I Know What I Saw

17 Saturday

‘It’s impossible,’ I say. There’s no solution to this formula.

‘Is it?’ Conway says, but he’s not really asking.

My brain continues to whirr and click through the gears. Could the murderer have changed everything? The murder was late Tuesday night. I told the police about it Wednesday night. They claim to have visited the address that night. It couldn’t be. Is it a trick of some sort? Is it the wrong address? But even as I am asking myself the questions, I already know it’s the right place, but somehow the impossible has happened.

‘It’s not exactly the way you described it, is it, Mr Shute?’ Conway again.

It’s not. There is no hiding from that. I don’t want to hide from that. It’s the truth.

‘Well, the layout is the same,’ I say in desperation but the words fall from my mouth like pebbles on to sand.

‘Nothing is the same, Mr Shute. Nothing that you have described to us, in detail, is the same.’

‘But—’

‘I will ask you a final time, Mr Shute. Did you witness a murder at this address? At number 42B?’

I notice that Blake has curled into herself in pity.

‘Yes. I know what I saw.’

‘So how do you explain that video?’ she asks softly. Her voice pleads.

‘I can’t. But I saw it.’ And then a thought comes to me that I voice straight away. ‘There in that room where that sunken table is. Did you check under there?’ I say but the question dies in the air. It’s not possible.

‘Xander. Mr Shute. Can I be really clear?’ says Blake. ‘If you maintain the lie, we are going to have to charge you with the more serious offence of Perverting the Course of Justice. If you accept it now as a lie, we can consider the lesser charge of wasting police time.’

I shake my head. This feels too fast and – wrong.

‘I – I know what I saw. Something’s not right.’

The two of them exchange glances. From one, a look of regret. From the other, irritation.

‘Fine. Mr Shute,’ says Conway. ‘We are formally charging you with Perverting the Course of Justice and we are terminating the interview. The time by my watch is fifteen twenty-two.’

The tapes are switched off and I am led out of the room and out towards the front exit.

I turn to Blake and try to catch her eye but fail. In the end I stop and face her.

‘There’s something you need to know about Ebadi,’ I say.

She raises her eyebrows and waits.

‘Two men came and removed the body the next morning,’ I say. ‘The neighbour from the main house, she saw them.’

Conway stops ahead of us and turns around.

‘Are you telling us that if we speak to Mrs Wilbert, the neighbour, again,’ he says, ‘she will tell us that on Wednesday morning she saw two men remove a dead body from the house?’

‘Well. No,’ I say. ‘She didn’t see the body, but the van. It must have been put into the van,’ I say quickly.

‘So, she saw a van?’

‘Yes. She saw a van and then she saw the men and they were clearly removing things from the house.’

‘Okay. I think we’re done here, Mr Shute.’

I turn back to Blake but her expression is set. ‘You have to check,’ I say.

She stares but says nothing. At the barriers the two of them wait and watch me leave.

‘We’ll be in touch, Mr Shute, if we need you sooner, but until then you’re to be back here in two weeks. March 1st,’ Conway says.

I push the door and step out. As my foot strikes the step, the world feels improbably solid. But I know it isn’t. I’ve just seen evidence of that on a screen.

My head throbs as I reach the bottom of the steps. None of this makes sense.

My mind needs room to run. There has to be an answer hidden in the facts somewhere. It just needs the right lens. If I stand back or to the side of this problem, I know I will be able to find the answer. And that it will come to me in a burst.

The light is beginning to fade and with it, whatever warmth it had brought. I look up as I leave the station behind and start a path in a loop around the building. It is a desolate place. I know that when the summer arrives, the light will make even these bricks quiver again with life. But at this moment, nothing around me feels capable of life.

As I walk around in a large circle, my mind begins to unfold, tracking the past as I go. The murder happened. Then a phrase that I have liked and stored comes to me. Is it Occam’s razor? Sherlock Holmes? Whoever it is, I remember the principle. Eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Does that hold true? If it does, then the truth is that the murder took place, because I saw it with my own eyes. I watched the before and the after and I saw her lying on the floor. The red wine blooming across her chest. She had stopped breathing. She was dead. I saw him leave. The following morning, I was in hospital. That night I was interviewed by the police. The same night the police went to the address. It was definitely the right address – I saw the video.

So far, so good.

But then it begins to break down. The door was the same door. The building was the same one. But could I have got the address wrong? Could I? I think about this carefully. No. I couldn’t have. The exterior was the same one from my memory. And when I went, this morning and saw it in its flesh, it was that house.

In the footage the interior was the same, in a sense. The dimensions were all the same. The windows hadn’t moved. The fireplace was in the same location. The cornicing on the ceiling was the same. It was the same flat. That is now one of the facts. There was a murder. In that flat. I can’t distil that any further.

Then as I round the boundary of the police station again, I come to a sobering conclusion. However improbable it seems, someone redecorated the house in the space of one day. It was unlikely, more than that, it was improbable. But not impossible. With enough money what could a team of say ten men do in twenty-four hours?

Unlikely.

But not, I have to conclude again, impossible. I am sure I saw this once on television. A woman leaves her house for a day and returns to find it transformed. A TV crew, an unlimited budget and a team of workers changed the garden, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedrooms. In a day.

It was unlikely. But not impossible.

Ebadi is a dangerous man. He could arrange a disposal quickly and discreetly with the money he seems to have. A man with these connections, who could call on men in a van to remove a body, could surely make decorative changes to a house. Even make them discreetly, quietly. Although Mrs Wilbert the neighbour heard noises in the night.

I begin to race through the changes in the house. The mirror could be put up quickly enough. And the floor. A tiled Victorian floor couldn’t be pulled up and retiled that quickly. But a new floor could be tiled on top. Without any mess. The grout might not dry hard in a day, but unless you touched it, you’d never know. Each day that passed would put it more and more firmly in place. By now it would be setting hard.

The darkness begins to establish itself and I sense something behind me. My body freezes as a shrouded figure comes hurtling towards me. I tense and then relax as he passes. A jogger. I breathe again. I think about settling somewhere nearby for the night and then I think of Seb in his house. Is he wondering whether I’ll be coming back tonight? Should I return there to spend another night in the warmth, or should I stay out and allow my mind the space it needs to stop aching? I can’t afford to have my bones and skin become used to comfort after everything I have done to season them against the ravage of weather.

The smell. Wouldn’t the place smell of work? Damp tile adhesive? But then what do police do when they make what they think is a routine call? Would they feel like they could make comments about strange smells to Arab millionaires in their Mayfair homes because a tramp made a complaint? Or would they have noticed it at all? Would the house have been carefully doused in oud and frankincense to mask the smell?

A chill wind stings my ears as I am thinking this and before I know it, I have decided to make for Seb’s house. The beating in my head has dissipated. The thinking is done for the day and I know what I need to do: sleep. A good night’s sleep now can help me more than an unbridled mind. Insufficient sleep interferes with the neurons’ ability to encode information and translate sensory stimuli into conscious thought. Without sleep the brain’s cells can’t communicate with each other. If don’t get more sleep, the memory lapses will continue to worsen, I am sure.

I take my bearings and head south, tight-roping through the Green Zones.

Although I know what has to be done, I also know there’s a limited window in which I can do it. There will be no help from Conway or Blake. I can’t see either of them helping me to expose Ebadi. They already feel as if I am dissembling. Lying. They have charged me with this: Perverting the Course of Justice – criminal lying. I have to do this by myself.