Shut Eye

by Adam Baron

  I was in a flat with a corpse and I was covered in blood and vomit. Someone must have seen something going on, one of the postal workers from Mount Pleasant maybe, and called it in. Or else… I turned to the door and was suddenly confronted by Dominic. That thing on his chest. I wanted to cover him, take that bottle out of his throat, but I knew I couldn’t do that. I waited for the sound of feet on the stairs and wasn’t long in getting it.

  I wanted to speak to them before they came running in and saw what there was to see in my flat. I hurried over to the door and got halfway down the first flight of stairs. I stopped before they turned into the door at the bottom, so that they wouldn’t think I was trying to leg it. I wanted to tell the officers what they were going to see, to make sure they were rational and controlled about it. I wanted to tell them before they found it themselves. I wanted that to be on record.

  I called out.

  ‘Up here.’

  A tall figure appeared at the door.

  ‘There’s a switch, just to your left. On the wall.’

  A hand reached out and pushed the timer and the small bulb popped on. There were two of them, both about my age, a man and a woman, both staring up at me. I told them what was up in the flat behind me and that I had come home to find it. They both looked shocked, nervous. I told them they had nothing to worry about from me and that I wouldn’t make any trouble. The WPC broke the silence by telling me to step back into the flat. She took a step towards me. I didn’t much want to go back in there but I agreed.

  I sat in the far corner, at the table, while the WPC made a brief examination of the body. The PC stood square in the doorway, glancing round anxiously at the windows in the front and the skylight to his right; any possible exits. Both of the officers were very efficient and neither of them made a scene or produced the torrents of vomit I have witnessed on similar, far less gruesome occasions. The PC was almost immediately on his radio reporting what he had found, asking for assistance, and I knew that very soon there wouldn’t be a whole lot of room in my flat. By now, both officers were glaring at me, trying to decide if I really was going to cooperate with them and not try anything. Their faces told me that they didn’t have any doubt as to what had happened here before they’d arrived.

  I held my head, which was starting to thud again, the contents of my room threatening to move on their own, to spin and merge into one another.

  ‘You found him like this, is that what you’re saying?’

  Involuntarily, I followed her glance to my futon. It brought me back a little. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And did you touch anything?’ The WPC went to stand halfway between myself and Dominic. She should have called me Sir. But I understood the extenuating circumstances.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing. The pillow, I pulled it off his face.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have?’

  ‘And you live here you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where had you been before you came back?’

  That was all the small talk I could manage. I held my head in my hands and ignored the question and then the others they pummelled me with. They gave up and the WPC asked her colleague whether or not we shouldn’t all be waiting outside. The PC said better not but didn’t give a reason. The three of us waited the ten minutes it took before anyone else arrived. I spent it keeping my eyes away from Dominic, fingering the blue folder my brother’s poems were in, which had lain on the table for almost a week. I even pondered taking them out but the WPC looked nervous.

  ‘Please don’t touch anything,’ she said, with an edge in her voice which she didn’t bother trying to conceal.

  ‘Sir,’ I mumbled. I put the file down.

  When the next car drew up and cut its siren the PC walked down and did the same thing I had, briefing the officers on the way up. There were two of them, both plainclothes, one very big, almost a kid. The other was a man I vaguely recognized, a tall, thin man with a very small head and a face which was so pinched it looked like a clay model. The elder one looked shaken but the younger one tried his best to look cynical and unconcerned, disgusted by the moral implications of the events only. They were followed in by four uniforms, each one taken aback like a row of dominoes. The elder plainclothes sat down opposite me and asked me a few simple questions which I answered, and then some harder ones which I did not. He cuffed me and then he led me past Dominic Lewes, who would soon be photographed by someone other than myself, and down into the street, by which time there was a total of four marked and two unmarked cars blocking the road outside my flat. I could see a space, a space in the row of cars where mine had been parked, but which had been occupied when I’d come back from the depot. I tried to remember the make of the car that had been there. An Escort. I thought it was an Escort.

  I was pushed through a small, official crowd of sullen faces, all full of either curiosity or contempt, towards the top of the street. The morning was still dark and there was only the odd postman about to see me taken past the newly erected cordon and bundled into the back of one of the marked cars. It took less than five minutes before the car had arrived at the station on Carlisle Street.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It had been a long night. It turned out to be a long morning too. It was obvious that I was exhausted and having difficulty focusing but they didn’t let me sleep. I wouldn’t have done either. I was left to stew for twenty minutes and then the officer who had cuffed me came in with his younger colleague. The colleague looked like a big farm boy, strong enough to pull a tractor, and I hoped it didn’t get nasty. I was feeling bad enough already.

  A medical officer came in and took scrapings from underneath my fingernails as well as hair samples for matching and possible DNA profiling. I was asked to remove all my clothes and these were taken from me. They would be analysed for blood and semen traces, as well as for stray hairs or pieces of skin which did not belong to me. The medical officer then examined my body for cuts, scratching and bruises; plenty of which could be found. He paid particular attention to my groin area, taking swabs from my penis and removing more hair. The two officers sat in disgusted though joyful silence throughout, both with their arms folded in front of them. I was given a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt to wear but no shoes, socks, shorts or any underpants.

