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A picture of composure in contrast to my wrecked self, Miss May was perched on a sofa in the
waiting area, handbag on her knee, hands draped on top of it. She wore very little make-up. Her hair
was pulled back neatly and fastened at the nape of her neck. When she saw me, she got up.
‘They asked me in for interview,’ she said. ‘About Lucas.’ She whispered the name, eyes wide with
disbelief, red-rimmed and bloodshot. I wondered whether that name would be whispered more now,
only spoken of in hushed terms, because Lucas Grantham might be a child abductor, a predator, a
monster.
‘What did they ask you?’
‘I’m not allowed to say.’
That didn’t stop me. ‘Anything? Did you think of anything? Do you think they’re right?’
‘I told them absolutely everything I could think of,’ she said.
‘Do you think he did it?’
There was a heightened quality about her, flushed cheeks and quick movements.
‘Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe, definitely maybe. I’m trying to think back over everything, in case
there were signs, I’m really trying. There was nothing obvious or I’d have said before, but there are
some things, little things that—’
She opened her mouth again as if to say more, and I felt as if she was going to confide something in
me, give me a drop of hope, but our conversation was brought to a halt because the officer who had
retrieved the books from me and John a few days earlier appeared suddenly beside us, car keys
jangling in his hand. ‘DI Bennett,’ he said. ‘OK if I drive you both home together? Apparently you live
reasonably close to one another.’
It was 9 am and the rush hour was abating. Bennett drove us through the city centre, where the
roads were hemmed in by smog-drenched modern buildings throwing endless reflections of tinted
glass back at each other, O FFI C E TO LET signs, boarded shopfronts, student accommodation with
jauntily coloured plastic windows, and concrete 60s edifices rotting in the pollution, graffiti-covered
and stained. At street level, office workers were arriving for work, trainers on, coffees and
briefcases in hand.
I broke the silence in the car. There was something I wanted to say to Miss May. ‘I’m not sure I’ve
ever thanked you properly for all the effort you made with Ben last year, when we were going through
our divorce. I really appreciated it. He did too.’
‘He did have a hard time.’ She gave me a wan smile.
‘Well, you helped him a lot.’
‘It was the least I could do,’ she said. ‘They’re such little souls. It’s a privilege to be a part of their
lives. You must feel so very empty without him.’
Bennett cursed at a cyclist who was climbing laboriously up the steep slope of Park Street,
wobbling into our path with the effort. I fixed my gaze on the tall Victorian Gothic tower at the top,
dominating the skyline, Bristol University’s most recognisable building. Beside it was Bristol
Museum. I thought of Ben’s favourite things there: the ichthyosaur skeleton, a case of glowing blue
crystals, a stuffed dodo and the painting by Odilon Redon.
‘I don’t feel empty,’ I said to Miss May, ‘because I know he’s alive. I know he is. But I do feel very
afraid.’
My words petered away, the last few dregs of sand falling through an hourglass.
She looked out of the window, and I worried I’d spoken too freely, exposed the depths of my
misery without enough filtering. It’s a line I’ve crossed many times since. If you talk too openly about
terrible things people shrink from you.