah looks up at me, and I think I see a hint of an apology in her eyes.
‘Joanna Oliva,’ the blond CID officer says.
‘No comment,’ I say, and I see a ghost of a smile on Sarah’s face.
‘You do not have to say anything,’ the blond man says, ‘but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence.’
I turn to look at Sarah again, confused.
‘You are charged that on 4th December you did cause wounding or did inflict grievous bodily harm with intent on Imran Quarashi, contrary to section eighteen of the Offences Against the Person Act eighteen sixty-one.’
In my mind’s eye, I see Reuben’s eyes widening in shock. I don’t know why I always imagine his reaction, and not my own.
I drag myself back to now.
Charged. I’m charged. There’s to be a trial.
I will be cross-examined by barristers in wigs, intending to catch me out. I’ll stand in the dock of the Crown Court while a jury sits and judges me. Will this be on my record forever? I think of the Open University course in social work I considered doing. I see us turned away from a flight to America. I see Reuben, standing by me, because it’s the correct thing to do, but being aghast at what I’ve done, at the change I’ve inflicted on our lives. The image is so vivid, it is almost real.
It goes on: Reuben telling a nameless, faceless colleague that he’s off to visit his estranged wife in prison. The colleague will offer him a drink. One for the road, she’ll say. He’ll accept it, unwillingly at first, and then one drink will turn into two, and he will miss visiting hours, and spend the night telling a blonde woman how much he used to love me.
That thought takes root, right in my stomach, able to germinate in the hollow left by the crime I committed.
The Offences Against the Person Act. Eighteen sixty-one. I turn the words over in my mind like somebody milling soil, uncovering the plants underneath it. Eighteen sixty-one. I’ve done something that a government in Victorian times thought was wrong. Something that’s been wrong since almost the beginning of time. A rung below murder, attempted murder, manslaughter. It sends a shiver through me.
‘Do you have any comments?’ the police officer says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘None.’
I am released on police bail. I’m to return to court on Monday for my bail hearing, proper.
Sarah says, ‘See you then,’ in a businesslike way, as though we’re merely meeting for a coffee, and leaves.
I am given my charge sheet, and there, as I walk into the reception, is Reuben.
He’s leaning against a wall. His legs are crossed at the ankles, and he’s raking a hand back through his hair. He’s wearing dark blue jeans, white trainers and a navy-blue coat with fur around the hood. He looks serious, his grey-green eyes raised to the ceiling. He is a tableau of somebody waiting for bad news. It feels like years since I have seen him.
‘Hi,’ I say, which comes out more like a croak.
‘Jo,’ he says, and the tone he uses is gentle. Kind. He extends a hand towards me, and it envelops mine. It’s cold. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ he says.
I close my eyes, drinking in his tall, assured form. When I open them again, he’s looking derisively around the reception. It won’t be snobbery; it’ll be something else.
Sure enough, he turns to me and says, ‘So this is where they process everyone.’
I nod once.
His tone is the same as the last time he came with me to see my parents and they were going on and on about a Sancerre wine, pouring it and wafting it and tasting it. ‘You don’t know about wine, do you, Jo?’ Mum observed, and Reuben said, ‘Why would you? Pretentious wankers,’ into my ear, which made me laugh.
I’m given a plastic bag containing my things. My bracelet. My purse. There’s nothing else in there.
‘Where are my clothes …’ I say. ‘My phone?’
‘They’re staying with forensics,’ a police officer says.
I can feel a heat spreading across my cheeks. Forensics. Bail hearings. The future isn’t stretching out in front of me any more. The road’s turned; headed off at a right angle. It’s become overgrown, wild with trees and weeds, so thick we can’t see our way. There is no normal path. No house in the suburbs. No children on our horizon, though it pains me to think it.
‘Oh,’ Reuben says, reaching over and sliding open the Ziploc of my things. ‘This can’t wait.’ He gets out the bracelet, my wedding bracelet, and manoeuvres it on to my arm. It sits loosely, it’s screws removed, but I don’t mind. His gaze holds mine the whole time, the same look on his face – a kind of serious happiness – as on our wedding day. I understand the message immediately.
We walk out of the police station and the cold winter wind feels glorious against my face. I close my eyes into it, like a dog on his first walk of the day, my face held up to the sky, just smelling and feeling the clear air and the space and the freedom. Reuben stands next to me, silently, holding the Ziploc bag, not saying anything. I breathe in the smell of the London car park. The pine trees. The minty-cold winter breeze. The exhaust fumes. It’s overwhelming after twenty hours of the same cell.
