‘Of course I’m upset, because all of this is completely ridiculous. I haven’t done anything wrong and you’re acting as though you don’t believe me.’
‘It is not our job to sit here and judge anyone, Gemma, we are just trying to establish what happened so that we keep your daughter safe, do you understand?’
‘But she is safe! Or she was, until you lot barged in,’ I yelled, completely losing my temper.
DC Miles held my gaze triumphantly, and then closed her notebook.
‘Okay, I think we have what we need for now. Before I finish this interview, is there anything else you would like to say?’
‘No,’ I said, unrepentant. They were trying to break me down into some gibbering wreck and I was not going to be broken.
‘Thank you everyone. The interview is now terminated and I’m turning off the tape. The time is 20.16 on November second.’
As she turned it off, my defiance turned itself off too.
Awkward and sullied, I stood up with the officers.
I wanted to switch the machine back on and have a rerun so that I could do it better next time. I couldn’t face going back to that cell again. I needed so badly to go home, to see Peter’s loving face, to feel his arms around me, to hear him tell me it’s all going to be okay.
* * *
As I was led back to my cell, a piercing screech rang through the corridor. It was getting louder and louder. Two cell doors down, three officers held down a young woman as she yelled and struggled and kicked out. She was wearing the same fashionable black lace-up boots that I had seen placed just where she writhed now.
‘Fuck you, you fucking motherfuckers! I haven’t done fucking nothing and you’re locking me up in that fucking hole again, get your hands off me you fucking perverts!’ she screamed, her face red and contorted, her bobbed brown hair sticking to her face, which was wet with tears or sweat or both.
‘What you looking at you stuck-up bitch? Eh? Wanna cop a feel too, you fucking lesbian whore!’
‘She’s in weekly, that one. Can’t stay off the booze,’ DC Bennett said, looking on sympathetically. ‘Sometimes I think she wants to end up in here.’
I didn’t know how to respond, but as I looked on at the woman, half-fascinated, half-terrified, I recognised her anger. In my restrained and educated way, I had done the same in that interview room. I had lost my cool and destroyed any hope I might have had of getting DC Miles on my side. Everything I had been striving to achieve – the perfect children, the perfect family, the perfect home, the carefully calculated work-life balance – might as well have been smashed to pieces, because in that one vital second under pressure, I couldn’t hold my temper, just like this raving banshee couldn’t right in front of my eyes.
DC Bennett slammed the cell door.
My desire to rant and rave and kick was growing, billowing. It took Herculean effort to hold it down. It growled and boiled in my body until the tension to hold it there was unmanageable, as though the smallest provocation could unleash it. I was almost grateful to be locked away in the cell.
The woman’s wailing echoed through the metal door. I wondered what had prodded at her anger that night, what lay deeper, what had built up over the years to come bursting out in such a fury on the officers that night. The sound of her terrible anger became mine; this anger that I felt now, that I was trying so hard to control, to suffocate, to keep away from a naked flame. I felt the surge of a self-pitying, tearful frustration, like a lifetime of repressed rage, rise up through my body and I slapped the wall with both hands as if I was trying to shove it over. The shockwaves shot up my arm and stung my palms and I did it again, and again, until my hands were hot and red and painful. It wasn’t like me, to have done that. I wondered at the police officers watching me on their screens, imagining them laughing at me, this middle-class woman, with her tailored navy trouser-suit, slapping at the wall, but it made me feel better to let it go, to feel the pent up tension in my body ebb away.
I sat slumped on the floor, impotent, numb. However much I might have pounded on and scraped at these walls, they would remain intact, while my skin would be torn to shreds.
Tucked under my armpits, my hands throbbed. A flash of Rosie’s contorted face mid-tantrum came into my mind. I couldn’t summon the teenage photograph of Kaarina Doubek, whose face had housed all my fears about Rosie’s ill-temper. I saw only my own anger reflected back at me.
In spite of Philippa Letwin’s repeated reassurance that I would be released on bail shortly, I couldn’t help feeling that I would never be set free.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Mira’s eyes snapped open in the dark. The crunch of car tyres pulling up on the cul-de-sac had woken her from a brief, uncomfortable sleep.
She felt damp. The hardness of the slimy, mossy slats radiated through her hip and her shoulder.
She blinked away the drowsiness, trying to place where she was. On seeing the view of the back of the Bradleys’ house, her heart jumped. She was curled up on the floor of the Bradleys’ gazebo at the bottom of their garden. Then she heard the mechanical slide of the gates open and the crunch of footsteps on the Bradleys’ gravel. Frantically, she scrambled up and crawled on her hands and knees back through the hedge.
The light was on in the potting shed.
After Rosie had left, Mira had not gone back to bed. Instead, she had found the hole in the hedge where the Bradley children crawled to retrieve their balls or skitter across to Victoria and Jim and whatshername’s at number two and she had clambered through it to the Bradleys’ garden to check that Rosie was not curled up on the doorstep. Mira wanted to keep a vigilant eye on the house, to be on the look-out for Rosie, making sure Rosie knew she always had someone to turn to, that she would never have to sleep on a doorstep as Mira had done.
She put the light out in the potting shed. The yeasty smell of Rosie’s spilt drink was still present. Mira’s heart melted at the thought of the little girl’s nervy disposition. She wanted to be her guardian angel, just as she had wanted to be for her own baby. The drips of condensation on the window where the kettle had boiled shimmered in the moonlight. The rivulets morphed into steam on a shop window, somewhere in her past. She felt the damp heat of the bustling chippy on a cold winter’s evening. The waft of vinegar and salt filled her head, taking her back.
She had counted out five one-pound notes into her mother’s hand.
‘What d’you want?’
‘Cod and chips and a deep-fried Mars.’
‘You sure that’s a good idea, chubby buttons?’ her mother had said, and she went to poke at Mira’s middle. Mira leapt back, knowing her mother’s fingers would press through the flesh to hit the taut drum of her pregnant stomach.
‘All right, chill out, love, I was only kidding,’ her mother responded, looking hurt more than angry.
‘I’ve got period pains, that’s all,’ Mira said.
They had sat on the bench as they waited for their order. Her mother recommended she take some of her heavy-duty painkillers when they got home. This had been a kindness Mira wasn’t used to. When Deidre wasn’t there, she let her guard down a little. It must have been exhausting for her mother to keep up the stonewalling routine, most probably long after her anger had died away. Mira guessed that her mother had known all along that Craig was the real villain of the piece. But it was almost worse when her mother was nice to her.
Mira moved her hand to a small smooth bald patch on the back of her skull, underneath all her hair where she had twisted and tugged. She enjoyed the snag of pain when a few strands came free into her fingers.