All i said was true, p.10
All I Said Was True, page 10
‘And – my question is – where is the bag that the knife came from?’ Metcalf asks, leaning in.
I’m trying to understand this quickly. The pieces aren’t falling into place properly. The bag was there when I’d been there earlier. It had to have been there when Michael got there. ‘Well, if you’ve searched the correct office –’
‘We did,’ Metcalf says bluntly. There is dandruff on his jacket and it has the effect of bringing me back into the room in a mundane, solid way. ‘We ordered the building to be sealed as soon as you were in custody and started the search. The search-book tells me: no bag in your husband’s office.’
‘Then Michael must have taken it. Find him and you’ll find the bag.’
Omer slides his paper across to Metcalf who nods at whatever is written there. ‘Did he have it with him when you saw him on the rooftop?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You never mentioned anything about him having a bag with him,’ says Omer.
I hike back through my memory of what happened. ‘Then he didn’t.’ I have to be careful now. ‘Or he did but I didn’t see it.’
Peter cuts across me. ‘Where is this leading?’
Omer ignores the interruption and keeps his eyes glued to me. ‘So then by your reckoning, he killed Amy Blahn with a knife that he took from your husband’s bag, from your husband’s office, and then returned to the office, what, to steal the bag?’
Peter, who has been tensing in his seat for the last few questions, finally snaps. ‘That isn’t a proper question, is it? You’re asking her to speculate. Frankly anyone in the building could have taken that bag before your search reached that room. It’s an enormous building.’
Omer takes his glasses off slowly and places them on the desk. He fiddles somewhere under the desk and brings up a small cloth and begins to wipe the lenses. ‘It’s not speculation exactly, is it, Mr Kelly? It’s just the logical extension of what Ms Mahoney has said. I’m just making sure we’ve understood it correctly. Have we, Ms Mahoney? Understood?’
I take the cue for what it’s worth now and mumble a reply. ‘No comment.’
Peter shakes his head gently. ‘It’s time for a break, Detective. We’ve been going a while now.’
Omer checks his watch. ‘Sure. But just one thing before we break. How did you know he’d left? Russell, I mean?’
The muscles in my arms begin to burn. Why do they keep asking the same questions? They are trying to trick me into an error. ‘Because he wasn’t in his office.’
‘But you thought he would be?’
‘Yes. I did.’
‘They told you at reception he was in his office?’
I cast my mind back. ‘I think they said he was away from his desk.’
‘Not that he’d left?’
‘Yes. They didn’t say he’d left.’
Omer straightens his tie. ‘So, given that his bag was still there, how did you know he wasn’t just away from his desk?’
I stop. How did I know? And finally, the answer arrives. ‘His things. He’d taken his stuff. Like, I don’t know, his keys, laptop. Phone. There was no phone there.’
‘It couldn’t have all been in the bag?’
‘I didn’t look in the bag.’
‘So how do you know the knife was in there?’ All of these questions from Omer peppering me now.
‘I didn’t. I assume it must have been because how else did Michael get it?’
‘Then all his things, his keys and laptop or whatever you were talking about, might have been in the bag too. If you didn’t look, you couldn’t know.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, confused by these questions that feel unconnected and sly.
‘And he might still have been in the office. Maybe he’d gone to the loo? Or gone for some water?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘He wasn’t there. He’d gone.’ I am conscious that my voice has become sharp.
‘How do you know that?’ Omer asks softly.
‘Because,’ I say and suddenly there are tears. They have been pooling quietly somewhere behind my eyes and now the dam has burst.
‘Because what?’
‘Detective, that break?’ Peter says urgently.
‘Because what, Ms Mahoney?’
I have to tell them but I am not sure what that will mean for me. I look for something to help focus my thoughts but all I can see now through this veil of tears is the room in blur. And then when I shut my eyes and the tears cascade, it’s no longer the room that falls into view when I open them, but the rooftop. And the blood ponding over my fingers as I hold her in my arms.
