Left You Dead

29

Joseph Rattigan had a poker face beneath spiky grey hair, a gut straining the buttons of his pale-blue shirt and a sloppily knotted tie. He was dressed in a chalk-striped suit that might have been made-to-measure, but not for him.

There had been a time when this Legal Aid solicitor, younger and fresher-faced, had been the bane of any officer with a newly arrested suspect, but now in his late fifties, the lousy pay and tough hours had worn him down, blunted his passion. The fire that had once raged in his belly had been doused by too much beer and junk food. His voice these days was bland and flat, as if he didn’t care, was ready to accept defeat because, sod it, no client was worth dying in a ditch for.

Just before 10.30 p.m. Niall Paternoster and Joseph Rattigan had completed their private conference ahead of his initial police interview at Brighton custody centre.

This would be the first of several interviews to be carried out over the next couple of days, following a strategy Norman Potting and Jon Exton had agreed with a tier five interview adviser, DC Alec Butler. The adviser’s role was to agree the strategy with the SIO and deal with not only the questioning of the suspect but also those that required special consideration or were deemed to be significant witnesses — sigwits.

Potting and Exton led Paternoster and his solicitor into the interview room. For the next forty-five minutes, they first went over in detail Paternoster’s initial account of his version of what had happened the previous day. Then they covered the couple’s background, relationship, financial status and current domestic situation.

The interview concluded with Potting leaning across the table towards the suspect. ‘Mr Paternoster, we’ve taken note of all you’ve said. The purpose of this initial interview has been to enable you to give a full account and your version of events prior to your wife’s disappearance. But you need to know that police officers have checked the CCTV at the Tesco Holmbush store, both inside and out, as well as showing your wife’s photograph to every staff member who was working there. There is no sign on any CCTV footage of your wife being in the store and no member of staff recalls seeing her.’

Paternoster turned, bewildered, to his solicitor. ‘This is crazy! It just can’t be — it doesn’t make any sense.’

Rattigan nodded, eyes wide open and vacant, like a zombie that wasn’t home.

‘We will continue with our second interview at 9.45 a.m. tomorrow,’ Potting said. Then, speaking to the mic, he added, ‘First interview with Niall Paternoster terminated at 11.22 p.m.’ He stopped the recording.