by Gavin Smith
“You’re back then, petal. There’s your dinner.” Barry had laid down a plate piled with potatoes, multiple meat pies, vegetables boiled to pulp and steaming gravy. “Get this stuck to your ribs, old son. If it don’t kill you, it might cure you.”
“Good man. Thanks a bundle.” To his surprised relief, Slowey found himself too hungry to be nauseous. “Look, Barry, before you wander off, what about this fracas last night then.”
“Handbags at twelve paces, petal.”
“Elaborate, Barry,” said Slowey, between scalding mouthfuls. A warm and gleeful feeling of comfort was growing in the pit of his stomach, his body’s way of thanking him for food almost worthy of the name. “Don’t be shy. You talk, I’ll eat.”
“Maureen,” shouted Barry, leaning round a short doorway and looking up the stairs to the living quarters. “Maureen. Watch the shop.”
Ignoring the indistinct but irate reply, Barry jammed a tumbler under an optic, helped himself to another triple and pulled up a stool of his own.
“Right then. Sunday. Yesterday. That’s it. Busy night. Good take for once. Makes a change, people getting off their arses to patronise their local innkeeper. It’s all supermarket ciderpops and DVD’s and wee-boxes these days. Is social intercourse a dying art, I ask myself. Never get an answer mind.
“Anyway, Sunday before a bank holiday is always a good tickle. People realise they don’t have to get up the next day, makes them think they should get pissed just to make it worthwhile. Just me behind the bar again, Maureen tucked up with her migraine or her historical novels. Always one or the other. Very sensitive woman, that. Could be psychic. Headaches only come on when we’re going to have a busy night. I should sell her to Lloyds of London.
“So, place is heaving. Nice enough crowd. Lary, but mostly regulars. Throwing money around. I’m like a blue-arsed fly, pulling pints, making change, shouting for Maureen for what it’s worth. Then it must have been getting on for closing time – and we observe licensing hours very strictly here, officer. There’s a ripple in the crowd. They all stop yacking and gawp in the same direction.
“Then I see your man Dale. Hogging the juke box like he always does. Plays a right load of old shite, but it’s his money. You know, lots of ‘medallion man’ bollocks, little pimps drivelling on about their pizzles and jizzles and cribs and bitches. Like Crufts in here some nights, just disrespectful. What would Sammy and Dean think of it all now? I keep meaning to have a word with the brewery. Gets you down. Anyway.
“Yeah, so he’s there but he’s staring at this runt of a lad who’s just walked in. Never seen him before but kind of familiar. This runty lad is talking to the Braxtons, both of them. But they’re looking anywhere but at him ‘cause they’ve twigged that Dale is about to go off on one. Don’t think they’re exactly scared of him, but you know how it is, hyenas and jackals don’t mix too well.
“Anyway, it’s quieter but it’s not exactly dead quiet and there’s still this hippity-hop bollocks thumping away and I’m thinking about pulling the plug ‘cause I’ve already called last orders anyway and I’m not racialist but I don’t want to know about the street and bangers and huge fizzles and bitches, but ….where was I?
“Oh, yeah. I don’t hear every word, but Dale’s all pumped up, shouting something about, “you cheeky little fucker,” then “I gave you fair warning.” Then something that did not endear Dale to yours truly; ‘this is my place – get back to your own shit-pile.’
“I could see the way it was going so I shouted for Maureen to watch the bar but she either couldn’t hear me or didn’t give a toss. Anyway, runty chap has turned round by now and just stands there, getting taller, beaming at something, head up high. Then it occurs to me – he’s staring at my camera. “Go on, then,” he says. “Twat me again, you pig. I’ll have your money and your job and your sweet little wife.” At least that’s what I think he said.
“So that’s when Dale lost it. It all went a bit Wild West. Didn’t touch the runt, mind you. Took it out on my property. Knocking over tables and chairs, glass everywhere. I shouted at him to get out. Told him I’d phone the police. Pointed out the camera. Told him it was wired in again and that he was being recorded. Then some of the regulars shoved him out, but he’d lost interest by then. And the runt was long gone. Fucked off while the fucking off was good.”