‘Because,’ I say, wiping my eyes. ‘I did look in the bag. There was no phone. No keys. Just his dirty clothes.’ They all stare at me in silence. ‘And his fishing knife.’
26
Then
Kate was waiting with two lattes. She half-rose, her limbs willowy, to air-kiss me on the cheek and sat down again with a furrowed glance. ‘How was the disciplinary?’
‘God,’ I said, holding up a hand. I took two sips of coffee and waited for it to hit my bloodstream. ‘They’ve suspended me,’ I said at last.
She reached over and took my hands and the touch of her skin on mine, soothing, brought tears to my eyes. I hated crying when I what wanted most was to be composed.
‘It’ll be okay. And you know what, so what if they sack you? You’ll get something else. You’re the smartest person I know.’
I released myself from her hands. ‘Thanks. I don’t know if I can go through it all again. Start again from nothing. I’m so tired –’ All the moving parts of my life were drifting apart and I didn’t have the strength to pull them together again.
I looked at Kate, her open face gently freckled across the bridge of her nose. How removed it was from all of this. I cut myself short. ‘Can we talk about something else?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Hey, I just remembered you shared your location the other day.’
‘Sorry. I thought I’d seen this guy again but I was mistaken.’ I didn’t want to tell her about Michael. Not yet. ‘How’s Anna?’
‘Anna? What do you mean?’ She pulled a strand of hair over her ear.
Her puzzlement was genuine. I held her eyes a beat but then let her go. ‘Your sister. She wasn’t feeling up to a drink – is she any better?’
Realisation dawned across her face. ‘Oh, sorry. Yes! What am I like? A million miles away. Yes, she’s got a migraine. But you. What are we going to do about you?’ she said and started rooting through her handbag absently, probably for lip balm.
‘We’ve been seeing a counsellor,’ I said. There was a crash of dropped crockery from the back of the café. A stream of laughter escaped from behind it. ‘For months now.’
Kate looked at me wide-eyed and held a hand over her face for a moment. ‘What? Seriously?’ she said. ‘Because of the affair?’
I smarted at the use of the word ‘affair’. It was one time – a mistake. ‘I don’t know if we’re going to make it,’ I said and then stopped. I stared at Kate’s hand. She hadn’t been looking for lip balm but a tiny roll-on. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s an essential oil,’ she said, handing it over. ‘Rub it on your wrists. Stress relief. Try some.’
I twisted it in my fingers as my mind raced on. I rolled the cool ball against my wrist. The scent filled my nose with a cloying sweetness. ‘Vanilla,’ I said. ‘I never had you down as vanilla.’
I searched for any trace of discomfort in her face but there was nothing. She nodded guilelessly. My stomach turned. I endured the next few minutes of bland conversation with a smile.
Vanilla.
‘I’m just going to pop to the loo. Won’t be a sec,’ she said brightly, after finishing her coffee, and got up taking her phone with her.
My mind tumbled darkly at the possibility. Kate and Russell? Though she was the one who had introduced us, she’d seemed almost apologetic about it. She knew him through her sister and refused to vouch for him. I hardly know him – so it’s no problem if you don’t like him, Lay. He’s a bit of a brat. And over the years if they happened to be in the same room, Russell would often just leave. It couldn’t all have been an elaborate act. Had they started off ignoring one another but then something sparked? Isn’t that what always happened? Steel struck flint again and again until suddenly there was fire?
I saw she’d left her bag. The hum of voices that had been indistinct became now untangled strands of conversation that I could make out. The crowd became a gathering of individuals, and each one made me self-conscious about what I was about to do.
I stood up casually and pretended to check my phone, turning a few steps in each direction and back again. But when I sat down, it was in Kate’s seat, in front of her open bag. I reached in and found her hairbrush. It was a round compact one with a mirror and collapsible plastic bristles on the inside. I quickly picked at the caught hairs and fumbled them into my pocket and then returned to my own seat just as she came into view.
