After three hours a couple of investigators came into the room. They sat in the two chairs opposite hers and switched on a tape recorder. ‘I guess you know what this is about,’ the first one said. His close-cropped hair looked plastered to his head, as if he had just been washing himself in the bathroom sink.
Erykah said nothing.
‘So you’re going to “ride” for your man, is that it?’ He nodded. ‘Come in here and give us the silent treatment, and go down for that drug-dealing murderer you think loves you?’
The other one shook his head. ‘It’s always the same story with these girls,’ he said. ‘Some gangster promises them the moon on a stick, grooms them to do his time for him.’ Erykah looked away, at the spindles of the tape recorder slowly turning. ‘Oh, you think your man is different, do you?’ he said. ‘You think you keep your mouth shut and go home to him and he’s going to pat you on the head and thank you and put a diamond on that skinny finger?’
Erykah bit her bottom lip. ‘Yeah, that’s what she thinks,’ the other one said. ‘She thinks she’s her man’s only woman, and she’s going to ride for him, and they’re going to live happily ever after.’
He pulled a folder from under the table. Inside were glossy photos, taken from some distance away. He spread them out carefully on the table as a card dealer might.
‘Take a good long look at this,’ the first detective said. ‘So here’s you, last Thursday, waiting by the offie for Grayson to pick you up. Right?’ Erykah didn’t need to acknowledge what he said, it was clearly her. His hairy finger jabbed another photo. ‘And here’s you and Grayson, an hour and ten minutes later, and he’s dropping you off.’ The men exchanged glances. ‘Short date, huh? Or just a quickie?’
Erykah stared hard at the white edge of the photograph. She would not lose it in front of these people. She would not turn him in. She would not cry.
‘Now here,’ said the other one. ‘Here’s Grayson again. About twenty minutes after you left, he’s back again. Only, is that someone in the car with him? Oh yes, it most certainly is. That’s Tasha Jones, isn’t it?’ He dipped his head and forced Erykah to look at him. ‘You know Tasha, don’t you? Grayson has mentioned all the time he spends with her, hasn’t he? I mean if he didn’t, that would be odd, right?’
Erykah swallowed. She knew Tasha a bit. They had been at school together, though not in the same year and had few friends in common. She had noticed that Grayson mentioned her lately. He said they were just friends, that Tasha was dating his cousin. ‘Man, that girl just don’t give a shit,’ he would say, approvingly. It was his highest compliment. Someone who didn’t give a shit was cool, desirable, someone like him. Erykah knew she was not someone who did not give a shit. She gave a lot of shits, all the time.
‘You tell us nothing, fine, we can’t arrest you.’ The second detective said. He leaned back in his chair and looked around the tiny room as if he was looking at buildings up and down her street. ‘You go home. And then what? You wonder. What he’s doing, who he’s really with. You wonder when you’re going to see us again and what we’re going to pick him up for. And then you won’t be able to say we didn’t tell you so.’ He nodded as if satisfied with this scenario. ‘By then you won’t be so clean. You will be an accessory. From now on, you will know what he is, and what he is capable of, and you will have kept that from us. That’s a crime. And guess who is going to be visiting your man, when you’re in jail and so is he.’ The two men nodded at each other. ‘Well it’s not going to be you is it?’
Erykah’s shoulders started to shake. ‘Ohh, I think we’re going to have a crier,’ the first detective said. ‘Wise up girl, this man doesn’t care about you any more than he cares about any of his other girlfriends. Did I say girlfriends, plural? Yes, I certainly did. We’ve been following Grayson for a few months now. Do you want to see the pictures?’
‘No, she is a tough nut, I can tell.’ The second detective collected up the photos and put them back. Now it was his turn to put a folder on the table. ‘She still thinks she’s the main woman. How about we show you what went down at the scene while you were waiting for your Romeo to finish taking care of business.’
