Greenwich Park

by Katherine Faulkner

  ‘We’re from Greenwich CID,’ DS Mitre continues. ‘We’re looking for Rachel Wells. We understand she was staying here?’

  KATIE

  You get to know every detail of a court building when you are on jury watch. The grubby windowsills, the scuffed green plastic chairs. The lift buttons, the smeared mirrors in the toilets. You learn the graffiti on the backs of the cubicle doors by heart.

  Hours stretch into days. You stare out of the windows, watch the traffic crawl by. You sip hot drinks from the machine in the lobby, get to know which combination of buttons to press for the closest thing to a coffee. You field phone calls from the desk, always asking when. You come to dread these calls, save up fragments of information for them, pretend insights. Which lawyer seemed upbeat, or downcast. Whether the jury had come back with questions and what these might signify, whether there has yet been a majority direction. What the jury mix is – how many young, how many old, how many women, men, white, black. And what it all might mean. We reporters exaggerate these small insights, try to encourage the impression that our being here, while we type up background pieces, is worth it. But the truth is, no one knows. No one knows anything at all.

  In the end, it takes over a week. The boys are guilty. In the public gallery, the families in their printed T-shirts gasp. A girlfriend’s head sinks into her hands. A pretty sister screams no, no. The judge cautions. The boys look stunned. One drops his head into his lap, the other holds his hands up in front of him, stares at his barrister, as if demanding an answer. One set of lawyers turn in their chairs with smiling handshakes for their juniors, nods for their client. The others sigh, put on spectacles, straighten their spines, brace themselves for questions about appeals and challenges that could stretch into years.

  Either side of me, the other reporters who have stood for the verdict fumble with phones under the cover of the press bench, eager to be the first to alert their news desks. At the back of the court, DCI Carter raises his gaze to the ceiling, closes his eyes, and lets out a long, deep exhale. And behind the curtain, the victim bends at the waist, and sobs.

  The force’s leader, Chief Constable Bannon, is waiting outside already, his statement all prepared, the cameras trained on him, resplendent in his smartly pressed uniform. Hair cut short at the sides, he is holding his police hat under his arm, in what seems to me a somewhat theatrical touch. A high-profile rape conviction – after a string of controversies about such cases being abandoned – is a much needed triumph for the force and the Crown Prosecution Service, and I can see that the media glory is to be reserved for the top brass.

  ‘I would like to pay tribute to the courage of the victim in this case,’ Chief Constable Bannon is saying to the circle of outstretched hands holding booms and microphones. ‘That young woman has shown a great deal of resilience and strength in very difficult circumstances. I sincerely hope that the guilty verdict will provide some closure on her horrendous ordeal, and that she will be able to rebuild her life, which was shattered by these events.’

  I’d already had the printed handout of what he was going to say, the press release with IN THE EVENT OF CONVICTION emblazoned on the top. I don’t need to hear the live version. Instead I slip away from the pack, get in my car and tap in the postcode of the hotel where I’ve arranged to meet both DCI Carter and Emily, the girl at the centre of what has turned into the biggest court case of the year.

  Emily has brought her sister along for support. They sit together on a sofa in the hotel room I have booked, overlooking Parker’s Piece. The cake and drinks I nervously laid out sit untouched on the coffee table between us.

  While I talk to her, DCI Carter sits at the back of the room, nursing a takeaway coffee. He throws me stern glances as I fiddle with the dictaphone, pour glasses of water. In the end, he needn’t have worried. Emily is clear and brave. She ignores the photographer, and he gets on with his job. She looks me in the eye, answers all my questions. She does not shed a tear. I notice that her spine is now straighter, her gaze unafraid to meet mine. And I learn, for the first time, what power there is in justice, in being believed.

  By the time we have finished it is dark outside. There is a drizzle of rain. The paving stones are dark and wet, the headlamps of cars bright in the distance. DCI Carter holds an umbrella over Emily and her sister while I hail them a cab, pay the driver in cash.

  ‘Thank you,’ I tell Emily.

  She nods. ‘Don’t forget to send me that copy, like you said.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Then, for the first time since I’ve met her, she smiles. ‘Thank you too.’

