‘Meaning that you were at home with your landlady, enjoying a takeaway curry and a few cans of Special Brew.’ She was only so-so as a poker player: she kept the edge out of her voice and her face as expressionless as the keyboard player in Sparks, but there was a set to her shoulders that betrayed an underlying tension.
‘I don’t drink Special Brew,’ I temporised. ‘It was probably Theakston’s Old Peculier. Or maybe some kind of Belgian blond–’
‘You were at home,’ Basquiat repeated, cutting across me. ‘You didn’t go out the whole night until Detective Sergeant Coldwood came to collect you at four a.m.’
Backed into a corner, I gave a straight answer. Too bad it had to be a straight lie. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘To the best of my recollection, I didn’t go out.’
‘Not even to pick up a pack of cigarettes?’
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘Nicotine patches, then.’
‘I don’t smoke because I never got started.’
‘Dry-roasted peanuts. Salt-and-vinegar crisps. A DVD rental.’
‘No, no, and no.’
She nodded, satisfied. ‘And your landlady will corroborate this?’
I looked over Basquiat’s head at Coldwood, who was studying Van Gogh’s ever-cheerful sunflowers and didn’t meet my eye.
‘Ask her yourself,’ I suggested.
‘In good time. I’m just asking you if you’re happy with your alibi, from a structural point of view. Is it fit for purpose, Castor? Will it take the strain?’
I looked her in the eye. ‘Alibi?’ I repeated, as if it was a word I’d never heard before.
‘If you were down in South London that night, you might not want to tell us about it.’
‘I can’t even remember the last time I was south of the river,’ I said. ‘Well, I mean before this thing broke.’
‘Days? Weeks? Months?’
‘Months. Must have been.’
‘How many months?’
‘At least six.’
Basquiat didn’t answer, but she did finally unzip the document wallet. On top of the papers inside was a small stack of A4-sized photographs, one of which she held up for me to see. It was a grainy enlargement from a badly framed original, taken at night without a flash but with some kind of light-enhancement technique that made everything into an over-contrasted soot-and-chalk cartoon. It showed a white Bedford van, stationary at a traffic light. Someone had drawn a ring around the registration plate in thick black marker.
Basquiat flicked that photo down onto my bedsheets like a blackjack dealer, revealing the second one behind it. This was a zoom in from the previous image, focusing on the driver. He was hunched over the wheel, squinting sideways at the red light that had stopped him in his tracks as though he could make it turn green just by facing it down. The resolution was surprisingly good: it was me at the wheel, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt. Basquiat dealt me that one too and showed me the third: a close-up on my face, the image looking a little washed out and raggedy-edged this time. So did I, for that matter. My mother would have said ‘Poor Felix!’ by automatic reflex.
‘Speed camera?’ I asked, conversationally.
‘Do you see any motion blur? Bus-lane camera, Castor. St George’s Road, Elephant and Castle. You tried to overtake a truck in the left-hand lane and got caught by the red at just the wrong moment. This was three weeks ago. The night of the third. ‘
I handed her the first two photos back. Might as well keep the whole set together.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You got me. Being vague on dates isn’t evidence of murder, though.’
‘No, just of having something you needed to lie about. We traced the reg back to a dodgy little runt in Cheshunt. Name of Packer. The worst kind of dodgy little runt, in a lot of ways — the kind that’s on parole, and caves in at the first whiff of a search warrant. He was telling us first of all that he’d hired the van out to a Greek gentleman named Economides. But I reminded him that every time a lag on probation actively colludes in a criminal enterprise, a fairy dies. After that he was only too happy to put your name in the frame.’
Thanks, Packer, I thought sourly. I owe you one, mate. But hard on the heels of that thought came the twin realisations that he didn’t have any choice and it didn’t make any difference. Once they had the van they had as much supporting evidence as they liked. My fingerprints would be all over it in any case. Basquiat had found a smoking pistol — but it was the wrong pistol, and the wrong crime. Looking for evidence that I’d tried to murder Kenny, she’d found the trail that linked me to Rafi’s escape.
I waited for her to tell me I had the right to remain silent, but she didn’t seem in any hurry to wrap this up.
‘So what were you doing in Elephant and Castle at half past midnight?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘Getting into line early for the tropical house? Or crossing over into South London by a route that wasn’t the shortest line between your gaff and Seddon’s?’
This was bad. Worse than bad, probably. At the Stanger we’d been careful not to park anywhere within range of the one visible security camera, but the nurse on reception had seen the van and presumably the description was right there in the police report. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. The only way I could get myself off the hook for attempted murder was to put myself on a different hook labelled grand theft Ditko. Either that or pray that Kenny would come out of his coma and agree to be a character witness. Under the circumstances, dumb insolence was the closest thing to a strategy I could scrape up.
Basquiat didn’t mind. She was keeping her end of the conversation up very well without me.
‘So we’ve got you in the vicinity of the Salisbury Estate,’ she summarised. ‘Admittedly, some weeks before the attack on Kenny Seddon, but — to make things more interesting — in a van you took the trouble to hire under an assumed name. And we’ve got you lying about it in evidence freely given to an investigating officer — both now and when I asked you the first time down at the Cromwell Road nick. Are we having fun yet, Castor? Because it gets better.’
I looked at Coldwood again. This time he met my gaze. He touched his lips, which were closed, presumably to indicate that I had nothing to gain by running my mouth off here. It was a fair point, but not one that I needed coaching in.
‘You were seen on the Salisbury Estate,’ Basquiat went on. ‘Two nights ago. Barely twenty-four hours after you were released from police custody. I’ve got positive ID from two separate sources. I ought to be embarrassed about how easy you’re making this, but hell, these days it takes a lot to make me blush. Now tell me what you were up to, and maybe when you come out on the far side of this you won’t be quite old enough to claim your pension.’
Her tone had become even colder and more clipped in the course of this speech, and she was leaning forward, her face just a little too close to mine. Two separate sources? I thought irrelevantly. Was one of them Catholic? Was the other Gary? Where did the Pope shit these days, anyway?
‘I was looking into the attack on Kenny myself,’ I began, ‘because it seemed pretty likely that I was going to end up in the frame for it–’
‘You built the bloody frame,’ Coldwood growled — his first contribution to the proceedings. I knew what he meant. I couldn’t have put myself in a shittier position if I’d been trying. But hope springs eternal, especially when you’ve got nothing else to fall back on.
‘Kenny was sending me a message,’ I said. ‘The words on the car windscreen were like — the last throw of the dice. He wanted me to look at what was happening down on the Salisbury, so he did the only thing he could think to do as he was bleeding out.’
‘And you felt like you had to honour his last request?’ Gary concluded. Basquiat clenched her fists and swung round to give him a look, but she was too late to stop him from spoiling her game plan. I took the sucker punch to the chest, not to the chin.
‘Kenny’s dead,’ I said, feeling a momentary sense of vertigo.