Little Black Lies (39 page)

‘Rachel didn’t kill Peter.’ Her tone is disparaging, verging on incredulous. ‘Shame on you for even entertaining the thought, Josh Savidge. You’ve known her since she was five, what were you thinking of?’

‘She confessed.’ Skye looks a little afraid of Catrin. ‘We have it on record.’

People are running around outside again. We ignore them.

‘She confessed because she thinks I killed him.’ Catrin is looking at me once more. ‘She thinks she owes me. She destroyed my life, so she’s giving me hers in return. She’s going to let me get away with killing her son, and she’s going to serve the prison time that is rightfully mine, because that’s the only way she thinks she can make it up to me.’

‘I don’t—’ Savidge sounds as though he’s going to burst into tears. I can’t look at him. I can’t take my eyes off the woman who holds the rest of my life in her hands.

That woman sits back, she might be completely at ease. ‘She may have seen me pick Peter up from the road but she couldn’t possibly have seen me putting him in the garden. You can’t see the garden gate from her bedroom window.’ She looks round in exasperation. ‘For God’s sake, I’ve been in that room dozens of times. I know what you can and can’t see from the window. She saw me pick her son up, she panicked and came racing downstairs to protect him, but by the time she reached the garden I was gone. And so was he.’

‘Rachel, is this true?’

My hands are clutching the tabletop. If I let go, I’ll fall.

Catrin hasn’t finished. ‘Except, my former best friend is a bit more cunning even than that. She’s gambling on me not letting her go through with it. That I’ll relent at the last minute and make my own confession, tell you what I did with Peter and where he is. She’s willing to risk going to prison, just to get her son’s body back. That’s how much she loves this little boy she’s just told you she killed.’ She shakes her head, and something in her cold, stern face softens. ‘You poor, poor, stupid cow.’

I don’t mean to wail, I simply can’t help it. It comes from nowhere and suddenly both Skye and Josh are holding me, trying to stop me from banging my head on the hard surface of the table. Finally, after what feels like for ever, but is probably only a couple of minutes, I’m being held in my chair. Skye’s arms are around me, but it feels more like a big hug than a restraint. Josh is crouched at my side, panting heavily.

‘I’m telling you, I’ll bloody well charge the pair of you if I don’t get some answers.’ He doesn’t mean it, I can tell. He’s as confused and unhappy and bewildered as the rest of us are. Except, perhaps …

Catrin waits for me to calm down, to stop sobbing, to look her in the eyes again.

‘Please,’ I say, knowing that I will beg, get down on my hands and knees if I have to. I will do anything to see my little boy one last time. I feel my face collapsing and know I’m about to start crying again.

‘Rach.’ She’s leaning across the table. The two minders copy her, ready to pull her back. ‘Listen to me.’

I think her voice is the only thing tethering me to sanity.

‘I’ve spent three years thinking about how I’m going to hurt you. Three years with nothing in my head but misery and stupid plans for revenge. I even wrote some of them down, which is why I’m here in the first place. And everyone is quite right that Thursday had a special significance. Thursday was the day I was going to bring everything to an end.’

I can’t do this. I thought I was strong enough. I’m not.

‘Rach, listen to me, look at me. I was going to call you on Thursday, round about three o’clock, before the boys got home from school. I was going to say that we needed to talk, that things had gone on long enough, and I was going to suggest we go out on my boat, so that we could be alone, so that no one would know what we were doing or try to interrupt us. I knew you’d agree.’

‘Yes.’ I would have done. I’d have agreed instantly.

Catrin’s eyes remain on mine but her lips are curling upwards in the faintest hint of a smile. ‘I was going to drive us out of harbour and then, when we were out of sight of anyone on land, I was going to shoot you with a tranquillizer gun.’

No one was expecting that. I can tell from the starts, the puzzled frowns, the nervous eye movements.

‘It was risky.’ Catrin ignores the police officers. It might be only the two of us in the room as far as she is concerned. ‘I roughly knew your weight, of course, and could calculate the amount of anaesthetic I’d need for a marine mammal of similar size. But different species react to drugs differently. There was a chance I’d end up killing you.’

‘You weren’t going to kill me?’

Her grey eyes are cold as steel. ‘Of course I was. Just not quickly.’

