Текст книги "The Driver"

Автор книги: Mark Dawson

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16

Milton was stacking the chairs at the end of the meeting, hauling them across the room to the walk-in cupboard, when he noticed that the woman he knew as Eva was waiting in the entrance hall. She was sitting against the edge of the table, her legs straight with one ankle resting against the other, with a copy of the Big Book held open before her. Milton watched her for a moment, thinking, as he usually did, that she was a good looking woman, before gripping the bottom of the stack of chairs, heaving it into the air and carrying it into the cupboard. He took the cloth cover from the table, tracing his fingers over the embroidered A.A. symbol, and put that in the cupboard, too. He shut the cupboard, locked it, then went through. Eva had stacked all the dirty cups in the kitchen sink.

“Hello,” she said, with a wide smile.

“Hello. You alright?”

“Oh, sure. I’m great. Just thought you could do with a hand.”

“Thanks.”

She stood and nodded down at the table. “Where does that go?”

“Just over there,” Milton said. “I’ve got it.” He lifted the table, pressed the legs back into place, picked it up and stacked it against the wall with the others. He was conscious that she was watching him and allowed her a smile as he came back to pick up the large vat, the water inside cooling now that the element had been switched off. She returned his smile and he found himself thinking, again, that she was very attractive. She was slim and petite, with glossy dark hair and a Latino complexion. Her eyes were her best feature: the colour of rich chocolate, smouldering with intelligence and a sense of humour that was never far from the surface. Milton didn’t know her surname but she was a voluble sharer during the meetings and he knew plenty about her from the things that she had said. She was a lawyer, used to work up in Century City in Los Angeles during clearance work for the networks. Now she did medical liability work at St Francis Memorial. She was divorced with a young daughter, her husband had been an alcoholic too, and it had broken their relationship apart. She had found the rooms, he hadn’t. She shared about him sometimes. He was still out there.

“Enjoy it tonight?” she asked him.

“Enjoy might not be the right word.”

“Okay – get anything from it?”

“I think so.”

“Which other meetings do you go to?”

“Just this one. You?”

“There’s the place on Sacramento Street. Near Lafayette Park?”

Milton shook his head.

“I do a couple of meetings there. Mondays and Fridays. They’re pretty good. You should – well, you know.”

He turned the urn upside down and rested it in the sink.

“How long is it for you?” she asked.

“Since I had a drink?” He smiled ruefully. “One thousand and ninety days.”

“Not that you’re counting.”

“Not that I’m counting.”

“Let’s see.” She furrowed her brow with concentration. “If you can manage to keep the plug in the jug for another week, you’ll be three years sober.”

“There’s something to celebrate,” he said with an ironic smile.

“Are you serious?” she said, suddenly intense. “Of course it is. You want to go back to how it was before?”

He got quick flashbacks. “Of course not.”

“Fucking right. Jesus, John! You have to come to a meeting and get your chip.”

Anniversaries were called birthdays in the rooms. They handed out little embossed poker chips with the number of months or years written on them, all in different colours. Milton had checked out the chip for three years: it would be red. Birthdays were usually celebrated with cake and then there would be a gathering afterwards, a meal or a cup of coffee.

He hadn’t planned on making a fuss about it.

He felt a little uncomfortable with her focus on him. “You’ve got more, don’t you?”

“Five years. I had my last drink the day my daughter was born. That was what really drove it home for me – I’d just given birth and my first thought was, ‘God, I really need a gin.’ That kind of underlined that maybe, you know, maybe I had a bit of a problem with it. What about you? You’ve never said?”

He hesitated and felt his shoulders stiffen. He had to work hard to keep the frown from his brow. He remembered it very well but it wasn’t something that he would ever be able to share in a meeting.

“Difficult memory?”

“A bit raw.”

The flashback came back. It was clear and vivid and, thinking about it again, he could almost feel the hot sun on the top of his head. Morocco. Marrakesh. There had been a cell there, laid up and well advanced with their plan to blow up a car loaded with a fertiliser bomb in the middle of the Jemma el Fnaa square. The spooks had intercepted their communications and Milton had gone in to put an end to the problem. It had been a clean job – three shots, three quick eliminations – but something about one of them had stayed in his head. He was just a boy, they said sixteen but Milton guessed younger, fourteen or fifteen at the outside, and he had gazed up at him and into his eyes as he levelled the gun and aimed it at his head and pulled the trigger. Milton was due to extract immediately after the job but he had diverted to the nearest bar and had drunk himself stupidly, horribly, awfully, dangerously drunk. They had just about cashiered him for that. Thinking about it triggered the old memories and, for a moment, it felt as if he was teetering on the edge of a trapdoor that had suddenly dropped open beneath his feet.