I sat patiently through ten minutes of Kate’s life-coaching. You need to focus on what you want for yourself, until she made her excuses and left, trailing smiles as she went.
The scent of vanilla clung to me all the way home. I couldn’t shake it even though by then the smell was mainly in my head. Kate. It couldn’t be Kate. She didn’t like him. They weren’t at all similar. He was energetic and driven whereas she was arty. He hated what he saw as all the pseudo-psychology she spouted. At home I ran straight to the bedroom and pulled away the covers to expose the pillows. I buried my face into the one on his side. The vanilla was there. I smelled my wrist. They smelled the same.
I rang Russell but it kept going straight to voicemail. I had to speak to him now about this. It couldn’t wait till after midnight when he got home.
By ten, I was so exhausted by the thoughts clawing around in my head that I had to do something to shut them down. I took a bottle of cognac to the bedroom, my head drenched in thought. Kate and Russell. Why didn’t I see it? The floor beneath me began to shift. I sat on the bed to stop the room from moving and when it finally did I climbed in and unscrewed the bottle and drank mouthfuls before lying back against the mustard velvet headboard.
I covered my eyes against the light that was suddenly everywhere. My thoughts crackled until the noise made me numb.
When he finally made it home, I was asleep. I managed a bleary attempt at consciousness when he walked in but I was too thick with alcohol to force myself awake. Instead I just lay there on the fringes of sleep, aware that he had picked up the bottle. He smoothed the covers over me and crawled into bed. I fell almost immediately back into a jagged, black sleep.
In the morning he escaped before I could talk to him. In the folds of sleep, I’d resolved to confront him, before it drove me completely mad. But he’d gone and I was left there in bed, staring at the ceiling long after he’d slammed the front door. When I finally emerged from bed, I was still raw from the booze.
I dressed and went into the kitchen to force down some toast. The scarred countertop stared back at me. The nub was protruding still from the scratches, a bluff in a stormy sea. I couldn’t wait for the sander so dug out Russell’s tool bag again. I found a chisel and a hammer and took it to the counter. Carefully angling the chisel against the slub of rock, I struck it hard with the hammer. At first it simply slid over but then when I hit it again, it caught and the tip embedded minutely in the stone. I struck it again, hard. The nub splintered into the air. I looked down at the top. The blow seemed to have pulled away a whole seam of stone with it so now there was a deep gouge in the Italian marble. Shit.
I put the tools away and covered the crevasse with some books so I wouldn’t have to look at it.
I swiped my keys from the table and paused. In the course of the night – in the tumbling uncertainty of it – something did crystallise. I had to find Michael. Michael knew something. He was following me.
As I walked to the front gate I noticed something glittering just on the other side of it. I stooped to pick it up. It was a thin silver chain. It could have been dropped by anyone, I knew that. But there was something indecent about it being there on my paving stones first thing in the morning. There was nothing distinctive about it. If you lost one of these, you wouldn’t be able to say it was yours with any certainty. I placed it carefully on the front doorstep. It could be mine, for all he knew. There’d be no reason for Russell not to return it to me or leave it somewhere for me to see.
If he was innocent.
27
Now
‘Just to be clear on this. You saw the fishing knife in Russell’s bag but you didn’t touch it?’ Metcalf is rigid with excitement.
‘That’s right,’ I say slowly. I can’t avoid this admission because it’s the only way that I can convince them that what I am saying is true.
There is a pause and for now they seem satisfied by this. ‘Okay. I see. I’d like to just ask you a few questions about what’s going on in your life right now,’ Omer says solemnly.
‘How is this relevant?’ Peter cuts across, but there is no commitment to his own objection. He seems worn out.
‘We’re just exploring motive,’ Omer says. ‘It’s up to you, Ms Mahoney, if you want to answer.’
I nod and for once I’m not asked to make my consent audible.
‘You’d lost your job recently?’ Metcalf says, looking at a sheet of paper.
‘I was suspended.’
‘How were you feeling, in yourself, about that?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I say.
