‘Where were you yesterday afternoon?’ DI Brosnin asks me.
‘I was here.’
‘You didn’t go out at all?’
‘Well, I went out in the morning to pick up the cake for the party, but other than that, no.’
‘What about your husband?’
‘Why are you asking?’
‘Because we believe that Mr Carlisle, Logan, received his injuries sometime between two and four p.m. yesterday. His text messages show he was in contact with your daughter until she asked him to meet her at her flat. Just after those messages he spoke to his sister, Bella Carlisle. After that, no one spoke to or had any kind of interaction with Mr Carlisle, as far as we can tell, until he showed up on the seafront.
‘So, again, where was your husband yesterday afternoon?’
‘Here.’
‘The whole time?’
I know what she’s thinking and no, it’s not possible. Evan wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t. I’m more likely to than him. ‘He went out for a little bit.’
‘What time?’
‘I genuinely don’t know. It was in the afternoon at some point.’
‘How long was he out for?’
‘I don’t know.’
From the pocket of the other officer, whose name I didn’t properly register, a jolly musical ringtone trills into the space after my answer. He takes out his phone, looks at the screen and then decides to walk into the corridor to take the call.
DI Brosnin doesn’t even acknowledge him leaving. ‘And your son?’
‘What about him?’
‘Was he here all yesterday afternoon?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Did he go out at an unspecified time for an unspecified length of time, too?’
If it was silly to think that of Evan, it is completely and utterly ludicrous to think that about Conrad. He is the most gentle boy in the world. His build and height – like his dad’s – plays into every stereotype we’re bombarded with about black men, but, like the stereotype, it’s wrong. My boy would not harm anyone unless in self-defence.
I’m about to tell her how ridiculous she is being with these questions when the nameless officer returns. He leans in and whispers into DI Brosnin’s ear. By the time he’s finished speaking, she is grinning, her pink-coloured lips drawn back over her smoker’s teeth. She flips shut her notebook and stands.
‘Thank you for your help, Mrs Gillmare. I will need you, your husband and your son to come down to the station at some point for questioning, but for now, I need to speak to your daughter.’
She leads the way out of my living room and down the corridor to the kitchen, moving with the entitlement of someone who lives here or believes everything is theirs for the taking. Verity has been sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, staring at the tabletop, while a police officer stands by the sink watching her do nothing. She looks up when we arrive in the kitchen.
DI Brosnin doesn’t break stride as she marches towards my daughter. Verity is, thankfully, dressed. She is wearing jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a long, long cardigan that has seen better days. ‘Verity Gillmare, I am arresting you on suspicion of attempted murder,’ states the police officer.
‘What?’ I hear myself say, even though I was expecting this. I knew DI Brosnin was going to be leaving with one of us in chains, but I thought it would be me. I really thought 1988 would play itself out to the degree that I would be the one falsely accused. ‘Why are you arresting her?’
DI Brosnin finishes telling Verity she does not have to say anything but anything that she does say may be used in evidence against her. Then she turns to me. ‘Last night, after we found out her connection to the victim and her address, we conducted a search of Miss Gillmare’s flat and found a significant amount of blood as well as signs of a struggle. In two rooms.’
‘That could be blood from anywhere,’ I say.
‘Yes, Mrs Gillmare, we know that. There were also two different sets of fingerprints found in the blood. We don’t have the DNA tests back yet, but along with having what we believe to be the weapon used, I would be remiss if I didn’t arrest Miss Gillmare,’ she cuts in. Dismissing me, she spins on her heels and tells her officer, ‘Take her away.’
Again Verity avoids my gaze. Again she pretends I’m not there. She can’t face me, she can’t look me in the eye, not until she has handcuffs around her wrists and she is level with me as they lead her out. Then she looks, then she acknowledges what is going on by acknowledging me.
And in that acknowledgement, she looks so little. So young. She looks like a little girl lost who is being taken away at her most vulnerable moment.
When she looks at me like that, it’s then that I want to move, it’s then that I want to snatch her up and whisk her out of here because it is 1988 and she doesn’t belong here.
But by then, of course, there’s nothing I can do to save her.
poppy
Now
In a couple of days they’re going to move Logan from this room. Bella and I were here, briefly, last night. The room is slightly bigger than a two-person cell but it seems smaller because of all of the machines surrounding his bed. Some are large with a computer screen at the top, others are wide, blocky columns that have lights that bleep, others still are mounted on arms that hang down from above and can be readjusted at will. The room is filled with bleeps and beeps, sounds and noises that are, I’m assuming, good. Constant short sounds are a sign that everything is stable, everything is fine – Logan is doing all right as long as that sound is still punctuating the air at regular intervals. Alain is outside with Mum and Dad, who have been in on their own already. Two visitors at a time. They’re very strict about that. We’d tried to argue, to say that we are a family and need to go in together but the senior nurse, with a smile that could melt rock and eyes that could probably shoot laser beams, kept looking at us with an expression that basically said, ‘Tell me again and again how so very important you are that you get to break the rules’ until we got the message and stopped.
It was better for Mum and Dad to be on their own, anyway. They could talk to him, hush him, love him without feeling they had to temper anything for mine and Bella’s ears.
‘I didn’t mean for this to happen,’ I whisper to Bella. She has been avoiding me, ignoring me, pretending that I don’t exist since I walked into the kitchen at 34 Surry Hills Street. In the hours since I last saw her, she’s obviously gone away, done a load of thinking and decided this is all my fault. I’ve been thinking the same thing, of course I have. She is behaving – as are Mum and Dad – as though I don’t feel culpable; as though I have shrugged off all responsibility when it comes to Serena and her brood and the impact they have on my life.
‘I know you didn’t,’ she whispers back.
‘I didn’t know,’ I say. ‘I had no idea what he was doing. Who he was doing it with.’
‘That’s not what I’m angry about,’ she replies.
‘Well, what, then?’ I ask her. I stare at her across our brother’s hospital bed. ‘Why do you barely look at me and when you do, you look like you want to murder me?’