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Back I Know What I Saw
Chapters (59)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise for I Know What I Saw
  3. By the Same Author
  4. Dedication Page
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  54. Now read on for a preview
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  59. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Can you help us with who he is?’

I stare at the woman standing next to the man. She does ring a bell. Belle. Michelle. Ma Belle.

Ma Belle. Mabel.

The woman in the picture is Grace.

And that man beside her is me.

31

Tuesday

I am back in the police cell. There, in the hot space of the interview room, with everything collapsing around me, I managed to do just one thing right: I asked for a solicitor. And so here I am, waiting for them.

The idea that the killing happened so long ago is sitting in my head, immiscible, like oil on water. I can’t absorb the information. I do know one thing, however. The problem – all problems – are mathematical in nature. The solutions are there in the analysis and I have been through the possibilities.

1    The police were lying to me in the interview to get me to confess to something. I’ve ruled this out. To make it work there would have to be illegality, not to mention effort on a monolithic scale, and I don’t think Conway is capable of either.

2    The police are telling the truth and there was a murder thirty years ago, but not the one that I saw. That means there were two murders. But it’s highly unlikely that there were two murders of two young women in one place. There’s a probability factor here that I have tried to calculate on too little data, but whichever way I unpack it and whatever the variables are, the probabilities are too remote. Then there is the simple fact of the picture – that was me, without a doubt.

And that picture of Grace, Michelle Grace Mackintosh. Ma belle. My Michelle. Our joke. That name she hated. Common. And now to see her, to see us, in that Polaroid from all that time ago, it feels like a heavy piece of machinery inside me has slipped its gearings and is shuddering to a halt. I can’t work out what she has to do with it. It can’t be her who was killed. It’s not possible. And yet from the list of what seems possible, it suddenly has shifted from possibility to likelihood. I have to accept that my memory of what I saw isn’t true.