Suspect

by Michael Robotham

  “SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”

  Bobby rocks back and forth on the edge of the chair. His mouth has gone slack and he’s no longer focused on me. I’m almost there. My fingers are in the cracks of his psyche. A single affirmation, no matter how small, will be enough for me to lever his defenses open. But I’m running out of story. I don’t have all the pieces. I risk losing him if I overreach.

  “Who was she, Bobby? Was her name Catherine McBride? I know that you knew her. Where did you meet? Was it in hospital? There’s no shame in seeking help, Bobby. I know you’ve been evaluated before. Was Catherine a patient or a nurse? I think she was a patient.”

  Bobby pinches the bridge of his nose, rubbing the spot where his glasses perch. He reaches slowly into his trouser pocket and I suddenly feel a twinge of doubt. His fingers are searching for something. He has eighty pounds and twenty years on me. The door is on the far side of the room. I won’t reach it before he does.

  His hand emerges. I’m staring at it, transfixed. He is holding a white handkerchief, which he unfolds and lays in his lap. Then he takes off his glasses and slowly cleans each lens, rubbing the cloth between his thumb and forefinger. Maybe this slow-motion ritual is buying him time.

  He raises the glasses to the light, checking for any smudges. Then he looks past them and stares directly at me. “Do you make up this crap as you go along, or did you spend all weekend coming up with it?”

  The pressure is dispelled like air leaking from a punctured raft. I have overplayed my hand. I want to ask Bobby where I went wrong, but he’s not going to tell me. A poker player doesn’t explain why he calls a bluff. I must have been near the mark, but that’s a lot like NASA saying its Mars Polar Lander achieved its target because it crashed and went missing on the right planet.

  Bobby’s faith in me has been shaken. He also knows that I’m frightened of him, which is not a good basis for a clinical relationship. What in God’s name was I thinking? I’ve wound him up like a clockwork toy and now I have to let him loose.

  19

  The white Audi cruises along Elgin Avenue, in Maida Vale, slowing as it passes me. I continue limping along the pavement, my tennis racket under one arm and a bruise the size of a grapefruit on my right thigh. Ruiz is behind the wheel. He looks like a man who is willing to follow me all the way home at four miles an hour.

  I stop and turn toward him. He leans over to open the front passenger door. “What happened to you?”

  “A sporting injury.”

  “I didn’t think tennis was that dangerous.”

  “You haven’t played against my mate.”

  I get in beside him. The car smells of stale tobacco and apple-scented air freshener. Ruiz does a U-turn and heads west.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The scene of the crime.”

  I don’t ask why. Everything about his demeanor says I don’t have a choice. The temperature has fallen to just above freezing and a mist blurs the streetlights. Colored lights are blinking in windows and plastic wreaths of holly decorate front doors.

  We drive along Harrow Road and turn into Scrubs Lane. After less than half a mile the lane rises and falls over Mitre Bridge where it crosses the Grand Union Canal and the Paddington rail lines. Ruiz pulls over and the engine dies. He gets out of the car and waits for me to do the same. The doors centrally lock as he walks away, expecting me to follow. My thigh is still stiff from Jock’s well-aimed smash. I rub it gingerly and limp along the road toward the bridge.

  Ruiz has stopped at a wire cyclone fence. Grabbing hold of a metal post he swings himself upward onto a stone wall flanking the bridge. Using the same post, he lets himself down the other side. He turns and waits for me.

  The towpath is deserted and the nearby buildings are dark and empty. It feels a lot later than it is—like the early hours of the morning, when the world always seems much lonelier and beds much warmer.

  Ruiz is walking ahead of me with his hands buried in his coat pockets and his head down. He seems full of pent-up rage. After about five hundred yards the railway tracks appear to our right. Maintenance sheds are silhouetted against the residual light. Rolling stock sits idle in a freight yard.

  With barely any warning a train roars past. The sound bounces off the tin sheds and the brick walls of the canal, until it seems as though we’re standing in a tunnel.

  Ruiz has stopped suddenly on the path. I almost run into him.

  “Recognize anything?”

  I know exactly where we are. Instead of feeling horror or sadness, my only emotion is anger. It’s late; I’m cold; and more than anything else I’m tired of Ruiz’s snide glances and raised eyebrows. If he has something to say, get it over with and let me go home.

  Ruiz raises his arm and for a moment I think he’s going to strike me.

  “Look over there. Follow the edge of the building down.”

  I trace the path of his outstretched hand and see the wall. A darker strip in the foreground must be the ditch where they found her body. Looking over his left shoulder, I see the silhouettes of the trees and the headstones of Kensal Green Cemetery.

  “Why am I here?” I ask, feeling empty inside.

  “Use you’re imagination—you’re good at that.”

  He’s angry and for some reason I’m to blame. I don’t often meet someone with his intensity—apart from obsessive-compulsives. I used to know guys like him at school; kids who were so ferociously determined to prove they were tough that they never stopped fighting. They had too much to prove and not enough time to prove it.

  “Why am I here?” I ask again.

  “Because I have some questions for you.” He doesn’t look at me. “And I want to tell you some things about Bobby Moran . . .”

