‘Now you want to tell us what really happened?’ demanded Helen Montgomery.
‘I have a right to a lawyer, don’t I?’
She sighed. Sticking to the necessary, recorded formality, she said: ‘You have such a right.’
‘I want to exercise it.’
‘It’s being done for you,’ reminded Bellamy. ‘Dwight Newton said he was talking to Dubette’s legal people.’
‘Then we’ll wait until they arrive,’ said Parnell. Seeing the immediate expression on Bellamy’s face, Parnell decided he was lucky not to have arrived at the station without being beaten for supposedly resisted arrest. Perhaps – although only just perhaps – there was an advantage in being an English boy after all.
Both escorted Parnell to the detention cell, a narrow, tiled room equipped with a single bed and a lidless toilet bowl.
The woman said: ‘I want your trouser belt and shoelaces. Your handkerchief, too. Had a bastard choke himself on his handkerchief once. Don’t want you cheating yourself out of what’s yours.’
‘Or cheating a lot of other guys out of their pleasure,’ added Bellamy.
Without a watch, it was difficult for Parnell to judge time, but there was still daylight through the barred window when the door opened again. The detention officer said: ‘The canteen’s got pot roast. You want pot roast?’
Parnell winced at the memory. ‘No, thank you.’
‘I thought you’d want that. I didn’t ask about anything else.’
‘I don’t want anything else. I’m supposed to be getting a lawyer?’
‘You called for one?’
‘It was being arranged for me.’
‘Don’t know anything about a lawyer.’
‘It’s being done.’
‘You wanna call again?’
‘No.’
‘You sure?’
Parnell nodded. ‘What time is it?’
‘Four thirty. You won’t get another chance to eat.’
‘I’m not hungry, thank you,’ Parnell refused again.
He estimated it to be another hour before the door opened again to the detention officer, who jerked his head and said: ‘Your lawyers are here.’
It wasn’t until he was out in the corridor that Parnell properly realized how claustrophobically small the detention cell was. The man said: ‘The pot roast was great. You missed a treat.’
Peter Baldwin, the head of Dubette’s legal department, was already in the interview room into which Parnell had initially been taken. There were no flickering recording lights on the still-in-place apparatus. With Baldwin was another man, who was fat, balding and corseted in a tight, waistcoated striped suit. Baldwin said: ‘This is Gerry Fletcher, your court attorney. Dwight wants you to know right away that Dubette’s handling everything. Costs, I mean. I explained already to Gerry. He’s in the picture.’
Fletcher’s handshake, like the hand itself, was soft. The man said: ‘Sorry it’s taken so long, but maybe it’s done us a favour.’
‘What favour?’ asked Parnell.
‘They took your car, obviously,’ said Fletcher. ‘Part of the evidence – the evidence. And they recovered Rebecca’s car from the canyon. They’ve done a paint match…’
‘Thank God…’ tried Parnell, but the attorney raised a podgy, halting hand.
‘There is a positive match, Dick. They got forensic proof it was your car – you – that pushed Rebecca over.’
‘ No! ’
‘Of course, I’ll go for independent forensic tests, but we’ve got to work a mitigating strategy.’
‘ No! ’ refused Parnell again, as loud as before.
‘Dick, I can’t defend you unless you’re straight with me!’
‘I did not run Rebecca’s car off the road… kill her… that’s being straight with you.’
‘Dick!’ said Baldwin. ‘You’re in bad shape. We’re into limitation here.’
‘No, we’re not,’ said Parnell, quieter, more controlled.
‘Dubette are backing you… going out on a limb… don’t make things any more difficult than they already are.’
Coming forward towards Fletcher across the table, Parnell said: ‘You want me to plead guilty, to whatever the final charges are?’
‘You’re a scientist! You understand what I’m saying. They’ve got irrefutable scientific proof that it was your car that hit hers! And she’s dead, at the bottom of a gorge. What other strategy do we have?’
Parnell turned to the company lawyer. ‘Thank you… thank Dubette… for the offer. But no.’
Baldwin shook his head, uncertainly. ‘What are you talking about, Dick?’
‘Another lawyer. Another strategy. The right strategy.’ Parnell stood. ‘There isn’t anything else for us to talk about.’
‘Sit down!’ said Baldwin, and at once Parnell remembered the same snapped instruction from Dwight Newton.
This time he didn’t do as he was told, walking instead to the door and pressing the summons bell.
From behind him Baldwin said: ‘You’re insane. Perhaps that’s it! You’re insane.’
Fletcher said: ‘You’re making one hell of a mistake.’
‘One of the officers who arrested me… who’d made her mind up that I was guilty, just like you… told me everyone keeps telling them that.’
‘In your case she was right,’ said the fat man.
‘You through already?’ demanded the detention officer, from the corridor.
‘Yes,’ said Parnell.
‘Don’t expect any help from Dubette,’ warned Baldwin, at the door.
‘I don’t. And won’t,’ said Parnell.
It took Parnell a further hour to convince the desk sergeant that Fletcher and Baldwin had not been his choice of attorneys and that therefore he still had the legal right to a representative telephone call, part of his mind reeling with the awareness that he didn’t have – or know – a lawyer to call, apart from the contract attorney. He’d already decided on his only approach, hollowed by the desperation of it, when he was finally shown in to an unsupervised inner office. So anxious, shaking, was he that he misdialled at the first attempt, jabbing at the button to disconnect, actually mentally praying – Please God, let somebody be there! – for a reply.
‘Yes?’ said Beverley Jackson’s clipped voice.
‘I’m in trouble,’ said Parnell.
‘We know.’
‘Get me a trial lawyer. Please!’
Twelve
B arry Jackson was a heavily built, blond-haired man with a deep, half-moon scar on his left cheek. He wore a sports shirt, jeans and a sports jacket and apologized as he entered the detention cell. ‘I was at home when I got the call.’
Reading the other man’s watch as the lawyer handed him his card, Parnell saw it was nearly midnight. Frowning down at the introduction, Parnell said: ‘Jackson?’
‘Beverley and I are still good friends. Just not good at being married – she never can bring herself to admit I’m always right. She thought you knew I was a lawyer – that that was why you called her.’
‘No,’ said Parnell. ‘Maybe it’s my first piece of luck.’
‘All I’ve got from the night sergeant are the charges. And I won’t be able to make a bail application until the morning. In between times, why don’t you tell me the story?’
His story was all that Parnell had thought about for so long it seemed forever, until his mind blocked and he didn’t feel he could think about it from any other direction. ‘You’re not going to believe it.’
‘You better hope I do.’
Parnell told it – hoped he told it – chronologically, from the moment Rebecca had picked him up from Washington Circle. And didn’t leave anything out, not even Rebecca’s admission of her pregnancy termination, his belief that the Metro DC officers had known in advance of the damage to his Toyota or the English-boy mockery on his manacled way to the station house.
‘This guy, Fletcher? He told you there’s forensic evidence that it was your car that hit Rebecca’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you?’
‘No!’
‘I can hear you well enough.’
‘No,’ repeated Parnell, more softly. He ached with exhaustion.
‘I find you’re lying, I relinquish the case, OK?’
‘I’m not lying. And OK.’