Lasting Damage

Chapter 3

Saturday 17 July 2010



‘Why did you want to speak to Simon Waterhouse?’ the detective called Sam asks. His surname is something long and unusual beginning with a K – he spelled it for me when he introduced himself. I didn’t take it in, and didn’t feel I could ask again. He’s tall, good-looking, with black hair and a dark complexion. He’s wearing a black suit and a white shirt with thin lilac stitched stripes, like perforated lines. No tie. I can’t stop looking at his Adam’s apple. It looks sharp enough to break skin. I imagine it slicing through his neck, an arc of blood spurting out. I shake my head to banish the morbid fantasy.

Does he want me to tell him again? ‘I saw a woman lying face down—’

‘You misunderstand me,’ he interrupts, smiling to show that he doesn’t mean to be rude. ‘I meant why Simon Waterhouse in particular?’

Kit is in the kitchen making tea for us all. I’m glad. I’d find it harder to answer the question with him listening. If I didn’t feel so horrible, this might be funny, like a weird sort of pantomime: The Policeman Who Came to Tea. It’s only half past eight; we ought to be offering him breakfast. It’s good of him to come so early. Maybe Kit will bring some croissants in with the drinks. If he doesn’t, I won’t offer. I can’t think about anything apart from the dead woman. Who is she? Does anybody know or care that she’s been murdered, apart from me?

‘I’ve been seeing a homeopath for the past six months. I’ve got a couple of minor health problems, nothing serious.’ Was there any need to tell him that? I stop short of adding that the problems relate to my emotional health, and that my homeopath is also a counsellor. My desire to evade the truth makes me angry – with myself, Kit, Sam K, everyone. There’s nothing shameful about needing to talk to somebody.

Then why are you ashamed?

‘Alice – that’s my homeopath – she suggested I talk to Simon Waterhouse. She said . . .’ Don’t say it. You’ll prejudice him against you.

‘Go on.’ Sam K is doing his very best to look kind and unthreatening.

I decide to reward his efforts with an honest answer. ‘She said he was like no other policeman. She said he’d believe the unbelievable, if it was true. And it is true. I saw a dead woman in that room. I don’t know why it . . . why she wasn’t there any more by the time Kit went and looked. I can’t explain it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation. There must be one.’

Sam K nods. His face is unreadable. Maybe he makes a point of encouraging mad people. If he thinks I’m mad, I wish he’d say it straight out: You’re a nutter, Mrs Bowskill. I told him to call me Connie, but I don’t think he wants to. Since I said it, he hasn’t called me anything.

‘Where is Simon?’ I ask. When I rang his mobile last night, his recorded voice told me that he was unavailable – not for how long, or why – and gave a number to ring in an emergency: Sam K’s number, as it turned out.

‘He’s on his honeymoon.’

‘Oh.’ He didn’t tell me he was getting married. No reason why he would, I suppose. ‘When will he be back?’

‘He’s gone for a fortnight.’

‘I’m sorry I rang you at 2 a.m.,’ I say. ‘I should have waited till the morning, but . . . Kit had gone back to sleep, and I couldn’t just do nothing. I had to tell someone what I’d seen.’

A fortnight. Of course – that’s how long honeymoons are. Mine and Kit’s was even longer: three weeks in Sri Lanka. I remember Mum asking if the third week was ‘strictly necessary’. Kit told her politely but firmly that it was. He’d made all the arrangements and didn’t appreciate her picking holes in the plan. The hotels he chose were so beautiful, I could hardly believe they were real and not something out of a dream. We stayed a week in each. Kit dubbed the last one ‘the Strictly Necessary Hotel’.

Simon Waterhouse is entitled to his honeymoon, just as Kit is entitled to his sleep. Just as Sam K is entitled to deal with my concerns quickly and early, so that he can enjoy the rest of his Saturday. It can’t be the case that everyone I come into contact with lets me down; it must be something I’m doing wrong.

‘He didn’t mention your name in his voicemail message – only the phone number,’ I say. ‘I thought it might be some kind of out-of-hours service, like doctors have.’

