Bright Spark (19 page)

       “Are
you joking?”

       “He is
our
prisoner now, Rob. It’s time we got our heads together.”

       “Haven’t
you got an enquiry room to manage?”

       “You
mean why can’t you have Slowey instead of me?”

       “That
too. He knows what he’s doing and hasn’t tried to have me arrested yet.”

       “I’ve
sent him home for a rest. Me being a caring supervisor. You’ve got to learn to
take better care of your staff.”

       “Why
don’t you email me to that effect?” Harkness paced another circuit of the
access bay. He’d found a new sympathy for the head-lolling, fur-chewing mania
of caged predators in zoos.

“More
to the point, why the bloody hell is Firth here now?”

       “Expediting
the enquiry,” said Biddle, looking fondly at the stupefied Firth.

       “Pissing
away an advantage.”

       “You
say potato.”

       “Come
on. Just think,” whispered Harkness. “There are evidential holes to be filled.
Looked to me like he had a decent injury. Leaving him in County Hospital overnight could have given us another day before the custody clock started ticking.
And I could have slept. And had a square meal.”

       “Boss
wanted to crack on. Town sergeant’s not happy with losing staff to babysit him.
Besides….”

       “Besides
what?”

       “Seems
your friend here was champing at the bit to see you. Once his leg was plastered
up and he’d sobered up enough to shout and hold a pen, he discharged himself.
County were glad to see the back of him.”

       “Marvellous.
Why’s that then?”

       “Some other
fuckwit snotted a probationer while trying to damage our fuckwit. There he is.”
Biddle indicated the electronic custody screen. “Number nine.”

       Harkness
squinted at the wide, elevated screen, with its neat delineations of names,
offences, review times, officer-in-case collar numbers and warning notes.
Toiling away beneath it, trading numbers and jargon and form sheets, the
custody sergeants resembled down-at-heel bookmakers at a race meet where every
hateful nag would fail to finish.

‘Braxton
K’ had been housed in number nine. ‘Police assault etc’ suggested a long stay
and both a doctor and appropriate adult had been requested. The volume crime
unit had been tasked with interviewing this body, charging him with the most
easily proved and least labour intensive offence and quickly sluicing him away.

Braxton.
He rolled the name around his head, looking for a connection. He should know. He’d
read it or heard it in the last eighteen hours. Slowey would know. He swallowed
a burst of anxiety, knowing he might well waste his first murder interview as a
DS if he didn’t eat something more substantial than a Mars bar and close his
eyes for twenty minutes. 

Drifting
in the haze of his own fatigue, he suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable. The
smoke receded and he found Firth’s eyes on him, blank, alert and indifferent.
For seconds, they studied each other. Harkness involuntarily scowled and
bunched his shoulders, returning the gaze and ready for the
testosterone-fuelled battle of wills that usually flowed from direct eye
contact. Firth turned away, revealing nothing, unruffled and uncurious.

“So.
Nigel.” Harkness leaned on the holding cell’s door-frame. “How are we?”

Firth
didn’t deviate from his study of the ceiling, eyes flickering from side to
side, lips counting silently.

“Rob,”
hissed Biddle. “None of your cowboy tactics now.  He’s not in for littering so
for fuck’s sake no Mickey Mouse bloody amateur interviewing off tape.”

“But
I’m bored, Biddle. I’m going to save us some time.”

“I’ll
give you a game of ‘I spy’ if you like.”

“Ok.
Let’s start with ‘u’. Give up? It stands for do whatever else you want, but
don’t you fucking try to
undermine
me in front of a punter.”

Biddle
bridled, flushing and straightening his jacket.

“It’s
your funeral, Rob.”

       Firth’s
face bore the memory of a smile when Harkness turned back to him. Harkness was
unnerved.  Firth had never before managed such a convincing show of
impassivity, although that might be pharmaceutical in origin. Worse, having
more in common with the suspect than he did with his co-pilot was not the best
basis for a good, attacking interview.

       “Nigel,
I’m going to assume that you don’t want to talk to me in this setting. Could be
you’re blaming me for that little road accident and you’d rather I just went
away and fucked myself and my mother. Besides, you don’t want to accidentally
give anything away about the fire you started. And those dead children.

“Yep,
if I were in your prison trainers, I’d keep my mouth shut too.” If Firth
reacted, Harkness couldn’t tell. “Remind me not to play poker with you, Nigel.
But here’s the deal. You can have a solicitor. Your know that. But you’re a
bright lad who’s been through the system. I’m offering you a chance to explain
your actions, scrub off all that dirt, get yourself off the hook. If I’m wrong,
I need to know.”

       Firth
inclined his head slightly, studying the CCTV camera over Harkness’s shoulder.
Harkness knew the system didn’t record sound and shrugged inwardly.

“But
if you freeze me out, glue your mouth shut and hide behind some lawyer who’s
only interested in prolonging all our pain and milking the system, I’ll have to
believe you’ve got something to hide and do what I need to do to prove it.

“So,
here’s the deal. If you skip the lawyer, we’ll get straight into interview. If
your story adds up, we’ll get you processed out ASAP. Otherwise, well, it’s a
bank holiday, the cells are heaving; you could be here for a long time waiting
for someone to come along and advise you on the bleeding obvious. I think our
number’s about to come up at the meat counter, so what’s it going to be?”

“Snelling,”
said Firth, eyes never leaving the ceiling. “Rory Snelling.”

“Next!”

The
magnetic contacts on the barred gate clicked as a custody sergeant beckoned to
them.

       “Whoop
whoop. Nee-naw, nee-naw.”

      
“You’ve
reached the voicemail of Rory Snelling. I’m currently engaged with another
client. If your call is urgent, please…..”

