The Bullet Trick (20 page)

A slim dark-haired figure walked into the room and I said, 'Ulla?' Feeling all the sharpness go out of me. And then I saw that she wasn’t Ulla. I sought for where we had met. Desperation plucked the images from my brain. The ersatz theme bar that had been trendier than I’d realised. My old university buddy. A pair of violet eyes, and her name came to me. 'Eilidh.' The woman gave me a blank look. 'I’m a friend of Johnny’s.'

Recognition clouded her face.

'Yes,' she said. 'William.'

The policeman stuck his head back round the door.

'Everything OK?'

Eilidh gave him a professional smile.

'It’s fine.'

The door closed behind her. I’d thought I was immune to embarrassment but Eilidh’s presence made me want to pull the manky prison blanket over my head and hide until she’d gone. I attempted a smile.

'I seem to have got myself into a bit of a scrape.'

Eilidh’s mouth twitched in a quick spasm.

'You’re looking at a murder charge. What we need to establish is how are you going to plead? Guilty or not guilty?'

'I didn’t do it.'

'OK.' Her voice was coolly neutral. I imagined she’d been brought up on tales of wrongful convictions, the Guildford four, Birmingham six, Maguire seven. Perhaps these injustices had even been what had turned her towards law, the chance to save innocent people from becoming victims of the judicial system. But then none of these people had been accused of beating an old defenceless man until his head resembled a rotten strawberry.

'No,' I made my voice firm, 'I really didn’t do it.'

'OK.' The cool neutrality remained. She’d be one of the first to be dismissed from the hypnotist’s audience. 'Take me quickly through what happened.'

I started with the walk along the Clydeside, giving the old man a can, my drinking session on the bench, and finally my urge to share my last drink with the old tramp.

'You don’t believe me do you?'

Eilidh glanced up from the jotter she’d been scribbling notes into.

'It’s not me you have to convince.'

The interview room was painted a pale shade of blue I supposed was designed to keep people calm. It seemed to work. There was a dead feeling in my chest where there should have been panic. Two plainclothes men were waiting on us, a red-haired, red-faced invitation to a heart attack and a large sandy-haired man with a broken nose and ginger moustache that would have looked good on a seventies’ footballer. The sandy-haired man introduced himself as Inspector Blunt and his companion as Inspector Thomas. He placed a thin sheaf of papers on the table and asked, 'Anyone want a glass of water?'

I nodded, surprised to find that the words wouldn’t come out.

Blunt looked at Eilidh. She smiled. 'Yes please.' And I got the feeling that they had faced each other this way many times before. The policeman fetched four plastic cups from a Water at Work cooler in the corridor. Thomas turned on the tape, introduced himself to the machine, then got us to do the same. My voice sounded weak and untrustworthy. I reached out to take a sip of water and toppled the cup across the table. Blunt saved the tape recorder. Eilidh took out a paper hanky and mopped up the splash. No one offered to get me another drink and I guessed there was no point in asking to fetch one for myself.

The whole thing felt like a formality. The policemen behind the desk looked like they’d met too many men who had tried to drown their troubles in drink, and when that hadn’t worked had tried to stab them away instead, to think that I was anything else. Blunt glanced at my written statement then looked up at me.

'Right, Mr Wilson, I’m not really getting this. You’re unemployed, you decided to have a wee drink down by the River Clyde and then you fancied a bit of company, so instead of phoning a pal, or even taking yourself to a pub where you might run into someone you knew, you went to offer,' he glanced at the paper in front of him, 'the deceased, Mr Michael Milligan, a swig from the last of your can?'

He looked at me for confirmation and I nodded miserably.

'Mr Milligan seemed asleep and it came to you that this wasn’t such a bad idea so you bedded down with him, under Jamaica Bridge, for forty winks?'

I nodded again.

'Except it turns out he wasn’t asleep was he?'

'I didn’t know that when I sat beside him.'

Red-faced Thomas spoke for the first time. His voice had a weedy treble tone that seemed out of kilter with his broad frame.

'You snuggled up beside a corpse and never noticed?'

'I didn’t snuggle up with him. I was drunk. I fell asleep.'

Thomas’s face grew redder. If there was ever trouble down at Blochairn fruit market he’d be able to go undercover as a cherry tomato.

'Drink isnae an alibi.'

'It’s not a bloody crime either.'

Inspector Blunt sighed; he looked at the statement again then turned his weary eyes on me.

'According to your statement you saw five youths going along the walkway at around the time the assault might have taken place.'

I nodded.

'You’re suggesting that they’re responsible for Mr Milligan’s murder?'

'I don’t know. It’s a possibility.'

'You can see the difficulty I’m having with this, Mr Wilson?'

'I can see it’s a bit unusual.'

'It’s unbelievable.'

I glanced at Eilidh for support, but she stared ahead, her jaw sternly locked.

Inspector Blunt leaned forward and the tiredness seemed to have gone from his face.

