Post Mortem (35 page)

‘No.'

‘He asked for your support and you quite rightly refused.'

Lizzie caught herself chewing the inside of her lip. She shook her head and then remembered that she needed to speak. ‘No.'

‘And then, after eighteen days, something changed, didn't it? What changed?'

‘Nothing.'

Lizzie sipped her water. There was silence.

Collins was reading again, her finger tracing the line of typeface. ‘He asked her
general questions
.' She looked up. ‘General questions? What
exactly
did he say?'

‘I can't remember, not exactly. It's a long time ago. He asked where her father was. Hadley had a way about him. I'm sure the
other officers will have told you. A way of . . . of getting what he wanted. That's why I think the girl might have thought he said something racist. But he didn't. He was the same with her as he was with everyone else . . .'

‘Yes, and he had a warning on his file for this way of getting what he wanted – as I've mentioned.'

‘I didn't hear him say anything reprehensible.'

‘Perhaps you didn't hear him say anything. You were with the grandmother.'

Lizzie remembered being outside in the cold yard. The scrubby pruned buddleia sprouting out of the concrete. The persistent angry voice down the phone. Then, when she had moved back into the kitchen, the shadowy figure of Farah in the hallway.

‘No. I was in the kitchen. I could hear what was said.'

‘Lizzie, I've read your other statements and they run to several pages. You don't usually generalize. There's no explanation for this one being so short.'

‘I was tired. It had been a long shift.'

Collins removed her glasses, holding them in her right hand. ‘I know about that long shift. Cosmina was your first murder? You did well, you and Hadley. You were both up for commendations at the end of it all. But one minute you're talking to Cosmina and the next minute she's being cut open. Your first post-mortem. As I said earlier, I've still not got used to them. Pretty harrowing, was it? And after a long night like that, you found the time to write a statement on an unrelated matter. Impressive.'

‘Is there a question there for me?'

‘It was a long, hard night and at the end of it you decided to back Hadley. It's an understandable mistake, Lizzie. You were inexperienced and under a lot of pressure.'

‘No.'

‘Tell me about writing the statement. You wrote it sixteeen hours
after you'd gone on duty. It had waited nearly three weeks. Why couldn't it wait one more day?'

‘I remembered I hadn't done it. I'd gone past tired by that point – why not sit for another thirty minutes? And yes, it did feel more important to write the damn thing. Hadley had tried to save Cosmina. We'd been on our own for a time. Hadley got a civilian to put the door in and we went into the house. After that I realized how important it was to back him, that he was a good copper and that we needed to stick together. But that doesn't mean I lied, only that I finally sat down and wrote it. Perhaps that's why the statement's so short. I was exhausted and I wanted to bash it out and get to bed after a very long shift. Or perhaps it was short because there simply wasn't much to say.'

‘A very long and difficult shift. You were upset. You made a mistake.'

‘No.' Lizzie folded her arms across her chest like a child: she had said all she was going to say on the subject. But when Collins did not ask another question, she blurted out angrily, ‘That conversation in the hallway: it was the biggest non-event ever.'

Collins raised her head. ‘Two people dead at the end of it all. That's not a non-event.'

She reached in her handbag and took out a tube of Polo mints. She offered it across the table. She said, ‘For the tape: I am offering PC Griffiths a Polo.'

‘No thanks.'

She pushed a mint up with her thumb and popped it into her mouth. The interview was going well. Lizzie was riled. She needed to keep the pressure up, keep manipulating the pace and the disclosure of evidence. Steve took a mint too. He tilted his notebook towards Collins and she slipped her glasses back on to read.

‘
We needed to stick together
? Could you clarify?'

Lizzie looked at Steve. He said, ‘Well, Lizzie?'

‘Yes, we need to stick together. To stand up for each other. But not beyond a certain point.'

Collins interrupted. ‘A certain point? Where's the line, then?'

Lizzie allowed herself to be exasperated. ‘The law, obviously. That's the line. Bloody hell, why else am I here? Support each other, yes, but not beyond the point where we are breaking the law.'

‘The law, then, that's the line?'

‘What do you want me to say? OK, integrity, that's a line too.'

‘But might there be a conflict perhaps between integrity and obeying the law? Or perhaps . . .' Collins searched for her exact meaning. ‘Perhaps integrity sometimes feels like sticking up for people rather than telling the truth . . . and then the law feels . . . well, how can I put it, not quite the point? That's understandable. Perhaps saying you'd heard a conversation you hadn't didn't seem like such a big deal after you'd recently seen someone's chest cavity secateured open. In the grand scheme of things that might have felt, well, like how you described the conversation in the hallway – a non-event.'

Lizzie remembered the heft and purpose of the body's deconstruction under the mortuary's stark fluorescence. The whine and smell of the saw. The body like cuts of meat, of bone and cartilage and brain. The plastic bags and jars. The gloves slimed in blood beyond the elbow.

Collins prompted gently, ‘Did it, Lizzie?'

‘No.'

‘No?'

Lizzie looked up. She was emphatic, her voice loud for the first time in the interview. ‘I didn't lie.'

It had been the emphasis perhaps of someone determined to see the interview through, but nevertheless it was no confession. Collins had felt as if she could almost reach out and take it, but it was like the twist of a fish in water that offered only the
sensation of movement, an intimation of the thing itself.

‘Did Mr Shaw have a view on any of this? He's an experienced officer. Did he talk to you, perhaps, about
sticking together
?'

‘No, he asked me to write a clarifying statement. That's it.'

‘You were in a relationship with Inspector Shaw.'

There was a pause. ‘Yes.'

‘You were in love?'

Lizzie shrugged.