“You know I’ll need to go through this again in excruciating detail, don’t you Barry?” Slowey pushed away the almost spotless plate and dabbed his lips with a paper towel. “Formally. Tidied up version.”
“You write it, I’ll sign it.”
“Just remind me, Barry. You said the camera was wired in again.”
“That’s right. Cameras were attached to nothing at all for a few years. Then I got myself a hard digital thingy last week. Mate wired it all in for me. Maureen wanted it done for ages. Anything for a quiet life. And it keeps the brewery on side.”
“So let’s get this straight. When this fracas occurred, who knew your cameras actually worked?”
“No-one. Except Eddie who installed it. And he’s on a booze cruise in the Med. Regulars always took the piss. Knew the cameras did nowt.”
“But you announced it. When Dale kicked off?”
“Too right.”
“Ok, great.” Slowey spent a few seconds writing then underscoring something in his notebook. “I’ll need names too. These regulars. Anyone else who saw this. Particularly anyone who took Dale outside. I’ll need them pronto.”
“Well I’ll scratch my head for you, but they all came straight back in. No lynch mob in this town, sheriff.”
“And this runty chap. I really need chapter and verse on him.”
“What, like a book of photos or a police line-up?”
“That kind of thing.”
“Anything to help, officer. You should be looking for Nigel Firth though. That’s his name.”
Slowey almost spat his coffee across the bar. “I thought you didn’t know him.”
“I don’t know him, petal. Not in the full sense of the word. Not like I go dancing with him or anything. But I recognised his face. He’s the arson feller. In the papers a few years ago. Googled it to make sure. Want me to print it out?”
In a heartbeat, the quiet gloom through the frosted glass of the saloon bar became a sociable hubbub. A pot-bellied man in a skin-tight t-shirt bearing the words ‘ask me anything’ heaved a laptop and a pair of loudspeakers onto the bar.
“Quiz night,” explained Barry, knocking back his whisky and moving up the bar. “A few regulars here by the looks of it. Might have a few more witnesses for you, but only if you’re good on sport and the pre-Raphaelites.”
Harkness was denied the existential rapture due him when he finally heard the sound of one hand clapping. The one flailing hand was his and for two hours and three interview tapes it found no counterpoint to strike against.
In the hour Snelling had filled taking instructions from Firth, Harkness had gulped his way through a pint of syrupy coffee and plotted out an interview plan so lengthy, artful and intricate it could have been a symphonic score.
Open questions that couldn’t be taken as leading or judgemental would form the opening salvo. The suspect, according to best practice and bitter experience, should be encouraged to speak expansively with minimal guidance or interruption, rather than having words crammed into his mouth.
Not only was this intended to prevent ham-fisted cops missing facts because their specific questions weren’t specific enough, or their leading questions led only up the garden path, it also ensured that suspects spun out enough rope to hang themselves, whether they admitted or denied the deed. It took intelligence, alertness and an amazing memory to lie consistently under pressure, as Harkness knew from his home life.
Once the suspect had given as complete an account as they were ever likely to, their words would be pored over in detail, with every inconsistency teased out and explanations demanded. Some challenges had to be devised on the wing, b
ut Harkness still plotted out Firth’s likely bolt-holes, seeing starkly how brittle and circumstantial his case was.
Appearing near the scene twelve hours after the event and happening to have bitter history with a much-hated man just as capable of destruction simply didn’t seal his fate, much as Harkness wanted it to. Even the alleged encounter in the pub didn’t clinch it. Coincidence wasn’t an offence and it was far from clear he’d done anything other than get threatened and run away.
In a murder interview, this should be an intricate process, an interview by committee. Every new interview tape would afford a chance to debrief, alter timelines, rephrase questions, analyse answers and tighten the noose. It should occupy three, four or more officers for at least a day. Instead, Harkness had a spare pen, Biddle and a tepid pep talk from the DI.
