The Fall (5 page)

‘Stepped in a kebab. Now leave it.’ He was buried in the duvet.

Exhausted, nerves jangling, she’d fitted herself into bed so she wasn’t touching him, and went to sleep.

Chris had always been it for her. Back in 1997 when they’d met in school, Keisha knew for sure she would never look at another boy, not ever in a million years. That nothing could ever come between them. And this was nearly true, until what he did to Ruby, of course.

When Hegarty went back to the interview room, Stockbridge was looking less cool, rumpled and tired. The remains of a soggy ham sandwich sat on the table, along with the dregs of the worst cup of coffee the police station could summon up – and that was pretty bad. ‘What now?’

Hegarty threw the pictures down on the table. ‘Look.’

The man’s face only tightened a fraction. Cold bastard. ‘Why are you showing me these?’

‘So you can see what you did.’ See if this would break the guy’s calm.

The man frowned. ‘I’m confused here. Is this that Johnson guy?’

‘Why don’t you tell us?’

He looked away impatiently. ‘I wouldn’t be asking if I knew.’ He pushed the pictures from him – a crumpled body, a foot sprawling in a blood-soaked office. ‘And you think it was me, because I – I hit him. But I told you, Christ, it was just a light punch. He laughed at me.’ Stockbridge ran his hands through his hair. ‘He said something like, “Look, Mr Banker, your card ain’t working. Just like the rest of us tossers now, eh?” And I was so – I was out of it. You know that. So I swung at him – I didn’t even hit him the first time. His nose was bleeding. But he just kept laughing. That’s what I’m telling you. He was fine. I swear he was fine.’

Anthony Johnson’s nose had been lightly contused, true. But that wasn’t exactly the end of it. ‘Then what?’

‘I went home. Charlotte will confirm that.’

‘Were you carrying anything when you went into his office?’

Stockbridge looked confused. ‘I don’t remember. I had a drink, I think.’

‘A drink in a glass, or in a bottle?’

‘Does it matter? A bottle, probably. Beer. I don’t drink spirits.’

Hegarty pushed another picture across the table. ‘Anthony Johnson’s throat was slashed with a broken beer bottle. Bled to death in three minutes, they tell me.’

All the blood drained from Stockbridge’s face, too.

They came in the open door, a team of three men in boiler-suits. The woman officer conferred with them in low mutters, pointing out something on the carpet that Charlotte was sure hadn’t been there before. Or had it? One immediately started taking photos and Charlotte backed away, arms over her chest.

‘Morning, miss,’ said one, the bald one. ‘Gotta search the place. You’ll have to stay in the hall.’

‘But I need to get dressed.’ Crap, the first policeman had been right.

The officers exchanged looks. ‘All right. You’ll have to leave the door open.’

This was mad. This was just too much. With one policeman watching her, Charlotte got some clothes from her dresser, then waited while the other two rifled through her bathroom in plastic gloves. At least it was clean in there.

They had questions. Had Dan showered since last night? What was he wearing? Where were his shoes? They lifted strange things – the towel, Dan’s toothbrush, the soap dispenser from the sink. She was asked to witness each one being bagged up, and soon there were gaps in the room like missing teeth, and she was allowed to dress with the door ajar. She did it very, very quickly, tying back her smelly hair, and when she came out it was so strange, like having a plumber round. Should she offer them tea?

‘Er – what do I do now? They said go to the station.’

The bald one was turning over her sofa cushions with gloved hands. ‘We’ll give you a lift, love, if you hang about.’

So polite! The other two were in the messy bedroom, and she saw the Asian one pick up her discarded nightie and put it in a plastic bag.

‘That’s mine!’

He turned patiently. ‘We need to take anything he might have touched, miss. Sorry.’

‘Don’t worry, miss, you’ll get it back.’

What could she say? ‘Er – OK. Thanks.’

When they’d finished they took her down to Camden, to the station. Baldy thrummed his fingers on the steering wheel as they waited in traffic on Chalk Farm Road. ‘God love us, traffic’s bloody murder round here on weekends now.’

The little one eyed Charlotte almost flirtatiously. ‘Ever been in a police car, miss? See, in the West End on a weekend, mobbed by ladies, we are. Them hen dos, they all want to get inside. Like firemen, innit?’

‘Sometimes we let them in right enough – if they’re puking on the pavement or decking each other with stilettos.’ Baldy chuckled.