‘Don’t worry about it. Really. It made a nice change to get an emergency call that wasn’t from Simon’s mother.’

‘Is she all right?’ I ask. I sense it’s expected of me.

‘That depends on your point of view.’ Sam K smiles. ‘She’s phoned me twice since Simon set off yesterday, crying and saying she needs to speak to him. He warned her that he and Charlie weren’t going to be taking their mobiles, but I don’t think she believed him. And now she doesn’t believe me when I say I don’t know where he is, which I don’t.’

I wonder if the Charlie sharing Simon Waterhouse’s honeymoon is a man or a woman. Not that it makes any difference to anything.

Kit comes in with the tea things and a plate of chocolate biscuits on a wooden tray. ‘Help yourself,’ he says to Sam K. ‘Where are we up to?’ He wants progress, solutions. He wants to hear that this expert has cured his wife of her lunacy during the ten minutes that he was in the kitchen.

Sam K straightens up. ‘I was waiting for you, and then I was going to explain . . .’ He turns from Kit to me. ‘I’m happy to help as much as I can, and I can put you in touch with the right person if you decide to take this further, but . . . it’s not something I can deal with directly. Simon Waterhouse couldn’t deal with it either, even if he wasn’t on his honeymoon, and even if . . .’ He runs out of words, bites his lip.

Even if it weren’t the most far-fetched story I’ve ever heard, and bound to be a load of rubbish. That’s what he stopped himself from saying.

‘If there’s a woman lying injured or dead in a house in Cambridge, then it’s Cambridgeshire Police you need to speak to,’ he says.

‘She wasn’t injured,’ I tell him. ‘She was dead. That amount of blood can’t come out of a person and them not be dead. And I’m willing to speak to whoever I need to – tell me a name and where I can find them, and I will.’

Did Kit sigh, or did I imagine it?

‘All right.’ Having poured himself a cup of tea, Sam K gets out a notebook and a pen. ‘Why don’t we go over a few details? The house in question is 11 Bentley Grove, correct?’

‘11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. CB2 9AW.’ You see, Kit? I even know the postcode by heart.

‘Tell me exactly what happened, Connie. In your own words.’

Who else’s am I likely to use? ‘I was looking on a property website, Roundthehouses.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Late. Quarter past one.’

‘Do you mind if I ask why so late?’

‘Sometimes I have difficulty sleeping.’

A sneer contorts Kit’s face for a second; only I notice its fleeting presence. He’s thinking that, if it’s true, it’s my own fault for giving in to my paranoia: I’ve chosen to torment myself with imaginary problems. He is sane and normal, therefore he sleeps well.

How can I know him well enough to read his thoughts, and, at the same time, fear that I don’t know him at all? If I looked at an X-ray of his personality, would I see only the bits I know are there – his conviction that tea tastes better from a teapot and if you put the milk into the cup first, his ambition and perfectionism, his surreal sense of humour – or would there be an unfamiliar black mass at the centre, malignant and terrifying?

‘Why a property website, and why Cambridge?’ Sam K asks me. ‘Are you thinking of moving there?’

‘Definitely not,’ says Kit with feeling. ‘We’ve only just put the finishing touches to this place, six years after buying it. I want to spend at least that long enjoying it. I’ve told Connie: if we have a baby in the next six years, it’ll have to bed down in a filing cabinet drawer.’ He grins and reaches for a biscuit. ‘I didn’t do all that work only to sell up and let someone else get the benefit. Plus we run a business that’s based here, and Connie got a bit carried away with the headed stationery, so we can’t move until we’ve written at least another four thousand letters.’

I know what’s going to happen before it happens: Sam K is going to ask about Nulli. Kit will answer at length; it’s impossible to explain our work quickly, and my husband is nothing if not a lover of detail. I will have to wait to talk about the dead woman.

Connie got a bit carried away.

Did he say that deliberately, to plant the idea in Sam K’s mind that I’m an easily-carried-away sort of person? Someone who orders six times more headed notepaper than she needs might also hallucinate a dead body lying in a pool of blood.

