Post Mortem (22 page)

Lizzie exhibited the photos and then wrote another statement on an unrelated matter.

This is a statement concerning arrest inquiries I made in company with PC Hadley Matthews at number 7 Kenley Villas on 23 March
.

Later that day, when she finally went off duty, Kieran had opened the door to her in his underpants.

‘Lizzie,' he said, in that one word conveying all the inconvenience and exhaustion of a middle-aged man facing another night shift with insufficient time to sleep. He was dead tired. He didn't want this complication right now, with the day full in the sky and the fresh demands of the next shift already in clear view. Lizzie, impatient, pushed the door open. She had had enough of half-measures. She was young and full of desire and her body would be – she knew this with a great and sudden clarity – irresistible. Her flat stomach, her youthful breasts, these were an unfair advantage over the unseen wife who had carried a child in her more exhausted body. But Lizzie herself was exhausted – exhausted by the constant effort of feeling responsible. She wanted at last to throw aside her quibbles. She pushed Kieran impatiently backwards towards the bedroom. He grinned, suddenly refreshed and delighted to take her behaviour at face value. He laughed at her as though acknowledging that she was indeed the thing she presently believed herself to be.

‘Hang on, hang on,' he said. ‘You're filthy. You stink.'

‘OK' she said, conceding that the shift she had just finished – the squat, the hospital, the mortuary – was perhaps not something to take into clean sheets. She pulled him by the hand towards the bathroom. Never letting go of him, she wrestled free of her clothes. The blue police trousers in a pile on the floor, she pulled him into the shower with her. She felt like a faun, undressed and revealed for what she was. She kissed him in the running water and he pressed
himself against her, lifting her. Her hand slipped on the wet wall and her mouth filled with water and his lips and tongue. Her hands around his back. His hand clenched on her small breast.
Ah, life
. . . Her neck crooked awkwardly between the shower panel and the corner of the room.

He carried her to the bed and they did it again, astonishing themselves with the energy of their bodies in the face of such a long tour of duty. He kissed her and rolled off on to his back, almost immediately asleep, a Channel swimmer falling exhausted on the shoreline. She curled her left hand around his neck – so strong and reassuring the heft of muscle, so adorable the curl of dark hair at the nape. The fingers of her right hand traced the pattern of the winding rose on his arm.

In spite of the long shift, she could not sleep. She went to the kitchen and stood looking out of the window. Through the flickering tree canopy she could see the lit gabled window of the Victorian house opposite. A woman was standing washing up. The banality of the lonely figure in yellow rubber gloves made Lizzie uneasy. Reality, perhaps, could not be so simply done away with. But she had made up her mind hours ago. She wasn't going to rehearse it all again.

It's not going to be a problem, she told herself. It's all fine.

She made her way back to bed and lay down beside Kieran. He turned in his half-sleep and threw his arm around her. Finally they both slept, their bodies thrown diagonally across the bed, arms outstretched as if reaching together for land.

27

C
ollins' chin rested heavily on the heel of her right hand and she appeared to be staring at the door of her office. On her desk was a packet of cigarettes, a set of keys, a takeaway coffee and a half-eaten blueberry muffin. She picked up the keys and unlocked her desk drawer. She removed the working file and searched through it.

Brendan Cormican LLB, of Cormican, Murphy and Khan, had drafted the initial complaint on behalf of Younes Mehenni.

PC Matthews, the solicitor wrote, had entered number 7 Kenley Villas on 23 March without permission. Mrs Mehenni, Younes Mehenni's mother, did not speak English and did not understand the police officers who had barged their way in with no power of entry. The entry to the house was therefore unlawful. Farah Mehenni had arrived to find PC Matthews and PC Griffiths already in the property. Matthews had suggested that the whole family might want to return home – here the solicitor started to go heavy on the quotation marks – rather than remain in London ‘pissing people off' and ‘creating work' for the ‘British' police. ‘Do you think the police would put up with any of this shit in your country?' PC Matthews had asked. In the course of questioning Farah Mehenni – a fourteen-year-old girl, Mr Cormican had noted – PC Matthews had called her father both ‘Mohammed' and ‘Bin Laden'. Farah Mehenni had been very upset. PC Matthews' actions made her fear the police, and when her father arrived home, she was so traumatized that she tried to intervene physically to protect him.
This created a situation where PC Matthews used force to remove her from the bonnet of his police car. This distressing and potentially harmful situation would have been avoided if PC Matthews had acted correctly. The family requested a police investigation into the incident, with appropriate disciplinary consequences for the officer.

It was all drearily possible. Collins knew PC Matthews' response almost off by heart, but she turned to it nonetheless and read once again his round state-school handwriting. It was a short statement, and to the point.