He forced his thoughts away from it, that dark and blank pit that fell away beneath him, a conscious effort, and then realised that Eva was talking to him. He focussed in on her instead, “Sorry,” she was saying, “you don’t have to say if you’d rather not, obviously.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“No, forget I asked.”

A little brightness returned and he felt the trapdoor close.

“It’s fear, right?” she said.

“What do you mean? Fear of what?”

“No, F.E.A.R.” She spelt it out.

He shrugged his incomprehension.

“You haven’t heard that one? It’s the old A.A. saying: Fuck Everything and Run.”

“Ah,” Milton said, relaxing a little. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

“I’ve been running for five years.”

“You still get bad days?”

“Sure I do. Everyone does.”

“Really? Out of everyone I’ve met since I’ve been coming to meetings, you seem like one of the most settled.”

“Don’t believe it. It’s a struggle just like everyone else. It’s like a swan, you know: it looks graceful but there’s paddling like shit going on below the surface. It’s a day-to-day thing. You take your eye off the ball and, bang, back in the gutter you go. I’m just the same as everyone.”

Milton was not surprised to hear that – it was a comment that he had heard many times, almost a refrain to ward off complacency – but it seemed especially inapposite from Eva. He had always found her to have a calming, peaceful manner. There were all sorts in the rooms: some twitchy and avid, white-knuckling it, always one bad day from falling back into the arms of booze; others, like her, had an almost Zen-like aspect, an aura of meditative serenity that he found intoxicating. He looked at them jealously.

“What are you doing now?” she asked him impulsively.

“Nothing much.”

“Want to get dinner?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Anywhere you fancy?”

“Sure,” he said. “I know a place.”

* * *

They were the only people in Top Notch. Julius took their order and set about it with a cheerful smile, and, soon, the aroma of cooked meat filled the room. He brought the burgers over on paper plates and left them to get on with it, disappearing into the back. Milton smiled at his discretion; there would be wry comments when he came in tomorrow. The food was as good as ever and the conversation was good, too, moving away from A.A. to range across work and family and life in general. Milton quickly found himself relaxing.

“How are you finding the Steps?”

“Oh, you know…” he began awkwardly.

“Which one are you on?”

“Eight and nine.”

“Can you recite them?”

He smiled a little ruefully. “‘We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.’”

“And?”

“‘We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except where to do so would injure them or others.’”

“Perfect,” she said. “My favourites.”

“I don’t know. They’re hard.”

“You want my advice? Do it in your own time. They’re not easy, but you do feel better afterwards. And you want to be careful. Plenty of people will be prepared to take your amends for you—”

“—and they can, too, if they’re prepared to make my amends.”

“You heard that one before?”

He smiled. “A few times. Where are you? Finished them?”

“First time around. I’m going back to the start again now.”

“Step Ten: ‘We continued to take a personal inventory.’”

“Exactly. It never stops. You keep doing it, it stays fresh.”

Eva was an easy talker, something she affably dismissed as one of her faults, but Milton didn’t mind at all; he was happy to listen to her, her soft west coast drawl smoothing the edges from her words and her self-deprecating sense of humour and easy laughter drawing him in until it was just the two of them in an empty restaurant with Julius turning the chairs upside down on the tables, a hint that he was ready to call it a night and close.

“That was really nice,” she said as they stood on the sidewalk outside.

“It was.”

“You wanna, you know – you wanna do it again next time?”

“I’d love to.”

“Alright, then, John.” She took a step toward him, her hand on his shoulder as she raised herself onto tiptoes and placed a kiss on his cheek. She lingered there for a moment, her lips warm against his skin, and as she stepped back she traced her fingertips across his shoulder and down his arm to the elbow. “Take it easy, alright? I’ll see you next week.”

Milton smiled, more easily and naturally than was normal for him, and watched her turn and walk back towards where she had parked her Porsche.

