by Ivo Stourton
More dangerous to Oates than this conscious corruption was the unconscious drive to confirm a cherished hypothesis, and it was amazing how, after the initial interview and the first solid decision on the credibility of a confession, the facts that militated against the suspect’s guilt moved meekly to the edge of the mind, whilst those which supported it clamoured for attention. In part it was the simple fact that if a confession was thought to be genuine, effort and attention drained away from the case through a thousand little channels, official and unofficial, as man hours were scaled back and corners cut, and as the next unsolved crime obtruded.
But none of these factors alone could explain the overwhelming significance of the initial decision. It was the pull of the explicable that sealed the deal. The commission of a crime created a gap in the narrative logic of the world, which could only be filled by the apprehension of the criminal. Computer games, TV shows, films and comics had trudged over and over along the same path, wearing the psychic groove so deep that real events were now expected to flow down those channels as naturally as rain water finding its way from the rooftops into the sewers. A believable confession fulfilled that need. If you got the first interview wrong, it was a big thing to derail the train of a moving narrative.
Oates had one superstition, brought back with him from the desert. He didn’t like to think of himself as a credulous man, and he told himself that he believed in it only as a fate placebo. Still, he had never gone into battle without performing it first.
When Mike was born, and the doctor with his controlled urgency demanded a c-section, he had to sneak off to the toilets to perform the ritual, because the sight of it drove Lori mad. She was jealous of it because it predated her knowledge of him. She was jealous of the man he had been before she met him, as if the younger version of himself had been her love rival. In a sense, Oates knew, she was right. He cherished that earlier incarnation of himself, the young man with a flat stomach and a good left hook who had felt the rush of battle in the desert. The taste of the old cigarette, so different from its modern incarnation, brought it back. Sometimes, he even thought about stealing away, doing a bunk with his former self, the two of them running off to some foreign warzone.
Lori was the same with his army buddies. She was always hospitable, bringing them beers from the fridge when they had their poker nights, but some time after they had gone home he would find himself quarrelling with her about something apparently unconnected, about his leaving the scum of his stubble in the sink, or the cash he spent on booze, or the hours he worked.
The cumulative effect of this over the years had been the slow separation of Oates from his old comrades, as Lori levied these scenes of domestic disharmony as the cost of every reunion. The strange thing was that Lori was not a nag, there was nothing further from her nature, and he could see that she loathed herself during these arguments, and cast about in vain for the cause of her frustration. If you’d asked her whether she wanted Oates to keep up with his army mates, she would say yes, of course, and she would mean it too. But every time the occasion arose, she would make it more difficult, and hate herself all the while.
He couldn’t help her because he felt no equivalent. She was ten years younger than him, and he didn’t get the sense with her that she had ever been a different person from the one she was today. Perhaps he had taken her too young; the thought had nipped his heels right up to the day of his wedding, but he had resolved when he made his vows to compensate by never making her regret her choice. And he didn’t think she ever had, with the possible exception of that single night when they got the call about Anna. He recoiled from the thought, and set about his ritual.
There had been nothing in the pockets of the suit they gave him, and he had borrowed an old-fashioned fifty pence piece from one of the groundskeepers. He flipped it until he got three heads in a row. It took him thirty tries. It was a good thing he didn’t believe in luck, because the last time it had taken that many the Mastiff he was travelling in had been ambushed in a narrow alley with adobe walls outside Damascus, and one of his friends had gone home flag-wrapped in the Hercules’s hold.
ALI FAROOZ WAS staring at the floor. He stood up and retreated from the table when Oates entered the room, and Oates judged he was the right height and weight for the murderer. He was heavy set, with the same big build as the victim. He was wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of blue trousers in a pared down version of the groundsmen’s uniform, and there were dark patches under his arms. He had been in the room long enough for the air to carry the smell of his unwashed body. Oates did not look at him, but instead set out his papers and a Dictaphone on the desk.
They had offered Ali a lawyer, but he had refused. The clichéd pattern for an Eddy was the nervous black teenager and the ageing white lawyer with a hand on his shoulder, some experienced criminal brief employed by the same man as the Eddy to keep an eye on him, cautioning him not to speak when he risked revealing his ignorance of the details of the crime.
“Smoke?” Oates asked him.
Ali was now standing by the barred window. “I don’t smoke.”
Oates shrugged, and went to put the packet back in his pocket, leaving an unlit cigarette pursed between his lips.
“And I would prefer it also if you did not smoke, Inspector,” Farooz blurted out.
When he heard this Oates was ready to show him who was in charge, but looking at Ali changed his mind. His expression was proud, but hopeless. The man was not trying to cheek him. He was simply trying to keep his dignity in this barred place, where he had been waiting for hours. Oates shrugged, and put the cigarette back in the packet. He gestured for Ali to sit down.
