The Perfect Girl

ZOE

Mum was my protector. Even when she got it wrong you could never fault her for trying. I knew that, and Jason banged on about it all the time. She wouldn’t have let them interview me without Sam.

Mum was a bit taller than me, and had shiny blonde hair, which everybody admired and which she gave to me and Grace.

When I was little, she was cuddly and firm and soft, and she smelled of wood smoke and cooking. In the flat we lived in after the accident she smelled of cigarette smoke and in the Second Chance House it wasn’t a smell, but a scent, and Chris gave it to her in posh bottles that she kept in a row on her dressing table. Her frame was thinner by then too. Not cuddly, like it used to be, but she looked great because it was so slim, everybody said so.

On the floor of the shed her body looked and felt cold.

Now, I just have my dad, and I have Tess, and I have Richard, I have Sam and I have Chris. But I’m very much not sure of Chris; in fact all I’m sure of is how much I don’t really know him when Mum isn’t here to be a bridge between us. The only thing I’m sure of is that he called me a slut yesterday evening, and that there was darkness in his eyes.

Tess and Richard love me but they won’t defend me the way my mum would.

Sam doesn’t think I need him.

My dad isn’t here yet, and I don’t want him to come anyway.

So when I sit down in front of the investigating officers I decide that I must protect myself, and I know what I’m going to do.

The policemen look exactly the same as each other, as if you’d popped them out of a PEZ detective dispenser. I’ve met a lot of police, and these two are definitely the most businesslike. They remind me of some of the men who come to the house to meet Chris: you want to unwrap them out of their perfect suits to see if they’ve got real beating hearts and breathing lungs underneath.

‘We’re very sorry for your loss,’ one of them says.

I don’t reply at first, because I’m thinking about the Unit.

When I got to the Unit, I thought everybody was going to be thick, and I was right in a way for many of them, but only if you’re just talking about exam success. Second Chance Family type of success.

The kids on the Unit weren’t thick at all if you’re talking about being smart. They knew stuff about police interviews, and legal advice and courtrooms that nobody tells you in your before life.

Right now, I’m not being charged with a crime; I know that.

But even though I’m not being charged what’s ringing in my head is what the kids in the Unit said about giving ‘no comment’ interviews. It’s the best strategy for not letting yourself get stuffed up by something that you say. What nobody tells you is that even if you’re not under caution, even if you’re just ‘having a chat’ with the police, you can make what they just have to decide to call a ‘significant statement’, and then they can ask you about it later in a proper, recorded interview, and that interview can be quoted in court.

Ergo: no chat you have with police is a ‘safe’ chat.

Ergo: I decide to run my own ‘no comment’ defence.

Because then, even though they’ll tell me that this could be seen as uncooperative behaviour, and it could be frowned on, etc., etc., all scare tactics, I’ll avoid the trap of delivering myself into their hands, because a ‘no comment’ interview dumps the burden of proof on the police if they want to charge you.

Why am I giving so much weight to what the kids in the Unit said? Partly it’s because as well as finding out they were cleverer than I thought they would be, I also liked and trusted them, a few of them anyway, though not all obviously, because some were proper psychos. It’s also because there’s one more thing nobody ever talks about in my life any more, and that’s how totally screwed-up unfair my verdict was.

Eva Bell robbed me of a chance at getting the ‘Not Guilty’ verdict my mum wanted because she lied to protect her brother. At the time, my mum sobbed and said ‘it’s a miscarriage of justice’ and Sam looked white and said how sorry he was, and my dad accused Mum of persuading me to make the wrong plea. In the Unit, I talked to Jason about it a bit but it was never a long chat because everybody in the Unit basically believes that they’ve been screwed over in some way so the key workers are fed up of hearing it.

When I first got out of the Unit, and we were in the flat, my mum used to talk to me about it and she was still really bitter, but since she met Chris I was never allowed to say how it was wrong. It was time to ‘put it behind me’, Mum told me. The ‘miscarriage of justice’ had no place in the Second Chance Life because it didn’t exist there. It was erased, even though the unfairness of it had burned inside me since the trial, and still does.

What I can do right now, though, is to use what I’ve learned from it; and what I’ve learned is that you can’t be too careful and you can never trust the system. Never.

It’s difficult to do what I’ve decided to do, I know that from before, because early interview is the softly, softly stage, when you feel like the police are your friends, that they understand, and it’s so tempting to talk, you even want to talk, and after the accident I told them everything, and I didn’t realise that each word was another scoop of the shovel in Project Digging My Own Grave.

So I tell myself to be strong and I put my strategy into action straight away. When the detective says, ‘We’re very sorry for your loss,’ I reply: ‘No comment.’

There’s a pause before one of them says, ‘You’re not being charged, love, we’re not taking a formal statement from you. All we’re hoping is that you can tell us a bit about what happened last night, just give us an initial account.’

When I hear that I think: Knew it, knew they were going to say ‘initial account’, but all I say is: ‘No comment.’

He puts his notebook down on the table and drops his pen on to it. Then he leans towards me. ‘You don’t need to reply “no comment” in an interview like this. We’re not asking you to account for yourself, it’s just a chat.’

‘No comment.’

‘Can you at least tell us how old you are?’

‘No comment.’

‘We gather you played the piano at a concert last night,’ says the other detective.

‘No comment.’

His eyebrows shoot up his forehead. I’m not always good at knowing when I’m annoying people but I can tell that I’m royally pissing him off now.

‘You’re very good at the piano I hear?’

‘No comment.’

‘It’s quite a thing to publicly perform at your age, isn’t it?’

It’s harder than you think to run a ‘no comment’ interview. The urge to reply, especially when questions are friendly, or flattering, is very strong. The normal answers to their questions form in your mouth but you have to swallow them back, and instead,spit out the two words that they have to pretend don’t frustrate them.

‘No comment.’

‘Would you say you’re a prodigy?’

‘No comment.’

‘Do you enjoy playing with your brother?’

That one is especially hard not to reply to, because they’ve got it wrong, and I hate it when people get things wrong. ‘Step. Brother.’ I want to say, and in my head I would add ‘imbeciles’. Jason didn’t like me correcting people, but my mum and dad never minded. It made them laugh.

‘No comment.’

I can see that I’m annoying the quiet one as well. He keeps trying tactics on me. He smiles, and then does a hard stare, and then looks quizzical as if he can’t possibly understand why I might be saying ‘no comment’.

Now he clears his throat and says, ‘You do know, Zoe, that we’re just trying to get to the bottom of what happened last night, don’t you? It would be for everybody’s good if you tell us what happened last night, because then we can focus on really finding out what happened to your mum. You’d want that for her, wouldn’t you?’

‘No comment.’

He tries not to be frustrated but a little twist of his lips tells me that he is and I have to bite my own lips so I don’t smirk.

In the Unit, if you get to smirk at the expense of the police, you would get an A star, or a sticker on your chart, or a shiny trophy, or whatever.

I don’t think the detective notices my lips twitching though, because the door of the room opens suddenly enough to make me jump and there is my actual, real dad.