‘Mr Finucane has made a statement,’ Nixon said.
‘Stay away from him. Sir,’ said Stormare.
37
Scobie Sutton was obliged to wait for three hours before the shooting board officers-a man and a woman, both youngish and expressionless-took him into an interview room. With a nod and a grunt, they sat him where suspects usually sat, so that he felt like a suspect and almost wanted to add his mark to the scuffs, scratches and graffiti on the tabletop.
‘You want to ask me about the shooting of Nick Jarrett?’ he said, trying to keep his voice unconcerned and accommodating.
The male officer, an inspector named Yeo, gave him a humourless smile. ‘Correct.’
‘I didn’t see what happened.’
‘We know that,’ said the female officer, a sergeant named Pullen. ‘But you were on the scene soon afterwards, you collected evidence, and took that evidence to the lab.’
‘Yes.’
She, like Yeo, smiled without warmth or humour. ‘We were contacted by the lab. Apparently there were irregularities in regard to the way you collected the evidence.’
Scobie swallowed.
‘Are you protecting Senior Sergeant Kellock and Sergeant van Alphen, DC Sutton?’
Scobie shook his head mutely.
‘We understand that there’s a certain culture in this police station,’ said Pullen.
‘Not sure what you mean,’ Scobie said, his voice betraying his nerves. He was quaking. He’d never been in trouble before. He’d never done anything to warrant trouble. An unwelcome thought came to him that this was punishment for his displeasure with his wife and the feelings he’d had for Grace Duyker yesterday. Could God act so quickly?
‘Oh, I think you do,’ said Pullen. ‘A masculinist culture, arrogant, protective. Kellock and van Alphen are running their own little fiefdom, correct? Men like you do their bidding, protect them, cover up for them. A culture that cuts corners, that likes to get a result, whether lawfully or not.’
The whiplash words were somehow worse coming from a woman, and maybe that was the point. ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Scobie whispered. He wanted his wife’s cuddly arms around him, protective, forgiving.
‘Or maybe it was tunnel vision,’ said Yeo. ‘You went in looking for what you expected to find rather than what was there. You all hated Nick Jarrett, after all. I mean, he was scum, killed the son of one of your civilian clerks.’
‘I followed procedure,’ said Scobie stiffly.
‘I followed procedure, sir,’ said Yeo.
‘Sir.’
‘Don’t make me laugh. Rather than call in bloodstain and GSR experts you gathered evidence and then released the scene before the techs could do their job properly. We lack separate, isolated tests for gunshot residue on Jarrett, van Alphen and Kellock, for example. Too late now. Thanks to your bull-in-a-china-shop methods, we can’t construct a narrative of what happened.’
‘Narrative’ was a new buzzword. Scobie felt a rare anger, but tried to look baffled, an expression he’d seen on the faces of the consummate liars he’d interrogated over the years.
Pullen leaned forward. ‘What did you think you were doing, bundling everything together? Didn’t your training tell you about cross contamination?’
Before Scobie could reply, Yeo hammered another question home to him. ‘And you let the crime-scene cleaners come in the very same morning. Why did you do that?’
‘I didn’t know they’d been ordered to clean up,’ Scobie protested. ‘The others must have arranged it.’
‘We’ve seen the paperwork,’ said Yeo. ‘Your name is on the requisition: Detective Constable Scobie Sutton. Look.’
He showed Scobie a faxed form. ‘That’s not my signature,’ Scobie said.
He swallowed and looked inwards, down long roads of fear and shame brought on by men like van Alphen and Kellock, and their schoolboy equivalents before that. He wanted to admit that he’d been intimidated. But he could picture the scorn and contempt the admission would bring. And he didn’t really mourn Nick Jarrett, he realised suddenly. But van Alphen and Kellock were dangerous. They’d killed a man, after all. So he did what most people did and played dumb.
‘We don’t know who was doing what, or where,’ said Pullen. ‘We can’t verify the sequence of events.’
‘No narrative,’ Scobie muttered.
‘Are you being smart?’
Yeo leaned forward. ‘Why the hell didn’t you photograph the scene, at least?’
‘No camera,’ Scobie muttered. ‘Budget constraints.’
Maybe he could lay all of this at the feet of Superintendent McQuarrie.
‘Oh, that’s convenient.’
A camera, Scobie realised, would have frozen Nick Jarrett in time, his position on the floor, his gloved hands, the knife before it was moved from one hand to the other. Yeo and Pullen had a point, that was for sure.
‘Those cuts on Kellock’s forearm,’ said Pullen. ‘What’s that about, do you know?’
Scobie frowned uncomprehendingly.
‘You didn’t notice the neat grouping? Three shallow, parallel, non-life-threatening cuts?’
‘Defence wounds,’ Scobie said.
‘Defence,’ scoffed Yeo. ‘I’d say van Alphen and Kellock have their defence pretty well sewn up, wouldn’t you, DC Sutton?’
‘Sir?’
Pullen leaned forward. ‘We need your on-scene notes, DC Sutton. Now, please.’
Scobie swallowed and looked at the wall behind her and said, in creaking tones, ‘I lost my notebook.’
‘Lost? Oh, that’s a good one.’
They kept him there until early evening. When he came out he saw Pam Murphy in the corridor. He tried to rally. ‘I thought you were away on an intensive?’
She was young and bright and healthy and he couldn’t stand it. ‘Just finished the first week. They let us go home for the weekend.’
‘Well, good luck.’
‘Thanks, Scobie.’
Pam knocked on van Alphen’s door. ‘Got a moment, Sarge?’
He waved her in. He looked deeply fatigued.
‘Heard about Nick Jarrett, Sarge,’ she said carefully.
He scowled. ‘This afternoon I was chewed on by a couple of shooting board dogs.’
‘Everything okay?’
He shrugged. ‘They’ve got nothing. Take a seat. What can I do for you?’
‘Thought I could pick your brains, Sarge.’
‘About?’
‘Interview techniques.’
‘Interview techniques?’ said van Alphen, faintly mocking.
Normally Ellen Destry would have been Pam’s first choice, but Ellen was snowed under, looked distracted, even miserable. Plus, Pam felt a little guilty because she was leaving the uniformed branch and moving on to plainclothes. She didn’t want van Alphen, her old uniformed sergeant, to think that she was a snob, had no more
