I decide to drop Henry at school myself today, and after I watch him running across the playground and into the classroom, I walk round to the office, where gimlet-faced Mrs Harper sits as usual behind her glass screen. Her assistant Miss Wallis is nervously putting documents away in a huge filing cabinet at the other end of the office. I wait for the obligatory minute or two while Mrs Harper taps away furiously at her keyboard, attending to something infinitely more important than me. Eventually she swivels to face me.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m Louise, Henry Parker’s mum.’ I have to say this every time I come in here. I don’t know whether she genuinely doesn’t recognise me, or if she’s punishing me for something: not being a regular at the school gates, or having a different surname to my child. ‘I just wanted to double check the safety procedures around pickup.’
‘Yes?’ If she was wearing a lorgnette she would be lowering it. The temperature around us drops a few degrees; I have done the unthinkable and questioned the school’s competence.
‘It’s just, I have reason to be especially concerned at the moment, so I wanted to make sure that no one else apart from me can pick him up without my permission.’
‘But you don’t usually collect him yourself, do you?’ she asks, her tone hinting at her disdain for me. It’s all right for you, I think, with your nice little job in a school, working school hours only.
‘No, he goes to after-school club,’ I say, forcing my voice to remain neutral. ‘But obviously that’s a regular arrangement that the school knows about. I’m talking about other people picking him up.’
I catch a glint in her eye at the hint of a scandal. ‘Do you mean his father?’ She lowers her voice. ‘Perhaps I should make an appointment for you to see the head…’ She turns to her screen, clicking on the appointments diary.
‘No! His father is fine.’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘I just mean anyone else.’
She sighs. ‘Mrs Parker, I can assure you that we will not let —’ she pauses for an infinitesimal amount of time, just long enough for me to register that she can’t instantly call to mind which child belongs to me ‘— we will not let Henry go home with anyone other than a parent, childminder or usual carer without express permission from you.’
Williams, I think as I always do, my name is Williams; it’s not the day for that particular battle though. I have no choice but to accept what she is saying, but I walk away with a heavy heart. I wish I could keep Henry with me all the time. When he’s away from me the anxiety is a physical pain that runs me through like a sword.
However, there’s no avoiding today’s appointment in Norwich. I spent so long keeping away from this part of the world, building a new life for myself in London, and now it won’t leave me alone, exerting a magnetic pull that I am powerless to resist.
Somewhere inside the glass-fronted building in front of me, DI Reynolds is waiting for me. What is she thinking? Is she wondering about me at all, or am I merely one of the many witnesses that she has to interview, the latest on a long list? Perhaps her training precludes her thinking like that. Maybe she has been drilled to always assume every witness knows something that could prove vital to the case. Or worse, maybe she has sensed something in me, a certain hesitation or guardedness. Is she going to grill me today, to come at me in some completely unexpected way? I have to be ready. I must be so utterly sure in my own mind of my story that she will not be able to trip me up.
I am shown to the interview room by a young woman in uniform who chats inanely to me as we walk through the corridors. We cover a lot of very British topics – the weather, traffic jams, the merits or otherwise of one-way systems. I can’t work out if this is a calculated way of relaxing me before I get pounced on, or if she’s just really boring.
Under the harsh lights, I perch on the edge of the moulded plastic chair, turning my cardboard cup around and around on the beige tabletop. I look around surreptitiously, trying to work out if there’s a secret two-way mirror hidden somewhere like on TV, but I guess the CCTV camera on the wall is doing that job.
DI Reynolds is talking on her phone when she opens the door, but she finishes the conversation quickly and smiles at me. She is bigger than I remember, although everything is amplified in this tiny room. I notice a raised mole on her cheek and red patches on her eyelids.
‘Louise. How are you doing?’
‘OK, thanks.’ ‘Very well’ would be pushing it.
‘This is DS Stebbings.’ She gestures at the suited man who has followed her in, a tall man in his fifties who sits down next to her, opposite me. I recognise him as the man who was with Reynolds the day I saw them driving away with Pete outside the offices of Foster and Lyme.
Reynolds plunges straight in with her questions; there’s no chitchat about the weather with her. We go over the ground we’ve already covered, but this time I’m prepared for the questions about Pete. Yes, I spoke to him earlier in the evening. He seemed perfectly fine, in a good mood. I saw them argue, but then I don’t think I saw him again after that; he must have left. She’s clearly pursuing this as a line of enquiry, but when she realises she’s not getting anywhere, she gives up and moves on.
‘OK. We have witnesses who mentioned that Sophie spent a lot of time talking to Sam Parker and Matt Lewis. Would you agree with that?’
‘Yes. They were good friends of Sophie’s at school.’
‘More than friends, do you think? With either of them?’
‘Matt had a crush on her back then but I don’t know for sure if anything ever happened between them. They used to flirt, you know, but I think that was all it was, on her side anyway.’
‘And Sam?’
‘No,’ I say instantly. ‘Definitely not Sam.’
