Now – 31st March
‘You should have a solicitor,’ DC Wazir says.
‘I don’t need one. I haven’t done anything.’
Wazir doesn’t like it and Ella knows her boss won’t either. The solicitor isn’t really for you, it’s for them, especially when you take whoever’s on the duty roster, some stranger who doesn’t know you and doesn’t care about your fate. They won’t do any more than the bare minimum. But their presence serves the investigating officer because it guarantees that everything has been done properly.
Without a solicitor she could claim coercion later. Or worse.
She won’t do that. Her escape route is nothing so common as playing the victim, but she feels sure she won’t need it. Not this time, anyway. This is a fishing expedition and as long as she stays cool, stays composed, then she’ll learn more from them than they’ll learn from her.
Because the problem with detectives, especially the ones like Wazir, who’s probably been underestimated her whole life, is the desperate need to display the intelligence people can’t believe they have. Show them disrespect, scratch that raw nerve, and they’ll overwhelm you with the evidence of their superiority.
Another life lesson from her dad and Ella doubts he ever thought she’d use it in this context. It was advice to help her climb the greasy pole once she was on the graduate fast track. He’d wanted her to understand how the officers above her worked so she could ultimately take their jobs. He has a Machiavellian streak he’s tried to pass on to her and not much of it has stuck, but she’s grateful for it in moments like this when she can summon his steady voice in her head and have him talk her through an awkward situation.
Wazir sighs, theatrically, and goes to get her boss.
Ella holds herself straight in the hard, plastic chair, resists the almost overwhelming urge to let out the nervous sigh that is fluttering in her chest. The camera is on, high in the corner, watching over her, and she knows the DI in charge of the case will have the feed playing onscreen in his office, studying her body language, waiting for her to give some small sign that she’s weakened and ready to say more than she should.
She tries to look how the Ella Riordan they think she is should look at this moment. Defiant but unconcerned. This isn’t her first interview room and, given her activism, she doesn’t expect it to be her last. Just the price of making your voice heard, standing up for others, taking the establishment’s heat.
Inside, the Ella Riordan they don’t know she is feels very different.
But she can’t let them see the fear churning in her stomach, the sick feeling that has somehow spread to her bones and skin and the fluid inside her spine, every atom of her spinning dangerously close to losing control.
She wants a drink of the water Wazir brought in but doesn’t trust herself to lift the bottle steadily. She’s dehydrated from being hauled out of bed two hours ago and given nothing since. With a deliberate movement that she hopes looks like boredom, she drags the bottle off the table and uncaps it in her lap, glad she hid the motion when she sees how badly she’s trembling. She takes a sip to wet her tongue but no more, knows that if she drinks it all down she’ll only feel worse.
They want her to do that. Drink too much, need to pee. Because people will say anything when they feel some urgent physical pressure.
Or, they want her to not drink because dehydration knocks points off your IQ, slows your responses and dulls your recognition.
It’s a no-win situation.
She tells herself to stop second-guessing them and focus on what she does know and what she can control.
Ella stares at the wall opposite her. White-painted and pristine, so recently redone she detects a hint of chemicals in the air still, along with the taint of her own body. She’s rank from not showering for two days and from living in these joggers and jumper, sweating in them, pacing in them. Forty-eight fitful hours trying to decide whether to call her father and tell him everything.
If she walks out of here today she’ll ring him.
Take this as a warning and do the right thing. He’s going to be tough on her. She can already picture the depth of disappointment creasing his face and dropping his shoulders. Then she sees him grimace and gasp and clutch his chest.
Shit.
No.
She can’t tell him. Not the whole, unfiltered truth. She’ll have to decide upon a different truth for him, but she’ll have three hours on the train to do that and she’s tested several versions out on Molly already, so she knows what doesn’t work.
Without thinking she clasps her hands on the tabletop, every muscle from her hips to her skull tensing up at once.
Molly.
This must have come from her. After all her big talk about never grassing and protecting your brothers and sisters, Molly has betrayed her. She should have known. People who are that clingy are always the ones who turn on you the hardest when the time comes. They invest too much in you because it distracts them from the holes in their lives and then, when you don’t live up to the idealised version that only exists in their heads, it’s all your fault.
But it is her own fault, Ella realises.
Right from the start of this mess she handled Molly badly.
The woman craved emotional connection, to have someone who would stand firm with her in her beliefs and causes. If she’d come clean with Molly as they stood over his body in flat 402, she would have shielded her from the police, because the truth – or the ninety per cent of it Ella could give her – chimed perfectly with Molly’s world-view and personal history. It would have bonded them stronger than a thousand hours of sit-ins and marches.
She’d almost done it, too.
