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58
June 2019
The Chicago police give the children drinks from a vending machine and settle them in another room. In the room where Lucy sits there is a computer screen and on the screen is a pair of British police detectives, one black with close-cropped hair, wearing a short-sleeved linen shirt, and the other white with a thick fringe of brown hair, wearing a fitted green polo shirt. They introduce themselves to Lucy as Detectives Owusu and Muir and tell her they are talking to her from a room at Charing Cross Police Station. They tell her that they have just spoken to Libby and to Miller. The detective called Samuel Owusu says he has also spoken to a man called Justin Ugley today, whom Lucy may have known by the name of Justin Redding, and that he had told them that life in Lucy’s childhood home had been unpleasant, maybeeven traumatic, and was there anything, he wants to know, that Lucy would like to tell them about the period of time when Libby was a baby, just before she and her brother Henry disappeared?
Lucy gulps drily and takes a sip of water. She is astounded that these detectives know so much. She is astounded that they have somehow found Justin, who for her feels like a sub-plot in a distant dream. She can’t even really remember what he looked like; he was always much more Henry’s friend than hers. She is astounded that they know her real name and that she is Libby’s mother.
‘What did Libby tell you?’ she asks now.
‘She told me very little. Because of course she was only a baby when these events occurred and so was not party or witness to them; all she would know would be what you and your brother might have told her. And what she would have read in her boyfriend’s magazine article. She didn’t know Birdie, she didn’t know Justin, she didn’t even know you, her own mother, until a year ago. Her insight was limited. Which is why we need to talk to you, Miss Lamb.’
‘I’m not sure what I can tell you. It was such a long time ago.’
‘Well, for example, maybe you could tell me about David Thomsen. About what sort of man he was.’
Lucy feels her insides compress, empty of every atom of air, collapse.
David Thomsen.
Dark interference swarms around her peripheral vision. She grips the underside of her chair and breathes in hard.
‘Are you OK, Miss Lamb?’
‘Mm-hm.’ She nods. ‘Yup.’ Then she says, ‘Should I have a lawyer present for this? I mean, am I under arrest? Or—?’
‘No, Miss Lamb. No. You are not under arrest. We’re merely trying to find our way through the tangled web of Birdie’s history in your childhood home and how she might have met her end there. Unless – maybe you already know the answer to the question? Maybe you could tell us, right now? Then you will be free to leave and enjoy the rest of your time in Chicago with your children.’
‘I don’t know what happened to Birdie.’
This was almost true. She was pretty sure that Henry had hit her with the elephant tusk. But then again, she’d been holding Libby, the baby, she’d been crying, everything had happened so quickly, she didn’t know, she really didn’t know.
‘She was evil,’ she says now, the words tumbling from her outside her control. ‘Birdie was pure evil.’
She watches the detective’s face on the screen. Nothing moves, apart from one eyebrow.
‘In what way was she evil?’
‘She groomed me to have sex with her lover when I was thirteen.’
‘Her lover?’
‘David Thomsen. He was forty-six. Maybe older. She wanted me to get pregnant by him because she wasn’t able to. So she groomed me. She left me alone with him. Made out it was romantic. Made out I was doing something noble and beautiful. And then …’
Tears form in the back of her throat and threaten to spill down her cheeks. She chokes them back, compelled now, desperately compelled, to tell someone about this thing that happened to her when she was just a child, to throw it at someone, to hurl it hard,to make it land somewhere and for someone to see it, to recognise this thing that she has never told anyone about, not even Libby.
‘They stole my baby when she was weaned, and they didn’t let me touch her. They kept her, Birdie and David, they kept her, they called her “their baby”. I could hear her cry, but I wasn’t allowed to go to her. And it was Birdie, she was the one. She had this way of looking at you, with those eyes she had, they were so pale, they almost weren’t blue, they were almost like chips of glass. Her hands, they were always cold. She would never touch you softly, only hard. When she taught us the violin – her hands around our wrists, like metal clamps.’ She subconsciously forms her hands into cuffs around her own wrists as she speaks. ‘The smell, she had this smell. Of sex. Often. Of hair. She had so much hair. She never washed it. She never smiled. She took my baby and pretended she was hers. Ishouldhave killed her. If I had killed her, I would have beenproud.’
Lucy’s heart pumps hard with adrenaline and she takes a deep breath to try to control it.
The detective stares at her for a second and then says, ‘So, you are telling me that even though you wanted to kill Birdie Dunlop-Evers, you did not.’
‘Yes. That’s what I’m telling you.’
‘So, who did kill her?’
‘I don’t know.’ She flinches with the lie and hopes that the detective in London will miss it on the screen.
‘Did you see her die?’