Oates had over the years built a shrewd estimation of his own effect on people, and he knew that his silent presence was a powerful lever on closed lips. He sat in front of Ali Farooz waiting for him to speak, to ask what would happen next or whether they were going to charge him. They sat like that without exchanging a word for almost a minute until the policeman himself became uncomfortable with the silence. It wasn’t that Ali was playing the hard man, or staring him out. He simply had the look of a man who doubted that speaking could do him any good.
His failure to ask anything about the case seemed to Oates to betoken a simple lack of interest. It was something he had seen on the faces of black mercenaries in Arab Africa. You would never see it on the face of a man raised in the UK, black or white – the British had too much faith in their rights to be truly terrified of the police, and too much of a conviction of their own significance to accept that their feelings and actions might have no effect. The Nigerians and Somalis Oates had captured in the desert had, through the sheer hardship of their lives, gained an indifference to their fate that made them fierce fighters and docile captives.
It was this realisation which made him say, not unkindly, “You’re a long way from home, eh?”
“I live in the staff accommodation just outside River Tunnel 1.”
“But you were born in Kenya?”
“I was born there, yes.”
“No family out there?”
He shook his head.
“For the tape, please.”
“No I have no family in Kenya or here or anywhere else.”
“You’ve been in the UK for five years, two years as an illegal, three under the amnesty.”
“That is correct.”
“You have no record. No previous arrests. Do you have any kind of police record in Kenya?”
“No. This was confirmed most vigorously at the time of the amnesty.”
“What did you do in Kenya?”
“I was training to be a doctor.”
“And you were involved with a dissident political organisation?”
Oates avoided using the name which had been given on the file, which he could not work out how to pronounce.
“Yes. It was for this I had to leave.”
“What were your lot then? Islamists?”
“I am Christian.”<
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“Socialists?”
Ali at first shook his head, then shrugged and nodded. Oates guessed he had been about to describe in detail how his personal political credo differed from socialism, and had decided at the last minute either that he couldn’t be bothered, or that such theoretical niceties would go over the head of his interrogator. Either way, Oates, who had been called more things in interview rooms than a referee at a football match, felt oddly slighted.
“For the tape, suspect is nodding. That’s pretty brave. Would you say you were a man of principle?”
Ali glanced up, sensing both an edge of sarcasm and an impending trap.
“What do you mean by this?”
“Well, you’ve never been in trouble with the police before.”
“Never.”
“And you believe in something so much you get chased into exile. You don’t seem like a very likely killer.”
“I hate them. I hate them all so much.”
“Who do you hate?”
“All these, the new-young.”
“Why do you hate them?”
“You tell me why they should live forever, when I have to die.”
Ali’s voice, which up to this time was inflected with the careful civility of a man trying to pass through foreign customs into a country he does not respect, was suddenly filled with such venom that Oates sat back in his seat.
“You tell me, mister. You tell me that and I will say I am sorry for what I did.”
“So why did you come to work here, if you hate the new-young so much?”
He shrugged. “Everybody hates his job.”
“Okay. So, you hate the new-young, but you come here looking for work, because everybody hates their jobs. Then one night you see Mr...” Oates pretended to flip through the pages of his notebook.
“Mr Egwu,” Ali said, not too quickly.
“Mr Egwu, thank you. You see Mr Egwu and you stab him to death. Had you seen him before you decided to murder him?”
Ali nodded.
“When?”
“I see him yesterday afternoon.”
“Just that one time?”
He nodded again.
“Where did you meet him?”
“In the carpark.”
“Did you fight with him? Argue?”
He shook his head.
“But you decided to kill him. Do you think that was a surprising decision?”
“It was not a decision. It was just something I did.”
“Mr Egwu suffered an extremely violent attack. He has over thirty stab wounds to his arms and chest. I would imagine it’s quite difficult to do something like that.”
Ali shrugged again, but he did not look away. “I told you, I hate all of them.”
“Why Mr Egwu, and not someone else?”
Ali sat silently, and for a moment Oates thought he might have shut up shop. Then he said: “He had this snake skin case. I help him carry it in. We don’t have people to carry stuff here you know, you bring your own stuff, because they don’t have people to carry things at real school. Most expensive place to stay in the whole country, the whole world maybe, and you carry your own damn things! But he calls over to me as I am crossing the carpark, and he says, ‘Would you mind giving me a hand?’, only it’s not a question, you see? So I say I am not allowed, but he says I should do it now. I say I will get in trouble if I do this, and he say I will get in trouble if I do not, and he will pay me. So I help him take it up, it is very heavy. I hurt my hand on the railing on the stairs. All the time I catch him staring at me. We come to his room at last, and I am looking at the case, and he asks me if I like it. And I ask him what is it, and he says it is real snakeskin. And he runs his hand over it, like this, but I don’t say anything. Then I think he was angry and he gives me five pounds. But it is an old five pound note, they only use them in the school. I cannot buy food and things with this. So I ask him for real money, and he tells me they take all his real money at the gate. I know this so I say he can give me the key to his locker and I will take some, just as much as he says I can take, and he tells me to get out now.”
