The Fall (6 page)

‘I’ll make sure the Family Liaison Officer keeps you up to date,’ Hegarty said. He felt as usual how pathetic those words were – the only comfort he could offer to the raped and knifed and bereaved. All he could do was try his best to catch the bad guy, so they could at least see who was responsible. Justice, some people called it. And if he was right, and he hoped he was, he’d got the guy for this one sweating in the cells.

Rachel sniffed loudly. ‘You not got any balm tissues? My nose’s getting chapped.’

‘Sorry. Can’t get the public to pay for them.’

‘I got a picture of him,’ she said suddenly. ‘On my phone. I was doing a pic of me and Mel when he come over.’ She’d whipped out her Nokia and shown him a blurred shot of the two girls in the foreground, and in the background a white man approaching. Could have been Stockbridge.

‘Can I?’ A phone picture wouldn’t be much use in court, but he took it and flipped through. The picture before was of Rachel with a different white man, adopting a cool gun-finger gangster pose. ‘This guy with the shaved head – who’s that?’

She went cagey. ‘Dunno. Some fella at the club.’

‘Would he have seen anything?’

‘Dunno. Dunno who he was.’

Rachel Johnson was pretty, yes, but he was fairly sure she wasn’t telling him the truth. In the end, though, both girls identified Stockbridge at once in the parade. In the past, Hegarty’d seen white witnesses fail to identify black suspects, since ‘they all look the same, don’t they?’ But both black girls knew Stockbridge at once.

‘That’s him,’ Mel had said, giving the man the finger through the reflective glass. ‘That’s the bastard. Hope he rots.’

Heading down to the interview room, Hegarty spotted one of the search guys he’d sent round to Stockbridge’s flat yesterday. ‘You get the shoes?’ The bald guy nodded. It was all round the station that whoever knocked off Anthony Johnson had also stamped on his hand, breaking the fingers. It was the kind of thing that made the officers really want to nail someone for the crime. They’d have blood all over them for sure, the shoes of whoever did it. If there was still any doubt about that.

Eventually, on that endless Saturday, Charlotte had fallen asleep across the orange plastic chairs. When she woke she had no idea what time it was, but they had definitely missed
Britain’s Got Talent
. The strip-lighting fractured on her tired eyes.

There were voices in the corridor, behind the shatter-proof glass with the posters about legal aid and benefit fraud and not slapping your wife about. Charlotte sat up, feeling sweat under her armpits.

‘Leave off, I can walk meself.’ A woman’s voice, and in the corridor, a girl walking tall and proud, her hair like a gold and bronze halo about her face. Charlotte recognised the girls from the club, the one with the afro, still in her shimmering silver dress from the night before. Her legs went on about a mile, and behind her, slinking against the wall, was the shorter one who’d shouted at Dan, her hair flat with over-straightening. That girl looked like she’d been crying. It was what Charlotte’s own face looked like in the yellowing glass, ravaged, screwed up like a dam against the tears inside. Their eyes met, and the other girl looked away.

Charlotte tried to put her thoughts in order. The guy at the club was dead. Murder, the policeman had said. God, it was so hard to remember – everything was slipping out of her head soapy-slick. So, what – Dan got in a fight with him? But he’d been away such a short time, just a few minutes. And he was fine, wasn’t he? No bruises, no blood. Wouldn’t she have known if Dan had been in a fight?

She had another memory. Dan, a few weeks ago, shouting at her:
I don’t give a fuck what kind of flowers we have!

He’d been at the table surrounded by spreadsheets, working on a Saturday again. She was trying to get him to finalise the wedding details, take an interest in it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, after two hours of her hurt silence.

‘It’s our wedding. Excuse me if I thought you might care.’

Running hands through his hair, his face haggard. ‘I’m sorry. Sometimes I just feel like there’s no way out.’

The waiting-room TV, set on news, scrolled on and on as the hours dragged forward. Eventually she slept again across the hard chairs, the ridges digging into her spine, woken by the noise of people coming in as much as by her own creeping, rising panic. It would be OK. Of course it would. But why were they still here, hours later?

All night long people had been brought in, drunks with blood streaming from their heads, women shrieking, sirens going. The TV was showing BBC news, and on it a rolling story about Haussmann’s Bank.
Bailed out by government loan
, it said. Then in the scrolling ticker she saw:
Man arrested over London club death
. The irony of it didn’t escape her, that the very catastrophe which had sent Dan falling into this mess hadn’t even happened in the end. Instead he’d made his own private disaster, now joining the bank on the news. But it would be OK. It had to be.