When I open
my eyes and look at Reuben, I expect to see sympathy – my heart lightens in anticipation of it – but instead there’s a strange expression on his face. And then it occurs to me: he can always see both sides of things. He will always defend the party being slagged off at a dinner party. It’s his way. It annoys my friends, my family, but I like it.
So what if he sees it from the victim’s side?
I can’t think of that. Not now I’m out; free. Who knows how long this freedom will last? I must try to enjoy it.
And, like a woman whose husband has left her, or who’s just been sacked unceremoniously from her job, I don’t think about where that road’s going. I will just concentrate on going home, tonight, with Reuben. To my own bed.
Tonight, I will dream of the hatch. I know I will.
Reuben pours a cup of tea, milk in first, amber steaming liquid second, and passes it to me. Edith is outside, coming home from her dog-walking with her daughter. Edith’s in the wheelchair she sometimes uses. The dogs look older, their beards whiter, their legs rangy.
I turn away from them, cradling my tea, and Reuben looks at me, his eyes watchful, and waits. He doesn’t need to say anything further. I hardly ever owe him anything, and he hardly ever asks anything of me. But he wants this, tonight: an explanation.
And so, without waiting any longer, I tell him.
He listens, not saying a word. He’s always been a great listener. He barely breaks eye contact, even when he sips his black coffee – he never drinks tea.
At the end of it, he sits back. ‘Jo,’ he says.
I wait for the tough love. This is how he does things. He listens silently, then sums it up in one sentence; usually a sentence nobody else would be able to get away with saying to me. You need to stop seeing your fucking rude parents, for example. Or, Stand up for yourself, then.
‘It will …’ he says, ‘it will be okay.’ He taps my leg, ever so gently, and that’s that.
‘And then after that,’ I say.
‘After it all … babies,’ he says with a nod, confirming that we are on the same page, even in a crisis.
‘Ginger babies,’ I say.
‘Steady on,’ he murmurs.
The relief is overwhelming. Both at his acceptance of our situation, and the reassurance he would never usually give. It’s so overwhelming it becomes intoxicating. I creep closer to him on the sofa. Maybe it will all be okay, I am thinking. Maybe this will be behind us in a few months’ time. Not laughed off, not minimized in the way that I’d hoped, but behind us nevertheless. Reuben is always right, and so I believe him.
And that’s what makes me want to tell him.
‘I was talking to Sarah about how long the guy was face down in the water …’
‘In the water?’ Reuben says.
‘Yes.’
He doesn’t say anything, but something in his body language changes. It stills. I am about to tell him, but then he is looking at me peculiarly. It is as though he is reassessing me.
‘And how long was it?’ he says.
‘No time, really,’ I lie. ‘I got him out straight away. But she asked,’ I add uselessly.
Reuben nods, once; a firm, downward movement. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘She probably just … she’s probably just checking.’
‘Yes. It was immediate.’
He doesn’t say anything else. I give it a few seconds, but he sips his coffee, swallows audibly, and then sips again. Not speaking. Not quite looking at me.
But I can read his features so well, even though what I see on them now surprises me. He is usually sympathetic to the wrongdoer; the underdog. But now I see his brow wrinkle, his top lip curl up slightly, and I know that he is thinking, How could you do this, Jo? But he doesn’t say it. Why would he?
11
Conceal
It’s all over the newspapers.
I can’t google it. Can’t ask anyone. Can’t browse BBC News on an iPad, for fear of leaving an evidence trail, but I can read it in the papers that come every morning – the papers Reuben devours with his coffee.
I grab the local newspaper before he can and spread it out in the sunlit kitchen. It’s stopped sleeting, finally, and outside the frost sparkles in the light.
The police are treating his death as suspicious, an article on page nine says. I read that sentence over and over. They are appealing for anybody who was in the area that night to come forward. The funeral will be next Monday, it adds.
I go to bundle the paper up, to throw it away before Reuben sees and asks me if I have volunteered what I know, but then I see the quote, in bold. Imran will be missed, it says. It is signed off Mohammed Abdullah, Imam, Paddington Mosque. He will be missed. Because of me.
I screw the paper up and take it outside, putting it in Edith’s recycling bin. My left hand aches as I do so. I call the GP. I’ll make something up, I reason. I make an appointment. I’ll get that hand sorted, if nothing else.
The next day, I swing my legs out of bed. The ever-present sweat evaporates off them, feeling like needles on my skin.
I haven’t hidden any evidence yet. I have been watching endless Netflix episodes in the night when I can’t sleep and not doing anything about my problems. It is Classic Joanna, Reuben would say, if he knew. Vintage Joanna. Not in a disparaging way. Just in a factual way: it is what I do.
