An Unedited Answer

I had imagined asking him the question many times. In none of those imagined conversations had the answer arrived while I was standing beside a mug with somebody else's lipstick on the rim.

“Is he there?” Mum asked quietly.

I nodded. She moved beside me, close enough that her shoulder touched mine, and put her own phone on the table. The emergency operator was still speaking through it. Mum repeated what Finn had said, using the words he had used.

Finn heard her voice.

“Who's with you?”

“My mum.”

“Bea.”

“I'm at home. She's here.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“You are talking to me.”

He breathed hard into the phone. For a moment I thought he would end the call.

Then he said, “It wasn't supposed to happen.”

“What was supposed to happen?”

“He was going to listen.”

I closed my eyes.

“About the form?”

“Yes. The form. The statement. Everything. He had copies. He kept saying I could fix it, like all I had to do was put my hand up and say I'd made a mistake.”

“You could have corrected it.”

“You don't understand.”

“Then tell me.”

The old invitation came out before I could stop it. Tell me enough and I will find the version that makes this manageable. I heard it in my own voice and hated it.

Finn said his father had already told people he had won full support. Finn had let him. When the provisional letter arrived, he had shown the first page and kept the financial conditions folded behind it. He had used his grandmother's address because the income figure there made the award possible. He had meant to explain it later, or change it later, or do something later. By Friday, later had become Monday, and Rowan was no longer willing to leave it inside that word.

“He said he'd go with me,” Finn said. “As if that made it better.”

“To tell someone?”

“To tell Mum. Or Judith. Whoever I chose. He kept giving me choices I didn't want.”

Mum's hand rested on my back. I could hear her breathing, slow and deliberate, as if she was offering me a rhythm I could borrow.

“Did you ask him to go outside?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because everyone was there. Because he said something about the profile near the office and I thought people could hear. I told him we'd talk by the teaching pool.”

The place had not been an accident. The argument might have been unplanned, the fall unplanned, but Finn had chosen somewhere other people were not.

“What happened on the path?”

“He showed me the page on his phone. The words from your film. He'd found the showcase. He said taking a sentence was one thing, but making up the money was different. He said I knew what those places were meant for.”

“He was right.”

“I know that now.”

“Did you know it then?”

Finn made a small, angry sound.

“Do you want me to say I was a horrible person? Will that help?”

“No. I want you to tell me what happened.”

He was silent long enough for me to hear a vehicle pass near him. Mum gave the operator another description of the location. I watched her write something on the grocery list, then put the pen down.

“I took the phone,” Finn said. “He was going to show Mum. He said he wasn't waiting until Monday if I was just going to keep saying I'd deal with it. I grabbed it. He tried to get it back.”

“And?”

“He called me a liar.”

The sentence came out with a trace of the original offence still in it. Even now, part of him was standing on that path feeling wronged by an accurate word.

“I pushed him away,” he said. “Hard. I was angry. He went backwards, and there wasn't—”

He stopped.

“There wasn't what?”

“The bit of ground I thought there was. The cover was off. He fell.”

Mum's hand tightened against my shoulder.

I looked at the kitchen window. A fly moved along the edge of the glass, meeting the same invisible obstruction again and again.

“Did you go to him?”

“I looked.”

“Did you go down?”

“No.”

“Did you call for help?”

He did not answer.

“Finn.”

“I had his phone in my hand.”

“That isn't an answer.”

“No.”

I turned away from Mum because something hot and enormous had risen in me.

“You had a phone in your hand and you didn't call?”

“I thought—”

“What?”

“I don't know. I thought if someone saw me there, that would be it. They'd think I'd meant it. I could hear the sound check. People were right there, and I couldn't make myself—”

“You could have shouted.”

“I know.”

“You could have opened the door.”

“I know.”

I pressed my fist against my mouth. I wanted to hurt him with the list of ordinary things he had chosen not to do. A door. A voice. A number everyone knew. The distance between the hall and the path had been so small.

Mum touched my arm. Not to silence me. To remind me I was in a kitchen and did not have to go back there with him.

“I can't tell you whether help would have changed what happened,” she said quietly, for me rather than the phone. “We don't know that.”

I nodded, though I could not yet use the distinction. What mattered in that moment was that he had not tried.

Finn was crying now. I could hear him trying to stop, each breath catching before he could make it quiet.

“I took the bag,” he said. “It was by the gate. I didn't think about it properly. I just picked it up.”

“Then you went back inside.”

“Yes.”

“And watched the band.”

“I couldn't stay outside.”

“You stood with us.”

“I know.”

The repetition made me furious. He knew. He knew now. He knew while I was saying it. None of the knowing returned Rowan to the kitchen where Alice was counting buttons.

“What about the message?” I asked.

Finn was quiet.

“The message to his mum.”

“I sent it.”

“From his phone.”