‘Miss Miller?’ It was the flat-shoed Brummie woman. A thin morning light was coming in the high windows.

Charlotte’s mouth tasted dry and sour, her eyes felt gritty. All she’d eaten was half a disgusting corner-shop sandwich, washed down with the worst cup of coffee she’d ever tasted, so bad she’d almost spat it back out into the polystyrene cup. But there was nothing else, so she drank it, and afterwards she had sat and picked the cup to pieces with nerves.

She stood up, dizzy, sure that what she was about to be told was going to change everything in a way she didn’t yet see. She had an urge to squeeze her eyes shut and hope it would all go away.

‘Can you come with me, miss?’

‘Sorry. Coming.’

‘But I don’t understand!’ Stockbridge’s girlfriend was wearing old jeans now, a baggy sweatshirt with the name of some Oxford college on it. Her face looked tired and confused, but she was still sexy. Very sexy.

‘I’ll try to explain again. We’ve charged your fiancé with the murder of Anthony Johnson, owner of the Kingston Town nightclub.’

The crosser she got, the rougher her voice became. Was that a northern accent creeping into her posh tones? ‘It’s ridiculous.’ She folded her arms. ‘To say that Dan might have killed someone – well, you don’t have a clue, obviously. Listen, I know he can seem kind of – sort of closed up, but I promise you he’s not, he’s just under so much pressure, and that’s how he goes when . . . It doesn’t mean anything.’

Hegarty bit back the urge to tell her about the mothers he’d interviewed, tearful and loving except for the dead toddler in the morgue, the favourite teacher and what you found on their laptop. You never knew. That was what he’d learned, if anything, from being in the police. ‘Let me ask you again, miss. When you came out of the ladies’, your fiancé was arguing with Mr Johnson?’

‘I didn’t say arguing!’ She sighed and rubbed her face. ‘Oh, I suppose they were. But it doesn’t mean—’

‘Then you saw the two men go into his office, yes? You waited outside the club, you say for just a few minutes, and then you went home? Did you get a taxi?’

‘Yes.’ Her eyes flicked away.

‘You’re sure?’

‘I – we must have. I don’t remember.’

He made a note. ‘You’ve already told us you took drugs that night. Is that correct?’

She nodded slowly, staring at her feet. ‘I wouldn’t normally.’

‘Where did he get the drugs?’

‘How would I know?’ She sat up suddenly. ‘Look, am I under arrest?’

‘No, miss. Not at the moment.’

‘Well then, I’ve already told you everything. I really don’t know any more.’

Hegarty clicked his pen. ‘Does Daniel have a problem with black people?’

She gaped. ‘What?’

‘It’s just a question, miss.’

‘Are you trying to say he’s a racist or something? Just because the guy was— Dan’s not racist, for God’s sake. He was the one who wanted to go to the bloody club in the first place. It’s so stupid.’ He thought she was about to say they even had black friends, but she seemed to think better of it.

‘There were a number of witnesses to the argument. You say you saw a group of people, possibly two black girls. Anyone else?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Recognise this man?’ He slid over a printout of the picture from Rachel Johnson’s phone, the mystery white man. She stared at it with a hunted look on her face. ‘Any idea who he could be?’

‘Of course not. This is all crazy.’ Her face was pale.

‘Hmm. OK, I suggest you go home, Miss Miller. You look tired.’ He saw her bristle. ‘I meant, you might like to have a rest. Nothing will happen today. The hearing will be at ten at the Magistrates’ Court. It’s on Holloway Road – they’ll give you the address outside.’

She tried to take this in. ‘So, tomorrow he can come home? That’s the bail hearing thing, is it?’

‘You should talk to the duty lawyer about it. Do you have your own lawyer, you and Mr Stockbridge?’

‘Of course not, why would we?’

‘Best get one soon. They’ll give you some numbers at the desk.’

‘He was a judge, you know.’ She got up with admirable poise. ‘Dan’s father. High court, for twenty years.’

Hegarty forced a smile. ‘Then I’m sure he’d advise you to get a lawyer as soon as you can.’

