by Hannah Howe
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I was sitting in a police interview room in the centre of Cardiff. Now that the moment had passed and the adrenalin had subsided, I didn’t feel too good. I gave my evidence to a courteous detective sergeant, placed my arms on the interview table then rested my head on my arms. I felt very tired. I closed my eyes.
Then Sweets came in, full of indignation and bluster. “What the hell happened at the quarry, Sam?”
I looked up and rubbed my eyes. “I’ve made my statement.”
Sweets was squeezing a stress ball. He threw it from hand-to-hand. “I want to hear it from your own sweet lips.”
I sat up and sighed. “She pulled a gun on me, so I shot her. She was upset because, like T.P. McGill, I’d rumbled her perverted operation. All the evidence is on my mobile phone. I told your detective sergeant where he could find it.”
“We’ve found your mobile phone, and viewed the evidence.”
“Great. So now I can go home?”
Sweets popped a sweet into his mouth. He squeezed his stress ball. He glared at me, leaving me in no doubt that I was the cause of his stress. “You shot her four times, Sam.”
I shrugged. “My finger got stuck on the trigger.” Sweets gave me a long, sideways look. In return, I gave him my innocent choirgirl smile. “It happens.”
“Jesus,” Sweets pushed his trilby to the top of his brow; he shook his head, “sometimes you take my breath away.” Then he frowned and viewed me with concern. “Did she do that to you?” He leaned forward and examined the grazes on my cheek. “You should get that seen to. I’ll get a doctor to have a look at it.”
I pushed my hair from my face, leaned back, stretched my arms and shook my head. “Don’t bother, Sweets, I’ve had worse.”
Then I leaned forward and thought of Dan.
Sweets must have sensed where my thoughts were going because he mumbled, “Did you love him?”
“No, never. By the end, I didn’t even like him. He was a bastard, but he didn’t deserve a place in the morgue.”
Sweets placed a hand on my shoulder. With his other hand, he squeezed the stress ball in a mixture of resignation and exasperation. He sighed, “I don’t know what to do with you. If you discovered a lead, I told you to contact me, didn’t I? Why wasn’t I called in on this sooner? Maybe then two people wouldn’t be in the morgue.”
“Save it, Sweets.” I closed my eyes and placed my hands to my forehead. “I don’t need one of your daddy lectures now.”
“Someone needs to daddy lecture you,” he tapped the side of his head with his index finger while pacing around the room, “to get some sense into your thick skull.”
I glared at him, my eyes alert, flashing, angry. “Listen, Sweets, maybe if I knew where my father was he’d talk some sense into me. But I don’t know where he is, so all I’ve got is my own conscience and I follow my conscience the best I can. I’m trying to survive. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do.”
He bounced the stress ball on the floor and caught it in his right hand. He shook his head again. “Two people got shot.”
“I know!”
“Your ex.”
“I know!”
“And you pulled the trigger on the other one.”
“I did!”
“And that could have been you dead in that quarry!”
“But it isn’t!”
Sweets removed his trilby and threw it on to the interview table. He scratched his balding head and sighed, “Oh, Sam, what am I going to do with you?”
I smiled, cheekily, “How about letting me go home so that I can have a bath.”
Sweets ignored me. He squeezed his stress ball. “Drake Jolley is talking to save his own skin. His statement backs up what you have to say. It’s a good job he is talking, otherwise you’d be in it right up to your pretty neck.”
“But I’m not. So how about letting me out of here so that I can go home and have a bath.”
Like a dog with a bone, Sweets refused to let go. “You shot someone, Sam.”
“You think I’m unaware of that?” I paused. I was tired of arguing, tired of the tension and my knotted emotions, tired of this room. “Look, Sweets, are you going to charge me, or not?”
“With being a pain in the arse, yes.”
“With anything else?”
He shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do for you.” While I pushed myself to my feet, he added, “You cracked the case, Sam.”
“Yeah.”
“If your old man knew, I guess he’d be proud of you.”
“Yeah.”
“You know who the ugly bastard is, don’t you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Georgi Dimitrov. He’s well connected on the Continent. It’s my guess that his bosses and her ladyship cooked up this little venture over Martinis on some Caribbean island. Dimitrov was probably installed as a minder, to keep an eye on things for the European mob.”
I nodded. It made sense. Baldy was obviously an outsider, not comfortable in his stately surroundings while Lady Diamond had been so obsessed with gathering baubles she would have sold her own daughter into prostitution.
From his jacket pocket, Sweets produced an evidence bag and a mobile phone. I assumed that it was my phone. “You’ve seen the faces on those pictures you took?”
“From a distance.”
“There’s going to be one hell of a scandal over this; a media circus. You’ll have your name in lights.”
Inwardly, I groaned. The thought of being photographed, of being harassed by the media did not appeal. I’d had a taste of it in the past, and it was something I did not enjoy. “Try to keep my name out of this, Sweets, as best you can. If there’s any credit going, you take it.”
He gave me an old-fashioned look, which did not bode well for my request.
“One more thing,” Sweets added as I placed my hand on the interview room door, “we had a report from Mansetree House. A maid claims that she was bound in a shed with tape around her mouth. She made a statement asserting that a woman assaulted her, a woman whose description comes close to yours.”
“My God!” I exclaimed, my hand pressed to my mouth. “Don’t tell me that I’ve got a double. Could the world cope with two Sam Sleuths?”
Sweets shook his head, sadly. He gave me half a grin, half a grimace and returned to his stress ball. “Get out of here. Have your bath. But next time...”
“If I get a lead, I’ll bring it to you.” I opened the door, then paused. “Oh, Sweets...two lions were wandering around a supermarket. One turns to the other and says, ‘quiet in here today, isn’t it’...”
Sweets rocked back on his heels and laughed out loud, a big, raucous belly laugh. “Not bad, not bad, kid. You’ve got potential. Now get out of here and stay out of my hair.”
I smiled and glanced at his balding crown. “What hair, Sweets?”
Sweets drew his arm back and hurled the stress ball towards me; but it’s okay, I made my escape before the ball bounced off the inside of the interview room door.