I listen as Kit describes our work. For the past three years, Nulli’s twenty-odd full-time staff have been working for the London Allied Capital banking group. The US government is in the process of prosecuting the group, which, like many UK banks, has a long history of breaking American rules about dealing with sponsors of terrorism, and unwittingly allowing blacklisted people and companies to carry out wire-transfer transactions in the US in dollars. London Allied Capital is currently bending over backwards to right the wrong, ingratiate itself with OFAC, the American office of foreign asset control, and minimise the eventual damage, which will almost certainly be a multi-million-dollar fine. Nulli was taken on to build data-filtering systems that will enable the bank to unearth all the questionable transactions that lie hidden in its history, so that it can come clean to the US Department of Justice.

Like everyone Kit tells, Sam K looks impressed and confused in equal parts. ‘So do you have a base in London, then?’ he asks. ‘Or do you commute?’

‘Connie’s based here, I’m half and half,’ says Kit. ‘I rent a flat in Limehouse – a box with a bed in it, basically. As far as I’m concerned, I only have one home, and that’s Melrose Cottage.’ He glances at me as he says this. Does he expect a round of applause?

‘I can see that a small flat in London would have a job competing with this place.’ Sam K looks around our lounge. ‘It’s got bags of character.’ He turns to study the framed print on the wall behind him – a photograph of King’s College Chapel, with a laughing girl sitting on the steps. Does he know he’s looking at a picture of Cambridge? If he does, he says nothing.

The print was a present from Kit and I’ve always hated it. On the mount, at the bottom, someone has written ‘4/100’. ‘That’s not a very good mark,’ I said when Kit first gave it to me. ‘Four per cent.’

He laughed. ‘It’s the fourth in a run of a hundred prints, you fool. There are only a hundred of these in the world. Isn’t it beautiful?’

‘I thought you didn’t like mass-produced things,’ I said, determinedly ungrateful.

He was hurt. ‘The handwritten “4/100” makes it unique. That’s why prints are numbered.’ He sighed. ‘You don’t like it, do you?’

I realised how selfish I was being and pretended that I did.

‘My wife calls houses like this “camera-ready”,’ Sam K says. ‘The minute I stepped over your threshold, I felt inferior.’

‘You should see the insides of our cars,’ Kit tells him. ‘Or rather, our two dustbin-spillover areas on wheels. I’ve thought about leaving them on the pavement next to the wheelie bin on collection day, doors open – maybe the council’d take pity on us.’

I stand up. Blood rushes to my head and the room tilts, blurs. I feel as if the different parts of my body are detaching from one another, breaking off and floating away. My head fills with a woolly throbbing. This keeps happening. My GP has no idea what the cause might be. I’ve had blood tests, scans, everything. Alice, my homeopath, thinks it’s a physical manifestation of emotional distress.

It takes a few seconds for the dizziness to pass. ‘You might as well go,’ I say to Sam K, as soon as I’m able to speak. ‘You obviously don’t believe me, so why should we both waste our time?’

He looks at me thoughtfully. ‘What makes you think I don’t believe you?’

‘I might be delusional but I’m not stupid,’ I snap at him. ‘You’re sitting there eating biscuits, chatting about wheelie bins and interior décor . . .’

‘It helps me to find out a little about you and Kit.’ He’s unruffled by my outburst. ‘I want to know who you are as well as what you saw.’

The holistic approach. Alice would be on his side.

‘I saw nothing.’ Kit shrugs.

‘That’s not true,’ I tell him. ‘You didn’t see nothing – you saw a lounge with no woman’s body in it. That’s not nothing.’

‘Why a property website, Connie?’ Sam K asks again. ‘Why Cambridge?’

‘A few years ago we thought about moving there,’ I say, unable to look him in the eye. ‘We decided not to, but . . . sometimes I still think about it, and . . . I don’t know, it was a spur of the moment thing – there was no particular reason behind it. I look up all sorts of strange things on the internet when I’m restless and can’t sleep.’

