Suspect (22 page)

“Oh, that’s right, he had a dream.” Ruiz’s voice is laced with sarcasm. He drops to a whisper. “You met Catherine that night.”

“No.”

“You lured her away from the Grand Union Hotel.”

“No.”

“You tortured and kil ed her.”

“No.”

“This is horseshit!” he explodes. “You have lied, denied and conspired to hinder this investigation. You have deliberately withheld information and have spent the last three weeks constructing an elaborate charade about a former patient in an effort to steer police away from you.”

“I have done no such thing!”

Simon touches my arm. He wants me to be quiet. I ignore him.

“I didn’t touch Catherine. I haven’t seen her.”

“I want to speak with my client,” says Simon, more insistently.

To hel with that! I’m done with being polite. “What possible reason would I have for kil ing Catherine?” I shout. “You have my name in a diary, a telephone cal to my office and no motive.

Do your job. Get some evidence before you come accusing me.”

The younger detective grins. I realize that something is wrong. Ruiz opens a thin green folder which lies on the table in front of him. From it he produces a photocopied piece of paper, which he slides across in front of me.

“This is a letter dated July fifteenth, 1997. It is addressed to the senior nursing administrator of the Royal Marsden Hospital. In this letter Catherine McBride makes an al egation that you sexual y assaulted her in your office at the hospital. She says that you hypnotized her, fondled her breasts and interfered with her underwear— ”

“She withdrew that complaint. I told you that.”

My chair fal s backward with a bang and I realize that I’m on my feet. The young detective is quicker than I am. He matches me for size and is bristling with intent.

Ruiz looks exultant.

Simon has hold of my arm. “Professor O’Loughlin— Joe— I advise you to be quiet.”

“Can’t you see what they’re doing? They’re twisting the facts…”

“They’re asking legitimate questions.”

A sense of alarm spreads through me. Ruiz has a motive. Simon picks up my chair and holds it for me. I stare blankly at the far wal , numb with tiredness. My left hand is shaking. Both detectives stare at it silently. I sit and force my hand between my knees to stop the tremors.

“Where were you on the evening of November thirteenth?”

“In the West End.”

“Who were you with?”

“No one. I got drunk. I had just received some bad news about my health.”

That statement hangs in the air like a torn cobweb looking for something to cling to. Simon breaks first and explains that I have Parkinson’s disease. I want to stop him. It is
my
business.

I’m not looking for pity.

Ruiz doesn’t miss a beat. “Is one of the symptoms memory loss?”

I’m so relieved that I laugh. I didn’t want him treating me any differently. “Exactly where did you go drinking?” Ruiz presses on.

“Different pubs and wine bars.”

“Where?”

“Leicester Square, Covent Garden…”

“Can you name any of these bars?”

I shake my head.

“Can anyone confirm your whereabouts?”

“No.”

“What time did you get home?”

“I didn’t go home.”

“Where did you spend the night?”

“I can’t recal .”

Ruiz turns to Simon. “Mr. Koch, can you please instruct your client…”

“My client has made it clear to me that he doesn’t recal where he spent the night. He is aware that this does not help his situation.” Ruiz’s face is hard to read. He glances at his wristwatch, announces the time and then turns off the tape recorder. The interview is terminated. I glance from face to face, wondering what happens next. Is it over?

The young WPC comes back into the room.

“Are the cars ready?” asks Ruiz.

She nods and holds open the door. Ruiz strides out and the younger detective snaps handcuffs onto my wrists. Simon starts to protest and is handed a copy of a search warrant. The address is typed in capital letters on both sides of the page. I’m going home.

My most vivid childhood memory of Christmas is of the St. Augustine’s Anglican School Nativity play in which I was featured as one of the three Wise Men. The reason it is so memorable is that Russel Cochrane, who played the baby Jesus, was so nervous that he wet his pants and it leaked down the front of the Virgin Mary’s blue robe. Jenny Bond, a very pretty Mary, was so angry that she dropped Russel on his head and swung a kick into his groin.

