‘I was making a smoothie. She was crawling around on the floor. She must have slipped or maybe she tried to pull herself up on the fridge and fell . . .’ Is that what she told Liz? Tiredness turns her thoughts sluggish but DC Rustin is watching, and her directness forces her to focus. ‘I’m sorry. I had my back turned so I can’t say exactly.’
‘Where was she when you found her: in what position?’
‘Um . . .’
‘Take your time,’ DC Farron intervenes.
‘I think she was raising herself up on her front . . . hence my thinking she was crawling and slipped forwards.’
DC Rustin does not let her gaze shift. ‘And yet the skull fracture is to the back of her head?’
The air is heavy with suspicion. Jess can taste it: earthy, ferric. Her skin goosefleshes, the fine hairs on her arm standing on end.
‘I . . . yes . . . You’re quite right. I was confusing it with her slipping forwards, the day before. She was on her back.’ The bruising was to the back of Betsey’s head. She knows that. She mustn’t forget it. ‘She was lying on her back,’ she says, more confident this time.
‘And what made you turn to see her?’
‘Well, there was a thud and she started crying. I was in the same room with her: I’d just turned my back for a minute while I was cooking. I picked her up immediately . . .’
Never over-explain, Ed once told her, after she was stopped for speeding and had three points added to her licence. And yet she can’t help it. Her explanation floods out, casting doubt on what she previously said.
DC Rustin leans back and she can feel the waves of disbelief rolling off her: a gentle lapping at first, but building in intensity.
‘So we know that she banged the back of her head . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet you didn’t mention this when you came into A&E and saw the first doctor, Dr O’Neill, nor when you were seen by Dr Trenchard?’
‘No.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I . . . I guess I didn’t think it was important. I didn’t think it was connected.’ She weighs each word like ingredients for a recipe she must get right.
A pause. DC Rustin glances down briefly then looks straight back at her, her eyes a dull, dishwater grey.
‘And you didn’t notice that the back of her head was tender: that it felt – I think Dr Trenchard describes it as squishy or boggy?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ she says.
Another few seconds of silence while DC Rustin assesses her, and heat threads up Jess’s neck.
‘Presumably you would have cradled Betsey’s head when you got her into the car seat, or held her in the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘But even then you didn’t notice this tenderness?’
‘No, I didn’t, no.’ Her voice swoops and catches, and she knows she sounds flaky. ‘I was in such a rush to get here.’
‘You were in a rush to get here, and yet you left it six hours I think to bring her in?’
‘Yes.’
A pause during which DC Rustin does not let her gaze shift.
‘I think earlier you said Betsey may have pulled herself up on the fridge and then fallen?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t see her do that either?’
‘No.’
A pause.
‘So why did you say it?’
‘I just . . .’
DC Rustin’s tone has segued from quizzical to confrontational and Jess hears herself faltering.
‘I just . . . I suppose it was an option. She’s started to pull herself up quite a lot, recently, and I thought that if she’d done so that might account for the thud. If she’d fallen from standing, she’d have fallen more heavily. That’s what usually happens because there’s further to fall.’
‘So this has happened before?’
Jess gives a short laugh, harsh and off-key. It sounds mad, even to her. ‘Well, yes. I mean, of course it’s happened before. All babies fall over when they’re pulling themselves up or crawling.’ She forces herself to smile. ‘I have three children and they do fall over, they do slip and hurt themselves. They’re more robust than you might think.’
DC Rustin smiles encouragingly. Perhaps they’ll be satisfied now. But no, the questions keep coming, and with each one, the detectives’ scorn increases. A mother who doesn’t watch her baby. Who can’t even accurately describe how she found her. Think, for God’s sake, think.
‘Please,’ she appeals to DC Farron, and she is suddenly engulfed by a fresh fear. She has no idea what is happening to Betsey or if her injury has got worse. ‘Please. Could I find out what’s happening to my baby? I just want to see how she is . . .’
DC Farron’s young face softens. Perhaps saying that was canny, though the request was instinctive.
But DC Rustin is in no rush. She doesn’t like Jess: that’s pretty evident, and it feels as if she is relishing this power she has over her.
‘In a minute. We just need to clarify a further couple of things.’
ED
Saturday 20 January, 3 p.m.
Seven
The police officers move swiftly and efficiently, the kitchen no longer the hub of Ed’s home but an area that must be photographed. He swallows, remembering a recent TV drama. They’re behaving as if it’s a crime scene.
Jess has gone to bed. He’d insisted. Had told her quite firmly that she was no help to him or the children, if she continued to watch the detectives with such fear, her desperation to be rid of them plastered across her face.
He didn’t add that she risked incriminating herself. But he felt it acutely. She’s been unpredictable, lately. Overemotional. Increasingly prone to becoming upset at the slightest thing. It hadn’t occurred to him that she wasn’t managing to hold things together, until very recently.
He turns his back on the scenes of crime officer. He can’t face watching him; feels exposed as if both he and the detectives view him with suspicion. All this could have been prevented if he’d taken Betsey to the hospital himself. This police interest must have been caused by some inaccuracy, some glitch in Jess’s explanation, and he would have smoothed away any wrinkle and stopped things progressing this far. She has never liked explaining herself. Perhaps she’d not been sufficiently clear in her explanation, not understood the magnitude of what was going on?
He risks glancing at the scenes of crime officer, conscious that any reaction might be noted, then runs a glass of water, welcoming the cool liquid coating his dry lips. He should have gone in. He was the one who noticed Betsey’s distress. The way she’d turned from him, twisting her neck, flinching from his touch; her teariness when she’d seen him – because she was usually so sunny, at least with him, a bone of contention with Jess. And then there was the vomit, the smell of which, he realises now, had partly drawn him into the nursery.
He feels ill at the memory. He’d never found any of his children like that before. A trail of sick spooling from her mouth and pooling on the cot mattress; her eyes gleaming with tears. Thank God he had checked on her. He wouldn’t normally have after a night out and, though he was home by ten, it had felt like a heavy session – a few beers drunk fast at the end of an exhausting week in a desire to delay facing Jess, and perhaps try to kid himself he wasn’t just a parent and the breadwinner; to pretend he was still the right side of forty.