My Sister's Bones(42)

I jump down on to the stony remains of my mother’s flower bed, and my bare feet sink into the soil. For some reason as I stand up and cross the lawn I think of Chris and that last trip to Venice. We were walking around a farmers’ market when one of the stallholders started to yell. His grill had caught fire. People were screaming and running away but Chris went straight towards the fire and helped put it out. He always knew what to do. It was one of the things I loved about him. His resilience and strength. If only he were here now, he would find a way to help that child. He would know what to do. But he’s not here and all I have is my own gut instinct. I have to trust it, I think to myself as I head back to the house. I have to be brave.





19


Herne Bay Police Station

33.5 hours detained

Shaw nods her head as she walks back into the room. We’ve had a ten-minute break during which I was offered a cup of coffee and a sandwich filled with orange stringy cheese. I sipped the coffee and left the sandwich untouched and now it lies congealing on the table beside me as Shaw sits down and opens up her briefcase. There’s something different about her. Almost sad. She takes out a sheet of paper and places it on her lap. I see the words ‘University College Hospital’ and I know what is coming before she even opens her mouth.

‘Can we talk about the baby, Kate?’

The room contracts as I sit looking at the last moments of my child; one solitary paragraph on a piece of paper.

‘What do you want to know?’ I reply. ‘It seems you have it all there in front of you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It must have been devastating.’

Her voice is sorely lacking in empathy and this puts me on guard.

‘Why? It happens every day, doesn’t it?’

Shaw doesn’t respond. She thinks I’m heartless.

I take my bag and root around for the photo. This woman thinks I’m some kind of psychopath. I have to prove to her that I have feelings, that I’m a human being; someone who cares. I take my wallet and pull out a small, square piece of paper.

‘Here,’ I say as I hand it to her. ‘My first scan.’

Shaw takes it and I watch as she squints at the fuzzy image.

‘It was a boy, apparently,’ I say, taking the picture from her hand and placing it back into my bag.

‘I know this is incredibly difficult, Kate,’ she says, reciting the words like an automaton. ‘But it will help so much if you can just share a little of what happened. I understand you miscarried the day of the altercation with Rachel Hadley.’

‘Yes, I’d just left the office when it . . .’

I pause, remembering the lift plunging downwards and the blood staining my trousers. One more thing I couldn’t keep alive.

‘Did anyone go with you to the hospital?’

‘No.’

‘So you went through the whole thing alone?’

I nod my head. The sharp hospital smell still lingers in my nostrils as I try to recall the events of that evening. But it’s all a blur. I was in so much pain I could only make out faint outlines; the doctors and nurses were just bluish wisps on the edges of my consciousness.

‘How far into the pregnancy were you?’

‘Four months,’ I tell her. ‘But according to the doctor the baby had died two weeks earlier.’

The guilt is still as raw as it was when it happened. Even knowing that he had been dead throughout it all and had nothing to do with Chris or the bottle of wine, the fact that I failed my baby gnaws away at me. I should have been strong for him and I wasn’t.

‘You spent the night in the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

I look down at my feet as I recall the tiny room with a curtain separating me from the corridor. I was handed a cardboard potty and told to pee into that rather than the toilet so they could monitor the stages of the miscarriage. It was undignified in the extreme but I was so full of painkillers I barely registered when the nurse came in to take the potty away.

I birthed the dead baby sometime around dawn. I remember the sun was just coming up through the wire railings of the hospital car park. I was standing by the window when I felt something shift. I ran to the bathroom with the potty and watched as this tiny, grey creature slipped out. My child.

I blink my tears away as Shaw plunges into her next question.

‘The baby’s father?’ she asks. ‘Did he come to see you?’

‘No,’ I reply. ‘He didn’t know I was pregnant.’

‘Why didn’t he know?’

‘I didn’t have the chance to tell him,’ I reply. ‘I’d planned on telling him that day, over lunch, but before I could he told me the relationship was over.’

I see him in my mind’s eye, sitting at the table waiting for me. His hands were clasped in front of him and he was staring fixedly at a picture on the wall: a Chagall print of a naked woman, hanging like a piece of fruit from a heart-shaped tree.

‘That must have been hard,’ says Shaw.

‘Yes, it was,’ I reply. ‘But then part of me had been expecting it for years.’

‘Why is that?’

‘He was married.’

I remember walking over to his table. He looked up at me and his face was so sad. He kissed me clumsily. His lips missed my mouth and caught my cheek instead. I went to kiss him but he turned his cheek. I just thought he was tired. I never would have imagined . . .