As Michael sat she took out a notebook and a pen from her jacket, then joined him. “If I could just confirm your name?” she said, holding her pen above the page.
Michael laughed, a short expulsion of breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But not until I know what this is about.”
She looked up from her pad, her pen still poised. For a moment she said nothing, as if weighing his guilt. But then she smiled again. It was, Michael saw, the opening gambit of much of her conversation. A learnt trait, perhaps.
“It normally works better with me asking the questions,” she said, then paused as if allowing her official tone to catch up. “We’re conducting,” she continued, resting her pen, “house-to-house enquiries. In connection with an incident at your neighbour’s house yesterday.”
“An incident?” Michael said.
“Yes,” she replied, taking up her pen again and returning to her notebook. “The Nelsons. A death.”
Looking back over the years, Michael would come to see how his response at that moment, although formed in relation to his knowledge of what had happened, might still have replicated that of a neighbour genuinely hearing the news for the first time. It was something about hearing those words in the mouth of another. Of knowing for certain, through language not sight, that Lucy’s fall had happened, that the fact of it was alive in the world. It was history, already causing action and reaction.
His intake of breath was involuntary, as if he’d touched a scalding plate. DS Slater looked back up at him.
“Who?” he asked.
“The youngest daughter,” she said simply. “Lucy.”
Michael brought his hand to his mouth. “Oh my God,” he said, turning away. His words, his feelings were real. He didn’t understand how, but it was like learning it anew. Hearing it, not just knowing it.
“How?” he said, turning back to her.
She met his eye. He half expected her to say, You tell me, Mr. Turner, or to pull his fingerprint from the back of her notebook. But she did not. She licked her lips, and he saw she was anxious. Was she meant to be telling him so much? Perhaps, for all her familiarity, she was a novice. Certainly her age would suggest as much.
“A fall,” she said. “Most likely an accident, but…” She tailed off, then smiled again, brief and tense. “Well, you know. We have to be sure. So,” she took up her pen again, “if I could just confirm your name?”
“Michael,” he said quietly. “Michael James Turner.”
“And your date of birth?”
The questions were standard. If she was a novice, then DS Slater acted her part well, reeling through them with a practiced rhythm. How long had he lived in the street? His occupation? For how long had he known the Nelsons? Michael answered them directly. None of them yet required him to deviate from the facts. But then, running into it as if it were as innocuous as any of her other questions, she asked him, “And what were your whereabouts between three and five p.m. yesterday afternoon?”
Michael began with the unaltered truth. “I had a fencing lesson,” he told her. “At four. Over at the leisure centre in Highgate.”
She wrote her notes. The silence unsettled him. The sound of her pen. “The one by the school,” he added.
She looked up from the page. “Yes,” she said, as if asking him to keep it simple. “I know.” She looked back down. “And what time did you leave for your lesson?”
Michael paused. This had to be arrived at, not presented. Thought, not said. “Um,” he said. “It must have been around three-fifteen, three-twenty at the latest.”
Again, she brought her eyes up to meet his. “To get to Highgate?”
“Oh, sorry,” Michael said. “I walk. I should have mentioned that. I always walk to my lessons.”
“Right,” Slater said, making another note in her pad. “And can anyone verify you were at the leisure centre?”
And that was it. Michael, with fewer than ten words, had spoken the course of his alternative day. And Detective Sergeant Slater had written it down. It was a statement. It existed. It could be questioned, challenged. Strangely calm, Michael went on to tell her about Istvan, looking for his number in his phone to give it to her. If she questioned Istvan would he mention Michael’s being sick? And if he did, would she guess the cause? It couldn’t be helped. It was a risk he had to take. Istvan was, after all, his alibi.
Was there, Slater asked him, anyone else who might have seen him at the lesson? A receptionist? A gardener? Michael didn’t think so, as far as he knew. She nodded. When prompted he told her about his walk home, across the Heath. It was a beautiful evening, so he’d stopped, rested in the woods. He’d taken his time. Had he seen anything in the Nelsons’ house when he’d left? Or when he’d returned? No, Michael said. No, nothing he could think of.
As he talked, Michael no longer felt as if he was hiding his actions from Slater, but rather pursuing a cause, beyond her detection. He knew he could help Samantha and Josh. That it was the right thing to do. As much as he wished he wasn’t, he was a recent graduate of their breed of loss. It was the least he could do, to risk his own prosecution to remain in their lives.
Slater continued her questions: No, he hadn’t seen the ambulance. And no he hadn’t heard anything from next door once back inside his flat. Had he seen Josh? Not since…he paused to think of the night. Thursday night. It must have been Thursday. Yes, they’d had dinner.
“No,” he corrected himself. She paused in her writing. “Sorry. It was the next morning.”
“When you last saw him?” she asked.
“Yes,” Michael said. Somehow he’d really forgotten. “I dropped round to lend him a screwdriver. For his glasses.”
“A screwdriver? He didn’t have one of his own?”
“Not of that size, no,” Michael said. “It was from my fencing kit,” he added, looking towards his fencing bag in the hallway.
“At what time was this?”
“It was early, before eight. Samantha,” he said, remembering Lucy banging that spoon against the table. “She hadn’t taken Rachel to school yet. So yes, it must have been early.”
―
Minutes later Slater was leaving, putting her notebook and pen back into her jacket pocket and handing him her card—“In case you think of anything else.”
“Yes, of course,” Michael said, putting it on the kitchen counter.
He showed her to the door. “How are they doing?” he asked, as he opened it. “Samantha and Josh,” he explained, although there was no need.
She frowned, then sighed, looking out into the stairwell. No, Michael thought, she hadn’t done this many times before. “They’re devastated,” she said, still looking away and raising her eyebrows, as if there could be no other answer. She turned back to him. “It’s been a terrible shock.”
Extending a hand, she shook his. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Turner,” she said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed your day.”
“No, thank you,” Michael found himself saying, “for letting me know.”
She nodded, the flicker of a question passing through her expression. She let it go. “Not at all,” she said, as she went to the stairs. “Have a good day, Mr. Turner.”
And then she was gone, her small feet tapping down the staircase, carrying his false day in her notebook out of his front door and into the real one.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THREE DAYS AFTER DS Slater’s visit, Michael was sitting with Josh on their usual bench on Parliament Hill. It was early in the morning and the first time Michael had seen Josh since the night he’d watched him weep beside the fence. Samantha had called him the previous day. He’d been washing up at the sink in the kitchen when she’d rung. As the phone pulsed on the work surface, he’d stared at her name on the screen before answering it.