As I wait, a familiar face pops around the corner of what looks like a break room along the hall, and my soul leaves my body.
It is the female officer from the night my alarm went off. The one who knew I was lying about why the alarm went off, the one whoasked if I was drunk, the one who told me it is illegal to record my neighbors.
She clocks me, her surprise as acute as mine, though better masked. She abruptly bobs back into the break room, the voices inside suddenly dropping away to whispers.Shit. This does not bode well.
After a few minutes I am called into the interview room by a nonuniformed officer in a suit, tie, and lanyard, which seems like a good thing.
“Ms. Green, I’m DI Lee Cobham. Take a seat.”
I do.
“We had someone out to you earlier this week, is that right?” he asks, giving away nothing.
“Yes, my alarm went off. I’d recently moved in.”
He nods. “A stressful time in anyone’s life,” he notes, then looks down at his pad. “You’re Northcroft Road, is that right? Why is that name familiar?” he asks himself, pen tapping pad. The tapping suddenly stops, and he looks at me quickly, covering whatever his realization was. But I saw it. He refocuses. “Can you explain to me exactly what you told the officer outside?”
I explain it again.
A silence descends, then he clears his throat, looks back at his scrawled notes, and says, “Right, so let me get this straight: you’re alleging that a woman—who you don’t know—is being held hostage at an unknown location, by a man you don’t know, and you are telling me you know all of this because you have obtained video footage of the inside of this complete stranger’s private residence. And all of this has been recorded, I’m assuming, without anyone’s consent and is on your hard drive? Can you see how what you are telling me might raise a few flags for us here?” he asks.
I am at a loss for what to say, so far is this from what I was expecting to happen here. He continues regardless.
“Oh, and for background, Ms. Green, you should be aware that we received a call earlier this week from a neighbor of yours, a Roger Evans, complaining about your cat recording his wife after she’d come out of the shower.”
I feel the blood drain from my face. Oh my God. The bike man. A flare of anger ignites inside me.
“I’m sorry—what?” I explode. “He literally lured my cat into his house and then threw him out onto his lawn, after feeding him without consent, and possibly injuring him. And no,I did notfilm his wife in the shower—that’s a gross misreading of events.”
“Then you watched the tape of his house?”
I am silenced.
DI Cobham leans back, seemingly satisfied by my outburst, his pen now tapping his paper. “And you’ve been filming other neighbors, and watching it, correct?”
I hesitate a little too long. “Not…not deliberately. I was trying to find out who vandalized Blue’s collar.”
I proceed to ramble out the entire thing now, from the beginning: the words on Blue’s collar, the reason I started using the camera, the footage, all the way back to the woman in the basement. When I finish, DI Cobham gives me a long look.
“You need to stop filming, Ms. Green. Okay?”
I take a deep breath in and I shake off everything that has come before.
“Okay. Just listen. Forget all of that. The woman in the basement is real. She needs help. I completely understand that the fact I have the footage at all is bad, but if you’d just look at it, then you can go and—”
“Ms. Green, can I just ask you what you thought was going to happen here this evening, exactly?”
The answer to his question is so obvious to me that I can’t quite understand why he’s asking.
“Well, that you’d…go and find her. Knock down the door. Save her.”
He nods sagely, but doesn’t speak, so I continue.
“Just, just, watch the video, please. Then you’ll see and you can go and get her out of there. I don’t know which house it is, but you must have a way to…Please watch it and you’ll see; I’m not making any of this up!”
I immediately regret saying anything about making things up, because now it fully sounds like I’ve made all of this up.
DI Cobham grimaces sympathetically, then straightens in his chair, presenting an amiable but authoritative front as he leans in to say, “Ms. Green, without the consent, tacit or otherwise, of thishomeowner, and the parties involved in your recording, I am legally unable to watch it.” He taps his pen in a fast, arrhythmic burst against the notes in front of him.
