I Know What I Saw

Grace now comes directly in view – just a shimmer. I stop and try to look at her but she is too insubstantial. But I see her smile, her eyes hollow. You, she points at me. It’s you she seems to want to tell me. I smile back at her. I nod.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘Me.’ And she becomes air again.

I walk, aiming for the Horniman grounds once more. That’s why she has appeared. She is calling me there so that we can talk this out. Me and her. She is calling me so that we can untangle it together, the thing that has been tugging at my brain.

Seb lied to me. I’m less sure about his motivation than I was last night, mixed as it was with his warmth and whisky. Was he just trying to confirm my suspicions? I don’t think so any longer.

I walk through the main entrance since it is daytime. There are no walkers or visitors at this hour, though. Only a few pigeons, grubbing for food, and me. I make my way to a sheltered spot I sometimes sleep in. My feet are fleet. The air carries me.

Ariel didn’t break in, did he? Grace says this but not with her mouth. It is all with a look.

He didn’t.

Seb lied.

There is the hollow formed from dead branches and twigs, still unmolested. I made this a few weeks ago as a shelter, before all of this. Before Squire, when the world was clearer. There is slime and rotting mulch now under its awning, but I am alone here.

I shut my eyes and catch Grace’s hand as she holds it out to me. She leads me somewhere deep inside a memory. The flames kick out at the wall. They glow and dance and crackle to the sound of a hissing turntable. I glance out from behind the edge of the sofa. He is standing over her, his legs steepled on either side. Can I see his face?

There are thoughts that are running through my head which feel as if they are chasing me or leading me somewhere. But they are there, with me.

I can’t go back there to Seb yet.

I have the QC to see on Monday. It’s Saturday now. Until then I can wait here.

Untangling. Collecting. Connecting.

If all the while, unravelling.

43 Monday

Nasreen’s chambers are exactly as I had pictured them. There are clerks in a clerks’ room busy on telephones and computer screens. The waiting room that I’m shown to has prints of hand-drawn caricatures of barristers on the walls. Through the glass door I see what must be the barristers, rushing past in smart suits. Then after a few minutes of waiting, a teenager in polyester comes to take us through to the conference room.

‘Can I get you some tea or coffee, Miss?’ he says to Jan as he leads us through a panelled corridor.

‘A coffee would be great, Mike,’ she says. ‘Xander?’

‘I’m fine with water, thanks.’

The words dry in my mouth. I am nervous here. This place is secluded like a Cambridge college, serious in a way that Cambridge wasn’t.

He shows us into a handsome room where a woman is waiting with a restrained smile. I glance round. More wood panelling. Sash windows open out on to a cobbled courtyard, making the place feel like a parody.

‘Mr Shute, I’m Nasreen. Do have a seat,’ she says to me, before turning to Jan. ‘How lovely to see you again, Janine.’

Jan smiles and sits next to me at the large glass table. Nasreen taps her laptop shut and leans forward to me.

‘Mr Shute. Let’s get to it, shall we? I’ve been through what the prosecution has served in terms of papers. There’s good and bad news from what I can see.’

I find myself nodding even as I am dangling by a thread in her fingers.

‘The good news is that there is no forensic evidence to link you to the murder whatsoever. By which I mean there is none anywhere near the body or even in the room as far as one can tell. Although you can be sure that they will be continuing to investigate and so you shouldn’t be surprised if we are served with evidence last minute.’

‘Okay,’ I say, and I look across at Jan who seems relaxed now, in the hands of the expert.

‘There are, however, your admissions in your interviews. I am bound to say, Mr Shute, if you had listened to advice in your last interview, they wouldn’t even have that. I mean, I think we could have excluded the earlier admissions made without a caution having been administered. But we are where we are.’

‘Where is that?’ I ask.

‘That depends on you, Mr Shute. If you stand by your admissions in the interviews, we have you at the scene of the murder as it is happening, with no good explanation for being there. Not to mention the emptying of a significant sum of cash from a bank account, weeks before the death.’ She says this last part with a raised eyebrow as if expecting me to protest.

‘What do you mean, stand by my interviews? I can’t unsay what I’ve said.’