It Was You

by It Was You (retail) (epub)

  ‘Come on, Billy.’

  I couldn’t move. Andy took my arm but I pushed hack against him. The door was open. The door to the cafe. Up ahead. Andy glanced at me and then signalled to the two plain-clothed detectives standing just inside the opening. When they didn’t get it instantly Andy made it obvious and they stepped inside and shut the door behind them. Andy helped me on. He wanted me to keep to the left side of the corridor and I tried to help him. But the absinthe had risen again, it didn’t care what the hell else was going on. I had to hold onto Andy. Andy’s arms felt strong around me. I wanted them to take me, to lift me, to fall asleep in them as they got me out of there.

  But when we got level with the door I stopped again. I looked at it. My print was already drying, like a child’s picture. Behind the door I could hear muffled sounds, movements.

  Andy shifted his weight under my armpit to move me along. The last, deepest level of drunkenness was calling to me. It was high tide for sure now but something was keeping me back, struggling against it. Something in me knew that I had to fight the booze, just for one minute, no more. I pulled myself up, a hand thrust out of the swell. I turned to the door. I heard more sounds. I knew what would be happening in there. I could see it all as though there was no door in the way. The plastic envelopes, the thermometer, the masks. A flash of light lit up the bottom of the door, followed by another. The photographer. The video would be later. I heard movements, low voices, another click and another flash of light.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said to Andy.

  ‘Billy?’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said again.

  Andy shook his head. He was confused. ‘But you were there, Billy. You were in there. You know.’

  I saw it all again. I saw Ally, saw her face, her hands. Saw her body. The blood.

  ‘Just tell me. Say it. You say it. I…I don’t know. I thought but…I don’t know. I couldn’t… Tell me. Then I have to know.’

  He did. He told me what I’d seen the moment I’d stepped into the room.

  He told me what I’d turned my eyes, my mind, my whole self away from.

  My body began to tremble. Andy took my arm again and led me along the corridor. In the lift my legs went and Andy had to get another officer to help me out and into car. In the car I shook and cried and I threw up and cried and threw up more, all over the seats and me and Andy and then finally I just curled up into a ball. The absinthe was still fighting for me and I wished to God that I’d let it win an hour or so earlier. That it had left me in some alley on my back for the muggers or the cops or just the morning to find me. Because however close it would come it would never win now, it would never beat the picture, never beat what I’d seen.

  Chapter Eleven

  The station they took me to that night was the one I’d worked in for most of my career. Calshot Street, a step away from King’s Cross, is one of the few remaining genuine Victorian nicks, complete with painted brick walls and interview rooms so dingy and cold you’d confess to anything just to get out of them. I know this because I’d not only harangued people in them for some sort of truth, I’d also been on the other side of the desk. Most stations now are more like leisure centres than lock-ups, with the Coke machines in the foyer and the rounded, blond-wood furniture. In contrast Calshot Street still retains that oppressive, flat feel, the aura of a building most people spend their entire lives hoping never to enter. The feeling of a building nobody wants to be in.

  I say nobody, but one man I knew relished his role as grand inquisitor so much that he positively rubbed his hands together whenever he walked through the door of the nick he was in charge of. Chief Superintendent Kenneth Clay is a huge mound of a man with a sharp, quick mind and tiny eyes so keen you think they can see into your pockets. When they took me out of the car and into the station, I saw Ken Clay going in before me. Clay is a hands-on copper, not likely to let something like this fall through one of his junior officers’ grasp. He won’t have been pissed off to get the call in the night – his heart rate would have gone up like mine had in the toilets of the Soho House. Strangely, I was buoyed by the sight of Clay, both in the Lindauer Buiding and here, hurrying through the door, briefing a breathless DC on the hoof. He’d be nasty, sly, he’d make Andy Gold seem pleasant as Cliff Richard on E. But he’d sort this. Whatever else Clay was he was too much of a copper not to absolutely have to sort this.