17

Peter Gleason was the park ranger for the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. He had held the job for twenty years, watching all the communal spaces, making sure the fishermen and water sports enthusiasts observed the local regulations, keeping an eye on the wildlife. Peter loved his job; he was an outdoorsman at heart and there could not have been many places that were as beautiful as this. He liked to say that he had the best office in the world; his wife, Glenda, had heard that quip about a million times but he still said it because it was true and it reminded him how lucky he was.

Peter had been a dog-lover all his adult life and this was a great job to have a hound. It was practically a requirement. He had had four since he had been out here. They had all been Labradors. Good dogs, obedient and loyal; it was just like he always said it, you couldn’t go far wrong with a Lab. Jethro was his current dog. He was two years old and mongrel, part Labrador and part pointer. Peter had picked him out as a puppy and was training him up himself. He had the most even temperament out of all the dogs and the best nose.

It was an early Tuesday morning in December when Peter stopped his truck in the wide, exposed and bleak square of ground that served visitors to Headlands Lookout. It was a remote area, served by a one-track road with the waters of Bonita Cove at the foot of a sheer drop on the left. He stepped carefully; yet another dense bank of fog had rolled in overnight and visibility was down to twenty yards. It was cold and damp, the curtain of solid grey muffling the sound. The western portion of San Francisco was just on the other side of the Bay, usually providing a splendid vista, but it was invisible today. The only sign that it was there was the steady, eerie boom of the foghorns, one calling and the other answering.

There were only two other cars in the lot. Fishermen still visited with reels to try and catch the fluke, bluefish, winter flounder, mackerel, porgy and weakfish that abounded just offshore, and as he checked he noticed that a couple of them had followed the precarious path down the cliff face to get to the small beach. Oystermen came, too, even though the oyster beds, which had once been plentiful, had grown more scarce. There was still enough on the sea bed to make the trip worthwhile: hard-shelled clams, steamers, quahogs, bay scallops, blue-claw crabs and lobsters. Others came with binoculars to watch the birds and the seals. Kayakers, clad in neoprene wetsuits, cut across the waves.

The margins between the road and the cliff had grown too wild in places for a man to get through but the dog was keen to explore today and Peter watched as he forced himself into thickets of bramble. He walked on, following the headland around to the west. He watched the dog bound ahead, cutting a line through the sumac and salt hay that was as straight as an arrow. Peter lived on the other side of the bay, in Richmond, and he had always had a keen interest in the local flora and fauna. He found the rough natural world interesting, which was reason enough, but it was also professionally useful to have some knowledge of the area that you were working in. As he followed Jethro through the salt hay that morning he found himself thinking that this part of the world would not have changed much in hundreds of years. Once you were down the slope a ways, and the city was out of sight, the view would have been unchanged for millennia.

He stepped carefully through the bracken, navigating the thick clumps of poison ivy before breaking into the open and tramping down the suddenly steep slope to the water’s edge. All along the beach were stacks of tombstones brought over from Tiburon. They had been piled into makeshift jetties to help combat the constant erosion and the salty bite of the tide had caused them to crumble and crack. The dog paused for a moment, frozen still, his nose twitching, and then, as Peter watched with a mixture of curiosity and anticipation, he sprinted towards the deep fringe of the undergrowth. He got six feet in and stopped, digging furiously with his forepaws. Peter struggled across the soft, wet sand as the dog started to bark. When he got there, the dog had excavated the sand so that a flap of canvas sacking had been exposed. He called for Jethro to stay but he was young and excited and knew he was onto something and so he kept digging, wet sand spraying out from between his hind legs.

By the time that the ranger had fastened the lead to the dog’s collar, he had unearthed a skull, a collarbone and the start of a ribcage.

PART TWO

The Man Who Would Be King

“Careful now.

We're dealing here with a myth.

This city is a point upon a map of fog;

Lemuria in a city unknown.

Like us,

It doesn't quite exist.” – Ambrose Bierce, San Francisco journalist, poet, and novelist

#2

MEGAN MELISSA GABERT

Meg Gabbert had always wanted to act. She was a born performer, that was what she would tell anyone who cared to ask her about her ambitions, and, as far as she was concerned, she was going to make it. She hadn’t decided exactly what her talents best suited – acting or singing, she could do both – but there was no question about it in her mind: she was going to be famous. It wasn’t in doubt.

