I Know What I Saw

I wipe my eyes with my sleeve. The woman from the house fights her way into my head, scarlet blotting her white shirt.

‘Ooh, careful there,’ she says. ‘You’ll pull away the stitches.’

‘Oh,’ I say, sitting up. ‘You stitched my eye?’ I feather my brow with the tips of my fingers.

‘Yes. Don’t worry. You might have some gaps here and there in your memory. But it’ll come good, don’t fret yourself.’ She smiles at me.

‘I should have done something though,’ I say.

She looks quizzically at me.

‘I let her die. I watched as she was murdered,’ I say.

She walks to the door. ‘I’ll just see if there’s a doctor about for that scan,’ she says and steps out.

I glance into the corridor. A different police officer from the one who had brought me is there. His face has the expression of a man used to killing time, scrolling through a smartphone with the expression of a child. He shifts in his bulky police gear as he sees me.

‘Done,’ I say, peering out.

‘Oh,’ he says, standing. ‘Good. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?’

I return a look that must be more alarmed than I’d intended.

‘Just for my notebook. Have to account for the time that’s all,’ he says, tapping his notebook.

There is a TV screen above me, playing some old show. A wisp of music snakes out. Ma belle amie. You were the beat of a drum and a symphony.

And that music, through some path I can’t untangle, takes me back to Grace and when I first saw her. It was Freshers’ week. Arriving at the college, I had the sensation of having finally sloughed off a battered old skin. There was no sadness in leaving Mum, Dad and Rory behind. In no time at all I was at a desk signing up for a student union pass. I had just put the pass into my pocket and turned around when I saw her. Just there, standing behind me.

‘Grace Mackintosh,’ she said. The person at the desk checked her name on a long printed sheet and frowned. She repeated her surname and he found it.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking over at me. ‘You’re in the same class.’

I froze. She smiled at me and all I could do was stare at her, a white-blonde sun. That was how it felt, as if I was being bathed in her radiance.

‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Grace. This is Nina.’ Nina was the darkness to Grace’s light. Sharpened slate, to Grace’s softened curve.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Xander. Xander Shute.’ And once again I couldn’t move.

‘Xander Shute?’

I look up.

‘I am arresting you on suspicion of assault occasioning grievous bodily harm. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

‘What?’ I say.

‘Sorry, sir, I am going to have to place you in handcuffs for your own protection.’

I recoil but his movements are so practised that my resistance is futile. The cuffs are heavier than I had imagined they would be. As they go on, the cold steel makes me shiver.

‘I am now going to search you. Do you have anything on you that could cause either of us any injury?’

‘What?’ I say again. ‘No.’

He gets down into a crouch and begins to pat around my legs moving slowly upwards.

He stops. He takes some surgical gloves from somewhere and puts them on. I do not know what he thinks he has found. My lighter?

‘Charlie,’ he says down the corridor to another police officer I have just noticed. ‘Get me a weapons tube. I’ve got something.’

My heart skips. The knife. The old drunk’s knife.

‘That’s not mine,’ I say, too quickly. ‘I found it in the park.’

A few minutes later the other officer returns with a Perspex tube. He deposits the knife into it. Evidence. How have they connected me to the woman’s murder so soon?

‘What’s going on?’ I say, but even as I say it I know something is wrong. Grievous bodily harm.

She must be alive. Still.

8 Wednesday

In the car on the way to the police station, I go over the events, scrabbling for details. A woman dead. Not dead though now, but alive. But harmed. Grievously. I try and think, late twenties, was she? Thirty? Dark hair, in curls. She was wearing a pink skirt, I remember now how it twisted around her waist. And that white shirt, the spilled wine, making maps on her body. A broken record. But the man who was there is more important right now. I’ll need to give a description of him with clear details so that when I deny it, it has the ring of truth – or if not truth, then plausibility. Plausibility: so much more important than simple, ordinary, mundane truth. Especially for a person like me.

I cast my mind back to him. It was difficult to judge from my vantage point on the floor, but I guess him to be about five feet eleven? Six feet? Trousers. He had trousers, of course, he had trousers but what were they like? Suit trousers I think, dark grey maybe. But what else? The details elude me and I screw my eyes hard in remembrance, but his face is lost to me.

‘You okay there, sir?’ the officer in the passenger seat says – the younger one.