The Fall (26 page)

But now he was there and talking to this Keisha girl was like pulling teeth. She was flashing him evils, as his girl cousins would have said, and when he sat down at the table she got up and went to the sofa, flicking channels on the muted TV.

He was a little shocked at the flat too. A lot dirtier than when he’d made the arrest. It looked like his place, unwashed dishes, pizza boxes in the recycling. And where was the Eames chair, and that nice painting from the wall?

Charlotte looked back and forth between them, tea slopping out of the cups in her shaking hands. ‘Keesh, are you sure you don’t want tea? It’s Tetley.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘There’s biscuits, nice ones . . .’ She trailed off. Hegarty took a biscuit, chocolate chip with a chocolate coating, very nice. Could have done with those at the station.

Charlotte cleared her throat. ‘So, DC – er, sorry, what should I call you?’

‘So long as it’s not Matty, I don’t mind.’ She looked confused. ‘Matthew, Matt, whatever you like.’ They were about the same age, him and her.

She looked up at him from under her lashes. ‘Like I told you the other day, Keisha came round to see me a bit after – everything. It was really kind of her, because she sort of like came to warn me.’

He thought he heard the other girl snort.

‘Warn you?’

‘Basically Keisha was there that night, in the club, with her boyfriend.’

‘Wait.’ He fumbled in his satchel for the picture printout. ‘That him?’

Charlotte stared at it for a while, her brow furrowed. She shook her head. ‘I never saw him, not really. Keesh, is that Chris?’

Keisha ignored her as long as she could, then got up with a sigh. ‘Give us it.’ She peered at the grainy print for a long time.

Charlotte was gripping the table. ‘Well?’

‘Course it’s him. So? It’s just some picture.’

Hegarty folded it away. ‘I asked you before if you knew him, didn’t I?’

She scowled. ‘Dunno. Still with him then, wasn’t I? Anyway, you’d arrested your fella – or that’s what you told the court.’

He decided to play nice. ‘You’re right, Keisha. We thought all the evidence pointed to Dan, but maybe we missed something, and you spotted it.’

‘All right,’ she said, after a pause. And she told her convoluted story about this boyfriend, this Chris, and how he’d left the club and her ‘freezing my arse off at the bus stop, I was’ – so she’d gone home and there he was in bed, his clothes in a bag and shoes all covered in something sticky and red.

‘Blood?’ he asked, pen hovering.

‘I dunno, not on bloody
CSI
, am I?’

Charlotte sighed. Hegarty shut his book. ‘What you’ve told me is a bit shaky, to be honest. It was weeks ago, and you didn’t come forward at the time.’

‘He was my fella! I’m not lying.’

‘He knows you’re not lying, Keesh, but is there anything else, anything at all?’ Charlotte leaned forward but Keisha shook her away.

‘I said everything I know. What else am I meant to tell you? You can’t come after me, it’s not fair.’

Hegarty raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m not coming after you, miss. You’re just a possible witness. You haven’t seen Chris since?’

Was it his imagination, or did she hesitate before shaking her head?

Charlotte tried again. ‘You didn’t say Chris was after me, for some reason. That’s why she came, DC, er, Matthew. She saw this friend of Chris’s and he said he was after me, and the reason she left in the first place was because he beat her up when he found out she had my purse. With my address, you see?’

‘Leave it, Char,’ said Keisha, full of steel.

Hegarty looked between the two, the one earnest girl with her fair hair falling into her eyes, the other sulky, arms folded. He could almost hear his dad in his head, the voice of the copper forty years on the job:
Walk off, son. Walk off
. He opened his notebook again. ‘Any reason this Chris’d be after you?’

Charlotte frowned. ‘I don’t know, but I do seem to have this memory where someone pushed past me at the club – maybe outside, maybe inside, I don’t know. I can’t really remember, it’s so frustrating.’

When Charlotte said this, the Keisha girl stiffened. He caught her eye and she looked away. He sighed. ‘And how would Chris have got home before you, Keisha, if he went back to the club? You got the bus?’

‘Musta got a taxi. Wouldn’t get one for me, tight bastard.’

He clicked on his pen and scribbled it down. ‘Might be able to find the driver. I’ll look into it, no guarantees though.’

‘Oh, thank you.’ Charlotte nearly knocked over her tea. ‘Oh God, I can’t tell you, it means so much, just to think maybe it wasn’t Dan.’

‘Keisha, you’ll need to make a sworn statement on this.’

‘What?’ Her head shot up. ‘I’m not swearing nothing.’

