‘I need to speak to Rachel,’ I say at the desk.
The desk sergeant looks at me. ‘Rachel?’
‘Or her colleague, DI Conway, I need to speak to one of them.’
He looks blankly at me as if I’m speaking in tongues, before languidly tapping on some buttons on a phone.
‘Name?’
‘Shute. Xander Shute.’
‘You want to be careful with a name like that,’ he says, enjoying his own humour. He mumbles into the handset before replacing it. ‘Coming now for you.’
Time drags its heels through the silence and I wait, sinking as I do.
‘Mr Shute?’ I spin around with surprise. I see both detectives.
‘Why haven’t you been?’ I say.
They exchange a look that confuses me.
‘We’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ Blake says.
‘What for?’ I say, following them as they walk to the same room I was interviewed in before.
‘Come, we’ll speak in here,’ Blake says, opening the door for me. The walls, matt black, undulate, making me queasy.
‘The Farm Street crime you reported,’ she says seriously.
I cross my arms and nod. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ I say. ‘Why haven’t you got police there?’
‘You’ve been to the address?’ Conway says, concerned. ‘You shouldn’t be going—’
‘You don’t understand,’ I say. ‘I saw him, the murderer, he’s still there walking around free as a bird. You need to go and arrest him, now.’
They look at one another again but say nothing. Blake opens the file and pulls out a photograph.
‘Is this the man you saw?’ she says, pushing the picture over to me.
The photograph is blurred like a still image from a video. I wonder whether there is CCTV somewhere that captured him. I look carefully at the face. It’s the man I saw earlier this evening, without a doubt.
‘That’s him,’ I say. They make tiny movements of their eyes towards one another.
‘Why haven’t you picked him up?’ I say. ‘Why is there no police presence there at all?’
And then I see the discomfort in their faces. Blake gives me a concerned smile. ‘Actually, Xander, he’s not a suspect.’
‘But the picture,’ I say, pointing at the image. ‘It’s him.’
‘It’s a still from the officer’s body-worn camera,’ Conway says.
‘So, you spoke to him. Someone spoke to him, surely? How did he explain the body? You must have had a team there. Forensics. You can’t have let him go. He killed her!’ My voice is climbing, no matter how hard I try to ground it.
‘Just calm down for a second, Mr Shute. Okay. Mr Ebadi. He’s a UAE national,’ Conway says, pointing to the image.
UAE? Did that make him Arabic? If he was Arabic I would have noticed. Wouldn’t I? But the context maybe confused me. He is light-skinned. I saw him in a Victorian house with a white woman and I just assumed – wrongly assumed. Even so, this is him.
‘So?’ I say, finally taming my voice.
‘So, you didn’t mention that he was an Arab gentleman,’ Conway says. ‘In your statement, you said it was a white male.’
I look at Blake in disbelief. ‘But light-skinned or white, what’s the difference? He murdered a woman.’
‘Well, we don’t believe he did,’ Conway says, pulling the photograph back.
‘He’s got an alibi for the night of the murder,’ Blake says softly.
‘What alibi?’
‘He wasn’t in the country, Mr Shute. He was in the UAE.’ I detect delight in his voice as if he has caught me in something, a lie.
‘Anyone can – could say that, have you checked?’
‘Mr Shute, we have checked. We’ve seen his passport, he was good enough to show it to us. And his flight e-ticket,’ Conway says flatly. ‘We spoke to the airline. It wasn’t him.’
I cover my head with my hands as my head begins to pound. It had to be him. It was him, wasn’t it? Suddenly I am not sure any more. Maybe it was a white male I saw after all. I had it right first time around before they tricked me into this odd admission.
‘Then it wasn’t him. It was a white male as I said.’
They look again at one another.
‘Did you check for other occupants? I don’t know if it was that guy,’ I say, stabbing at the still. ‘But it was someone. Someone killed a woman in that house.’ My voice is shrill in my ears.
Blake shakes her head sadly and stands up. ‘The officers checked that house. There was no evidence of any murder at all.’
No evidence? How can that be? ‘So, now what?’ I say. ‘What’s your next move? You can’t just let him sit there destroying evidence.’
‘Our next move is, do you want to make a withdrawal statement?’ Conway says. ‘We can’t have a murder allegation left hanging in the air.’
‘Withdrawal? No, I don’t want to make a withdrawal statement. I know what I saw and I can’t believe you’re not taking it more seriously!’
The file sits tightly under Blake’s arm.
‘Think about it, Xander,’ says Blake. ‘You might have made a mistake here. I can understand it, of course I can. You’re facing an extremely serious allegation yourself. A man was badly assaulted. He’s alive, but Mr Squire had just been minding his own business before he was attacked with a knife. So, I can understand how the stress of that might cause you to deflect the allegation by making another. Believe me, we see plenty of allegations and cross-allegations, but this is too serious, Xander. We are giving you a chance here. Drop it, now, and we can write it down to nerves. Otherwise, I’m afraid we are going to have to charge you with wasting police time. Or perverting the course of justice, if the CPS want it to go that way.’
My eyes travel from one officer to the other. Slowly and deliberately, I cross my arms.
‘You better charge me then,’ I say.
14
Friday
They’re still talking about dark matter in the magazines. The maths is still the maths and the theoretical physics is still as it was, theoretical. The only thing that ever changes is the intensity with which they remind us that we know nothing. When I think of dark matter, it always brings me straight back to Rory and the conversations we had. I didn’t have anyone else to talk to about this stuff – only he understood it well enough.
‘Ninety-five per cent of the Universe is dark matter and dark energy,’ I said to him once. It might have been for one of Dad’s ‘debates’.
‘So?’ he said.
‘So, none of it’s ever been observed. It’s pure hypothesis.’
‘And?’ He was doing that thing I hated, lifting an eyebrow with his finger.
‘So er-bloody-go, we only know what five per cent of the Universe is. We don’t know what ninety-five per cent of it even is.’
He lets this sink in. ‘No,’ he says finally, ‘that’s not the same thing.’
I stare at him.
‘It’s not the same thing. We don’t know what it consists of, elementally, but we know what it is. It’s dark energy and dark matter.’
‘No. That’s just a bloody hypothesis. It’s theoretical. It doesn’t exist outside some physicist’s head.’
Dad had been in the room, I remember, because I was always aware of him. He was reading his paper but he was listening. Mum might have been hovering, glasses hanging from a chain, but equally she might have been in the study, writing a paper.
Dad smiled because he saw something that I didn’t and he was enjoying it.
‘I disagree,’ Rory said. ‘It does exist.’
‘How do you know that? Has it ever been seen? Has it ever been detected?’
‘It could be a weakly interacting massive particle. If it interacted too weakly for detection. What with neutrinos and everything.’