When she was in seventh grade, she had taken to the stage in her school’s production of Bugsy Malone. She had hoped to play Tallulah, Fat Sam’s moll and Bugsy’s old flame, but that role had been assigned to a rival. She ended up playing Blousey Brown, a sassy dame who had designs on Hollywood and, once she had gotten over her disappointment, she decided that this was the better role, one that was more suited to her. She had a great voice and everyone said that she was brilliant on opening night. The local paper exclaimed that she stole the show. It was something she would never forget: the excitement she felt while she was standing there in the single spotlight, belting out the numbers to a roomful of parents and friends. If she had needed any confirmation about the course she had chosen for herself, this was it. From that point forwards, performing would be the only thing she was interested in doing.

Getting to the stage where she could make enough money to support herself through her acting was going to take some time and, until that happened, she had paid her way with a little hooking. It had started with webcams but then she had realised there was more to be made by going a little further. She had posted an ad on the Fresno/Adult Services page of Craigslist a year after she graduated from high school. She had a killer photo from a session she did for her acting portfolio and the replies had been instantaneous. She was hanging out with a guy in those days, this dude called Clay, nothing serious, just messing around, and she had persuaded him to come along and keep an eye on her. He drove her from job to job. They worked out a routine to keep her safe: he called her cell ten minutes after she went inside and if there was no answer then he would know that she was in trouble. If she answered, everything was fine. She charged a hundred bucks an hour and gave him twenty.

It was going okay but she was always a little nervous that she’d bump into a john again when she was off the clock. She knew, too, that there was better money to be made in a bigger city. She thought of Los Angeles but the idea of being closer to Hollywood and her dream frightened her; she wasn’t ready for that yet. San Francisco seemed like a good compromise.

The difference in the city was stark. It was full of johns, and they were of a much higher class than the bums and stiffs she was used to in Fresno. There were plenty of out-of-towners, away from home and bored and looking for a little fun. She would take her laptop to a hotel room, post an ad and wait for the calls. She could get through four or five appointments and clear a thousand bucks every night, easy. The men were a real mixture: some were old and wanted to daddy her; others were young and trim and good-looking. The money was amazing. She took rooms in the nicest hotels with views of the Golden Gate and ate in the best restaurants. She never had any problems with what she was doing. It was another performance, in a way. The johns were prepared to pay to spend time with her. She could play any number of parts for them: schoolgirl, vamp, prim secretary. Their adulation was instant and obvious. For as long as she was with them she was desired: full of potential, the centre of attention, loved, rich. And what was wrong with that?

* * *

She heard the Cadillac before she saw it. It backfired loudly from a couple of blocks away, the noise carrying down the street and around the corner to where she was waiting at 6^th and Irving. The engine sounded throaty and unhealthy, as if it was about to expire, and she had been nonplussed as it pulled over to stop at the edge of the sidewalk opposite her. The man she had spoken to on the phone had said that he was an executive from a company that dealt in cattle all the way across the south-west. He certainly had the accent for it, a mild southern burr that leant his voice a musical quality. She hadn’t expected him to be driving a beat-up car like this but, as she crossed the sidewalk to the open window, she chided herself for jumping to conclusions.

A bum begging for change next to the entrance to JC Penney watched as the door was opened for her. He watched as she carefully slid into the car, her hands pressing down her skirt as she lowered herself into the seat. The man didn’t think twice about it and she hardly registered; he was hungry, and more interested in adding to the couple of bucks in change that had been tossed in to the cap on the sidewalk before his folded legs. If he had paid attention, perhaps he would have noticed the look of confusion on the girl’s face as she looked, for the first time, at the man who had picked her up. He might have remembered more if he had known that he would be the last person to see the girl alive.

18

Milton leant back and traced his fingers against the rough vinyl surface of the table. It had been marked by years of graffiti: gang tags, racial epithets and unflattering remarks about the police, some of them quite imaginative. There was a dirty glass of water, an ashtray that hadn’t been emptied for days and, set against the wall, a tape recorder. He crossed his arms and looked up at police officers who were sitting opposite him. The first was a middle-aged man with several days of growth on his chin, an aquiline face and a lazy left eye. The second was a little older, a little more senior, and, from the way the two of them had behaved so far, Milton could see that he was going to keep quiet while his partner conducted the interview.

The young one pressed a button on the tape recorder and it began to spool.

“Just to go through things like we mentioned to you, we’re gonna do a taped interview with you.”

“That’s fine,” Milton said.