  It was still dark, no sign of the sun. I was taken through the main door of the building, coppers and the general public alike drawing back at the sight of a man whose impeccably cut suit was liberally decorated with tears, blood and vomit. In a dank, featureless interview room I gladly surrendered the suit, my shirt and my shoes and was given a faded T-shirt and a pair of old jeans in return. Once inside them I sat, my elbows on the desk in front of me, my mind crammed full of static, unable or unwilling to fix on anything, like a TV that can’t find a station. The only thing I was aware of was the uncomfortable glances of a PC, sitting in a chair by the door, his face blank, his palms on his thighs. Neither of us said anything until we heard footsteps outside the door. The PC stood and unlocked it. I looked up to see Ken Clay bustling in, Andy Gold on his heels.

  When Clay sat down, all signs of the chair beneath him disappeared so that if you’d come in right then you might have thought he was levitating. I sat up a bit, my stomach rolling at the sight of my former governor. I remembered again how we used to call him Condor. Condor Clay. Not because of the graceful flight of the bird but because of the way a condor goes about eating a dead animal. The condor wants to get at the guts. The guts are, of course, hidden inside the animal but the condor doesn’t make itself a hole in the corpse to get at them with its beak. It uses the one that’s already there.

  I didn’t for a moment think that Clay was going to pussyfoot around so his first question surprised me.

  ‘So, Billy, Christ. Are you OK?’

  It was what I’d asked Jemma. It was only then that I realized what a pointless question it was.

  ‘I don’t know what I am,’ I said. ‘Where’s Mike?’

  ‘He’s not here. They’ve taken him off to UCH.’

  ‘UCH?’

  ‘He’s OK, don’t worry, but he’s freaked out. He’s in shock, or so they say. They’ve sedated him and they won’t let us near him.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s all right. You don’t need to hassle him. Speak to him when he’s ready. I can give you it all. There’s nothing I can’t tell you.’

  ‘OK. Good.’ Clay nodded to the PC, who slid a tape into a desk-top recorder. ‘So tell us. Take your time, and if you need to stop it’s OK, Billy. We’re in no hurry.’

  ‘I won’t need to stop.’

  ‘OK then.’

  The PC hit the record button and then activated a camcorder fixed high up on a wall behind the two detectives. It was angled high but I figured it would just get the bald spot that sat towards the back of Andy’s head like a shallow bunker in the rough. I took a breath. I tried to find a voice, a character who could tell all this, go through all the stuff I’d already blurted out to Andy. I settled on the voice I used to use in court: the polite copper, unemotional, rigorous. It felt odd that way, already making the events I was telling seem like history. Things that had actually happened. As I went on it became more disconcerting, largely due to the expressions on the faces of the two men right in front of me. It was pity, but not the right sort. Not pity because of what had happened to my friends but a different kind. As if I was telling them how great my wife was when they already knew she was sleeping with someone else. I was confused, their smug patience needling me towards anger. When I got to the end a soft, wistful smile settled on Clay’s face and Andy smiled too. Andy thanked me for my candour concerning the coke. He assured me that no action would be taken on that score. But then he shook his head.

  ‘Very touching, Billy.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Earlier, in the pub. I asked you how long it had been. You remember?’

>   It seemed like a lifetime ago. ‘Yes. But…’

  ‘I meant since we’d seen each other but it’s been even longer since you were a cop, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘So I shouldn’t really be surprised at what you just told us. Not really. But I didn’t think you’d ever stop thinking like a copper, Billy. It seems odd that you have.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You said you’d tell us what happened.’

  ‘I did tell you. What did I just do? You think I don’t want to help you here? She was my friend. Of course I do. We went out, we ate, then Mike came. We did coke, we drank. We met the girls. We went back to my office. Heather wanted mixers so Mike opened up the cafe.’

  ‘OK, OK. We got that. But do me a favour. Try answering like a copper. Think back. Who suggested going back to the Lindauer?’