Biddle had at least volunteered to take Firth’s prints, DNA and fingernail cuttings, and to make sure his belongings were sent to the lab for trace analysis. It gave him plenty of time for a smoke.
Just short of forty minutes into the interview, with an automated voice from the twin tape-recorder warning of the first tape’s imminent end, Harkness barked out his hundredth question and received a weary, “no comment” in reply. It would, he reflected, have been a dynamic and clinching interview if only the suspect had participated in it.
Taking aside the spoken word, everyone in the room had said a great deal, if only the interview transcript could have described every gesture and involuntary tell. Harkness had been assigned the most cramped interview room, so that he and Firth, Snelling and Biddle were fixed a few feet apart by crude benches and a scratched slab of a table, both fixed to the wall. Predictably, the air conditioning in the rooms had failed completely, leaving them all poached by heat and hostility.
Snelling had opened the scoring by cutting across Harkness’s painstakingly formulated opening question with objections to a variety of issues, not least of which was the police’s “riding roughshod over his client’s inalienable rights.” He’d then produced a written statement on which his client would entirely rely and beyond which his client would not be commenting.
After scanning the statement briefly and finding the expected bare denial, Harkness dropped it into an evidence bag and pointedly ignored it, resigning himself to a solo performance. At their last meeting, Firth had been so eager to spar with him that he’d ignored his solicitor and showed too much of his damaged soul. This time, he’d devoted himself to reading the graffiti etched into the table while repeating ‘no comment’ at metronomic intervals, sometimes between and sometimes during questions.
“Nigel, tell me everything you’ve done in the last 36 hours. Be as open as possible – I need to know where you’ve been, what you’ve done and who you’ve spoken to or kept company with. Take your time.”
“No comment.”
“Where were you yesterday evening?”
“No comment.”
The basics outlined and ignored, the fishing trip had embarked.
“Nigel, this isn’t television. There’s no two-way screen. No drugs in your coffee. No cheap psychological tricks. No leading questions. Your solicitor thinks we’ve got our facts…..
“No….
“….wrong. Maybe you….”
“…..comment.”
“….do too. Tell us the truth.”
“If we’re wrong about you, we’re wasting time when we could be out looking for a murderer. Do you want that kind of responsibility?”
“No comment.”
“We know he knocked you about in prison. Maybe nobody listened at the time but now you have the floor.”
“No comment.”
“Did you set that house fire to get back at Dale Murphy?”
“No comment.”
“We know you did it. In time, you’ll go down for it. Maybe you didn’t know it would spread. Didn’t think anybody would be trapped. Didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“No comment.”
“You will NEVER have the chance to use that excuse after today. Miss that chance, the world will know you for a murderer and a liar.”
“No comment.” No comment and no glimmer of a response. No dilating pupils. No rush of blood to the cheeks or away from the knuckles. No smirking or scowling. Firth had walled himself in beautifully.
And so it had gone, less an interview than a schizophrenic monologue. Perhaps he should have continued, asked the same questions again and again, jumbling the words for his own entertainment, seeing how much brow-beating and pressurised boredom Firth could take.
If he had continued, he knew it would have been for his own benefit for he had an urgent need to understand Firth, to see where the springs uncoiled and the cogs bit in that complex head of his. To see what it took to carry that much damage and guilt and wretchedness with so much smirking serenity.
“You know all about the caution, don’t you Nigel. Mr Snelling will have no doubt briefed you on its limitations. Well you and I both know the law. You go mute now then lay it on thick at court, with your bad character for arson, everything you try to do to defend yourself will be tainted and those nice local men and women who don’t want to be burned alive and don’t like your sort will convict before you open your mouth. Think about it.”
Firth mimed drawing a zip closed across his mouth and almost smiled.
“For the benefit of the tape,” Harkness concluded wearily, “Mr Firth has indicated he would rather not be unzipped at this time. Interview concludes at 2130 hours.”
The sound of one hand clapping was the clockwork whirring of a tape machine, the apnoeic snorting of a fat, drowsy cop, the skittering of a lawyer’s pen as it tore a furious and righteous screed across its page, and the echo of fatuous words.
