Quarter Square

by David Bridger

  But Dawson still wasn’t ready to tell me. He took me back to my verbal account and examined it. He walked me through everything I’d said so far, taking each small section in turn and encouraging me to remember more and more about it before moving on to study the next segment.

  He was making me commit further and further to my story and manoeuvring me into spaces where I would have to invent things on the spot if what I was saying had been concocted: inventions I would have to remember accurately when he reexamined me. He was calm and meticulous, like a surgeon, cutting deeper and deeper.

  My main difficulty was keeping the insiders out of the picture. I managed to do it, but I suspected these lies of omission were making me look guilty, so I compensated by talking in great detail about my dealings with builder’s merchants and subcontractors.

  “I bought a lot of stuff in Plymouth last week, and all the credit-card receipts are in my wallet. They’ll prove I was where I say I was. Take a look at them.”

  “We will.”

  Explaining my whereabouts during Flo’s funeral gave me the most trouble. I’d lost track at the time, but that took place on Saturday, and this was Monday. Still Monday. It had been a very long day.

  Anyhow, I hadn’t seen anyone on the outside from Friday evening until Sunday morning and had no receipts to cover that thirty-hour period. The fact that I was being interviewed in Islington told me the murders must have occurred there, and thirty hours would have been long enough for me to get from Plymouth to London, kill them both and return to Plymouth. The time gap worried me.

  Strangely, though, Dawson didn’t probe that weakness. He allowed me to explain it away as time spent working alone in the theatre. From that I assumed the murders must have occurred before then. Thursday night, perhaps. However, I was tired, my head was buzzing from two hours of interrogation and I didn’t trust my powers of deduction.

  Dawson pulled a slim folder from his file and rested his fingertips lightly upon it. “We want to talk to a Plymouth man of about your age and height, but thinner. Wears dark clothing in a rather theatrical style. He has longish black hair and a little Vandyke beard. Sound like anyone you might know?”

  Shit. I shook my head. “No one I can think of.”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar?” He pursed his lips and shook his head too, as if sympathising and trying to jog my memory.

  “No.”

  “That’s odd.” He slipped a glossy ten-by-eight photograph from the folder, placed it on the desk and announced an evidence number for the tape.

  It was a good-quality shot of Will and me outside the theatre. I had him pinned against the wall and was threatening him with my raised fist. Both our faces were visible. There could be no doubt about our identities.

  “Oh, him.” My mind raced through various possibilities.

  “Yes, him.” Dawson raised his eyebrows, waiting for whatever I came up with.

  “He’s a nuisance who heard I was taking people on and keeps pestering me for work. I needed a couple of tradesmen and found the ones I want. He has no skills anyway. Eventually he got a bit nasty—” I nodded at the photo, “—so I told him to back off.”

  “So this is another example of you not having a temper, is it?”

  I sighed. “Look. Things took a nosedive last week, and yes, maybe I’ve been more touchy than usual. Surely that’s understandable. No?”

  The detectives turned to each other wordlessly. They didn’t buy it.

  Tough. I’d chosen my story, and now I’d have to stick with it.

  Dawson produced another folder and announced its evidence number. “You asked what happened to Carole and Tony.” He opened the folder. “This is what happened.”

  I stared down at two photographs of carnage. Carole’s and Tony’s naked bodies lay torn apart in the master bedroom of our old home. There was blood everywhere. Blood and guts and flaps of skin and clumps of hair. Everywhere. The bodies were unrecognisable, but that was definitely our bedroom, and the police were telling me it was Carole and Tony.

  I couldn’t take in the horror. Couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My heart thumped massively, and my mind rebelled. I shoved my chair away from the desk, from the photographs.

  Dawson’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear anything other than the blood drumming in my ears. He and Smith studied me while I reeled from the shock. It took me a while to get my thoughts in order. I sipped a glass of water and focused on Dawson to keep my gaze away from the photographs.

  “I didn’t do this. I couldn’t do this. Please, hurry up and find a way to know I didn’t do this, so you can start looking for whoever did.”

  Chapter Six

  “Okay,” Smith said. “Help us to help you. Tell us about you and Carole.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. How long have you been married?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “Why do you think that happened between Carole and Tony?”

  “I think you’re asking the wrong person.”

  “But we can’t ask them. Why do you think it happened when it did?”

  That one was easier. “I changed jobs a year ago. Neither of them was very keen about it. In fact, that’s an understatement. My whole family thought I was having some kind of breakdown.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Carole and my parents. And Tony, I suppose.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Florida. When I left the firm last year, Dad sold up in disgust, and they took early retirement.”

  “You don’t get on?”

  “We share a mutual disappointment.”

  “You’re a self-employed builder, aren’t you?”

  “Carpenter.”

  “What was your old job?”

  “Chartered surveyor.”

