Chapter Twenty-Nine

TWENTY-NINE

Some things were the same, some things were different. Laura sat, bent over, her head resting on top of her folded arms. Last time was late at night, this time was early morning, although really, who could tell? There was no natural light in the room; it could have been any time. It was a different room, but for all intents and purposes it might just as well have been the same. Last time it had been overly warm, this time it was bloody freezing, but there were the same bright lights, the same cheap furniture. A nasty gray carpet like the one in her hallway at home. (Don’t think of home. Don’t think of home, or you’ll cry.) Like last time, Egg was there, and Eyebrow too, sitting opposite her, expressions grave. Graver than last time, she thought. Whenever she caught Egg’s eye, he looked away, and that made her scared.

She was exhausted. It seemed like days had passed, even weeks, since she’d received the phone call at Irene’s yesterday afternoon. She’d gone to meet the police at her home as per their request. She’d been cautioned, standing outside in the car park with all the neighbors watching, and they’d escorted her up the seven flights to her floor. There were people already there, waiting on the walkway outside, dressed in those white protective suits like you see on TV.

“What’s going on?” Laura asked. “You’ve already done this, haven’t you? You searched here before—why do you have to do it again?” New evidence had come to light, someone said; they were going to have to search more thoroughly. There was a bit of waiting around, and then they brought her here, to the police station. It was late by that time. They put her in a cell and told her to get some rest. She hadn’t slept a wink.

“Laura?” Eyebrow placed a cup of water in front of her. “The duty solicitor’s just on his way now, all right? We’ll get started in a minute.”

“Yeah, all right,” Laura replied. “Cheers.”

That was the same—the polite, faux-friendly thing they did. They’d always done it; every run-in with the police she’d ever had, they did it. She’d imagined, though, that this time might be different, because this time was different. This wasn’t trespass, or disorderly conduct, it wasn’t public intoxication or petty theft. This was murder.

Murder!Laura felt a giggle rising up in her chest. She jerked upright, biting her lip, but fight though she might, she couldn’t keep it down; a chuckle rose out of her. Egg looked up from his notes, surprised. Laura laughed some more. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t fucking funny. She laughed louder, longer, tears coming.

“Are you all right, Laura?” Egg asked her. She leaned forward, placing her forehead on the desk, chewing the inside of her cheek. Stop laughing stop laughing stop laughing stop fucking laughing.

The door opened and Laura stopped laughing. She looked up. A small, slender man with ginger hair and very pale skin held out a limp hand for her to shake. The duty solicitor, different from the one before. He gave her his name, which she immediately forgot, and a quick, nervous smile. Why was he nervous? That wasn’t a very good sign, was it?

Egg said something; he was introducing them all, for the record. Laura listened to everyone’s names and then forgot them (again): Egg, Eyebrow, Nervous Guy. Laura Kilbride. They started asking questions, the same as last time. Where she had met Daniel, when, what time they’d gotten to the boat, what they’d done when they got there. All the same stuff they’d been over before, first in the flat and then at the police station.

“Fucking hell, change the record, won’t you?” Laura said at last. “We’ve done this already, haven’t we, we’ve sung this duet. Quartet?” She looked at Nervous Guy. “Would this be a quartet? You’re not really contributing all that much, though, are you? Do you do harmonies?”

Egg pursed his lips, his expression pained.

“Do you think this is funny, Laura?” Eyebrow asked. “Do you think this is a joke?”

“It is a fucking joke, yes! Because I’ve already told you about Daniel Sutherland. I’ve already told you, we argued, shoved each other around a bit, and that was it. I did not stab him. We’ve been over all this and you’ve got nothing—you’ve got fuck all, haven’t you, it’s just that you haven’t found anyone else, so now you’ve got me back in here, and you’re harassing me?”

She turned to Nervous Guy. “They need to put up or shut up, don’t they?” Nervous Guy looked down at the notepad in front of him, its pages blank. Fuck’s sake, he really wasn’t much use, was he? “You need to charge me or let me go.”

Egg leaned back in his chair and looked her in the eye as he calmly explained that, in addition to a witness who had seen her, bloody and agitated, leaving the scene of the crime around the time of Daniel Sutherland’s death, they had her DNA on his body, and his on hers. They also had the fact that she had stolen a watch from him. Moreover, he said, the analysis that had been carried out on her T-shirt showed that, although the majority of the blood present in the fabric belonged to her, a small but significant amount had been detected that belonged to Daniel Sutherland.

“Can you explain that, Laura?” Egg asked. “If, as you say, Daniel was still alive and well when you left, how do you explain the presence of his blood on your clothing?”

