Blood Relative

by David Thomas

  I didn’t reply. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the right words. I was simply incapable of speech.

  Andy was lying almost directly in front of where I stood, about halfway to the far wall. His face was frozen in an expression of fear and bafflement. His pale-blue, button-down shirt was punctured with stabs, though they were nothing compared to the terrible open wound that had cut his left thigh open almost to the bone.

  Andy had died at the centre of a spreading, swirling eruption of blood. It lay on the floor in puddles and smears whose patterns showed the thrashings and spasms of his dying limbs as clearly as angel wings in the snow.

  The blood was not confined to the floor. It had been flung across the canvas-white walls like the first scarlet spraying of a Jackson Pollock painting. It was dripping from the fancy leather sofas – one of them in particular was doused in it – and the wheeled bookcases that stood on either side of the fireplace. It soiled our creamy rugs. There was even a single scarlet handprint on the glass opposite me. The floor beneath it was a messy confusion of bloody footprints. Andrew must have reached out for support. Or perhaps it had been Mariana. Maybe she had gone to help him. Maybe that was why she was covered in blood. I mean she couldn’t have … no, that wasn’t possible. Not Mariana.

  Up to now I had been numb, as though my brain had been overwhelmed, unable to process the torrent of sensory and emotional information with which it had been flooded. I’d never in my life seen a dead body before. Our father died when I was twelve and Andy was five, but Mum wouldn’t let us see him. She said it would be too upsetting. So I had no idea until then how utterly changed the human form is by the absence of life, how absolute the difference between existence and its termination can be. A corpse bears no resemblance whatever to an actor lying still and trying not to breathe. A corpse that has bled out is doubly emptied: the stuff of life has left it as well as the spirit.

  Finally, the reality of Andy’s death seemed to register, like a website that takes an age to upload but then flashes all at once on the screen. I actually reeled back a couple of paces, as though I’d received a physical blow, and that was probably just as well because it took me away from the corpse and the blood. So when I threw up all over the floor in front of me none of the vomit corrupted the evidence.

  I straightened up, wiping the spit and puke from my mouth, and walked over to the kitchen sink. I turned on the tap, caught some water in my cupped hands and used it to rinse out my mouth. A second handful was splashed over my face.

  Mariana was almost close enough to touch, standing by the hob, ladling spaghetti out of a giant pan into three white bowls. ‘Viel von Nudeln für jeder,’ she said in a cheery, almost singsong, voice: plenty of pasta for everyone. And then, more to herself, ‘Die Männer haben Hunger. Sie müssen genug haben, zum zu essen’: the men will be hungry, they must have enough to eat.

  Her bloodied fingers had left red smears on the white china crockery and the aluminium pan. I had a terrible vision of blood in the cooking water, like squid-ink, and as the pasta came out of the water I half-expected it to be pink. Mariana was working like an automaton, oblivious to the fact that the bowls were piled to overflowing and that the pasta spoon she was dipping into the pan was coming up with nothing but water.

  I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know what to feel. Grief for Andy and anger at his death; fear and concern for Mariana, mixed with love, a kind of pity and an instinctive desire to protect her; above all a total bafflement at what was confronting me. All those emotions swirled inside me, colliding and cancelling one another out until all I was left with was numbness.

  Mariana’s mood suddenly changed. Her head darted from side to side. She was obviously looking for something. ‘Wo setzte ich der carbonara Soße?’ She was wondering what she’d done with the carbonara sauce. The hob had nothing on it apart from the pan that had held the pasta. For a second, I too looked about me for the sauce, as though it could be magicked into being, that normality could somehow be restored.

  That was when I saw the knife.

  Mariana had bought a set of Japanese chef’s knives: the Ryusen Blazen series. They featured a core of powdered tool steel, sandwiched between two layers of soft stainless steel, with cutting edges honed to the thinness of a razor blade. The biggest knife in the set had a wide blade 240 millimetres long, which tapered to a point sharp enough to draw blood if you so much as rested a finger against it. It was called a Western Deba. It was lying just the far side of the three white bowls, and the last drops of stringy, semi-coagulated blood were still falling from its blade to the pure white of the Poggenpohl work surface.

  Finally, I found my voice.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘What it looks like. I serve the meal.’

  Finally, Mariana had spoken English, but her accent was still more Germanic than usual. She sounded like a different person.

  ‘But Andy’s dead!’

  She looked at me uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Sorry? I don’t understand. Your brother is now not coming to supper?’

  3

  I dialled 999. When the woman on the other end of the line asked me which service I wanted, my mind seemed to scramble. ‘I don’t know,’ I blurted. ‘Someone’s dead at my house. He’s been stabbed. Somebody killed him.’

  She took my name and address and told me to stay where I was: ‘The police and an ambulance will be with you soon.’

  When she mentioned the police I thought of all the thrillers I’d read, the TV cop shows I’d seen: detectives always suspected the family first. What if they thought we’d done it? Somewhere inside I must have known that Mariana was the only possible suspect, but I was a long way from admitting that to myself or anyone else just yet. I speed-dialled my lawyer, Jamie Monkton. He handled all the practice’s contractual work. Jamie wasn’t the kind of lawyer who hung around a lot of police stations. But he was the only one I knew.