Again, the mood in the room shifts. Savidge clears his throat, but doesn’t seem to know how to begin. It is Skye who speaks next, from her position on the floor beside me. ‘So what was the plan? When – if – Rachel woke up?’

‘We were going south.’

The officers are exchanging looks around us. ‘What’s south?’ asks one of the constables.

‘Nothing,’ I say, because in those four words she’s told me exactly what the plan was. ‘We were going to die together, weren’t we? After days, maybe a week or so, the seas would get too big for that small boat and we’d be lost.’

Catrin inclines her head. ‘I was planning on a few days at least. Enough time for you to dwell on what was going to happen. On what you were leaving behind. A few days of agony didn’t really feel enough, but it was the best I could come up with.’

‘Until you saw Peter in the road?’ says Savidge. ‘When suddenly you had a much better plan. You decided to take the child, rather than the mother.’

‘Yes.’

This is it. It’s coming. I reach out for Skye but she’s moved. I can’t look for her. I can’t take my eyes off Catrin.

She gives a heavy sigh, as though her confession, like mine, is proving exhausting. ‘When I saw Peter in the lane that day, I stopped the car, got out and picked him up. Just as you saw.’

I want her to stop. I’ve changed my mind. I can’t bear to hear this.

‘It was the second time in two days that I’d held a young child. Archie, when I found him, was too shocked and cold to do anything but cling to me, but Peter was quite different. He wrapped his arms round my neck and pushed his face against my shoulder, the way Kit used to at that age.’

Her eyes stay on mine but their focus drifts. She’s slipped away, is reliving the moment she held Peter in her arms. I think I can see the gleam of a tear.

‘And…’ prompts Savidge.

She comes back to us, blinks, gives a half shrug. ‘And everything changed.’

Savidge opens his mouth, she doesn’t give him chance.

‘I knew I could never kill Peter.’ She’s speaking directly to me again. ‘I didn’t even want to kill you any more. So I carried him to the gate and put him back in the garden. I turned the car and I drove back down the hill. The last time I saw your son, Rachel, he was alive and well.’

And again, we stare at each other for what feels like a very long time.

Until Savidge interrupts. ‘So if you didn’t take Peter, Catrin, why did you race down to your boat? Why did you disappear for hours?’

Her eyes drift briefly from mine. ‘Because I needed to think. I’d spent months planning that my life would effectively end on Thursday. I needed to come to terms with the knowledge that it wasn’t. That I wasn’t going to die and I wasn’t going to kill Rachel.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?’

She tosses her head in exasperation. ‘It would hardly have helped my case, would it? And it was completely irrelevant, because as far as I was concerned, the last time I saw Peter, he was absolutely fine.’

She seems to lose interest in Savidge and turns to me again. ‘I know what happened that day,’ she says. ‘You know, the day Ned and Kit died?’

I can only stare back. She knows? She knows what I did that day?

‘I know how you felt about Ben.’ She shakes her head sadly. ‘No one cries for five hours at a friend’s wedding. And I know you knew about Callum.’ She shrugs. ‘I guess the temptation was too much to resist.’

She reaches out towards me but the table is too wide. ‘It’s OK,’ she says, and there is a ghost of a smile on her face. A smile of pity, but I’ll take what I can get. ‘You know what? If it hadn’t been for the accident, you’d probably have done me a favour. Really, it’s OK.’

I hadn’t known it was possible for misery to hurt this much. And yet, somewhere, out in the universe, a cog slips back into its rightful place. The wheels start turning again, and their movement is smooth.

He’ll shrieve my soul, he’ll wash away

The Albatross’s blood.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say.

Her small, slim body relaxes as her hatred of me slips out of it. She knows that I’ve seen it. ‘I know,’ she says.

‘If there was anything, anything at all that I could do…’

She gives a brief, almost amused, look around the room. ‘Clearly.’

The sound of wood scraping along the floor. ‘Enough.’ Savidge is on his feet. ‘I’m getting the boss in. I’m separating you two. One way or another, we’re going to get to the truth.’

I open my mouth. Catrin beats me to it.

‘Don’t be such a twat, Josh. Get Stopford by all means, get the entire bloody constabulary back, but splitting us up will achieve nothing. We’ve told you everything we know. Rachel did not kill Peter. She couldn’t kill to save her own life.’

