Post Mortem (24 page)

She did not know what to do, how to survive the night. She had only loose change remaining in her wallet. She began walking along the seafront, east towards Hastings. Out on the darkened beach she could see three men in bleached stone-washed jeans drinking beer. One had his feet resting on a wheeled suitcase. She walked on, past the derelict pier and a crazy golf course where pirate flags hung unmoving in the darkness. The shoes were cutting into the back of her heels and the dress clung to her tights. On her right was an amusement arcade and she walked inside for shelter. It was a charivari – bright lights, loud recorded music. Elvis, a Dracula laugh, the whirr of a helicopter. Lizzie stood in a daze and watched the shove-halfpenny machine shuffling endlessly back and forth, the two-pence pieces shifting incrementally towards the edge.

Things had been going well, that was what she remembered.

It had been the last night duty of the set, and the team were anticipating the four rest days that were finally coming their way. Everyone shared the growing night-duty appetite for carbohydrates and sugar. Arif had made toast. Lizzie spread melting butter on hers and poured honey over the top. Hadley handed her a mug of
milky coffee and squeezed his bulk into one of the small chairs. He pushed one of the other chairs away with his feet and, leaning back, affected a Yardie style.

‘Hey. Wagwan?'

She laughed. ‘Yeah, all right.'

Kieran joined them, late as usual. A slice of toast remained for him and he reached over her and took it. ‘Just the one?' he asked.

Arif was already rising from his chair. ‘I can stick another one in the toaster, guv. It'll only take a couple of minutes.'

Kieran said, ‘Arif, sit down.'

Hadley caught Lizzie's eye and gave her his habitual wink.

Kieran addressed the table, ‘Well, ladies and gents, I've just been talking to Mr Reyes on the second floor. Very happy. Homicide have just informed him that Stefan's intending to plead to murder. A very good result indeed. Hadley and Lizzie have both been put forward for commissioner commendations. Didn't they do well?'

There were nods of appreciation, laughter, a bit of back-slapping.

Hadley said, ‘Cuddly toy. Cuddly toy.'

Arif caught Lizzie's eye and shrugged, the reference lost on them both.

When the duties were allocated that night, Lizzie was teamed up with Arif. She knew it was a vote of confidence: for the first time she was not paired with someone more experienced. It was a significant event – her initiation into being the senior officer in the car, the one expected to make the call on any difficult decision. She enjoyed the night: the dispatches were straightforward and Arif was good company. They laughed at the ridiculous calls and at three in the morning parked up by the Thames to eat chocolate. Lizzie was happy: something difficult was safely behind her.

It had only been an eight-hour shift and the time had passed quickly. She threw her bag into her locker, already anticipating her bed. As she went outside, two police horses were moving
into the yard from the stable. She stepped back to let them pass, breathing in their smell, feeling the heat rising from their flanks.

She had decided to run before going to bed. She would chase away the dirt, the misery, the anxiety, and then collapse into clean sheets to begin her rest days. She pulled on jogging trousers, laced her running shoes, slipped her iPhone into her top pocket and left her flat. The light had been expanding with astonishing speed into an overcast but bright morning. She turned along the gravel path and quickened her pace, running easily, elated, flying through her tiredness. The smell of earth. Ear buds stuffed in, music turned up loud. The air sliced by shafts of light, running as if through the shutter of a camera, fluorescent green and sharp shadow. The ground turned upwards and she felt, like the action of a piston, the strong pulse in her chest deepening as the measures of blood pumped through the chambers of her heart.

That was when the ringtone had sounded in her ears, interrupting her Millie Jackson. She fished the phone out and glanced at the screen:
Number withheld
. She was leaning over her legs, sucking in breath. It was probably a call from the early turn that had relieved her team, a query from one of the dispatches that she had handled during the night. She would take it and then she could run on and sleep undisturbed. She swiped the screen.

‘Don't worry. They won't be able to trace this call to me. I'm in a phone box.'

