There was just the tiniest shake of her head.
“Good. They can’t without my or Lucien’s permission, and we won’t give it to them. They’re also not allowed to take hair or saliva samples.”
Jaz said nothing, and she was still looking at Oliver like she hated him, but I could tell when she was paying attention, and this was one of those whens.
“What have you told them?”
She shrugged.
“Nothing?”
A head-twitch that could have been a nod.
“Good,” said Oliver again. “At some point, there is going to be an interview. I am going to accompany you.” He took a deep breath and got very, very rigid. Then he shot a meaningful glance at a security camera. “Shall I tell you what I remember happening this evening?”
At last, Jaz’s ice-girl facade cracked. “Go on then, this ought to be good.”
“We had a fight,” he said, his voice soft and cool and level. “It became very heated.”
“Oliver,” I half whispered, “I don’t think this is helping.”
Jaz was half grinning. “No no, this is fantastic. Come on, Oliver, tell me how inappropriate I was.”
“I lost my temper,” Oliver continued. “And I told you to get out of my house. I think, although of course it’s hard to remember these things exactly, that I said something like you could take the car and go for all I cared. I didn’t mean it literally, of course, but youclearly”—he gave Jaz his most no-seriously-you-have-to-fucking-trust-me look—“didn’t realise that, which means yousincerely believed that you had my permission to take the vehicle.”
Jaz nodded. She might not have been Oliver’s biggest fan, but she was sharp. “Yeah. Sounds about right.”
I had to admit, this did not seem like a fantastic idea. I mean, I knew twocking was bad, but this felt like it was just moving the bad around. Like there was crummy parenting and then there was telling a teenage girl to get in a car in the middle of the night and drive away with it. My one faint consolation was that Oliver probably knew what he was doing.
Fuck, I hoped he knew what he was doing.
When they came to collect Jaz for her interview, she was only allowed to take one adult with her. And obviously that adult was Oliver. Which meant I was left filling in paperwork and worrying while Oliver and Jaz tried to pass off a case of aggravated twocking as a simple misunderstanding.
Eventually, when I was about halfway through the checklist of “ways this could go horribly wrong” that my brain had handed me without being asked, Oliver and Jaz came out into the reception area. There were a couple of officers with them, and they shared a few words with Oliver that I didn’t catch. And then Jaz was getting her stuff back, such as it was, and a few moments after that we were being ushered out the door by a cluster of Dagenhamian cops who clearly regretted having ever met any of us.
Our car had been brought around from the lot they’d been storing it in, and it lookedmostlyfine. One taillight was out, but otherwise it seemed drivable. So we drove it.
Well, Oliver drove it. And we stayed pretty silent until we were out of Dagenham, because it felt really luck-pushy-fate-tempty to say,Hey, good job perverting the course of justiceright in front of a police station.
“Did it go all right?” I asked.
Oliver seemed to be giving Jaz room to answer first, but when she didn’t, he stepped in. “They concluded that the case wasn’t worth the Crown’s time to pursue. Especially because we both maintained that Jaz thought I’d given her permission to take the vehicle.” His lips twitched. “Twocking cannot exist if there is reasonable expectation of consent.”
“Yeah but…” I rubbed my eyes because I’d had barely any sleep and what I did get was on a sofa. “Would it have been simpler to just tell them we didn’t want to press charges or whatever?”
“On an American television show, yes. In real life in Britain, no.”
I groaned. “This is going to be one of those ‘That thing isn’t a thing’ things, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I’m sorry to inform you that that thing is, indeed, not a thing. Private citizens do not press criminal charges in this country. The Crown does. Technically speaking, had Jaz stolen our car, the crime wouldn’t have been against us; it would have been against the king.”
“Hang on,” I protested, “it’s a car, not a swan.”
“It’s the king’s law.”
“But it’s our car.”
“We’ll make a republican of you yet, Lucien.”
