‘And this is everything from O’Neill’s attic, too, right?’ I said, gesturing to one of the many clutters of case files.
‘Correct,’ she affirmed. ‘Other than the stuff the director’s office took.’
That didn’t surprise me; there was something else going on here with O’Neill that the head honchos at the police were clearly concerned about.
‘But let me be perfectly clear, Cis, the only reason I’m helping you with this is to prove Fran didn’t do it. Someone killed O’Neill, but I’d bet my career that it wasn’t her.’
By now I was realising that I wished I hadn’t followed my gut in the first place, but Cis was relentless. My passive attempts at any kind of placation with her had failed, so I had to do something to protect Fran from her. I was just still hoping it was a random stranger who had offed O’Neill. I was going to be in trouble if it ended up being Angus.
‘Crystal clear,’ Cis repeated.
I stopped for a moment, trying to make sense of all the mess Cis worked in. Did she not have any kind of organising system? No colour-coded markers to signify importance?
‘Well, I need to find the transcript somehow,’ I said, waving my hands at the sheer amount of chaos rammed into the tiny room.
Cis quickly walked over to one of the many jumbles, pulled out a document, and passed it to me.
Why did you visit Gordon O’Neill a few weeks before he was murdered?Cis had asked Angus.
He’d apparently just given a grunt at that; Steve had annotated on the script that it sounded most like an ‘I don’t know’ after he had slowed it down on the recording.
Do you know Gordon O’Neill?
Apparently, Angus had just mumbled again.
Do you know anything that could help us find Mr O’Neill?
Apparently, that ‘no’ had been more audible than his previous answers.
The whole conversation had seemed pointless, and considering they had nothing on Angus at the moment, they were unable to arrest or charge him with anything, nor search his apartment, which would have required hundreds of police man-hours. I wondered if Fran knew that Angus had been questioned. It wasn’t like he was the world’s best communicator.
I knew that Angus’s life had involved moving between various foster families, where he’d struggled to adapt, frequently experiencing violent outbursts and emotional breakdowns. Most of this I had gathered from dribs and drabs that Fran had told me over our relationship. What I hadn’t known, as I scanned his profile now, was that seven years ago, when he was twenty-two, he had tried to rob a Tesco Metro. I had not known he had a criminal record…
A question began to percolate deep within my mind, something that I had been wondering for the longest time.
‘Cis?’ I asked, peering up from my document. ‘What’s the difference between a Tesco Metro and a Tesco Express?’
Cis, who had begun to chug on a protein shake, paused and gently placed the bottle down on a column of papers.
‘You know what? I don’t know. Let me google it.’
As I continued reading, I tried to push aside the ethical qualms I had about delving into such confidential information, especially considering this was a part of Fran’s history she had actively decide not to share with me. The reports from Angus’s social care worker, forwarded to Cis, detailed him as a recluse battling severe agoraphobia. Exposure to the external environment would trigger intense anxiety and behaviour bordering on schizophrenic. Intriguingly, his ill-fated robbery at Tesco Metro had involved him dialling the police before even entering the store and holding the cashier at knife point with no real demands. Charged with attempted robbery, Angus’s guilty plea had met a sympathetic response from both the jury and judge, resulting in mandated therapy and several hundred hours of community service. How he’d avoided any prison time was a mystery to me – probably because Isla wasn’t on the prosecution team that day.
‘So, what do you think, darling?’ Cis asked. ‘Please tell me your brilliant detective mind can make more sense of it than I can. I feel like my head is about to explode.’
I rubbed the palm of my hand across the soft stubble on my chin as I thought it over, trying not to let Cis’s poorly disguised flattery get to me as I inspected the transcript one more time, making sure there was nothing I missed. She puckered her lips as if she was trying to stop herself from saying something.
‘Just say it,’ I said to her, exhausted of her performance. ‘Seriously, just say it.’
‘It won’t show up on the transcript but…Fran was too good in the questioning. She wastoogood, Gareth. She did the little shaky voice, the little teary concerned eyes, she came across asa saint. But the woman started to smile at some points. I mean, who does that?’
‘Oh, come on, it could have just been nerves, like people who laugh at funerals.’
‘Seriously, Gareth, that’s your excuse for her?’
‘She had been preparing the whole night before for it,’ I reasoned peevishly. ‘We forget, but it’s incredibly nerve-wracking for the people on the other side of the desk. Come on, stop being an eejit.’
Cis nonchalantly shrugged her bulky shoulders.
