‘Where were you? Who were you with?’
‘Actually, yesterday, I was fifteen. It’s my birthday. I forgot.’ Inane sniggering in the background of the call.
‘Chris, wherewereyou? You went out. Where did you go?’
‘What are you asking me all this shit for?’ the kid baulked. ‘Aren’t you there working a fuckingmurderright now?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘And you’re blowing up my phone asking me if I was there?’ His voice was rising steadily. He was as fast to anger as all the Powder men who had come before him. The voices in the background had fallen away. ‘Are you for real?’
‘There’s a person on the CCTV who looks just like you.’
‘Jesus, man,’ Chris sighed. ‘Whoever you’ve got on CCTV, like,murdering someone, it isn’t me. And it’s kind of wild that you would ask me that at all, you know. Especially today.’
‘Okay, look, I’ve come at this wrong,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying you did it, but maybe you’re a wit—’
My son hung up on me. I stood there staring at the peacocks on the roof of the pub, two of them, wandering along the slanted corrugated iron awning over the extension at the back. They were hunting for frogs, I supposed, in the guttering. As I watched, one of them plucked something out, a slithering, wriggling thing that twisted and writhed before it was swallowed whole. Russell’s words came back to me.Hunt him down.
I told myself it was the pressure of my first real homicide since the incident. All that was weighing on my performance. That it couldn’t have been my son there at the pub—like he’d said, he was fifteen the night before, a hair over sixteen now. The girl behind the counter hadn’t carded him for his drink. Guilt swept through me at the idea that I had just called Chris and asked him what I had, in the way that I had. My strange but harmless little boy. My misunderstood creature. I’d bruised him on his birthday, in front of his friends.
The unsettled feeling in my chest wouldn’t go away, though. The immediate, instinctive notion that I’d just been looking at my child, exactly where he shouldn’t have been, exactly when he shouldn’t have been there. I’d started to tell Chris that I was enquiring about it because he might have witnessed something useful to police. But the guilt that was roiling in me now was the knowledge that I hadn’t been assessing Chris’s usefulness as a witness in the first instance; I’d been assessing whether or not he’d done it.
RUSSELL
Iwent into the beer garden, stood under a tree, making and taking phone calls. My phone was running out of battery, and I reminded myself to plug it in next time I was in a car. When I went back into the pub, the owner was there. Rob Winter was a small, bespectacled man with wispy orange curls crowning his skull. I found him sitting at the gloomy little bar on a padded leather stool, a notepad spread out on the stainless steel bar top, covered in handwriting that looked like rows and rows of dead and mangled mosquitos. When I entered, Rob stood and took me in. I didn’t know if anybody had warned him what I was like, or if the fact that he had found a murdered girl that morning was enough to unnerve him, but he tried to say hello and then thought better of it halfway through the word, so what came out was a strangled ‘Hek’.
‘Rob Winter.’
‘That’s me, yes.’
‘I’m Detective Inspector Russell Powder.’ I looked at him the way I look at the wriggling things I invariably find at the bottom of my street garbage bin when I manage to convince myself to hose it out. ‘I want you to run me through this morning’s events.’
‘Right.’ He nodded, putting his hands on the paper in front of him. ‘I, uh. I took Dodge through it. And he’s got me to start writing my statement.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘I don’t care. I need to hear it all again.’
Rob licked his thin lips. ‘That’s fine. I can say it as many times as you like.’
I put my hands on the bar. He studied them, the grazed knuckles.
‘You don’t want to record it?’ he asked. I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘Because Dodge recorded it. On his phone.’
‘I don’t want to record it,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t need there to be any evidence of what I’ll do to you if I catch you in a lie, Mr Winter,’ I said.
Rob Winter stared at me. A fan came on in the beer fridges behind him, and the bottles tinkled.
‘I’m here to find out who murdered that young woman up there.’ I raised a finger and pointed up and to my left, towards the hotel rooms. ‘And time is of the essence. If you delay me in what I’m trying to do here, even for a second, by not telling me the complete and unfiltered truth, I’m going to have to get creative with some of the objects you have back there.’
Rob’s little green eyes dropped to the bar top in front of him. To the muddling stick and the paring knives sitting by a glass canister of lemons and limes. They travelled across the rows of heavy pint glasses to the wall beside him, where all the spirit bottles stood in rows. He glanced the other way, at the glass racks and chopping boards. His eyes finally landed back on me, and he braved a tiny laugh. ‘Are you kidding?’
‘Do I look like it?’
Rob plucked at the front of his shirt. ‘What do you want to know?’
