Читать книгу The Boy in the Park: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist - - Страница 18

As the recording resumes on its B-side, the tension between the male’s voice and Pauline’s is high.

‘Didn’t kill my wife?’ Joseph yells, spitefully. ‘I don’t know what in the godforsaken pits of your deranged mind you’re talking about, but this is going way, way past anything that “therapy” is supposed to be good for. You can’t just baldly call me a liar. Why would I lie about something like this?’

‘I’m not necessarily saying you’re lying, Joseph,’ Pauline answers, ‘but—’

‘Not lying? You’re flat out telling me that the one thing I’m flat out telling you isn’t true. What else would you call that?’

A slight pause. Hearing the recorded hesitation, Pauline recalls how she’d searched for the right word. ‘A mistake.’

‘A mistake!’ A hand slams down on a table. ‘A mistake! This isn’t like you’re asking me to do math problems in my head, woman! I killed my wife. Took a pillow, slammed her head down onto the floor. Held it over her face and watched her body writhe until it didn’t move any more. Dead. Telling you this isn’t a mistake of my memory!’

His words are enraged. There is genuine disbelief in them, utterly uncomprehending of the blanket rejection of his claims.

Pauline’s voice returns, with the same practised calm she had trained herself to manifest in situations like this. ‘There are reasons I’m calling it a mistake, Joseph, but it will do little good for me to explain them outright. It’s better if you can come to it yourself. Maybe you—’ Her voice hesitates, then she seems to start again afresh. ‘Why don’t you start by telling me more about her. Your wife.’

The man’s breathing steadies. ‘What do you want to know?’ Then, with a snort, ‘What can I tell you that you’re not just going to call more lies, or “mistakes”?’

Pauline doesn’t fall prey to the provocation but answers calmly. ‘What do you remember about her? About the two of you together?’

‘I remember plenty. All the normal stuff.’ Joseph’s words are gruff.

‘So tell me about that,’ she prompts. This is good territory; the opportunity to speak about ‘normalcy’ has a tendency to calm people overcome with the unusual. She remembers the moment, sat there across from him. ‘Tell me about the normal stuff.’

‘Falling in love. Romance. The way we’d look at each other.’ His voice slows, as if his words are retreating into memory, but he grows more stolid and sturdy as he continues.

‘We were so happy. When it was just us, with no one else around. It was like there were only two of us on the planet. The sun and the stars and the moon disappeared, and there was only her and me. It would be like that wherever we were, whatever the circumstances. She’d look into my eyes, and I’d look into hers, and the universe would just melt away.’

He hesitates. His voice bears the traces of embarrassment, as if speaking this way, in his current position, is a sign of weakness and immaturity.

‘That sounds very comforting,’ Pauline says encouragingly. Hearing her own words played back to her now, they seem mildly inadequate. His emotions were coming through. She could have prompted him more. Encouraged him.

‘She was nothing but love and warmth,’ he continues, and Pauline is drawn back to the moment. He hadn’t needed further prompting; he’d swept himself away. On the cassette his embarrassment is instantly gone. ‘Blonde hair, she had, and big blue eyes. Soft cheeks and a killer laugh. She’d take my hand in hers, wrapping her fingers through mine, and take me on walks. I’d never gone on walks before her, never been interested. But walks with her were like dreams. We’d go out together, sit on a big blanket and have picnics. Can you imagine that? In this strange world, having picnics out in the countryside?’

Pauline’s voice offers a soft, noncommittal chuckle. The kind that broadcasts pleasant encouragement without meaning anything on its own.

‘She would make the most amazing treats for me. Out of nothing. I don’t know how she did it. It’s not like we had cash flowing out our pockets night and day, but somehow she’d fabricate the most perfect foods for those outings. Sweets. Savouries. And there would always be a little card tucked into the picnic basket. Something handmade, brilliantly drawn, with some inside joke written out inside. We would laugh until we were in giggles.’ His voice trails off again. Then, in barely more than a whisper. ‘She was one of a kind. Nobody else like her. I wanted it to be just us. Us and no one else.’

Pauline lets the remembered narrative halt, allows some silence to buffer her next question.