‘Were you depressed? Or angry?’ Metcalf says, raising his voice too much.
‘You mean did it make me want to kill a stranger on a roof?’
Peter stifles a smile and raises an eyebrow at them both as if to say you did ask.
Metcalf scratches his forearms, leaving traces of dust and red. Omer signals to him that he’s going to take over. ‘You’ve already told us a bit about your relationship with your husband. That you thought he might be having an affair. Did that make you angry?’
‘It didn’t make me happy,’ I say. And I think this is true. I wasn’t angry about it. The anger, if there had been any, had long since burned away.
‘We’ve taken a statement from Russell and he doesn’t seem to share your views about the marriage.’ Omer asks the questions softly so that it feels like he’s tossing grenades underarm as if to a child.
Russell? I don’t know why I am surprised – shocked – by this. Of course they would have taken a statement from him but still the news unravels me. I blink the shock away. ‘You mean he doesn’t agree he was having an affair? I could have saved you the trouble, Officer, and told you that myself. He was denying it. Always denying it – that was the problem.’
‘Then what made you think he was having an affair?’
‘Is this important?’ Peter asks. His hands are in tight fists.
‘According to your client it’s the reason she went to his workplace. To confront him. Wasn’t it?’
‘Not exactly,’ I say.
‘But you were going to his place of work unannounced for a reason,’ Omer presses on.
‘Well, yes. I needed to speak to him. He was coming home late, sometimes so late I’d be asleep. He’d leave in the morning before I woke up. He wouldn’t take my calls and I’d had enough.’
‘So, you turn up at the office. They let you in at reception and then you go to his office – his room, but he’s not there.’
‘Correct.’
‘But he’s left his bag. You’ve seen his knife in the bag. But his phone and keys and whatever else aren’t there. And you’re as certain as you can be that he’s gone?’
‘Yes,’ I say, exhausted by the repetition of these questions.
‘Leaving his bag and his fishing kit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘How am I supposed to know what he’s thinking, Detective? I can’t read his mind when he’s talking to me, let alone when he’s ghosting me.’
Peter raises an eyebrow at them in warning.
‘Well, did you not wonder about it at the time? Like, why has he left his bag here?’
‘Not really. Maybe he didn’t want me to see what was in it? Maybe he had, I don’t know, something incriminating in there? A pack of condoms, a pair of knickers, I don’t know. Maybe he just couldn’t be bothered to carry it home on public transport,’ I say and I am only just on the sane side of shouting.
‘And this Michael guy didn’t have it with him on the roof?’
‘The bag? No. I’ve said that already.’
‘And you can’t account for why it wasn’t in Russell’s office when we searched it?’
‘No. I can’t. Maybe Michael took it after the stabbing. Maybe someone else took it. His actual office doesn’t have any locks.’
Omer and Metcalf look at each other, waiting. Finally, Omer nods. Metcalf takes a sheet of paper dramatically from an envelope and slides it over to me. ‘When police went to see Russell at home today, the bag was there.’
A veil of blood rushes under the surface of my skin. I can’t understand what has happened. ‘Then he obviously came back for it,’ I say, trying to hang on to information which is now slippery through my fingers.
‘We checked the CCTV. He didn’t come back. He says he took it home when he left,’ Omer says solemnly.
‘Then he took it with him.’ I click through the options in my head. ‘He could have gone to the loo. Perhaps I saw it then. And he came and got it before he left.’ I’m trying to put this together quickly but at the same time make sure there are no holes left open.
‘The thing is, Layla, we have checked the time of your 999 call to the police. It was at 20:39 and lasted around three minutes.’
‘And?’
‘And,’ Metcalf says, elbowing in, ‘Russell left at 20:18. In other words twenty minutes beforehand.’
‘Sorry, I don’t understand the point you’re making,’ I say. The sound of a door slamming, metallically somewhere in the belly of the building, reaches me. And it’s that more than anything else that has happened that frightens me most. The idea of being buried here or somewhere like here, for years.