  I frowned. ‘Ruth. Yes Ruth. I don’t know why, some romantic notion of—’

  ‘Anyone else keen to go?’

  I frowned more, thinking about it. I did want to help them. Maybe I had skipped stuff. But how could it be important? ‘Nicky,’ I said. ‘He was. Then we were going to go to his bar after.’

  ‘And what about Heather?’

  ‘She was keen enough, didn’t seem to care either way. She’d have done whatever Nicky wanted. Why?’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me? I didn’t mind. It was a laugh, we were all just getting blown along. Wherever we went it didn’t matter.’

  ‘And what were you intending doing up there? In your office.’

  ‘Drink, mess about, finish the stash, I guess. Andy, I’m trying to help, but I really don’t know what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Got a bed up there, haven’t you?’ he went on. ‘You and Nicky were in, weren’t you? You’d have probably stayed there while they went on to his. You and Ruth, the tall one?’

  ‘No. You’re wrong. By what does it matter? I can’t see why it’s relevant what I was going to do…’

  Andy didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me. ‘Five of you there. Odd number, no? With you four in pairs Mike was a bit of a gooseberry, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Not really, we were all having a great time. As I say I wasn’t intending…’

  ‘Did he seem happy about going up to your office? Like you all were?’

  I thought about it. ‘No. Actually he wanted to go home, to take the cab on.’

  ‘Did he now? So why did he come up?’

  I shrugged. ‘I persuaded him to.’

  ‘And why did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Oh, all right, maybe so that he could be a gooseberry.’ I tried to laugh. ‘Protection, you know, so I wouldn’t do anything. I wasn’t intending to but it couldn’t hurt, could it, having Mike there to make sure?’

  ‘Because you’re seeing that girl again. Sharon, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t see—’

  ‘Answer me this. Like a copper. OK? Mike was reluctant to go upstairs. Why?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He knows you’re seeing Sharon, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d have thought he’d be keen to go up, keep you out of trouble. As a mate. But he wanted to go home. I wonder why. I wonder why he was so keen, desperately keen, not to go up to the third floor of the Lindauer Building this morning. Can you think of a reason, Billy?’

  There was silence in the room. I hadn’t seen it coming. Without any warning Andy’s words had smashed straight into me like a lump of concrete thrown off a motorway bridge. I couldn’t speak. My eyes opened and my throat closed. All I could hear was the tape machine whirring. I began to feel sick again. I couldn’t believe I’d let Andy lead me where he had.

  ‘There’s no way,’ I managed to say. ‘Don’t waste your time on that.’ I tried to laugh again. It sounded like an animal being strangled.

  ‘No? You said that Mike phoned you, asked if he could join you and Nicky on your girls’ night out. Right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, tell me what he said on the phone.’

  ‘I told you. We’d just had dinner when he called. He wanted a blow out. A big one. Ally told him to go. His last chance.’

  ‘His last chance?’

  ‘Before the baby, the baby.’

  ‘What time did he call?’

  I shook my head. ’Ten, ten-thirty.’

  ‘And what was he like?’

  ‘Fine. He was normal.’

  ‘And when he met you?’

  ‘The same. No different.’

  ‘The girls said he was behaving strangely.’

  ‘We all were. We were mashed. Fucked. Wine, beer, coke, absinthe, champagne.’

  ‘Yes, but they said he was all over the place. Something in his eyes. They also said you practically had to force him to go upstairs.’

  ‘He wanted to go home, to Ally.’

  ‘He didn’t want to go back there, more like! Knowing what was waiting for him. What he’d already done.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Calm down, Billy. And tell me this. When he found her, when he opened up the cafe tonight, what did Mike do?’

  ‘He was distraught. He held her, put his arms round her.’

  ‘Which means we can’t pick up any latent blood on him. He covered himself, so to speak.’