The accent, the youth of the voice – the identity of the caller was unmistakable. Lizzie's immediate impulse had been to switch the phone off without speaking. She hadn't replied, just waited.

‘Please don't think I mean you harm,' Farah had said. ‘I don't. I like you.'

‘You shouldn't be ringing me.'

‘You gave me your number.'

‘OK, but that was—'

‘Yes, that was to help
you
. That was so you could nick my dad.'

‘You're angry.'

‘Don't start that.' Farah's voice was shaking with rage.

‘What? Start what?'

‘Never mind.'

There was silence at the end of the line. Then, spoken as though it were merely an observation, Farah said, ‘You made a statement. My dad says his lawyer told him. You made a statement.'

‘That's right.'

‘You said you were there all the time. You heard everything between me an' the other officer. That's what I been told.'

‘Yes. That's right.'

‘But that ain't what happened, is it? You weren't there, not all the time. You were in the garden and with my nan.'

‘Well . . . that's how I remember it. I've got to go . . .'

But of course Lizzie hadn't ended the call. She had been as snared as a fish on a line. There was a pause, and with a chill, it occurred to her that Farah was in no rush to speak: she had known that Lizzie would not ring off.

‘I don't know why my dad's bail's not been cancelled.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘We had an agreement. I was going to bring my dad in and he was going to get a caution.'

‘I never promised—'

‘You said . . .'

Briefly Lizzie enjoyed the comfort of anger. ‘No. For your father to be eligible for a caution, he had to tell the truth. He had to admit the offence and say he was sorry. I made that perfectly clear to him through his solicitor. But he couldn't bring himself to do that.'

There was a pause at the end of the line. Then Farah spoke more quietly, as if she were regretful.

‘I don't want to be nasty to you.'

Lizzie felt her role shifting. She too felt sorry, sorry for this girl on the other end of the line who seemed so afraid.

‘Look, it'll be OK, Farah, really. It's just a minor offence.'

But Farah snapped in, immediately angry again.

‘You don't understand. That bitch is going to take our house away.'

‘Farah, please.
Relax
. They're not going to—'

‘If you carry on, I'm going to put the phone down.'

Lizzie stopped speaking. She waited.

Farah spoke bitterly, ‘What do you know? What do you know?'

Lizzie should have ended the call and lived with the consequences; she knew even then that she should, but still she held on. After a short silence the voice continued, no longer threatening, just factual and a bit nervous.

‘My dad says you say you heard PC Matthews speaking to me an' he never said nothing racist.'

Lizzie hadn't replied, just waited for the rest.

‘Well, I think you made a mistake. Everyone does that from time to time. My dad did. Your mate did. I think you did an' all.'

‘I made a mistake?'

‘Yes, you did, PC Griffiths. Think about it. What have you done wrong?'

After the call, she ran again, forcing herself to sprint. The incline peaked and levelled off, opening into wide flat grass. She ran on, turning away from the grass back into woods. The ground was uneven and she had to avoid losing her footing on tree roots and rabbit holes. She slowed her steps, lifting her head towards the winding path. Brambles were sprawling out. Her legs seemed to stop by themselves. The music in her iPod had become nothing but roaring noise. She switched it off and surrendered to the sound
of her breath coming in hungry gulps. There was an old wooden bench stranded in the neglected urban woods and she sat down heavily. She closed her eyes, allowing the truth of the phone call to confront her fully. She had a sense of rightness that it had caught up with her. She leant forward, elbows resting crooked on knees, forehead pressing into her hands.

The good officer, she told herself, does not panic.

She went home and showered and went to bed.

But after just a couple of hours it had woken her: the voice of the girl on the other end of the phone. Her recollection of the call was uncanny, eidetic. Farah had not sounded malevolent – that was one of the things that had struck Lizzie. She had been angry, desperate even on occasion, but most of the time her tone had been that of someone putting their hand up in class and venturing an opinion, someone not used to doing that, someone who felt all eyes upon her but who was going to give it a go anyway.

