time for her old colleagues.
‘I have to write an essay,’ she said. ‘Worth twenty-five per cent of my marks.’
‘Essay? You should be out cracking heads.’
Pam smiled at him across his tidy, gleaming desk and said, ‘Well, you’re a dinosaur, Sarge. Me, I’m up-and- coming. Three thousand words by Monday morning, so I’ll have to work all weekend. Questioning witnesses versus questioning suspects. What to ask, what not to ask. Establishing mood and rhythm. Using psychology and body language. Etcetera, etcetera.’
Van Alphen stared at her in disbelief. His expression said that he relied on experience and instinct, techniques learned on the job, not in a classroom, and which didn’t have fancy names like ‘body language’.
‘Murph, you know how to interrogate people,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you in action. You’re good at it. Just write what you know.’
‘What I know doesn’t add up to three thousand words, Sarge.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have gone to detective school, should you?’ he said, with a sharkish smile.
‘Oh, thanks a lot,’ Pam said, getting to her feet.
He waved her down. ‘Take it easy, take it easy. I realise you have to get on in this game, you don’t want to be stuck behind a desk or the wheel of a patrol car.’
She gave him a sympathetic smile. He must hate being desk-bound. ‘You’ll be cleared for duty soon, Sarge, don’t worry.’
His lean, saturnine face relaxed into what passed for a warm smile. ‘As you say, Murph, I’m a dinosaur. Three thousand words! Jesus.’
‘Exactly,’ said Pam, who was accustomed to writing terse arrest reports, in which narrative flow, tone and even grammatical sentences were a handicap.
‘You said psychology. It’s all psychology.’
Pam wrote the word on her pad and looked at him expectantly.
‘You’re interviewing a suspect,’ said van Alphen. ‘You want him or her at a disadvantage.’
Pam nodded. She knew that but had never labelled it before. It was instinct. ‘How do you achieve that, Sarge?’
‘Little things, and you let them accumulate. For example, use of their first name, not their surname, helps to undermine them. The use of silence-let it build until they’re desperate to fill it. Fire a series of answers to unasked questions at them, your tone frankly disbelieving: “So you say you don’t know how the knife got under your mattress?” for example.’
Pam scribbled to keep up.
‘You used the term “body language”, Murph. Terrible expression, but I guess it explains what one does in an interview room. You let your face and body show contempt, doubt, ridicule, sometimes sympathy. You get in their faces, pat them gently on the wrist, exchange scoffing looks with your partner, slam your palm down hard on the table, stuff like that.’
All things Pam had done. ‘Sarge,’ she said dutifully.
‘And you vary your approach, keep them unsettled. Kind, then cruel.’
‘Sarge.’
In the corridor outside, and in the nearby offices, were the sounds of voices, laughter, footsteps, doors slamming-familiar sounds that Pam badly missed. She glanced at her watch. She’d spend thirty more minutes with the sarge, then drive home and relax in the bath. ‘But what about their body language, Sarge?’
‘What about it?’
Pam flicked back to her lecture notes. ‘If they have their legs together, ankles crossed and hands in their laps they’re protecting their genitals-fending off trouble, in other words.’
‘If you say so,’ scoffed van Alphen, rocking back in his chair and slamming one booted foot and then the other onto the top of his desk, giving her a wry look.
Pam grinned. ‘If they touch their nose and lips, it means they’re stressed. There are many capillaries in the nose and lips. Blood rushes there…’
Van Alphen drew his slender hands down his narrow cheeks comically.
‘Arms folded across the chest is another protective gesture- protecting the heart, concealing powerful emotions,’ Pam said.
‘A little book learning is a fine thing, Murph,’ van Alphen said. He paused. ‘On the subject of psychology: you need to find out what they want.’
‘Their “dominant need”,’ Pam said brightly. ‘Respect, safety, flattery, sympathy. One should stimulate or exaggerate this need, then finally offer to gratify it in return for a confession or co-operation.’
‘So why the fuck are you asking me all this?’ growled van Alphen, not unkindly.
‘It’s questioning techniques, Sarge. I know the psychology: I just need to know how to frame questions.’
‘But it’s all psychology,’ insisted van Alphen. ‘For example, if a suspect’s tired, you fire hard questions at him.’
‘The wording, Sarge.’
‘Apart from who, what, where, when and why?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, try to get at motive. Ask things like: “Can you think of any reason why someone would want to kill him?” or “Did they argue over money?” or “Was she involved with another man?” Obvious, surely.’
‘Sarge.’
‘Psychology,’ insisted van Alphen. ‘Just when they think an interview is over-you’re going out the door, in fact-you turn back and hit them with what’s really on your mind. Or you ask a series of absurd, grotesque or mild questions to throw them off balance, then hit them with the million-dollar question. Or you give them back their answers twisted slightly, to see what corrections they make.’
Pam scribbled, her head down, commas of hair brushing her jaw.
‘You throw them a series of quick questions requiring short, simple answers, then suddenly lob a difficult one at them, a trick question. Or they answer, but you look at them quizzically until they qualify it to fill the silence. It’s answers that matter, not questions. The absences in answers, their tone, and the specifics that can be challenged or disproved or that contradict other specifics.’
‘Sarge,’ said Pam, still scribbling.
‘You force suspects and witnesses alike to separate what they think they know from what is actually true, you help them through uncertainties and attack their certainties.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘And always, always, you ask earlier questions again, worded differently.’
‘Sarge,’ said Pam, wondering if she had enough for three thousand words. She thought she might look up old case notes and reproduce interview transcripts, generally pad out her essay in the time-honoured way of all students everywhere.
‘Always get their story first,’ van Alphen said. ‘Get them to commit to it. Then you take it apart, detail-by- detail. You’ll find that most people can lie convincingly some or even a lot of the time, but only the good liars remember exactly what they said.’
‘He doesn’t work here any more,’ said the manager of Prestige Autos late that Friday afternoon. ‘I sacked him.’
John Tankard stood there with his mouth open, feeling powerless. He hadn’t felt this bad since that time he’d shot a deranged farmer. He’d gone on stress leave for it, then returned to work and thrown himself into the job, together with coaching a junior football team, and these things had been pretty successful in staving off depression, but it was his new car that he’d been counting on most to make himself feel better.
‘The guy ripped me off,’ he said hotly, ‘while employed by you.’
The manager, a portly older guy with furry eyebrows, made a what-can-I-do? gesture. Plastic pennants snapped in the breeze. A salesman in a sissy-looking suit was putting the hard word to a young guy who was critically but longingly circling a Subaru WRX-drug dealers’ car, thought Tank sourly-while his girlfriend looked on in boredom. A bus belched past. And so life was going on unchanged around John Tankard but he himself was
