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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
  5. 1
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  54. Now read on for a preview
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  59. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘No. He wasn’t there. I thought he was. I went up there expecting him to be there, but he’d gone by the time I’d arrived.’

Metcalf sniffs deeply. The impression he’d given earlier, of friendliness, is beginning to ebb away. ‘Sorry, I don’t think I’m following this. You’d arranged to meet him there?’

‘No. Not arranged.’ I take a breath to order my thoughts. ‘What you have to understand is that we weren’t getting on. Our marriage, it was breaking. I thought he was having an affair.’

The detective shares a look of sympathy with me but it doesn’t feel real. It seems just like a way to slice in a question. ‘Did you suspect him to be having an affair with the deceased?’

‘I didn’t know.’

He pauses, pen to his mouth. ‘You said your husband works at the building. What does he do?’

‘He works for the Environment Agency.’

He shelves the pen behind an ear so he can turn the page in front of him. ‘Did you know that he’d been meeting Amy Blahn?’ He drops the page and his hands, now free, begin to flutter. I notice a wedding ring belting a swollen finger.

‘As I said. I thought he was having an affair. I believed he was meeting someone but I didn’t know who.’

‘But now. Do you think he was having an affair with her?’ He points at her smiling face still on the table.

‘I don’t know. It’s confused in my head now. It was Michael. He was getting into my head.’

I need time to think. Before I can decide what to do, I need to see the weft and weave myself, but I can’t. I haven’t slept and the events of the last night are a kind of vibration that seem to shake loose everything that went before it.

‘Did you kill her because you thought he was having an affair with her?’

The cliché astounds me. ‘What? You mean in a jealous rage?’

‘Maybe?’

‘I didn’t love him by then. Not after everything. I wouldn’t have killed over him.’

‘So then?’ He touches the top of his head, lightly. He has thinning mousy hair and doesn’t want to encourage a fall. He sits back and attempts a smile but it fails at the last. I don’t like his face, I realise, now that I look closely. There is a streak of meanness there in the mouth. The features aren’t even. His chin is heavy and long. But then he has this perfect, smooth, blemish-free skin which ruins everything.

‘Well?’ he says. ‘Can you answer the question? Why were you there?’