The Red Road (15 page)

But the real reason that George didn’t like Monkton was that he made Gamerro feel old and clumsy. Gamerro gave advice as he always did with young officers but Monkton seemed to know everything already. He listened patiently, he was superficially respectful but he knew it already. The entry exams were more stringent now. The new intake were a different class than in his day. George found himself thinking about bringing his retirement forward. His cousin had a paper shop and wanted him to come in with a half share.

And yet George Gamerro was too experienced a cop to distrust his discomfort with Monkton entirely. He found himself seeking Monkton’s company, the way he might return time and again to a lying witness.

‘OK.’ George put his flask down on the desk for later. ‘You ready then?’

Monkton stood up. ‘Aye.’

They walked down to the cells together, taking their time, walking in silence as they got their heads ready.

Questioning a child about a brutal murder would be draining. George’s own children were in their twenties and he couldn’t help but remember the unformed putty of them at fourteen. He comforted himself with the thought that it should be straightforward: in the car with Monkton and Harry, the kid had already confessed to the murder. They just needed to get it on tape for corroboration. If they didn’t get it there would be plenty of fingerprints. The alleyway was wallpapered with smeared handprints.

The lighting in the corridor was dim and contrasted sharply with the hard white light in the interview rooms. George had often thought that it gave interviewees the subliminal sense of being marooned.

He and Monkton hesitated at the door to the interview room, looked at each other, gathered their thoughts. George opened the door to the startlingly bright room and his pupils contracted suddenly, a painful twinge as the light slapped his retina. His eyes watery, his vision blurred, he guessed his way to the seat at the table, following the route his legs remembered from a hundred other interviews held on a hundred other rainy evenings.

He didn’t look at the boy at the table. Neither he nor Monkton greeted either him or the woman sitting behind him. It wasn’t deliberate rudeness. They had to get the tape recorder working before anyone said anything, so that everything would be on record. George was aware that it must seem rude, or cold, or something, but they had procedures to follow and it was important that they saw them through. He was aware also of performing well for Monkton, showing him how it should be done, proving he wasn’t past it. For a moment, as his backside made contact with the chair, he felt like a memory of Monkton’s, from early in his career, a story being passed on to the would-be cops who were now in primary school, the boys who’d become the men who’d make Monkton feel old and out of touch.

Sitting next to the wall, blinking his vision clear, he put the tapes in, turned on the machine and gave the date, place and a list of those present. Then he started.

‘Michael Brown? Is that your name?’

A whispered ‘Aye.’

‘Well, Michael, as you heard me saying to the tape there, I’m Detective Sergeant George Gamerro. I’ll be leading this interview.’

The boy didn’t look up. He was small for his age, thin shouldered, wearing a dirty yellow Nike T-shirt. His eyes were swollen.

‘Do you understand, Michael?’

The boy gave a tiny nod to the table.

‘Do you know who this lady is behind to you?’

He didn’t say anything.

‘Yvonne’s a staff member at Cleveden House, where you live, isn’t she?’

The boy nodded again.

‘Would you mind speaking, Michael, so we can get it on tape?’ George was being as gentle as he could but the boy didn’t speak. ‘OK. Now, Yvonne isn’t here to give you legal advice or anything like that. She’s just here to make sure you’re all right, isn’t that right, Yvonne?’

Yvonne looked up at George and nodded, half smiling, almost as shy as the boy. She was just a kid herself, a slip of a thing, she wouldn’t be any trouble.

George’s eyes fell on the boy’s T-shirt. Dirty yellow. Not muddy or anything, dusty with dirt though, as if he had rolled around on dry ground. George caught himself. There was something wrong about the T-shirt. His glance fell to the boy’s face.

The boy was facing the table but he was staring up at Monkton, and for a moment George thought his eyes weren’t swollen from crying but from hating Monkton. He looked tiny, sitting with his hands on his lap, shoulders dropped, eyes straining through his eyebrows.

