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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

Jan leaves the building with me and we walk to Temple Station a few minutes away. ‘That letter is good,’ she says, once we get there. ‘Same paper, same handwriting as the others the police have. And Nasreen. She’s my first choice for your case.’

I manage a smile.

‘But we still need to know where the money is. They could put you through the mill for that.’

I wipe a hand across my face and watch as she turns and disappears through the barriers and down the stairs, deep underground. Once she has gone I walk the other way towards the river. Now this is done, I have to speak to Seb. I don’t want to, but he has left me no choice.

44

Tuesday

When I manage sleep, the memories begin to gather. They are liquid, like blood, pooling in places, coagulating in others. There is a kind of repair going on where the gaping patches are slowly, haphazardly, being stitched together. Since all of this began, I’ve started waking up sometimes with my fingers at the edge of something important, delicate. There are, for instance, cold ponds of recollection: long nights in squats. Fights over sleeping bags or sticky, collapsed mattresses. Fights over drugs. I couldn’t function there in that world. The rules had all to be relearned. Hierarchies I had known were no longer recognisable.

And then the memories jolt forwards and backwards years at a time. But through it, that song is there like a shard in my brain.

There’s trouble on the uptrack …

But the vision of a girl on my mind

Just won’t go away …

And after meeting Nasreen, I know why. That record connects me to her life and death and I can’t let it go. The image jabs, again and again. A broken record. The bench. There in the museum grounds. We sat on it together, Grace and I. Our bench. But when the images of those days collide, it’s not the sunshine that filters through, it’s the mud. I am clawing away at the wet earth, sinking my fingers deep into the mud, and I am desperate. There is an urgency in the memory or the dream, whichever it is. I am on all fours, digging, digging as if trying to uncover a dead body. And in my dream I pull the body out, wrapped in paper, only to discover it’s not Grace. Or it is her, but a fractured version of her.