“I’m going to grant the police request. Detectives have forty-eight more hours.” He addresses Augie. “Mr. Shaw, you will be held in protective custody for a little longer but I’m going to ask that you be well looked after. In the meantime I want a full psychiatric report.”
Augie glances at his brief, wanting an explanation. Mr. Reddrop gives him a sad shrug.
“When can I go home?” he asks in a loud voice.
“You’re still under arrest.”
“But I want to go home.”
Augie is being led away between the two police officers. Victoria Naparstek tries to signal him.
“I’m going to be sick,” he says.
“Not here,” says the officer.
Outside the court, Victoria weaves between the waiting reporters in the foyer, looking for Reddrop. She intercepts him before the main doors. I don’t hear their conversation, but she’s clearly a persuasive woman.
“We can see him,” she says, slipping her arm through mine. “Augie won’t be transferred to prison until later in the day. He’s downstairs.”
Having emptied our pockets and signed the waivers, we are taken along a bleak corridor by a court security officer, who wears his set of keys like a sidearm. The door is unlocked. Augie is squatting on a bunk with his legs folded beneath him like a complicated pair of springs.
He wipes his cheeks and won’t look at Victoria as she takes a seat on the bench opposite.
Some psychologists will tell you that the most important word a patient speaks is the first one. Once events are related, everything that follows becomes a version of the same theme or an attempt to redress a mistake.
I don’t agree. I expect people to lie. I expect them to hide things. The truth is a movable feast. It comes out over time or emerges from the static or the facts that people can live with. Augie looks like a bird on a perch, his head cocked towards the lone window.
“If I’ve done this thing they should just kill me,” he says, scratching at his bandaged hands. “But I haven’t done this thing and I can’t stay in here because I’ll die anyway.”
Victoria reaches out, but Augie pulls away, shuddering.
“Lots of sperm go into making a baby but only one sperm makes it through to fertilize the egg,” he says. “The other sperm are trying to get there first, but they die, you know, they all die.”
“You’re not making sense,” says Victoria.
“The egg splits. Two sperm. That makes us twins.”
He’s talking about his brother.
“… cells replicate, atoms fire, the brain forms…”
Augie turns to me. “I’m just trying to keep people from dying.”
“What people?” I ask.
“If I die, how will I save them?”
His eyes are darting from side to side, dancing in his head.
“I raped a woman. You should have listened.”
“You didn’t rape anyone,” says Victoria.
“I raped five girls at school.”
“That’s not true.”
He stops and stares at me. “Are you here to kill me?”
“No.”
“You’ll kill me eventually.”
“No, I won’t.”
Victoria looks at me, hoping I can help. But as soon as I speak Augie reacts with instant hatred, almost snarling at me. Victoria steps back, frightened. “Are you taking your medication?”
Augie looks at his hands. “You say I have a chemical imbalance. That I suffer from hallucinations. But you’re wrong. What I hear is real.” His shoulders are hunched and a tiny vein throbs at the side of his neck. “I think I killed her.”
“Who?”
“The woman on the road.”
“What woman?”
He whispers in a little boy voice. “What was she doing there? She was standing in the middle of the road.” He looks from face to face. “I think I ran her over. I must have done. I couldn’t stop in time.”
My eyes meet Victoria’s. She shakes her head.
“What makes you think you hit this person?”
Augie wipes a strand of spit from the corner of his mouth. “I tried to swerve, but I think I heard a sound. That’s why the car went in the ditch. When I got out I looked for her. I called out, but she was gone.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“My brother told me not to. He said I’d be blamed.”
“For the fire?”
“For running that woman over.”
He presses his chin into his knees. “I looked for her, but then I saw the snowman and I got frightened.”
“The snowman?”
“He came out of the forest covered in snow.”
“You saw him after you saw the woman?”
Augie nods.
“This woman, what did she look like?”
“She was beat up, you know, but it was weird. Her shoes.”
“What about them?”
“She wasn’t wearing any.”
7
Low gray clouds scud across a dirty sky and the dreaming spires are etched against the southern horizon like vague giants marching out of the mist.
The cab driver maneuvers deftly on the icy streets, keeping the needle around 20 mph and rarely touching the brakes unless he has no choice. Victoria Naparstek is no longer with me. The moment I mentioned visiting Drury she grew quiet and began making excuses.
“He has a family,” she said, as though that made a difference.
The cab pulls up outside a two-story house with a gabled roof. A lop-sided snowman is standing inside the front gate dressed in a flowery hat and a Tottenham scarf.
Drury is shoveling snow from his driveway. Working up a sweat, he’s peeled down to baggy chinos and a sweatshirt.
A snowball explodes at my feet. A young girl peers from behind a makeshift fort of rubbish bins and a toboggan.
“You missed,” I say.
She holds up another snowball. “That was a warning shot.”
Drury leans on his shovel. “Hold your fire, Gracie.”
“I think we should arrest him, Daddy, he looks like a bad’n.”
“Let’s see what he has to say first.”
Gracie is wearing a woolen cap with earflaps that make her look like Snoopy in a Peanuts cartoon. Her pale cheeks are dusted with freckles and glasses are perched on the end of her nose. Her younger brother is sitting on the front steps, pushing a toy bulldozer through clumps of ice.
“What are you doing here, Professor?”
“I have a question.”
“It could have waited.”
“I talked to Augie Shaw again.”
“On whose authority?”
“His lawyer and his psychiatrist.”
Drury sets the shovel aside, pulling off his gloves. “What’s your question?”
“Why would a woman go out in the middle of a blizzard without any shoes?”
“You talking about anyone in particular.”
“You have an unidentified female found in a lake.”
“What about her?”
“Augie Shaw said he saw a woman on the road that night. He thinks he might have hit her. That’s why he drove his car into the ditch.”
Drury doesn’t seem surprised at this. I try again.
“You found a woman’s body in a lake. I saw the crime scene from the train. How far is that from the farmhouse?”
Drury doesn’t answer. His wife has appeared at the top of the steps, her body framed in the doorway, standing with one hand on her hip. Pregnant. Pretty. Tired around her eyes.
“Is everything all right, Stephen?” she asks.
“Everything’s fine. This is the psychologist I was telling you about.”
She smiles. “You should invite him inside where it’s warm.”
“The Professor won’t be staying.”
She picks up the young boy and rests him on her hip before turning inside.
I notice the curtains moving at the front window. She’s watching.
Drury rubs at his neck. “Get to the point, Professor?”
“The woman in the lake-was she wearing shoes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she have any injuries?”
“I haven’t seen the post-mortem. Body was frozen solid. They can’t cut her open till she thaws.”
The DCI plunges the shovel deep into a pile of snow.
“I think she was at the farmhouse that night,” I say. “A dress was soaking in the laundry. Shoes were drying by the fire. Someone took a bath…”