Collins leaned back in her chair. She allowed Lizzie's reluctance to use the word
love
to sink into her, and the youthfulness of Lizzie's caution expanded within her like a flavour. She was so young, so young for so much to turn on her.

‘Well, did you love him?'

Lizzie sighed. ‘I don't know. I think so. I thought so.'

There was something there, and Collins gave herself a moment to consider it. Then she said, ‘Something has changed between you?'

Lizzie looked at her and her eyes narrowed. ‘A lot has changed, Sergeant.'

Perhaps that question had been a mistake. Lizzie's defiant tone suggested that it had steadied her. Collins turned to Steve.

‘Would you get out the CCTV images, please?'

Steve unclipped a plastic folder from the file and took out some full-colour images. He passed them across the desk. They were screen grabs of Lizzie on Polegate station, walking beside the woman with the dyed red hair and pushing a pram.

Steve read out the exhibit numbers. ‘SJB/5, SJB/6, SJB/7 . . .'

Collins said, ‘Did you meet Mr Shaw yesterday?'

Lizzie passed the images back. ‘No.'

‘Did you call him?'

‘Yes.'

‘You used a pre-paid mobile. Why?'

‘I didn't want to be found.'

‘What did you talk about?'

‘Not much. He told me to make myself known to police.'

‘So what were you doing in Polegate yesterday?'

‘Wandering.'

‘Wandering?'

‘Yes, I've been all over. St Leonards, Hastings, Rye, Eastbourne . . .'

‘Let's talk about this not wanting to be found. After Hadley and Farah died, you went absent without leave.'

‘Yes.'

‘You ended up standing in the darkness on the edge of Portland Tower.'

Silence.

‘You thought, perhaps, of jumping?'

There was no reply.

‘Tell me about that.'

Silence again. Then Lizzie said, ‘I can't.'

‘You can't? Why not?'

Lizzie closed her eyes. Here was something at last: the darkness. Collins sought the question that would reach into it. She waited. Lizzie opened her eyes, as if recollecting herself, but she said nothing.

‘Why would you despair?' Collins said.

Lizzie bent over the table and pressed her forehead into the heel of her hands.

Collins said, ‘I only want the truth. I just want to know what happened.'

Lizzie did not move.

Collins waited. The time stretched and was alive and then, incontrovertibly, became lifeless. Lizzie would not speak.

Collins said, ‘Seventeen twenty-five hours. I'm suspending the interview.'

Steve offered to put Lizzie in her new cell and sign her back while Collins updated the boss.

They met in the canteen and sat opposite each other with coffees. Collins had got herself a muffin but did not eat it.

She said, ‘This interview is the only thing we've got.'

‘You're getting very close.'

‘Let's give her five more minutes on her own. That might be all she needs.'

‘Eighteen twenty hours. I'm resuming the interview. DS Collins present. Also present . . .'

‘DC Steve Bradshaw.'

‘PC Lizzie Griffiths.'

‘You're still under caution, Lizzie. You understand that?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're still entitled to legal advice.'

‘I know.'

‘Tell me about the roof.'

‘I was drawn back to it.'

‘No, the first time, when Farah was there with Ben. You got there very quickly?'

‘Yes. I broke the law. I drove on blue lights.'

‘Why did you do that?'

Lizzie looked suddenly directly at Collins, and Collins saw something new in her expression, a determination, as if Lizzie had newly resolved on some frightening enterprise, like scaling a rock face or jumping from a significant height, and in spite of her trepidation was set upon seeing it through.

‘About five days previously I had received a phone call from Farah
Mehenni. She was upset with me. She thought I'd promised her father a caution and I'd let her down. She said she was desperate about him being charged and she wanted to talk. There was a place she liked, a place she had found that no one knew about.'

It was rubbish, nonsense. The call had been about the phone. Collins had to compose her expression to hide her angry contempt. But Lizzie's story was in deadly earnest and there was just enough truth there for it to hold. The only way to show the lie was to treat it as if it were the truth, to probe its fault lines until it fractured.

Collins said, ‘And that place was the roof of Portland Tower?'

Lizzie looked at her with a tiny frown before answering. ‘Yes. I charged Younes Mehenni at about two o'clock in the afternoon. I was in the police station putting the final touches to the case papers. When I heard the description of a five-year-old missing boy, I knew straight away it was Ben.'

‘Because of the bear suit?'

‘Yes. When we reported the initial allegation at his house, he was wearing a bear suit. And then I heard there were some figures on the top of Portland Tower . . .'

‘So you realized at once that the incidents were linked, and you were so worried that you used blue lights when you weren't authorized.'

‘Yes, I did. Everything I knew about Farah was worrying—'

Collins interrupted. ‘And PC Matthews, had you told him about the phone call from Farah?'

‘No, I didn't tell anyone.'

‘I ask because PC Matthews . . . Well, you were
quick
, but PC Matthews was . . .' Matthews was a fucking time lord, she thought. ‘PC Matthews was even quicker. How did he know Farah and Ben were there?'

‘I don't know.' Lizzie sighed as if suddenly exhausted by it all. ‘You'd have to ask him.'

Collins brushed aside her own irritation at Lizzie's sarcasm. She needed to stay on track, to keep the pace of the questions up.

‘And how had Farah got hold of your telephone number?'

‘I'd given it to her. I gave it to her when I went to persuade her to get her father to hand himself in.'

Collins cursed herself: the story was firm, organized. Bits of it were true, other bits false, and it was proving impossible to sift out the lies. That time in the cell was supposed to have led Lizzie closer to a giving-up of the truth. Instead the opposite had happened. The story had emerged fully formed, flawless. It was as if in the short interval, while Collins had sat in the canteen with Steve, Lizzie had remade herself.