Clare Mackintosh - I Let You Go

There is a pause before DI Stevens speaks again. ‘When did he first hit you?’

‘Is this relevant?’ Ruth says, looking at her watch.

‘Yes,’ DI Stevens snaps, and she sits back in her chair, her eyes narrowed.

‘It started the night we got married.’ I close my eyes, remembering the pain that came out of nowhere and the shame that my marriage had failed before it had even begun. I remember how tender Ian was when he returned; how gently he soothed my aching face. I said I was sorry, and I went on saying it for seven years.

‘When did you go to the refuge in Grantham Street?’

I’m surprised by how much he knows. ‘I never went there. They saw my bruises at the hospital and asked about my marriage. I didn’t tell them anything, but they gave me a card and said I could go there whenever I needed to, that I’d be safe there. I didn’t believe them – how could I be safe so close to Ian? – but I kept the card. I felt a little less alone for having it.’

‘You never tried to leave?’ DI Stevens says. There is barely concealed anger in his eyes, but it isn’t directed at me.

‘Plenty of times,’ I say. ‘Ian would go to work and I’d start packing. I’d walk round the house picking up memories, working out what I could realistically take with me. I would put it all in the car – the car was still mine, you see.’

DI Stevens shakes his head, not following.

‘It was still registered in my maiden name. Not intentionally, at first – it was just one of those things I forgot to do when we got married – but later it became really important. Ian owned everything else; the house, the business … I started to feel I didn’t exist any more, that I’d become another one of his possessions. So I never re-registered my car. A small thing, I know, but…’ I shrug. ‘I would get everything packed, and then I would carefully take everything out and put it back the way it was. Every time.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he would have found me.’

DI Stevens is flicking through the file. It is astonishingly thick and yet all that can be listed within it are the incidents that resulted in a call to police. The broken ribs and the concussion that required a spell in hospital. For every mark seen there were a dozen others hidden.

Ruth Jefferson puts a hand on the file. ‘May I?’

DI Stevens looks at me and I nod. He passes her the file and she begins looking through it.

‘But you left after the accident,’ DI Stevens said. ‘What changed?’

I take a deep breath. I want to say that I had found my courage, but of course it wasn’t that at all. ‘Ian threatened me,’ I say quietly. ‘He told me that if I ever went to the police – if I ever told anyone what had happened – he would kill me. And I knew he meant it. That night, after the accident, he beat me so badly I couldn’t stand, then he hauled me upright and pinned my arm across the sink. He poured boiling water over my hand, and I passed out from the pain. Then he dragged me out to my studio. He made me watch while he broke everything – everything I’d ever made.’

I can’t look at DI Stevens. It is as much as I can do to get the words out. ‘Ian went away then. I don’t know where. I spent the first night on the kitchen floor, then I crawled upstairs and lay in bed, praying I would die in the night, so that by the time he came back he wouldn’t be able to hurt me any more. But he didn’t come back. He was gone for days, and gradually I got stronger. I started to fantasise that he was gone for good, but he had hardly taken anything with him, so I knew he could come back at any moment. I realised that if I stayed with him, that one day he would kill me. And that’s when I left.’

‘Tell me what happened to Jacob.’

I put my hand in my pocket and touch the photograph. ‘We had an argument. I had an exhibition – the biggest I’d ever had – and I’d spent days setting it up with the man who curated it, a man called Philip. It was a day-time event, but even so Ian got drunk. He accused me of having an affair with Philip.’

‘Were you?’

I redden at the personal question. ‘Philip was gay,’ I said, ‘but Ian wouldn’t accept it. I was crying and I couldn’t see the road properly. It had been raining and the headlights kept shining in my eyes. He was shouting at me, calling me a slut and a whore. I went through Fishponds to avoid the traffic, but Ian made me pull over. He hit me and took the keys, even though he was too drunk to stand.

‘He drove like a maniac, all the time shouting at me about how he was going to teach me a lesson. We were going through an estate, through residential roads, and Ian was driving faster and faster. I was terrified.’ I twist my hands together in my lap.

‘Then I saw the boy. I screamed, but Ian didn’t slow down at all. We hit him and I saw his mother buckle as though she’d been hit too. I tried to get out of the car, but Ian locked the doors and started reversing. He wouldn’t let me go back.’ I take a gulp of air and when I exhale it comes out as a low wail.

There is silence in the small room.

‘Ian killed Jacob,’ I say. ‘But I felt as though I had.’

47

Patrick drives carefully. I brace myself for a thousand questions, but he doesn’t speak until the Bristol skyline is far behind us. As the towns give way to green fields, and the jagged lines of the coast appear, he turns to me.

‘You could have gone to prison.’

‘I meant to.’

‘Why?’ He doesn’t sound judgemental, simply confused.

‘Because someone had to pay for what happened,’ I tell him. ‘Someone had to go to court so that Jacob’s mother could sleep at night knowing that someone had paid for her son’s life.’

‘But not you, Jenna.’

Before we left I asked DI Stevens what they would tell Jacob’s mother, suddenly presented with the collapsed trial of the person she thought had killed her son.

‘We’ll wait till he’s safely in custody,’ he told me, ‘then we’ll tell her.’

I realise my actions now mean she will have to relive it all.

‘In the box with your passport,’ Patrick says suddenly, ‘I saw – I saw a baby’s toy.’ He stops, not putting words around his question.

‘It belonged to my son,’ I say. ‘Ben. I was terrified when I fell pregnant. I thought Ian would be furious, but he was ecstatic. He said it would change everything, and although he never said it I was certain he was sorry for the way he had treated me. I thought the baby might be a turning point for us: that it would make Ian realise we could be happy together. As a family.’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘it didn’t. At first he couldn’t do enough for me. He waited on me hand and foot, and was always telling me what I should and shouldn’t eat. But as my bump grew, he became more and more distant. It was as though he hated my pregnancy; resented it, even. When I was seven months pregnant I got a scorch-mark on his shirt while I was doing the ironing. It was stupid of me – I’d gone to answer the phone and got distracted, didn’t notice till it was too late. Ian went mad. He punched me hard in the stomach, and I started to bleed.’

Patrick pulls the car over and switches off the engine. I gaze out of the windscreen at the waste ground by the side of the road. The litter bin is overflowing, and discarded wrappers dance around in the breeze.

‘Ian called an ambulance. Told them I’d fallen. I don’t think they believed him, but what could they do? The bleeding had stopped by the time we got to hospital, but I knew he had died even before they scanned me. I felt it. They offered me a Caesarean section, but I didn’t want him taken from me like that. I wanted to give birth to him.’