  I watch as the brake lights on the taxi recede into darkness, the puddles on the pavement bright with the lights of cars. The wind picks up. I pull my scarf up over my chin, turn to my left. DCI Carter is still there, still holding the umbrella, staring after the taxi.

  ‘I have you to thank for that, I suspect,’ I say. I have to raise my voice over the rain.

  ‘Not at all,’ he mutters. ‘Entirely her choice.’

  I smile. I don’t believe him.

  ‘Well, thank you anyway.’

  He turns away, embarrassed. Then he pushes the umbrella into my hand. ‘Here you go,’ he says. ‘Don’t get wet.’ His fingers are warm against mine. He looks at me for a moment, and I can’t make out his expression. Then he shoves his hands in his pockets, turns on his heel and disappears into the darkness.

  As soon as DCI Carter has gone, I race back to the hotel room, slam the door shut behind me. I flip out my laptop, fire off an email to the desk, tell them the interview is in the bag, but that they will have to wait for copy. I hadn’t told them it was definitely happening until now – I’ve found it’s best to manage expectations. They call me straight away, but I ignore my vibrating phone. They just need to let me write. I skip back to the start of the sound file and hit play. I work fast, have a sense of writing well. The noise of the rain outside somehow seems to help my mind to focus. There is a lot here, I think to myself, relieved. More than enough.

  When my phone vibrates for the third time, I hit pause, pull out my single headphone and snatch it up.

  ‘Hugh, I’m going as fast as I can,’ I snap.

  ‘Katie? It’s Sally.’

  At first I can’t place the name. Then I remember. Sally in the flat below. Sally who is feeding Socks, my cat, while I’m in Cambridge.

  ‘Sally? Hi. Is everything all right? Socks OK?’ My stomach twists. Immediately I think of the screech of tyres, the joyriders who speed down Dartmouth Park Road at night. A splatter of blood across the tarmac.

  ‘Socks is fine.’ She hesitates. There is a silence on the line for a moment, a slight fizzing noise. ‘It’s just, um, there’s a couple of police officers here.’

  ‘Police? For me?’

  ‘Yes.’ She coughs. ‘They said something about a missing girl – Rachel something?’

  I frown. ‘Rachel?’

  ‘They um …’ I can hear someone in the background, a man’s voice, his tone sharp, impatient. I hear Sally murmur something back, then clear her throat. ‘They were wondering when you might be back?’

  HELEN

  As they sit down at our kitchen table, the tall officer pulling his tie loose from his shirt, reaching his long fingers into his breast pocket for a pen, I feel a gathering sickness, a heaviness in the pit of my abdomen.

  I clear my throat. ‘Can I get either of you a hot drink? I’m making a latte for myself anyway.’

  Neither of them answers. I decide to start making coffees anyway. I feel it is important, somehow, that I make them. Establish myself in the role of helpful witness, respectable local property owner. Someone who is on their side.

  ‘Rachel has been reported missing,’ DS Mitre is saying. ‘A family member contacted us, concerned for her welfare. We’re keen to try and establish where she might be.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  I can hear a waver in my voice. For God’s sake, I think.

  I concentrate
on steaming the milk, holding the jug at an angle, my hands trembling. I bet they’ll be grateful for a nice coffee. They’re probably used to machine coffees, strip-lit waiting rooms, scaly communal kettles. Or the houses of criminals, I suppose, where no one thinks to offer them a drink. When I try to imagine what those places might look like, my mind draws a bit of a blank. Council flats with brick balconies, lines of wheelie bins, walls with anti-climb paint. Signs that say ‘No Ball Games’. Places I only ever see from the outside.

  ‘You said that Rachel had been living with you?’

  I sense their gaze on my face. I have a strange, anchorless feeling, as if I am not in my kitchen at all, but adrift on a vast sea, being carried further and further from the shore.

  ‘Yes, she had been staying here,’ I say eventually. My hand is trembling on the jug. The metal of it makes a slight vibration against the coffee machine. ‘Just for a couple of weeks,’ I add. I place the jug down, wipe my hands on my maternity jeans. They feel clammy.

