The Happier Dead (7 page)

“But you were born in Kenya?”

“I was born there, yes.”

“No family out there?”

He shook his head.

“For the tape, please.”

“No I have no family in Kenya or here or anywhere else.”

“You’ve been in the UK for five years, two years as an illegal, three under the amnesty.”

“That is correct.”

“You have no record. No previous arrests. Do you have any kind of police record in Kenya?”

“No. This was confirmed most vigorously at the time of the amnesty.”

“What did you do in Kenya?”

“I was training to be a doctor.”

“And you were involved with a dissident political organisation?”

Oates avoided using the name which had been given on the file, which he could not work out how to pronounce.

“Yes. It was for this I had to leave.”

“What were your lot then? Islamists?”

“I am Christian.”

“Socialists?”

Ali at first shook his head, then shrugged and nodded. Oates guessed he had been about to describe in detail how his personal political credo differed from socialism, and had decided at the last minute either that he couldn’t be bothered, or that such theoretical niceties would go over the head of his interrogator. Either way, Oates, who had been called more things in interview rooms than a referee at a football match, felt oddly slighted.

“For the tape, suspect is nodding. That’s pretty brave. Would you say you were a man of principle?”

Ali glanced up, sensing both an edge of sarcasm and an impending trap.

“What do you mean by this?”

“Well, you’ve never been in trouble with the police before.”

“Never.”

“And you believe in something so much you get chased into exile. You don’t seem like a very likely killer.”

“I hate them. I hate them all so much.”

“Who do you hate?”

“All these, the new-young.”

“Why do you hate them?”

“You tell me why they should live forever, when I have to die.”

Ali’s voice, which up to this time was inflected with the careful civility of a man trying to pass through foreign customs into a country he does not respect, was suddenly filled with such venom that Oates sat back in his seat.

“You tell me, mister. You tell me that and I will say I am sorry for what I did.”

“So why did you come to work here, if you hate the new-young so much?”

He shrugged. “Everybody hates his job.”

“Okay. So, you hate the new-young, but you come here looking for work, because everybody hates their jobs. Then one night you see Mr...” Oates pretended to flip through the pages of his notebook.

“Mr Egwu,” Ali said, not too quickly.

“Mr Egwu, thank you. You see Mr Egwu and you stab him to death. Had you seen him before you decided to murder him?”

Ali nodded.

“When?”

“I see him yesterday afternoon.”

“Just that one time?”

He nodded again.

“Where did you meet him?”

“In the carpark.”

“Did you fight with him? Argue?”

He shook his head.

“But you decided to kill him. Do you think that was a surprising decision?”

“It was not a decision. It was just something I did.”

“Mr Egwu suffered an extremely violent attack. He has over thirty stab wounds to his arms and chest. I would imagine it’s quite difficult to do something like that.”

Ali shrugged again, but he did not look away. “I told you, I hate all of them.”

“Why Mr Egwu, and not someone else?”

Ali sat silently, and for a moment Oates thought he might have shut up shop. Then he said: “He had this snake skin case. I help him carry it in. We don’t have people to carry stuff here you know, you bring your own stuff, because they don’t have people to carry things at real school. Most expensive place to stay in the whole country, the whole world maybe, and you carry your own damn things! But he calls over to me as I am crossing the carpark, and he says, ‘Would you mind giving me a hand?’, only it’s not a question, you see? So I say I am not allowed, but he says I should do it now. I say I will get in trouble if I do this, and he say I will get in trouble if I do not, and he will pay me. So I help him take it up, it is very heavy. I hurt my hand on the railing on the stairs. All the time I catch him staring at me. We come to his room at last, and I am looking at the case, and he asks me if I like it. And I ask him what is it, and he says it is real snakeskin. And he runs his hand over it, like this, but I don’t say anything. Then I think he was angry and he gives me five pounds. But it is an old five pound note, they only use them in the school. I cannot buy food and things with this. So I ask him for real money, and he tells me they take all his real money at the gate. I know this so I say he can give me the key to his locker and I will take some, just as much as he says I can take, and he tells me to get out now.”

