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I relish the small silence that falls after this pronouncement.
‘May I get back to my holiday now please, Detective?’
‘Sorry, excuse me, Mr Lamb. Just a few more questions, if you don’t mind.’
‘I’m pretty sure there’s nothing left to say. You know everything. Birdie Dunlop-Evers was a sociopath, she terrorised our whole household for more than five years, she groomed my sister for sex with a grown man when she was only thirteen, she stole my sister’s baby, she was part of a suicide pact with my parents and David Thomsen and somehow ended up dying from a head injury that was probably very well deserved and which could have been delivered by any of a number of people as she was universally hated and very dangerous. And now we’ve established that absolutely anyone could have got into the back garden to, as you say, remove her remains from the roof and toss them in the river. I think, Detective, that your lukewarm case just ran cold again. And to think that you gotInterpolinvolved in this. How embarrassing!’
Samuel rests his gaze upon me for a few seconds, before adjusting his position slightly and looking at his paperwork. ‘Just a few more questions. If you don’t mind.’
I throw him a hard stare. What else has he got?
‘You were the last person to see Libby Jones – or Serenity as she was then known – when you left the house. Yet by the time the police arrived, the bodies of your parents and Mr Thomsen had been lying on the kitchen floor for three to four days. Whathappened, please, during those days? Who was there and what were they doing?’
I sigh. ‘No one was there. Everyone else ran away and left me to deal with all the shit. Lucy left me with her baby. It was all down to me. I stayed as long as I could.’ I deliver my best martyr face and sigh again.
‘But what I don’t understand, Mr Lamb – and I appreciate that you were only a child at the time – is why did you not call the police? Here you were, as I now know, four young teenagers, trapped in a house with evil people, sexual abuse was happening, child abuse was happening, and finally your captors were all dead and you were free. Why did you not call the police then? Call them and let them take you to safety?’
A good question. I rearrange myself in my chair and then look straight into the screen. ‘We were traumatised,’ I say. ‘We were broken. We were damaged. I have no other explanation for you. Decisions I made when I was sixteen years old feel so distant as to be almost alien. If I had my time over again, I would have called the police. But as it was … I did not.’
Samuel exhales and I can see I have beaten him.
‘Well, I am going to thank you for your time, Mr Lamb. But I will need to stay in touch with you and this is still an active investigation. So please, I would appreciate it if you and your sister could return to London immediately and do not disappear again.’
The screen goes blank a moment later and I turn to the operative in the room with me. ‘It appears I am free to go?’
‘It appears you are. Yes.’
Back on the street I turn on my phone. I pause for a moment. I can feel a thrum of tears at the base of my throat. I can feel arestlessness, a need for something, but this time it is not a need for oblivion, it is quite the opposite. It is a need for a hug from my sister. To be with my family. To be safe. I want to see my cats. I want to see my colleagues. I want to go for a jog around Regent’s Park. I want to go home.
I press some buttons and unblock my sister’s phone number. Immediately an array of notifications from her appear on the screen. I open the newest one and read it:
I’m sorry. I just wanted it to end. I hope it was OK. Please call me.
I call her. ‘Well, hello.’
‘Oh my God, Henry. Are you OK? What happened with the police? Where are you?’
I tell her that I am fine, that I am free. I tell her where I am, and she tells me that she is at the same hotel that I was staying at only a few short nights ago.
She’s waiting for me in the lounge with Marco and Stella and to my surprise all three of them throw themselves at me when I appear, and I am momentarily subsumed by people who smell familiar, and it is a strangely wonderful feeling. I gently squeeze them back.
And then we order something to eat and I can feel it, I can feel it lift, and although I know it is not fully over, although I know that DI Owusu is at this very moment in London thinking of new paths to pursue, new questions to ask, although I know I am not yet out of the woods entirely, I can, for the very first time since that April morning back in 1994 when I left my parents dead on the floor and Libby asleep in her crib and strode into central London with a thousand pounds in the pocket of my father’s Savile Row jacket,see what lies beyond, and it looks good to me and now I just want to get there. I am feeling healed, somehow, and please excuse the woo-woo nonsense, you know I don’t normally subscribe, but I really do feel reborn.
Chicago has healed me. Lucy and her children have healed me. And now this unctuouspasta aglio e oliois also healing me. When I get back to London, I will reclaim my identity. I will reclaim Henry Lamb. I will own the little boy who I last saw looking at me in a mirror in a Chelsea townhouse all those years ago. I have no reason to pretend not to be him any more. No reason whatsoever.
‘Oh,’ says Lucy, breaking into my thoughts. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t ask. But Phin? Did you ever find him?’
I cough on a mouthful of pasta and bring my napkin to my face.
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, unfortunately not. But not for lack of trying.’
I see something pass across her features then. I’m not sure what it is. Disbelief? Fear? But it’s gone before I can grab hold of it to analyse and then she smiles again.
‘Ah, well,’ she says. ‘Maybe it wasn’t destined to be.’
‘Maybe not,’ I say. ‘Maybe not.’