  “That’s quite a downsize. So were they all correct? Were you having a breakdown?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Joe,” she urged. “Stop making me drag this out of you like I’m drawing teeth. You said you wanted to help.”

  “Okay.” I sat forward. “This is how it was. Carole and I met at university. We were both studying maths for our first degrees, although with different careers in mind. I was planning to join my father as junior partner, and she was heading to the city.”

  I smiled in memory of her fierce ambition.

  “She worked hard and was very good at her job. It involved project management, hiring and firing, with quite a big team under her. She was always busy and well regarded in the industry. Headhunters stalked her all the time.”

  “Firing?” Smith interrupted. “Did she do much of that?”

  “Not individually, I don’t think, but her last project was working out how to run the business with fewer people, which meant redundancies.”

  “Did she ever mention any names to you? Anyone who might have felt hard done by?”

  “No.” I couldn’t remember a single name from Carole’s work. What did that say about me? “Sorry.”

  “No problem. We’ll ask her colleagues. Carry on.”

  That was an interesting angle. I tried to remember what I’d been about to say. “Well, she was a go-getter basically, and she always expected me to go-get too. I played the game for as long as I could, but even by the time we got married, straight out of university, my plan was to get out of surveying eventually. I had this dream of working with wood, turning my hobby into a business and being my own boss.

  “It wasn’t a secret. Carole knew all about the dream. But apparently she never thought I’d do it. She was shocked when I said I was actually going to leave the job.”

  I flashed back to that bloody awful family dinner with Carole announcing my intention before I was ready and everyone shouting at me as if I were a difficult child.

  “She really worked on me. They all did—her and my parents and Tony—but I just put my head down and carried on. It was stormy as hell at first, but once they realised how determined I was, t
he rows stopped. Even then I knew they were talking about me behind my back, and I was okay with that. I understood. They expected my new business to fail within the first few months, but I was doing something I loved, and it worked out okay for me.”

  I looked back and forth between Dawson and Smith. “That’s it. I don’t know what more I can tell you.”

  “So money isn’t important to you?” Dawson asked.

  “I need it to live, the same as everyone does.”

  “But you’re not a greedy man?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “It’s plain luck, then, that you’ve ended up owning an expensive house in Islington and a theatre in Plymouth?”

  Bloody hell, though. He was right.

  Smith was doodling on a pad. She stopped and looked up. “How did you feel when you found Carole and Tony having sex?”

  “I was pissed off.”

  But that wasn’t the whole story. I thought of that lonely night on the stage floor only a few days ago and recalled my emotions. I mean, I’d found my wife in bed with my best friend, and what concerned me most was: how could she think I’d hit her?

  Not why was she doing my friend?

  Not how could Tony do that to me?

  Not even why were they being careless enough to get caught?

  No, what I wondered was how come she didn’t know me better? When it was pretty clear from the circumstances that I’d been missing a few things about her. And about Tony.

  I remembered my numbness when I’d realised the part of my life that included Carole and Tony was over. But it hadn’t broken my heart the way I might have expected it to. Considering my immediate attraction to Min, I had to question whether I’d ever really loved Carole.

  “I was hurt and pissed off with them both. They were the two people I trusted most in the world, and they betrayed me. They should have told me what was going on.”

  “Tell me about Tony,” Dawson said.

  “He was a wheeling-dealing property developer.” I smiled as I heard the job description in Tony’s voice. “Always on the lookout for a good deal. I expect he could be ruthless in business life, but I never saw that part of his character. We were best mates ever since school. Like brothers.” I shook my head. “I didn’t think he even liked Carole.”

  They watched me in silence for several seconds. Then Dawson called a break. It was seven o’clock. We’d been going at it hard for two hours, and my head buzzed.

  They left me in the interview room, and the silent policeman came back to stand by the door. He brought me a cup of tea, which I sipped while waiting for them to return. Too much sugar. It made my teeth itch.

  When they bustled back in, Smith switched on the tape, and Dawson got straight down to business.

  “Tell me how you got blood on your jeans and shoes.”

  I thought immediately of the fight outside the theatre, and Will and Danny dragging me inside before the police arrived.

  I kept my features blank. “I have no idea. It could be anyone’s blood, from any time. I’ve worked all over London in the past year, including a couple of months on building sites. People get injured. How much blood?”

  “Tiny specks. But it’s blood, all right.”

  “Look. It’s not my blood or Carole’s or Tony’s. I know it, and you know it. I don’t know whose blood it is, and to be honest I don’t know where we’re going with this.”

  Dawson gave a single nod. “We’ll talk again tomorrow.”

  The uniformed policeman took me back to my cell, locked the door, and they left me alone for the night.

