Haterz (35 page)

“Great, great,” I said. “I mean, not that she’s my girlfriend now. No. Because she’s met someone else.”

“She wants you back?”

“God, no,” I said a little too quickly.

“Right.”

“No, no, she’s kind of moved on. She’s very happy.”

“Like Guy and me?”

That took some wind out of my sails. I rallied. “Yes,” I said hesitantly. “Just like you and Guy.”

Another silence settled over us.

“The police came round last night,” said Amber.

“Really? Why?”

“The gig. I wish you hadn’t done that.”

Right. I had genuinely forgotten. Yes. Right. That was a problem. Yes. One large jumble sale.

“Oh.”

“You idiot.”

I smiled.

“What?” she said crossly.

“Sorry,” I giggled uncontrollably. “It’s just the way you say ‘idiot.’”

“How?”

“Kind of fondly. It’s nice.”

“It’s not meant fondly. Idiot.” She smiled. Just a little.

“So, how was the police thing?”

She shrugged. “How do you think? Guy and I were in the middle of a Korea-sized row. The police turned up to ask a couple of tiny questions about some burglaries.”

“Uh-huh. And of course you told them you were innocent.”

“Of course I told them I was innocent.”

“And you are.”

“Only...” Amber looked down at the ground. “That’s why I came round to see you last night.”

She’d told the police about me. She’d betrayed me. It’s rare that you get to feel betrayed by someone; almost exciting. I just felt rather dead about it. Curious. When you get a filling and tap a spoon or tinfoil along your teeth one at a time until you find it and all the nerves in your head explode? That. I was working through my brain, tapping my feelings. No explosion. Nothing. Numb.

“You told the police I organised the stunt?” Still nothing.

“No.” Amber was annoyed by the question. “Look, there’s something we need to talk about—”

“Who told the police?”

Amber sighed. “Guy did.”

Bang. There we go. Explosion.

I
’M NOT GOING
to say, “All things considered, the police were quite nice about it.” It’s just that it could have been so much worse. I was kind of expecting my first visit to a police station to be about any one of a number of deaths (I’d even made a list—an unwritten list obviously—of which one was most likely to get me investigated). Instead, here I was being rather glumly investigated over a series of “internet related burglaries.”

The room itself was so dull. Deliberately dull. It was an anti-room. I’d hired enough of this sort of space. Light came in from high windows, presumably so that passers-by couldn’t gawp in, and so that people inside couldn’t daydream of a world outside.

I think I was supposed to be frightened. Or nervously intimidated. I wondered about feigning the correct emotions. But I just felt really tired, and then there was the pisser that Guy had dobbed me in. I didn’t expect he’d be that fond of me right now, but this felt really... unfair. I mean, yes, I had kind of fallen in love with his girlfriend, and yes, I had kissed her, but to hold that against me seemed mean.

The police seemed nice enough, and their questions were doing all the proper things. It was curiously like interviewing someone when you were out chugging. Lots of, “How do you feel about...?” and “Can you just talk me through...?” Over and over again.

Too tired to muster a proper defence or character I produced a lacklustre Hugh Grant. I heard the recording back recently. “I’m afraid you must think me dreadful...” “It comes across to me as a prank, if prank is the right word...” and even “gosh” and “these pirates—they seem pretty ghastly people though, don’t they?”

You can also tell I’m tired. Dog tired.

They wander around the point of the conversation like lazy sharks, sauntering closer and closer to the real subject. There’s the occasional diversion.

“Can we just ask—would you like to receive medical attention? You appear to have some small injuries to your face. We’d like to assess them, if that’s okay with you. Have you been in a fight?”

I politicked how to answer that one. I figured that something like the truth would do no harm.

“Ah, well... My friend Guy and I were engaged in... perhaps ‘horseplay’ isn’t quite the right word, is it? Anyway, we had an altercation, you could say.” It’s funny how when people talk to the police their diction jumps sideways, like they’re emulating an officer giving an “I was proceeding in a westerly direction” statement from a 1940s film. As if anyone ever spoke like that.

We strolled back and forth and around that fight. They would sidle out a gently probing question, “What would you say the provocation for this altercation was?” See? Even they were doing it now. And I’d counter with something bashful, “Well, I’d say he was very cross with me.”

Their eyes were clear. They both looked young and neat and just a little bored. This was clearly their routine. There was no chemistry or spark between them. Her name was Julia. His was Mike. They had that look of graduate trainees. Working steadily through an assignment.

You could jab away, just a little, at their carefully constructed personalities. For instance, if you said something like, “Well, you know, some people are asking for it aren’t they?” they’d reply, “That’s quite an aggressive thing to say, don’t you think?” and you could then counter it with, “Well, he was very cross. I don’t blame him for lamping me.”

We were basically knitting between us. They were painting me into a corner over the thefts. I was constructing a picture for them of Guy as a violent, unpredictable man. Mostly for my own amusement. Because he’d dobbed me in to the police. ‘Dobbed me in?’ See? It’s impossible to talk around the police properly. No matter what you do, where you try and move yourself, your inner ITV Drama voice comes out.

I was being quite careful about the actual thefts. I told them I didn’t have an alibi, that I was watching the webcast. Both of these statements were true. They hadn’t yet asked me directly if I did it. There was a lot of, “We’re going to show you a piece of video. Would you agree that the person in this video could be you?”

“Well, of course, it could be. But then again, it could be anyone. You’re going to just use the first bit of that, aren’t you? Well, I mean, fair play to you if you do. I wouldn’t blame you.”

You can hear me on the tape. I’d punch me. I don’t quite know what I was playing at.