A col ective groan went up from the audience, but it was drowned out by Russel ’s howls of pain. The entire production disintegrated and the curtain came down early.

The backstage farce proved even more compel ing. Russel ’s father, a big man with a bul et-shaped head, was a police sergeant, who sometimes came to the school to lecture us on road safety. He cornered Jenny Bond backstage and threatened to have her arrested for assault. Jenny’s father laughed. It was a big mistake. Sergeant Cochrane handcuffed him on the spot and marched him along Stafford Street to the police station where he spent the night.

Our Nativity play made the national papers. VIRGIN MARY’S FATHER ARRESTED, said the headline in
The Sun. The Star
wrote: BABY JESUS KICKED IN THE BAUBLES!

I think of it again because of Charlie. Is she going to see me in handcuffs, being flanked by policemen? What wil she think of her father then?

The unmarked police car pul s up the ramp from the underground car park and emerges into daylight. Sitting next to me, Simon puts a coat over my head. Through the damp wool, I can make out the pyrotechnics of flashguns and TV lights. I don’t know how many photographers and cameramen there are. I hear their voices and feel the police car accelerate away.

Traffic slows to a crawl in Marylebone Road. Pedestrians seem to hesitate and stare. I’m convinced they’re looking at me— wondering who I am and what I’m doing in the backseat of a police car.

“Can I phone my wife?” I ask.

“No.”

“She doesn’t know we’re coming.”

“Exactly.”

“But she doesn’t know I’ve been arrested.”

“You should have told her.”

I suddenly remember the office. I have patients coming today. Appointments have to be rescheduled.

“Can I cal my secretary?”

Ruiz turns and glances over his shoulder. “We are also executing a search warrant on your office.”

I want to argue, but Simon touches my elbow. “This is part of the process,” he whispers, trying to sound reassuring.

The convoy of three police cars pul s up in the middle of our road, blocking the street in either direction. Doors are flung open and detectives assemble quickly, some using the side path to reach the back garden.

Julianne answers the front door. She is wearing pink rubber gloves. A fleck of foam clings to her hair where she has brushed her fringe to one side. A detective gives her a copy of the warrant. She doesn’t look at it. She is too busy focusing on me. She sees the handcuffs and the look on my face. Her eyes are wide with shock and incomprehension.

“Keep Charlie inside,” I shout.

I look at Ruiz. I plead with him. “Not in front of my daughter.
Please
.”

I see nothing in his eyes, but he reaches into his jacket pocket and finds the keys to the handcuffs. Two detectives take my arms.

Julianne is asking questions— ignoring the officers who push past her into the house. “What’s happening, Joe? What are you… ?”

“They think I had something to do with Catherine’s death.”

“How? Why? That’s ridiculous. You were helping them with their investigation.”

Something fal s and smashes upstairs. Julianne glances upward and then back to me. “What are they doing in our house?” She is on the verge of tears. “What have you done, Joe?” I see Charlie’s face peering out of the sitting room. It quickly disappears as Julianne turns. “You stay in that room, young lady,” she barks, sounding more frightened than angry.

The front door is wide open. Anybody walking by can look inside and see what is happening. I can hear cupboards and drawers being opened on the floor above; mattresses are being lifted and beds dragged aside. Julianne doesn’t know what to do. Part of her wants to protect her house from being vandalized, but mostly she wants answers from me. I don’t have any.

The detectives take me through to the kitchen where I find Ruiz peering out of the French doors at the garden. Men with shovels and hoes are ripping up the lawn. D.J. is leaning against Charlie’s swing, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He looks at me through the smoke, inquisitive, insolent. A faint hint of a smile creases the corners of his mouth— as though he’s watching a Porsche get a parking ticket.

Turning away reluctantly, he lets the cigarette fal into the gravel where it continues to glow. Then he bends and slices open the plastic packing surrounding a radiator.

