by Tom Bale
‘Yeah. Certainly not your normal profile for a burglar – a young woman.’
The witch turned, gave him a sharp look. ‘Who said she was young?’
Russell quickly laughed off his mistake. ‘It’s got to be, hasn’t it? An old biddy is even less likely.’
Still that probing gaze. Finally, she let him off the hook. ‘No, you’re right,’ she said, and expelled a strangely burdened sigh. ‘Most criminals are men.’
He grunted his agreement, then stalked back outside, asking himself: Just what the fuck does she mean by that?
11
Afterwards Jen would wonder if it could have been a coincidence – the knock on the door, just as they’d raised the issue of theft. She knew from the TV shows that other officers might be monitoring the interview, so perhaps they’d waited, deliberately, for the moment when production of the figurine would have maximum effect.
The accusation floored her. Without thinking, she blurted, ‘You must have put it there.’
Reed shook his head, scornfully, while Howard, in a crisp voice, said, ‘The officers I work with are not in the habit of planting evidence.’
‘No. I’m sorry.’ Jen felt ashamed of her reaction. ‘But someone put it there.’ She swallowed; almost a gulp. ‘I swear on my life that I didn’t take it.’
Silence. Jen felt beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead. She wasn’t sure where to go from here. Swear on Charlie’s life – could she bring herself to do that?
Because there were more than a few treacherous thoughts in her head. Such as: what if she’d had a blackout, or was suffering from some kind of breakdown?
She’d admired the figurine. Coveted it, even.
Was it possible that she had stolen it?
Stricken by the idea that she couldn’t trust her own memory – her own sanity – she slumped in her seat and stifled a sob. Her fighting spirit was already seeking answers.
‘May I see the tape again, please? When I crossed the hall, all I had in my hand was the note.’
Reed shifted awkwardly in his seat, which Jen took as a signal in her favour: the first indication that the detectives were operating on anything less than solid ground.
‘The angle’s not great,’ he admitted, ‘so it’s inconclusive.’
He brought up the video, fast-forwarding through the minutes that Jen was in the dining room. When she emerged, he slowed to normal speed and even paused a couple of times, catching her in mid stride as she headed towards the front door.
He was right. The camera’s position meant her right arm was obscured, though Jen thought she glimpsed her hand, and a collection of white pixels that must have been the note.
‘Could you run it in slow motion?’ she asked. ‘You can just about see the paper in my right hand, and there’s nothing else.’
Patiently, Reed complied with her request, and the three of them studied the procession of images with fierce concentration.
‘Not an ideal view,’ Howard finally conceded, ‘but it’s quite possible that you concealed it under your right arm, then slipped it into your bag.’
Jen gaped at her. ‘Why would I do that? I didn’t know the camera was there.’
To that, there was only silence. Reed returned to the start and ran the footage again. Jen couldn’t help noticing the furtive, hesitant way she moved: to these officers the woman on screen must appear sneaky and dishonest.
She realised she was shaking her head, as if denying it to herself. Was that the behaviour of a wholly innocent person?
She remembered an occasion when Charlie was a baby, and not sleeping well; Jen had walked out of a department store without paying for a packet of babygrows. Fortunately, the staff had accepted that it was forgetfulness rather than shoplifting, but she’d been mortified.
Then a more positive memory, a straw to clutch at: ‘A few weeks ago I was in a cafe,’ she told them. ‘The woman at the next table walked out, leaving her handbag on the floor, wide open, with her purse just sitting there. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to take it, but I handed it to the staff. The next time I was in, the manager told me how grateful the woman was.’
DS Howard affected a look of puzzlement. ‘I’m not sure what this has to do with—’
‘I’m saying: this isn’t me.’ She nodded at the evidence bag. ‘I don’t steal. I don’t vandalise property. Mr Wilson dropped the keys on the grass, and I picked them up and wrote him a note. I was trying to be helpful. . .’ And there she was forced to stop, because her vision was blurred with tears and she knew she was about to lose control.
