Chapter 39
Chapter Thirty-Nine
He doesn’t use the word ‘killed’. He says, ‘There’s been an accident.
A man’s been hurt – badly hurt. I think he might be dead.
We need an ambulance and the police.’ He gives the address, the name of the school, tells them the main entrance is locked, but we’ll open it from inside.
The operator asks him to stay on the line, he says, ‘Yes,’ then puts the phone on the desk beside the lamp and stands there with his arms hanging at his sides, staring at the wall.
Olivia is on the floor by the chair. She’s pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
She’s crying in a steady, rhythmic way that frightens me more than screaming would.
Her wrists are red and raw where the tape was, and there’s a strip of it still trailing from her left ankle, stuck to her sock.
She hasn’t looked at Ross. She hasn’t looked at the shelves, the scattered books, or the shape on the carpet that used to be a person.
She’s looking at the floor between her trainers, and she’s rocking forward and back.
The sound she’s making is somewhere between breathing and sobbing, and it goes right through me.
I kneel and put my arms around her, and she grabs hold of me so hard it hurts – fingers digging into my coat, face buried against my shoulder, her whole body shaking against mine.
She smells of sweat and dust, but underneath that she smells of herself, of my daughter.
I hold her and press my lips to the top of her head and say, ‘I’m here. I’m here. You’re safe.’
The words feel like a lie, because nothing about this is safe.
The sirens arrive faster than I expect. One, then two – the sound growing from a thin whine in the distance to a full wail that fills the corridor outside the library and bounces off the walls.
Blue light sweeps across the tall windows.
I hear doors, voices, the crackle of a radio, and then footsteps on the stairs, heavy and fast, and two paramedics break through the library doors, followed by a uniformed officer with a torch.
After that, the room stops belonging to us.
The paramedics go to Ross. I watch them crouch beside him, check his pulse, check his airway, speak to each other in low voices I can’t hear properly.
One of them touches his neck, two fingers pressed below the jaw – and looks at the other and shakes his head.
That’s it. One tiny shake, and it’s confirmed.
Ross Mercer is dead on the floor of the library where we first kissed, and the man who did it is standing four metres away with his phone still lit up on the desk and his hands at his sides.
More officers arrive. The corridor fills with torchlight and voices.
Someone props the library doors open and puts tape across the entrance – police tape, the kind I’ve only ever seen on television.
A female officer wraps a foil blanket around Olivia’s shoulders and walks her down to the ambulance to be checked over.
Every cell in me wants to go with her, but they steer me the other way, into a classroom that smells of whiteboard markers and dust, and someone puts a paper cup of water in front of me that I don’t drink.
Alex is still in the library. I can hear them talking to him, but I can’t make out the words.
The questions start.
A detective arrives – plain clothes, tired face, a woman in her forties with short hair and a lanyard around her neck.
She introduces herself, but I don’t catch the name because my brain is doing something strange: it’s focussing on details I don’t need – the scuff on her shoe, the pen in her breast pocket, the way her lanyard is twisted – while refusing to process the things that matter.
She sits across from me at the desk and opens a notebook.
She speaks calmly and clearly, and I can see in her face that she already knows this is going to be complicated.
‘Mrs Stiller, I need you to talk me through tonight. From the beginning.’
The beginning. Where is the beginning? The school gates at fourteen? The library, the kiss, the window we climbed through? The day Ross vanished and didn’t come back? Or is it closer – the cottage, the brick, the note, the drive home, the lie I told PC Heywood at my kitchen table?
‘I came here tonight because of a note.’ My voice sounds wrong.
Thin and detached, as if someone else is speaking and I’m watching from across the room.
‘It was wrapped around a brick that was thrown through the window of a cottage in Wales where I was staying. The note told me to come to this school, alone, no police. It said my daughter’s life depended on it. ’
‘Do you have the note?’
‘It’s in my coat pocket.’
She holds out her hand. I reach into my pocket and pull it out – crumpled now, soft, the creases deep – and hand it to her. Gloves on, she reads it, turns it over, places it in a clear plastic bag she takes from her jacket.
‘And your daughter was here when you arrived?’
‘She was tied to a chair in the library. Tape around her wrists, her ankles, her mouth.’ My throat closes on the last word. I swallow hard and keep going. ‘Ross Mercer was in the room. He was waiting for me.’
‘Ross Mercer – is that the deceased?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what is your relationship to Mr Mercer?’
‘He was—’ I stop. What is the right word?
Boyfriend, first love, stalker, ghost, the boy who broke me, the man who came back, the body on the library floor?
‘We were together as teenagers. Here, at this school. He disappeared when I was seventeen. He came back a few weeks ago and started contacting me.’
She writes. She asks me when the contact started, how it happened, what he said, what I said.
I answer as well as I can, but the story sounds mad even to me – the messages, the meetings, the shopping centre, and everything that came after.
Every detail I add makes the next one harder to believe.
I can see her writing, and I can see the lines getting longer, and I know that what she’s building on that pad isn’t a story that makes sense.
It’s a mess. A tangle of secrets and lies and things I should have said weeks ago and didn’t.
Then she asks the question I’ve been dreading.
‘Mrs Stiller, were you visited by police yesterday evening? At your home address?’
My stomach drops.
‘Yes.’
‘And during that visit, were you asked about anyone who might pose a threat to your family?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you tell the officers?’
The silence in the classroom is enormous.
And in it, I can hear myself from the previous evening, sitting at my kitchen table with my husband beside me and two officers waiting for an answer: The truth is, I kissed a guy in a bar and made it sound like I had some sort of stalker to make it easier for my husband to forgive me.
‘I lied,’ I say.
