Crusher (3 page)

Footsteps had paused in the corridor outside. I
blinked back into the present, turned my face away from the wall and watched the door open. Two plain-clothes officers entered, one well-fed and heavyset, the other lithe and wiry. They were followed by a uniformed PC, possibly one of the uniforms who had turned up on my doorstep earlier, but the stab vests and crew cuts made them all look alike. The older, beefier detective was white, in his mid-fifties I guessed, with craggy features and thinning brown hair going grey at the temples. His suit had a slightly rumpled air, like it had once been classy and sharp but had been worn too often. The younger one was black, with skin so dark it shone. He could not have been much older than thirty, and his head was shaved bald. He carried himself like an athlete and his suit was impeccable, his tie crisp and neat and symmetrical. If it wasn’t for his deadly serious expression you’d think he’d fallen out of an expensive menswear catalogue.

“Mr. Maguire,” said the older one, “I’m DI Prendergast, and this is DS Amobi. Are you up to answering a few questions? We’ll try to keep it short.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“We just want to go over your statement again. Would you like something to eat, or a drink?” Amobi’s caring tone was convincing. His voice was deep, with a faint African twang—Nigerian, maybe. I shook my head
as they pulled the chairs out from under the table and settled down opposite me.

“Are you warm enough?” asked Amobi, glancing at my paper boiler suit. My clothes had been taken away for forensic testing as soon as I’d arrived at the station.

“I’m fine,” I said.

The room was too warm, in fact, and it was stuffy. There had probably been a succession of suspects and victims in here throughout the day, stumbling or sobbing through their stories. And now me. There were no windows in the room and the door gave onto an internal corridor; there was a ventilator in the ceiling, probably part of an air-conditioning system, but I guessed it was switched off in the evenings to save money.

Prendergast ignored my response to Amobi’s question and waded straight in. “You found the victim’s body when you came in from work, and dialled nine-nine-nine on your mobile, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Prendergast glanced briefly at the clipboard on his lap. I presumed it held a copy of my statement. “The victim was your father?”

“My stepfather. He married my mother when I was three.”

“What about your real father, your natural father?” asked Prendergast. “Where’s he?”

“No idea,” I said. “I’ve never met him. My dad was my dad.”

Prendergast chewed his lip and rolled his pen between his fingers. “And your mother, where’s she?”

“In the States somewhere. She left us, about five years ago.”

“So it was just you and your stepfather who lived in the house?”

“Me and my dad. Yeah.”

“Anyone else have keys, anyone else have access?”

“No. He said something about losing his keys. Last night.”

“Right,” said Prendergast, as if this didn’t really interest him. “Were you aware before you entered the house that there might be something wrong? Any sign that someone had broken in, anything out of place?”

“I noticed the curtains were closed. Dad liked the curtains open, for the light.”

“Were they open when you left this morning?”

“Yeah. He opened them while I was in the shower.” Prendergast made a silent, brief note; Amobi glanced at him, his expression composed and neutral, but I sensed he thought Prendergast already had a theory he wasn’t sharing.

“Take us through this morning, from when you got up till you left for work.”

I talked about that morning, again. It didn’t take long. But I noticed Prendergast was writing nothing down, and trying not to smirk. I began to see where this was going, but got to the end of the story before my anger bubbled up to the surface. Amobi sat there, relaxed and attentive; he hadn’t made up his mind about anything from what I could see. When I finished speaking, Prendergast let a few seconds tick by. Eventually Amobi leaned forward.

“Finn—did you notice anything missing? Had anything been taken?”

“Dad’s laptop.”

“Any idea of the make?”

“A MacBook, about six years old.” Amobi slowly took a note. Dad had bought it from a bloke in a pub a few years before. Maybe it had been nicked, I never asked. It was already pretty clapped-out when he got it, but it was reliable, and it did enough of what he wanted: browsing the Net for research, soaking up the endless writes and rewrites and edits and rewrites.

“He must have been using it when … when he was attacked. Listening to music. He did that while he worked. He wouldn’t have heard a thing.”

Prendergast nodded as if this all made sense. Amobi noticed me frown.