‘And Catrin doesn’t know how to lie.’ I’m talking to Josh, but looking at my best friend.

She’s looking right back. ‘Unlike you. You’re a bloody master at it.’

‘Could never fool you, could I?’

The tiniest of smiles and then she’s talking to Savidge again. ‘Josh, come on. While you’re focusing all your efforts on us, no one is looking for Peter. You haven’t been looking for him since you made up your mind I took him.’

She hasn’t convinced him, I can see from the look on his face. He’s had two suspects today, he’s not going to let us both go without a fight.

A knock on the door. It opens. The desk sergeant. ‘Josh, I need a word.’

‘Give me a minute, Neil.’

‘No, has to be now. I’m serious, Josh.’

‘For God’s sake, what is it?’

The desk sergeant looks around and seems to decide. ‘I’ve got Callum Murray in the interview room. He’s claiming he killed Peter Grimwood.’

37

I’m back in the interview room, alone. Catrin has been returned to her cell. Callum’s arrival – not to mention his confession – has floored all of us, but Josh Savidge has wit enough to realize that he needs to talk to him alone.

Already, ten minutes have passed and they won’t even have finished booking him in yet. There is no time for this. My baby is out there. Peter. I’ve started whispering his name to myself like a mantra. Peter, Peter, Peter.

I can’t sit down. I pace the room, pound my fists on the walls, but not so loud as to attract attention, because I mustn’t waste any more time. I peer out into the corridor and see nothing. I walk to the window and look up at the sky.

I don’t believe it. Not the man on whose shoulder I wept only this morning. I have always liked Callum. He is big, friendly, larger than life in every respect and yes, there might be shades of him that are darker, no one can have been through what he did in the war and come out of it unscathed, but he keeps his dark places hidden away and private. I have never thought him dangerous.

My dad thinks the world of him, and he’s never wrong about people. He certainly had me pegged years ago.

Callum could not have harmed my child. And yet I no longer believe it was Catrin. I’ve looked into her eyes. It wasn’t Catrin.

Was it me? Did I kill him and wipe the memory from my mind? Is that even possible? Much more of this and I’ll start to believe anything. I think back, watching Catrin walk towards her car with Peter in her arms, losing sight of her (she was spot on about that), running from the room, out of the house, across the garden.

Outside, a large engine roars into life and I can’t help but step away from the wall. The revving sounds continue, increasing in volume. Then a burst of forward momentum. I back up, almost to the door, and the truck stops. Its headlights are shining in through the window. Then, equally quickly, the engine squeals, tyres scrape across the road and it speeds away.

Inside the building I hear footsteps running. Another siren sounds but it’s heading up the hill to the bonfire.

I want to bang on the door, demand to know what’s going on, but there simply aren’t enough people in the building to deal with hysterics on my part. I may be losing my mind, but I have to do it quietly.

There’s something going on up at the bonfire, otherwise more police would be here. I’m praying Sander had the good sense to take the boys home; that wherever my three men are, they’re safe.

An alarm sounds, drowning out external noise. From inside the building I hear more running footsteps.

An escape? Callum changed his mind and ran for it?

The alarm continues, painfully shrill. Then someone is at the door. I step back and Skye rushes inside. She is wearing her high-visibility jacket.

‘Get your coat.’ Without waiting for me to move, she grabs it from the back of the chair I’ve been sitting on.

‘What’s going on?’ I speak without thinking because from the corridor comes the faint but unmistakable aroma of smoke. Skye has brought it into the room too, clinging to her like cheap perfume.

‘Someone sent a firework through a window. The main office is on fire.’ She’s holding out handcuffs. ‘I have to cuff you, I’m afraid. Sergeant’s orders.’

The smoke is thicker in the corridor and from somewhere close by I can hear crackling as Skye, now cuffed to me, drags me towards reception.

‘Breathe as little as you can till we’re outside.’ She succumbs to a fit of coughing.

My eyes begin to sting. There are footsteps at our rear but I don’t look back. We run through the security doors into the reception area. Neil, the desk sergeant, a handkerchief to his face, is holding open the front door.

Smoke is racing ahead of us, thickening in the cooler air. Skye pulls me outside, beyond its reach, beyond the wave of warmth that has been increasing with every second. The cool clear air feels like a huge relief.