Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner (read book txt) 📗

placing him in these clothes, is still not real to me, even now.

I have tried to put Rachel out of my mind, to focus on us, on the baby. I always thought I’d be delighted if she just disappeared. But whenever I think about the night she left – the night I can’t remember – I’m filled with that sick feeling. My thoughts keep looping back to her, to the spare room and our last encounter.

The more I try to remember the end of the party, the further away it seems to drift. I try to think if there is any chance I could have drunk something, accidentally, like Daniel said. I haven’t touched alcohol for nine months – I’m sure it wouldn’t take much. But enough to make me forget how I got to bed?

Over the past few days, I keep finding myself on the stripped bed in the spare room, looking around as if the room might hold the answers somewhere. I sit there for a long time sometimes, staring up at the cornices on the ceiling, the blind cord, the shelves on the far wall, the baby stuff piled up in the corner. Anything that might jog my memory into life. The air in the room feels cold, quiet, thick. She is gone. I got what I wanted. But if everything is all right now, like Daniel says, why does it feel like it isn’t?

The other night, Daniel found me in there. I’m not sure how long I had been sitting on the bed. It had got dark, but all the lights were off. I hadn’t noticed I was sitting in the dark. When he asked what I was doing, I wasn’t sure what to say.

The laundry is a displacement activity, probably. But it seems to work better than most things. The soft hiss of the iron, the clouds of steam that come and go in front of my eyes, the smoothing of creases, all of it is hypnotic somehow.

Daniel says he is going out for a run. Running seems to be a new obsession, like mine is cleaning.

‘Don’t you want to watch this?’

I have been encouraging Daniel to watch episodes of One Born Every Minute with me. I think it will be useful for him. Every time one of the babies is born, I find I have tears all down my face. Daniel doesn’t seem to enjoy it as much as I do, however.

‘You carry on. I think I’ve seen this one.’

‘No, you haven’t, it’s one of the new –’

‘I won’t be long.’

He is still out when the knock on the door comes. I place the iron upright on the board, brush my hands on my jeans. Steam clouds the windows, little drops of condensation gather in the corners.

Two blurry shapes in the glass of the door.

Only when I open the door do I see the police badges. The man speaks first. He is tall, red-haired, gangly, young-looking, his jacket sleeves just slightly too short.

‘Good evening. I’m DS Mitre and this is DC Robbin.’

DC Robbin nods, her eyes travelling from my face, to my bump, and then up again. She is thick-limbed, powerful-looking. Her skin the colour of coffee, her eyebrows plucked into two elegant arches.

‘We’re from Greenwich CID,’ DS Mitre continues. ‘We’re looking for Rachel Wells. We understand she was staying here?’

KATIE

You get to know every detail of a court building when you are on jury watch. The grubby windowsills, the scuffed green plastic chairs. The lift buttons, the smeared mirrors in the toilets. You learn the graffiti on the backs of the cubicle doors by heart.

Hours stretch into days. You stare out of the windows, watch the traffic crawl by. You sip hot drinks from the machine in the lobby, get to know which combination of buttons to press for the closest thing to a coffee. You field phone calls from the desk, always asking when. You come to dread these calls, save up fragments of information for them, pretend insights. Which lawyer seemed upbeat, or downcast. Whether the jury had come back with questions and what these might signify, whether there has yet been a majority direction. What the jury mix is – how many young, how many old, how many women, men, white, black. And what it all might mean. We reporters exaggerate these small insights, try to encourage the impression that our being here, while we type up background pieces, is worth it. But the truth is, no one knows. No one knows anything at all.

In the end, it takes over a week. The boys are guilty. In the public gallery, the families in their printed T-shirts gasp. A girlfriend’s head sinks into her hands. A pretty sister screams no, no. The judge cautions. The boys look stunned. One drops his head into his lap, the other holds his hands up in front of him, stares at his barrister, as if demanding an answer. One set of lawyers turn in their chairs with smiling handshakes for their juniors, nods for their client. The others sigh, put on spectacles, straighten their spines, brace themselves for questions about appeals and challenges that could stretch into years.

Either side of me, the other reporters who have stood for the verdict fumble with phones under the cover of the press bench, eager to be the first to alert their news desks. At the back of the court, DCI Carter raises his gaze to the ceiling, closes his eyes, and lets out a long, deep exhale. And behind the curtain, the victim bends at the waist, and sobs.

The force’s leader, Chief Constable Bannon, is waiting outside already, his statement all prepared, the cameras trained on him, resplendent in his smartly pressed uniform. Hair cut short at the sides, he is holding his police hat under his arm, in what seems to me a somewhat theatrical touch. A high-profile rape conviction – after a string of controversies about such cases being abandoned – is a