  ‘That’s insane. Crazy. OK, as a copper, tell me why. He’s going to have a baby, he’s got a lovely wife. Go on, why?’

  Andy smiled that smile again. I wanted to ram it down his throat. ‘When did you see him last?’

  I hesitated. Andy would check. Someone from the Tate would have seen us.

  ‘The day before yesterday. At Tate Modern. We met for a drink.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Nothing much. It was just a casual thing.’

  ‘Nothing personal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was Mike a jealous kind of man, Billy?’

  ‘How the hell do I know? You only know that about your partners, not your friends.’

  ‘A good point. A copper’s point. But, I wonder, did he ever find out?’

  I knew what Andy meant but I looked confused. ‘About what?’

  ‘About Ally. Ally and me. I’ve filled Chief Superintendent Clay in on our little affair. Was Mike ever filled in?’

  ‘I don’t know. He never told me if he was.’

  ‘What if he suddenly found out, huh? That wasn’t what you talked about at the Tate, was it? Or, since our fling was years ago, did he think she was seeing someone else? Did he have reason to believe that kid was someone else’s?’

  ‘No. No. She wasn’t seeing anyone and he didn’t think she was. We didn’t talk about that.’

  ‘Then what did you talk about?’

  I thought again. I shook my head. They were wrong.

  ‘Nothing. Listen, you were a mistake. They were just having problems then. Ally loved Mike. And he loved her.’

  ‘Think like a copper, Billy. You do so well and then you blow it. How many times did you hear people sticking up for their friends, their husbands, their brothers, just like you’re doing now? Think. You asked me to tell you and I’ll tell you again. The baby: it’s gone. Gone. There was nothing inside her. You saw, remember?’

  Andy looked at me, making me acknowledge what he’d said. I wanted to turn away from it but I couldn’t. I felt Andy’s breath as he leaned forward.

  ‘You know it’s got to be someone close to her to do that. Someone seriously screwed in the head. Not just some killer. You know, Billy. Statistics alone say it was him but we’ve got more than that.’

  Everything inside me stopped. Andy’s eyes were wide open, gauging my reaction. More. What more? No. Whatever it was, no way. I knew Mike. I knew how he was with Ally. Only the other day, his arms round her, joking about Chelsea. I saw him on the Tate balcony but pushed that aside. Finally I summoned the courage.

 
‘What more do you have?’

  ‘You don’t know? About your friend? Three years in a young offenders’ institute? Called them borstals back then. Well? Never told you? Just flipped, the records say. And he never mentioned it, well, well. Nearly killed a boy, some stupid fight over nothing, when he was fifteen. Kid teased him in a shopping centre. Never leaves you that kind of thing. Found out Ally’d been shagging someone else and he lost it again.’

  ‘No. He didn’t think she was being unfaithful.’

  ‘You know what?’ Andy smiled. ‘I always thought you must have given it to her at some point or another. That bun in her oven, you the baker were you?’

  ‘Go fuck yourself.’

  ‘Be more fun than doing it to her was, I can tell you. I thought Italians were supposed to be hot but she was insane, cut my back up so bad…’

  I tried to get over the desk but the PC got to me. When I was back in my chair again Andy carried on. Beneath it all, beneath the horror I felt at what had happened and the disgust I felt for Andy, I couldn’t help thinking he was good, damn good. He was the bad cop all right and he didn’t need the good cop.

  ‘Your problem is that you think women are saints, Billy. I could tell at the time you thought she was too good for the likes of me.’

  ‘Her and any woman not on death row. And most of them.’

  ‘Good one. But women do sleep with inappropriate people sometimes. That Sharon. Your brother Luke’s fiancée, isn’t she?’

  ‘Was. She’s not now.’

  ‘But if medical science ever comes up with a way of bringing him round he won’t be too happy about it, will he? No. Face it, Billy, Ally was seeing someone else and Mike found out. In some spacked-out rage he attacked her, did that thing that you saw. I saw.’