‘Am I allowed to be cheeky?’ I’d asked.
‘No you’re fucking not,’ said Seawoll.
‘I’m afraid it has to be done, sir,’ I said to Albert Pryce.
‘Does it? Or do we just think it does?’ he asked. ‘Did you join the police to do paperwork? Of course you didn’t.’
I made a show of straightening my papers and looked at Albertina, who was resolutely staring at the point on the table where her phone would have been if we hadn’t asked her to leave it in her bag.
‘Would you say you were Christina’s best friend?’ I asked.
‘Maybe,’ she said.
‘Oh, come on,’ said her father, ‘you practically lived in each other’s pockets.’
Albertina glared at him, but either long exposure had rendered him immune or, more likely I thought, it didn’t even register. Seawoll had told me not to be cheeky, but there’s cheeky and then there’s cheeky.
‘Did you see a lot of Christina Chorley, then, sir?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, very clever,’ he said. ‘Middle aged man, young girls, let’s have a little dig, see what we can find? Is that it?’
‘We’re merely looking to establish a timeline,’ I said.
‘Interesting that you refer to the collective “we” there,’ he said. ‘Is that why you joined the police? To find an identity? You’ve got an old fashioned working class London accent, so I’m betting your mum was a native, south of the river, maybe Deptford, maybe from an old Southwark family.’
God help me, but I couldn’t stop myself saying, ‘Pretty much.’
‘So there you were, growing up stuck somewhere between black and white,’ said Mr Pryce. ‘Never really one thing or the other. I mean . . . absent a father figure for you to build your black identity around and, being a proper working class bloke, not comfortable with your feminine side. I’ll bet you didn’t do well at school – right? Bit of a rebel, acting up.’
‘I had my moments,’ I said, thinking of the time me and Colin Sachlaw borrowed a lump of dry ice from the chemistry lab and slid it into the girl’s toilets. I didn’t mind the week of detention, but they called mum at work. And that didn’t end well.
‘So, hello police,’ said Mr Pryce. ‘A nice uniform identity, a little authority and, god knows, after Macpherson they’d be desperate enough to recruit you to overlook any educational deficiencies.’
That, as they say, is fighting talk. But, as Nightingale once told me during boxing practise, the best blow is the one your opponent doesn’t even notice until he keels over.
‘I don’t blame you,’ said Mr Pryce, not noticing his daughter’s look of disgust. ‘Scrabbling for some structure in the wreckage of the permissive society to make a meaningful connection with other people. But we don’t do that anymore, do we? Listen to other people. The mighty Self has obliterated our ability to communicate.’
‘Dad,’ said Albertina.
‘You’re lucky, though,’ he said. ‘It could have been Islam, couldn’t it? The siren song of the mad mullahs, or the rough fellowship of the gang. Did smiting the infidel not appeal? Did you have something against drugs?’
‘Dad!’ screamed Albertina. ‘For god’s sake shut the fuck-up.’
Her dad’s mouth closed with a click and he looked guiltily at his daughter in a way that suggested to me that things like parent-teacher conferences and the like might have followed a similar pattern.
Albertina turned to me, controlled her breathing, and asked whether it was alright if she could choose her own responsible adult – thank you very much.
Her dad was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid. So the next responsible adult was a suspiciously competent criminal solicitor whose parents might have been from the Kashmir but who spoke with a Bradford accent. He also slicked his thick black hair back with gel and, I suspected, wished he could wear his aviator sunglasses indoors. We got on famously.
Stephanopoulos took the opportunity to get a separate statement from Albert Pryce and sent in Guleed to do the honours. I wondered what she was going to make of the mad mullahs.
‘I’m sorry about my dad,’ Albertina said as soon as we sat down.
I’d fetched in some coffee for me, a bottle of iced tea for her and a plate of biscuits to add to the whole we’re just having a chat vibe and Stephanopoulos gave me permission to take off my jacket and roll up my sleeves.
‘Mine always talks about jazz,’ I said.
‘You have it easy,’ she said and we both turned to the solicitor who gave a little shake of his head.
‘Can I remind you that we’re conducting an interview here,’ he said.
‘Come on,’ said Albertina. ‘You have a go, too. Then we can get all serious.’
‘Politics,’ said the solicitor finally. ‘He goes on and on about the partition.’
Albertina asked what partition that was.
‘The partition of India,’ said the solicitor. ‘Now can we get on?’
Albertina sighed and asked me what I wanted to know.
‘When was the last time Christina stayed the weekend at your place?’ I asked.
‘Three weeks ago,’ she said. I looked up the dates and confirmed them.
‘And before that?’
Albertina had to think about it, but she thought it was probably three or four weeks before that.
‘Do you know if she was telling her father that she was staying with you, but then staying with somebody else?’ I asked.
‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘I had to cover for her.’
‘Do you know who Christina was staying with?’
‘Some man,’ she said with a definite emphasis on the word man – as opposed to a boy.
I asked if this man had a name.
‘Raymond,’ she said. ‘No wait. Reynard – like he was French.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’
She shook her head.
‘So you never met him?’ I asked this to avoid the whole for the record Miss Pryce has shaken her head, which can come back to bite you in court.
‘I never met him,’ she said.
‘But you knew he was an adult?’
‘It’s not like Christina ever shut up about it,’ said Albertina. ‘Although, to give her her due, unlike Dad, she didn’t feel the urge to write it all down and publish it for everyone to see.’
Albert Pryce’s last book but one, An Immovable Subject, had been a semi-autobiographical account of how he’d left his second wife – Albertina’s mother – after falling in love with an American intern half his age.
‘You’re sure his name is Reynard?’
‘Oh, definitely,’ she said.
‘Was there anything unusual about him?’
‘Like what?’
‘Did anything Christina said about him strike you as unusual?’
‘She said he was a prince,’ said Albertina.
I asked whether Christina had said where Reynard was a prince of.
‘Not that kind of prince,’ said Albertina. ‘Chris said he was a fairy tale prince.’
‘Interesting,’ I said, and asked if Albertina knew how Christina and her ‘prince’ had met. While I did that, I wrote the word NIGHTINGALE on my pad in large enough letters to be picked up by the camera and then I underlined it twice.
The word ‘bollocks’ is one of the most beautiful and flexible in the English language. It can be used to express emotional states ranging from ecstatic surprise to weary resignation in the face of inevitable disaster. And Seawoll was definitely veering towards the latter when we all sat down in his office to talk about Reynard Fossman.
‘Bollocks,’ said Seawoll.
‘And he came to see you last night?’ asked Stephanopoulos.
I read them in on my brief encounter with Reynard at the gig and his message to Nightingale.