Now – 20th March
The new building is now eight storeys high and Callum still hasn’t come home.
Twenty-four hours has become two days, which means the police have information compelling enough to keep him in custody, even though he’s innocent and the murderer – I see from her social media – is currently in Hackney protesting the closure of a day nursery and I, the accomplice, am here on my balcony watching the final steels going on to the roof of Rise 2.
What can they possibly have on him?
Is it just that he’s a lone man of a certain age, living in a flat that he hasn’t decorated since his parents died? Or that he’s an ex-soldier; what would a profiler make of that? It makes him dangerous, experienced in killing; would they say he got a thirst for it that civilian life can’t slake? That he snapped, that he has PTSD and can’t help himself? They don’t blame him: the army did it, they’ll say. We understand; just tell us the truth and we can make sure you get the help you need.
Callum is the perfect scapegoat.
He has no alibi and he looks wrong. Never mind there can’t be any actual evidence against him. Sometimes that’s enough.
I don’t know how he’ll be holding up under questioning. His life is regular and ordered and I’ve long suspected he needs it to be that way to keep himself on an even keel. Could he be one of those men who crack in the confinement of a holding cell? Will two nights hearing the racket of other prisoners be enough to make him confess to something he didn’t do?
The thought of him, sleep-deprived and vulnerable, makes my eyes sting, and I can pretend it’s the wind cutting across the site but it isn’t. I’m surprised by the depth of this feeling, then ashamed of myself for being surprised that I miss him, that I’m scared for him.
It’s so easy to imagine some old stain on his soul being laid out in front of him and this new crime seeming like a way for him to finally atone.
I know he’s wracked by guilt. I’ve heard him scream in his sleep on bad nights and tasted tears on his face the morning after the quietly tortuous ones. Part of him wants to confess, and God knows I understand that. Not the urge to tell the law but to tell someone. There have been moments when the words almost spilled out of me – ‘Ella killed a man and I helped her cover it up.’ The night after it happened, when he told me he heard Ella arguing outside his flat, the night he sat so pale and shaken in my kitchen with the image of the corpse he’d found filling his eyes. Almost every time we were alone together I could have said something.
And maybe I should have.
Maybe if we’d shared our darkest secrets we’d both have found a kind of peace.
If he’d shown me his demons and let me give him whatever absolution a lover can, then maybe he’d have a fighting chance of getting through this.
But what if it isn’t him they suspect?
What if they’re going to use him to get to me?
If I hadn’t been in his flat when they came to arrest him perhaps he would already be free. There’s a chance he’s being pumped for information rather than confession.
I go back inside, slide the door closed behind me, blocking out some but not all of the building-site clamour, drop into the chair at my desk and run through what he knows.
Callum heard Ella arguing with a man on the night it happened.
He doesn’t know it’s the man she killed but it’s hardly a wild deductive leap and even if he says nothing to Wazir, I know it will be preying on his mind.
I need to be tough about this, put my emotions aside for a moment.
Would he grass? Is he the type?
Callum isn’t one of us. He doesn’t share our sense of solidarity. Under pressure he won’t throw his chin up and say ‘no comment’ to every question fired at him.
I suspect he has a strong sense of morality lurking somewhere deep down. He wouldn’t be so haunted by his past if he didn’t. Which means, no matter how close we are, how friendly he’s always been to Ella, we can’t rely on him lying to protect us.
If they ask, he tells.
Wazir and her crew probably know by now that Ella was arguing with the dead man in the corridor, which means they could feasibly start to consider her a suspect and the fourth floor the place where he was killed.
They could already be making plans to return and toss the flats up there, filing search warrants and arrest warrants in mine and Ella’s names. They might already be out there looking for her.
I send her a quick text, telling her I’m feeling fluey and could she pick up some shopping for me? I add a short list of items. Say I’ll pay her back.
Part of me is thinking how it will look if it’s checked out later. Part is considering whether she’d actually turn up if I told her what was really happening. But we need to talk now, straighten our stories up.
Ten minutes of smoking and fingernail chewing and staring at the wall later, I get a text back to say no problem. She’ll be around in about an hour and make sure I put a scarf on to keep my neck warm.
While I wait for her I decide to try and get an update on Callum. Wazir’s card is in my desk drawer. I doubt I’ll get anything out of her, so I call the number for the station and get caught in an options system, which eventually leads me to a phone that rings and rings. I put the call on loudspeaker as I light another cigarette and let it keep on ringing, from a sense of perverse determination, sure that someone is sitting inches away from it.
Finally it cuts out and I swear into the empty flat.
Wazir it is.
