Black Rabbit Summer (28 page)

‘No, I’m fine. I mean, if
you
want a cup of tea…’

She shook her head.

Barry said, ‘So we’re all OK to carry on?’

Mum nodded.

Barry looked at me. ‘Peter?’

I nodded.

‘Good.’ He turned to Gallagher and nodded. Gallagher reached down to the bag at his feet and pulled out a large plastic
evidence bag. He placed the bag on the table in front of me. ‘For the benefit of the tape,’ Barry said, ‘I’m now showing the witness a yellow rucksack that was recovered from Raymond Daggett’s back garden.’ He looked at me. ‘Do you recognize this, Peter?’

‘Yeah, it’s mine.’

‘Can you tell me what it was doing in Raymond’s garden?’

‘I left it there on Saturday night, before we went to the fair.’

‘Why?’

‘The bottle of wine was in it, the one I stole from Dad. I didn’t want Mum to see it when I left the house, so I put it in the rucksack. When I got to Raymond’s, I left the rucksack in his shed.’

‘It wasn’t in the shed when we found it.’

‘I know –’

‘What time did you get to Raymond’s on Sunday morning?’

‘About six thirty –’

‘And what did you see when you got there?’

My voice trembled a little as I told him what I saw – the blood on the ground, Black Rabbit’s head impaled on the gate, the smashed-up hutch in the garden, the bits and pieces scattered around the shed doorway, the headless remains of Black Rabbit…

‘That must have been quite upsetting for you,’ Barry said.

‘Yeah, it was.’

‘Do you have any idea who might have done it?’

‘No.’

He nodded. ‘Did you touch anything while you were there?’

‘Yeah, the gate. I opened the gate. But I used my elbow.’

‘Did you touch anything else?’

‘No… I was sick before I went through the gate.’

‘Sick?’

‘I threw up.’

‘Right… but once you’d gone through the gate, you didn’t touch or move anything?’

‘No.’

‘OK.’ He turned to Gallagher again and held out his hand. Gallagher reached down to the bag and brought out two more evidence bags, small ones this time. He gave them to Barry and removed the rucksack from the table. Barry placed the two clear envelopes on the table in front of me. ‘For the benefit of the tape,’ he repeated, ‘I’m now showing the witness two items found in a recently recovered article of clothing that is believed to belong to Stella Ross.’ He looked at me. ‘Have you seen either of these two items before, Peter?’

I was already studying one of the objects in front of me. In fact, I was more than just studying it, I was mesmerized by it. It was a pebble – a shiny black pebble. Round and flat, about the size of a £2 coin, it was the kind of pebble that’s perfect for skipping across rivers. It was a beautiful thing – glossy and smooth, shiny and black – but the most astonishing thing about it, and the reason I couldn’t take my eyes off it, was the strange little stick-figured picture that had been painstakingly scratched into its surface. It was a picture of a rabbit. The crude simplicity of the etching somehow gave the natural perfection of the stone a weird kind of extra dimension, an
extra
beauty, and although I’d never seen Raymond scratching a picture into the surface of a pebble, I just knew it was the kind of thing he’d do. Find a pebble, clean it up, scratch a little picture on it…

Swallowing hard, I turned my attention to the other object.

It wasn’t quite so mesmerizing as the pebble – just a shortish length of fine gold chain, the chain of a necklace. A broken necklace. There wasn’t anything distinctive about it – no charms, no markings – but it somehow seemed vaguely familiar. I didn’t
know why. There was just something about it, something that reminded me of something…

‘Well?’ said Barry.

‘What?’ I said quietly, staring at the pebble again.

‘Have you seen them before?’ Barry asked.

‘No…’

‘Are you sure?’

I nodded. ‘What are they?’

‘They were found in the coin-pocket of Stella’s shorts. Are you absolutely certain you’ve never seen them before?’

‘I’ve never seen them.’

‘Have you ever been in Raymond’s bedroom?’

I looked up at him. ‘What?’

‘His room, Raymond’s bedroom. Have you ever been in it?’

‘Why?’

‘Just answer the question, Peter.’

‘Well, yeah… I’ve been in his room. Not recently, though…’

‘When was the last time?’

