Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

‘Ben’s coming back.’

‘I hope he is, God knows I do, you know I do -’ she was twisting a tea towel tight between her hands – ‘but we have to accept the possibility that he might not be back soon, that some harm might have come to him. It’s been six days.’

I couldn’t hear it. Not from Nicky. Not from anybody. Not now. Not ever.

‘I’m going to see Ruth,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This wasn’t how I wanted this morning to go.’

When you work a case like this one, you long for a lead. When you get one, you’re all over it, and that’s how I felt about Nicola Forbes. I’d been ready to chase her to the end of the line.

What you don’t expect is for something else just as strong to turn up, because then it’s a bit like being in a shooting range, trying to decide what to aim at, what’s a decoy and what’s real. Friend or enemy? Where should your sights land?

You can’t always tell straight away, but sometimes you are presented with a clear and immediate threat, and it’s obvious that you must respond to that.

That’s what happened on day six of the case. The letter arrived, and it changed the game completely.

It came in the morning post. Postmark BS7, addressed to Fraser directly, at Kenneth Steele House. Fraser’s secretary opened it. Her scream could be heard out in the corridor at the far end of the incident room and she bolted out of her office.

Fraser pulled us in straight away. The letter was in an evidence bag by then, and the secretary was already having her fingers inked next door so we could eliminate her prints. She was shaking and tearful, an extreme reaction for somebody who regularly got to file crime scene photographs.

‘Jim,’ Fraser said once we’d closed the door behind us. ‘Get John Finch in.’

Emma was there too. She didn’t look as though she’d slept. Under her make-up her skin was dull and strained. To anybody else she probably looked more or less her usual self – a tired version of herself, of course – but I could see a few extra small signs of disarray. Her hair wasn’t tied up as neatly as usual, and her shirt didn’t look fresh. You can do that if you want to know every inch of somebody better than you know yourself. I wanted to put my arm around her, ask her if she was coping, but I couldn’t of course. Not there, not then.

Emma’s phone rang just as Fraser finished filling us in. She glanced at it. ‘It’s Rachel Jenner, boss,’ she said. ‘Should I tell her?’

‘Nuh uh,’ said Fraser. ‘Not a word, not yet.’

Zhang agreed to come and give me a lift to the nursing home. She drove carefully and we didn’t talk.

Sitting beside her in the silence, I felt, for the first time since Ben had gone, a sort of awakening, an impulse from within, which told me to lift my head up from the sand, to stop burrowing into my memories of Ben, and instead to look around me, to be more alert.

I needed to consider people, to assess them, as a detective might, as Clemo might, and I needed to do it now. I’d placed my trust in my husband and my sister in the past, and both of them had proved themselves unreliable.

I needed to consider my assumptions about life too.

I’d also placed my trust in the veneer of a civilised society, the lie that is sold to us daily, which is that life is fundamentally good and that violence only happens to those who warrant it; it tarnishes only the trophy that’s already stained. That’s the same logic as the age-old accusation that a raped woman somehow deserves it, and based on that, without questioning it, I’d trusted that if Ben ran ahead of me in the woods then he would come to no harm, because I believed myself to be fundamentally good.

And, worse, the betrayal had been a double one because Ben had also put his trust in me, in the way that children must, and so I’d failed him as well as myself: abjectly and possibly finally.

I looked at Zhang’s hand on the wheel, her knuckles white as she gripped it firmly at ten to two, and I realised that beyond my first impressions I hadn’t before thought about who she really was, or what she might be like.

‘Do you have a family?’ I asked her as the car idled at a junction.

‘I have a mum and dad,’ she replied.

‘I mean children of your own?’ Though as I said it, I realised she was probably too young.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I won’t have children for a while, if ever.’

‘Oh. You know that already?’

‘I do.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘Because I’m not ready to be responsible for somebody else’s life yet.’

She said it so simply that it gave me a frisson of shock because I realised that she already knew what I was only just working out – that we should look very carefully indeed before we leap, or believe, or trust – and that this younger woman had recognised that before I did only made me feel more foolish.

I didn’t know how to respond so I fixated on what was around me. Outside the sky was the kind of grey that looks perpetual and heavy, and the clothing of the people in the street was flattened against them by a strong wind. I retreated back into silence and the slow unfurling of the thoughts in my head, where I was starting to doubt everything I ever thought I’d known.

There was one consolation at that moment when everything weighed unbearably heavily and when suspicion was beginning to edge into every corner of my mind. It was that I was on my way to visit Ruth. I desperately wanted to see her because she was one of my favourite people in the world. Ever since Ben was a baby, she’d been a reassuring presence in my life, offering me gentle, unconditional support, and our friendship had grown alongside him.

Life hadn’t been easy for Ruth. To those who didn’t know her she would appear dignified, proud and fragile, always chic in a uniform of dark clothes with a scarf neatly tied at her neck, a silky flash of colour. As a young woman, she’d had the talent to be a concert violinist, but she’d also felt things so deeply that they could wound her.

Her violin playing had captivated John’s father. ‘I fell in love with her the first time I saw her play,’ Nicholas Finch would proudly tell everyone, in his Brummy accent. In fact most people who’d heard her play were entranced. She’d trained and performed on the instrument for years, but ultimately found public performance an intolerable pressure, and as a result, when she was in her twenties, shortly after marrying John’s father, she’d sunk deeply into the first of many bouts of deep depression that she suffered throughout her life.

I first met Ruth in early 2003, a good year for her. She and Nicholas were enjoying his retirement. After a long career as a GP, which had kept him working all hours, finally having him around had helped Ruth remain stable. They were planning to buy a small apartment in the Alps, and they’d taken a successful trip the previous year to Vienna, to see the buildings and neighbourhoods that Ruth’s parents grew up in. Lotte and Walter Stern had been musicians too, both successful and well-respected performers before the war, but they’d become refugees, driven from Vienna after Kristallnacht, when Lotte Stern was heavily pregnant with her daughter.

In the summer of 2003, John and I made our first visit together to his parents’ home in Birmingham. I found Ruth and Nicholas charming and welcoming. Their contrasting personalities intrigued me. Nicholas was a big, warm-hearted man with a kindly, relaxed manner, which had won him many friends amongst his patients during his years as a GP. His bonhomie was the opposite of Ruth’s nervous disposition, but she welcomed me cautiously.