  “I can’t talk about my patients.”

  “You just have to listen.” He rocks from foot to foot. “Take my word for it—you’ll find it fascinating.” He walks two paces toward the canal and spits into the water. “Bobby Moran has no girlfriend or fiancée called Arky. He lives in a boarding house in north London, with a bunch of asylum seekers waiting for council housing. He’s unemployed and hasn’t worked for nearly two years. There is no such company as Nevaspring—not a registered one at any rate.

  “His father was never in the air force—as a mechanic, a pilot, or anything else. Bobby grew up in Liverpool, not London. Since leaving school he’s had part-time jobs and for a while worked as a volunteer at a sheltered workshop in Lancashire. We found no history of psychiatric illness or hospitalization.”

  Ruiz is pacing back and forth as he talks. His breath condenses in the air and trails after him like he’s a steam engine. “A lot of people had nice things to say about Bobby. He is very neat and tidy according to his landlady. She does his washing and doesn’t remember smelling chloroform on any of his clothes. His old bosses at the shelter called him a ‘big softie.’

  “That’s what I find really strange, Professor. Nothing you said about him is true. I can understand you getting one or two details wrong. We all make mistakes. But it’s as though we’re talking about a completely different person.”

  My voice is hoarse. “It can’t be him.”

  “That’s what I thought. So I checked. Big guy, six foot two, overweight, John Lennon glasses—that’s our boy. Then I wondered why he’d tell all these lies to a shrink who was trying to help him. Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “He’s hiding something.”

  “Maybe. But he didn’t kill Catherine McBride.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “A dozen people at an evening class can verify his whereabouts on the night she disappeared.”

  I don’t have any strength left in my legs.

  “Sometimes I’m pretty slow on the uptake, Prof. My old mum used to say that I was born a day late and never caught up. Truth is, I normally get there in the end. It just takes me a little longer than clever people.” He says it with bitterness rather than triumph.

  “You see, I ask
ed myself why Bobby Moran would make up all these lies. And then I thought, what if he didn’t? What if you were telling the lies? You could be making this whole thing up to divert my attention.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “How did you know that Catherine McBride cut her carotid artery to hasten her death? It wasn’t mentioned in the postmortem.”

  “I studied to be a doctor.”

  “What about the chloroform?”

  “I told you.”

  “Yes, you did. I did some reading. Do you know that it takes a few drops of chloroform on a mask or a cloth to render a person unconscious? You have to know what you’re doing when you play around with that stuff. A few drops too many and the victim’s breathing is shut off. They suffocate.”

  “The killer most likely had some medical knowledge.”

  “I came up with that too.” Ruiz stamps his shoes on the bitumen, trying to stay warm. A stray cat, wandering along inside the wire fence, suddenly flattens itself at the sound of our voices. Both of us wait and watch, but the cat is in no hurry to move on.

  “How did you know she was a nurse?” says Ruiz.

  “She had the medallion.”

  “I think you recognized her straightaway. I think all the rest was a pretense.”

  “No.”

  His tone is colder. “You also knew her grandfather—Justice McBride.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “It didn’t think it was important. It was years ago. Psychologists often give evidence in the family division. We do evaluations on children and parents. We make recommendations to the court.”

  “What did you make of him?”

  “He had his faults, but he was an honest judge. I respected him.”

  Ruiz is trying hard to be cordial, but polite restraint doesn’t come naturally to him.

  “Do you know what I find really hard to explain?” he says. “Why it took you so long to tell me about knowing Catherine McBride and her grandfather, yet you give me a crock of shit about somebody called Bobby Moran. No, sorry that isn’t right—you don’t talk about your patients, do you? You just play little schoolboy games of show and tell. Well, two can play that game . . .”

  He grins at me—all white teeth and dark eyes.

  “Shall I tell you what I’ve been doing these last two weeks? I’ve been searching this canal. We brought in dredging equipment and emptied the locks. It was a lousy job. There was three feet of putrid sludge and slime. We found stolen bicycles, shopping carts, car chassis, hubcaps, two washing machines, car tires, condoms and more than four thousand used syringes . . . Do you know what else we found?”

  I shake my head.

  “Catherine McBride’s handbag and her mobile phone. It took us a while to dry everything out. Then we had to check the phone records. That’s when we discovered that the very last call she made was to your office. At 6:37 p.m. on Wednesday, November thirteenth. She was calling from a pub not far from here. Whoever had arranged to meet her hadn’t turned up. My guess is that she called to find out why.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  Ruiz smiles. “We also found her diary. It had been in the water for so long the pages were stuck together and the ink had washed away. The scene-of-crime boys had to dry it very carefully and pull the pages apart. Then they used an electron microscope to find the faint traces of ink. It’s amazing what they can do nowadays.”

  Ruiz has squared up to me, his eyes just inches from mine. This is his Agatha Christie moment: his drawing-room soliloquy.

  “Catherine had a note in her diary under November thirteenth. She wrote down the name of the Grand Union Hotel. Do you know it?”

  I nod.

  “It’s only about a mile along the canal, near that tennis club of yours.” Ruiz motions with a sway of his head. “At the bottom of the same page she wrote a name. I think she planned to meet that person. Do you know whose name it was?”

