A Line of Blood (33 page)

‘Dad! Dad!’

‘Max.’ No light through the curtains. ‘Max, are you OK?’

‘I’m fine, Dad.’

I switched on the light. ‘What time is it?’

‘Half past two.’ He was dressed. Red t-shirt, dark blue jeans. ‘Dad, can you find the neighbour’s key?’

‘Max, what’s going on?’

‘Can you, though?’

‘No, Max, get back to bed.’

Max left the bedroom. I turned off the light. I wondered if Millicent was awake, lying on a bed in a police holding cell, thinking about the fact that she wasn’t being released. I had spoken to the lawyer she had chosen from the list, a young woman who sounded far too delicate to be a criminal defence solicitor.

Millicent’s solicitor had confirmed what the detective had told me, that the police would hold Millicent for another twelve hours. Surely they couldn’t do that, I had asked. Yes, she was afraid the police could extend Millicent’s custody, as long as the request was approved by an inspector. If it was of any comfort, she didn’t think they had very much on Millicent; she suspected they were simply trying to frighten her into a confession. She expected Millicent to be released without charge.

Sound of a footstep on a loose board. Someone downstairs.

I pulled on a pair of pants and a t-shirt. Max’s room was empty. As I stood on the landing I heard the back door open. I went back into Max’s bedroom, pulled the curtain away from the window, looked down.

There in the garden was Max. He looked up at me, then turned and walked deliberately towards the love seat by the wall.

No!

I pulled on a pair of trousers, slipped on a pair of trainers and headed downstairs.

As I reached the kitchen I saw Max disappear over the wall into the neighbour’s garden.

Please God, no!

I looked around. There was no light in any of the houses except ours. What was he up to? What the hell was he up to?

As soon as I stepped on to the love seat I saw him, standing at the neighbour’s back door.

‘Max, come back here.’ My voice was quiet, but he must have heard me. ‘Max.’ Still he paid me no attention. I jumped up on to the wall, and down into the neighbour’s garden. I listened. Distant traffic. The slam of a car door. An engine starting.

Max had the neighbour’s back door open now, had pulled it as far back as the hinges would let it go. Then he crouched down, seemed to be waiting for something. I saw a faint beam of light fall on to the varnished floor. Car headlights in the street, I thought. The door to the neighbour’s front room must be open. I could hear the change of gear, see the beam from the headlights pass across the floor.

Panic like a hand across my throat.
If someone sees us now …

‘Max,’ I said, ‘close the door.’ But he stayed crouched where he was, looking into the house, listening. What was he doing? What was he waiting for?

I went to him and stood behind him for a while, looking in. I could see nothing.

‘What is this, Max?’

‘Shh, Dad, wait.’

‘We’re going home, Max.’

But Max simply shook his head.

‘Max,’ I said. ‘Max.’
Don’t let him take charge.

At the sound of a car engine in the street Max tensed. As the light from the car swung through the room the edges of the furniture lit up, eerily familiar. That better, cleaner version of our kitchen, the lines sharper and straighter somehow, the paintwork immaculate, every gap in the floor filled.

The light intensified, and Max crouched lower, his head almost level with the floor.

‘Max,’ I said, ‘Max, what are you looking at?’

‘You’re too high up, Dad,’ he said, as if speaking to a cretin. ‘You’re going to have to wait for the next one.’

‘For the next car?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What am I looking for, Max?’

‘You have to see it, Dad. But you have to get down.’ I looked around. I was fairly certain no one was watching. Somewhere nearby I could hear a helicopter; somewhere, a siren. In the street beyond a couple was arguing, voices raised. The woman’s voice chided; the man’s pleaded. On the main road a dustcart collected refuse from the chickenshops: paper and card, bones and fat. A night like any other night in our part of town.

The voices grew distant. A car engine approached.

Max looked up at me. ‘Dad, you’re too high up.’

‘What am I looking for?’

‘You’ll see.’

I crouched down beside him, stared across the floor. And then I saw it. There in the light of the car headlights was a layer of dust as thin as the bloom on a new plum. And as the light swept across the floor I saw what Max had seen.

