Sometimes Emrys Williams felt as though he had spent the entire thirty years of his working life in an interview room with hard chairs and bitter coffee, and achieved little more than bad breath and piles.
But this was different.
Whatever the outcome, Emrys Williams knew that this case would always be about this moment. This was what the boys in the station would remember about him; this was what they’d joke about every time someone opened the staff-room fridge to get a Coke or a cheese triangle. And even though he would hand the case over to a superior as soon as the day shift arrived, it would be his testimony of discovery that the reporters would be crowding the benches to hear when the case went to trial at the city’s Crown Court. The head-in-the-fridge case, they’d call it. Or something clever and journalisty that he couldn’t think of right now.
Something he would be remembered by, even in jest.
Emrys Williams straightened up into a new phase of his policing career, and found he did have a tiny sliver of ambition left.
He puffed out his chest.
‘This is a crime scene,’ he said. ‘Everybody out.’
The car swung away from the house, and from Jackson and Kim with Lexi between them, and from the curious, slippered neighbours.
Patrick had calmed down as soon as Shorter pushed him arse-first into the back seat and shut the door. Now he rested his head against the glass and watched the bright, Saturday-morning city pass through his vision, while a great peace settled over him like warm silk.
He had solved the mystery of Number 19.
Soon the police would realize their mistake and let him go, and arrest Dr Spicer instead. Soon Lexi would know what had happened to her father, and for some strange reason, that felt good – even though it didn’t benefit him. Without knowing how or why, Patrick felt there was something about having given something back. It was curious and he didn’t understand it, but that didn’t make it untrue, even if it had not helped him in his own quest.
In that he had failed, and yet he no longer felt like a failure. He had come to the city for answers and he had found them here. They were just different answers – and to different questions.
There were mysteries that could be solved, and others that could not. Maybe what had happened to his father was one of those that could not. The idea had never occurred to Patrick before and it did now with a sudden surge of hot emotion. He had done his best. Maybe that would have to be enough. He didn’t think he had any more left inside him.
The idea of his quest slipping away brought heat to his eyes. He wiped them, then stared curiously at the shimmering trail on the back of his hand.
It made him feel strangely normal.
49
DS WILLIAMS HAD only been in charge because he was on night shift. The big guns came in by day.
Williams briefed DCI White as soon as he arrived, then went down the corridor and opened the flap in the cell door to check on the suspect, who was pale and wiry, and still wearing only his boxer shorts.
He didn’t look much like a killer, but then, killers rarely did.
‘All right?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said the boy. ‘My head hurts.’
‘Drink much last night?’
‘I don’t drink,’ said the boy, with an edge that surprised him. ‘I went to Dr Spicer’s party but I only did the washing up. Then I saw the bite marks on his finger and left. That’s when he ran over my bike and tried to run me over. I had to jump out of the car park and into a tree.’
Williams wondered what he could say in the face of such craziness. ‘First time in a police station?’ he asked cautiously.
‘No,’ said the boy. ‘I went to a police station after my father died.’
Emrys Williams bit his lip. He always tried to keep an open mind about suspects – even when they were found covered in blood and with a severed head in their fridge – but Patrick Fort wasn’t doing himself any favours. The skinny goth at the crime scene had said something about him having some mental health issues. They had to do this properly; they didn’t want a killer wriggling off the hook on a technicality.
So he just said, ‘The doctor will be here soon. And the duty solicitor.’
‘I don’t need a solicitor. I haven’t done anything wrong. I just want to tell you what happened. but nobody wants to listen.’
‘All in good time,’ said Williams. ‘We’re trying to get hold of your mother now.’
‘My mother? Why?’
‘She needs to be with you.’
‘She won’t come,’ said the boy.
‘Why not?’
‘She doesn’t like me that much.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ said Williams, even though he thought it might be.
The suspect shrugged and then shivered. Williams could see the gooseflesh on his chest from here. It reminded him of drying the boys after swimming when they were younger. Rubbing warmth back into them while their teeth chattered.
He fetched an old blue sweatshirt from Lost Property.
‘Here, put this on.’
Patrick Fort took it from him warily and held it up, wrinkling his nose. The slogan on the front said LITERACY AINT EVERYTHING.
‘It has sick on the sleeve,’ he said, pushing it to the other end of the slatted bench. ‘And no apostrophe.’ Then he looked around the cell and said, ‘Do you have a dustpan and brush?’
Williams sighed and withdrew, shaking his head.
Sergeant Wendy Price passed on her way from the machine with a cup of grey coffee. ‘What’s up?’
Williams jerked a thumb at the cell door. ‘Kid’s got a severed head in his fridge but he wants a bloody feather duster to do a bit of housework.’
She grinned and leaned up to peer through the flap. ‘Oh, him,’ she said.
‘You know him?’
‘He came in a few days ago with blood on his hands and said he wanted to report a murder. When he saw I’d clocked the blood, he legged it. I chased him halfway to Splott!’
‘You gave up before the war memorial,’ Patrick corrected her.
Sergeant Price blushed and snapped the flap shut.
She lowered her voice and added, ‘I think he knew Darren Owens.’
Williams looked at her sharply. Darren Owens who had been found in the park, up to his elbows in a disembowelled jogger? ‘What makes you think that?’ he asked.
Sergeant Price shrugged. ‘They said something to each other in Reception. I don’t know what, but I’d definitely say they’d met before.’ She lifted her cardboard cup in a toast of ‘You’re welcome,’ and disappeared through a doorway.
Emrys Williams watched her go, and – with a growing sense of foreboding – wondered just how much he’d really discovered when he opened that fridge door this morning.
If the boy knew Darren Owens, then a severed head might be just the start of it.
He looked through the flap again with new eyes.
This is how things change.