The detective doesn’t react. She writes, and waits.
‘They asked me about Ross. My husband told them there was someone – a man from my past – and they asked me who he was, and I said there was nobody. I said I’d kissed a stranger in a bar and exaggerated it to my husband. I said he was confused.’
‘Why did you lie?’
‘The note.’ I point at the plastic bag on the desk. ‘It says no police. It says my child’s life depends on it. I was terrified that if I gave them his name, Ross would find out, and he’d—’ I can’t finish. I press my hand against my mouth.
‘And your husband,’ the detective says. ‘Was he present in the school tonight?’
‘Yes. He came in after me. We planned it together – I’d arrive first, he’d follow shortly after. If Ross tried anything, Alex would be there.’
‘So your husband entered the school with the intention of confronting Mr Mercer?’
The way she says it makes my blood run cold. Because I can hear what she’s really asking, and the answer is the thing that’s going to pull us under.
‘He was protecting us,’ I say. ‘He was protecting me and Olivia.’
‘I understand that’s how it felt. But I need to establish the sequence of events. Your husband entered the building separately, arrived in the library without Mr Mercer’s knowledge, and then physically attacked him.’
‘He tackled him. Ross was – they were struggling, and Ross went backwards into the bookshelves, and—’
‘Mrs Stiller.’ She’s gentle but firm. ‘A man is dead. Your husband entered the room and initiated the physical contact. We’ll need to take formal statements from both of you, and from your daughter when she’s ready, and I have to be honest with you – the circumstances here are serious.’
I know. I know they’re serious. I know that from the outside this looks like something it isn’t – a jealous husband, a secret ex-boyfriend, a plan, a confrontation, a death.
I know that every lie has made it worse, and every truth I’m telling now comes too late to sound like anything other than damage control.
‘Can I see my husband?’ I say.
‘Not right now. He’s being spoken to separately.’
‘Is he being arrested?’
She pauses. The pause is the answer.
‘Your husband is being arrested on suspicion of manslaughter,’ she says. ‘That doesn’t mean he’ll be charged. It means we need to investigate what happened here tonight, and we need to do that properly, and while that investigation is ongoing—’
I stop hearing her. The words keep coming – custody, solicitor, statement, investigation – but they’re just sounds.
Background noise. Wallpaper over the hole that’s opening in the middle of my chest, because my husband just killed a man to save his family, and now they’re taking him away, and I’m going to drive home with our daughter in the passenger seat and walk into an empty house, and he won’t be there.
When the questions finally run out, the female officer brings Olivia back to me, still wrapped in the foil blanket, and she folds into my side and stays there.
Alex appears in the corridor twenty minutes later.
He’s flanked by two officers, his hands not cuffed – not yet, I think, or maybe they’ve decided that’s not necessary.
Maybe they’re being kind in front of his child, I don’t know, and I can’t ask.
He looks at me through the classroom door, and his face is the colour of paper.
His eyes are red, and he mouths something I can’t make out.
Then he looks at Olivia, and something breaks in his expression – the muscles around his mouth give way, and his chin crumples, and for half a second he looks like a man who is falling and knows there’s nothing underneath.
‘Dad?’ Olivia’s voice is small.
‘It’s all right,’ he says. His voice cracks. ‘It’s going to be all right, Liv. Go home with Mum. I’ll be back soon.’
He won’t. I know that, and he knows that, and from the way Olivia’s hand tightens around mine, she knows it, too.
But we let him say it, because what else is there?
What else do you say to your daughter when the police are walking you down a school corridor at midnight and the man you killed is lying under a sheet in the room where your wife fell in love for the first time?
They take him down the stairs. I hear their footsteps on the resin floor – three sets, evenly spaced – then the bang of the main entrance door, and then nothing.
The detective gives me a card. She tells me they’ll need a full statement tomorrow, that someone from family liaison will be in touch, that the paramedics have checked Olivia over and she’s unhurt – shaken, marked by the tape, but unhurt.
She tells me I can take my daughter home.
She says the words gently, as if it’s a kindness, and I suppose it is – the kindness of being allowed to leave the place where your life fell apart instead of being made to sit in it until morning.
I take Olivia’s hand. We walk down the corridor together, past the classrooms and the lockers and the display boards, past the staircase, past the kitchen. The window I climbed through is still open. Cold air is coming through it, and I can smell the rain and the bins and the night outside.
We go out through the main entrance. The car park is full of vehicles – patrol cars, an ambulance, an unmarked car. Blue lights turning slowly, painting the school walls in pulses. Olivia walks beside me with the foil blanket still around her shoulders, holding my hand so tightly my knuckles ache.
Alex’s car is where he left it, parked on a side street round the corner.
I find the spare key in my coat pocket – he gave it to me at the kitchen table, before we left, before any of this – and I unlock the doors, help Olivia into the passenger seat, and fasten her belt because her hands are shaking too hard to do it herself.
I get in and start the engine. I sit with my hands on the wheel and my daughter beside me, and the school shrinking in the rear-view mirror, and I think: I should feel something. Relief, grief, terror, guilt. Something.
I don’t feel anything at all.
I pull out of the side street, turn left on to the main road, and drive home.
The house is dark when we get there. I unlock the front door, switch on the hallway light, and stand in the doorway of our kitchen, looking at the table where Alex sat three hours ago and told me to go to the school. His mug is still on the worktop. His jacket is on the back of the chair.
Olivia goes upstairs without speaking. I hear her bedroom door close, then the creak of her bed. I stand in the kitchen and wait for the sound of her crying, but it doesn’t come. Just silence. The fridge humming. The clock ticking.
I sit at the table.
Alex’s chair is empty.