‘I see you’re upset,’ MacCullagh says. ‘I know this is upsetting. All we want is the truth.’
‘I don’t know the truth.’
‘Is Elissa Mirzoyan alive?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was Elissa being held in the’ – she looks at her notes – ‘the Memory Wood? Was she inside that building when it burned?’
‘Please. I don’t know. I really don’t.’
‘Kyle, did you have anything to do with that fire?’
A sob bursts loose from my throat. I sound like a wild animal caught in one of my brother’s traps.
MacCullagh repeats her question. When I don’t answer, she says, ‘I’ve already told you about the fingerprints and the DNA, and the tests we’re doing on the items we found in your bedroom. Let me explain something else. The reason you’re wearing a paper suit is because your clothes are being analysed too. But I can tell you, even without waiting for the report, that they smelled very strongly of petrol. So if there’s a way you can explain that, it’s best you do it now. Because … because if you don’t, Kyle, it won’t look good, and then I might not be able to help you. Can you tell me why your clothes smelled of petrol?’
I wipe the tears from my face.
Poor Gretel.
Like me, she didn’t always tell the truth. But at least she always had good reason.
‘I … I spilt some,’ I say. ‘Knocked some over.’
‘Where was this?’
‘The Gingerbread House.’
‘The what?’
It’s an effort to speak. My throat’s so dry it hurts. ‘The Gingerbread House. Inside the Memory Wood.’
‘You mean the cottage that burned down?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kyle, I’m going to ask you again. Was Elissa Mirzoyan inside that building when it burned?’
I feel Mama’s eyes on me. I can’t meet them.
Right now, this very minute, there are people out there – people like Elissa’s mum, Elissa’s grandparents – who are hurting. They’re hurting very badly indeed. They’ve been separated from someone they care deeply about, someone they love very much, and they desperately want to know what’s happened to her. I’m hoping you can help them, Kyle. I’m hoping that you and me, working together, can find a way to ease their suffering.
‘Kyle,’ the detective says, more forcefully now. ‘Were you holding Elissa Mirzoyan inside that cellar?’
Looking up, meeting her gaze, I decide I don’t want this woman as my wife. I bow my head again, but I can’t shut her out completely.
‘I didn’t call her that,’ I whisper.
IV
For half a minute, nobody speaks. Finally, MacCullagh asks, ‘What did you call her?’
‘Gretel. I called her Gretel. And she called me Hansel.’
‘Hansel and Gretel, the Gingerbread House. Like the fairy tale.’
‘It was her idea. She said we could be brother and sister.’
I rub my nose, dismayed to see a smear of pale snot across my hand. Mama raised me to have good manners. I dread to think what this detective must think of me. ‘I never had a sister,’ I tell her. ‘If I ever did, I’d want one just like her.’
MacCullagh leans forward. ‘How did the fairy tale end?’
‘Not like the book.’
‘Was Gretel in the cellar when the Gingerbread House burned?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Kyle, I realize this is difficult. But you’ve taken a big step. You’ve told us you know Elissa – I mean Gretel – and that helps a lot. What we need now is the rest, and I think you’re brave enough to share it. We owe it to her mum – an explanation as to what happened.’
I close my eyes. I can feel that wall inside my head beginning to crumble. Suddenly, it’s all I can do to brace myself against it. ‘I’m not lying,’ I say. ‘At the end … I really don’t know what I did.’
MacCullagh takes a breath, slowly lets it out. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Let’s try something different. Let’s go back in time, you and I.’
Opening my eyes, I ask, ‘You mean like in a time machine?’
‘Exactly like a time machine.’
‘H. G. Wells wrote a story called The Time Machine, but it was fiction. Real time machines don’t exist.’
‘This’ll be a time machine inside our minds.’
I tilt my head, trying to see if she’s teasing, but she looks deadly serious.
‘I want you to get into the time machine,’ she says, ‘and take me back to the first time you met Gretel.’
‘The very first time?’
MacCullagh nods.
When I look past her, I’m shocked – and dismayed – to see that Mama has left the room.
Mairéad
I
She questions Kyle North for another two hours, but despite hearing a lot about his interactions with Elissa Mirzoyan – or Gretel, as he calls her – she’s no closer to a confession. Whenever she asks how Elissa ended up in the cellar, he claims ignorance or talks in undecipherable riddles.
Sometimes, as she watches him, she thinks he’s laughing at her, that he’s deep in some mind game only he understands. He denies any knowledge of the YouTube recordings, even though the equipment used to make them was found in his bedroom. The laptop will doubtless yield further footage, yet he maintains ignorance of that, too.
He’s clearly suffering from some kind of psychosis, which means if she doesn’t request a full assessment soon she risks compromising the case. Where there’s an immediate risk to life, she can bypass the normal protocols and continue to question him, but she no longer believes there is a risk to life – everything points to Elissa having been inside that cellar when the fire was set.
As she spars with Kyle, Mairéad feels the shadow of her grief falling over her. Towards the end of the interview, it’s an effort to sit up straight in her chair. But she’s committed herself to this. No way she can bow out now.
After updating her senior officers in advance of the next media briefing, Mairéad instructs DS Halley to drive her back to Meunierfields. Under a darkening sky, in which helicopters buzz like angry wasps, the estate crawls with grim-faced SOCOs.
Changing into a pair of borrowed boots, she finds Paul Deacon, the crime-scene manager she spoke to on the phone.
‘Christ alive,’ Deacon says when he sees her. ‘You look like death warmed up.’ He leads her through the Memory Wood to a clearing untouched by fire. Three mobile lighting towers illuminate it. At the base of a giant yew, easily five hundred years old, a geodesic tent stands beside a huge mound of earth. White-suited officers move around inside.
From the tree’s upper bows hang the sodden shreds of what look like paper lanterns. Had Deacon not pointed them out, Mairéad doubts she’d have spotted them. A SOCO, balanced on the upper rung of an aluminium ladder secured to the trunk, is placing something into an evidence bag. Across the clearing, Mairéad notices a second tent beside a matching pile of excavated earth.