He couldn’t see how the police could possibly have grounds to arrest either of them. Not yet anyway. But he had just learned the hard way how it feels to be formally interviewed in the pursuance of a murder investigation. And it didn’t feel good.
Now, more than anything, all Greg wanted to do was ensure that his mother suffered no more pain. As ever, he just wanted to protect her. But he had yet to work out how to do that.
Sixteen
Lilian got through to the emergency services almost instantly.
‘My husband is dead,’ she told the operator. ‘He attacked me. I... I’ve killed him.’
The woman’s voice, steady and professionally calm, did not alter one iota. Lilian was asked for her name, where her husband could be found, and where she was.
‘Are you hurt, Lilian? Do you have any injuries?’
Lilian heard herself reply in the negative. The throbbing in her ankle reminded her too late just how ridiculous her reply was.
The police came for her surprisingly quickly. She’d waited at the phone box as instructed. Indeed, she’d slumped to the floor as soon as she’d finished the 999 call. She remained in a crumpled heap, until a patrol car pulled up alongside.
Two officers stepped out of the car. The younger of the two, who looked barely out of his teens and had the acne to go with it, opened the door of the call box and looked down at her.
‘Lilian St John?’ he enquired.
Lilian nodded.
She struggled into a sitting position, still holding her torn shirt together with one hand. With the back of the other she dabbed ineffectually at the tears and the snot she knew must be all over her face, and glanced down at herself. For the first time she noticed that she was covered in blood.
The older officer reached out as if to help her stand up.
‘You’d better come with us, love,’ he said in a purposefully friendly tone of voice, his vowels distinctly Bristol. ‘We’ll take you back to the station. Get all this sorted out. Nothing to worry about.’
They drove her to Trinity Road police station where she was examined by a police doctor. Her clothes were removed from her and replaced with a white paper suit. Her fingerprints were taken, DNA extracted, and she was photographed. She had not been arrested, so she was asked for permission at every stage, which she gave at once. She didn’t see how she could refuse. She felt as if she were in a kind of trance, and all of this must surely be happening to someone else. Her ankle continued to throb so badly, it was mostly impossible for her to think beyond the pain. The doctor muttered something about arranging an X-Ray.
Meanwhile Lilian was given paracetamol, escorted to an interview room and asked to wait. Occasional razor-sharp pains shot up and down her injured leg, but eventually it did become more comfortable. In any case, Lilian was a lapsed Catholic. She did guilt well. She thought that she deserved to suffer, after what she had done.
A tall thin constable, stoically silent and impassive, stood at the door. The time passed slowly. It felt as if she were alone in the little room, except for her poker-faced guard, for hours. She couldn’t be sure, as she had no watch. She was brought food on a tray. But nobody spoke to her. At one point she asked to go to the toilet. A young woman constable was summoned to escort her. She waited right outside the cubicle.
Lilian felt like a criminal. She supposed she was a criminal. She had killed her husband. She wasn’t afraid of the process of the law. Not yet. She knew that she had acted in self-defence and she just assumed, with the track record of her time in hospital and the attack that had led to it, and with a warrant already out for Kurt’s arrest, that this would be accepted by the authorities.
She felt relief that she would never again be confronted by the man who had caused her so much pain, both physical and mental. But she already regretted that she had taken another human life.
Eventually two policemen, one in uniform and one wearing a dark grey suit and overly bright tie, arrived.
The suit, a small man with bloodshot eyes, introduced himself as Detective Sergeant McDermott and the uniformed officer as Constable Richardson. She recognized Richardson, overweight, his face more florid than was healthy, as the older of the two constables who had collected her from the phone box.
Richardson set the interview room’s recording apparatus in operation, and announced the names of those present, the date and the time as four fifteen p.m. It must have been around mid-morning when they’d brought her to the station, Lilian thought. She had indeed been waiting in the little interview room for several hours.
DS McDermott asked if she wished to have a lawyer present. She shook her head. No lawyer could alter what had happened, that was for sure. She had killed Kurt. She had to accept the consequences.
‘Right, Mrs St John, what I would like you to do first is to tell me in your own words exactly what happened today between you and your husband,’ began DS McDermott.
Lilian did her best to do so.
‘I had to get away from him, that’s why I came to Bristol,’ she began. ‘But he followed me. He put a tracker on my car. That’s how he found me so quickly. He said he wanted to rebuild our marriage. He made me go to the hotel with him. I was so afraid. He has always been violent. He attacked me in the hotel room, and I panicked. I was desperate to escape again. That’s when it happened... I didn’t know what I was doing.’
Lilian was all too aware that she was not telling her story well, but was somehow incapable of doing any better.
DS McDermott smiled thinly. ‘It’s all right, Mrs St John,’ he said, not unsympathetically. ‘Obviously this is very difficult for you. But we do need a little more detail here. You say Mr St John attacked you. What did he do exactly?’
Lilian tried to explain the sequence of events at the hotel, how she had attempted to leave, and Kurt had stopped her, grabbing hold of her. She admitted that she had smashed the vase over his head, nearly knocking him out.
‘But then he came at me, really came at me.’
‘Let’s be absolutely clear here,’ McDermott responded. ‘You appear to be admitting that it was actually you who was first violent to your husband earlier today. Is that so?’
‘Uh, no. Well. I’m not sure. He grabbed my arm. Pulled me back into the room...’
‘Right, so he grabbed your arm and pulled you back into the room. Then you smashed a heavy vase over his head with such force that he received a deep cut and was nearly rendered unconscious. That could be regarded as rather an extreme reaction, Mrs St John, don’t you think?’
Lilian hoped she was imagining things but the policeman’s voice seemed cooler, although his manner remained professional and unthreatening.
‘You didn’t know him, didn’t know what he was capable of...’
Lilian realized she was making a mess of things. She felt the room beginning to swim.
‘Are you all right, Mrs St John?’
Automatically Lilian nodded. She actually didn’t think she’d ever felt less all right in her entire life.
‘OK, so let’s continue, shall we? You say that after you’d smashed a vase over his head, your husband “came at me, really came at me”. Is that correct?’
‘Yes. He hit me in the face, and in the stomach.’
‘Again, we need to be very clear on this. You have been examined by our doctor who found no sign of any noticeable injury in your abdominal area. And your face is unmarked except for the shadow of some old bruising.’