Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

‘Jim.’ It was a plea. ‘I thought you would help me.’

‘I thought I knew you.’

She tried to reach out and touch my face, but as her fingers grazed my cheek I said, ‘Don’t,’ and she withdrew her hand quickly, as if I’d scalded her.

I massaged my temples, and I felt an exhausted, debilitating sadness because I knew that this was the end of us, and that I’d made my own bed on this one. It was my own fucking fault. End of.

She took another deep breath. ‘I did it because of what happened to my sister,’ she said, and I could hear that there was bravery in her voice, that she was working up courage for what she was about to say, but for me it was too late for that, because she’d betrayed the police force and the investigation, betrayed Benedict Finch, and betrayed me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not interested. I don’t want to hear it.’

She opened her mouth to reply but something she saw in my face made her close it again, and her features drained of hope.

‘Jim…⁠’ was all she managed.

‘No.’

I didn’t want to hear it because Emma wasn’t the person I thought she was, and I wouldn’t lie for her.

She started working at her phone again, desperately tapping at the screen, and it was too much for me; it was delusional.

I snatched the phone from her, opened the car window, threw it out and watched it clatter across the pavement and break against the urine-stained wall, pieces of it scattering amongst dark black puddles, fag butts and other unidentifiable scraps of filthy rubbish. A passer-by paused to give me a look and I told him to fuck off.

‘Tell Fraser,’ I said to Emma. ‘Or I will.’

‘Jim.’

‘You need to go and do the right thing or this could hang us all. Now.’

I started up the car and eased back into the traffic. I couldn’t look at her. In the rear-view mirror I could see a vast mural covering the side of an office building: a mother and child. It was a pure image, made of black lines and a white background, the mother’s lips as sensual as Emma’s. I thumped the dashboard again, felt the pain again, and then I took the car in the direction of Kenneth Steele House. On the way, we didn’t speak at all.

When we parked at Kenneth Steele House, Emma got out of the car without a word and I watched her walk across the car park, and climb the steps to the entrance, slowly, straight-backed. I gave it a full twenty minutes before I followed her. Twenty minutes of gazing through the windscreen at the sharp-tipped silvered-metal railings that encircled the car park and wondering whether she was doing the right thing in there.

When I finally got out of the car, my body was protesting with fatigue, and I checked my face in the wing mirror to be sure I wasn’t wearing the whole episode for anybody to read. Inside, I said my normal hello to Lesley who was on Reception, and she smiled at me, and I hoped she didn’t notice that I felt like I was wading through shit.

With Zhang not answering her phone, and somebody in the incident room telling me that Clemo and Fraser were unavailable too, I had to turn to John. Or, as the papers would have it, the unimpeachable Mr John Finch, Consultant Paediatric General Surgeon and proud owner of a lovely new wife.

He answered the phone with the same haste with which I jumped on every call I received. To give him credit he quickly managed the disappointment he obviously felt when I said I didn’t have news, took me seriously when I explained about the pictures in the book and didn’t demur when I asked him to drive me, and the book, to the police station.

Heading up the steps of Kenneth Steele House, I realised I could barely even remember our arrival nearly a week before. The receptionist told us that if we’d like to leave the book with her then she’d ensure that it was taken up to the incident room.

I said that I’d like to speak to somebody in person. I mentioned DC Zhang, and DI Clemo.

She asked us to sit and we perched side by side on the same sofa we’d occupied on Monday morning.

She made some hushed calls, head down, covering her mouth as if we could lip-read. Then she crossed the foyer, heels clipping the floor noisily, and said, ‘Someone will be down to see you soon. If you wouldn’t mind being patient.’

She brought us hot tea in plastic cups so thin you could burn your fingers.

John passed the time by looking through Ben’s book methodically, page by page, over and over again. I could barely sit down; I was pulsating with impatience, and after what felt like an interminable wait I approached the desk again.

‘Somebody’s coming, they’re rather busy up there this morning,’ I was told.

‘Can we interrupt them, this is very important?’

‘They know you’re here, they’re just in a meeting.’

‘Can I just speak to DC Zhang?’

‘Please be patient, Mrs Finch.’

‘My name is Jenner.’

‘Sorry, Ms Jenner. DC Zhang and DI Clemo have only recently arrived themselves and I’ve rung the incident room but they’re both tied up just at the moment. If you can try to be patient one of them will be down before long, I assure you.’

‘Please.’

‘I would ask you to sit down again if possible.’

I sat, my knees jigging, hands wringing.

John said, ‘Perhaps it’s best if we just leave the books here.’

‘What if they can’t read Ben’s writing?’

‘Rachel…⁠’

‘No. I want to hand them over myself, explain them.’

After another ten minutes I felt my patience snap. I took the book from John and said, ‘If they’re not coming down here I’m bloody well going to go up there.’

‘No, don’t do that,’ John said, but he was too slow to stop me. I marched to reception, propelled forward by my certainty, and my outrage that nobody had come to listen to us.

‘Where are they?’ I said to the receptionist.

‘Mrs Jenner, if you can just be a bit more patient-’

‘Stop asking me to be patient. How can I be patient? My son is missing and if they can’t be bothered to come down here I’m going to go to them. What’s more important than a piece of new evidence that they don’t know about? How is it that I can get the immediate attention of any journalist in the country but not of a single officer investigating my son’s case? Should I take this to the press? Should I?’

I was waving the book at her, brandishing it in her face.

‘Please don’t raise your voice, Ms Jenner.’

‘I will raise my voice if I fucking well feel like it. I will raise my voice until SOMEBODY COMES DOWN AND LOOKS AT THIS BOOK!’ I slammed it down on the desk in front of her. ‘THEY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS BECAUSE I WANT MY SON BACK. I WANT BEN AND IF YOU DON’T WANT ME HERE THEN YOU CAN FUCKING WELL ARREST ME.’

She was no pushover, the receptionist. She spoke to me in a voice that was steel-reinforced. ‘If you take a seat, I shall phone the incident room once more. If you continue to make a scene I shall ask one of my colleagues to escort you from the building.’

Up close to the desk, I saw that her handbag was tucked into a corner behind her desk. It had a newspaper folded on it, and I realised that even here, in this environment, I was probably being judged through the filter of what was written about me; that the receptionist was seeing, in front of her own eyes, the Rachel Jenner from the press conference.

John was at my side, and he coaxed me away then, back to the sofa, and I stared at the few people coming and going through the foyer in front of us with an empty gaze that made many of them take a second look at me.

Within minutes, a man stood in front of us.

‘DI Bennett,’ he said, sticking a hand out to John first, and then to me. His handshake was painfully strong, and I didn’t recognise him. ‘Is this it then?’