       “Yes,
Rory, it’s urgent. It was urgent an hour ago and it’s still urgent now. Ring
me. It’s Sharon. But you knew that.” Sharon Jennings cleared the call. “Fuck
it!”

       “Epithets
unwarranted!” said Jeremy in his lisping sing-song. “May warrant your detention!”

       “You’re
right, JJ. Pretend I never said it.”

       “I’m
good at pretending. Lying commensurate with good manners. Manners maketh the
man. Man made the car to take us over the road.”

       “I’m
sure you’re right, JJ.” Once more oblivious to her, Jeremy was busily
rearranging his toy car collection. Each treasured, die-cast miniature was
precisely aligned and spaced on Sharon’s dining table. Not only were the cars
aligned with the grain of the wood, but they appeared to be sub-categorised
into makes, models and functions.

“What
are you doing now, JJ?”

       “Truth
self-evident to law-abiding motorists,” he said, ignoring her and concentrating
on a series of intricate three-point turns so that half a dozen toy hatchbacks
could make way for a fire engine, police car and ambulance.  

       “Is
that how it looked last night, JJ?”

       “No no
no no no. Toys easier to move. Mother said to be clear in my head and get all
my ducks in a row for the policeman so as to tell what should be told.”

       “You’re
a good lad, JJ.”

       “Yes I
am SJ.”

       Her
phone trembled into life, barely managing the first two seconds of ‘Daddy Cool’
before she answered it.

       “Rory?”

       “Erm,
yes.”

       “You
don’t seem sure.”

       “Thanks,
yep, just print the whole thing.”

       She
felt herself sliding to the margins. She swallowed a rebuke, not quite finding
the words and knowing she wasn’t entitled to bitterness. They were
professionals who’d slept together, nothing more. This call was strictly
business. One colleague to another. So why did she keep having this debate with
herself?        

       “Sorry,
Shaz, not quite free to talk. What do you need?”

       “It
won’t wait. Can you get yourself free to talk?”

       “Do
you know where I am?”

       “At
the police station, printing off Nigel Firth’s custody record?”

       “Wait.”

She
was scuffed and buffeted, coming to a rest in a softened space where muffled
voices could just be heard over the clinking of change on keys. Paul Simon was
a prophet: Rory had finally slipped her into his pocket with his car keys. A
door slammed and was locked and an extractor fan buzzed. She was abruptly
dragged out of the pocket.  

       “Shaz.
Hi. Sorry. So: Firth. Shoot.”

       “You
sound like a text message. Are you billing by the word now?”

Rory
held his breath. She knew this mannerism. He’d be taking the second or two he
needed to fine-tune his response. Were she an office junior, he’d have
lambasted her for wasting his time. Were she his girlfriend, he’d have ignored
her call, keeping her at the requisite distance from his work. As a fellow
professional, an apprentice and a walking reminder of delirious transgression,
she was getting harder for him to peg.  

       “Keeping
my powder dry,” he said warmly. “Could be a long night. The sooner I crack on
with it, the better. Look, I know Firth’s one of yours. This may change things
for your case, but there’s nothing you can do about any of this right now. You
should just enjoy what’s left of your day off.”

       “The
police came to see me. An hour or two ago. About the arson murders.”

       “You
should have called.”

       “I’m
calling.”

       “At
the time.”

       “I’m a
big girl, Rory.”

       “Of
course. I’m not doubting your acumen. Who was it and how badly did you maul
him?”

       “One
DS Harkness. New to me. And I was a pussycat.” She winced. She’d been more like
a hissing wildcat, betraying her fears when she should have played the sphinx.

       “I
know him. Bad tempered. Aggressive. Bit of a blusher. Thinks he’s got a poker
face, but very readable. Does look like he’s been hit with a poker though. An
oaf but persistent. What did he ask? What did you say? Wait, I’m going to jot
it all down.”

       “I
thought time was of the essence. Won’t they miss you? They’ll think you’ve got
dysentery.”

       “Right,
go.”

       Sharon summarised her encounter with Harkness. She included the connections he’d made
between Firth’s paperwork, the firm, Murphy and, incidentally, her family. She
made great play of upbraiding Harkness for his sins against confidentiality. 
She was drowned out by the toilet flushing.

       “Rory?”

       “Wait!”
he shouted into the phone as the cistern filled itself torrentially.
“Thinking.”

She
turned to study Jeremy, who had now re-created the scene of the crime with
fully deployed emergency vehicles, as well as cereal boxes for houses and
clothes-pegs for people. His glazed, distracted look meant that he was
memorising any conversation in earshot.

“Shaz.”

“Here.”

“Sorry.
Looking for something to lean on and pushed the flush,” he lied. She could
visualise his notes: ‘our PI dept gives cops A1 motive’; ‘what has SJ given
them?’; ‘amateur theatrics gives us away?’ He’d given himself some time to
simmer down, for old times’ sake.

“Did
he actually kill those people?” she said, suddenly tired of choking it back.

       “Christ,
Shaz, you do pick your times.”

       “Could
there be a better time?”

       “Yes,
there could. Over drinks. In an undergraduate moot. In a post-trial debrief.”

       “But
don’t we need to know right now?”

       “What’s
got into you, Sharon? What on earth did that policeman do to you? Should I be
jealous?”

       “You don’t
get to be possessive, Rory,” she spat, recoiling from his assumptions.
“Besides, he was really just a messenger.”

       “Sharon,” Rory sighed, breathing out his last reserves of professional courtesy. “Let’s get
back to ethical basics. I’m here to defend him. That’s my job, whether I like
it or not. The police have to prove it and I have to put them to the proof.”

Now
she was getting lofty indulgence. In every sphere of life, he pushed all the
buttons until he found one that lit up.