As she’d sat there alone, watching the life go out of his eyes, she’d calculated how much she could afford to reveal and what would have to stay secret. She’d tried to predict Molly’s reaction based on the direction of her various loyalties and their relevant potency, and decided, finally, regretfully, that they weren’t close enough yet for her to be relied upon.
Yes, Molly had covered for her in the past but always with a slight reluctance. She’d seen it the night of the Brighams arson, a split second of fear that made Molly look all of her years suddenly.
Instead, scared and muddled, Ella had settled on an ugly half measure – manoeuvre Molly into helping her get rid of his body and provide her with a credible story for how he died. And then, just when she needed to bind Molly closer to her, she ignored all of her instincts and did the exact opposite: pulled away, dropped out of contact, piled lie upon lie. Giving in to the childlike urge to run and hide and pretend none of it had happened, just stay quiet and wait for the adults to come and tidy up after her.
No wonder Molly turned on her. It’s all she deserved.
The interview-room door opens and Wazir comes in, trailed by an improbably tall, middle-aged guy, so pale and insubstantial Ella feels she can see straight through him. He folds himself into the seat opposite her and says nothing as Wazir performs the formalities in her brisk fashion. But he keeps watching Ella. His long fingers twitch on the frame of the tablet he’s brought with him, as if he can’t wait to show her what the device contains.
Ella meets his gaze, sees the hunger in his eyes, despite the stony expression.
Her stomach gurgles and she resists the urge to apologise, states her name for the record at Wazir’s prompt.
He does the same. DCI Sean Naysmith. London accent, or Estuary at least.
‘Before we begin, I would urge you to reconsider continuing without legal counsel present,’ he says.
‘I don’t need a solicitor,’ Ella replies. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
Naysmith’s eyebrows lift very slightly and he touches the knot of his tie, straightening it needlessly. ‘If you change your mind at any point, make sure you speak up, Ms Riordan.’
Suddenly she wants to speak up, so urgently she has to press her lips tight together. Say the magic words and make all of this stop, but it’s too soon. There’s still a chance she can get out from under what she’s done. Who she’s killed.
Wait, she tells herself. You might be okay.
‘Can you identify this man for us, please?’ Naysmith asks, pushing the tablet across the table to her.
The face onscreen is several days dead, the skin discoloured, marbled with veins full of blood gone bad, bloated beyond recognition for a casual acquaintance.
But Ella knew him better than that. Would have recognised him by the line of his lower lip or the way the tip of his nose turned up and narrowed almost to a point, an oddly feminine quirk for such a masculine man.
This will not be okay.
‘Um…’ She forces herself to keep looking at the screen, feeling revulsion, which she hopes they read as a reaction to the shocking sight in front of her. She presses her knuckles to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, this is – I think you could have warned me.’
‘You must have seen this sort of thing during your police training,’ Naysmith says coolly.
‘She didn’t get that far,’ Wazir chips in. ‘How long did you last, Ella? Six weeks, was it?’
Ella doesn’t answer, keeps staring at the image onscreen, remembering how close that snub nose had been to her own, how hot his breath bloomed across her face as he shouted at her, his hand clamped around the back of her neck, rough-skinned and stronger even than she thought he was. She remembers the rage boiling off him, the sharpness of his sweat and how she knew he would kill her. If she didn’t stop him.
But they wouldn’t care about that.
Better the innocent dead victim than the live one whose guilt is up for debate. So much messier to be guilty and innocent at the same time.
‘Are you going to pretend you don’t know him?’ Naysmith asks, propping one icepick-thin elbow on the table.
‘I don’t recognise this man,’ Ella says.
Naysmith reaches over and swipes the screen. ‘How about now?’
The same upturned nose and full bottom lip stretched into a broad grin.
‘Name eluding you?’ Wazir asks. ‘Funny that, considering how many times you used it to register complaints against him.’
She has a few sheets of paper stapled together and she makes a show of looking through them.
‘This is a good one – from the statement you made on April the seventh 2015, after he put you in hospital with two broken ribs. “Adam Pearce is not fit to wear the uniform of Her Majesty’s Constabulary. He represents everything that was wrong with previous generations of police officers and, if you want to move forward into greater diversity and cooperation with the general public, you cannot allow a man as dangerous as Adam Pearce to represent you, out there, on the streets.”’
Ella listens to the words her father had written for her, the ones she’d spoken in that dreary wood-panelled room, which wasn’t a court but still laid down sentences and doled out punishment. They were part of another life, had been spoken by another Ella Riordan, and now they were returning to haunt her.
Just like Pearce had.
He was at the back of the party crowd when she spotted him from her milk-crate stage, the only person not clapping as she finished her speech, his face lit by one of the paper lanterns swinging in the breeze.
