4
IT WAS GONE NINE O’CLOCK BY THIS TIME, BUT THE STREETS were still busy and we didn’t make great progress. I was still smarting from Tulloch’s comments about wandering and fumbling, so I kept my eyes closed and asked myself what I could have done differently. Joesbury said nothing.
After ten, maybe fifteen minutes of silence, he switched on the car stereo and the eerie notes of Clannad filled the car.
‘Oh, you are kidding me,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Is there anything in the glove compartment?’
I opened my eyes and, still wearing latex gloves, pulled out the only CD in the small compartment. ‘Medieval plainsong,’ I said, reading the cover.
Joesbury shook his head. ‘If you get chance to speak to her about her taste in music, go for it,’ he said. ‘She had me listening to Westlife the other night.’
He lapsed into silence again as we reached the Old Kent Road. Occasionally, as the streetlights caught the car windscreen at the right angle, I could see his reflection. Nothing out of the ordinary. Late thirties, I guessed, brown hair cut short. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. His face and bare forearms were suntanned. His teeth, I’d already noticed, were even and very white.
Another ten minutes passed without either of us speaking. I had a sense, though, partly from the way his head kept tilting, that he was watching me in the car windscreen too.
‘If I’d got to her sooner, would she have lived?’ I asked, as we turned off Lewisham High Street and into the car park behind the station.
‘Guess we’ll never know,’ replied Joesbury. There were no spaces left so he parked directly behind a green Audi, completely blocking it in.
‘She was still alive seconds before the ambulance arrived,’ I said. ‘I should have put something against the wound, shouldn’t I? Tried to stop the bleeding.’
If I was hoping for any sort of comfort from this guy, I was wasting my breath. ‘I’m a police officer, not a paramedic,’ he replied, switching off the engine. ‘Looks like you’re expected.’
The station’s duty sergeant, a scene-of-crime officer and a police doctor were waiting for us. Together we walked through the barred rear door of Lewisham police station and my arrival was officially recorded. I’d worked for the Metropolitan Police for nearly four years, but had a feeling I was about to see it from a very different perspective.
Some time later, I sat staring at dirty cream walls and grey floor tiles. My left shoulder was sore from where I’d fallen on it earlier and I could feel a headache threatening. Over the past hour, I’d been asked to undress completely before being examined by a police doctor. After a shower, I’d been examined again, and photographed. My fingernails had been clipped, my saliva swabbed and my hair combed thoroughly and painfully. Then I’d been given a pair of orange overalls normally issued to prisoners in custody.
I hadn’t eaten that evening and, whether it was due to low blood sugar, shock or just a cold room, I was finding it hard to stop shivering. I kept seeing pale-blue eyes, staring at me.
I could have saved her. If I hadn’t been in my own little world, we might not be kicking off a murder investigation right now. And everyone knew that. It would be my legacy, for as long as I stayed in the service: the DC who’d let a woman be stabbed to death right in front of her.
The door opened and DI Joesbury came in. In the small room he seemed taller than he had on the street or even in DI Tulloch’s car. DC Gayle Mizon, the detective who’d assisted the police doctor in examining me, was with him. The two of them had been laughing at something in the corridor outside and he was still smiling as he held the door open for her. He had a great smile. Then he turned to me and the smile faded.
‘Still bored?’ I asked, before I could stop myself.
I might not have spoken. I got no reaction whatsoever.
Mizon was an attractive blonde woman of around thirty-three or -four. She’d brought me coffee. I put my hand on the mug for warmth but didn’t dare pick it up. I was shaking too much. Joesbury continued to study me, my hair still wet from the shower, my face dry and pink because it hadn’t been moisturized, and my prisoner-in-custody uniform. He didn’t look impressed.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a statement.’
By the time he called a halt, I’d barely the energy left to sit upright in my chair. If I’d wanted to be tactful about DI Joesbury’s interviewing technique, I’d have said he was thorough. If honesty had been the order of the day, I’d have called him a sadistic shit.
Before we started, they explained that Gayle Mizon would be taking the statement, Joesbury only sitting in on an advisory capacity. They’d even given me chance to request he leave the room. I’d shrugged and muttered something about it being fine. Big mistake, because the moment the interview kicked off, he took charge.
What followed didn’t feel like any witness statement I’d ever been a party to before. More like I was about to be charged. He made me go over every detail several times, until even Mizon was looking uncomfortable. And he kept going back to the same point. How could I not have seen something? How could I have missed the attack and yet been close enough for her to die in my arms? Every second I was waiting for him to say that the blonde woman would still be alive if I hadn’t messed up.
Finally, he terminated the interview and switched off the recording equipment. The clock on the wall said ten past eleven.
‘Is there someone you’d like us to call?’ asked Mizon, as Joesbury took the disc out of the recording machine and labelled it.
I shook my head.
‘Will there be someone at home when you get there?’ she asked me. ‘Flatmate? Boyfriend? You’ve had a nasty shock. You probably shouldn’t be on your own.’
‘I live on my own,’ I said. ‘But I’m fine,’ I added, when she looked concerned. ‘Is it OK if I go now?’
‘Family?’ Mizon wasn’t giving up easily.
‘They don’t live in London,’ I said, which was true, if a bit disingenuous. They don’t live anywhere. I have no family. ‘Look, I’m tired, I haven’t eaten, I just want to get home and—’
Joesbury looked up, frowning. ‘Did nobody offer you food?’ he asked, and really, you had to admire the way he made it sound like it was my own fault.
‘Really not a problem. Can I go now?’ I stood up. ‘Sir,’ I added, for good measure.
Joesbury turned to Mizon. ‘Gayle, if we’d brought the killer in red-handed, knife dangling from his teeth, we’d have fed him. One of our own, we leave to starve.’
‘I thought someone else was …’ Mizon began.
‘It’s really not …’ I tried.
‘Sorry,’ she said to me. I shrugged, managed a smile.
Joesbury stood up and crossed the room. ‘Come on,’ he said, holding the door open.
‘Where are we going now?’ I hadn’t the energy to even try being polite any more. Not that previous efforts had been all that successful.
‘I’m getting you fed, then I’m getting you home,’ he replied. He nodded at the disc on the table. ‘Can you get that processed?’ he said to a rather surprised-looking Mizon. Then he walked me out of the station.
Tulloch’s silver Mercedes had already been moved and Joesbury opened up the green Audi we’d blocked in previously. He turned on the engine, put the car into gear and began flicking through a stack of CDs.
‘Got any Westlife?’ I asked, as he reversed the car out of the parking space and turned it round. When he didn’t reply, I made a mental note that a sense of humour wasn’t high on this guy’s list of attributes. And that I could probably cross out fair-minded and compassionate as well. In fact, so far, the only box I could tick was a healthy respect for a woman’s need to eat. He pushed a CD into the stereo. Back on Lewisham High Street, he turned the volume right up and rhythmic, percussion-based club music filled the car. Message received and understood, DI Joesbury, I wasn’t meant to talk.