‘I don’t know… years ago, when we were little kids.’

‘How little?’

I shrugged. ‘Six, seven years old… something like that. Raymond’s parents started getting a bit funny about things around then… they didn’t like other people being in the house. So whenever I went round to Raymond’s after that we spent most of our time in his garden.’ I glanced at the pebble again, then looked up at Barry. ‘What’s this got to do with anything?’

‘This pebble,’ he said, tapping the plastic envelope, ‘it’s very similar to a number of other pebbles we found in Raymond’s room. Same colour, same size, same markings.’ He looked at me. ‘It also has Raymond’s fingerprints on it.’

∗

I found it really hard to concentrate after that. DI Barry didn’t say anything else about the pebble or the necklace, he just started asking me all about Saturday night again, and I started telling him what he wanted to know… but I was only semi-conscious of what I was saying. Half of me was just opening my mouth and letting the words come out –
I did this, we did that, I don’t know, yes, I think so
– while the other half, the inside half, was thinking about Raymond’s pebbles. Why didn’t I know about them? Why hadn’t he told me about them? And why had he given one to Stella? I mean, it wasn’t hard to imagine him doing it… smiling shyly, mumbling awkwardly…
you don’t have to keep it if you don’t want to… I mean, I know it’s a bit… well, you know… I mean, if you don’t like it…
and it was easy enough to imagine Stella taking the pebble from his hand… looking at it, maybe laughing at it, then stuffing it carelessly into her pocket.

But why?

And why hadn’t he given one to me?

I would have really liked one of those pebbles… I could have kept it next to my porcelain rabbit on top of the chest of drawers. But then maybe, I thought, maybe Raymond only gave the rabbit-pebbles to people he didn’t like? Maybe they were some kind of bad-luck charm, something he gave to people who’d pissed him off. Or maybe…

∗

By the time I’d finished telling Barry about Saturday night, and Gallagher had written it all down, and I’d read through what he’d written, and I’d watched Mum read through it all, and I’d signed it at the bottom of each page… by the time I’d done all that, I’d just about had it. I was drained, exhausted, sick of talking, sick of sitting in that dull white room, sick of everything. I’d told Barry a lot more than I’d told anyone else – mainly, I think, because I was too busy thinking about Raymond to concentrate on lying – but there was still quite a lot that I hadn’t told him. Wes Campbell, for instance. And Nicole’s behaviour in the den, and afterwards at the fair, and almost everything that Raymond had said to me that night. I’d told Barry about the fortune-teller, which he seemed to find pretty interesting, but I didn’t go into any detail about what she’d said. I’d even told him about the guy with the moustache. But when Barry had asked me what he looked like, and where I’d seen him, and why I thought he was worth mentioning, my answers were so vague that Barry had stopped listening after a few seconds.

He didn’t want feelings, he told me, he just wanted the facts.

What happened next?

Where did you go?

Who did you see?

What time was this?

So that’s what I’d given him – the facts. Times, places, people, things… I just kept talking. Talking, talking, talking. I thought we’d finished when I got to the bit about waking up Mr Daggett after I’d found Black Rabbit’s head on the gate, but I was wrong. Barry had one more little surprise for me.

As Gallagher wound on the video tape again, Barry said, ‘I’m sorry we’ve taken up so much of your time, Peter. And you too, Mrs Boland. And I’d like to thank you both for being so helpful.’

He smiled at Mum. She just scowled at him. He looked back at me and continued. ‘I just want to show you something before we start going over your statement, if that’s all right.’

‘Oh, come
on
,’ Mum sighed. ‘He’s had enough –’

‘It’ll only take a minute,’ Barry said. ‘I just need to clarify something.’

Gallagher had stopped the tape now. The picture on the screen was a blurred shot of the ground – trampled grass, cigarette ends, litter. Then Gallagher pressed
play
and the image on the screen lurched upwards. The camera swung aimlessly around the fairground for a while, showing us dizzying pictures of the crowds and the lights and the rides, and then suddenly it steadied again – and now I knew where the cameraman was. He was standing near the Portaloos. I could see the rows of blue cubicles, the people going in and out… and I could see the ragged square of shadowed ground at the far end of the toilets. There was no sound on the film now, so I guessed the microphone had been switched off, and there was no sign of Stella either.