  I shake my head.

  “Care to hazard a guess?”

  I feel a tightness in my chest. “Mine?”

  Ruiz doesn’t allow himself a final flourish or triumphant gesture. This is just the beginning. I see the glint of handcuffs as they emerge from his pocket. My first impulse is to laugh, but then the coldness reaches inside me and I want to vomit.

  “I am arresting you on suspicion of murder. You have the right to remain silent, but it is my duty to warn you that anything you do say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you . . .”

  The steel bracelets close around my wrists. Ruiz forces my legs apart and searches me, starting at my ankles and working his way up.

  “Have you anything to say?”

  It’s strange the things that occur to you at times like this. I suddenly remember a line my father used to quote to me whenever I was in trouble: “Don’t say anything unless you can improve on the silence.”

  1

  I have been staring at the same square of light for so long that when I close my eyes it’s still there, shining inside my eyelids. The window is high up on the wall, above the door. Occasionally, I hear footsteps in the corridor. The hinged observation flap opens and eyes peer at me. After several seconds, the hatch shuts and I go back to staring at the window.

  I don’t know what time it is. I was forced to trade my wristwatch, belt and shoelaces for a gray blanket that feels more like sandpaper than wool. The only sound I can hear is the leaking cistern in the adjacent cell.

  It has been quiet since the last of the drunks arrived. That must have been after closing time—just long enough for someone to fall asleep on the night bus, get into a fight with a taxi driver and finish up in the back of a police van. I can still hear him kicking at the cell door and shouting, “I didn’t fucking touch him.”

  My cell is six paces long and four paces wide. It has a toilet, a sink and a bunk bed. Graffiti has been drawn, scratched, gouged and smeared on every wall, although valiant attempts have been made to paint over it.

  Above the heavy metal door, chipped into brickwork, is the message: Hey, I just saw someone from the Village People!

  I don’t know where Ruiz has gone. He’s probably tucked up in bed, dreaming of making the world a safer place. Our first interview session lasted a few minutes. When I told him that I wanted a lawyer he advised me to “Get a bloody good one.”

  Most of the lawyers I know don’t make house calls at that time of night. I called Jock and woke him instead. I could hear a female voice complaining in the background.

  “Where are you?”

  “Harrow Road Police Station.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I’ve been arrested.”

  “Wow!” Only Jock could sound impressed at this piece of news.

  “I need you to do me a favor. I want you to call Julianne and tell her I’m OK. Tell her I’m helping the police with an investigation. She’ll know the one.”

  “Why don’t you tell her the truth?”

  “Please, Jock, don’t ask. I need time to work this through.”

  Since then I’ve been pacing the cell. I stand. I sit. I walk.

  I sit on the toilet. My nerves have made me constipated or maybe it’s the medication. Ruiz thinks I’ve been holding things back or being economical with the truth. Hindsight is an exact science. Right now my mistakes keep dividing inside my head, fighting for space with all the questions.

  People talk about the sins of omission. What does that mean? Who decides if something is a sin? I know that I’m being semantic, but judging by the way people moralize and jump to conclusions, anyone would think that the truth is real and solid, that it’s something that can be picked up and passed around, weighed and measured, before being agreed upon.

  But the truth isn’t like that. If I were to tell you this story tomorrow it would be different than today. I would have filtered the details through my defenses and rationalized my actions. Truth is a matter of semantics, whether we lik
e it or not.

  I hadn’t recognized Catherine from the drawing. And the body I saw in the morgue seemed more like a vandalized shop-front mannequin than a real human being. It had been five years. I told Ruiz as soon as I was sure. Yes, it could have been sooner, but he already knew her name.

  Nobody likes admitting mistakes. And we all hate acknowledging the large gap between what we should do and what we actually do. So we alter either our actions or our beliefs. We make excuses, or redefine our conduct in a more flattering light. In my business it’s called “cognitive dissonance.” It hasn’t worked for me. My inner voice—call it my conscience or soul or guardian angel—keeps whispering “Liar, liar, pants on fire . . .”

  Ruiz is right. I am in a shitload of trouble.

  I lie on the narrow cot, feeling the springs press into my back.

  Summoning my sister’s new boyfriend to a police station at six thirty in the morning is an odd way to make somebody feel like part of the family. I don’t know many criminal barristers. Usually I deal with Crown solicitors who treat me like their new best friend or something nasty they stepped in, depending on what opinion I offer in court.

  Simon arrives an hour later. There’s no small talk about Patricia or appreciation for Sunday’s lunch. Instead he motions for me to sit down and pulls up a chair. This is business.

  The holding cells are on the floor below us. The charge room must be nearby. I can smell coffee and hear the tapping of computer keyboards. There are venetian blinds at the windows of the interview room. The strips of sky are beginning to grow light.

  Simon opens his briefcase and takes out a blue folder and a large legal notebook. I’m amazed at how he combines a Santa Claus physique with the demeanor of a lawyer.

  “We need to make some decisions. They want to start the interviews as soon as possible. Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  I feel myself blinking rapidly. What does he mean? Does he expect me to confess?