‘Definitely.’
‘It was like that,’ he said and clutched at the bottle of water we’d provided.
I was conducting the interview on the blue sofas in the lobby by the safe and the display cases. I was still in my noddy suit, which was not ideal, but I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t going to have to go back into the crime scene.
‘Like that, really,’ said Phillip, and he took a swig from the bottle. ‘Really. Like being smacked on the back of the head.’
Which hadn’t happened – at least according to the paramedic who’d had a look. He had worried about concussion all the same, and had wanted Phillip to take a quick ride to A & E. But Phillip had refused to leave until his dad or one of his brothers arrived to keep an eye on the shop.
I led him through his initial statement. How the victim had entered his shop shortly after opening time and asked about rings.
‘He seemed totally normal,’ said Phillip. ‘A little intense, maybe, but normal. I showed him some rings, but he was after a particular style.’
‘What was he after?’
‘That’s difficult to say,’ said Phillip. ‘I’m not sure he knew exactly himself. A puzzle ring, or possibly a gimmal ring.’
A gimmal ring being two rings joined together to form one – very popular with romantics and suspicious husbands from the Middle Ages onwards.
‘He said it “opened up” and had “symbols” on the outer and inner surfaces.’
In the old days I would have made a Lord of the Rings joke about the Black Speech of Mordor, but now that I’m almost a father I’m trying to adopt a more professional attitude and set a good example for trainees like Danni.
‘Did he say what kind of symbols?’ I asked.
‘Well, I did ask him if he meant Elvish,’ said Phillip. ‘I’ve heard that was popular fifteen years ago – on gold rings, anyway.’ He obviously misinterpreted my expression because he continued, ‘Because of the hobbit films.’
Not Elvish, replied the man, but mystical symbols, alchemical symbols.
‘I said we didn’t have anything like that in stock,’ said Phillip. ‘And he said I was lying. He said that his ex-wife had sold it to us and, when I asked when, he said years ago. I said I’d look it up in our inventory, but there was nothing like that in the shop and he could look around if he didn’t believe me.’
The man was getting agitated and Phillip wondered whether he should activate the silent alarm, only you weren’t supposed to do that unless it was a real emergency and Phillip wasn’t sure it was – right up until the moment the man pulled out a gun.
‘At first I couldn’t believe it,’ said Phillip. ‘It didn’t seem real.’
And you’d have to be meshuga to try and rob the vault. Shop policy was to give them whatever they wanted and let them run out into the arms of the police.
Only Phillip couldn’t give the meshuggenah what he wanted, because Phillip had never heard of this particular ring, or the man’s ex-wife, and definitely didn’t have it in stock.
‘Wait,’ I said, because some of this was missing from his earlier statement. ‘Did he give the ex-wife a name?’
Phillip paused.
‘Anthea?’ he said, ‘No it wasn’t that – older, old-fashioned … Althea. Like the woman in the poem.’ I must have looked blank. ‘“To Althea, from Prison”? “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage”?’ He sighed. ‘It’s a poem by Richard Lovelace. Fairport Convention did a famous version. You lot are making me feel old,’ he said, and chuckled. He flexed his shoulders and neck and became noticeably more relaxed.
Contrary to what people think about police interviews, we like relaxed. People are more likely to blurt out the truth when they’re relaxed – even incriminating truth – so I smiled and said that we get that a lot.
And then I asked whether the man had given his ex-wife a surname.
‘Moore,’ said Phillip. ‘Moore with an e – he was very definite about that. Wanted me to check our records.’
‘And did you?’ I asked.
‘Of course I did,’ said Phillip, tensing up again. ‘He was pointing a gun at me. Or at least I looked it up in the book.’
This was an old-fashioned account book which Phillip’s family still used, mainly because it added an air of mystery and style to the shop. Their true stock control system ran off a laptop.
I was willing to bet money that the laptop had been sanded along with everyone’s phones and the CCTV cameras. Still …
‘Do you have off-site backup?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ said Phillip, and I added searching that database as an action to pass on to Guleed.
‘Was Althea Moore with an e in the book?’ I asked.
‘I never got a chance to find out,’ said Phillip. ‘I was looking it up when … it happened.’
The flash of light that was like being brained with a plank of wood.
‘And then he was just lying there,’ said Phillip. ‘Brown bread.’
‘The pistol was a fake,’ said Stephanopoulos once we’d reconvened in the upstairs lobby for post-crime-scene coffee. ‘The firearms guy knew it as soon as he looked at it. It’s an Airsoft replica – shoots pellets.’
‘When are they going to move the body?’ I asked.
‘This afternoon,’ said Guleed, and I made a note to let Nightingale know so he could wangle the PM for Dr Vaughan and Dr Walid.
‘Do you think this is a Falcon case?’ asked Stephanopoulos with the merry tone of a senior officer hoping to make a tricky-looking case somebody else’s problem.
I was pretty certain it was indeed Falcon, but it’s the policy of the Special Assessment Unit to discourage other units from foisting their cases on us. Even if it’s Stephanopoulos.
We call this encouraging operational self-sufficiency.
‘I don’t think we’ll know until we have a cause of death,’ I said.
So, after I’d briefed Nightingale over the phone I commandeered the vault’s meeting room, conveniently located just off the lobby, and used it to finish up our Initial Vestigium Assessment. With the aid of Danni’s crime scene map we collected a representative sample of phones, cameras and laptops from the SOCOs. Or, more precisely, we prised them out of their reluctant fingers by promising that everything that needed logging or signing would be logged and signed, and that the chain of custody would be maintained yea, even unto the end of days, or the first court appearance – whichever came first.
We started with Phillip Arnold’s iPhone 6, since that was most likely the closest affected item. You need a special screwdriver for the pentalobe screws, but apart from that, the 6 is less hassle to open than previous models. I’d known just by shaking it by my ear what to expect, so I made sure to put down a white sheet of paper to catch the sand that dribbled out when I lifted out the motherboard. Unfortunately the protection plates were soldered on, so I had to pry them loose to show Danni the chips.
‘This is what happens when someone or something does serious magic around modern microprocessors,’ I said. ‘It’s basically just silicon sand with trace impurities from metals and quartz.’
‘Is this why I’m wearing a crap wind-up watch, then?’ said Danni. ‘And why my lovely phone, which has my entire life on it I may add, is locked in the safe back at Russell Square?’
‘We got tired of replacing people’s phones,’ I said.
‘And you get the Airwave handsets cheap,’ said Danni.
‘Not that cheap,’ I said. ‘I prefer to use the burners.’
I’d issued one to Danni when she’d started the course. Experience had taught me that it’s much easier to get a copper to do something if you throw in some free kit.