When Charlotte could finally leave, it was getting dark. She emerged into a quiet, rain-washed Camden, the May skies darkening with clouds. After waiting twenty minutes for a bus, shivering with tiredness, she got home to the ransacked flat and washed her hair free of the smell of the police station, immediately feeling better. Then she picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone. Imagined the cut-glass tones of Dan’s mother, Elaine: ‘Good afternoon, 54372.’ Saying
hello
wasn’t polite, apparently. Or his father, Justice Edward Stockbridge QC: ‘Pardon?
Pardon?
Speak up, will you, Charlotte.’

Charlotte knew she should get a lawyer, of course, but the thought of ringing the Stockbridges made her feel even more sick than before. Wouldn’t it all blow over after the hearing? Dan had only been gone a few minutes, not long enough to kill someone, for God’s sake, even if he was capable of it. Which he wasn’t.

Slowly she put the receiver down. After all, what could his parents do today? Maybe they would never need to find out.

There was no food in the fridge except for what she’d bought on Friday, a lifetime ago. She ate three olives, making her stomach churn. The clock kept up its insistent tick, stringing out her nerves, so she got up and turned on the stereo, but it was playing the last CD she’d had on, the song for their first wedding dance. She turned it off, resisting the urge to chew on her nails. No point in spoiling months of careful maintenance. Tomorrow it would be over and she could forget all about those head-spinning facts.

The witnesses. The row. The drugs . . . All of it was true, but she’d kept opening her mouth to say, ‘Yes, but . . .’ There was always an explanation when it was you they were accusing. Meanwhile that young policeman, the one who’d seen her boobs, kept whipping out more and more evidence. Like Paul bloody Daniels.

Charlotte hated that policeman. He had an answer for everything. And he’d left a large footprint on her cream carpet. Red-brown and sticky, she knew what it was. It was blood, that Johnson guy’s blood, smeared on her living-room floor.

Charlotte went to the hall cupboard where their cleaning lady kept supplies, and rooted about until she found a cloth. She never did her own cleaning, so she wasn’t sure what they had.

She scrubbed it until just a red tidemark was left, then poured away the bloody, brackish water. Her hands smelled of old metal pipes. Tomorrow she would get up, fix her hair, go to court and bring Dan home, then put this behind her as one of the worst weekends of her life. And maybe by the time their first anniversary came round she’d be ready to think of it as a funny occurrence in the past, but she doubted it.

‘Jesus! You scared me.’

He was sitting on the pile of dirty clothes by the bed, watching her. She sat up, head and heart pounding, and felt for her bottle of Coke. ‘What you doing up? It’s what – eight? Christ, are you sick still? I only got in at four.’

He said, ‘We’re going to court.’

‘Court?’ She pushed down her hair; that bloody woman had diddled her on the chemical straightener, lasted two months her
arse
.

‘That’s what I said. Come on, shift it.’ He tugged the duvet off her and she gathered up her gangly limbs.

‘Fuck! It’s cold. Is the heating not on?’

‘Meter’s run out.’ He was leaving the room. That meant he hadn’t put the money in, spent it all on booze for some club owner. And why were they going to court? Must be one of his loser mates in trouble again. For fuck’s sake.

When Keisha had come home before light earlier that morning, Chris was bedded down on the sofa with his coat over him. The microwave was back, she’d noticed. Trying not to wake him she’d brushed her teeth and got into bed in the almost-dark, and next thing she knew he was shaking her awake.

She rubbed her face, trying to wake up. ‘Why are you going to court? Fucking hell, I got, like, three hours’ sleep.’ She looked at the clock on the newly returned microwave. ‘Is that right? Jesus, why’d you wake me up so early?’

‘’Cos you’re coming with me. So get dressed.’

‘But . . .’ She tried to catch his eye but he looked away and made a sort of jerking movement.

‘Stop asking questions. You’re just coming, OK?’

‘Why?’

He turned, met her with a hard stare. ‘’Cos I don’t trust you here on your own.’

Keisha’s mouth fell open. What could you even say to that? She just stood there, saying nothing.

Chris pulled his jacket off the chair. ‘Get a move on. I’m leaving.’

Keisha didn’t look at the papers or go online, and if she watched TV it was only E4 or MTV. They didn’t show the news in the old folks’ home in case it upset them. So it wasn’t until they went to court that morning that she even knew Anthony Johnson was dead.