‘You got him put out of training,’ Wazir says, relishing every word and the implications behind them. ‘Adam had wanted to be a copper since he was four years old. Did you know that? His mum told us all about it. Her dad was a copper, too. Adam idolised him.’
Ella thinks of him taking another drink from his bottle of beer, the contempt he managed to project across the roof at her. So potent she took an involuntary step back off the crates and would have fallen if Molly hadn’t caught her. Everyone thought it was the drink. But she was completely sober. The alcohol neutralised by fear and adrenaline.
Wazir is still talking, Naysmith apparently happy to let her take the lead. A good copper, some old part of Ella’s brain thinks admiringly, letting his subordinate finish the job she started, enjoy the glory of nailing the murderer.
‘It’s quite clear from your complaint here, and the numerous ones brought before he attacked you, that Pearce was a violent individual.’ Wazir changes tone. ‘Do you want to tell us what happened, Ella?’
She doesn’t.
‘You were suffering from PTSD for some time after he attacked you,’ she says, more paperwork in her hand. Medical-looking. ‘I understand it’s quite common for people with PTSD to act in unpredictable ways when they’re faced with triggers. Like seeing their attacker again.’
Seeing him, she thinks. Being dragged down a set of stairs by him, along a hallway, trying to reason with him, find out what he wanted so she could give it to him and go back to her new and better life. Naively assuming that he was someone who could be negotiated with.
‘You must have been terrified,’ Wazir says softly.
Terrified was good. Terrified dredged up an offer that cut through his rage and slackened his hold on her arm.
‘People will understand, Ella.’
Meaning a jury. Not all people. Just the twelve who could convict her and put her away for a very long time.
‘Was it self-defence?’
Ella looks at Wazir, sees the desperation masquerading as concern, and knows she’s put this together herself, is staking her future on being right because, if she isn’t and she’s harassed ex-ACC Alec Riordan’s daughter without being able to prove her case, it’ll be the end. A few phone calls between old pals and an indelible black mark will be stamped on Wazir’s record.
Ella knows the look because she’s that young woman too.
If things had played out differently after the hearing maybe they would have ended up working together. They would have hated each other, of course. Too similar, she thinks, and too ambitious. The kind of colleagues who were smart enough to give the appearance of full and complete cooperation while they sharpened special blades for one another’s ribs.
Yes, Wazir’s scared but Naysmith isn’t. Which means this isn’t a punt. His experience is showing and Ella trusts it.
‘It would be better for you to own up now,’ he says. ‘A full confession, Ella. I think you acted in self-defence and then you panicked and hid his body. Which is entirely understandable given the circumstances. And, in all honesty, I feel a great deal of sympathy for you and I’d like to help you. But, I can’t do that unless you tell us what happened.’
Lies.
Obviously.
Ella knows what she’s done and that the post-mortem will have given them a very good idea of how the murder unfolded, too. Even the most expensive barrister would struggle to spin that into self-defence.
The first blow; maybe she could pass that off as an accident. He’d come at her, but after last time she was expecting it. And she was not that girl any more, the one who froze. She was stronger and faster and better drilled. So when he charged towards her she spun away and used his own momentum to turn him towards the fireplace, sticking out a foot, which upended him and sent him head first into the tiled hearth with a sickening crack.
That was somewhere between an accident and self-defence.
‘It wasn’t an accident, though, was it?’ Wazir asks.
Ella wonders how long they’ve been sitting here in silence. She glances towards the clock and sees that almost an hour has passed since the interview began and yet it feels like minutes. She’s losing perspective. Losing control.
‘One blow – that’s accidental. Self-defence? Okay.’ Wazir taps her inky-painted fingernails against the file. ‘But it wasn’t one blow, Ella. It was three. At least.’
She’d lost control then, too.
Four blows. The first an accident. Almost. The rest – with her hands gripping his ears through his knitted beanie, which slipped as she slammed his skull against the hearth – they were the actions of a person she didn’t recognise. Not New Ella. The one who gave interviews to the Guardian and hosted literary evenings at Foyles, the one who sat with old ladies she barely knew, reading to them because they weren’t able to since their stroke and they missed their Maeve Binchy stories.
Not even Old Ella did things like that.
When she was attacked, she froze and let the boot strikes rain down on her.
Whoever killed Pearce was someone else altogether. The version of her most capable of escaping from this filthy mess.
Ella looks between them; triumph on Wazir’s face, curiosity on Naysmith’s. She licks her lips, tastes copper where the thin skin has split and bled.
‘I want to speak to DCI Joe Dylan. I won’t speak to anyone else. You need to bring Dylan here, right now.’