“What time was this?”
“About six thirty, because I am heading for my shift in the kitchen.”
“Okay. And what did you do after that?”
“I go and I serve the students supper in hall. I think I will calm down but I do not. I think that there cannot be many snakes like this one left in the world, and this man, he paid someone to kill one of them for him. The snake needs his skin, but this man wants it, so he takes it, and he gives me a five pound note which I cannot use, because only the guests are allowed in the shops in the school.”
“What time did you finish work?”
“The hall closed at nine o’clock, and we have clean-up after. I thought I would get calm. I say to me it is not so much to cry about, but I just get more and more angry, thinking about it. Miss Swatch, my boss, she says to me that if I break any of the dishes then the costs comes out of my wages, because I slammed the washer shut.”
Ali stared at him. Oates could sense that he expected him to make a note of this, and to follow up later with Ali’s supervisor to check if it was true. He put his pen down on the desk.
“Prudence Egwu was attacked in the early hours of this morning. What did you do between the end of your shift and the assault?”
“I sat in my room.”
“And what did you do after you killed him?”
“I put my overalls in the incinerator in the basement of the science block. And I take a long shower,” Ali spread out his clean hands for Oates to see, splaying the pale palms.
OATES RAN HIM through the details of the evening several times, asking him the same things in slightly different ways. His story never changed, but it had the suppleness of memory, adjusting to accommodate his interrogator’s variations. After two and a half hours, Oates went to take a break. The eastern edge of the night sky was tinged with the dawn. He stood outside and played bits of the interview back on the old-fashioned Dictaphone they had given him. If he was an Eddy, he was a bloody good one. A bad Eddy tended to give himself away by not knowing the crime in sufficient detail, and a better one by presenting a story that fit together too neatly, without the roughness of a thing hewn from nature.
Often they were too keen to explain their motives; Oates had found that with real crimes, the guilty party only had a slightly better idea of their rationale than the interviewing officer. He looked at me funny; she shouldn’t have called me that; I was bored. Those were the reasons underpinning the most violent crimes he had ever encountered. Ali’s story had practical consistency, with just the right touch of the inexplicable. Maybe for once it was as simple as it looked, and they had the guilty man. Oates and the idea stood side by side in silence, smoking together in the still of the night, and by the time the cigarette was down to the filter they were starting to trust one another.
Oates brought Ali the statement to read and sign. He didn’t ask him if he needed someone to help him read it, as he didn’t want to insult him. When Ali was finished reading, Oates gave him a biro. Ali took the pen from him, and for a second he held it like a poor man holding a strange piece of cutlery in a fancy restaurant, unsure of what to do with it and unwilling to ask. He leant down, put his left hand on the paper to hold it steady, and signed his name. Oates picked up the paper and blew on the signature. As he did so, he felt his nose twitch. Ali seemed to him an educated man, and had been a university student. The signature looked like the work of an illiterate.
Oates took the signed confession with him to the ops room where he found Bhupinder arranging interviews with Prudence Egwu’s neighbors. Having promised that each student could give his statement in the presence of a member of staff, and most of those students having reflexively insisted on independent representation, the coordination of so many people was proving a nightmare. Even when an interview had been organised, the guests made curiously unhelpful witnesses. Something in the atmo
sphere of the spa induced in them the sullenness, shyness or unhelpful enthusiasm that the teenagers they were playing might have felt. He waited until his second in command had finished placating an irate company lawyer who had been woken in the early hours of the morning to attend an interview with his CEO.
“You said you’d found his diary. Can I have a look?”
“Course. There’s hundreds of the bloody things. He’s recorded every single thing he’s done since he came to this country. I swear, I’ve just read about him having a shit.”
Oates looked at the stack of diaries, and for once it seemed that Bhupinder was not exaggerating. There were piles upon piles of spiral bound notebooks, at least a hundred in total. If it was confined to real incidents, the biography of the most exciting man alive would not have covered so many, and as Ali was unlikely to have carried any with him from Kenya, the books must deal with a period of no more than five years. Oates plucked one from the top of the stack, and read a sentence at random… my jeans with the second button missing on the fly, and my shirt. The stain is still quite visible on the sleeve, but the button which I re-attached to the cuff is quite firmly in place, which is a good thing…
Although the substance was a little bizarre in its mundanity, it was the form that interested him. Word upon word of dutiful detail marched in neat little ranks from one margin to the next. Oates got the impression in reading it that there was still some ghostly schoolteacher looking over Ali’s shoulder as he wrote, thinking nothing of the content but ready to rap his knuckles with a ruler at the first sign of an inksplodge. It was impossible to connect the neat hand of that journal with the shaky signature hanging around looking shifty at the bottom of the typed confession.
Oates took a scrap of paper, and held a pen in his own left hand. He tried to sign his name, holding the paper steady with his dominant right. The resulting scrawl looked close to Ali’s john hancock.