T
HE MORE THEY
talk about my situation, the more I realise how terribly alone I am. Oh, it’s nothing they were doing. It’s just that the penny gradually dropped. I’d been in here for a long time, and it had just been getting more and more boring. The last time I’d ever been in a police station was to report a stolen bicycle and they were far less thorough then. This was... forensic.

Oh. That was the word. The troubling word.

Thing is, we’d pretty much reached the end of the park. Or the centre of it. I was a bit confused about my metaphor. But basically, you know what I mean. I’d led them along a path, digging it as I went along. I’d thrown out my evening to them, my day, telling them that while I’d actually been hiring a van and breaking into people’s homes I’d really been chugging. It was a reasonable lie. It was solid enough. I stepped back to have a look at my handiwork. It looked fine. All things considered. But I knew there was something wrong with it. What was it? Something glinting in the sun, exposed in the light.

“That all seems great,” said Julia.

Mike nodded.

“I was wondering,” she said. “Can we ask you something?”

“Sure, shoot—er, oh, I’m most dreadfully sorry, I can’t remember your name.”

“Inspector Franklin. Julia.”

“Right, yes, right. Sorry. Anyway, ask away.” That was right. She was Inspector Franklin and he was... Mike... I couldn’t remember. I felt so tired and I was trying to remember their names. I’ve never been good at names, but this was worse than being at a party. I conjured up a mental image. A drawbridge? Oh right. His name was Keep. Couldn’t even remember his rank. Let’s call him Inspector Keep as well. Inspector Keep leaned forward. “We just wanted you to talk us through it all again.”

This time Inspector Julia nodded.

“Okay,” I said, glancing back down the path. Yeah. Seemed stable enough. I opened my mouth, ready to take the first step.

“Only,” Inspector Franklin’s interjection was sudden, “before you start that, I just thought I’d say that a few months ago, your friend’s girlfriend died. There’s been some talk about the coroner’s verdict. Have you anything to say to that?”

The roof of my mouth went dry. “No.” My voice on the tape recording is quite clear. Remarkably so.

“And shortly after that, a number of threats were issued to Ms Dass when she began a relationship with Mr Hammond. Coincidentally, some of the people issuing these threats were themselves victims of assaults. Have you anything to say about that?”

“No, no.” My voice sounded absurd. Like I was disputing the likelihood of rain.

They both looked at me. They knew. They bloody knew.

“No? Interesting.” Inspector Franklin said, her voice amazingly flat. How did she do that? “Anyway, could you walk us through that statement of yours?”

“What?”

“Your statement about the events of last night.”

“Sure, I—” I swung my foot out onto the path. Only the path had vanished. I had no idea what to do next.

T
HERE WAS A
rap on the door. Inspector Franklin looked annoyed. Keep got up and went out. There was whispering in the corridor.

She stared at me. I stared at her.

Julia. She’d not said at any point, “Call me Julia,” but it was there. I knew her first name. We were sort-of friends. Perhaps if I told her, we could sort this out. No, that was lunacy. Unless I just told her about the burglaries. That was fine. Just a prank. Great. I was making a political statement. Or something.Julia smiled at me without smiling at all.

I think I looked like a goldfish. On the tape you can hear a pop-pop noise.

And then, absurdly, if you listen closely, you can hear me humming. Just very gently. It sounds as though it could be any tune. It could be. Absurd how you hum these things. But, if you knew the song, you’d know it was ‘Love In The First Degree’ by Bananarama.

Then Keep came in. He didn’t address Julia. He didn’t really address me. He was speaking to me, but looking at a drab grey patch of drab grey wall.

“Your solicitor’s here,” he announced.

My solicitor?

O
KAY.
H
ERE ARE
the facts about my solicitor.

She looked exactly how you would expect a solicitor to look. Her name was Andrea and she just exuded that feeling of healthy country living. For all I knew she’d come straight here from walking the dogs and riding the horse. She was very smartly dressed, but wore her expensive clothes with the air of someone throwing on some old tweeds to do weeding. She looked constantly on the verge of laughter and greeted me as an old friend, and I had never met her before in my life.

We met in a tiny little room little different from the tiny little room I’d already been in. I have no idea why they bothered moving me.

She sat down and banged a file onto the desk. It was red, a vivid splash of colour in the muted space. “Paperwork,” she announced with a laugh. “It always creates a good impression. I feel naked without it and absolutely no one takes you seriously unless you have a folder, but really, it’s all on the iPad. This is mostly just print-outs of a couple of emails and directions from Google for finding the nick.”

“But—”

She rambled on, looking around the room as though planning on moving in and working out where to fit the sofa. “They always make police stations so hard to find. Whenever they say on the news ‘bailed to appear at’ I always roll my eyes and try and imagine the god-awful rabbit warren they’ll have hidden the poor sod in.”

“Have I been on the news?”

She barked at that. “Get over yourself, sunshine. This case is one up from rag week.”

I flooded with relief. I gushed with it. I suddenly realised that I did care very much about what was going on.

“Who—”

Andrea seemed not to have heard. “You know, I’m often tempted to bring in a scented candle to these places. I’m sure I’d be told off.” She beamed. “Calendula, or blueberry, or just plain old chocolate. Something heady and sweet.” She pushed the folder towards me. “Anyway, paperwork, including the confirmation that I’ve been engaged to act as your solicitor.”

I opened the folder. There really was very little in it. One sheet of paper said the following:

This woman is your solicitor. You can trust her. By agreeing for her to represent you, you hereby agree to keep our relationship silent. She will get you out. In return, you must do one last thing for us.

“Always read the small print,” beamed Andrea implacably. “Small print’s a bugger.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES