I Know What I Saw

13 Thursday

When I cross the park, I find myself in a small road, South Audley Street. I see Mayfair Library and that shakes something loose in my head. I’ve been here before. I push open the door but hesitate, and then I remember I’m clean. The staff blink calmly at me as I pass through and turn a corner. There is a bank of computers to the left and I aim straight for them and sit down. How to begin a search on a man I know nothing about? My eyes lid over and again the pain in my head strikes up a beat.

The sensation of someone before me makes me open my eyes. There’s a lad standing in front of me, late teens, in school uniform.

‘Here,’ he says and holds out a magazine to me. I take it, puzzled, from his hands and see that it’s the New Scientist.

I sit up and look into his eyes, questioning.

‘She told me to give it to you,’ he says, indicating the librarian in the next aisle, wheeling a book trolley.

I stand up to get a better look at the woman. She has long blonde hair and a small serious face. She catches my eye and waves at me before walking over.

‘Xander!’ she says. ‘Is that really you? You look so different!’

I stare at my clothes and then at my hands. I am different.

‘Thank you,’ I say, confused for a moment, and then I remember all at once. This is my library. I come here every week, for this magazine and for warmth and ordinary sanctuary. And she, Hazel?, has always been nice to me. My heart starts to thump suddenly. How have I forgotten this, even for a second? Is something happening to my brain? I rub my head as if I can massage my brain back to normal. That kick in the head from Squire. What did he do to me?

I stare at the magazine in my hands. ‘The Galaxy That is Missing All Its Dark Matter’.

‘It’s a good one this week.’

Looking up, I see that the boy is still there.

‘Thanks,’ I say, and fumble for more to say. ‘You a scientist?’

‘What?’ he says and he looks more confused than me.

‘Science. Do you like it?’

‘Not really. I prefer the arts,’ he says. He’s confident with me. He should be wary of me, an adult stranger. Don’t they teach kids that any more?

‘You knew that, Xander,’ he says, a little uncertain. I feel like a feral cat that he’s trying to stroke.

‘Have we met?’ I say, alarmed.

He looks at me with a frown, laughing a little. ‘Yes, Xander! It’s me, Amit. Are you okay?’

I look again at the computer and the blinking cursor. I am a computer expert and I have written hundreds of programs for mining and predicting data streams, but I can’t use this thing in front of me. I stand.

‘Sorry. I have to go,’ I say to the boy. When he turns his head and his hair flicks in his eyes, I suddenly remember him. Amit. I saw him at the gallery – he gave me oranges, and suddenly I feel a pressing need to remember what happened to them. As I ran from Squire, I left them behind. The thought that they are rotting under mulch makes me unaccountably sad.

‘Have you, erm, tightened the loose screws now?’ he says, pointing at his head and smiling. ‘Remember me?’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Thanks for the oranges,’ I add as a convincer, and he smiles again.

I make for the exit. The librarian is there at the desk and opens her mouth to say something but whatever it was, I wave it back into her head. I have to go and get this straightened out in person. There should be police there. The man might be disposing of evidence this second. That could even be where he has gone.

Once off the bus I make quickly for Paddington Green Police Station. I walk in and the smell, a cloying tangle of disinfectant and boiled potatoes meets me.

‘I need to speak to Rachel,’ I say at the desk.

The desk sergeant looks at me. ‘Rachel?’

‘Or her colleague, DI Conway, I need to speak to one of them.’

He looks blankly at me as if I’m speaking in tongues, before languidly tapping on some buttons on a phone.

‘Name?’

‘Shute. Xander Shute.’

‘You want to be careful with a name like that,’ he says, enjoying his own humour. He mumbles into the handset before replacing it. ‘Coming now for you.’

Time drags its heels through the silence and I wait, sinking as I do.

‘Mr Shute?’ I spin around with surprise. I see both detectives.

‘Why haven’t you been?’ I say.

They exchange a look that confuses me.

‘We’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ Blake says.

‘What for?’ I say, following them as they walk to the same room I was interviewed in before.

‘Come, we’ll speak in here,’ Blake says, opening the door for me. The walls, matt black, undulate, making me queasy.

‘The Farm Street crime you reported,’ she says seriously.

I cross my arms and nod. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ I say. ‘Why haven’t you got police there?’

‘You’ve been to the address?’ Conway says, concerned. ‘You shouldn’t be going—’

‘You don’t understand,’ I say. ‘I saw him, the murderer, he’s still there walking around free as a bird. You need to go and arrest him, now.’

They look at one another again but say nothing. Blake opens the file and pulls out a photograph.

‘Is this the man you saw?’ she says, pushing the picture over to me.

The photograph is blurred like a still image from a video. I wonder whether there is CCTV somewhere that captured him. I look carefully at the face. It’s the man I saw earlier this evening, without a doubt.

‘That’s him,’ I say. They make tiny movements of their eyes towards one another.

‘Why haven’t you picked him up?’ I say. ‘Why is there no police presence there at all?’

And then I see the discomfort in their faces. Blake gives me a concerned smile. ‘Actually, Xander, he’s not a suspect.’

‘But the picture,’ I say, pointing at the image. ‘It’s him.’

‘It’s a still from the officer’s body-worn camera,’ Conway says.

‘So, you spoke to him. Someone spoke to him, surely? How did he explain the body? You must have had a team there. Forensics. You can’t have let him go. He killed her!’ My voice is climbing, no matter how hard I try to ground it.

‘Just calm down for a second, Mr Shute. Okay. Mr Ebadi. He’s a UAE national,’ Conway says, pointing to the image.

UAE? Did that make him Arabic? If he was Arabic I would have noticed. Wouldn’t I? But the context maybe confused me. He is light-skinned. I saw him in a Victorian house with a white woman and I just assumed – wrongly assumed. Even so, this is him.

‘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.