‘So, last night, you logged onto Roundthehouses and . . . what? Talk me through it, step by step.’

‘I searched for properties for sale in Cambridge, saw 11 Bentley Grove, called up the details . . .’

‘Did you look at any other houses?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? What made you pick 11 Bentley Grove?’

‘I don’t know. It was third on the list that came up. I liked the look of it, so I clicked on it.’ I sit down again. ‘First I looked at the photographs of the rooms, and then I saw there was a virtual tour, so I thought I might as well have a look at that too.’

Kit reaches over and squeezes my hand.

‘How much was it on for?’ Sam K asks.

Why does he want to know that? ‘1.2 million.’

‘Would that be affordable for you?’

‘No. Not even close,’ I say.

‘So you have no plans to move to Cambridge, and 11 Bentley Grove would be out of reach price-wise, but you were still interested enough to take the virtual tour, even after you’d looked at the photographs?’

‘You must know what it’s like.’ I try not to sound defensive. ‘You find yourself clicking on one thing after another. Not for any good reason, just . . .’

‘She was wilfing,’ Kit tells Sam K. ‘Wilf as in “What was I Looking For?” – aimless web-surfing. I do it all the time, when I should be working.’ He’s covering for me. Does he expect me to be grateful for his support? It’s his fault that I’ve had to make up a story. I’m not the liar here.

‘All right,’ says Sam K. ‘So you took the virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove.’

‘The kitchen came up first. The picture kept turning – it made my eyes feel tired, so I closed them, and then when I opened them I saw all this . . . red. I realised I was looking at the lounge, and there was a woman’s body—’

‘How did you know it was the lounge?’ Sam K cuts me off.

I don’t mind the interruption. It calms me, pulls me out of the horror that’s still so vivid in my mind, and back into the present. ‘I’d seen it in one of the photographs – it was the same room.’ Haven’t I just told him I looked at the photographs first? Is he trying to catch me out?

‘But there was no woman’s body and no blood in the photograph, correct?’

I nod.

‘Let’s leave aside the blood and the body for a second. In every other respect, the virtual tour’s lounge was the same as the lounge in the photograph, yes?’

‘Yes. I’m almost sure. I mean, I’m as sure as I can be.’

‘Describe it.’

‘What’s the point?’ I ask, frustrated. ‘You can log onto Roundthehouses and see it for yourself. Why don’t you ask me to describe the woman?’

‘I know this is hard for you, Connie, but you have to trust that anything I ask, it’s for a good reason.’

‘You want me to describe the lounge?’ I feel as if I’m at a kids’ party, playing a stupid game.

‘Please.’

‘White walls, beige carpet. A fireplace at the centre of one wall, tiles around it. I couldn’t see the tiles in detail, but I think they had some kind of flower pattern on them. They were too old-fashioned for the room.’ I realise this only as I hear myself say it, and feel relieved. Kit might choose tiles like that for our house, which was built in 1750, but never for a modern house like 11 Bentley Grove that can’t be more than ten years old. He believes new buildings should be wholeheartedly contemporary, inside and out.

Therefore 11 Bentley Grove is nothing to do with him.

‘Go on,’ says Sam K.

‘Alcoves on either side of the chimney breast. A silver L-shaped sofa with red embroidery on it, a chair with funny wooden arms, a coffee table with a glass top and flowers in a sort of horizontal display case under the glass – blue and red flowers.’ To match the tiles. There was something else, something I can’t call to mind. What was it? What else did I see, while the room was slowly circling? ‘Oh, and a map above the fireplace – a framed map.’ That wasn’t it, but I might as well mention it. What else? Should I tell Sam K there was something else but I don’t know what? Is there any point?

‘A map of?’ he asks.

‘I couldn’t see – it was too small in the picture. In the top left-hand corner there were some shields – about ten maybe.’

‘Shields?’

‘Like upside-down gravestones.’

‘You mean crests?’ says Kit. ‘Like when a family has a crest?’