“What?” said Amobi.

“His notes were gone too,” I said. “He used to write stuff longhand before he put it onto the computer. He had loads of printouts and cuttings and background stuff. Whoever killed him must have taken them.”

“We found another laptop upstairs,” said Prendergast.

“If it’s an old Dell, it’s mine.”

“Why do you think this intruder left that behind?”

This intruder
. I shrugged. “Because it’s a piece of crap?”

“Was there any money in the house? Anything valuable?” Amobi was taking notes of his own. Slowly, not in shorthand. I caught a glimpse of his handwriting; beautiful copperplate.

“No. Nothing. We’re not exactly loaded.”

“Was there anything that might have attracted the attention of a burglar?” asked Prendergast.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Drugs,” said Prendergast. He had sat back in his chair with his hands crossed on his belly, like a bloke listen-ing to a story he’s heard a hundred times before but is too bored to interrupt. His fake-relaxed pose conveyed its own sense of menace, as theatrical as cracking his knuckles.

“No.”

“Would this intruder have had any reason to think there might be drugs in the house?”

“Why don’t you find him and ask him?”

“Maybe we already have.” Prendergast’s smirk had vanished, and in its place was anger and indignation, as if someone had murdered
his
father and was giving him the runaround.

Amobi cleared his throat and cut in, “Perhaps we should take a break. You’re sure you don’t want anything to eat, Finn?”

“I’m OK, thanks,” I said, still staring at Prendergast. His smirk was back. Amobi stood up and pulled back his chair, and eventually Prendergast lumbered to his feet. He was overweight and out of condition, and the way he kept finding things to do with his hands suggested they weren’t happy unless they were holding a cigarette. But he was a big man and I could sense a deep dangerous current of bitterness and anger surging underneath that soft muscle.

Prendergast and Amobi left. The uniformed PC stayed in the room, but took a seat, saying nothing. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation anyway. I was still trying to figure out what it meant, the scene in our downstairs room, my dad slumped over the table, his headphones plugged into nothing, his laptop gone, his notes gone. The laptop was an ancient piece of crap, but some smackhead might have thought it worth something. But how would a smackhead have got into the house and crept up
on my dad without him noticing, even with earphones in? And what would a smackhead have wanted with all those pages of scribble and ancient dog-eared photocopies of news cuttings?

My dad once mentioned a writer he’d known from Northern Ireland whose gritty tales of Protestant extremists got him bullets in the post and death threats over the phone. He’d fled to England, to an undisclosed address. “I’m pathetic,” Dad had said. “For a minute I actually envied the poor bastard. Someone gave a shit about what he wrote.”

Is that what my dad had done? Pissed someone off with his script? Was that why all the notes were taken, and his laptop? I didn’t even know what the story was about—he’d changed it so often I’d stopped listening. It started off being about a guy under witness protection, then it had turned into a cop drama, then been about bent bankers and politics …

With the laptop gone, how was I going to find out? He’d backed up the stuff onto a memory stick, yeah, but last time I’d noticed, it was still plugged into the laptop, and now it was gone too.

The door burst open again, and Prendergast entered, a manila folder in his hand. He stood there staring at me, then jerked his thumb at the PC. “Coffee, milk, no sugar. You want anything?” This last to me. I shook my head.
The PC hesitated, and Prendergast glared at him. “And take your time, all right?”

Reluctantly the PC left the room, and Prendergast shut the door behind him. He sighed as he slipped off his jacket, draped it over the back of one of the chairs and sat down heavily opposite me. His grey-green eyes were red-rimmed; they looked as if they’d had a sense of humour once, but had become pickled in cynicism.

“So, what was it about?”

“What was what about?”

“This bust-up you had with your stepfather.”

“We didn’t have a bust-up.”

“Pull the other one. You’re a bloody teenager. They argue about bloody everything. Drugs, was it? You were dealing again, and he found out?”

“I don’t deal in drugs.”

“Come on, Finn. Three months’ youth custody, expelled from school, it’s all in your record.” He tapped the folder. “Weren’t doing very well there anyway, from what I’ve read. Failed every exam you ever took. Not surprised you turned to dealing, it’s the only way you’ll ever make a decent living.”

