Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

‘I said to her that if you’ve been called those things, accused like the mother is, you never get over it. That’s the shame of it. If she’s guilty, she deserves it, if she’s innocent, then people have done her wrong.’

We swung around the Bear Pit roundabout, the swift curve of it making my stomach quail, dirty shop windows advertising bridal wear and discount trainers blurring in front of my eyes. Yards ahead, I saw the magistrates’ court, and the hospital buildings.

‘I’ll get out here,’ I said at a red light. ‘Can you stop?’ desperate to escape him, that kind man, before he saw who I was.

‘Are you sure, love?’ Eyes in the mirror again, a frown line above them. ‘Are you OK? Are you sick? You don’t look too well. Sorry, I thought you were visiting somebody, I didn’t know you were sick. Shall I take you to A & E?’

I opened the door while we were at the light, pushed some cash at him, got out. He had to drive on because the light turned green and somebody behind him landed a fist on their horn.

My scarf wound tightly up my face, my hair arranged like a pair of curtains that were mostly shut, in the plate glass outside the hospital entrance my reflection told me I looked like somebody with something to hide.

Nine o’clock Sunday morning, on Fraser’s instructions, Bennett and I were knocking at a heavy wooden door set in a stone wall on a wide pavement in the posh end of Sea Mills and listening to the sound of birdsong while we waited for a reply.

The woman who opened it had the same flaming red hair as Ben’s teaching assistant. She wore an extravagantly colourful kimono over a pair of pyjamas and had bare legs and feet. Her toes curled in as the cold hit them. She was polite but perturbed. She was Lucas Grantham’s mother.

‘He’s here but he’s still asleep,’ she said, when we asked if we could have a word with him. ‘He got in late last night.’

‘Anybody else at home?’ Bennett asked her.

‘No. Just us. Nobody else lives here.’

The house was unusual, 60s built I’d have guessed, single storey, wrapped in an L-shape around a large garden. Impenetrable looking from the outside, the interior was flooded with light because almost every wall facing the garden was made of glass.

She asked us to wait in a modest-sized sitting room. There was nothing showy about this home apart from the architecture. The furnishings weren’t new and the walls were lined with shelves in cheap brown wood, which carried hundreds of books. Visible across the garden was a room at the end of the house, which looked like an artist’s studio.

In a far corner of the garden was a very large mound, covered in grass, and at one end of it was a corrugated metal door that you reached by walking down a few steps.

‘Do you know what that is?’ Bennett said, in a voice that told me he’d quite like to educate me.

‘It’s an Anderson shelter,’ I said. I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of engaging in his usual one-upmanship. I’d wanted to do this interview with Fraser but she was still firefighting back at HQ after Emma’s confession. We’d only been out together for half an hour but already I was tolerating Bennett at best.

When Lucas Grantham appeared, his pale skin was whiter than I remembered, freckles running over it like a nasty rash. He wore a crumpled T-shirt, which looked like he’d slept in it, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms.

His mother had dressed herself and Bennett said, ‘Make us a cup of coffee would you, love? While we have a chat with Lucas.’

I winced as I saw pride flicker in her face before she made a calculation and quelled it in the face of our authority. She left us with her son.

The three of us sat down around a low coffee table, and I pulled a photograph from my file and put it down in front of Grantham. It showed his car, crossing the suspension bridge, at 14.30 on Sunday, 21 October, time and date clearly printed on the photograph.

‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Oh fuck. I told Sal we shouldn’t have done this, I told her.’

‘Done what, son?’ said Bennett.

‘Now you’re going to think that I’ve done something to Ben Finch. Truth is, I don’t even know him very well! I don’t. He’s a nice kid, he’s good at art, but that’s all I know!’

‘Reel it back in, son,’ said Bennett. ‘Reel it back in. Let’s start at the beginning.’

Grantham’s panic was palpable now, hands rubbing up and down along his thighs, clawing at his knees. Eyes darting from Bennett, to me, to the photograph, to the doorway where his mother might reappear.

‘Who’s Sal?’ I asked him.

‘That’s my girlfriend.’

‘The one who gave you the alibi?’

‘Yeah.’

‘The alibi that said that the two of you were at Sal’s flat on the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-first of October?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is that true?’

‘No.’ His face twists.

‘Why did you lie, Mr Grantham?’ Bennett again.

‘Because I knew what you’d think.’

‘What would we think?’

‘That it was me that took Ben. Of course you’d think that! I would, anybody would. That’s why Sal helped me get an alibi.’

‘And did you? Did you take Ben Finch?’ I took back the questioning.

‘No!’ He shook his head violently.

‘Did you hurt Ben Finch?’

‘No.’

‘Did you see Ben Finch?’

‘No! I swear it. I wasn’t even in the same bit of the woods as him.’

‘So what were you doing?’

‘I was cycling the trails at Ashton Court.’

‘With anybody?’

‘On my own.’

‘What time did you get home?’

‘About five o’clock. Sal can confirm that.’

‘Sal who helped you fabricate an alibi?’

‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘Do you know we could charge both of you for this?’ I was so angry I could have throttled him.

‘Do you mind, Mr Grantham,’ Bennett said, standing up, moving to the window, ‘if we take a look in your Anderson shelter?’

‘Why? Why would you do that? I was cycling, that’s the truth, it’s the truth I swear it.’

His mother was in the doorway now, as he knew she would be, and she had a tray of mugs in her hands. It wobbled.

‘Oh my God, Lucas,’ she said. ‘What have you done?’

‘Mum, I’ve not done anything. I promise.’

‘God help us,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been secretive, God knows you have, but please tell me you’ve nothing to do with this.’

It wasn’t the display of loyalty you might have expected from a mother. Bennett and I exchanged a glance.

‘Do you think you might be willing to come to the station with us for a bit more of a chat?’ I asked Lucas.

He nodded, his pale eyes cast down, his cheeks flaming.

The hospital receptionist sent me to a ward in the old part of the building. I walked down a corridor that was long and square, an exercise in perspective, with a pair of double doors at the end. Rectangular strips of lighting hung from the ceiling at regular intervals, each one emitting a pale bloom of fluorescence, as if it were undernourished.

Old linoleum that was the colour of ripe cherries covered the floor, and on each side there were private rooms where patients lay. Some were propped upright, reading, or watching TV. Others were just contours under the sheets, still as a landscape, in rooms that seemed more dimly lit, as if they were advertising their role as a potential place of transition, a conduit between illness and health, or between life and death.

I saw Katrina emerge from a room at the far end of the corridor. She stepped out, then turned and closed the door gently behind her. She stood for a second or two, looking back into the room, her hand against the window. She wasn’t aware of me.