‘Yes.’ That’s it. I couldn’t think of the word. ‘Most of them were colourful and patterned, but one was empty – just an outline.’

Was the empty crest the missing detail? I could pretend it was, but I’d be kidding myself. My mind took something else from that room, something it won’t put back.

‘Anything else?’

‘A dead woman in a pool of blood,’ I say, hating the belligerence in my voice. Why am I so angry? Because you’re powerless, Alice would say. We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless.

At last, I hear the words I’ve been waiting for. ‘Describe the woman,’ Sam K says.





Words begin to pour out of me, an uncontrollable flow. ‘When I saw her, and all that blood, when I realised what I was looking at, I looked down at myself – that was the first thing I did. I panicked. For a second I thought I was looking at a picture of myself – I looked down to check I wasn’t bleeding. I didn’t understand it afterwards – why would I do that? She was lying on her front – I couldn’t see her face. She was small, petite, my size and build. She had dark hair, same colour as mine, straight like mine. It was . . . messy, sort of fanned out, as if she’d fallen and . . .’ I shudder, hoping I don’t need to spell it out: dead women can’t make adjustments to their hair.

‘I couldn’t see her face, and I imagined – just for a second, until I got my bearings – that she was me, that I was the one lying there. Stop writing,’ I hear myself say. Too loud. ‘Can’t you just listen, and make notes afterwards?’

Sam K puts down his notebook and pen.

‘I don’t want to build it up into more than it was,’ I say. ‘I knew she wasn’t me, of course I did, but . . . it was as if my perception played a trick on me. It must have been the shock. She was lying in the most blood I’ve ever seen. It was like a big red rug under her. At first I thought it couldn’t be blood because there was so much of it, it covered about a third of the room, but then I thought . . . Well, you must know. You must have seen dead people lying in their own blood, people who’ve bled to death.’

‘Jesus, Con,’ Kit mutters.

I ignore him. ‘How much blood is there, normally?’

Sam K clears his throat. ‘What you’re describing doesn’t sound implausible, in a bleeding-to-death scenario, though I’ve never seen it first-hand. What size is the lounge?’

‘Twenty foot ten by eleven foot three,’ I tell him.

He looks surprised. ‘That’s very exact.’

‘It’s on the floorplan.’

‘On the Roundthehouses website?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know the dimensions of all the rooms?’

‘No. Only the lounge.’

‘Tell him what you did last night, once I’d gone back to bed,’ says Kit.

‘First I rang Simon Waterhouse, then, when I couldn’t get him, I rang you,’ I tell Sam K. ‘After talking to you, I went back to my laptop and . . . looked at 11 Bentley Grove again. I studied every photograph, I studied the floorplan. I watched the virtual tour over and over.’ Yes, that’s right. I hereby declare myself obsessive and insane.

‘For six hours she did that, until I woke up and dragged her away from the computer,’ says Kit quietly.

‘I kept closing down the internet, then opening it up again. A few times I turned off the laptop, unplugged it, then plugged it in again and rebooted it. I . . . I was exhausted and not thinking straight, and . . . I kind of got the idea into my head that if I persisted, I’d see it again – the woman’s body.’ Am I being too honest? So my behaviour last night was out of control – so what? Does that make me an unreliable witness? Do the police only listen to people who take mugs of Ovaltine to bed at ten o’clock and spend the rest of the night sensibly asleep in their flannel pyjamas? ‘I’ve never seen a dead body before. A murdered body, that then disappears. I was in shock. I probably still am.’

‘Why do you say “murdered”?’ Sam K asks.

‘It’s hard to imagine how she could end up like that by accident. I suppose she might have plunged a knife into her stomach, laid herself face down on the floor and waited to die, but it seems unlikely. It’s not the most obvious way to commit suicide.’

‘Did you see a stomach wound?’

‘No, but the blood looked thickest around her middle. It was almost black. I suppose I just assumed . . .’ A deep tarry blackness, thinning to red. A small window, rectangles of light on the dark surface . . .

