Christopher David Jago, ever serve in the British army?”
If there was hesitation, it was only fractional. She answered slowly, and surely and with pride in her voice. “Yes, Chris was a soldier.”
“So why did you choose not to tell us that?”
“When?”
“Let’s start with when you came to London to identify a body that you believed to be that of your brother.”
“This is going to sound stupid, but nobody asked me.”
“You’re right,” Kitson said. “It does sound very stupid…”
“Well, I can’t help that. I didn’t think it was relevant.”
Holland spoke up. “Surely, if you were looking for your brother, any information about him, about his past, would have been relevant, wouldn’t it?”
“Look, I just wanted to know if it was him, and when it wasn’t, I just wanted to get the hell out of there and go home. Nothing else seemed very important.”
Holland stretched out his legs, then withdrew them quickly when his feet made contact with Jago’s. “You had a long chat with Dr. Hendricks on the way to the train station, didn’t you? You were perfectly happy at that time to talk about your brother’s history with drugs, about his mental problems, but, again, you never saw fit to mention his past in the army.”
She reached toward her handbag. “Can I smoke in here?”
“I’m afraid not.” Kitson raised a finger casually toward the smoke alarm on the ceiling, neglecting to mention that it never contained any batteries. The no-smoking rule was her own. She hated cigarettes anyway, but also believed that keeping an interviewee on edge would deliver better results more often than not.
Jago smiled weakly. “What happened to the good cop sliding the fag packet across the table when the bad cop goes out of the room?”
“We’re both bad cops,” Kitson said.
“Miss Jago.” Holland tapped a finger on the tabletop. He wanted an answer. “You never mentioned your brother’s army history during the conversation with Dr. Hendricks. Is that correct?”
She nodded.
“For the tape, please…”
“Yes, correct. I never mentioned it, but I don’t see why one’s got anything to do with the other.”
“Don’t you?” Kitson asked. “How many ex-soldiers do you suppose end up sleeping on the streets, Susan? As opposed to ex- footballers, say? Or ex-bank managers?”
Jago shrugged.
“Let’s move on a bit,” Holland said. “A couple of days after that first trip to London, you were contacted by Detective Constable Stone, who told you that we had information about your brother’s death.”
She shifted suddenly on her chair, as though there were something uncomfortable on the seat beneath her. “Right, like it was good news. A fucking phone call from some smarmy, low-rank moron who’d obviously drawn the short straw, telling me Chris is dead. And now you’re going to sit there and ask me why I didn’t say anything about him being in the army again, aren’t you? Well, I’m sorry if I had other things to worry about, like what I was going to tell my mother. Like how I was going to find out where the council had buried my brother…”
Holland could see by the look on Kitson’s face that she was in no mood to be messed around. “Let’s not waste any more time with this, all right? I’m going to stop saying ‘forgot to mention’ and ‘neglected to inform’ and I’m going to call it what it is: lying. You lied to us, and you withheld information that might have been important to a murder investigation.”
Jago slapped her palms against her jeans and raised her voice. “They’re not the same thing. They’re fucking not. You tell me when I lied…”
“What about the tattoos?”
The skin around her mouth slackened suddenly, as if the ponytail had been keeping it taut and had suddenly been removed.
“I haven’t done anything wrong.” She held Kitson’s stare, but her voice had lost all of its stridency.
“You were asked on a number of occasions, by myself, by DS Holland, and by DC Stone during your telephone conversation on seventeen September, if you knew what the significance of the tattoos was. On each of those occasions you said that you did not.”
“ On each of those occasions I was hardly thinking straight, was I?”
“You lied.”
“No.”
“You knew very well they were army tattoos.”
“I never lied. I’ve already explained that the first time I was messed up. I’d just seen a dead body, for crying out loud, I’d been looking at some poor sod with most of his face kicked to shit. Then, later on, when he asked me about the tattoos on the phone, I was in a complete state, wasn’t I? Because I’d just found out that Chris had been murdered as well. How was I expected to think straight?” She shook her head, kept shaking it, but both Holland and Kitson could see immediately that she knew what she’d just said.
“That’s a strange way of putting it, don’t you think, Susan? Your brother was the victim of a hitand-run driver, wasn’t he? You’d been given no other information than that. You were told it was an accident. Yet you just said ‘Chris had been murdered as well.’ Like the first victim had been murdered…”
Outside on the street a car was being revved up, and somewhere along the corridor a telephone was going unanswered.
Kitson leaned forward. “Why did you lie to us?”
It hadn’t taken very long. Susan Jago had been prepared, certainly, had been gearing herself up to front it out, but no amount of hard-faced posturing could mask the agony she felt inside. Once she started talking, it came quickly, like poison from a boil that’s been lanced.
“I didn’t think it mattered, I swear I didn’t. It’s like I told that pathologist bloke in the car, I just thought Chris had gone walkabout-you know?-and that he’d come waltzing back when he was ready. So why would knowing what he’d done before matter to anyone except me and him? I just wanted to forget all of it. I managed to convince myself that I didn’t know much about his past and that it wasn’t hurting anybody to leave it like that.” She looked from Holland to Kitson and back again. “Then I found out he was dead, and I knew there were two of them. When I knew they’d both been murdered, I wanted to come clean about it all. I wanted to tell, honestly I did, but it was like I’d got so caught up in the lie that I couldn’t figure out a way to make it right again…”
“Did you recognize the man you saw in the mortuary?” Kitson asked.
She raised her eyes, every trace of bravado long gone. “I could really murder that fag now.”
“Did you recognize him, Susan?”
“Yes. He was in the crew with Chris. But on my children’s lives, I never knew his name. I just saw a photo of the four of them together once, that’s all.”
“What crew?” Holland said.
“Chris was a Tanky. He was in the Twelfth King’s Hussars. That’s a cavalry regiment-”
Kitson raised a hand, needing to slow things down a little. “Four of them, you said. Why four?”
“There’s four in a Challenger crew. That’s the tank Chris and his mates were on. It was the four of them that went out and got those tattoos done just before they were flown out. The blood groups and those letters, which is just a piss-take, by the way, because they all hated the Royal Tank Regiment. There was some stupid rivalry, because they thought the Royals were posh, and the Royals’ motto is ‘Fear Nought,’ right? So Chris and the others got their own mottos done, as a joke: S.O.F.A.-Scared Of Fuck All…”
Holland was struggling to take all of it in, but he could sense its importance. The room seemed to constrict suddenly and grow warmer. It felt as though his ears were popping. “We’ve got plenty of time to get all this down, Susan. Can you just tell us why you wanted to keep it a secret?”
Jago reached down and lifted her handbag onto her lap.
“You can have that fag in a minute, Susan,” Kitson said.
But it wasn’t a cigarette packet Jago took out. It was a videotape. She placed a hand flat on top of it; then, after a few seconds, she pushed it across the table.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” she said. “Anything I can. But I will not watch it…” 1991
