Part 11 (1/2)

'I was scared of you,' I replied. 'You seemed so sophisticated.'

'I was a year older.'

'Luke, give me some reason to believe it wasn't you?'

'Why should I?' He looked at his watch. 'Your five minutes are up. I hope I haven't been of help to you. I'll leave you to find your own way out.'

I sat in my car for a few minutes, then drove slowly towards the motorway until I saw a payphone. I rang Helen Auster in Kirklow and asked if I could meet her, now, as soon as I could get to her. She sounded puzzled but agreed. The day brightened as I drove west from Birmingham and as I entered Shrops.h.i.+re and drove along the top of the hills, my spirits lifted slightly. Kirklow police station was a large modern building just off the central market place. Helen met me at the front desk, wearing a long coat, and suggested we go for a walk. As we talked we strolled around the beautiful soft-stone buildings that made up the centre of the town. It was very cold and I wasn't sure why I was there.

'Are you all right?' Helen asked.

'I've just been to see Luke McCann,' I said.

'Where?'

'At his school in Sparkhill.'

'Why did you do that?'

'Have you seen the papers? Have you seen what happened with Alan at the ICA?'

Helen smiled thinly. Her pale skin was flushed in the cold and her cheeks were reddening.

'Yes, I saw that.'

'It was awful, but I think Alan is right and I feel desperate about it.'

'You mean about Luke.'

'Yes,' I said. 'That's why I went and confronted Luke. I didn't really know what I was going to say but he seemed shaken.'

'Isn't that understandable?'

'Look, Helen, I know that there's no scientific way of showing that Luke was the father of Natalie's baby but I've been racking my brains about what you could do to establish a connection. I thought I could go through the party list with you and identify all the people who might have known Luke. He might have said something to them. Have you talked to his parents? They might have something to say.'

Helen looked around.

'Let's go in here,' she said, and steered me into an empty tea room where we both ordered coffee. When it arrived, we sipped it for a moment in silence, cradling our chilled hands round the cups. Helen looked enquiringly at me.

'Who told you that it was impossible to connect Luke to the foetus?'

'Claud. He said that you wouldn't be able to do DNA fingerprinting because the DNA would have decayed and got contaminated.'

Helen gave a brief smile.

'Yes, he's right. One of the bases of the DNA oxidises and the strands crumble. And the DNA that was extracted from the recovered bones was 99 per cent contaminated.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'It doesn't matter. DNA fingerprinting is no use for this case but there is another technique that's called polymerase chain reaction.'

'What's that when it's at home?'

'It's a way of amplifying very small amounts of human residue. Of course, the DNA strands are still broken up but there are a great many repeats in the DNA sequence. And these little repeat sequences are characteristic and they are inherited.'

'What does that mean?'

'It means that Luke McCann wasn't the father of Natalie's baby.'

I felt my cheeks flush.

'I'm terribly sorry, Helen. I've been stupid.'

'No, Jane, it was quite understandable. Mr McCann was never arrested or even questioned under caution. So he wasn't officially released, and so we didn't announce the results of the test. In the light of subsequent events, we've decided to issue a statement this afternoon.'

'Is the test reliable?'

'Yes.'

'G.o.d, Luke should have just said. It was my fault, though.'

We drank our coffee. Helen insisted on paying for herself. Then we walked across the square towards the police station. We halted outside and I prepared to say goodbye. Helen hesitated and spoke a little haltingly: 'You and Theodore Martello, you went out together, didn't you, that summer?'

'That's one way of putting it.'

'Why did it, I mean, how did it end?'

'Unhappily.'

'He talks about you a lot, Jane.'

'How would you know?'

'Oh, you know, when I've talked to him. I told you before, I've talked to him quite a lot. On and off.'

She looked awkward but eager, and a thought a rather terrible thought flashed across my mind. I stared at her, and she flushed a bright, hot red. But she didn't look away. I knew, and she knew that I knew; I wanted to say something, to warn her or tell her not to be foolish. But then, with a grimace, she turned rather clumsily and left me. I had a spare half hour on my parking ticket and used it walking around the centre of Kirklow, entirely heedless of my surroundings.

Fifteen.

I found my life slipping almost pleasurably into a routine. The solid banks between which all the appointments and obligations and habits flowed were provided by the sessions with Alex Dermot-Brown. They had become as regular and unthinking as sleeping and eating. The morning bike rides along the ca.n.a.l, the weaving through the market to his house were now automatic. The visits acc.u.mulated in my memory and became comfortingly indistinguishable.

Session by session, I worked my way through what seemed to me to be everything about my life. I talked about my adolescence and Paul and my parents, but of course the story kept coming back to the Martellos, almost as if the Martellos const.i.tuted my story. They had always seemed to be at the centre of what was best about it. I described for Alex the childhood summer games. Other people had nostalgic, mythologised views of their early years: our shared childhood really was golden. I talked of my closeness with Natalie and Theo, and a great deal about Claud, as if I was trying to remake the relations.h.i.+p in my own mind, perhaps in a way that would justify my having left him.

It was hard to tell it as a narrative because our marriage hadn't so much broken up as faded away. I couldn't fasten on to any obvious reasons. There was no infidelity, certainly no violence, not even any obvious neglect. That wasn't Claud's style. In lots of ways I admired Claud more than I ever had. As I turned him into words, there in Alex's back room, I felt that I was in danger of making him seem almost irresistible, and of appearing to be talking myself out of what I had already done.