Only, I’m not able to ignore it completely. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Usually, I have no trouble ignoring things. The huge gas bill we got that quarter when I had the heating on constantly. I just hid the bill under the bed. The lump in my armpit I had for over eighteen months but never saw the doctor about. It went, in the end, but what if it hadn’t? And yet this – this, I can’t ignore. It keeps popping into my mind, making me sweat and shake intermittently.
I’ve got to get rid of the evidence. That’s the most important thing. I’m not trying to get away with it. Not yet. I can’t decide that. The guilt is too bad. But I need to protect myself. For the time being. And that starts now.
I call work, speak to Daisy in the office, say I’m at the doctor’s. I’ll go in later. Nobody is surprised. I’ve got form for this unreliability, sadly, a fact Wilf – who has never called in sick once – finds astonishing.
We were the Murphy siblings. Off to Oxbridge. Ruling the school, in the musicals and the orchestras and the swimming teams. We were almost famous. We used to be so similar. We were high achievers, but we were also pissabouts, behind the scenes. Used to do our homework reluctantly so we could be free to find our Narnias in the back garden (Wilf once did a wee in the bushes and Dad told him off for being vulgar) and bounce on our beds. We were allies against our oppressive parents and the silent, huge house. And then he changed. Or rather, I floundered. I went to Oxford and couldn’t do it without somebody cracking the whip, and Wilf … well, he rose to it. Becoming the kind of person who enters six marathons a year and talks endlessly about training runs. The kind of person who has extreme opinions about the stock markets and discusses them in Zizzi on your thirtieth birthday – for example.
And so, despite what he’d say, I feel no guilt in calling in sick. I’m not even a librarian. I am unqualified. It hardly matters. Besides, it’s Ed’s day off today, thank God. Hopefully he’ll never realize I have been off, too.
I can’t make a list, and so I sit on the end of our bed and consider the evidence. I itemize it in my mind.
My coat.
My shoes.
CCTV.
My gloves.
My scarf.
My appearance.
Witnesses.
DNA?
I catch sight of myself in the mirrored wardrobe doors and wince. It’s all so amateur. If this had happened to Reuben – not that any of it ever would have, I think with a frown; not only because of his morals but also because of his gender – he would have had some idea of what to do. Do police look at the tread of a shoe at a crime scene? Do they check every CCTV camera, question everyone in the area, search for minuscule bits of DNA
that might have drifted down on to the steps? Or would they think: this is unexplained; perhaps this man tripped? I have no idea. None.
The first thing I must do is get rid of everything I was wearing.
I can’t burn them. It would draw too much attention. I don’t want to bin them. I would worry about where they’d end up, that they could be traced to me.
Sainsbury’s, I think. There’s a clothing bank. I could put them in there. They will become anonymous, tangled with all the other clothes. I get in the car, having stuffed the clothes and shoes – those beautiful shoes, with their cream ribbons, worn once – in a bag for life, and drive there. My hands are slick with sweat on the steering wheel and leave an imprint on the plastic door handle as I get out.
I stand next to my car, the milky winter sunlight in my eyes. A man is ahead of me at the clothing bank, meticulously opening and closing the tray as he loads blouses and skirts on to it. I cannot help but stop and stare at him. It’s not what he’s doing. It’s the look on his face. I think he’s trying not to cry. His chin quivers violently. His hands shake.
I can see the clothes from my position by the car. A sage-green blouse. A creased-up linen skirt. A pair of pointed shoes with a heel. As I stare at him, he clutches a cream blouse and brings it up to his nose.
They’re a wife’s clothes, I find myself solemnly thinking. No wonder his chin shakes. I wonder how many weeks or months it has taken him to accept it. To clear out her side of the wardrobe – to bring the clothes here – and to donate them.
How could I possibly go over and interrupt that? Not only interrupt it, but taint it, with my sordid activity?
What if I am found out? And he – a widower – is called to court, because he witnessed me burying evidence, and is forced to relive the day he finally summoned the courage to throw his wife’s clothes away? I couldn’t make him do that.
I stand in the cold sunlight and continue to study him. He’s well dressed, with a nice car. They had a nice life, I think. Barbecues every Bank Holiday Monday with their friends. Three children who visit all the time, not like me and Wilf; weirdly aloof but needily competitive, too. Little bowls of Maltesers and M&Ms around the house, and not just at Christmas. She will have loved Glade plug-ins and I bet he would have been irritated by their synthetic smells. I can picture them now. I turn away. I can’t bear it. His sadness.
Anything You Do Say Page 9