  ‘And how did you know her?’

  I take a breath.

  ‘We met recently,’ I say. ‘At an antenatal class.’

  ‘An antenatal class?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’ DS Mitre’s expression suggests this was not within the range of answers he had expected.

  I place the coffees down. DS Mitre thanks me. The female officer doesn’t.

  ‘So, how can I help?’ I ask, easing myself into a chair slowly, trying to look casual. ‘Is Rachel OK? When you say missing – she’s not in any trouble or anything, is she?’ I try to make my voice sound normal.

  ‘We’re just keen to establish where she is,’ DS Mitre says. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Thorpe, did you say you met Miss Wells at an antenatal class?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Why was Miss Wells at an antenatal class?’

  I stare at her. ‘Because she was pregnant,’ I say, looking from one detective to the other. They glance at each other, then DS Mitre speaks.

  ‘Are you sure about that, Mrs Thorpe?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. We did an NCT course together.’

  The detectives look at each other, write down notes. They seem to be writing quite a lot. They ask more questions, then – how many weeks she was, which hospital she was giving birth at. I try to remember any details she might have told me. Can’t they just access her medical records or something?

  ‘When did you last see Rachel, Mrs Thorpe?’

  ‘It was the night of our bonfire party.’ I pause. ‘The 5th. Of November, obviously.’

  ‘I see.’

  DS Mitre drops his gaze to his notebook, and starts writing, his long pale fingers curled around a black biro.

  DC Robbin takes over now. She is speaking just a little bit more loudly than she needs to. Her tone makes me sit up straighter.

  ‘Before she left – did Rachel say where she was going?’

  I shake my head. ‘No – she left without saying anything. I mean, she had told us she was moving out, around the middle of November. That she had found a place.’ The detectives write this down. ‘But no, we didn’t know she was leaving that night. We woke up the next morning and she’d gone.’

  ‘Any idea where this new place was?’

  ‘She didn’t really say,’ I murmur. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You don’t know why she might have left so suddenly?’ DS Robbin’s head is cocked to one side, her thin eyebrows arched like punctuation. Her eyes are fixed on mine. The room feels airless, my tongue dry and thick, as if it is stuck to the top of my mouth.

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘So there hadn’t been an argument at this party, nothing like that?’

  My pulse is climbing. My face feels red hot. Before I’ve even really thought about it, I find I am shaking my head and saying: ‘No.’

  ‘So you weren’t concerned? At her leaving like that, without telling you why, or where she was going?’

  ‘No, I was concerned, of course I was,’ I say, feeling the heat in my cheeks again. ‘I texted her. I wanted to make sure she was OK. And she replied, pretty much straight away.’ I reach for my phone. ‘She said she was going to her mother’s. Here, let me find the message.’

  I pull my phone out, find the message she sent me the day after the party, show it to DS Mitre. I think for a moment that he will be pleased, will thank me for my time, tell me he’ll give her mum a ring now and he’s sorry to have wasted my time. Instead, the atmosphere changes. The officers both examine the phone. They exchange glances again.

  ‘Is that not where she is, then?’ I ask. ‘At her mum’s?’

  DC Robbin closes her notebook, leans forward slightly.

  ‘Mrs Thorpe, what did she mean when she said she was sorry about last night?’

  I blink.

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Well, I suppose we’d fallen out a bit. Not badly.’

  She looks at me intently. ‘I thought you said you hadn’t had an argument.’

  I’m tapping my leg under the table, the bench underneath me shaking slightly. ‘We hadn’t,’ I stutter. ‘Not an argument. That’s not what I meant.’ I force myself to stop, place my feet flat on the floor. I wish Daniel were here. He said he was just going out for a run. He’s been ages.

  ‘I mean, look … it had been a bit awkward, the three of us. We’d been a bit – a bit snappy with each other, perhaps. I did tell her that night that I thought … perhaps the time had come for her to leave.’

  ‘You wouldn’t class that as an argument?’

