The Memory Game

Fourteen

Neville Chamberlain Comprehensive School in Sparkhill. A disaster in grey concrete. Probably no more than twenty years old, already stained with moisture, like underarm sweat. An East German police interrogation centre dropped into a world of towerblocks, crouching red-brick houses and bypasses. I’d left home in the dark and now, as I parked outside, it was still before eight. No one was about.

The steamed-up, rapidly cooling interior of the car was depressing. I had nothing to read except an A-Z, so I crossed the road to a tiny café opposite the main school gate. I ordered a mug of mahogany-coloured tea, fried egg, bacon and grilled tomato. Almost all the tables were occupied by men in donkey jackets and the air was smoky and steamy. I looked at the front page of the Sun being read by the man opposite me. I wondered if there would be anything in the press about Alan’s fiasco.

By twenty past eight I was back outside on the pavement, walking up and down to keep warm. Ten minutes later I saw him, on a bicycle. He was wrapped in a large coat, heavy gloves, helmet, but Luke’s pale, thin face was unmistakable. As he approached the gate, he swung his right leg deftly back over the bike and rode the final few yards standing on the left pedal, swinging between the groups of pupils who were gathering. I had to run across the road to intercept him. I called his name and he turned his head. He didn’t seem surprised and just gave a slightly sarcastic smile. He pulled off his helmet and ran a gloved hand through his long hair which was streaked with grey.

‘Don’t you have a job to go to?’

During the drive up, my mind had buzzed with things I wanted to learn from Luke. Now that I was here, it was difficult to think of what to ask.

‘Can we talk?’ I said.

‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’

‘I mean, can we talk privately?’

A vein throbbed in his temple. He flushed deeply and I thought he was going to shout at me, but then he looked around and made an obvious effort at self-control.

‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I can give you five minutes.’

Luke chained his bike to a stand and led me through a heavy swing door. We walked noisily down a school corridor whose grey aridity was relieved by paintings and collages on the walls.

‘Have you seen the papers today?’ he asked, without turning his head.

‘No.’

‘I could sue Alan, you know.’

‘You might lose.’

Luke responded with a curt laugh and led me into a room that was so small that when we both sat down we were almost touching each other. We were surrounded by shelves with bright new exercise books and sheaves of drawing paper.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Did you co-operate with the police?’

Luke laughed again, in apparent relief.

‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘You haven’t got anything, have you?’

‘Well, did you?’

‘I’ve been questioned by the police, my name has been in the papers. I’m afraid that I’m not very interested in talking to you about this. Look, I don’t know what it is you’re trying to discover, but if you’re trying to prove something out of some girlish fantasy about Nat, just forget it.’

‘If it wasn’t your baby, whose could it possibly have been?’

Luke hardly seemed to be listening to me.

‘I always liked you, Jane. The others, Nat’s brothers, they looked down on me. I used to feel in my innocence that you didn’t.’

‘I was scared of you,’ I replied. ‘You seemed so sophisticated.’

‘I was a year older.’

‘Luke, give me some reason to believe it wasn’t you?’

‘Why should I?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Your five minutes are up. I hope I haven’t been of help to you. I’ll leave you to find your own way out.’

I sat in my car for a few minutes, then drove slowly towards the motorway until I saw a payphone. I rang Helen Auster in Kirklow and asked if I could meet her, now, as soon as I could get to her. She sounded puzzled but agreed. The day brightened as I drove west from Birmingham and as I entered Shropshire and drove along the top of the hills, my spirits lifted slightly. Kirklow police station was a large modern building just off the central market place. Helen met me at the front desk, wearing a long coat, and suggested we go for a walk. As we talked we strolled around the beautiful soft-stone buildings that made up the centre of the town. It was very cold and I wasn’t sure why I was there.

‘Are you all right?’ Helen asked.

‘I’ve just been to see Luke McCann,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘At his school in Sparkhill.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Have you seen the papers? Have you seen what happened with Alan at the ICA?’

Helen smiled thinly. Her pale skin was flushed in the cold and her cheeks were reddening.

‘Yes, I saw that.’

‘It was awful, but I think Alan is right and I feel desperate about it.’

‘You mean about Luke.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s why I went and confronted Luke. I didn’t really know what I was going to say but he seemed shaken.’

‘Isn’t that understandable?’

‘Look, Helen, I know that there’s no scientific way of showing that Luke was the father of Natalie’s baby but I’ve been racking my brains about what you could do to establish a connection. I thought I could go through the party list with you and identify all the people who might have known Luke. He might have said something to them. Have you talked to his parents? They might have something to say.’

Helen looked around.

‘Let’s go in here,’ she said, and steered me into an empty tea room where we both ordered coffee. When it arrived, we sipped it for a moment in silence, cradling our chilled hands round the cups. Helen looked enquiringly at me.

‘Who told you that it was impossible to connect Luke to the foetus?’

‘Claud. He said that you wouldn’t be able to do DNA fingerprinting because the DNA would have decayed and got contaminated.’

Helen gave a brief smile.

‘Yes, he’s right. One of the bases of the DNA oxidises and the strands crumble. And the DNA that was extracted from the recovered bones was 99 per cent contaminated.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It doesn’t matter. DNA fingerprinting is no use for this case but there is another technique that’s called polymerase chain reaction.’

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It’s a way of amplifying very small amounts of human residue. Of course, the DNA strands are still broken up but there are a great many repeats in the DNA sequence. And these little repeat sequences are characteristic and they are inherited.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that Luke McCann wasn’t the father of Natalie’s baby.’

I felt my cheeks flush.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Helen. I’ve been stupid.’

‘No, Jane, it was quite understandable. Mr McCann was never arrested or even questioned under caution. So he wasn’t officially released, and so we didn’t announce the results of the test. In the light of subsequent events, we’ve decided to issue a statement this afternoon.’

‘Is the test reliable?’

‘Yes.’

‘God, Luke should have just said. It was my fault, though.’

We drank our coffee. Helen insisted on paying for herself. Then we walked across the square towards the police station. We halted outside and I prepared to say goodbye. Helen hesitated and spoke a little haltingly:

‘You and Theodore Martello, you went out together, didn’t you, that summer?’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘Why did it, I mean, how did it end?’

‘Unhappily.’

‘He talks about you a lot, Jane.’

‘How would you know?’

‘Oh, you know, when I’ve talked to him. I told you before, I’ve talked to him quite a lot. On and off.’

She looked awkward but eager, and a thought – a rather terrible thought – flashed across my mind. I stared at her, and she flushed a bright, hot red. But she didn’t look away. I knew, and she knew that I knew; I wanted to say something, to warn her or tell her not to be foolish. But then, with a grimace, she turned rather clumsily and left me. I had a spare half hour on my parking ticket and used it walking around the centre of Kirklow, entirely heedless of my surroundings.