I said nothing. There was nothing to say. Prendergast opened the folder and pretended to read it.

“Diagnosed as suffering from dyslexia. From the Greek, meaning thick as shit.”

Did he think he was being original? I’d heard that same pig-ignorant gag a million times.

“I have a job. I work at Max Snax on Ealing Road.”

“Yeah, yeah, selling chicken-burgers—that’s just a cover, isn’t it? The punters come in, you slip them something under the counter, another twenty quid and sir can go super-large?”

I let him talk. He was smirking again.

“There was no
intruder
, was there? Your stepfather lays it down—quit dealing or get out of his house. You sleep on it, you think, his house? This could be my house. Why don’t I just get rid of him? And you take his bowling trophy or whatever it was and you clout him over the head a few times and you leave him there, bleeding his brains out, and you jog to your dealership job and serve deep-fried crap with crack all day like nothing’s happened. End of your shift, you jog home, come in, get your mobile out and you say
‘Someone’s killed my dad.’
 ” Prendergast put on a little-boy-lost voice. “But I’ve listened to the call you made. You’re all calm and collected. You’re not upset, you’re not surprised. Because you don’t give a shit. You just won the raffle.”

The worst thing was, he was right about the last bit. It was like I’d felt … nothing. Maybe I’d been in shock, maybe I still was, maybe it just hadn’t hit home yet but someone had killed my dad, and I just felt … curious?
More bothered by the hows and whys than the fact my dad was dead. Until now, that is. When I looked at Prendergast I felt plenty. It was all coming back, the anger, the impotence, the feeling I was talking underwater, drowning where no one could hear me. And sheer bloody frustration that everything was stacked against me and the police didn’t give a shit about the truth—they just wanted to boost their clear-up figures.

It had been years ago, when Dad and I had been really skint. I’d started walking the streets all night and hanging out with half a dozen dead-end no-hopers just like me. We’d go looking for trouble and if we couldn’t find any we’d make some, and one night we found someone’s stash of ketamine and coke abandoned in a park, and like a stupid fourteen-year-old punk I’d taken some to school and tried flogging it. And a kid in the year above who had once tried to bully me and got my fist in his mouth reported me and the cops came and some smug fat bastard just like Prendergast had decided I would make a great example to other lippy brats who stepped out of line.

The school didn’t hesitate—I was already on their shitlist. The conviction for dealing had screwed what little future I’d had left. My last year of education was in a shithole with metal detectors at every doorway, a hotline to the local nick and a nursery for the babies of the
girls in Years Ten and Eleven. The kind of place where barely being able to read was par for the course. I left well before my seventeenth birthday and no one came after me to change my mind.

“Ninety per cent of the time the person who reports finding a dead body is the murderer,” said Prendergast. “You might as well have written a confession in your stepfather’s blood. We’re going to get to the truth eventually. Save us all the sob stories and the pissing about, all right?”

“You got it all wrong,” I said. “We didn’t argue. I just killed him because I was fed up looking at him. I wore two sets of gloves and a mask so you wouldn’t find any fresh DNA on the murder weapon. I changed my clothes afterwards, put the stuff with all the bloodstains in a plastic carrier bag with a brick and chucked the lot into the river on my way to work. You won’t find it. You won’t find any evidence, and in an hour or two you’re going to let me go home, because everything I just told you is inadmissible. You never cautioned me, you haven’t offered me a brief, you’re interviewing me with no other officer or adult friend or social worker present. Maybe when they do turn up I’ll tell them you stuck your hand down my trousers. Yeah, I’m dyslexic, but I’m not the one who’s thick as shit.”

Prendergast was trying to smirk again, but underneath
those cracked capillaries in his cheeks his jaw was clenched. He had hoped this would be open-and-shut, that he could hector and bully me into a quick confession, because he had other things on his mind. He was too angry to be doing this job, it seemed to me. I half expected him to kick the chair back and have a swing at me; he was an old-fashioned copper. Let him, I thought, I could use the practice. I could take a punch, and at the very least I’d leave him with his nose in need of straightening.