Reed produced a tissue and passed it over. Jen nodded her thanks, blew her nose, and said, ‘It’s easily verified. Just get in touch with the cafe.’
‘That isn’t strictly relevant to this case,’ Howard said, ‘but we’re happy to take the details.’
Reed scribbled a note, while Howard picked at her nails and looked eager to move on. Jen could see that this example of her honesty wasn’t likely to make any difference, but she was clinging to it more for her own benefit.
I’m not a criminal. I wouldn’t steal something and then blank it out. . . would I?
The stress of the divorce had certainly taken its toll on her emotional wellbeing, but it had been going on for more than a year, and she hadn’t exhibited any strange behaviour up till now. Why would she suddenly turn into a thief?
‘I just did what I thought was best,’ she said. ‘I wish now that I’d handed them in at a police station, but I was going to be late for work. I thought leaving a note would be just as good.’
As if she hadn’t spoken, Howard said, ‘This sort of artwork is something that interests you, isn’t it? Celtic mythology. Gods and goddesses.’
Jen stared at her, then looked away. ‘Not particularly.’
‘Oh?’ The detective had heard the lie. She glanced at her colleague, who took out another sheet of paper.
‘This is from your Facebook page, about eleven months ago.’
Jen leaned forward to take a look, gripping the table as if she feared her connection to the world was about to break. It was a printed screenshot from a blog post that one of Jen’s friends had shared on social media. The blog was devoted to Pagan deities, and had included images of the male and female horned gods, Cernunnos and Elen. They were paintings rather than statues, but the representation of Elen was strikingly similar to the figurine on the table before her.
Jen stared at the sheet of paper. She wasn’t a regular on Facebook, but posts like this cropped up all the time and occasionally she commented or shared something just to demonstrate that she was still alive; a lot of people seemed to think it odd if you weren’t constantly parading your life for the world to see.
But this. . . this innocent click on someone else’s post felt like the final condemnation, sealing her fate.
She looked up, and it was clear in their faces: she could deny it all she liked but it wasn’t going to help. Only one option left to her now.
‘I’d like a solicitor, please.’
12
The interview was suspended at once. Reed left the room, then returned for a whispered conversation with Howard, leaning across the table with his back to Jen, before explaining that she could be represented by either a duty solicitor or somebody of her own choice – but not right now.
‘It’s almost 10 p.m.,’ Howard said. ‘I suggest you get some rest and we’ll resume in the morning.’
‘I’ve got to stay here?’
The detective nodded. ‘We’re allowed to hold you for twenty-four hours, I’m afraid.’
Jen was mute. At the back of her mind she’d known it might come to this, and yet to hear it confirmed was much harder to bear. There would be no collecting Charlie tonight: instead she would be sleeping here, in a tiny horrible cell.
With the formal interview over, the detectives seemed to relax. Discussing her options for legal assistance, Reed sounded genuinely concerned for her wellbeing, and approved
of Jen’s suggestion that she would speak to the solicitor handling her divorce and see if she could recommend a specialist in criminal law.
‘Good idea. And once that’s sorted, you’ll want to get your head down. An experience like this is incredibly draining.’
Until he’d said it, Jen hadn’t appreciated just how exhausted she felt. But the evidence was there when she got up from her chair and stumbled, her legs struggling to keep her upright.
Then it was back to the main area, which now had the rowdy atmosphere of a football terrace. Five or six young men were being booked in, presumably for fighting – they were all hopelessly drunk and hurling abuse at the staff. One of them spotted Jen and leered, shouting, ‘Oy, you’re fucking fit! Hope I’m sharing your cell.’
‘That’s enough,’ the custody officer growled, and Reed swiftly led her out of their sight.
The conversation with her divorce lawyer threatened to be painful, but Yvonne Cartwright was a shrewd woman who quickly spotted the potential for distress. After listening to a brief summary of the day’s events, she assured Jen that ‘just the right man’ would be there for her in the morning.