There were two statements in the file from PC Lizzie Griffiths. The first covered the entry to the property and the use of force against Farah Mehenni. This statement was more detailed than Hadley's. There was more of a sense of the moment when the father returned home, the girl running, the panic attack at the side of the street, the understandable decision not to arrest her. The substance of the statement did not contradict Hadley's – there was a lawful entry and a lawful use of force – but there was an intriguing absence. Lizzie had not covered Hadley's conversation with Farah Mehenni.

Then, eighteen days later, there was a second statement.

Collins put the file down. She rested both elbows on the desk and rubbed her face with her hands. She slipped on her jacket, lit a cigarette and, taking half the discarded muffin with her, stepped out of the window on to the low roof. Sid flapped down towards her and jumped about slowly at a judicious distance. Collins threw a decent-sized lump of the muffin away from her towards the edge of the roof. The crow tilted his head to one side and then hopped away towards the food. Collins pulled her jacket around her and smoked, closing her eyes and leaning back against the wall.

She thought of a child pressing its hand on a window's condensation. If, even weeks later, you blew on it, you could still see the pattern of that hand.

She opened her eyes and gazed at the sky. It was streaked with dispersing jet trails, and in the intensity of colours there was a hint of the day beginning to fade. She thought back to the statements. Events must leave marks on the real world, just as light marked a photographic plate. A man raises his arm and hits his wife with a hammer. The blood splashes on the wall in a particular way. He drives his car from the scene. The CCTV camera catches
the vehicle as it crosses the junction. Evidence was impersonal. It rolled out endlessly – as indifferent to meaning as the paper marked by the seismogram's needle. To be a good investigator one had to have a persistent and concentrated interest in finding out what had happened. Eventually the facts would yield to such determination.

Collins threw her head back, stretching and yawning and digging her fingers into the back of her neck. It was wishful thinking. Vanity, even. What did she have? Some discrepancies. A persistent nagging feeling that she didn't know the whole truth. She hadn't come close, she felt, to answering the question Caroline Wilson had asked in her Victorian classroom. What was it that could possibly have provoked Farah Mehenni to take the child?

Sid hopped towards her and cocked his head to one side.

‘You're right,' she said. ‘Not a good idea for Inspector Shaw to arrive and find me out smoking on this roof.' The crow took another jump towards her. ‘Cupboard love,' Collins remarked as she bent down and offered the remaining muffin. ‘You don't fool me.' The bird reached out and took the food delicately from her hand.

Steve had escorted them both up from the lobby. The thin black man standing beside Inspector Kieran Shaw was dressed in a dark suit and Oxford shoes. He held out a card and DS Collins scanned it quickly.
Mark Jacobs, LLM, Krauss & Horne
. She handed it back. ‘I don't keep them, thanks. I've made a note.' She turned to Inspector Shaw. ‘Do you mind if I ask why you've brought a brief here? You're not a suspect.'

Mr Jacobs intervened with a quick smile. ‘My client will answer any questions you've got for him on tape. Let's just say he has concerns about the conduct of this investigation and has asked for legal representation. Are you comfortable with that?'

‘Perfectly. Although it would have been helpful to have been informed in advance.'

Jacobs smiled again. He was a man who obviously relished his job. ‘Helpful? In what way? What difference would it have made?'

It was a game, of course, and she would have to think before she spoke. ‘None really, I suppose, but it would perhaps have been courteous.'

Jacobs was pulling out a chair. ‘In which case, my apologies, Detective Sergeant. I certainly didn't intend to be rude. May I?'

‘Yes, please.'

Collins' phone was ringing. She glanced at the screen. DCI Baillie. She hadn't told him she was interviewing Shaw and she didn't want that conversation right now. She rejected the call and looked up to see Shaw watching her. He smiled slowly and Collins wondered whether Baillie knew about the interview already.

Steve offered to make hot drinks for everyone. Collins accepted: anything to give herself a little bit of time to think. She glanced back at Inspector Shaw. He was wearing a dark grey suit with a light blue shirt and no tie. A good-looking man, for sure, and confident in his looks. He returned her look evenly.

‘Do you have any news about PC Griffiths yet?' he said.

‘Not yet.'

‘You're up on her phone, of course?'

‘I can't discuss that.'

They waited while the kettle boiled.

Normally this was the time for small talk. Football. For the more educated suspect, global warming, or even the law. But Collins anticipated Shaw's rejection of any such overtures and decided that under the circumstances silence would be better. Everyone else in the room seemed to be in agreement and so they sat without speaking while Steve fussed over instant coffee, tea bags and milk.

‘Are you all sweet enough?'

Shaw said, ‘Just one for me.'

Steve dispensed the drinks. Collins said, ‘Thank you for coming in so late.'