Aware of the tape, George lifted a bit of paper so that the pause would sound as if he had been looking through notes. But he kept thinking about how the T-shirt was wrong. He knew why suddenly: there was no blood on it. But this kid was in care. If he had come from a chaotic house and changed out of a bloody T-shirt there might not be a clean one to put on, he might have grabbed a dirt-dusty top from a floor. George didn’t rate group homes as a way to bring kids up, whatever they came from, but homes did keep them clean. He had to give them that. They laundered their clothes and their bed linen, they cleaned the mud from their shoes and their knees. There wouldn’t be a dusty T-shirt lying around a group home.

George put his hand on the table in front of the boy to get his attention. He dragged his fingers back, pulling the boy’s focus with him. The boy looked at him and George softened his face.

‘Michael, are you planning to speak to me?’

He was being much softer than he normally would. He could feel Monkton bristle next to him, sucking his teeth, shift in his chair.

The boy was looking properly at George now, reading him.

‘Is that your T-shirt?’

Confused, the boy ran a finger on his chest. ‘Bought it.’

‘Which shop did you buy it in?’

The boy lowered his brow, the look he had been giving Monkton on him now. He thought George was asking if he’d stolen it.

‘Because,’ said George, ‘my niece was looking for a yellow T-shirt with Nike on it.’

The kid tutted at the weak ploy, making George feel foolish in front of Monkton.

‘OK,’ he said, his voice colder, ‘
when
did you put that T-shirt on?’

The boy looked left, anticipating an angle, he looked right, looking for a reason not to answer. He couldn’t find one. ‘Yesterday. In the morning.’

He’d put it on before the murder. George believed him. Monkton, however, gave a small sigh that would be inaudible on the tape. George was afraid he had missed something, that he was making a fool of himself. He decided to change the subject.

‘What happened last night?’

But the boy didn’t answer, he just stared at Monkton.

‘This is your chance to tell us your version, Michael.’

Nothing. Angry stares. Monkton was smirking at the table.

‘How do you think it’ll look when we go to court and you’ve refused to answer any questions? A jury will think only a guilty person would refuse to speak.’

The boy was shifting in his seat, as if he was playing with something in his hands under the table.

‘Hands on the table,’ George ordered and the boy did it.

George tried another tack. ‘Michael, just tell us. You’ve already told the officers who brought you in that you killed your brother.’

He was fingering a cut, that’s what he had been doing under the table. They were small hands, slightly puffy. The puffiness drew George’s attention. He looked and suddenly saw swellings, scratches, welts. The injuries were not on the promontories of his knuckles, not where they would have made contact if the boy had hit someone. The cuts and bruises were in the soft valley of his knuckles, on the flat plains of the backs of his hands. Someone had hit him. His big brother had hit him and Michael fought back, and it got out of hand. George felt relief. Here was the reason, an excuse for compassion.

‘Hey, those bruises on your hands,’ he asked, fingering his own knuckles, ‘how did that happen?’

But the boy didn’t speak. He didn’t blurt an excuse for killing his brother. He sat dumb, looked at Monkton’s hands, at breaks on the knuckles there. George looked as Monkton covered the bruised hand with the other one. His relief deflated: Monkton had battered the boy and now he was sitting through the interview to stop the child saying anything about it.

George could do one of two things now: he could ask the question again and the boy might say that Monkton had hit him. The other course of action was to ask about something else. If he did ask about his hands then it would be on the tape. Even if George didn’t report it, the person transcribing the tape would have to.

George was old enough to know what would happen to a cop who did that to another cop. He thought of Monkton’s relationship with powerful men, the small knowing smiles at the mention of the chief, the DCI, the handshakes in corridors.

And George knew what would happen when Brown’s defence solicitor heard about it. They’d use it to invalidate the oral confession from the car and Michael Brown would get off the murder charge, get out and they’d pick him up in another year or so for another murder, a second life lost over a slap, maybe, nothing much, maybe.

‘When did you last see your brother, Michael?’

The boy shrugged a shoulder, remembering. A flash of panic in his eyes and his courage left him. He covered his face with his battered hands and keened, the breath leaving his chest until there was none left in him. He would confess now, George felt sure, they just had to wait.