Compared to the black and white surveillance shots of the corner by her house, the crime scene photos were lurid, full-colour, full of detail. Rory and his bodyguard had been gunned down in the door of his penthouse suite. Grayson hadn’t even tried to hide the crime. There was so much blood at the scene, the cops said, that the first police to arrive slipped and fell on the marble floor.
‘I didn’t know anything.’ It was the first time she had spoken since the police met her at her lecture, and the words stuck in her throat. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Come off it,’ the first detective said. ‘You know more than you are telling us.’
The other one nodded. ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t cooperate,’ he said. ‘Nobody will believe we just let you walk out of here without making a deal.’
‘Right now he’s wondering where you are,’ the first detective said. ‘Why you didn’t come home after your lecture. Maybe one of his boys is outside, and they know you have been in here four hours already. They already think you’re grassing. You know what that means, what they are going to say about you even if you deny it. So you might as well tell us everything.’
‘But everyone saw you take me away. People get arrested all the time. There’s no reason for him to think that I’m going to talk to you.’
‘Arrested?’ The first one smiled. ‘But we didn’t arrest you.’
The other one shook his head. ‘We just brought you in for questioning. No charges. You could have walked out of here any time. Didn’t you know that?’
The first one stood up and walked to the door, opened and closed it again. ‘Door wasn’t even locked. Nobody forced you to stay.’
She put her forehead on the table. They were right, of course.
The first cop patted her arm. ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Just tell us now and it’s all over. Isn’t that what you want? For the chaos to end. You can’t be with your man the way you want to be if his life is like this. You’re a smart girl with your whole life in front of you. You don’t want to ruin that now. It will do you both good. You’ll be better for it. Stronger.’
It was only during the trial she realised how easily they had played her. They didn’t have to deviate from their plan one bit. They never even had to offer her anonymity, or do a deal, or promise her any kind of protection. They showed her a photo of her man with someone else, and she sang like a lark.
Erykah felt as if the murder itself was her fault. Grayson was always so careful – had arguing with her that night made him careless? Or worse, had their row sent him over the edge? It seemed so out of character. She had no other explanation for why things had happened the way they had. If she had kept quiet would he even have been caught?
The trial for the double murder occupied the front pages for months. The press ran endless promo photos of Rory from Northern Boyz’s first album. Then it was the turn of Rory’s bodyguard, a retired policeman from Leeds, and the tragic family of seven he left behind. Then finally Grayson himself and Erykah.
And the shirt. The shirt he had changed into, calmly, when he came back to the car. When she had told the police this detail their faces had lit up. They were not just handling a cop killer, someone who had taken down one of their own. The shirt was enough to claim he had planned it to the last detail. No crime of passion here. Premeditated.
And it didn’t matter to the press that she had cooperated with the investigation, that she was a witness for the Crown case, that she had done what she thought was the right thing. That she dressed well, spoke well, had never been in trouble in her life. That she was a student, and a good one too. All that mattered was where she was from, the colour of her skin, and what that stood for in the narrow minds of the editors. Her boyfriend was a cop killer.
Her boyfriend was a drug dealer. She was only trash.
In her bed, night after night, she stared at the ceiling for hours, unable to sleep. I did the right thing, she told herself over and over. But no matter how many times she said it she never quite believed it was true.
And she was sure she could never go home again. She had broken the first rule of the streets. The most important one.
The last time she had seen her first love was in the dock as he was sentenced. She had never known him to be scared of anything. When the judge read his whole life sentence, the barest quiver of fear started to darken his eyes. He looked at her and he mouthed something silently, but she had no idea what he was trying to tell her.
Then the court officers crowded round. They bundled him out to a van while paparazzi tried to throw themselves in its path. Erykah wrote him three letters in that first week. All three were returned, unopened.