  Sitting at my writing table, I enjoy the moon shadows cast through the many-paned window at my back and study the fountain pen in my marbled hand. Will there be any more words for me? I don’t know. I’ve written millions of them during my long life of loneliness, and I’m tired, but contentedly so. Colleagues are urging me to retire and enjoy my model making, and the idea is becoming more attractive by the day. I have almost made that decision, and now it is time for another one: what to cook for dinner this evening? The moonlight is blotted out, and the window smashes. Glass showers everywhere, and I turn to glimpse a huge shape reaching for me.

  My lover and I roll around on a thickly carpeted floor, beating each other with velvet cushions and giggling like naughty children. She pulls me closer and lifts her face for a kiss. She is Min.

  Walking along the road from my childhood home towards school, I pass the place where my lion watches me, and it feels good. Safe. I don’t look over my shoulder, but I trust him to be there. His quiet courage fills me.

  I hadn’t expected to sleep, but I woke at dawn in a much calmer place. The numbness and sadness about what had happened to Carole and Tony remained, but I trusted I would be cleared, and I looked forward to going home to Quarter Square.

  After bacon and scrambled eggs in my cell, I was taken back to the interview room, where Dawson and Smith were waiting, and the interrogation recommenced.

  They took me back over my movements during the week and checked my story with the version I’d provided last night. Their demeanour had changed, and I hoped that meant they believed me.

  When two quiet taps sounded behind the detectives’ heads, as if someone had tapped a coin lightly against the darkened glass, Dawson announced a refreshment break, and the detectives left the room.

  Dawson returned after the break, but without Smith. In her place was a tall man with a stern, forbidding, craggy face. They sat down, and oozing authority, the stranger introduced himself as Sebastian Merritt from the Home Office. I glanced at the tape recorder, which nobody had turned on, then at Dawson. The detective’s face remained blank.

  “Let’s talk about people you know,” Merritt said. “Tell me about your family and friends.”

  “Carole and my parents are my only family.”

  “We spoke with Carole’s mother and father. Do you keep in touch with them?”

  “Not unless I have to.”

  “They don’t have a very high opinion of you.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I don’t care. They thought Carole was marrying down. I think they’re ridiculous snobs. That’s it.”

  “What about friends?”

  “Mine?”

  He nodded.

  “There was Tony. He and I had lots of other friends and acquaintances, but mainly it was the two of us.”

  “How about colleagues at work? Bosses and staff. Just tell me about everyone you can think of.”

  I didn’t know where he was going with this, but I did what he wanted as best I could. I told him about colleagues and acquaintances, workmates from my old job and contacts in my current one. I told him about local shopkeepers and neighbours and everyone else I could think of.

  “Might anyone harbour a grudge against Carole or Tony? Or against you maybe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Search your memory. Can you think of any strange people or events in the recent past or further back?”

  I tried, but I honestly couldn’t come up with anything.

  Merritt’s disapproval was evident. He walked from the room without a word of warning or goodbye to either me or Dawson.

  Smith returned immediately, and the detectives turned the tape back on to wind up the interview.

  At eleven o’clock they released me, and I walked from the station, free. I wasn’t allowed inside our old home—the crime scene—and had been told to let the police know if I planned to be anywhere other than Plymouth in the foreseeable future.

  On my way to the house I remembered Dawson’s remark about my owning it all now. When Carole’s life insurance paid up, it would clear the mortgage on this place and I would own it outright, as well as the theatre in Plymouth. Other than providing renovation cash for the theatre through its sale, though, I wasn’t interested.

  Without even looking through the windows into the house, I collected my van from the driveway
and set off for Plymouth.

  I was under surveillance. The black car that followed me back to the West Country made no attempt to hide.

  Chapter Seven

  I reached Plymouth at four in the afternoon. Twenty-eight hours had passed since my arrest, and I was drained.

  The black car swept past when I pulled up outside the theatre, and I gave its two shadowy occupants a friendly wave as they turned the corner.

  Min, Andrew and several other insiders were sitting in the garden. They’d been worried about my sudden disappearance, and Min stood to hug me.

  They listened to my story about the events in London, and more people arrived as the word spread about my return. I had to repeat everything five or six times, until everyone had heard everything.

  They were concerned, but Min was horrified. As the insiders discussed what I’d told them, and the conversation took on a life of its own without any need for my input, she pulled me to one side.

  We settled in the quiet spot under the tree where she taught the kids, and she made me tell her everything again in the greatest detail.

  “Tell me about all the policemen,” she said when I’d finished.

  “The ones who interviewed me?”

  “Yes. Start with them.”

  I told her about Dawson and Smith. I didn’t know why, but she wanted more, so I described everyone I’d come into contact with since I last saw her: the two Plymouth guys who arrested me and took me up to London; the custody sergeant; the various silent policemen who had fed and guarded me; Merritt…

  “Who?”

  “Some guy called Sebastian Merritt. From the Home Office. Seriously up himself.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  I recalled everything from Merritt’s interrogation. I told her, word for word, what he’d asked and what my answers had been.

  “What does he look like?”