Lizzie could not lie still. She got out of bed and moved to the kitchen. She began to fill the kettle. She was haunted by an eerie sense of déjà vu, as though she had always known that this was going to happen. Hard on its heels came a sweaty sense of fear and shame – a shame so deep that she imagined she would never be able to tell anyone what had happened. She thought, in a flash of recognition, of those moments in interview when she calmly revealed some evidence of which the suspect had been unaware. It could be anything – CCTV, the location of a phone, a quiet voice in the background of a 999 recording. Whatever it was, it was the caught-in-a-lie moment. The pulling-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat moment. Sim sim salabim, here is the fucking rabbit you had not expected. A feeling of total power, righteousness even – however fleeting – always accompanied that moment. She had perhaps recognized that same tone briefly in Farah's voice. Lizzie's tongue pressed itself to the roof of her mouth. She felt sick.

The kettle was overfilling into the sink. She turned off the tap and emptied half of it out, then set it to boil.

How had she come to this? This . . . error of judgement. That was how she tried to style it at first. Had it been tiredness? Lacking the courage to do nothing? Wanting too much to be liked? Was it really as weak as that? What was Hadley to her that she had done something so . . . so
stupid
for him? That was the word that now repeated over and over to her. Not immoral, not wrong; no, worse than that: stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Weak. Unnecessary. All of this was
unnecessary
.

It was only later that the other words – the moral words that she avoided then – came home to her like baying dogs that would be heard.

Think about it. What have you done wrong?

I have . . . lied
.

She hadn't answered the question, of course. In any case, it hadn't been the lie that Farah was referring to. It had been something more practical, an oversight. Suddenly they had been talking business.

‘So what do you want?' Lizzie had said.

‘What's so difficult to understand? Why don't you get it?'

‘Meaning?'

Farah's voice, faint at the end of the mobile's crackling line, had been apologetic, hesitant, childish even.

‘What my dad did, it's not a big deal, is it? Not really, you know it ain't. You must have seen a lot worser than that. What that fat copper said to me, that's not a big deal neither. I protect my dad an' you protect your mate. It's just normal, innit? It's just what people
do
. They stick up for each other. You an' me, PC Griffiths, we're the same. Don't you think? We're not bad people. We're
good
people. Well, I'm a good person an' I bet you are too. I really do. Deep down. I bet we could be friends. We neither of us want no one getting in no trouble. Why don't we give everyone a second
chance? Everyone gets to start again, what's wrong with that? You can trust me, PC Griffiths.'

Steam had been pouring out of the kettle. Lizzie had flicked the switch and returned to bed without making her drink. She curled up on her side, hoping that the impersonation of sleep would bring its reality. But the problem went round and round in her head, like a buzzing fly trapped in a glass.

No charge, no complaint. That was how Farah wanted to work it.
Lessons learned all round
. It had sounded persuasive for all of about five seconds.

The Crown Prosecution Service had already agreed to charge Mehenni. How to explain to them that suddenly a charge was no longer required? Plus the Chief Superintendent had taken an interest. Carrie Stewart had made bloody sure of that. He had come to see Lizzie in person: he wanted the book thrown at Mehenni.

‘Well done, Lizzie. Make sure you serve him with his immigration notice too. Not that it will make any difference, but it does put the fear of God into some of them. And apply to remand, of course. Let me know how you get on.'

No chance of losing the evidence, either. The photos were still on Carrie Stewart's hard drive and Carrie wasn't the type to let it drop.

No, it wasn't going away.

She tried out her defence. She had been mistaken in her recollection. Yes, that was possible. She was in the kitchen with Mrs Mehenni. She might perhaps have missed some part of the conversation between Hadley and Farah. But her statement had been so categorical on this. She had been in the kitchen throughout and had heard the whole conversation.

She tried to clear her mind, counting her breath.

Then she reached to the side of the bed and called Kieran.

‘Sure,' he said. ‘Yes, I'm just waking up. Come over. I'll make us both pasta.'