On the first day back at uni after the trial she was called up to the Dean’s office for an academic review. Her sinking heart told her something was up. The pink-faced Dean waved his hands in the air, talking around what he was trying to say. It was all academic integrity this, reputation of the university that. In other words: you are not worth protecting. We don’t see you as one of us. She felt the expectation, the assumption, even, that she would do what he felt was the right thing.
The right thing being: jump before you’re pushed.
Fine then. She showed them by running away faster than they could throw her out. Would a white student have faced the same pressure? She couldn’t say. Did it matter? By the time the lightweight four she had been training with rowed in the Games in Atlanta, Erykah was already married and settled down with Rab.
The group of rowing coaches was as pale and male as the Dean’s office had been that day. Erykah searched Dom’s face for a sign. ‘This isn’t going to be a problem, is it?’
Dom frowned, the gurning of a man who was trying gravitas on to see if it fitted. His finger rested on the front page as if it might draw some wisdom from there. The headline was so clunky, ugly. Spelling out a final judgment in large bold type to readers whose only interest in the news was finding out who was being torn down today.
‘Erykah, you have to try to see this from my point of view,’ he said. ‘More importantly, from the club’s. The association has already been on the phone. They suggested mandatory testing. As head coach, this puts me in a bad position. I don’t want to lose the respect of my crews over this, and certainly not the association’s.’
So he had no idea how people already saw him. The truth was that the club succeeded in spite of, not because of, Dom’s leadership. Every year the number of high performance rowers dropped as talented oarsmen defected to other clubs. One junior had left rowing altogether for track cycling, and was already being tipped for the next Olympics. The more he stuffed the club’s coaching staff with school chums and college mates, the worse things got.
‘This isn’t just old news, Dom, it’s archaeology,’ she said.
‘I can’t believe it.’ Dom shook his head. ‘All this time, living under a pseudonym, right under our own noses—’
‘Pseudonym? Are you joking? It’s not like I went out and bought a fake passport or something. I got married. Rikki is an old nickname. Surely even you understand that, Dominic.’
His long face was still pulled into the kind of sorry-not-sorry look beloved of late night news interviewers and public schoolboys who were secretly gleeful that they were about to ruin your day. ‘I’m meant to be the face of this club, Erykah. How do you think this makes me look?’
Who the fuck cares how you look, you polished turd. ‘I’m no criminal, Dom, which you would know if you read the article.’
‘It must be a terrible situation for you, yes,’ Dom said and spread his palms open. A gesture of trust. He’d probably read it in a book somewhere. ‘Having your past brought up like this. But that doesn’t mean it should become our problem at the club. At the least, you should have told us about your dark secret before it came out.’
‘She is a fucking dark secret, chum,’ one of Dom’s friends offered in a stage whisper.
‘Oh, you did not just say that,’ Erykah growled.
The young man looked at her, red patches rising on his milky cheeks. ‘Excuse me?’ It was confrontational, not apologetic.
‘You heard me,’ Erykah said. ‘Cretinous toad.’
‘There’s no need to be so aggressive,’ Dom said.
It took Erykah a moment to parse that he was talking to her, not his friend in the rugby top. ‘Aggressive?’ Erykah said. ‘I’m the one who is being aggressive? Anyone else would have turned this room upside down after a crack like that. Any of the men’s squad marched in here for twenty-year-old tabloid stories, you’d hear the shouting all the way down to the Tideway.’
‘Enough,’ Dom said. ‘We have to think about the club here.’
Erykah set her jaw. ‘If a statement of court records is what they want, then fine,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to jeopardise our boat.’
‘It’s, um, beyond that point now,’ Dom said. ‘If it was a matter of you supplying some documentation, sure, fine . . . but it’s not just the crime angle. You are associated with known drug dealers. That starts to bring all kinds of questions to the table.’