---

•   •   •Turns out, Daniel had said, sometime in the early hours, when he’d finished for the second time, gimp-fucking isn’t really my thing. It came out of nowhere, that. She hadn’t been ready for the casual cruelty of it. She knew Daniel wasn’t exactly a nice guy—she wouldn’t have gone with him if he had been, she didn’t like nice guys, nice guys usually turned out to be the worst—but she hadn’t expected that. She hadn’t expected him to push her away, to laugh when she stumbled and fell—not a forced laugh either, a real one, as though he genuinely thought it was funny. When she got up, she could hardly see for rage; she went for him so fast she caught him off guard. She saw the look on his face. For a moment, just a fraction of a second, he was afraid.

---

•   •   •“Laura?” Eyebrow this time, leaning forward over the table. “Can you? Can you explain the presence of Sutherland’s blood on your T-shirt?”

“I bit him,” Laura said.

“You bit him?” Eyebrow repeated, deadly serious, and as hard as Laura tried to mirror Eyebrow’s straight face, she just couldn’t; she started to laugh again, because how could she not? This was serious, it was deadly fucking serious, and she looked across the table at the detectives and she laughed and laughed and they, for their part, looked unhappy (Egg) and self-satisfied (Eyebrow).

At her side, Nervous Guy twitched. He raised his palms, spread his fingers, and looked at her as if to say, What the fuck? “I bit him hard, here”—Laura pointed to a place on her neck, above the clavicle—“and I drew blood. I had blood in my mouth, on my lips, I wiped it away. I must have got it on my shirt.”

Eyebrow smirked, shaking her head as she did. “Is that it?” she asked. “Is that your explanation?”

“It is, yeah. Ask your forensics people,” Laura said. “Ask them if there was a bite on his neck.”

“Given the position of his stab wounds,” Egg said quietly, “it’s possible that we wouldn’t be able to tell—”

“Hah!” Laura barked, leaning back in her chair with a smile, victorious.

“But I don’t think it’s very likely that a bite would account for the blood that we found, unless the bite was extremely deep. Was it?” Egg asked.

Laura swallowed. “Well, no. I’m not a fucking vampire, am I? There was a bit of a scuffle. Something broke, maybe a plate, a glass, I don’t know. A glass. Was there glass on the floor? Bet there was. He had blood on his . . . on his hand, I think, and he pushed me—yes, he pushed me in the face, because I remember, I had it, I had blood on my face, when I got home. He pushed me in the face, and maybe again on my chest, as he moved past me.” Beside her, Nervous Guy scribbled furiously on his notepad.

“You didn’t mention this before, Laura,” Egg said. “Why didn’t you say any of this before?”

“It didn’t matter,” Laura said. “It didn’t—”

“Of course it mattered—it matters when you lie to the police,” Egg said, his voice strained. “Why wouldn’t you just tell us that? Why would you lie about something like this?”

“Why wouldn’t I lie?” Laura snapped. “I was already in trouble—I’m always in fucking trouble—I just didn’t want to make it worse. I lied, all right?” She was shouting. “I lied then but I’m telling the truth now.”

From somewhere—Laura couldn’t say where; perhaps she had a bag of tricks beneath the table—Eyebrow pulled out a plastic bag, which she placed on the table between them. Laura stared at it.

“What can you tell us about this, Laura?” Eyebrow asked.

Laura opened her mouth and then closed it again. “What can I . . . ?” She was going to laugh again; she bit down hard on her lower lip. “What can I tell you about it? It’s a knife, by the looks of things. It’s a small . . . smallish knife. It has a black handle. Wooden, I suppose. There’s something on the blade. I have no idea what it is, but I’m guessing—”

“Don’t guess,” Nervous Guy interjected sharply.

“Yeah. Okay. Good point. What can I tell you about it? I can tell you it looks like a knife that I’ve never seen before.”

Egg nodded. “All right. Well, would it surprise you to hear that we found this knife in your flat?”

Laura shook her head. “No . . . I mean, yes! Yes, of course it would fucking surprise me, I just told you I’d never seen it before, it’s not mine. It’s not.” She got to her feet. “It’s not!”

“Please sit down, Laura,” Egg said gently.

She sat. “Why would I . . . ?” She started again. “No, okay, say, say for the sake of argument—”

“Ms. Kilbride, I—” Nervous Guy had woken up at last.

“No, it’s all right, it’s all right. Say, for the sake of argument, it was in my flat. Why would I leave it there? Do you think I’m insane? A moron? Why would I just leave it lying around for you to find?”

“You left Daniel’s watch lying around,” Eyebrow pointed out.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you don’t kill people with a watch!”

“But you do kill people with knives?”

Laura rolled her eyes. “You see this?” she said, turning to her solicitor. “You see? Trying to put words in my mouth, trying to trick me. Typical fucking rozzers. That knife is not mine. I don’t know where it comes from; it isn’t mine.”

“So . . . what?” Eyebrow prompted. “What are you saying? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so tell me what you think happened.”

Laura opened her mouth and closed it again, like a fish. She threw her hands in the air. “I don’t fucking know, do I? Someone put it there. One of your lot, maybe. Trying to stitch me up. Desperate, aren’t you, because it’s been two weeks since he died and you’ve got fuck all.”

