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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 Grace be dead? How could I have seen it and not remembered – not remembered that it was her? My Grace. Who I loved. Love.

I know that people do repress painful and traumatic memories. But this doesn’t feel like a repression. For instance, I know that I have suppressed what happened with Dad. I have buried it deep into the folds of my past. It is there, still. I sense it all the time, as a kind of grotesque in a room that I walk around every morning and evening. It’s always there, but there are days when it’s so well camouflaged that I can pretend it doesn’t exist. I know that it does and I know that if I could steel myself I could face it down if I had to.

But this isn’t like that. I haven’t buried Grace. I haven’t erased the memory or airbrushed it out of existence. I have a memory of that night – a clear one.

It’s her with me in that Polaroid. It is. I remember her as she was. But the dead woman, when I see her, is older, and less vibrant. The side of her face was flatter – it didn’t reflect the light like Grace’s did. And the hair was a different colour. But when I saw the picture of her in the interview, I was less sure. In that police picture, with her face captured from the side, as if in sleep, it could be her. I can’t be sure that it’s not.

I am back at Seb’s house. The sight of the old house gives me a warm feeling. It takes me to a time that was more – binary. I need to speak to him and tell him everything. I also need the money, it seems. Murder in jealousy or murder for money: the oldest and most hackneyed of motives. I’m sure Seb will have it still. Or maybe he banked it, or I don’t know what. I can’t know exactly but there will be a trail, at least, that he can verify. I bring to mind the look on his face when I turned up with the money and how we had packed it into a trunk in his loft with other things that I couldn’t bear to throw out – letters, photographs, trinkets.

I knock on the door, bathed in street-light. I hadn’t realised how long I had been in the police station. They keep you there, deprived of light and any sense of the day. They strip out all the day’s signposts so that when you are released you have the sensation of being in a time-slip.