“There’s my ID. And there’s my partner’s.”

“Okay.”

“So I’m Inspector Richard Cotton. My colleague is Chief of Detectives Stewart Webster.”

“I can see that.”

“Now, first of all, can you please state your name for me?”

“John Smith.”

“And that’s S-M-I-T-H.”

“Correct.”

“Your date of birth, sir?”

“Thirty-first of October, 1973.”

“That makes you forty, right?”

“It does.”

“And your address at home?”

“259 Sixth Street.”

“What’s that?”

“A hotel.”

“An SRO?”

“That’s right.”

“Which one?”

“The El Capitan.”

“How are you finding that? Bit of a dive, right?”

“It’s alright.”

“You say so. Phone number?”

He gave them the number of his cellphone.

“Are you alright for water?”

“Yes.”

He tossed a packet of cigarettes on the table. “Feel free to light up. We know this can be stressful.”

Milton had to stifle a long sigh of impatience. “It would be stressful if I had something to hide. But I don’t, so I’ll pass, but thanks anyway. Now, please – can we get started? There’s already been too much waiting around. Ask me whatever you like. I want to help.”

Cotton squinted: one eye, a little spooky. “Alright, then. John Smith – that’s your real name, right?”

“It is.”

“And you’re English, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve been to England. Holiday. Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, all that history – one hell of a place.”

Milton rolled his eyes. Was he serious? “Just ask me about Madison.”

“In a minute, John,” the man said with exaggerated patience. “We just want to know a little bit about you first. So how come you ended up here?”

“I’ve been travelling. I was in South America for six months and then I came north.”

“Through Mexico?”

“That’s right.”

“How long you been here?”

“Nine months. I was here once before, years ago. I liked it. I thought I’d come back and stay a while.”

“How have you been getting by?”

“I’ve been working.”

Cotton’s good eye twitched. “You got a visa for that?”

“Dual citizenship.”

“How’s that?”

“My mother was American.” It was a lie but it was what his passport said. Dual citizenship saved unnecessary nonsense that would have made it more difficult for him to work. Being able to claim some connection to the United States had also proven to be useful as he worked his way north up the continent.

“Alright, John. Let’s change the subject – you want to talk about Madison, let’s talk about Madison. You know we’ve dug up two bodies now, right?”

“I’ve seen the news.”

“And you know none of them are her?”

That was news to him. “No. I didn’t know that.”

“That’s right – none of them. See, Madison had a metal pin in her hip. Fell off her bike when she was a girl, messed it up pretty good. They had to put one in to fix it all together. The remains in the morgue are all whole, more or less, and none of them have anything like that.”

Milton felt a moment of relief but immediately tempered it: it was still surely just a matter of time.

“That doesn’t mean we won’t find her,” Cotton went on. “If you’ve been watching the news, you’ll know that we’re still searching the beach and we’re very concerned that we’re gonna find more. So, with all that being said, let’s get down to meat and potatoes, shall we?”

“Please.”

“Why’d you do it, John?”

Milton wasn’t surprised. “Seriously?”

“What did you do with her body?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m not kidding, John.”

“No, you’ve got to be. It’s nothing to do with me.”

“Answer the question, please.”

He looked dead straight at the cop. “I just answered it. I didn’t do it. I have absolutely no idea where she is.”

“So you say. But on your own account you were the last person to see her alive.”

He clenched his fists in sudden frustration. “No – that’s not what I said.”

“You got a temper, John?”

“I don’t know that she’s dead. I hope she isn’t. I said that I was one of the last people to see her before she disappeared. That’s different.”

“We know the two girls we’ve got in the morgue were all hookers. Madison was hooking when she disappeared. It’s not hard to join the dots, is it?”

“No, it isn’t. But it has nothing to do with me.”

“Alright, then. Let’s change tack.” He took a cigarette from the packet and lit it, taking his time about it. He looked down at his notes. “Okay. The night after she disappeared – this is the Friday – we’ve got a statement from Victor Leonard that says you went back to Pine Shore. He said he saw you coming out of the garden of the house where the party was the night before. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“We checked the security camera, Mr. Smith. There’s one on the gate. We looked and there you are, climbing over the wall. Why’d you do something like that?”

Milton gritted his teeth. The camera must have run off rechargeable batteries that would cut in when the power went out. “The gate was locked,” he said.