“Yes. I knew how to unlock it. He'd lent it to me before.”

I gripped the edge of the counter so hard that my fingers hurt.

“Why did you call her Mother?”

“I don't know.”

“You knew he didn't talk like that when he was serious.”

“I wasn't thinking about how he talked. I was thinking about what would make people stop looking at the centre.”

There it was, without the softer words he had been using. He had wanted the search to move away from where Rowan lay.

“The coach?”

“After the first set. I took the bag to the stop. There were people getting on. I left it on a seat and got off before it went.”

“You knew what was in it.”

“Yes.”

“The blue headphones.”

He gave no answer, but he did not need to. The detail from that first awful Saturday found its place, not as a brilliant clue I had solved, but as something he had let slip while pretending to help us look.

I could hear Mum speaking to the operator again. An officer was close to the centre. She asked me to keep Finn on the line if I could, but not to promise him anything or go anywhere myself.

“Stay by the gate,” I told him. “Don't move into the yard.”

“I can't get in anyway.”

“Then stay where you are.”

“Are they coming?”

“Yes.”

He inhaled sharply.

“You called them.”

“Yes.”

“I asked you—”

“You asked me to listen. I listened.”

For a few seconds I thought he would run again. I heard gravel shift under his shoes. Then the rattling stopped.

“The jacket,” he said. “I borrowed it because I thought there'd be dust outside. That's what I told myself. I don't know if that's why I did it. Sam had taken it off. It was on the hook.”

“Val thought he saw Sam.”

“I know.”

“And you let him.”

“I didn't tell him to say that.”

“You let him.”

Finn began to answer, then stopped.

“Yes.”

The word was almost lost in the wind.

“Why did you cover the gold wristband?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Gold meant you could go through the office. I thought someone might remember it. I couldn't get it off, so I put another one over it.”

Such a small, deliberate thing. A black strip over something that was still there.

“The cards?” I asked.

“I took the wallet out when we were sorting the crate. After your photograph. I remembered the camera had been running. I didn't know what it had got. The passage, voices, me going through. I kept thinking there'd be something.”

“So you kept it.”

“Yes. I recorded over part of one card. Then I stopped. I thought you might already have it all. I didn't know what was on your laptop.”

“You kept telling me to wait for the hire shop.”

“I know.”

I shut my eyes again. There had been days in which he could have returned it. Days in which he could have said Rowan was not on a coach. Days in which Denise had asked people whether her son might be somewhere too frightened to call home.

“Where's his phone?”

“At Nan's. In a blue plastic box upstairs. I put it with some papers. I was going to get rid of it and then I couldn't make myself touch it again.”

Mum repeated the location to the operator. I heard her voice shake for the first time.

A man's voice sounded near Finn, distant but clear enough for me to recognise that he was addressing him.

Finn did not answer immediately.

“Bee?”

“I'm here.”

“Do you think I meant to kill him?”

I looked at Mum. She shook her head very slightly, not giving me an answer, reminding me I did not have to supply one.

“I don't know what was in your head,” I said. “You have to tell them what you did.”

“He was my friend.”

The words hurt more than a denial would have.

“Yes,” I said. “He was.”

The other voice came closer. Finn was asked to put the phone down and show his hands. He said something I could not hear, then the call changed to a dull rubbing sound.

I waited until a new voice came through. An officer identified himself, asked who I was and confirmed my location. Mum answered the practical questions when I could not.

Then the call ended.

I stood holding the phone after the screen went dark.

Mum took it gently from my hand and put it on the table. I bent over the sink and was sick without warning. There was not much in my stomach. My whole body seemed determined to remove something anyway.

She held my hair back and said my name, nothing else.

When I could stand, she brought a chair to the sink because I did not want to walk to the table. I sat with a glass of water between my hands while she called Adebayo's office and then Caroline Dunn. She asked that Rowan's family be informed through the proper people before anything reached the news. She did not ring Denise herself to deliver a version of what she had just heard.

Sam came home while Mum was on the phone. He saw my face and stopped in the doorway.

“They found him?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Finn?”

“Yes.”

He sat on the floor beside my chair because there was no space for another one. He did not ask what had been said until Mum was finished speaking.

I gave the police my account that evening. They asked me to go through the call from the beginning, to separate what I remembered exactly from what I could only summarise. Mum gave her own account of what she had heard. There were other records, other officers, the emergency call. It did not rest on my memory alone.

By the time they left, I felt scraped out.

Imani sent a message asking whether I wanted company. I wrote that I could not talk yet.

She replied: You don't have to. I'm here tomorrow too.

I put the phone down.

Upstairs, the landing light came on when I pressed the switch. Sam had finally replaced the missing bulb. It was too bright, showing dust on the skirting board and the edge of a patch we had never repainted.

I stood under it for a moment, then went to bed.