“Someone put it there,” Eyebrow repeated, very slowly. “You think someone placed the knife in your flat? Does anyone else have access to your flat, Laura? Anyone else have a key?”

“What, aside from the butler?” Laura snapped. “Aside from my cleaning lady, and my personal trainer, and . . . oh, hang about. Miriam!” It came to her, just like that. “Miriam had my key!” The detectives exchanged a quick glance. “She must have . . . fucking hell. Look, I was joking about the butler, but there’s this woman, her name’s Miriam, she lives on the . . . oh, you know her, you’ve spoken to her, she said she found him, didn’t she? Well, she had my key.”

Another look passed between the detectives before Eyebrow leaned forward and prompted, “You’re saying Miriam Lewis had your key?”

“I don’t know her last name—she’s the one on the boat, who said she found him. How many Miriams can there be?”

“Only one, and that is definitely Miriam Lewis,” Egg replied. He looked genuinely, gratifyingly baffled. “Why would you believe that Miriam Lewis had put this knife in your flat?”

Laura’s breath was coming quick and shallow, she was seeing things as she hadn’t before, she was seeing a glimmer of light, she was feeling—what was this strange sensation?—hope. “My key,” Laura said. “You remember, I told you I lost it? I hurt my arm?” Egg nodded. “Well, it turns out she had it. She said she found it, in his boat, she didn’t say why she took it. . . . The point is she could have come into my flat, at any time since he died! And the thing is, you see, the thing is . . .” It was all becoming clear to her now, all of it. “The thing is, she has a grudge against the Myersons. Did you know that? Hates them, thinks they’re evil, not entirely sure why but she told me, right, she told me that she thought it was Carla—that’s Daniel’s aunt, yeah? She told me that she thought that Carla killed Daniel, which I thought was really weird at the time, but now I think it was because she was trying to deflect attention elsewhere. I mean, she says she found him, but how do you even know that’s true? Maybe she found him because she knew he was there to be found? Don’t they often say that it’s the person who found the body that did it? And I know it sounds maybe kind of far-fetched because she’s an old woman—”

“She’s fifty,” Egg said.

“Yeah, exactly, but just because she’s old, doesn’t mean she couldn’t have killed him. She’s . . . she’s seriously damaged, you know? I know, I know what you’re thinking, you’re looking at me like, look who’s talking, but sometimes it takes one to know one. Did you know she says she was abducted by a serial killer once? That she wrote a book about it? She’s”—Laura drew little circles in the air with her forefinger, pointing at her temple—“she’s fucking nuts.”

The detectives, both of them, were leaning back in their chairs, their arms crossed. For a moment, Laura seemed to have stunned them into silence. Eyebrow was the first to recover. “This key you say she has, she—”

“Had, not has. I got it back from her.”

“You got it back from her? Yesterday, is that right? When you went to her boat, when you attacked her?”

“When I what? No, I didn’t attack her, I didn’t—”

“Ms. Lewis made a complaint against you, Laura,” Eyebrow said. “She—”

“Oh, now this is bullshit. This is such bullshit. I did not attack her! She pushed me! Look!” Laura pointed to the bruise on the side of her face. “She pushed me, I fell, but . . . but that’s not even the point, is it?” Laura turned to Nervous Guy. “Shouldn’t you be doing something? Saying something?” She poked the plastic bag containing the knife with her finger. “Are my fingerprints on there? They’re not, are they?”

“We’re still carrying out tests.”

“Tests? For fingerprints?” She spluttered a derisive laugh. “You’ve found fuck all, haven’t you? Look, are you going to charge me with something or not? Because if you’re not—”

“We are going to charge you, Laura.”

Hopes, dashed. “But . . . but the key,” Laura said. “Doesn’t that say anything to you?”

“You had motive, means, and opportunity,” Eyebrow said firmly, ticking items off on her fingers. “You lied to us about the seriousness of your altercation with Daniel. His blood was found on your clothing. The murder weapon was found in your possession.”

“It wasn’t in my possession.” Laura started to cry. “The key, it must be . . . please.” She looked at Egg, who looked as though he might be about to cry too. He wouldn’t meet her eye; he looked down at the desk and then over at Nervous Guy.

“We’ll take her down to hear the formal charge now,” he said.

“No, please,” Laura said again. She held out her hands to Egg. She wanted to beg him, she wanted to fling herself at his feet, to offer herself to him, but there were other people in the room now, people in uniforms, someone helping her out of her chair. They were gentle enough but the gentleness made it worse; she started to push them away, started to fight.

“Laura.” She could hear Egg’s voice, concerned, reprimanding. “Laura, come on, don’t do this.” But she wanted to do this, she wanted to fight, she wanted them to grab her, to throw her to the ground, to knock her out. She wanted oblivion.