Charlotte stared out of the window at the clean, gleaming morning. It was still only 10 a.m. ‘That happens?’

‘Just as much as you like, love. You’d be shocked.’

Baldy was being kind, assuming Charlotte would never puke or fight in public, but seeing as she had only the haziest of memories of the night before, she kept quiet until they pulled up near Mornington Crescent.

‘That’s the station, love. Out you get.’

What were they going to do to her in there? Suddenly she felt like throwing up too, and bent over, taking deep breaths until she felt she could go in.

‘But I don’t understand,’ Charlotte said later, for the hundredth time that day. ‘Wouldn’t he get, like, released on bail?’ It was surreal to hear those words tripping off her own tongue.

The duty lawyer from the police station was about ninety years old. Bits of the skin round his nose were white and flaky; Charlotte couldn’t stop staring. He explained the procedure to her over and over from tatty laminated handouts, but she couldn’t seem to understand. ‘I’m sorry, dear. It’s unusual to get bail in murder cases, you see.’

‘So he’s here till Monday? Is that allowed?’

‘Yes, dear. They need to take him before a judge. But as I said, it’s unlikely bail will be granted.’

Her mind was like wood; nothing went in. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means he must stay in custody until there’s a trial, I’m afraid.’

‘Custody?’

‘Prison,’ he explained, shuffling his papers together.

Charlotte’s brain was moving with the speed of geology. ‘So, even though he didn’t do it, he can’t come home?’ She said it hopefully. As if it would make the lawyer laugh and say, ‘Of course not, dear. You can’t send someone to jail when they didn’t do anything. This is England!’

But instead he said, ‘Until there’s a trial, no. That could be a while.’

‘A while? What – like, weeks?’
Oh, Christ
, she thought.
The wedding
. But surely not.

‘Oh no, dear.’

Thank God. She smiled in relief.

‘We could hope for maybe five, six months, if it was fast.’

She gaped at him. ‘Six
months?
But – but people are always out on bail on TV.’

‘Well.’ He blew his nose with an old-man honk. ‘I’m afraid the television-makers aren’t always accurate. And, my dear, the evidence at this stage does look rather compelling. Your barrister may advise a guilty plea.’

Charlotte looked at her huge, flashy engagement ring. ‘We’re getting married next week,’ she heard herself say. ‘It’s all planned.’

The lawyer looked alarmed. ‘Oh. I hope you took out insurance?’

Only the glacial speed of her mind stopped Charlotte from slapping him across his flaky face with the splinter of rock on her hand.

The weekend had been fucked up. When she woke up on Saturday after the club he was gone, the bed empty and cold. The bag of clothes in the hall had disappeared – weird – and he’d even tried cleaning his trainers. The kitchen bin was full of red-stained kitchen roll; he’d used the whole roll up, so she’d have to buy more. She went into the bathroom and saw again the red drop on the pink mat.

Keisha wasn’t thick, even if she’d got kicked out of the posh school. She’d washed blood off the bathroom floor before from his dripping nose or knuckles. But he’d hardly had time to get in a fight the night before, and why would he lie to her if he had? Usually he was proud when he’d ‘sorted people out’.

He hadn’t done a good job of cleaning the shoes, despite the whole roll of paper, so she filled a basin and let them stand. She shoved the bath mat into a bag, yet another thing to drag down the laundrette. There was still only frozen food and no microwave, so she ate a few handfuls of Choco Pops without milk. They were for Ruby really, if she was ever allowed home again.

Work at the old folk’s home, two miles up Finchley Road, was the usual crap. Mr Smith, a big fat man who ate everything put near him, filled the commode up so high it touched his old white bum, and he just sat on top of it smiling away, ignored by the nurses. The bastard owner Barry called in all the night staff at the end of her shift and bitched about food costs. No special diets, he said, even if someone was literally wasting away. Keisha wasn’t about to fight with him – like all the girls she was off the books and grateful for work.

She walked home as it got light, passing the shut-up shops, the O
₂
centre, still and empty, no one up. As she drew near home she started to wonder. Would he be there? The sick feeling was back, that kind of anxiety about unlocking your own front door. He could be gone days, it’d happened before.

He wasn’t there. She turned on the telly for a while and it was playing weird religious stuff, Sunday-morning programmes, but somehow she couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking. The shoes. The mat. Where the hell was he? Where had he gone when he’d left her at the club?