Two sets of footprints. One led through the door and into the front room, and the other led from the front room towards the back door.

‘Did you see it, Dad?’

‘Yes, Max, yes, I saw it.’

I didn’t need to see it a second time, but I waited with Max anyway, afraid perhaps that what I had seen was a trick, the product of fatigue and of fear. And the next passing car confirmed it. Two sets of footprints. The same women’s shoes. The strange, hour-glass shape of them. Wedged soles, I guessed. How could Millicent have been so stupid?

We drank milk and ate biscuits in our own kitchen, me at the table, Max on the worktop.

‘Dad, were those the shoes that Mum has?’

I looked at Max. I didn’t want to have this discussion.

‘I don’t know. And how did you open the door, Max?’

He picked something from the ticket pocket of his trousers. ‘Catch.’

A slick metallic parabola. I fumbled the catch, and something fell to the floor near the foot of my chair. I reached down and picked up a key. It looked like one of Bryce’s. We sat there, the two of us, staring at it, and at each other.

‘The neighbour thought Mum lost it. I heard him shouting at her for a very long time. He said he wouldn’t give her another one, even though he did. He was really shouting. When do you think she went in there?’

‘Max,’ I said, ‘we don’t know that it was Mum.’

‘But when do you think it was?’

‘I don’t know.’

I did know, of course. It had happened the night I was in Edinburgh. That night Millicent had abandoned Max. It had to have happened then. I believed what she had told me: that she had sat in the park, in the rain; that the mud had ruined her shoes. That much was probably true. Although, I wondered now, had she actually told me she had sat in the rain in the middle of the park, or had she simply implied it? In any case, she was in the neighbour’s house before her shoes were covered in mud.

Those shoes were in our bin.

‘Are those footprints why the police arrested Mum?’

‘I don’t think they can be, Max.’

‘Why not?’

Because the police searched the bin and didn’t take the shoes.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But what do you
think
, Dad?’

‘Back to bed.’

‘But it’s almost time to get up.’

‘It’s four o’clock, Max.’

I was sure that the footprints weren’t the reason, that the police had been acting on a hunch. Unless there had been another forensic team in the house, shining lights at low angles across the floor, the police could not have seen Millicent’s footprints in daylight.

When Max was asleep I went to the front door. There was light in the sky now. I brought in the grey composite dustbin that stood jammed in front of the bay window, stood it in the middle of the floor in the front room.

I began to take out the bags one by one. I wasn’t completely sure what I was looking for. The smell of rot was over-powering, and it was all I could do to keep from retching. Serve us right for mixing food waste in with the recyclables. Everything was covered in a fine blue-green powder. I forced myself not to gag, tried to hold my breath.

Near the bottom of the bin I found what I was looking for: a tied Sainsbury’s bag through which I could feel Millicent’s shoes. I put the other bags carefully back into the bin, and wheeled it outside again.

I untied the bag. Inside were two more bags. In one were Millicent’s dress, bra and pants, the ones the rain had ruined on the night she abandoned Max. In the other were the shoes she had worn when she had returned to Bryce’s house. If she had been telling me the truth, if she had thrown her clothes away that night, she had gone to the trouble of removing them from the bin again before the police had searched the house. Otherwise, surely –
surely
– the police would have found these bags, and when they had found them they would have wanted to know what they were doing there. My wife had waited until after the police search to dispose of her evidence.

Then I found something else: inside one of the shoes was a small pair of soft leather gloves; inside one of the gloves was a small piece of heavy black adhesive tape, compressed into a ball.

Back in the white windowless room I waited, staring at the gunmetal door. The room was airless, and the dying fluorescent tube flicked uselessly on and off, waking some animal instinct in me for flight. There was nothing to look at, so I took out my phone. 11.06. No signal.

Millicent arrived, flanked by two officers I didn’t recognise. She was wearing the same clothes as yesterday; the tendons in her neck were drawn tight, and the corners of her mouth were dry and cracked.