‘He can’t admit it as evidence if you don’t make a statement, duh!’ Charlotte seemed to be losing patience.

‘Yeah, yeah, who died and made you Legally Blonde? Chris’ll kill me if he finds out, like actually kill me.’

‘But they’ll arrest him, for God’s sake!’

‘And you believe that, same coppers what came round here and lifted Dan?’

That shut Charlotte up. ‘I have to trust them.’ She turned her big blue eyes to Hegarty. ‘Can she have a bit of time to think?’

‘I can arrest you, you know,’ said Hegarty, just to rattle the grumpy girl. She had enough attitude to bury a small building.

‘I can plead the fifth.’ Keisha crossed her arms.

Hegarty stood up. ‘Think you’ll find that’s America, miss, and sadly for you there’s no such thing in the UK. Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1984.’

Keisha muttered something that sounded like
wanker
. Giving the other girl a dirty look, Charlotte got up to see him to the door. ‘I’m sorry to spring all this on you. You must think I’m an idiot, trying to be all
Murder She Wrote
.’

He shrugged his jacket on. ‘Nah. Although I did have a thing for Angela Lansbury in
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
.’

Her face lit up. ‘I love that film, I’ve got it on DVD.’

Of course she did. He looked at her for a second too long, her hands wringing together.

‘And the other thing, the letter about Dan? Will you . . .?’ She dropped her voice and he saw she didn’t want Keisha to know she’d asked him to help Stockbridge. Maybe she didn’t totally trust the other girl.

‘I’ll see what I can do. No promises.’

Hegarty’s dad, Maverick Mike, knew a lot of people. Before he married and settled in Cumbria, he’d been all round the country, and it was getting to be a bit of a joke how often a court clerk or officer or even a judge would say, ‘Oh, you’re Maverick Mike’s lad?’

As it happened, Hegarty Senior also knew one of the POs at Pentonville, where Daniel Stockbridge was currently being held awaiting trial. Hegarty’d already decided, even apart from his earlier impressions of a cold bastard, that Stockbridge was a twat. Imagine being stuck in there with three hundred men and turning down a visit from the lovely Charlotte. But when he got into the interview room and smelled the stale air, he understood better. Maybe it was just too much, to be in here and see her or smell the outside rising off her hair.

The door opened and Stockbridge was brought in. Although he was a remand prisoner he was wearing the same grey prison tracksuit as the other men. There was a healing cut over his eye, yellowing on the edges. He looked awful, Hegarty thought, pale and blinking in the orange light of the interview room. The man must have lost two stone since his arrest.

Stockbridge sat down slowly. ‘You want to arrest me for anything else?’

‘How are you, Daniel?’

Stockbridge gave him a dirty look. ‘How do you think? Waiting for a trial date.’

‘Shouldn’t be long now. I hear you might be pleading Guilty.’ That was the advantage of being Maverick Mike’s boy – you heard things, you knew ways to wind them up.

‘What’s it to you? That’s what you think, isn’t it?’

‘But when we first met, you didn’t exactly agree, did you?’

Stockbridge looked angry. ‘You had all that evidence, showing I’m a racist, my prints on the bottle. You found it all.’

Hegarty leaned forward. ‘Do you remember what happened, Dan? Do you remember that night?’

A long pause. Hegarty saw the man was shaking. ‘Well?’

‘No.’ His voice was a whisper.

‘So, why would you plead Guilty?’

‘You said – you had all that evidence. The bottle, the CCTV. No one else could have done it. That’s what you said. And the lawyer said, maybe they’d go easier on me if I admitted it.’

‘Are you sure no one else could have done it?’ Hegarty pushed his chair back.

‘What the hell is this? You said no one else went in, but he was dead. And I don’t remember, you know that? I don’t remember a fucking thing. So what am I supposed to . . . ?
Fuck
.’

Hegarty let the echoes of the man’s voice fade away. ‘So you’re pleading Guilty because you don’t
remember
?’

‘I don’t know. The man’s dead, isn’t he? Someone has to be punished for it.’

Christ, the man was in a bad way. ‘You had another blackout, I hear.’ He nodded at the cut over Stockbridge’s eye.

The man clammed up. ‘Accident.’

‘Someone lamped you, I hear tell. Think you’re a racist, don’t they?’

‘And who the fuck did that come from? You were the one who dug up all that old stuff.’

Another pause. ‘Dan,’ Hegarty said quietly. ‘You didn’t say anything racist to Anthony Johnson, did you? She was lying, wasn’t she, that girl?’