Her mobile goes straight to voicemail. I picture her switching it off before she goes into the interview room and wonder if it’s Callum waiting in there for her. Another round, grind him down with repetition, the oldest, most boring trick in the world, but it works.
I think of her parting shot in the hallway the other night. ‘We’ll have your toy boy with us a lot longer than twenty-four hours.’
At the time I thought she was playing mind games with me, but now I realise they might actually have come for him with solid information.
I’m still thinking about it when Ella arrives, plastic carrier bags clutched in one hand, and walks straight through to the kitchen to unpack them, pausing briefly to look me over. ‘Oh, you don’t look very well at all, Mol.’
Is it any wonder?
I’m putting on more make-up just to bear the sight of myself in the mirror, an ever-thicker ring of kohl. Ella, by contrast, seems to be back to her old self and for a short and bitter moment I resent her youthful resilience.
‘Callum’s been arrested,’ I tell her.
Ella stops, clutching a loaf of bread. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. You talked to the police last.’
She slams the bread down. ‘Why would I say anything about him?’
‘Well, someone’s put them on to him.’
‘They’ll have been interviewing everyone from the guest list,’ she says slowly, as if it’s just dawning on her. ‘Maybe one of them mentioned the weird maintenance man and they ran with it.’
‘He isn’t weird,’ I snap.
‘I didn’t mean that, Molly. But he might look that way to other people.’ She glances towards the window, bites her lip. ‘How well do you really know him?’
‘Well enough.’
It’s a meaningless comeback and a lie. I’m not about to share what little I know about Callum with her and I feel a flicker of sadness that I no longer trust her enough to air my fears.
‘He was in the army, wasn’t he?’ she asks, stowing the bread in a cupboard, reaching for the marmalade she’s bought. ‘What did he do?’
‘He was a cook,’ I say firmly.
‘I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. He’s a grown man; he can take care of himself, right? He’ll probably be home later today when they realise he didn’t do anything.’
‘They’ve had him over twenty-four hours,’ I tell her. ‘They obviously have some kind of evidence or they wouldn’t be able to keep him in.’
She looks thoughtful. ‘He found the body. Do you think maybe Callum went to check if he was definitely dead and left his fingerprints or DNA or something?’
I’m sure that’s not how it happened. The man had been dead for days, no room for hope on a body that’s laid for that long. And Callum isn’t naïve, he’d know the difference between a corpse and someone who’s only unconscious. And how would he have reached the body? Jumped down into the lift shaft or climbed up through the service hatch?
‘It’s human nature,’ Ella says with a shrug, putting milk and butter in the fridge. ‘You see a body and you reach out for it. You want to help them.’
Strange, because that isn’t how she reacted when he was lying dead at her feet. She couldn’t bring herself to help me move him until I shouted at her. Her recollection is changing, she’s twisting it to suit some new narrative in her head. Maybe one where she wasn’t involved at all. That’s what good liars do, convince themselves it happened another way to make the story easier to sell.
And I’m realising that Ella is a well-practised liar, if not yet a good one.
At each turn she’s tried to wriggle away from the truth. I’ve presented a challenge to her and she’s countered. Over and again. She didn’t know him and then she did, but not well, and she didn’t see him at the party, but then the photographs contradicted her and so she couldn’t remember. I put her on the spot that time; she didn’t have chance to formulate an excuse.
Now, she’s concentrating on flattening out the empty carrier bags on the worktop, folding and smoothing them until each one is a small, neat square she can slip into the drawer next to the sink.
‘Callum heard the two of you arguing before you killed him,’ I say. ‘I told you that already, didn’t I?’
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘What if he tells the police about it?’
‘Then I’ll tell them the same thing. He was mistaken.’
She sounds so sure of herself. Her voice becoming clipped and prim, how I imagine her mother talks when she’s sending back something in a restaurant or telling the cleaner that her work isn’t up to par and she’ll have to do it again before she can go home.
I wonder if she used that voice with the police, letting them see where she comes from. Did she drop her father’s name to Wazir and Gull? Did she need to?
Faint disgust crimps her nose when she looks back at me and that’s something she can’t straighten out as deftly as a plastic bag. The emotions I’ve been tamping down the last two weeks are rising in my chest. It’s physically painful, facing up to what I’ve known but haven’t wanted to admit.
I was wrong about her.
Ella isn’t like me or Carol or any of the dozens and hundreds of people she’s worked alongside since she came to London. She might believe in the importance of the causes she supports, but she doesn’t care. Carol said Ella was a tourist, a little rich girl slumming down here to annoy her parents. That she was using the movement to build a name for herself with the ultimate aim of shifting into politics or some well-remunerated think-tank position in a couple of years’ time.