The four of them queued again for the custody desk, the murder suspect once again denied his perch at the top of the tree. One sergeant was bickering with a very white and very British drunk who demanded to be classified as ‘non-white miscellaneous’. The other examined every one of two dozen credit cards found in a middle-aged shoplifter’s purse while she dabbed at her tear-streaked mascara like a heart-broken clown.
They waited back to back, eyes outwards like Spartans, three of them using their mobile phone as weapons of distraction while Firth studied the custody board with rapt interest.
‘Bell me,’ Slowey had texted. There was nothing from Hayley. Harkness followed Firth’s gaze and wondered if the current pulsing at his temple arced directly from the LED’s spelling out ‘Braxton K’.
“Sergeant Biddle, take over please,” announced Harkness as he bypassed the queue, keyed in the code which he happened to know was Dawson’s year of birth and let himself into the custody office.
“You done already?” mumbled Dawson from where he reclined on an executive chair, feet on a desk, tipping pickled onion crisps into his upturned mouth. “I was going to finish my refs on time for you but you’ve beaten me to it.”
“Gone as far as it can. For now. About this Braxton kid.”
“What about him?”
“Who’s interviewing him?”
“No clue. He was pissed up and off his tits on something pharmaceutical. Bedded down ‘til morning then volume crime will deal.”
“Do me a favour, would you? Leave a note on his record asking whoever gets him to ring me first.” Harkness turned to leave then hesitated. “Oh, and leave yourself another note if you want a quiet night in here. Don’t let him mix with Firth. Might disturb your sleep.”
“You off somewhere?”
“Things to do. I’m a sergeant now. Biddle will take care of the admin.”
“Isn’t he a sergeant an’ all?”
“Last time I looked. But he’s not as quick on his feet as me.”
The strip lighting jabbed at his eyes and seemed to broil the air. The skin on his face and hands still glowed, taut with heat, and he ached for a cold shower with its necessary and purging pain. Turning a corner into incomplete darkness felt like some kind of repri
eve, dusty shadows blotting the sodium glare from outside.
A low murmur of conversation and a thin line of light spilled from a closed door. The air had thickened with odours of wet earth, stale urine and the sharp, high-octane tang of rough liquor. Harkness swung open the door.
“And this,” said Slowey with the breezy enunciation he reserved for children and the mentally ill, “is the gentleman I told you about earlier, Mickey. The one who would love to talk to you about anything you’ve got on your mind. Isn’t that right, Rob?”
“Erm, yes, Ken, that’s right.” Harkness, managing not to look taken aback by the hulking presence wedged into the corner opposite Slowey. “I’m just here to listen. By the way, I’m Rob.”
“Mickey was just telling me about a nasty thing that happened last night.” Slowey’s level tone belied the intensity of his eyes as he willed Harkness to understand. “So nasty he had to leave his base camp and sleep in a bus shelter.”
Mickey nodded, pursing his chapped and whiskered mouth and humming faintly with the unaccustomed satisfaction of being taken seriously. His matted hair seemed to have been plastered to his skull in a special effort to look tidy. Blackened plasters held his scuffed spectacles together and little of his rotund frame could be seen under his head to toe combat gear, complete with webbing which bulged with unknowable essentials.
“Well first of all Mickey, I’d like to say a big ‘thanks’ for coming here and helping us out like this.”
“’s awreet.”
“Can we get you anything to eat or drink?”
“’ready ‘ad c’fee an’ choc’lit.”
“You know Mickey, don’t you Rob?” prompted Slowey.
“Course I do, Ken. Keep that bridge safe for us all, don’t you? Against enemy attack.”
“Keepin’ tabs. Eyes on. Owt could happen. Major trunk road. My home too. Gotta be done. Duty callin’. Could be Ivan. Could be provos. Could be ragheads. See me, first line of defence ain’t it.”
“How long’s it been now, Mickey? Five years? Speak up loud and clear now.”