I Know What I Saw

I shake my head. He opens his mouth as if to speak but thinks better of it. ‘I checked. Or, at least, I got someone to look it up at the library. You don’t work there.’

He looks at me, his face red with anger. He makes a move towards me and then stops and holds up his palms.

‘How long has it been?’ I say. He considers the question and then sits back down with a sigh.

‘Three years and eight months,’ he says, deflated. Any fight he may have had in him has gone. ‘The pressure to make decent numbers year on year … But I don’t need to tell you about all that, do I?’ He pauses, as if on the edge of tears. ‘And you never came back. It was just there, burning a hole in my roof for twenty-five years.’

‘Seb …’

‘What would you have done?’ he asks, desperation cracking his voice.

‘Not that,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t have stolen.’

He stares at the carpet. I wait for him to finish accounting for himself.

‘It was just a few thousand at first. Enough to feed the mortgage, pay the bills. And then the months went by and nobody was hiring after the banking crisis.’ He shakes his head. ‘It made sense to pay the mortgage off. It made sense, Xander, you must see that. The money was just up there, getting devalued when the dollar fell. And some of it had even begun to rot.’

I sit down again.

‘Go on, ask what you want to ask me,’ he says.

‘No. I know it wasn’t you who killed her.’

‘Only just though, eh?’ he says.

‘You lied to me.’

‘I never lied to you,’ he says bleakly.

I let out an incredulous laugh.

‘I was embarrassed,’ he continued. ‘After all these years you came back and we were …’

‘What?’

‘The same,’ he says. ‘I thought – I thought I was better than you. But I wasn’t.’

The words ring and lie suspended in the air for some moments, and I have to look away. When I turn back I see dust motes colliding with invisible forces, molecules directing them this way and that in the dying light. Brownian motion, I think, as we look at one another in silence. Tossed around by invisible forces. I’m shocked by how much I failed to see. ‘Seb,’ I say then. ‘You should have—’

Then the telephone rings and the sound of it lunges between us, impatient. Seb waits for it to ring out but when it doesn’t he answers reluctantly. A few seconds later he offers me the handset.

‘It’s for you.’

‘Hello?’

‘Xander? Good. It’s me, Jan. Have you got five minutes? There’s news.’

Immediately my heart begins to quicken. ‘Go on.’

‘It turns out they have the record sleeve, after all. They tested it for prints … there’s a partial print which probably belongs to the deceased.’ She pauses. ‘Then there are four dabs which the forensic scientist says are a good-to-strong match for yours.’

I feel the breath stall in my chest as the words filter through.

‘They survived? All this time?’

‘Not exactly. They did a routine set of lifts at the time.’

My prints. I hadn’t expected that. I was expecting his prints. The murderer’s.

‘Were there others?’

‘Some partials,’ she says, ‘but not good enough for a comparison.’

There is an answer to this lurking somewhere in the eaves of my brain. Jan carries on explaining about partial prints but I’m trying to focus on finding this reply. How could my prints be on there? Suddenly, there is a glimmer of something and when I tease it out the answer is there. ‘Wait. My prints. Yes. Of course, there were my prints. The record. I bought the record for her.’

The line is dead for a second.

‘Okay,’ she says slowly.

‘The letter,’ I say. ‘It’s in there: thank you for the gift, she wrote. That was it – the record was the gift I’d bought her.’

‘That could be any gift—’

‘No, she says … You know how much I love Jack. She said it. Jack is the record – Jack T. And when I play it. It was the record,’ I say.

There is a pause. ‘We’d need to prove she was talking about that specific record.’

It is so obvious. But she sounds uncertain.

‘All we have for certain is your prints on the record,’ she says. ‘That’s the evidence.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not on the record – you said sleeve. What about the record itself? I saw him throw the record. It will have his fingerprints on it, the killer’s. It has to. That’s all records ever do, attract fingerprints.’

‘Unfortunately, they have some of the record. But they’ve lost some of it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They only have a piece of it and that doesn’t have any prints on it.’

‘What?’ I say, my hopes crashing under the weight of the information. ‘How could they just lose it?’

‘It happens,’ she says. ‘Missing exhibits. Sometimes they don’t even seize everything. They didn’t think it was a murder, remember. It’s a minor miracle they had any of it.’

I consider this and exhale.

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘I’ve told Nasreen about all this, and I’ll tell her what you said about the record. Needed to confirm your explanation for the prints. Okay. Better go,’ she says, and hangs up.

I replace the handset and sit back down.

‘Everything okay?’ Seb says, concern written on his face.

I shake my head. ‘Not really.’

45 Friday