By ten thirty she was back in her cell. The custody assistant persuaded her to accept a meal, and brought her a microwaved shepherd’s pie, along with a drink of hot chocolate. Jen didn’t think she was the least bit hungry, but she found herself greedily devouring the entire meal and felt quite a lot better for it afterwards.
She steeled herself to sit on the toilet, reminding herself that this was luxury compared to the many times she’d had to use a hole in the ground, then lay down on the thin mattress and covered herself with the blanket. By turning towards the wall, she hoped to fool herself into believing she was in a normal room, rather than confined to this small, unwelcoming space.
Over the years she’d slept in tents and caves, on bare earth and painfully hard floors, in hotels and hostels infested with bedbugs and roaches (and sometimes with their human equivalents). She’d slept in searing heat and icy cold conditions – she’d even slept on the deck of a ship in a terrifying thunderstorm – but never in a cell. Never as a prisoner.
The closest experience was probably on a ferry crossing in the Philippines, where her cabin had been smaller, hotter and much dirtier than this, thick with the stench of rotting food and diesel fumes; she’d gone down with food poisoning and barely moved for fifteen hours, hugging a bucket like a lifebelt. At least this room wasn’t pitching up and down. . .
But sleep didn’t seem feasible. Even if she was able to silence the turmoil in her head, there was nothing she could do about the commotion from the other cells. The young men kept up a barrage of screams and shouts; one of them was repeatedly stamping his foot against the door, while another seemed to be headbutting the wall.
Jen recalled a visit to a zoo where Charlie had expressed his concern at the sight of animals in cages. ‘Doesn’t it make them unhappy?’ he’d asked, and when she tried to explain that often they were treated better here than in the wild, he had said, ‘It’s still not fair, though. Because the animals don’t get to choose.’
And now that’s me, she thought. Someone decided I had to be put in a cage, and I didn’t get to choose.
She felt heartbroken for Charlie. In terms of the battle for his future, the implications were almost too awful to contemplate.
The break-up of her marriage – and its impact on her son – was an all-pervading source of anxiety. For the most part he seemed to have adjusted well to the separation, but the failure to agree on sensible residency arrangements threatened to undo the progress they’d made. Jen did all she could to shield him from the knowledge of the ugly, bitter disputes that continually erupted between her and Freddie, or between her lawyers and his.
Freddie, she suspected, made slightly less effort, though even he seemed to recognise that there should be boundaries set for Charlie’s benefit. But Freddie’s father saw things differently, and it was he, as the ultimate paymaster, who seemed intent on making the divorce as grisly and expensive as possible.
Depending on what happened tomorrow, Jen would probably have to come clean about the allegations against her. She liked to think Freddie would take no pleasure from her predicament, though Gerard was sure to feel vindicated. He’d had the lowest of opinions of her from the start, for many reasons – one of them being that she disagreed with almost every aspect of his worldview. And since broadcasting his trenchant, bigoted views had made him a multimillionaire and media darling, he hadn’t taken kindly to such bold opposition from within the family.
He was also a fervent advocate of ‘traditional families’ – despite being on his third marriage – and felt that a wife belonged at home, attending to her husband’s needs. He’d been outraged by Jen’s intention to carry on travelling the world, especially once she had a baby to consider. Freddie had wavered in his support, sometimes enthusiastic about the adventures they would have when Charlie was a bit older, but rarely brave enough to say so in front of his father.
The police clearly suspected that she and this Alex Wilson had been having an affair, and she’d destroyed the artwork in an act of spite. It was the sort of story that thrilled the tabloids – the spurned lover cutting her man’s clothes to shreds or wrecking his car – and for that reason it would be easily believed, not least by Gerard Lynch.