‘Do you ever wonder, Joseph, whether you were too lucky?’

It was the question to which Pauline had known this whole line of discussion would have to lead. His response, however, had been hostile and resistant.

‘There you go again!’ his voice taunts from the recording. ‘I tell you something simple, something straightforward, and you go off toying about with words. Playing your games.’ He’s vocally irritated. ‘What’s that even supposed to mean, “too lucky”?’

‘I mean,’ Pauline’s voice comes back calmly, ‘do you ever sometimes feel that this perfect marriage, this perfect woman, that they’re almost too perfect to be …’ She allows her voice to trail off.

Joseph doesn’t pick it up. Pauline hadn’t wanted to push. Instead, she’d made the decision to shift tack once again.

‘Something must have happened, if everything was once that idyllic.’

The man’s breath picks up pace, and his words are harder when they return.

‘Everyone has another side to them. Everyone, even her.’

Silence. She lets Joseph recollect, uninterrupted, before he speaks again.

‘I got to the point where I knew there must be someone else. I don’t know the exact moment it hit me, but after I’d figured it out it all made perfect sense. She was in love with another man.’

‘You’d had suspicions?’

Joseph’s voice hardens. ‘I had reasons to be suspicious.’ He doesn’t elaborate.

‘And?’ Pauline finally asks.

‘I don’t know when it started. Probably’d been going on for years. But that was it. That’s when I knew.’

‘Knew what, Joseph?’

‘Knew I had to kill her. Knew she couldn’t be allowed to live.’

The statement comes as a definitive finish, and a long silence follows. Pauline’s voice, however, returns with a new, slightly firmer tone.

‘Joseph, I’ve looked at your file. I even did a little research last night, from home, to examine things further.’

She recalls that she’d looked down at her stack of notes as she’d delivered the comment, a strategy to suggest definitiveness. Certainty, even of things unknown. It was a true comment, as far as it went – Pauline had indeed spent at least an hour the night before, just before sleep, with Joseph’s file open on her knees, the comforter of her bed a makeshift reading desk as she tried to ponder a way forward for the next day’s interview.

‘They won’t let me see my file,’ the man’s voice answers.

‘That’s standard procedure.’

‘So … what’s in it?’

‘There are records from the trial. From your previous escape attempts. But mostly it’s notes from conversations like these. From talks you’ve had with other people. Some from talks with me.’

‘Fat lot of good they do, any of them.’ Joseph’s voice is disgusted.

‘There’s also biographical data about your life.’

Four seconds of silence. Joseph’s voice is vaguely confused, vaguely annoyed when it returns. Pauline now leans towards the recorder again, eager to relive every sound from the tensest moment of that interview.

‘It can’t be complete,’ he says. ‘My file, my details. I haven’t told them everything. I thought that’s why we were here. You want to drag the rest out of me.’

‘It is. But some things aren’t buried away inside.’ There is a soothing compassion to her voice, now. The balance between firmness and tenderness at this moment was critical. ‘Some things can be checked on externally.’

The cassette almost manages to capture her slow draw of breath before her next words.

‘Joseph, I know you don’t want to hear this. Especially after all you’ve just recounted, I know it’s going to be hard to hear it again.’

His breathing audibly deepens on the recording, as if he’s steeling himself for something.

‘You didn’t kill your wife,’ Pauline repeats.

‘Screw you! This again! How would you know?’ Pure rage is captured in the magnetic reverberations. ‘I’ve never told anyone what I did! I’ve always passed it off as someone else’s crime. But you told me you wanted me to be honest!’

‘And I do.’

‘Then – dammit. I just opened up to you! It’s you who’s the liar. A liar and a hypocrite.’

The sound of another chair bending under a repositioning of body weight. It comes from the right speaker, the one on the side of Pauline’s voice.

‘I want you to be honest with me, Joseph. Honest enough to admit that you did not kill your wife.’

‘Damn you! I told you yesterday that I di—’

‘I want you to be honest enough’, her voice breaks through his, ‘to admit that you’ve never been married, Joseph. That you never had a wife at all.’