After maybe a minute it rang again. I flicked it open.
‘Hello?’
‘Felix.’ It was Matt’s voice, and hearing it I remembered how our last meeting had ended: probably that was why his tone sounded so guarded. But maybe he’d had second thoughts about letting me in on what he and his dubious friends were up to at the Salisbury.
‘Hi, Matt,’ I said. ‘How’s your soul?’
There was a long silence. Maybe it wasn’t the most tactful way of starting the conversation, but then I was feeling too bruised and battered to be interested in my brother’s tender feelings. ‘Something you want to share?’ I prompted him. ‘Or are you calling me out of the blue because you decided that “brother’s keeper” line was too cheap a shot to let stand?’
Another silence.
‘This is my statutory phone call, Fix,’ Matt said at last, his voice unnaturally calm. ‘I’m at Cromwell Road police station. I’m under arrest for murder.’
15
The interview suite at Cromwell Road reminded me of the classrooms at the Alsop Comprehensive School for Boys, where I spent the years between changing up from short trousers and leaving home. The resemblance wasn’t immediately obvious, because the classrooms at Alsop mostly had windows whereas the Cromwell Road interview rooms are below ground and therefore don’t. And you never had to be swiped in through the doors at Alsop by a burly constable wearing a hundredweight of ironmongery at his belt. Moreover, the teachers at Alsop were for the most part saintly men and women who got little reward for plucking the flowers of higher learning and strewing them at our ungrateful feet: you’d be hard put to it to find a saint in a London cop shop, unless he’d just been done for resisting arrest.
So I suppose it was just the institutional thing: not quite ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’, but the feeling that you’re handing over some portion of your life into someone else’s hands, to be tagged and bagged and given back to you later, maybe, if they can find it again and if it’s still identifiable as yours. Fatalism descends on you like a stifling woolly blanket as the door closes behind you.
Gary Coldwood was sitting in a tubular steel chair with a red plastic seat — some kind of Platonic archetype of cheap, nasty, totally disposable furniture. But he stood up as I came into the room.
The surroundings were sparse. Just a table and two chairs, a green plastic wastebasket and, for some reason that escaped me, a poster on the far wall advertising all the many benefits of using a condom. When having sex, I assumed, rather than, say, for piping crème de chantilly or impromptu party decorations.
‘Go and get Matthew Castor from the remand cells,’ Gary said to the cop with the keys. ‘Sign him in here for thirty minutes on my bounce code. Seven-thirteen.’
The uniform hesitated. ‘Can’t use these rooms for visits, sarge,’ he said, in a timid tone that sounded like it didn’t know what it was doing in his square-jawed, bushy-bearded mouth.
‘It’s not a visit,’ Gary said. ‘It’s an interview.’
The uniform still didn’t seem entirely happy. He shot a look at me that spoke twenty-seven volumes plus an appendix. ‘But, you know, for an interview,’ he said. ‘If there’s a civilian observer, you’ve got to fill in a–’
‘What civilian do you mean?’ Gary asked mildly.
The constable thought this through, and eventually got there. ‘Right you are, sarge,’ he said, in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink kind of voice, and he went on his way.
‘Thanks,’ I said to Coldwood.
‘You’re welcome.’
‘And thanks for the heads-up, too, you duplicitous bastard.’
Coldwood nodded. ‘Which is why we’re in here,’ he said, ‘and all on our lonesomes. Get it out of your system, Fix.’
‘You fucking knew she was going after Matt.’ I thrust a finger at his face. ‘You knew it, and you didn’t tell me.’
Gary nodded. ‘Right. I knew it. Did you?’
‘No!’ I exploded. ‘If I’d had the slightest fucking inkling, I’d have warned him. And I’d have kept my mouth shut in front of you and your better half, you back-stabbing little pig-farmer.’
‘I’m going to have to smack you,’ Gary admonished me.
‘On an interview?’
‘You had the marks when you came in. You’ve seen how reliable a witness PC Dennison is.’
‘Gary, why the fuck didn’t you at least give me a–’
‘Because it’s an open and shut case,’ Gary said. ‘And your best bet, if you really had nothing to do with it, was to stay well clear. Whereas if I’d told you we were about to arrest your brother, you’d have gone barging in like a fuckwit, probably got yourself seen tampering with the evidence and ended up on a bloody conspiracy charge. Because what you’re short on, Fix — what you do not have even a bastard trace of — is peripheral vision. You only see what you’re going for, and you walk right into every bleeding thing else.’
Gary had been talking in his usual voice when he started that little speech, but he was shouting when he got to the end of it. I opened my mouth to shout back, and — to my complete and absolute amazement — he was as good as his word. He clocked me a solid one on the mouth.
It wasn’t hard enough to knock me down, but it made me stagger. I blinked twice and shook my head. Licking my lips, I tasted blood. ‘Son of a bitch,’ I growled, and I started forward with my fists up. But Gary just stood there, staring me down, and after a moment I let my hands fall again.
‘Are you ready to listen to reason now?’ he asked.
I spat on the floor — a thick red gobbet — then met his gaze. ‘Have you got any?’
Gary breathed out heavily. ‘What I’ve got, Fix, is evidence. Which I’m about to share with you out of the goodness of my heart — unless you piss me off so much that I sign off early and forget you’re stuck in here until the morning. If you’re interested, sit down and shut up. Otherwise, say something really clever and sarcastic and I’ll be happy to leave you to it.’
After a moment’s painfully weighted silence, I sat down in the other chair, giving him a shrug and a wave.
‘The writing on the windscreen,’ Gary said.
‘Points to me,’ I observed.
‘No. It doesn’t.’
‘What, you know another F. Castor, Gary?’
‘We put the lab boys on it, Fix. The letters had been washed or smeared away, but the oil traces from Seddon’s fingertip were still there on the glass. He didn’t write “Felix Castor”. He wrote “Father Castor”.’
I opened my mouth to speak, but the words fled away into my hind-brain and my mouth just hung open, waiting for them to come back.
‘So then we looked at your brother’s movements,’ Gary said. ‘He was seen leaving that Saint Bon Appetit place around midnight, although he’d previously told a colleague that he was turning in for the night. We’ve got his car on CCTV twice, once in Streatham and once at Herne Hill. And — get this, Fix — the priest in the room next to his is woken up at four the next morning by the sound of someone crying. Loud, uncontrollable sobbing, in his own words, coming from Matthew’s room. And he’s prepared to go on record that it was Father Castor he was hearing.’
I found a word floating somewhere in the void that seemed as though it might be relevant and serviceable. ‘Circumstantial,’ I said. ‘It’s all circumstantial.’
‘Maybe it is,’ Gary allowed. ‘But it was enough to get us a warrant. And the Basilisk was careful to shake you first, before she went in, just in case the forensics didn’t play. She got your statement, which placed Matthew Castor at the Salisbury both before and after the fact.’
I shook my head in protest. ‘Not before. I couldn’t eyewitness him before. I just said he was with Gwillam, and Gwillam–’
‘None of it matters, Fix.’ Gary cut across me impatiently. ‘Because the forensics did play out. Matthew’s fingerprints and boot print match, a hundred per cent. And this just in — we shagged the phone records for the place where Matthew teaches. Him and Seddon were gabbing away every day for a week before the killing. They met up in that car, and your brother brought a straight razor with him. He brought an accomplice, too, and we’re still working on that. But we’ve got him, Fix. If he’s innocent, then this is a fit-up so immaculate that only God could have pulled it off.’