Too quick. Reynolds looks alert, interested. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘I don’t know if you already know this, but Sam and I were married. We split up two years ago.’
‘So you were… childhood sweethearts?’
‘No.’ What a repulsive phrase. She seems to think so too, the words foreign on her tongue. ‘I didn’t see him for years after we left school. We met again by chance in London ten years later, in ninety-nine.’
‘So what makes you so sure that Sophie never had a relationship with him?’
‘Well, I…’ What is it that makes me so certain? Because she knew I liked him? Do I honestly believe that would have stopped her? Because Sam never mentioned it? Maybe he wouldn’t have done; after all, it would have been ancient history by the time we got together.
My silence clearly speaks volumes to Reynolds and she moves on.
‘And what about in the years since school – had Sophie kept in touch with Matt or Sam, or anyone else at the reunion?’
‘I think she was in touch with some people – she told me when I saw her before the reunion that she still saw Claire Barnes, and Matt Lewis. Maybe some others too.’
‘Was there any hint that she had had any sort of sexual relationship with Matt as an adult?’
‘No, she didn’t mention anything like that. Just that she saw him from time to time.’
‘And Sam? Had she seen him since your school days?’
‘He didn’t see her while he and I were together, as far as I know. But I wouldn’t know about the last two years. He… he’s married again, with a baby. We only speak because we have to now, about our son.’ Bringing Henry into the conversation draws the knot in my chest a little tighter. Our son, who might be in danger because of me. Part of me wants to break down, to tell Reynolds everything, beg her to protect my son. But I try to rationalise it. How much danger can Henry be in? I won’t be letting him out of my sight again after yesterday. He’s safe at school. Sam’s got him tonight, so I texted him this morning to ask if he had plans to take Henry out anywhere tonight, and he said he would be picking him up from after-school club and going straight home. He’s four years old, so he’s never alone. I can protect him.
Reynolds is still looking at me enquiringly.
‘Things didn’t end all that well,’ I say. ‘Between me and Sam.’
‘How so?’
‘He left me for someone else.’ Even now I hate saying those words; hate the bald, hard fact of them. I wasn’t enough for him, even though I gave him everything I had. ‘Look, this hasn’t got anything to do with what happened to Sophie.’
She makes a face that says she’ll be the judge of that.
‘OK. So how did Sophie seem, the night of the reunion? Is there anything that gives you pause, in the light of what happened subsequently?’
‘She was fine. Happy, apart from the argument with Pete, although I have no idea what that was about. But to be honest, I wouldn’t know whether she was her normal self or not. Like I said, I hadn’t seen her for over twenty-five years, except for that one night a few weeks ago.’
‘And you – you weren’t in touch with anyone from school? Apart from Sam?’
‘No. They weren’t exactly the happiest days of my life.’
‘What about Sam? You said he wasn’t in contact with Sophie. What about other old school friends? Was he in touch with anyone?’
‘He went out occasionally with Matt Lewis, but not often. I’m afraid I wasn’t that interested. Happiest days and all that.’
I am prevaricating. It’s less that I wasn’t interested, more that I wanted nothing to do with Sharne Bay or our school days, and couldn’t understand why Sam didn’t want to cut the ties as well. On the nights he met up with Matt, I’d pretend to be asleep when he came in, mutter at him to tell me in the morning, and then when morning came find an excuse to be out of the house early.
‘And what about the other people at the reunion? We’re talking to the bar staff and the cleaners, of course, but there was a teacher there too, Mr Jenkins?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘I believe he was a teacher there when you were at school?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Surely they don’t suspect him?
‘Did you speak to him at all, or see him at any point in the evening?’
‘Mr Jenkins? Only when I arrived. He was on the door. Look, has someone said something?’
‘What do you mean?’ Her face is inscrutable.
‘Well… when we were at school there were all these rumours about him. That he was… you know… a pervert. Liked sneaking around, watching the girls get changed, that kind of thing.’
‘I see.’ She’s not giving anything anyway.
‘But I’ve no idea if there was any truth to them. He certainly never did anything to me, and I never heard anything first-hand. It was always someone who knew someone. You know what teenagers can be like, how things get around. I wouldn’t want to suggest that he… you know…’
‘Of course.’
Reynolds looks intently at me, her hands face down on the table.
‘I appreciate that you hadn’t seen Sophie for many years, and that you didn’t know much about her adult life, and of course we are pursuing various lines of enquiry,’ she says. ‘But we can’t ignore the fact that she was killed at her school reunion, an occasion loaded with significance at the best of times. Was there anything that happened in your school days, anything at all, that you think may have a bearing here?’
I think of Maria’s face, glaring defiantly at me from my computer; of Sophie silhouetted against coloured glass, gathering herself for what was to come; of Tim at the top of the school drive, gesticulating at a figure in a black coat; of a golden necklace, twisted around a sixteen-year-old girl’s finger a lifetime ago.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Nothing at all.’