“How many stitches?”
“A lot. Maybe ten or fifteen.”
“OK, and can-”
Harris switched the machine off.
“David, I notice you’re a white male,” he said. “You’re about six four tall, wearing black boots, black jeans, and a black three-quarter-length leather coat. And the collar is… round.”
“Your point being what?” I said.
Harris got up and walked around behind me. I felt him lean his weight on the back of my chair. His breath was warm on my neck. I watched him in the mirror, making a show of examining the back of my head. I guessed he was focusing on the shaved patch. That, and the line of twelve neat stitches running across the center of it. I was beginning to resent that scar. It wasn’t the only one I had. It wasn’t even the largest. But it was causing more than its share of trouble.
“Anything you’d like to share with us, David?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I think I will have a word with my lawyer, after all.”
Harris looked irritated. He shot a sour glance at Gibson, and dropped back into his chair.
“You can do that, David, if you want,” Gibson said slowly, as though he were talking to an imbecile. “But if you do, we can’t help you. We can’t even talk to you. You’ll stay in jail while we check into all the unsolved homicides from while you were in New York. And in D.C. It’ll take months, if you go that way.”
“But it’s not too late to talk to us,” Harris said. “Help us now, and we’ll try to keep you out of the system. Get this thing cleared up real quick. That’s what you said you wanted.”
“Not anymore,” I said. “Now I want to speak to my lawyer.”
“David, calm down,” Gibson said. “All we’re saying is, we’ve heard the caller’s side of the story. Why not tell us yours?”
“I’ve told you already,” I said. “You didn’t listen. Now I want my lawyer.”
“Let’s not be hasty, here, David,” Gibson said. “Look at it from our side. Think how this thing looks.”
“It looks like a frame,” I said. “It looks like you can’t be bothered to do your jobs. Now-my lawyer. Fourth time. I won’t ask again.”
“At least tell us why you moved the body,” Gibson said.
I folded my arms and kept quiet.
“When that guy called 911, the body was at the back of the alley,” Gibson said. “That was at 23:57.”
“Four minutes later, when the uniforms arrived, it had moved to the front,” Harris said.
“You were the only one at the scene,” Gibson said.
“So it had to be you who moved it,” Harris said.
“Only question is, why?” Gibson said.
I didn’t answer.
“Like we said before, David, we don’t think you’re a bad guy,” Harris said. “We think you felt bad about what happened. We think you dragged that body nearer the street ’cause you wanted it to be found. You wanted to put things right.”
“That shows remorse, David,” Gibson said. “Remorse is good. Remorse could really help you. But you have to tell us.”
“Your lawyer will tell you to keep quiet,” Harris said. “But he doesn’t have to live with this thing. You do.”
“So, if you were sorry, if you were trying to put things right-tell us about it,” Gibson said. “You’ll feel a whole lot better.”
“And save yourself a whole lot of jail time,” Harris said.
“Because if you don’t talk to us, we’ll have to pull in that witness,” Gibson said. “And with a description of you like he gave on the phone, he’ll pull you out of a lineup in a second.”
“And that would change the game, David,” Harris said. “Big-time.”
“Make what you did look premeditated,” Gibson said.
“Self-defense would be out of the window,” Harris said.
“Manslaughter would be out,” Gibson said.
“We’d be talking about murder,” Harris said. “Think about that.”
Gibson slid his pen and a pad of paper toward me.
“Write what happened, the way we told you,” he said. “Or write your lawyer’s number. Your choice.”
I wrote down a number.
FIVE
The first thing I do in the morning, if I’m not in jail, is read the papers.
I enjoy them well enough from Monday to Saturday. Sundays aren’t so good, though. There’s too little news. Too much opinion. And a huge sheaf of magazines to deal with. Like the ones I picked up at Charles-de-Gaulle on my way over to start this last job. There was a whole supplement about people’s attitudes to work. Why had they taken their jobs? What did they like about them? What did they not like? What would make them leave? The answers had been spun out into four pages of bar graphs and diagrams and pie charts. All the usual reasons were there-money, status, promotion, hours, travel. But according to the journalists, the biggest factor was “interaction with colleagues.”
Not something you’d expect to see in my profession.
Although, just once, I met someone who made me wish it was.
Tanya Wilson looked pretty much the same as the day I first met her in Madrid, three years ago. She was five feet eight, slim, with an elegant blue suit that combined perfectly with her plain white blouse and low-heeled navy shoes. Her dark shoulder-length hair was pulled back from her face, as usual. She’d always preferred that style, despite the way it emphasized the sharpness of her features. I remember thinking at our original meeting that she looked like a lawyer, and today, with a battered leather briefcase and narrow metal-framed glasses, the impression was stronger still.
For a moment neither of us spoke.
In our profession, when it comes to relationships, there’s a line you don’t cross. Or at least, you don’t if you have any sense. Tanya and I both understood, but we’d come close to crossing it anyway that spring. Perilously close. Maybe a couple of toes had actually crept over to the other side. I’m pretty sure mine had. I think hers had, too. But before we could abandon reason altogether and leap right across with both feet, fate intervened. I was sent to Morocco, to collect someone.
It should have been a routine trip. Four days, maximum, there and back. Tanya was handling the arrangements so I had no reason to worry. And as you’d expect, the job started flawlessly. Travel documents, flights, currency, accommodation, vehicles. Everything went exactly according to plan. There wasn’t even the slightest hint of a hitch until the end of day two. Then, when we were thirty minutes away from our rendezvous, that all changed. There was an incident with our Jeep. It was caught in an explosion. Some sort of improvised roadside device, I assume, but there was no proper investigation into what kind. I never found out who planted it. How it was triggered. What happened to our contact. Who cleaned up the mess. Or how the remains of the driver- someone I’d known for ten years-ended up back in Scotland for a memorial service I couldn’t attend. All I can remember is waking up in a hospital in Rabat, two days later. It was a dismal place. The lights were down low and I thought I’d been left there alone, but as I drifted back into consciousness I realized that someone else was with me. It was Tanya. She was standing at the end of my bed, silently watching me, with a single tear glistening in the corner of her right eye.
Tanya visited me every day after that. First in Morocco, then in Spain when I was sent back to recuperate. Some days she could only grab a few minutes. Others she was with me for hours on end. But however long we were together, all we could think about was getting some real time to ourselves. Alone. Away from doctors and nurses and squeaky hospital furniture. It was becoming an obsession. Rules and conventions and protocols wouldn’t have stood a chance. Nothing would, if fate hadn’t showed its hand a second time.