“What time was this?”

“About six thirty, because I am heading for my shift in the kitchen.”

“Okay. And what did you do after that?”

“I go and I serve the students supper in hall. I think I will calm down but I do not. I think that there cannot be many snakes like this one left in the world, and this man, he paid someone to kill one of them for him. The snake needs his skin, but this man wants it, so he takes it, and he gives me a five pound note which I cannot use, because only the guests are allowed in the shops in the school.”

“What time did you finish work?”

“The hall closed at nine o’clock, and we have clean-up after. I thought I would get calm. I say to me it is not so much to cry about, but I just get more and more angry, thinking about it. Miss Swatch, my boss, she says to me that if I break any of the dishes then the costs comes out of my wages, because I slammed the washer shut.”

Ali stared at him. Oates could sense that he expected him to make a note of this, and to follow up later with Ali’s supervisor to check if it was true. He put his pen down on the desk.

“Prudence Egwu was attacked in the early hours of this morning. What did you do between the end of your shift and the assault?”

“I sat in my room.”

“And what did you do after you killed him?”

“I put my overalls in the incinerator in the basement of the science block. And I take a long shower,” Ali spread out his clean hands for Oates to see, splaying the pale palms.

O
ATES RAN HIM
through the details of the evening several times, asking him the same things in slightly different ways. His story never changed, but it had the suppleness of memory, adjusting to accommodate his interrogator’s variations. After two and a half hours, Oates went to take a break. The eastern edge of the night sky was tinged with the dawn. He stood outside and played bits of the interview back on the old-fashioned Dictaphone they had given him. If he was an Eddy, he was a bloody good one. A bad Eddy tended to give himself away by not knowing the crime in sufficient detail, and a better one by presenting a story that fit together too neatly, without the roughness of a thing hewn from nature.

Often they were too keen to explain their motives; Oates had found that with real crimes, the guilty party only had a slightly better idea of their rationale than the interviewing officer.
He looked at me funny; she shouldn’t have called me that; I was bored
. Those were the reasons underpinning the most violent crimes he had ever encountered. Ali’s story had practical consistency, with just the right touch of the inexplicable. Maybe for once it was as simple as it looked, and they had the guilty man. Oates and the idea stood side by side in silence, smoking together in the still of the night, and by the time the cigarette was down to the filter they were starting to trust one another.

Oates brought Ali the statement to read and sign. He didn’t ask him if he needed someone to help him read it, as he didn’t want to insult him. When Ali was finished reading, Oates gave him a biro. Ali took the pen from him, and for a second he held it like a poor man holding a strange piece of cutlery in a fancy restaurant, unsure of what to do with it and unwilling to ask. He leant down, put his left hand on the paper to hold it steady, and signed his name. Oates picked up the paper and blew on the signature. As he did so, he felt his nose twitch. Ali seemed to him an educated man, and had been a university student. The signature looked like the work of an illiterate.

Oates took the signed confession with him to the ops room where he found Bhupinder arranging interviews with Prudence Egwu’s neighbors. Having promised that each student could give his statement in the presence of a member of staff, and most of those students having reflexively insisted on independent representation, the coordination of so many people was proving a nightmare. Even when an interview had been organised, the guests made curiously unhelpful witnesses. Something in the atmosphere of the spa induced in them the sullenness, shyness or unhelpful enthusiasm that the teenagers they were playing might have felt. He waited until his second in command had finished placating an irate company lawyer who had been woken in the early hours of the morning to attend an interview with his CEO.

“You said you’d found his diary. Can I have a look?”

“Course. There’s hundreds of the bloody things. He’s recorded every single thing he’s done since he came to this country. I swear, I’ve just read about him having a shit.”