‘Connie?’ Kit’s face is swimming in front of mine. ‘Are you okay?’

‘No. No, not really. I saw the window . . .’

‘Don’t try to talk until the dizziness passes.’

‘. . . in the blood.’

‘What does she mean?’ Sam K asks.

‘No idea. Con, put your head between your knees and breathe.’

‘I’m fine.’ I push him away. ‘I’m fine now. If nothing else I’ve said has convinced you both, this will,’ I say. ‘I saw the lounge window reflected on the surface of the blood. As the room turned, the blood turned, and so did the little window. That proves I didn’t imagine it! No one would imagine such a stupid, pedantic detail. I must have seen it. It must have been real.’

‘For Christ’s sake.’ Kit covers his face with his hands.

‘And her dress – why would I have imagined a dress like that? It was pale green and lilac, and had a pattern that was like lots of hourglass shapes going down her body in vertical lines, curved lines going in and out, in and out.’ I try to demonstrate with my hands.

Sam K nods. ‘Was she wearing shoes, or tights? Any jewellery that you noticed?’

‘No tights. Her legs were bare. I don’t think she was wearing shoes either. She had a wedding ring on. Her arms were up, over her head. I remember looking at her fingers and . . . Yes. Definitely a wedding ring.’

And something else, something my mind’s eye refuses to bring into focus. The more I try and fail to identify it, the more aware I am of its hidden presence, like a dark shape that’s slipped off the edge and out of sight.

‘What happened when you saw the body on your laptop?’ Sam K asks. ‘What did you do, after you’d examined yourself to check you weren’t bleeding?’

‘I woke Kit and made him go and look.’

‘When I went in, there was a rotating kitchen on the screen,’ Kit says. ‘Then the lounge came on, and there was no woman’s body in it, and no blood. I told Connie, and she came in to look.’

‘The body had gone,’ I say.

‘I didn’t reload the tour,’ says Kit. ‘It was still running when I walked into the room, the same one Connie had started, on a repeating loop. I’m not saying changes can’t be made to a virtual tour of a house – of course they can – but they wouldn’t affect a tour already playing. It’s just not possible—’

‘Of course it’s possible,’ I cut him off. ‘You’re telling me someone can’t arrange a virtual tour so that once in every hundred or thousand times, a different picture of the lounge comes up?’ Come on, Kit. Aren’t you proud of your pupil? It’s thanks to you that I no longer underestimate what’s technically possible. A computer, instructed by the right person, can do almost anything.

‘Well?’ I demand. ‘Isn’t it possible?’

Grudgingly, Kit concedes that it is. ‘Please tell me you’re not going to spend the rest of the day sitting through the tour a thousand times,’ he says. ‘Please.’

‘Can I have a look at the laptop?’ Sam K asks.

While Kit takes him upstairs, I pace up and down, picturing 11 Bentley Grove’s lounge, trying to uncover the missing detail. The woman disappeared. The blood disappeared. And something else . . .

I’m so wrapped up in my thoughts that I don’t notice Kit has returned, and I jump when he says, ‘I know everyone hates estate agents, but you’ve taken it to a whole new level. What you haven’t done is considered the why. Why would some evil genius estate agent, sitting in his office in Cambridge, want to include an elusive dead woman complete with own pool of blood on the virtual tour of a house he’s trying to sell? Is it, what, a daring new marketing technique? Maybe you should see which agent the house is on with, ring up and ask them.’

‘No,’ I say, feeling calmer as he loses his cool. ‘It’s the police who ought to do that.’ I won’t let him turn this into something to be laughed at.

‘You say she was murdered. Most murderers want to cover up what they’ve done, not broadcast it via one of the country’s most popular websites.’

‘I’m aware of that, Kit. I also know what I saw.’ I need to ask him something, but every question I ask is another opportunity for him to lie. ‘Why didn’t you tell him?’

‘Tell him?’

‘Sam. That I was obsessed with 11 Bentley Grove long before last night. The whole story.’

Kit looks caught out. ‘Why didn’t you tell him? I assumed you didn’t want him to know, because . . .’ He stops himself, looks away.