Stockbridge hung his head. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know any more.’

‘You had a blackout.’

‘Yes.’

‘Wasn’t the first time.’

‘No. I’ve had them a few times. I didn’t know what was happening to me.’ Stockbridge was whispering, staring at his restless hands. ‘I was so stressed. All that stuff at work – God, you wouldn’t believe what was going on there. I could tell you some things . . .’

‘Yeah? Tell me then.’

He slumped. ‘What’s the point? It’s me that’s in prison, not them.’

‘If you spot an irregularity, you have to report it. Isn’t that the law on banking?’

Stockbridge laughed. ‘And if I don’t – what? You’ll arrest me again? I think that ship has sailed, Officer.’

‘Who gave you the coke, Dan?’

‘Why, you want him in here too?’

‘What if I do? Did any of that banking lot stand by you when you needed them? You know how much stuff they gave me on you, Dan? Mountains of it. Handed it over on a plate. Why’d they do that, eh?’

The man shook his head. ‘There’s no point in saying.’ His voice was dead.

‘Did you know something? Was that it? You had something on them?’

Daniel Stockbridge’s face was shining with tears. Had he even noticed? Hegarty relented, sat back. ‘Someone called Alex, wasn’t it, who had the coke? Charlotte remembered the name.’

A whisper. ‘Carter. Alex Carter. He’s head of my division. He’s my boss. Was my boss.’

Hegarty scribbled it down. ‘Thanks, Dan.’

‘Don’t call me Dan.’ He rubbed at his face with the back of his hands, like a kid.

Hegarty cleared his throat. ‘So it says here you’ve been diagnosed with epileptic blackouts, Mr Stockbridge. You know what that means?’

‘That I’m totally fucked?’

‘Means you can’t remember what happened. You’re an unreliable witness.’

Stockbridge looked up. His eyes were red and haunted. ‘What?’

‘Dan, you’re not a reliable judge of what happened.’

‘But – no one else could have killed him. You said.’

Hegarty got up. ‘We’ll let the jury decide that, shall we? In the meantime there’s someone waiting to hear from you, and she wishes you’d at least make an effort.’

Dan said quietly, ‘I don’t want her to see me like this. She’s better off without me.’

Hegarty turned away in impatience. ‘She’s waiting for you – you realise that? She’s out there, every day, waiting for you to start fighting.’

Stockbridge stared at his hands again, still trembling. ‘You seem to know a lot about my fiancée, Officer.’

Hegarty signalled to the PO that he’d finished. ‘Get a lawyer, Stockbridge, will you? Make her see she’s got a reason to wait for you.’

The other man thought about it for a moment. ‘And what if I don’t want her to?’

There’s plenty who’ll pick up the pieces
. Hegarty bit down the thought. ‘See you in court, Dan.’

The door clanged shut as he left Stockbridge in the small, windowless room.

The next thing that happened was a trial date came through. Of course Dan didn’t tell her, wouldn’t even accept her letters, so Charlotte only found out when Hegarty phoned to let her know.

She was on her way to work, walking down Tottenham Court Road. ‘Pardon? Oh, sorry, the traffic is so loud. What did you say?’

‘The trial date. Just heard it on the grapevine. CPS’ll let you know, but I reckoned you’d want to hear soonest.’

She stopped walking. ‘When?’

‘October. They don’t like to hold big trials in summer.’

The traffic was deafening, and for a second Charlotte felt she might choke on the dust and fumes. ‘Does he know? Did they tell him?’

‘Well, sure, he’s meant to have time to prepare his defence.’

‘He needs a lawyer. Did he say he would get one?’

His voice was gentle down the line. ‘I only saw him for ten minutes, like. Didn’t really get on to that.’

Christ. She’d had such a sharp stab of hope when Matthew – DC Hegarty – agreed to go and see Dan in prison. But nothing had changed. No one talked about Dan. No one thought of him. It was as if he’d vanished from the world, and nobody even cared. Except her.

‘Charlotte? Get ready for your witness summons. Prosecution’ll almost definitely call you.’

Charlotte pictured them suddenly, waiting to testify, side by side in court and Dan across the room in a wooden box. ‘And Keisha?’

‘Not unless she makes a statement. I did look into her story, but . . .’

‘But?’

He sighed. ‘I couldn’t find anything. No taxi records, nothing.’

‘Oh. Listen, I’m so sorry about how rude she was when you came round. She’s just not ready. Could I – could we meet up again, not at my place? Another coffee or something?’