I Know What I Saw

‘There’s a hallway once you go through,’ I say, closing my eyes to let the detail come flooding through. ‘Victorian tiles on the floor. Black on white. There’s a Tiffany lampshade on the light. A large gilt mirror – ornate. Cream walls I think. And then at the far end of the corridor, there’s another door and when you open that there’s a kind of double room. As if it’s been knocked through. A fireplace ahead and to the left. Two leather chesterfield sofas opposite one another. Bookcases along the walls. A dining table and six chairs in the other half of the room. Mahogany. Silk patterned rug on the floor. Do you need me to go on?’

‘No, thank you. That accords roughly with our note of what you said last time,’ he says.

‘And are you maintaining this account, Xander?’ Blake asks.

‘Yes, of course I am,’ I say, still confused by what is coming. I know something is coming, the questions are setting it up. I just don’t know what it can be.

‘Two uniformed police officers attended the address on the night that you reported the murder and confirmed that there were no traces of a struggle or any assault, let alone any fatalities.’

‘Yes. You told me that last time,’ I say. ‘And you spoke to the guy that lives there. Ebadi? He had an alibi. I know that. But I have more information about that – information that changes things,’ I add.

To my surprise they ignore what I say and continue with their questions as if I haven’t spoken. ‘Showing the suspect exhibit PJW/2. Mr Shute, would you look at this footage please?’

Blake has opened her laptop and is playing what looks like CCTV film.

‘What’s that?’ I say. ‘CCTV?’

Without looking up, she says, ‘No. It’s the footage from the body-worn camera by the searching officers.’ She spins the laptop round so that we can both see it.

‘As you can see that is him approaching number 42B. Do you recognise the door?’

‘Yes. That’s it,’ I say.

‘Okay and in a minute, you’ll see the gentleman opening the door. Mr Ebadi.’

I watch, transfixed. This was almost the scene from this morning. I think of the neighbour, Mrs Wilbert, her hand poised over the doorbell. I shake my head and focus again on the screen. The door opens and I see a face. I recognise him from the still they showed me last time. I look carefully. He looks different now that I see him in motion. Different from the man I saw in the half-light strangling the woman.

The officer wearing the camera and this Ebadi speak for a few seconds. Ebadi is smiling at first, and then there is a look of concern, confusion even. He nods after a moment and waves the police in without hesitation. But I know why that is. He doesn’t care about the police coming in because the body has been moved. He will have cleaned the place up so confidently that twenty-four hours later, the police are being ushered in without pause. Either he knows that the police will not find anything, or he’s calculated that his chances are better if he lets them in now, so he won’t have to see them return with warrants flashing.

The footage runs on until Conway presses pause, and I, too, freeze. My mouth drops. I stop breathing.

This cannot be.

The feeling I have now is of the world coming to a halt on its axis. It seems like the Universe is crashing past me at speed. And I am just standing there, motionless.

It’s not the same feeling as the one I had after Rory. That was disbelief. Reality had been exposed simply as mist.

I feel myself mentally leave the room under the pressure of the moment.

Rory.

Pulling at me again.

We didn’t really recover from our teenage fighting. We tried, as adults, to relegate the past into insignificance, but instead it began to invade all our spaces and push us apart whenever we tried to draw near. It didn’t matter whether it was neutral ground or not, it seemed like neither of us could cross the bridge to reach the other. I wonder now whether I could have tried harder, but when I put myself in that space, I remember that I did try. I went to his new flat soon after he bought it. He never came to me. But I did go to him.

I arrived at his building in Ludgate Circus, bringing with me the heat from the street. It was one of those buildings that had been ‘reinvented’. Traces of a former glass-warehouse or coffee-vault or some kind of faded glory were there deep in the brick. And now, crowding and rocketing land prices had polished the rust away and called it new.

An old lift clanked into place and I remember the smell of it as I pulled the concertina gate across and waited as it lurched between floors. My pulse quickened as it always did when I was in a confined space. Then finally, after those slowly ground-out minutes, the doors opened.