  ‘I need your advice,’ I said.

  ‘No worries,’ he replied. ‘Give me a call in the morning. Can’t talk right now, I’m afraid. We’ve got people over for dinner.’

  ‘No, this is an emergency. My brother Andrew is dead.’

  ‘Oh shit, I’m so sorry. When?’

  ‘Tonight, at the house. He’s lying on the living-room floor. There’s an ambulance on the way. They’ve probably notified the police, too.’

  ‘My God, what happened?’

  ‘He was stabbed. He was lying there when I got home.’

  ‘Stabbed? Jesus … I’m sorry, Pete, I don’t know what to say … How’s Mariana?’

  ‘She’s here. She’s not doing too well. I mean, physically she’s fine, but she’s in a hell of a state mentally. They were the only people in the house.’

  ‘Oh, right … I see.’ Monkton’s voice changed as he took in the implications of what I’d just said. He seemed to be casting aside his role as my friend and, for the first time, looking at the situation through lawyer’s eyes. ‘Look, this is a bit out of my territory. You’re going to need criminal lawyers – both of you, I should think. And they’re pretty hard to find these days. No money in it, you see, and you have to be specially registered to be able to take legal aid cases.’

  ‘We don’t have much time, Jamie. Would it just be quicker for me to look in Yellow Pages?’

  ‘No, I’ll find someone … hang on, there’s someone here … Samira something: one of our friends brought her as his plus-one. I’m sure she said she did legal aid work. She might be able to help. Look, I expect the rozzers’ll bring you both down to York nick. They might move you to the force HQ at Newby Wiske later if they think the case is important enough. But the first stop will definitely be York, so I’ll meet you there, with anyone we can rustle up. In the meantime, don’t touch anything that looks remotely like evidence. And when the police arrive, say nothing. Keep it to name, rank and serial number.’

  ‘Sorry about your dinner party,’ I said, still under the mistaken impression tha
t I was living in a world in which any of the normal rules and manners of my past life still applied.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Monkton, ‘that’s the least of our worries. Listen, Pete, be careful, OK? This is serious stuff … Right, I’d better go and get things moving. I’ll see you later.’

  I managed to get Mariana to a dining chair, well away from Andrew’s body. I guided her with a hand in the small of her back, where there wasn’t any blood. Aside from that, I didn’t touch her. I didn’t put my arms around her to comfort her. I told myself I was doing only what my lawyer had told me. But it was more a case of self-preservation. I didn’t want to be implicated in whatever had happened here. If only I’d known what was going to happen over the next hours, days, weeks, months, I’d have let the evidence and implications look after themselves, taken Mariana in my arms and pressed her as close to me as I could, just to feel her against me. But I didn’t, and I’ve regretted it ever since.

  Mariana was settled now, still very passive, staring blankly into space. I pulled up a chair, sat down and tried to talk to her, but she didn’t even seem to be hearing me. We were still there a few minutes later, as silent and still as two showroom dummies, when there was a sharp rap on the door.

  The police, it turned out, had got there before the ambulance. Two cars arrived in quick succession: a pair of uniformed officers in one, two detectives in the other. When he saw Mariana, the senior of the two detectives called up his station and asked for a third car and a female PC. And that was just the start.

  We were both arrested and read our rights. I imagine that for some people the words of the police caution must be part of their everyday lives, as familiar as their name and address, or the words to ‘Happy Birthday’. But I’m not one of them. As the constable intoned, ‘You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence,’ I could barely credit that he was talking to me. When I said, ‘But I haven’t done anything,’ he didn’t even try to disguise his scepticism.

  Once that was done, we were asked to give our version of events. I refused to talk without a lawyer present. I also pointed out as strongly as I could that Mariana was incapable of understanding anything that was said to her, let alone responding with a coherent answer. Finally, the police realized there was nothing to be gained by trying to get any more out of us there. One of them led me down to a police car and bundled me in the back. Mariana was taken to another car, accompanied by the female constable.

  By that point our house was already making the transition from a home to a police crime scene. An ambulance was parked by the door, its two-man crew chatting to one another as they waited for permission to remove Andrew’s body. Inside the building, a pathologist was crouched over the corpse, while white-suited scene-of-crime officers got to work on the gory evidence.

  We left them all behind as we were driven away. Mariana’s police car was ahead of mine. Just as we were passing through the gates, I saw her turn her head and look back, whether towards me, the house, or something quite different, I don’t know. Her face was caught wide-eyed in our headlights. Mariana’s beauty, her self-confidence and her once unbreakable spirit had all deserted her. She looked strained, helpless, frightened, with the particular fear of an animal or small child that cannot comprehend what is being done to it, still less do anything to change its circumstances.

  I barely recognized her.

  4

  Jamie Monkton was right. We were taken to York police station, a modernist seventies block hidden away behind the Victorian walls of an old army barracks. The words North Yorkshire Police were written across the front in white sans-serif capitals.