She must have slept a while, because she woke up when the door slammed. Her face was creased from the nubbly sofa. ‘You back?’

She heard him moving about in the hall, and then suddenly he was in the room. ‘Where’s the fucking bath mat?’

‘Eh?’ She dug her fists into her eyes. ‘Oh, I was gonna wash it. It was dirty.’

There was something wrong with his face. His eyes were too wide.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Don’t fucking touch my stuff, OK? What else did you move?’

‘Nothing!’ She felt it rising up in her, so tired, so pissed off. God, she was sick of this. ‘All I did was clean up some of that mess you left. You ruined your shoes.’

He froze. His blue eyes fixed her across the room. ‘What did you do with them?’ His voice was very soft.

She started to get up; she could tell from the light it was late afternoon. ‘I didn’t do nothing, they’re in the kitchen. Don’t walk that mess over the carpet.’

‘You cleaned them.’ He hadn’t moved.

‘Well, yeah. They was dirty, yeah? I mean . . . you said, you said you stepped in a keba—’

Suddenly Chris was across the room and holding her round the waist. His face was very close, like he might kiss her. He smelled like he’d slept out all night – cold, greasy. ‘That’s right. I stepped in a kebab, yeah?’

‘That’s what you said. But—’ She stopped herself. She knew the difference between blood and ketchup, but maybe he had his reasons. She’d given up trying to understand. ‘Look, babe, it’s fine. I’ll clean ’em again if you want.’

He let go. ‘Just leave them. Leave them, OK?’

‘OK.’ She started moving to the door.

‘Er, where the fuck are you going?’

She turned to look at him, in his dirty T-shirt, his face like he hadn’t slept at all. ‘I’m going to work. It’s Sunday. I have to work.’ She held her breath – maybe he’d take that as a dig, that she was saying he didn’t have a job. But he just nodded slowly, looking confused. He raked his hands over the skin of his eyes. ‘All right. All right. What time are you back?’

‘Usual. Five-ish. Will you . . . you’ll be in?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, but she didn’t think he was listening at all.

Yawning, Hegarty finished his dry Danish pastry and brushed the crumbs off his tie. He’d been worried about yesterday’s ID parade, he had to admit. The sister, Rachel Johnson, and the other girl, Melanie Taylor, had been a problem from the start. They didn’t want to go to the station, didn’t want to do the ID parade, didn’t want to look at the other men paid to appear alongside Daniel Stockbridge.

‘What if I’m not sure, like?’ asked the Mel one.

‘That’s the idea,’ he’d explained as patiently as he could. ‘It’s just another way to see if we got the right guy.’

‘How comes I can’t do it with Rach?’ She annoyed him, her narrow suspicious face smeared in last night’s make-up. Both girls had come in wearing their club clothes, cheap and shiny. He didn’t like the holes in their stories either.

‘He was saying racist shit,’ Mel maintained. ‘That posh guy.’

‘Like what?’

‘You nigger. That sort of thing.’

He’d written it down, wondering if her over-confident tone meant she remembered or she was making it up. The other girl, Rachel, seemed less certain.

‘Just, like, racist stuff.’

‘Like what?’

‘Dunno.’ She’d picked at her silver nail polish, matched to her dress. Her eyes were red and he reminded himself that her brother was dead. Both girls seemed anxious he’d caught ‘that racist fucker’.

‘They should hang ’em, bastards like him,’ was Mel’s opinion.

‘Well, we don’t actually have capital punishment in the UK.’

‘Eh?’

Rachel, tall and beautiful, had used up tissue after tissue in her interview. ‘Why’d he kill our Anthony? He’d never done nothing to no one, never hurt a fly.’

Hegarty, who’d been looking up Anthony Johnson’s long and dodgy gang-related record, wasn’t so sure. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

Pain twisted up her pretty face. ‘Mum’s devastated. Heart-broke. Doctor had to sedate her, and Tanika, that’s our Anthony’s missus, her and the kids are just sort of, like, in shock. Won’t even remember their dad, will they.’

A wife, then – that was interesting, given the discussion Hegarty’d just had with Mel about her relationship with the deceased. ‘Is there any other family to inform?’

She dabbed her eyes. ‘Our Ronald’s still in Jamaica. Not sure when he’ll make it back. Don’t even know when we’ll get Anthony home – his body.’ She was crying again, clear tears rolling out of her dark eyes. She hardly seemed to notice.