That reminded her of Freddie’s insinuation that there was something between Jen and her boss, Nick. She’d never really mentioned him to Freddie, and it couldn’t have come from Charlie: her son had met Nick only a handful of times, usually on the desperate days when childcare was unavailable and Jen had no choice but to bring him along to work. Maybe he’d said it just to goad her, but it was a good example of Freddie’s hypocrisy. He still got touchy at any hint of another man taking an interest in her, even while boasting about his own conquests.
As the night wore on, the cells around her grew quieter, but sleep wouldn’t come. The knowledge of her imprisonment was an agony; no matter how uncomfortable she became, she could not get up and leave this room. At times she was close to panic: what if there was a fire, and no one let her out?
She tried to construct a fantasy that she was at home with Charlie, going through the normal bedtime routine. Often, instead of reading a story, he wanted to hear about one of her adventures. Norway was the winter favourite: how she’d camped on the edge of a glacier, which in the depths of the night would creak and groan like some great alien beast, restless in its slumber. Or she would describe the vast summer plains of the Serengeti, swarming with wildlife. Charlie was obsessed with giraffes, in particular, and desperate to see them in their natural habitat.
Jen had always promised that one day she would take him on the sort of adventures she used to have, but to keep telling him that now would make her a liar and a fraud. After this, she might lose him forever.
Thoroughly despondent, she tried to break this chain of thought. It felt like the odds were stacked against her, but for Charlie’s sake she had to stay strong, think logically, fight her corner.
So think. The damage seemed real enough, and it must have happened today. Either she’d done it herself, and somehow blanked the memory of it, or. . .
Someone else had done it. And they hadn’t stopped at vandalism – they’d planted the stolen object in her flat. But the idea that she was being framed seemed just as bizarre, just as hard to accept, as the suggestion of a blackout.
Insanity or paranoia, she thought miserably. It wasn’t much of a choice.
13
Jen slept a little, but sleep was not her friend. It was a feverish few hours of wretched unconsciousness, fractured by dreams of Tilgate Forest. The one consolation was that she woke with a measure of relief. I’m only here, in a police cell; it’s warm and well lit, and the monsters can’t be real.
The cells around her were blissfully silent, the young men sleeping off the booze that had derailed their evening. A new custody assistant looked in on her, and th
ey chatted for a few minutes, Jen feeling ridiculously grateful for some human interaction. Her stomach was raw from the tension of the previous day, but she agreed to breakfast: cornflakes in a Styrofoam bowl, and water to drink.
Her whole body ached, so she ran through a few yoga moves: a pretty standard routine, though doing it in here made it feel like some corny montage from a prison movie. Afterwards she felt only marginally better. Normally the reward for a bad night’s sleep in a hostile environment was a glorious vista, or the thrill of the exploration that lay ahead – a desert to cross, a mountain to climb. Here there were only the drab four walls, the echo of clanging doors, the fetid smell of male bodies discharging all manner of waste. As the custody assistant glumly reported, ‘Night on the tiles, and with a lot of ’em it’s coming out of both ends.’
But there was progress, as well. At eight o’clock Jen was taken to see the custody sergeant, a different one from yesterday, who authorised her move to a private room for a meeting with her solicitor.
Tim Allenby was about forty-five, tall and thin, a natural clotheshorse in a light grey Ted Baker suit, with foppish blond hair and attractive features marred only by the acne scars that pitted his cheeks. After shaking hands, he met her gaze and said, ‘I’m afraid I must be brutally honest. It doesn’t look good.’
Jen nodded. ‘I sort of had that impression myself.’
He ran through his briefing from DS Howard, who he’d known for years. ‘She’s diligent, and fair – and very thorough,’ he said, as if by way of a warning.
There were only a couple of embellishments that Jen could add, such as the recent demonstration of her good character. Allenby sucked his teeth as he considered it.
‘I’m not sure that would carry much weight with a jury. Stealing a purse from an unattended bag is very much the act of an opportunist. This situation feels rather more premeditated.’