Read Online What She Knew by Gilly Macmillan - Free Book Online Page A

coffee table, and three bland landscape prints on the wall opposite. The carpet was industrial gray. On one of the armchairs a lone purple cushion sagged as if it had been punched. A door was labeled EXAMINATION ROOM.
    A man arrived. He was tall, well built, and closely shaven, with thick, dark brown hair, cut in a neat short back and sides, and hazel eyes. He had large hands and he put a tray down on the table clumsily: the stacked cups slid dramatically to one end, the spout of the pot let free a slug of hot liquid. DC Zhang leaned forward to try to save everything but there was no need. The cups wobbled but didn’t fall.
    The man sat down in the armchair beside me and extended his hand to me. “DI Jim Clemo,” he said. “I’m so sorry about Ben.” He had a firm handshake.
    “Thank you.”
    Clemo cleared his throat. “Two things we need from you as soon as possible are the contact details for Ben’s GP and his dentist. Do you have those to hand?”
    I took my phone from my pocket, gave him what he wanted.
    “Does Ben have any medical conditions that we should be aware of?”
    “No.”
    He made notes in a notebook that had a soft acid-yellow cover. It was an incongruously lovely object.
    “And do you have a copy of Ben’s birth certificate?”
    My paperwork was disorganized, but I did keep a file of Ben’s important documents.
    “Why?”
    “It’s procedure.”
    “Am I having to prove he existed or something?”
    Clemo gave me a poker face, and I realized I was right. It was my first inkling that I was involved in a process where I didn’t know the rules, and where nobody trusted anybody, because what we were dealing with was too serious for that.
    Clemo’s questions were thorough and he wanted detail. As I talked, I sat with my arms wrapped around myself. He moved a lot, leaning forward at some moments, sitting back and crossing his legs at others. He was always watching me, his eyes constantly searching my face for something. I tried to quell my natural reticence, to talk openly, in the hope that something I told him would help find Ben.
    He started by asking me about myself, my own upbringing. How that was relevant I didn’t know, but I told him. Because of my unusual circumstances, the tragedy of my parents’ death, it’s a story I’ve told a lot, so I was able to stay calm when I said, “My parents were killed in a car crash when I was one and my sister was nine. They had a head-on collision with an articulated lorry.”
    I watched Clemo go through a reaction that was familiar to me, because I’d witnessed it so often: shock, sorrow, and then sympathy, sometimes barely concealed schadenfreude.
    “They were driving home from a party,” I added.
    I’d always liked that little bit of information. It meant that in my mind my parents were forever frozen as young and sociable, invigorated by life. Probably perfect.
    Clemo expressed sympathy but he moved on quickly, asking me who brought me up, where I’d lived, then how I met John, when we got married. He wanted to know about Ben’s birth. I gave them a date and a place: July 10, 2004, St. Michael’s Hospital in Bristol.
    Beneath the facts my head was swimming with sensations and memories. I remembered a hard and lengthy labor, which started on a perfect scorcher of a day, when the air shimmered. They admitted me to a delivery room at midnight, the heat still lingering in every corner of the city, and as my labor intensified through the long hours that followed, it was punctuated with the shouts of revelers from outside, as if they couldn’t think of going home on such a night.
    Before morning there’d been the fright of a significant hemorrhage, but later, after the sun had risen high again, I felt the extraordinary joy of being handed my tiny boy, who I watched turn from gray to pink in my arms. I felt the weightlessness of his hair, the perfect softness of his temples, and a sensation of absolute stillness when our eyes met, me holding my