  The medical officer expressed the opinion that I should see a doctor, both for the superficial wounds to my face and head, but also for suspected broken ribs and concussion.

  ‘Let the bastard suffer,’ the young man opined, but the doctor was sent for.

  I asked for a lawyer and gave the uniformed officer minding the door Mike Williams’ number.

  ‘Shame his office isn’t open yet, isn’t it?’ The older man stood up and brought his chair over to face me at the desk. ‘Don’t mind if we start without him, do you?’

  It didn’t matter what I minded. In fact, I was glad to get on with it; I wanted them to get an officer round to the freight depot on York Way to find evidence of what had happened to me there. With any luck there would still be the bag with my blood in it. That’s if they got there before some idiot chucked it out. They might even get some prints off it if I was lucky.

  I went through the events of the evening from going to the gym, and seeing Nicky, to getting the phone call and what had happened after that. I didn’t know whether or not to mention the fact that I’d known Dominic Lewes but decided I should. There were files in my office that could link me to him. I told them how I had photographed him and beaten up his pimp who was apparently known as Rollo. I told them that the man who had beaten me up had mentioned his name. I told them that a Ford Escort, five or six years old, had been parked outside my flat but had gone by the time the police arrived. It was my opinion that its owner had killed Dominic, left his body in my flat and then waited outside for me to come home before making a call to the police. All of this was noted with clearly displayed scepticism.

  I was beyond tired and it was now my ribs
which were giving me the most trouble. Discovering Dominic’s body in my flat had taken my mind off the painkillers I had intended taking and I asked if I could have some.

  ‘The doctor will be here soon, sir,’ the older man said with a smile.

  The doctor didn’t come for another hour, and only then because I refused to answer any more questions until he did, and took to groaning quietly. Not wanting a cell mortality on their records the two officers let the doctor into the room and he bandaged my head and my ribs and put a dressing on my face. He sent for a nurse and an hour later they stitched up the wound on the back of my head. The front of the head is harder, the doctor informed me. He was told not to give me anything that would send me to sleep. He didn’t give me anything.

  All I had to do was sit it out. Both the pain and the interrogation. I was nervous, but the physical evidence would say that I had been at York Way as I had claimed, and the police would find no forensic evidence on Dominic Lewes to say I had killed or indeed been anywhere near him. The ravings of the two officers, taking it in turns to play bad cop and bad cop, sailed over me. I gazed round at the dull grey walls, at the flimsy table, perfect for sweeping aside in dramatic temper tantrums by detectives who have seen too many reruns of The Sweeney. I drank three cups of lukewarm gun oil and as the tiny window announced the coming day, I waited for the appearance of my friend the Chief Inspector. The Chief liked to take a personal interest in the bigger cases, and I’d have to go through it all with him anyway so there was no point saying a great deal to these two. I tried to make some sort of sense out of what had happened, how everything had got tangled up together, but I could hardly make the table sit still let alone figure something which seemed totally incomprehensible. What did Dominic Lewes have to do with what I was doing for Sir Peter Morgan?

  The Chief didn’t come at all that day. They let me have two hours’ sleep and Mike Williams came at around ten. He wasn’t a criminal lawyer but he was glad to help and would know who to get in if it looked like I was going to need anyone special. I told him that I didn’t need him around for the interrogations. He asked me if he should demand that I be sent to a hospital but I said no, it would only slow things down. I kept expecting Andy Gold to show up but then remembered he’d been taken off the case. I kept expecting him to show up anyway, because we were supposed to be friends, but then remembered that friendship can be an embarrassing concept for a police officer, especially if the friend in question is a suspect, a likely candidate for serial killer.

  Milson and Clarke went at me all afternoon but I didn’t tell them anything that I hadn’t before. They tried to pick holes in my story, especially the York Way episode which I had no witnesses to, but when what you are telling is the truth your story tends to stand up – if you ignore the deviations and stick to the facts. It pissed them off, I could tell, but they still thought they probably had me. They asked me where I was the night John Evans was killed, where I was when James Waldock had been butchered and what I had been doing the night Edward Morgan had taken a man back to his flat. I couldn’t tell them of course, not without looking at my diary, and they got a lot of pleasure out of that. They even sent for a baseball hat, which they put on my head, gazing at me in profile with copies of the picture I had been showing round in their hands. They photographed me and I assumed that they would be showing my picture round to the people they had interviewed already.

  I tried to remember how long forensics people took. I was more than three years out of date but I did know that a case like this would get top billing. I figured that if the Chief wasn’t here then the report wasn’t ready yet; he wouldn’t waste his time if there was a chance that forensic evidence would prove it one way or another. Milson and Clarke were just to soften me up, to keep me awake and my head hurting. I remembered what a good detective the Chief had been, what a calculating, heartless, vindictive bastard. Even if he knew I had nothing to do with it he’d have let Milson and Clarke have a go at me, to see if I knew anything else which might be useful to him.