‘Because?’

‘You know damn well why! If I’d told him what’s been going on since January, he wouldn’t have given your dead woman the time of day – he’d have assumed the vanishing body was a figment of your imagination, just like the rest of it’s a figment of your imagination!’

‘Would he? Mightn’t he have assumed the opposite – that something must be going on, something involving 11 Bentley Grove and you?’ I wasn’t willing to take the risk; perhaps Kit wasn’t either.

His eyes fill with tears. ‘I can’t take much more of this, Con. I keep telling you, and you don’t listen.’ He falls into a chair, rubs his temples with his fingers. He looks so much older than he did six months ago. His face has new lines; there’s more grey in his hair; his eyes are duller. Have I done that to him? The alternatives are too horrible to contemplate: either he’s the kind, funny, loyal, honourable man I fell in love with and I’m slowly but surely destroying him, or he’s a stranger who has been wearing a disguise for months, maybe years – a stranger who will eventually destroy me.

‘I love you, Con,’ he says in a hollow voice. I start to cry. His love for me is his most effective weapon. ‘I always will, even if you succeed in driving me out of this house and out of your life. That’s why I didn’t tell’ – he gestures towards upstairs – ‘the whole story. If you want the police to take you seriously, if you want them to go to 11 Bentley Grove and check there’s no dead woman lying on the carpet, then, however crazy it is, that’s what I want too. I want you to feel better.’

‘I know,’ I say, numb inside. I don’t know what I know any more.

‘Do you have any idea how hard it is, living under a cloud of suspicion when you’ve done nothing wrong? You think I don’t know what you’re thinking? “Kit’s a computer geek. Maybe he can make a body appear and disappear in a matter of seconds. Maybe he killed the body himself.” ’

‘I don’t think that!’ I sob. Because I didn’t let myself go that far. ‘I hate being suspicious of you, I hate it. If 11 Bentley Grove was anywhere but Cambridge . . .’

Sam K is back, standing in the doorway. How much has he overheard? ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he says. ‘I’m going to speak to Cambridge police myself. They’re more likely to pay attention if I make the initial contact.’

My heart jolts. ‘Did you . . . ?’ I point upwards, towards our office.

‘I didn’t see a body, no. Or any blood.’

‘But . . .’

‘The strong likelihood is that you were tired and had some kind of . . . transitory hallucination. What did you call it before? A trick of perception. But, at the same time, I don’t want to dismiss what you’ve told me, because . . .’ He sighs. ‘Because you rang Simon Waterhouse, not me. Simon’s the one you wanted. I can’t turn myself into him, but I can do the next best thing, do what I know he’d do: take you seriously.’

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘Don’t thank me – I’m only the stand-in.’ Sam K smiles. ‘You can thank Simon, the next time you see him.’

It’s only once he’s gone that it occurs to me what those words must mean: he knows I’ve met Simon before.



*



POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/20IG



CAVENDISH LODGE PRIMARY SCHOOL

BULLETIN NO. 586

Date: Monday 30th November 2009



Kittens at Cavendish Lodge!



We had an assembly with a difference on Wednesday in Class 1! Marcus’s cat Bess has had five kittens, and his mum and dad brought them all into school! We had a marvellous time playing with these cute furry visitors, and a very interesting talk afterwards about pets and how to care for them, so huge thanks to Marcus and his family for allowing us to have this super treat! Below are two lovely write-ups from Class 1 children . . .



yesterday afternoon Marcus kittens came into school. They looked so cute they were black with white patches. I got to hold one of them they were lovely and furry but they had very sarp pink claws. One of them runed of beind the piona. I herd one of them purring. They had little blue eyes. It was a lovely afternoon.

by Harry Bradshaw



yesterday Marcus and his mummy brought some kittens to our asembaly we were talking about how to look after pets they were so lovely some were black with wight patches. The mummy cat Bess was not there. I got to hold four of them they felt soft just like fethers.

by Tilly Gilpatrick