Oates looked at the stack of diaries, and for once it seemed that Bhupinder was not exaggerating. There were piles upon piles of spiral bound notebooks, at least a hundred in total. If it was confined to real incidents, the biography of the most exciting man alive would not have covered so many, and as Ali was unlikely to have carried any with him from Kenya, the books must deal with a period of no more than five years. Oates plucked one from the top of the stack, and read a sentence at random
… my jeans with the second button missing on the fly, and my shirt. The stain is still quite visible on the sleeve, but the button which I re-attached to the cuff is quite firmly in place, which is a good thing…

Although the substance was a little bizarre in its mundanity, it was the form that interested him. Word upon word of dutiful detail marched in neat little ranks from one margin to the next. Oates got the impression in reading it that there was still some ghostly schoolteacher looking over Ali’s shoulder as he wrote, thinking nothing of the content but ready to rap his knuckles with a ruler at the first sign of an inksplodge. It was impossible to connect the neat hand of that journal with the shaky signature hanging around looking shifty at the bottom of the typed confession.

Oates took a scrap of paper, and held a pen in his own left hand. He tried to sign his name, holding the paper steady with his dominant right. The resulting scrawl looked close to Ali’s john hancock.

Bhupinder had his lunch in a Tupperware dish open in front of him on the desk. The crustless halves of a coronation chicken sandwich were arranged on a bed of kitchen roll with a housewife’s loving precision. Oates knew Bhupinder lived alone, whilst his mother bugged him for grandchildren. There was something slightly melancholy about lavishing that much care on your own sandwiches. Oates reached over, and took the apple which stood for pudding in that little tableau. Bhupinder looked up, hurt but unsurprised by this fresh outrage, and he made no protestation as Oates left the room, slipping the apple into his pocket.

When he walked back in through the door of the interview room, Ali was in the same position as he had left him. Oates asked, “Have you eaten?”

For the first time in their whole interview, Ali looked unsettled. He was unbalanced by a moment of kindness.

“The men here gave me some tea. But I didn’t drink it.”

“Catch,” Oates said, and threw him the apple. Ali caught it in his left hand. He raised it to Oates and smiled. His teeth were very white. The crunch of the bite sent juice frothing down his chin.

Oates pictured in his mind’s eye the video of Mr Egwu’s death he had watched on the Oracle. The blow that had killed him had come down hard on the nape of his neck, just above the right shoulder. To swing a blow like that, you’d have the knife in your right hand. Ali Farooz had signed the confession with his right hand, but when he wasn’t thinking he caught apples with his left.

Oates allowed himself a little moment of pride at having detected the pretence. He had something definite to pass on to the Superintendent. He was glad for Ali, too. He quite liked the man who had faced him across the table for the last couple of hours. Eddies always thought they’d make it through thirty years inside, but somehow they never did. It was cheaper to have them killed in prison than to buy them the Treatment when they got out.

There was another, even greater reason to smile. An Eddy was the best lead you could have. He must have been hired by somebody, briefed by somebody, and whoever that person was knew the real killer and had enough cash to make his offer to Ali credible. Ali must have been an ambitious young man to accept the offer in the first place, and although Oates could not offer him the Treatment, he was confident he could guide him through the narrow pass between threats and bribes to the truth.

O
NE OF THE
handymen showed Oates through to a room outside the shell of the dome where his earpiece could once again pick up a signal. He had intended to call the Superintendent then Lori, but instead he found himself calling Grape.

“Hey.”

“Oh, hello,” she said.

“You sound pretty chirpy, considering.”

“I try to stay professional.”

Her impersonal tone both irritated and impressed him, as she’d been high not more than five hours before. It was as if it was poor etiquette for Oates to have mentioned it, like trying to take someone up on an excessive offer of hospitality made when they were drunk.

“What’s your problem?”

“I thought we had a good working relationship, Inspector. I don’t know what you’re trying to pull but, for your information, I check my facts and I don’t like being used.”

“Two things. First, we don’t have any relationship working or otherwise and if I drop you the odd tip you should be grateful, not lecture me on professional standards. Second, I haven’t told you anything but the truth.”