‘Was associated,’ Erykah said. ‘Twenty years ago. Dom, do you really think I’m on drugs? As my coach, seriously, do you think that? You want a piss test?’ She could hear her own voice, the anger in it. And it was still only a fraction of the anger she was feeling. ‘Fine, I’ll do it here. Now. He was dealing cocaine, for God’s sake. It isn’t even a performance-enhancing drug,’ she said. ‘If you tested the whole squad you would pick up loads of people who wouldn’t pass. And you know what? I would not be one of them.’
‘Yes, well, that’s the problem. We don’t want the whole squad tested. The men’s eight are aiming at Nat Champs this year, and the men’s lightweight pair are in the middle of squad trials. If we aren’t seen to be strong on this, it could affect everyone.’
‘Are you saying . . . ? Wait, no, I don’t want to know,’ she said. If the squad were juicing that was none of her business.
Dom’s expression revealed nothing. ‘Twelve months. Consider it a sabbatical. We’ll review your case and decide if you can rejoin the club next year.’
‘You have to be fucking kidding me.’
‘There’s no need for that kind of language,’ Dom said, as if he was a schoolteacher and she a child. ‘Hand over the admin details for the website and your membership card before this gets ugly.’
Erykah turned towards Nicole, who cut her eyes away. So she wasn’t going to stick up for her either. Probably hoping to distance herself and try to save the rest of her season, whether she had Erykah in her boat or not.
An image flashed behind her eyes. The key in the locker. Her heart lurched in her chest.
Erykah took a deep, deliberate breath. Do not lose it in front of these jerks. They are not worth it. ‘You do know, I assume,’ she said, throwing her voice as low as she could, ‘that I could get out a chequebook and buy this entire club right now?’ She watched the expressions on their faces turn to shock. ‘Fire all of you.’ She looked around the room, as if assessing the club’s value. ‘Turn it into a fitness studio. Or better yet, a women only rowing club.’
Their mouths opened and closed like fish gasping on the beach. It had never crossed their minds before that not only could she have power over them, but that she might use it.
‘But I’m not going to do that,’ she said. Jump before you’re pushed. Her arms dropped to her side and she raised her chin. ‘We’re done here. Take your year suspension and shove it up your arse.’ She turned and reached for the door.
‘Don’t be difficult.’ Dom‘s voice struggled to regain some of its former haughtiness. ‘Are you sure you wa
nt to burn this bridge?’
Erykah looked back over her shoulder. ‘Who needs bridges?’ she said. ‘Baby, I can swim.’
She walked along the river towpath slowly, in case anyone came after her. No one did. Not Nicole, not anyone. The river was quiet, all the rowers and clubs were off the water for the night. Spiders wove slow webs in the gaps between iron fence posts, setting their traps for insects drawn by artificial night-time light.
The reaction of Dom and his friends to finding out about her past upset her, but it didn’t surprise her. She had learned a long time ago that people had an infinite capacity for judging others based on little – or even no – information. Of course people like them would not want her anywhere near the club, they hardly tolerated people like her under normal circumstances. This was just a convenient excuse to do something they probably wanted to do all along.
She felt bad about indulging this bitter line of thought, but then she remembered how even Nicole hadn’t stood up to them, and felt a whole lot worse. The same woman who, less than a week ago, was begging her to run away and start a new life. When it really mattered, even she could not tell those pricks where to get off. Not that it would have changed much, but Nicole could have risked it, and probably not been thrown out of the club. She could have said something and didn’t. Maybe that was payback for not turning up on Valentine’s Night.
Erykah unlatched the garden gate and came in through the French doors. The sound of the shutting door was muffled by noise from the television. Rab was in the front room eating a Chinese takeaway and watching television.
She shed her jacket and bag on a chair. Rab’s eyes detached from the television screen and followed her progress around the house like a dog watching its owner. She didn’t trust this. She preferred the silent stand-off, the cool silence they had achieved after many unhappy years together, weaving their separate corridors through the house like ant tunnels that never crossed. This time last year it would have been her eating a takeaway and watching trash TV. This time last week, even.
The Turning Tide Page 10