But he didn’t. Michael Brown breathed in, sudden and loud, a drowning man coming to the surface, and as he did his hands began to slap at himself, scratching at his face, scratching welts on his cheeks and eyelids. Yvonne grabbed his elbows from behind him, pulling his arms back until he couldn’t move.

His face was a mess of welts, his eyes wide and chest heaving hard, the breath rasping loud through his throat. George had never seen anything like that; it made him think of an animal panicked at slaughter. He wanted to get out of here.

He hurriedly rolled through the appropriate wording, stopped the tape and waved Monkton out of the room. They didn’t speak until they were walking down the corridor and the door was shut.

Monkton spoke first. ‘What was that all about?’ he smirked.

George punched his shoulder, turning Monkton to face him and jabbing a finger at his nose.

‘Did you raise your hands o’er that boy?’

Monkton tipped his head, disrespectful, half-mocking. ‘Come on ...’

George was furious: ‘Did you hit the wean when you were bringing him in?’

‘As if I’d hit a wean,’ said Monkton, his flat tone telling George to let it go.

But George had already let it go. He could have asked about it on tape. He had already let it go. What he couldn’t let him away with was the lack of deference to a senior officer and Monkton knew it.

Monkton sighed and explained: ‘It was a restraint, sir. He resisted arrest in the car. He went mental, just like he did then.’ He looked back down the corridor. ‘Grabbing at himself, at the headrest and that and we had to restrain him and his hands got bumped.’ He raised his hands in supplication. ‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I wanted the back-seat confession to be good, for us to only need fingerprints for corroboration and be able to shut the case down. But I’m not getting that, am I, DC Monkton?’

‘No, sir,’ said Monkton as George turned back to the stairs. ‘But there is a reason why you send us young guys out on a call like that.’

George slowed his pace, just a step behind Monkton. The statement hurt his pride. It suggested that George was past his prime, which he was, he knew he was. But it did something else too. It alarmed him. And as he stopped to take the uncomfortable feelings apart – the hurt pride of an older man, usurped, the fear of what Monkton and other young officers understood by their physical prowess – it was then that he saw a scratch on Monkton’s neck. It was a deep cut, diagonal, running into his hairline. The hair around it was pinkish, where blood had been crudely washed off. It was proof that the boy had gone for him in the car. But what George saw was an injury from a hand around a neck, a cop kneeling on the chest of a small ill-fed boy in a yellow T-shirt and the boy’s hand coming up and scratching the back of the burly cop’s neck.

Monkton turned back to him and smiled. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea, sir?’

George shook his head. ‘Be back here in ten minutes.’

Monkton jogged on down the stairs.

George found Harry in the canteen, eating his pieces, and pulled him aside.

‘Sit here,’ he said, pointing him to a seat in the furthest corner of the canteen.

Harry smiled as he took the seat and laid his Tupperware box in front of him. George sat opposite him, took the Tupperware box by the corner and pulled it away across the table.

‘Hey,’ Harry’s eyes followed it, ‘I’m starving.’

‘Tell me, minute by minute, what happened when you went to Cleveden to pick up Michael Brown.’

Harry looked wary. ‘Well,’ he reached for his top pocket, ‘I’ve got my notes—’

‘Fuck your notes,’ said George. They both knew the value of notes. Notes were justifications to strangers who had never been punched or bitten or spat at. They were letters for teachers, not a conversation within a family. ‘Tell me.’

Harry and George had always liked each other. They both played bowls, supported the same small football team. If they’d lived near each other and had been closer in age they would have been friends. But they didn’t and they weren’t.

Harry sat with his hands flat on the table, each a perfect mirror to the other, and looked George in the eye. ‘I’m telling
you
,’ he said, meaning ‘I’m not reporting this or giving evidence’. ‘Just
you
.’

‘OK,’ said George.

‘Monkton went mental. Stopped the car halfway here, dragged Brown out, screaming at him, “We could kill you and no one would know”, “Your brother was worthless scum”. World’s well rid, sort of thing.’ He stopped, looking down. George let him catch up with himself. ‘It’s the wee guy’s brother. Dead, know? The wee guy ...’ Harry got lost in the unhappy memory.