'I think you did go for a walk by the Clyde and I have no doubt you had a drink on one of the benches down there. I’m even fairly confident that we’ll find someone who saw you doing that very thing. But I don’t think you went to kindly offer Mr Milligan a bit of hospitality. I think the opposite is true. You were angry and frustrated and that poor old man was in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

'I didn’t do it.'

'What did you use? A hammer?'

I stood up, balling my hands into fists.

'I didn’t bloody use anything.'

Eilidh put her hand firmly on my arm and I sat down.

The fat policeman looked like he was enjoying himself. His weedy treble piped up.

'You seem to have a bit of a temper there, Mr Wilson. Have you ever been in this kind of trouble before?'

'No.'

I lowered my head so he wouldn’t see the lie on my face.

There was a sharp knock at the door; a uniformed officer came in and whispered something softly into Blunt’s ear. The inspector glanced swiftly at his watch then addressed the tape recorder.

'11.57 p. m., interview suspended, inspectors Blunt and Thomas leaving the interview room.'

He leant over and switched off the machine.

Eilidh spoke for the first time since she’d accepted the glass of water.

'Can I ask what’s going on?'

'You can ask.'

'My client has a right to know of any developments.'

'At the moment my guess is your client knows more than the rest of us.'

He rose wearily and shut the door behind him. The policemen’s departure left me with a strange mingling of hope and unease.

'What do you think it is?'

Eilidh’s tone was professional. 'It might be nothing to do with your case. Or it might be new evidence of some sort.'

'Would that be good or bad?'

She gave me a thin look.

'It’d depend on what the evidence was.'

We sat in silence for a while. Movie lawyers always passed their clients a packet of cigarettes as soon as they sat at the interview table but my guess was that Eilidh probably didn’t even smoke. The headache was back, pressing at the usual spot above my temples. I wondered if I could ask Eilidh for a painkiller. I glanced at her profile; it was set in a grim expression that made me wonder how this would affect my mother if it went wrong.

'How’s Johnny?'

'John is fine, but it’s best if we concentrate on what’s happening here.'

The realisation that she couldn’t tolerate Johnny’s name on my lips stung and my voice came out high and querulous.

'I’ve done nothing.'

'You were found sleeping next to the body of an old man who’d just been battered to death. The cut on his neck was deep enough to almost decapitate him. Your fingerprints were on a beer can in his possession and you have his blood on your clothes. The police are within their rights to question you. Indeed they’d be remiss not to.'

'I didn’t do it, Eilidh, I was drunk and stupid, but I didn’t touch the old man. I wouldn’t do a thing like that.'

She shook her head and glanced at her watch. Then an officer came to accompany me back to the cells.

I sat in the cell for a long time. My waiting was punctuated by deliveries of tea that I drank and food that I felt too sick to eat. From time to time the sound of footsteps would raise the faint hope that I was about to be released, and a more definite dread that some drunken hard man was about to join me in my cell. But perhaps it was a quiet night in the world of crime, or maybe the stripy-jumper team were on a win that evening, because I was left alone to work through what had got me there.

The policeman who eventually came to collect me kept his face blank. I didn’t bother questioning him. I would find my fate out soon enough.

Eilidh was waiting for me in the same interview room where we’d sat earlier. I wondered if she’d been on duty for the whole time that I’d been locked up and how she managed to look so fresh in the middle of the night.

'They think they have the boys who did it.' Relief made me drop my head into my hands. Eilidh squeezed my shoulder for a brief second and I felt her warmth through my police-issue jumpsuit. 'They’re setting up an ID parade and want to see if you recognise them.'

I lifted my head from the cradle of my hands, feeling the blood rise to my face.

'So I’ve been promoted from arch murderer to star witness?'

'Be thankful.'

'Oh aye, I feel like I’ve won the bloody lottery.'

It was early the next morning when I eventually left the station. They’d left me to sweat it out for a few more hours in the cells but the policemen’s demeanour towards me had subtly changed. They still thought me a nasty, smelly alcoholic fuck-up, but they didn’t think I’d killed the old man. Eventually my clothes were returned. They were caked in grit from under the bridge and there was a streak of blood on the front of my jumper where the old man’s broken head had slumped against it. I threw the jumper into the corner of the cell, then lifted it and bundled it beneath my arm. I would dispose of it myself; I didn’t want to leave anything that could be stored up for future convictions.

The boys had looked diminished in the harsh light of the identity parade. A couple of them looked like they’d been crying, another like he had drifted into a trance. One of them was full-on cocky. I wondered if he really didn’t feel any fear or if he was psycho or maybe just a consummate actor. I stood behind the viewing mirror and indicated each of them by number. The boys looked young now that the energy of the assault had left them, and I remembered the way they had careered after the boat. Even if I hadn’t recognised them I would have been able to spot the accused. They were the youths who had spent a night coming down in a police cell, the ones who had sat with their social worker or mother and answered questions about the killing of an old man. If I hadn’t recognised them the parade would have been a travesty, but I knew their faces as well as I knew my own. After all, I’m expert in the art of recall.