  DS Mitre looks at DC Robbin. His radio crackles, and he glances down. None of this seems real, I think. None of it belongs in our kitchen, on our quiet Sunday evening, with the sounds of the washing machine, a car outside, the next-door neighbour’s girl doing her clunky piano practice.

  DS Mitre leans towards me.

  ‘Mrs Thorpe, would it be all right if we took that phone away with us today?’

  I stare at him. ‘My phone? Why?’

  ‘It might help our inquiries to do some analysis. Help us locate Miss Wells. Make sure that she is safe.’

  The way they say it, I feel like I can’t say no. But can they really do that? Take my phone?

  ‘The thing is,’ I say, ‘I’m about to have a baby. And I’m having our landline disconnected. Too many cold callers, you know? So …’ I look from one officer to the other. ‘I really need my phone. Anything else is fine, but – I really need it.’

  DS Mitre glances down uncomfortably at my bump. Then he looks at DC Robbin. She gives an infinitesimal nod.

  ‘Very well. Just a few more questions, Mrs Thorpe.’

  There are a lot more questions, it turns out. They want a list of who was at the party. I write down the ones I know. I tell them they will have to talk to Charlie about the rest. They want to know other things, too. Like whether I have the details of anyone who might know her. Associates, is the phrase they use. Friends, colleagues, anyone she knew locally. And do I know much about the father of her baby?

  I seem to be unable to give them any of the answers they want. The more they ask, the more I realise how little I knew about Rachel. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, for what feels like the twentieth time. ‘Like I said, I only really know her through that antenatal class.’

  ‘And yet she moved into your house.’

  ‘Not moved in – it wasn’t like that.’

  I need to reset my tone of voice. I sound shrill, defensive. I sound like someone who has done something wrong. DC Robbin has stopped writing things down. She is leaving that to DS Mitre. Instead she is looking at me, her lips closed, her eyes unblinking.

  ‘It was meant to be just a couple of nights at most,’ I say, more slowly. ‘It turned into a bit longer. That’s why there had been a bit of tension, I suppose. She said she’d found a new place. That she was moving out in mid-November. But it was all a bit vague.’

  ‘I see. And where had sh
e been living before she came to stay, with you?’

  I shake my head. ‘I know she lived round here, but I never went to her home and I … I never met any of her friends.’

  The detectives glance at each other. I have the feeling I am getting everything wrong somehow.

  ‘And the father?’

  ‘She never actually mentioned a name. Just that it was someone she met through work.’

  ‘And they were together?’

  ‘I don’t think so. They had a relationship – I got the feeling it was quite casual – and the pregnancy wasn’t planned. She said she would have liked to be with him but … but she’d found out that he … he was taken.’ He belonged to someone else. Those had been the words she used, hadn’t they, that time at the pub? I remember the damp smell of the tables, the staring eyes of the ship lights.

  ‘You say she’d met the father through work,’ DS Mitre is asking now. ‘Where exactly was that?’

  ‘I, um … I don’t know. I think she once said something about working for a music venue or something. But she was on maternity leave early, like me, you see – for health reasons.’

  ‘Health reasons?’

  ‘Yes. She had the same as me, I think – very high blood pressure. Risk of pre-eclampsia. So you’re advised not to work too much, certainly not in the third trimester. We just never really talked about work, because neither of us was working. It was mainly babies and stuff.’ I glance at DC Robbin, wondering if she has children. I guess she doesn’t. She doesn’t look much older than me, if at all. She must be clever to be a detective. I wince, thinking how dull I must sound to her. ‘Sorry,’ I mutter.

  DC Robbin doesn’t say anything. She keeps looking at me.

  ‘Not at all.’ DS Mitre flips his notebook shut, and stands up. ‘You’ve been very helpful, Mrs Thorpe. Thanks for your time.’

  I lead them both into the hallway and open the door.

  ‘Look,’ I say, my hand resting on the latch, ‘can I just ask? Sorry if it’s obvious but – is she not at her mother’s then? Like she told me she would be?’

  DS Mitre glances at DC Robbin. He pulls his jacket on, the jumper cuffs sticking out of the too-short sleeves.