‘According to the timer on the camera,’ Barry said, ‘this was filmed at twenty past midnight. Stella was last seen heading off to the Portaloos about ten minutes earlier.’

I stared at the screen, watching the camera as it panned slowly around the fairground. Then Gallagher hit the pause button, and the picture froze, and I was looking at a stuttered image of myself. I was sitting on a bench, a bottle of Vodka Reef in my hand. I was staring across at the patch of ground by the Portaloos. I looked lost – dumb and dazed, overloaded. In the background, another dazed-looking figure was standing on her own, quietly watching me from a distance. Her face was slightly blurred, and she was partly hidden behind the awning of a tent, but there was no mistaking those darkened eyes, those reddened lips…
the slicked-back hair, the low-rise jeans, the flimsy little cropped white vest.

It was Nicole.

She was watching me.

I leaned forward in my seat and squinted at the screen. Behind Nicole, about ten metres further back, another blurred figure was standing in the doorway of a tent. I recognized the tent. It was the fortune-teller’s tent. And there she was, Madame Baptiste, Lottie Noyce, watching Nicole as Nicole watched me, as I watched Pauly, as Pauly went after Eric and Campbell…

And now here I was, sitting in this silent white room, watching it all over again.

‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ DI Barry said. ‘Sitting on the bench.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What are you doing there?’

Feeling bad
, I thought to myself.
That’s what I’m doing there. Feeling bad. I’ve forgotten what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m wondering what’s the matter with me. Why can’t I do anything right? Why can’t I do anything?

‘I’m not doing anything,’ I told Barry. ‘I’m just sitting there, you know… I was tired. I’d been looking for Raymond. I was just taking a rest…’

‘You just happened to be there?’ he said. ‘Ten minutes after Stella disappeared, and you just
happened
to be there?’

I shrugged. ‘Everyone’s got be somewhere.’

Barry looked at me, unable to keep the disbelief from his eyes. But he didn’t say anything. He just nodded at Gallagher, and Gallagher pressed
play
again, and I watched myself stutter into life on the screen – looking at the bottle of Vodka Reef in my hand, knowing that I shouldn’t drink it, that it wouldn’t do me any good, but not seeming to have any choice. I didn’t have any
choice. The bottle just lifted itself to my mouth, tipped itself up, and the next thing I knew it was empty.

The screen went blank.

Mum didn’t say anything to me as DC Gallagher escorted us out of the interview room and led us down to reception. She didn’t look at me either. And as we followed Gallagher along the corridors and down the stairs, I wondered what she was thinking. Was she angry with me? Was she concerned? Was she shocked? Disappointed? There was no way of telling from the look on her face, but I didn’t think I’d have to wait very long to find out. Before we’d left the interview room, DI Barry had started arranging for someone to drive us home, but Mum had told him not to bother.

‘Thanks all the same,’ she’d told him, ‘but we’ll make our own way back. We’ve got a few things to do first anyway.’

And I was pretty sure that those ‘things to do’ consisted mostly of talking to me.

As we passed through the security doors into reception, Gallagher stopped by the open door and nodded towards the exit.

‘If you go through those glass doors and turn right,’ he told us, ‘that’ll take you out on to Westway.’

I glanced at him, surprised at the squeakiness of his voice, and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t actually heard him speak until now. He’d been with us since ten o’clock that morning, and it was just gone two o’clock now. Four hours, and he’d never said
a single word.
Mind you
, I thought to myself,
if I had a voice like that, I wouldn’t say very much either.

‘All right?’ he squeaked at me.

‘Yeah, thanks,’ I told him, trying not to smile.

As we started heading towards the glass doors, I could see that Mum was trying to keep a straight face too, and just for a moment everything felt OK. Mum was Mum again – the Mum I knew. The Mum who made me laugh at things I shouldn’t really laugh at – like men in bad wigs, or women in stupid clothes, or tough-looking policemen who talked like Mickey Mouse – and I knew if I’d looked at her then, we would have both started giggling like idiots. And that would have been fine with me. But just as I was about to look at her, something else caught my attention.