And I defended her. Time and again I stood up for her, telling Carol and God knows how many other doubters that we shouldn’t judge Ella on her background. She was her own person, I said. She wants to make a difference, I said. And I believed all of it, every stupid lie she fed me, right from the first brief conversation we had in the A&E department at St Mary’s while she sat with her arm broken and her spirit rising.
I was so gullible I could drop to my knees and die of shame on the kitchen floor.
But I can’t buckle, not yet.
‘Did you put the police on to Callum?’
She must be able to hear how furious I am, even though I speak in a low voice. How sad I am for losing him and losing her and already sinking into self-pity too.
‘How can you ask me that?’
‘People get in trouble around you, Ella. Have you noticed that? Other people suffer, but you walk away scot-free.’
‘Callum is going to be fine,’ she says softly, almost sing-song.
‘This isn’t just about Callum.’
Her eyes harden in an instant. ‘Brighams? You want to bring that up now? Like we don’t have enough to worry about.’
‘It’s all the same thing,’ I say, the words rushing out of me. ‘You got those blokes into it and when it all went pear-shaped, where were you? You ran off and left them to take the fall. And I fucking helped you! Like an idiot. I lied to the police for you then, just like I’m lying for you now, and I don’t think you’ve told me the truth about any of this.’
I press my lips together, trying to hold back the tears, but they’re pricking the corners of my eyes and I feel a lump in my chest, making every heartbeat reverberate like a blow.
‘That isn’t how it happened.’ She crosses the floor, propelled by an anger that seems to scare her. She takes a step back, visibly reins herself in. ‘Quinn promised me we were only going after the computers. That’s all I agreed to. You know that, Molly. He lied to me.’
‘And now he’s doing five years,’ I say in a strangled voice.
She throws her hands up, turns a circle in the middle of the kitchen.
‘Quinn’s out. Okay? He got released a while back.’
I blink at her. ‘How?’
‘How would I know? I just heard he’d got released early.’ She gives me an acidic smile. ‘Maybe he decided to turn informer. He knows everyone, Carol reckons; that’s the kind of information the police would spring him for, isn’t it?’
‘It was him,’ I say, before I’m fully aware of thinking it. ‘You killed Quinn.’
‘What? Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘He got early release and he came to have it out with you, didn’t he?’ I move in on her, feeling like I’m floating above the floor. ‘Carol was here; he must have come in with her. That’s who he was!’
Ella takes a deep breath but she swallows hard before she can speak. She’s almost as scared as on the night it happened. She’s trying to control it, but I know her too well to be sold the lie of composure she’s desperately reaching for as she tosses her head and drags her satchel off the counter.
‘This is stupid.’ She starts out of the kitchen, stiff-legged and jerky. ‘I’m going home. We can talk about this when you’ve calmed down.’
I follow her to the door, watch as she struggles with the tricky latch she’s usually alright with, but not when her fingers are shaking. Finally she gets it open and leaves without a backwards glance.
My hands are shaking as well. The rest of me along with them. I feel spun off my axis as I close the door and replace the chain, just like on any other day, like a person whose world hasn’t crashed around her. For a few more minutes I manage to keep up the facade for myself as I put away the shopping she’s left on the counter in her haste to storm out of here. I make a cup of tea and light a cigarette and realise as I stub it out that I have been talking to myself this whole time, muttering under my breath, questions and answers and entreaties and denials.
All pointless.
I go to my desk and google Ryan Quinn before I think better of it and by the time I realise how it might look to the police, in the event of them searching my computer, it’s too late. The screen is full of Ryan Quinns. But there’s only one image of the man I want. The Brighams attack wasn’t widely reported and where it was, the photos used were of the damage rather than the accused.
Until he was found guilty and then they used his police mugshot.
I was expecting an instant reaction, yes or no, but I can’t tell for sure if it was Ryan Quinn whose pulse I couldn’t find, whose body I carried along a semi-lit corridor and threw into a lift shaft.
This Quinn was photographed with the evidence of his crime still covering his clean-shaven face: smoke smudges and black smears and under it his skin a livid red from the heat he probably didn’t expect to flare so fast and fierce. His hair is blond, oddly fascist in its cut, and singed heavily, his brows and lashes gone.
I study the image more intensely than I’ve ever studied one before, trying to fit this face onto the one I remember from that night, but it’s impossible.
That man was thickly bearded and pale-skinned, how this man might have been before the fire, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe the line of his jaw is similar and the tilt of his brow. Prison can change people beyond all recognition. It could have made Quinn softer or harder and I’ve no way of knowing which.
An hour passes and I keep staring at the photo and still there’s a knot of fear and fury in my stomach.
Finally I do the only thing that will bring me peace or answers.
I call Carol.