'Suppose it had been one of them?' Michaelson said. 'How would you feel then?'
Alston stared back at him.
'Easy happen, Billy. Split second, someone out there with a gun.'
Alston shifted on his seat, hitched his shoulders and let his arms fall down by his side, long fingers, big hands.
'This little confrontation with St. Ann's,' Pike said. 'This meeting you had. There was always going to be trouble, right?'
Alston shrugged.
'Billy, you thought there'd be trouble?'
'Nothin' we couldn't handle, i'n it?'
'Nothing you couldn't handle.'
'Yeah, 's'right.'
'Because you had a gun.'
'I never had no gun.'
'Two days before, you were out trying to buy one.'
'No.'
'Pub car park out at Carlton. Half-eleven.'
'I don't know no pub out Carlton. I don't never go to no Carlton.'
'We've got a witness, Billy.'
'Yeah? Well, he's lyin'. Whoever it is, I'm tellin' you, he's lyin'.'
'You're not listening, Billy,' Michaelson said. 'We know you were there and we know why. You were there to buy a gun.'
'Bullshit!'
'One hundred and fifty pounds for a handgun and ammunition, that was the deal.'
Alston started to say something, then sat back, the beginnings of a smile on his face. 'Say, just say, right, I was there, like you say-'
His solicitor reached out a hand, as if to intervene.
'An' lessay, jus' for the sake of argument, right, I was thinkin' 'bout buyin' this gun.'
'Billy,' the solicitor said, 'I really don't think-'
'Then if you got someone was there, you know I didn't buy no gun, right?'
'Billy-'
'Could be, I was tempted to buy a piece, but then I realise, like you all always tellin' me, that's not such a cool thing to do. So I jus' walked away. Far as I know, ain't no law 'gainst thinkin' 'bout doin' somethin' an' if that's all I'm here for, you wastin' my time an' your own. Aw'right, Mr. Bond?'
'Fuck's sake, Charlie,' Bill Berry said. 'Little bastard's running 'em round in circles.'
Resnick told Michaelson to suspend the interview and allow Alston to take a break. Forty-five minutes later, he went back in there himself, taking Anil Khan with him, still hoping for something positive from the scene-of-crime officers searching the house.
According to Alston, the reason he backed out of the deal over the gun was that he realised it was stupid, get caught with a firearm in your possession, you were looking at serious time. And, no, he still maintained, as far as he knew, none of his crew had gone up to St. Ann's that day strapped. As for the identity of the shooter, he had no idea. No more than the police did themselves.
Resnick knew the clock was ticking down.
Charge him or let him go.
Resnick had been back at his own desk for twenty minutes or so when one of the duty officers rang up from below. 'Howard Brent, sir. He's down here now. Wants to see you if he can.'
Resnick sighed and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. 'I'll come down.'
Today Brent was wearing his blue Converse trainers with black jeans and a suede jacket, a white T-shirt with two overlapping gold chains, a gold ring in place of the diamond stud in his ear.
'Mr. Brent, what can I-?'
'You arrest someone for my daughter's murder, and I have to learn this when someone phone me from the paper.'
'Mr. Brent-'
'This is my daughter we talkin' about.'
'Mr. Brent, if you hadn't been so hostile towards officers engaged in this investigation-'
'Hostile? That's good comin' from you. You callin' me hostile.'
'If you hadn't persistently refused to have anything to do with the Family Liaison Officer appointed, then you would have been informed in the proper way, using the proper channels. As it is, I can confirm, yes, a suspect has been arrested and is currently being questioned at this station.'
'Alston, right?'
'Mr. Brent-'
'What everyone's sayin', Billy Alston. That's what everyone's sayin' on the street.'
'A statement-'
'Hey, man!' Brent jabbed a finger towards Resnick's face. 'Don't fuck with me. Alston, he here 'cause he killed my daughter, I got a right to know.'
Wearily, Resnick shook his head. 'Mr. Brent, all I can tell you is this. We are speaking to someone in the course of our enquiries and nothing more. No charges concerning your daughter's murder have been made.'
Brent made a tight scoffing sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh.
'If and when that happens,' Resnick continued, 'you will be informed. Now please go home. There's nothing you can do here.'
'You think? That's what you think, eh? Well, I tellin' you, this gonna get sorted. One way or another. You know that, yeah? You know?'
Resnick turned and walked away.
At four o'clock that afternoon, the report came through from the team that had been searching the Alston house: a small quantity of cannabis aside, nothing illegal had been found. No firearms, no other drugs, no ammunition.
At a quarter past six that evening, Billy Alston was released.
Ten
The closer the trial date came, the more it played on Lynn's mind.
She'd been in court to give evidence on more occasions than she could remember: sworn the oath and told, despite the attempts of the defending barrister to throw her off course, the whole truth and nothing but.
She felt nervous, nevertheless.
Always had, always did.
The fear that she might trip up, throw away the case with a careless word, a slip of the tongue, some misremembered fact, let herself and everyone down. As if she were being tested: as if, somehow, she were the one on trial.
'All relative, isn't it?' a colleague had once argued, a young DC who'd taken a philosophy course as part of his criminology degree. 'Your truth, another man's falsehood. A matter of perception. Prisms. Nothing's absolute.' He'd left the Force after four years and taken a lecturing post at the University of Hertfordshire.
Those who can't hack the real world, teach, Lynn thought. The rest of us dig in our heels and get on with it as best we can. But then, when she heard the stories coming out of the local schools and academies, she reckoned that kind of teaching was probably real enough.
This was real, too.
Viktor Zoukas, charged with murder.
Culpable homicide. The arcane language was imprinted on Lynn's mind: where a person of sound memory