  * * *

  At seven that night I was taken from the holding cell to an interview room and was eventually joined by Ken Clay, the Chief Inspector of Islington Police. He came into the room quickly, accompanied by a humourless, sour-faced DC I had never seen before. He pulled the chair opposite me and sat on it, his thighs running over the sides like a cake rising out of a tin.

  ‘Well, Billyboy, we have been busy, haven’t we?’

  Clay’s face was a huge, fleshy maze of broken vessels and his hands were too; matching mounds of unbleached tripe. He had placed a folder on top of the table and he pulled the contents out of it. He leafed through the fifteen or so pages briskly, his fingers clumsy, not built for such close work. He put them down and then smiled, giving me a flash of lurid red gums above yellow teeth stained with black.

  ‘All of it. From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.’

  I took a breath and went through it, from first meeting the MP, to trying to get a picture of Dominic Lewes, to the night before last when I’d been beaten up and come home to find a corpse in my bed. I didn’t tell him about Charlotte and Lloyd but not for any other reason than belligerence. I’d let him have it if it looked like he was going to guess there was something missing. Clay’s face was a livid mask.

  When I’d finished, he sat back.

  ‘You beat up a pimp and then the boy you’re after winds up starkers, without his cock, in your bed, after someone sees you threatening a young lad with a knife and forcing him into your doorway.’

  ‘What knife? That’s crap, that’s absolute crap.’

  Clay laughed. ‘Glad I’m not you, Billy.’

  I took his point but tried to ignore the mocking, selfsatisfied tone. ‘Who is he, the caller?’

  ‘The caller preferred to remain anonymous.’

  ‘What about the pimp? Have you found him yet?’

  ‘He’s relaxing downstairs.’ Clay was pretending to be affable. I was surprised he was letting me ask him questions.

  ‘He’s still got a bit of a face on him. Claims he was mugged, doesn’t know anything about any boy prostitutes or private detectives.’

  ‘He was in Dominic’s house, I saw him.’

  ‘I know, I know. I believe you there, Billy. There. Just giving him rope to hang himself. You know the score.’

  He fumbled for the top sheet of paper on the table and managed to pick it up. The DC sat up a bit.

  ‘Now then,’ he said. ‘What have we got?’ Clay’s sarcasm was stronger than his aftershave. ‘A corpse in your flat, not only that of a boy you were looking for but also connected to a job you’ve been doing for a bereaved MP; exactly the same MO as that used by a serial killer the MP had paid you to look for. Curious. We’ve then got a flat door which has been broken into, very probably by your good self to make it look like someone else did it. Not very convincing. And …’ Clay looked over at the DC and then at me. ‘Thanks to Dr Burg at the forensics lab, we’ve got something a jury would be very interested in. Very interested in indeed.’

  Clay leant forward. The DC sneered. They both stared at me with a look I recognized; that of detectives who had something. What? What forensic evidence? I began to get an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. Did he mean fingerprints? It was my flat for God’s sake. Blood on my clothes? Maybe, but it was mine and I had already accounted for it. Hadn’t they checked the freight depot? What else could they have? I figured they were just fishing, but I didn’t like the look on them.

  I waited for it. Clay cleared his throat and read from the page.

  ‘ “On examination of the back passage no semen was found although traces of Nonoxynol were evident as were two hairs which, under examination, did not match those of the victim. They probably arrived there during the anal intercourse which accounts for the presence of the Nonoxynol. The hairs are both compatible with those usually found in the groin region.” ’ Clay paused and the DC sat up even straighter than he had been doin
g. Clay pointed his chin at me.

  ‘ “Microscope analysis of the hairs, and of those taken from the suspect in custody, shows that the hairs are of the same colour, width and type as the suspect’s pubic hair, though only a DNA match could prove they came from the same person. At this stage I would guess at a likely positive outcome. The samples have been sent to Cambridge and I will advise when the results are in.” JM Burg MD.’

  Clay put the paper aside and raised his eyebrows. A muscle twitched in my jaw which could have been seen a mile away. I looked Clay in the eye.

  ‘They were in my bed.’

  Clay shook his head slowly. He spoke softly. ‘They were up his arse you mean. They were way up there.’

  ‘He shoved them up there, he…’ I stopped speaking. There was no point, I was just falling into his trap, getting angry. A well of doubt rose from my bowels.

  ‘They were found on my bed,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘They were found by the killer and placed in the corpse to deflect suspicion from him on to me. The whole thing is a set-up to do that.’ I tried to sound sure but Clay was right; evidence like that was always compelling in the hands of the right prosecution brief. Crying ‘frame-up’ always sounds like clutching at straws. Clay didn’t say anything, waiting for me.

  ‘I would hardly be likely to do him in my own flat, would I?’

  ‘You could have got carried away. Butchering young boys isn’t exactly logical, wherever you do it.’

  ‘What about time of death?’ I said.