“We interviewed your neighbors,” explains Ruiz. “You were seen burying something in the garden.”

“A bug-eyed goldfish.”

Ruiz is total y baffled. “I beg your pardon?”

Julianne laughs at the absurdity of it al . We are living in a Monty Python sketch.

“He buried Charlie’s goldfish,” she says. “It’s under the plum tree next to Harold Hamster.”

A couple of the detectives behind us can’t stifle their giggles. Ruiz has a face like thunder. I know I shouldn’t goad him, but it feels good to laugh.

2

The mattress has compressed to the hardness of concrete beneath my hip and shoulder. From the moment I lie down the blood throbs in my ears and my mind begins to race. I want to slip into peaceful emptiness. Instead I chase the dangerous thoughts, magnified in my imagination.

By now Ruiz wil have interviewed Julianne. He’l have asked where I was on the thirteenth of November. She’l have told him that I spent the night with Jock. She won’t know that’s a lie.

She’l repeat what I told her.

Ruiz wil also have talked to Jock, who wil tel them that I left his office at five o’clock that day. He asked me out for a drink, but I said no. I said I was going home. None of our stories are going to match.

Julianne has spent al evening in the charge room, hoping to see me. Ruiz told her she could have five minutes, but I can’t face her. I know that’s appal ing. I know she must be scared, confused, angry and worried sick. She just wants an explanation. She wants to hear me tel her it’s going to be al right. I’m more frightened of confronting her than I am of Ruiz. How can I explain Elisa? How can I make things right?

Julianne asked me if I thought it unusual that a woman I hadn’t seen in five years is murdered and then the police ask me to help identify her. Glibly, I told her that coincidences were just a couple of things happening simultaneously. Now the coincidences are starting to pile up. What are the chances of Bobby being referred to me as a patient? Or that Catherine would phone my office on the evening she died? When do coincidences stop being coincidences and become a pattern?

I’m not being paranoid. I’m not seeing shadows darting in the corner of my eye or imagining sinister conspiracies. But something is happening here that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

I fal asleep with this thought and sometime during the night I wake suddenly, breathing hard with my heart pounding. I cannot see who or what is chasing me, but I know it’s there, watching, waiting, laughing at me.

Every sound seems exaggerated by the starkness of the cel . I lie awake and listen to the seesaw creaks of bedsprings, water dripping in cisterns, drunks talking in their sleep and guards’ shoes echoing down corridors.

Today is the day. The police wil either charge me or let me go. I should be more anxious and concerned. Mostly I feel remote and separate from what’s happening. I pace out the cel , thinking how bizarre life can be. Look at al the twists and turns, the coincidences and bad luck, the mistakes and misunderstandings. I don’t feel angry or bitter. I have faith in the system.

Pretty soon they’re going to realize the evidence isn’t strong enough against me. They’l have to let me go.

This sort of optimism strikes me as quite odd when I think about how natural y cynical I am concerning law and order. Innocent people get shafted every day. I’ve seen the evidence. It’s incontrovertible. Yet I have no fears about this happening to me.

I blame my mother and her unwavering belief in authority figures such as policemen, judges and politicians. She grew up in a vil age in the Cotswolds, where the town constable rode a bicycle, knew every local by name and solved most crimes within half an hour. He epitomized fairness and honesty.

Since then, despite the regular stories of police planting evidence, taking bribes and falsifying statements, my mother has never altered her beliefs. “God made more good people than bad,” she says, as though a head count wil sort everything out. And when this seems highly unlikely, she adds, “They wil get their comeuppance in Heaven.” A hatch opens in the lower half of the door and a wooden tray is propel ed across the floor. I have a plastic bottle of orange juice, some gray-looking sludge that I assume to be scrambled eggs and two slices of bread that have been waved over a toaster. I put it to one side and wait for Simon to arrive.