  As I arrived I caught a brief glimpse of Mariana’s back as she was led away by the WPC. I was booked into custody by a uniformed sergeant and told I could have someone informed that I was being detained at the station. I gave him the name of my business partner Nick Church. The sergeant then offered me a copy of the Code of Practices governing police treatment of suspects under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and informed me of my right to consult a solicitor, free of charge.

  ‘My lawyer should be getting here any minute,’ I said.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Now we need to fill in a risk-assessment form.’ Even in the nick you can’t get away from health and safety.

  He asked me whether I was currently taking medication of any kind, would need to see a doctor, or suffered from any form of psychiatric illness. Then he told me to take off all my clothes except my socks and underpants. He also asked for my watch and mobile phone. They would all, he said, be needed for forensic examination. I didn’t bother to protest or plead my innocence. But I remember, very clearly, a sudden pang of fear that somehow some of Andy’s blood might have got onto me and that this would then be used to claim that I was there at the time of the murder. That was immediately followed by a spasm of guilt that my first thought was to save my own skin, rather than think of the far greater trouble that Mariana was in.

  I was given a rough, grey blanket to wrap myself in and led away to a cell. I am not someone who normally suffers from claustrophobia, but when the steel door was closed and locked, imprisoning me, it was all I could do to slow my breathing and force myself to overcome the near hysterical surge of fear and panic. I lay down on the solid, padded bench that ran along one wall, closed my eyes and tried to relax. My confinement, though, was a brief one. Within minutes the door was reopened and Jamie Monkton walked in. He frowned as he saw me shifting into a sitting position, swathed in my blanket.

  ‘What happened to your clothes?’

  ‘Taken away as evidence.’

  ‘Well, they’re not leaving you like that.’

  I wasn’t interested in my clothing, or lack of it. All I wanted to know was, ‘Have you seen Mariana? What are they doing with her?’

  He shook his head, ‘They’re keeping her under close watch, making sure she doesn’t hurt herself or anything until they can rustle up a police doctor to examine her. But they’ll need a shrink, too, if they want to section her.’

  ‘Section her? But that’s for loonies, isn’t it?’

  Monkton sat down next to me on the bench. ‘Listen, Pete, you’ve got to face facts. I don’t know what’s happened to Mariana, but she’s acting, well … unusually, to put it mildly. And if they do charge her, some kind of insanity plea may just be her best line of defence.’

  ‘Why does she need a line of defence?’

  ‘You know the answer to that question.’

  ‘No I don’t! She hasn’t done anything. She can’t have. I was with her in the office all morning and she was fine. I spoke to her mid-afternoon and it was a perfectly normal conversation. How could she go from that to … ?’

  ‘I don’t know, Pete. Better leave that to the experts to decide. I just wanted you to know, though, I was right about the girl at the party. She does do crime. You and Mariana are each going to need a lawyer, so she’s gone to get her boss. They’ll be here soon. Meanwhile, I think they want to get you sorted for a photograph, DNA swab, all that kind of thing, OK?’

  ‘I suppose. I mean, it’s not like I have any choice in the matter, right?’

  ‘Afraid not. But I will insist they get you something to wear.’

  ‘Just make sure Mariana’s all right.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Monkton said. ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’ll live.’

  He stood up, gave me a quick, almost embarrassed pat on the shoulder and asked to be let out. Ten or fifteen minutes later, I was given a pair of jeans intended for someone considerably shorter and fatter than me, and denied a belt to hold them up. They also found me a white shirt, made from some sort of synthetic fibre that made me feel as if I were wrapped in a plastic bag. I was asked to fill in a form giving my consent to being photographed and swabbed, then I was taken away to have the procedures done. I spent another twenty minutes ba
ck in the cell, and then I was taken away again.

  5

  The interview room was featureless, just a box painted an indeterminate pale grey with darker grey carpets; a rectangular table with a voice recorder and a couple of microphones; two metal-framed plastic chairs placed by each of the long sides of the table; a camera on the far wall pointing down into the room.

  I was sitting on one side of the table, facing the camera. A uniformed cop stood on the far side of the room, watching me, saying nothing. Then the door of the room opened and a woman came in. She was Asian, with huge brown eyes emphasized by dramatic make-up and lips painted a glossy, almost liquid crimson. She wore a short, close-fitting, sleeveless dress, with sheer tights and teetering heels, all black, and as she walked up to the table, the room was filled with a heady, spicy scent.

  ‘I’m Samira Khan,’ she said. ‘And in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t normally dress like this for work. I was at the Monktons’ dinner party. Jamie said you might need some help.’

  ‘What about Mariana? Is someone looking after her?’

  ‘My senior partner, Mr Iqbal,’ said Khan. ‘He insisted.’

  She looked at the policeman. ‘You can go now,’ she said, like a young duchess dismissing a footman. ‘I need some time alone with my client.’

  Once we were alone, Khan sat down in the chair next to mine.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘we don’t have much time, so pay attention. You are about to be interviewed by Detective Chief Inspector Simon Yeats. He’s good and he knows it, but remember: you don’t have to tell him anything. If there’s a question you don’t like, don’t answer it. Don’t let him put words into your mouth. Words can easily be twisted. You say something one way now, it sounds very different when it’s being read out in court.’