I Know What I Saw

‘So?’ I say, finally taming my voice.

‘So, you didn’t mention that he was an Arab gentleman,’ Conway says. ‘In your statement, you said it was a white male.’

I look at Blake in disbelief. ‘But light-skinned or white, what’s the difference? He murdered a woman.’

‘Well, we don’t believe he did,’ Conway says, pulling the photograph back.

‘He’s got an alibi for the night of the murder,’ Blake says softly.

‘What alibi?’

‘He wasn’t in the country, Mr Shute. He was in the UAE.’ I detect delight in his voice as if he has caught me in something, a lie.

‘Anyone can – could say that, have you checked?’

‘Mr Shute, we have checked. We’ve seen his passport, he was good enough to show it to us. And his flight e-ticket,’ Conway says flatly. ‘We spoke to the airline. It wasn’t him.’

I cover my head with my hands as my head begins to pound. It had to be him. It was him, wasn’t it? Suddenly I am not sure any more. Maybe it was a white male I saw after all. I had it right first time around before they tricked me into this odd admission.

‘Then it wasn’t him. It was a white male as I said.’

They look again at one another.

‘Did you check for other occupants? I don’t know if it was that guy,’ I say, stabbing at the still. ‘But it was someone. Someone killed a woman in that house.’ My voice is shrill in my ears.

Blake shakes her head sadly and stands up. ‘The officers checked that house. There was no evidence of any murder at all.’

No evidence? How can that be? ‘So, now what?’ I say. ‘What’s your next move? You can’t just let him sit there destroying evidence.’

‘Our next move is, do you want to make a withdrawal statement?’ Conway says. ‘We can’t have a murder allegation left hanging in the air.’

‘Withdrawal? No, I don’t want to make a withdrawal statement. I know what I saw and I can’t believe you’re not taking it more seriously!’

The file sits tightly under Blake’s arm.

‘Think about it, Xander,’ says Blake. ‘You might have made a mistake here. I can understand it, of course I can. You’re facing an extremely serious allegation yourself. A man was badly assaulted. He’s alive, but Mr Squire had just been minding his own business before he was attacked with a knife. So, I can understand how the stress of that might cause you to deflect the allegation by making another. Believe me, we see plenty of allegations and cross-allegations, but this is too serious, Xander. We are giving you a chance here. Drop it, now, and we can write it down to nerves. Otherwise, I’m afraid we are going to have to charge you with wasting police time. Or perverting the course of justice, if the CPS want it to go that way.’

My eyes travel from one officer to the other. Slowly and deliberately, I cross my arms.

‘You better charge me then,’ I say.

14 Friday

They’re still talking about dark matter in the magazines. The maths is still the maths and the theoretical physics is still as it was, theoretical. The only thing that ever changes is the intensity with which they remind us that we know nothing. When I think of dark matter, it always brings me straight back to Rory and the conversations we had. I didn’t have anyone else to talk to about this stuff – only he understood it well enough.

‘Ninety-five per cent of the Universe is dark matter and dark energy,’ I said to him once. It might have been for one of Dad’s ‘debates’.

‘So?’ he said.

‘So, none of it’s ever been observed. It’s pure hypothesis.’

‘And?’ He was doing that thing I hated, lifting an eyebrow with his finger.

‘So er-bloody-go, we only know what five per cent of the Universe is. We don’t know what ninety-five per cent of it even is.’

He lets this sink in. ‘No,’ he says finally, ‘that’s not the same thing.’

I stare at him.

‘It’s not the same thing. We don’t know what it consists of, elementally, but we know what it is. It’s dark energy and dark matter.’

‘No. That’s just a bloody hypothesis. It’s theoretical. It doesn’t exist outside some physicist’s head.’

Dad had been in the room, I remember, because I was always aware of him. He was reading his paper but he was listening. Mum might have been hovering, glasses hanging from a chain, but equally she might have been in the study, writing a paper.

Dad smiled because he saw something that I didn’t and he was enjoying it.

‘I disagree,’ Rory said. ‘It does exist.’

‘How do you know that? Has it ever been seen? Has it ever been detected?’

‘It could be a weakly interacting massive particle. If it interacted too weakly for detection. What with neutrinos and everything.’

‘It’s not a WIMP,’ I say.