‘Hey,’ she said.

She sat down, tried to smile, reached out for my hand.

I let her hold it for a moment, then drew away from her.

Your footprints in the neighbour’s house.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘everybody’s still really polite, but this was a long night. It got so I started wishing I had something I could confess to. Kind of like you said. But I think they started to realise I don’t.’

The door opened, and a uniformed officer showed in a young woman, pressed white blouse and knee-length twill skirt, tall and perilously thin. She introduced herself to me, her voice tremulous: Millicent’s lawyer. She was nervous behind her wire-rimmed glasses. I forget her name.

‘Millicent has been doing brilliantly, Alex.’ The young woman sat down beside Millicent, rubbed her hand encouragingly, looked expectantly at me. I said nothing, so she spoke again, as if to fill the silence. ‘We’ll have you out soon, Millicent. Won’t we, Alex? You can go home, have a little sleep, a nice long bath, and be fresh in time for your radio show this evening.’

What were you thinking?

I must have grimaced, because something stopped the lawyer in her tracks. Everyone in the room was looking at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You’re sorry?’ said Millicent. The young lawyer looked puzzled.

The abandonment of Max.

‘Millicent,’ I said, ‘I can’t do this.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m pressing charges.’

‘Alex, wait. What?’

The bottle arcing towards me through the air.

‘I can’t do this any more. I don’t know who you are.’ I looked at Millicent, pale in her crumpled shirt, the lines in her face etched deep by lack of sleep.

I leaned in to her, spoke softly so that only she could hear. ‘Your footprints. I found your footprints in the dust on the floor of Bryce’s house.’

‘Alex,’ said Millicent. ‘Alex, I’m going to need you to put our family first.’ She was trying to keep the pleading tone out of her voice, but to anyone who knew her, it was there.

I leaned in again. ‘I won’t tell the police what I found, Millicent. But I
would
like to know what they learn from you.’

I had given her the gloves as a present, years before, after a filming trip to Italy. Soft brown Florentine leather. They had cost a fortune; I had never seen her wearing them.

‘Alex,’ said the lawyer, ‘I wonder if we might go somewhere and talk this through.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s already done.’

‘Good man,’ the detective had said when I told her of my decision. ‘Give us a little time to have a look at what’s going on here. Break down the resistance. Maybe see if my colleagues can’t get a little confession out of her.’

Was it Max’s book? Was it the footprints in the dust? Was it the gloves in the dustbin? Or was it just the grinding, gut-wringing exhaustion that came with each new discovery?

‘They won’t threaten her, will they?’

‘Alex, mate,’ said June, ‘this is all about what emerges through dialogue. We all need to know the truth about your wife.’

‘And you’re not pressing charges against me? I’m no longer helping you with your enquiries?’

‘Our focus is now on your wife.’

Some wiser inner voice told me that pressing charges against my wife was like sleeping with her sister, that I was becoming a colder, crueller version of myself. But I pushed the thought away. I wanted to know the truth.

Although, as my wiser inner voice reasonably pointed out, if I was on a mission of truth then why wasn’t I telling the police about the footprints, or about Max’s book?

The police did not let Millicent ring the radio station. I found out later that her lawyer rang and spoke to someone who worked in sales. The lawyer did what she could, without explaining that Millicent was under arrest, said that her client could not appear on the radio that evening due to circumstances beyond her control. The radio station must have read between the lines.

An hour later the station manager returned the lawyer’s call, made it clear that the station would not be inviting Millicent back. The police had rung the manager, and the manager had told them Millicent had been there for no longer than forty minutes on the night of Bryce’s death. Millicent’s alibi had collapsed.

Still, said the lawyer, she didn’t think the police had much to work with; Millicent hadn’t directly lied to them.

I searched those parts of the house where I thought Millicent might have hidden something. I found nothing in her wardrobe, or in the backs of the cupboards in the kitchen, or under the sink. On top of our cigarette cupboard I found an old pack of Marlboro. I sniffed at it, felt the pull of nicotine, but threw it away, along with the rest of the rubbish.