“Why didn’t you buzz to get in?”

“Because someone had changed the code to the gate after Madison disappeared. Rather than wasting your time with me, I’d be asking why that was. A girl goes missing and the next day the code to the gate is changed? Why would they want to keep people out? Don’t you think that’s a little suspicious?”

“We’ll be sure to bear that in mind. What were you looking around for?”

“Anything that might give me an idea what caused Madison to be so upset that she’d run away.”

“You spoke to Mr. Leonard?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Madison went to his house. I wanted to know what she said to him.”

“He say anything useful?”

He thought of Brady. “Not really.”

“And you don’t think all this is something that the police ought to do?”

“Yes, I do, but Madison’s boyfriend had already reported her missing and he got the cold shoulder. Most crimes are solved in the first few hours after they happen. I didn’t think this could wait.”

Cotton chain-smoked the cigarette down to the tip. “Know a lot about police work, do you John?”

“Do you have a sensible question for me?”

“Got a smart mouth, too.”

“Sorry about that. Low tolerance level for idiots.”

“That’s it, John. Keep giving me attitude. We’re the only people here keeping you from a pair of cuffs and nice warm cell.”

Milton ignored the threat.

Cotton looked down at his notes. “You said she was frightened?”

“Out of her mind.”

“That’s not what security at the party said.”

“What did they say?”

“Said you barged in and went after her.”

“I heard her screaming.”

“How’d you explain how one of them ended up with concussion and a broken nose?”

“He got in my way.”

“So you broke his nose and knocked him out?”

“I hit him.”

“It raises the question of that temper of yours again.”

Milton repeated himself patiently. “I heard Madison screaming.”

“So?”

“So I went in to see if she was alright.”

“And?”

“I told her I’d take her home.”

“And?”

“She got around me and ran.”

Cotton got up and started to circle the table. “You mentioned Trip Macklemore. We’ve spoken to him. He said you had Madison’s bag in the back of your taxi.”

“I did. I gave it to him afterwards.”

“What was it doing in your car?”

“She left it there.”

“But you’d already taken her where she needed to go. Why would she have left it?”

“I said I’d wait for her.”

“You didn’t have another job to go to?”

“She was nervous. I didn’t think it was right to leave her there, on her own, with no way to get back to the city.”

“You were going to charge her for that?”

“I hadn’t decided. Probably not.”

“A favour, then? Out of the goodness of your heart?”

“It was the right thing to do.”

“He’s English,” the other man, Webster, offered. “What is it you call it?”

“Chivalry?”

“That’s right, chivalry.”

“Don’t know about that, boss, doesn’t strike me as all that likely. Taxi drivers aren’t known for their charity.”

“I try and do the right thing,” Milton said.

He looked down at his notes. “You work for Vasilly Romanov, too, right? Mr. Freeze – the ice guy?”

“Yes.”

“We spoke to him. He had to have words with you the afternoon she went missing. That right?”

“I dropped some ice.”

“He says you were agitated.”

“Distracted. I knew something was wrong.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I already have.”

Cotton slapped both hands on the table. “Where is she?”

Milton stared at him and spoke calmly and carefully. “I don’t know.”

He drummed the table. “What did you do with her body?”

“It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Is she on the headland?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me share a secret with you, John. The D.A. thinks you did it. He thinks you’ve got a big guilty sign around your neck. He wants to throw the book at you.”

“Knock yourself out.” Milton calmly looked from one man to the other. “We can go around the houses on this all day if you want but I’m telling you now: if anything has happened to Madison it has absolutely nothing to do with me, and it doesn’t matter how you phrase your questions, it doesn’t matter if you shout and scream and it doesn’t matter if you threaten me – the answers will always be the same. I didn’t do it. It has nothing to do with me. And I’m not a fool. You can say what you want but I know you don’t think that I did it.”

“Really? How would you know that, John?”

“Because you would have arrested me already and this interview would be under caution. Look, I’m not a fool. I understand. I know you need to eliminate me. I know that I’m going to be a suspect. It stands to reason. I’ll do whatever you need me to do so that you can be happy that I’m not the man you want. The car I was driving that night is parked outside. Get forensics to have a look at it. You can do it without a warrant – you don’t need one, you have my authorisation. If you want to search my room, you’ve just got to ask.” He reached into his pocket and deposited his keys on the table. “There. Help yourself.”