I Know What I Saw

43 Monday

Nasreen’s chambers are exactly as I had pictured them. There are clerks in a clerks’ room busy on telephones and computer screens. The waiting room that I’m shown to has prints of hand-drawn caricatures of barristers on the walls. Through the glass door I see what must be the barristers, rushing past in smart suits. Then after a few minutes of waiting, a teenager in polyester comes to take us through to the conference room.

‘Can I get you some tea or coffee, Miss?’ he says to Jan as he leads us through a panelled corridor.

‘A coffee would be great, Mike,’ she says. ‘Xander?’

‘I’m fine with water, thanks.’

The words dry in my mouth. I am nervous here. This place is secluded like a Cambridge college, serious in a way that Cambridge wasn’t.

He shows us into a handsome room where a woman is waiting with a restrained smile. I glance round. More wood panelling. Sash windows open out on to a cobbled courtyard, making the place feel like a parody.

‘Mr Shute, I’m Nasreen. Do have a seat,’ she says to me, before turning to Jan. ‘How lovely to see you again, Janine.’

Jan smiles and sits next to me at the large glass table. Nasreen taps her laptop shut and leans forward to me.

‘Mr Shute. Let’s get to it, shall we? I’ve been through what the prosecution has served in terms of papers. There’s good and bad news from what I can see.’

I find myself nodding even as I am dangling by a thread in her fingers.

‘The good news is that there is no forensic evidence to link you to the murder whatsoever. By which I mean there is none anywhere near the body or even in the room as far as one can tell. Although you can be sure that they will be continuing to investigate and so you shouldn’t be surprised if we are served with evidence last minute.’

‘Okay,’ I say, and I look across at Jan who seems relaxed now, in the hands of the expert.

‘There are, however, your admissions in your interviews. I am bound to say, Mr Shute, if you had listened to advice in your last interview, they wouldn’t even have that. I mean, I think we could have excluded the earlier admissions made without a caution having been administered. But we are where we are.’

‘Where is that?’ I ask.

‘That depends on you, Mr Shute. If you stand by your admissions in the interviews, we have you at the scene of the murder as it is happening, with no good explanation for being there. Not to mention the emptying of a significant sum of cash from a bank account, weeks before the death.’ She says this last part with a raised eyebrow as if expecting me to protest.

‘What do you mean, stand by my interviews? I can’t unsay what I’ve said.’

‘Well, how can I put this?’ she says slyly. ‘Not all defendants maintain at trial the account they give at the police station. Often things are said at times of considerable pressure that on reflection aren’t intended. Do you see? I mean here, for example, there is the admission on the one hand that you saw the deceased being murdered. And on the other hand, the fact that in your account you only visited that house on that street for the first time just weeks ago. On one view, you and the police are at cross purposes. You are talking about different things.’

I shift in my place. These are the same clothes I slept in, though I have washed in a public lavatory. My procedure is that I take a sock and wash it thoroughly in hot water and soap. Once it is clean I use it as a flannel before drying it again under a hot-air dryer. But clean skin under dirty clothes still makes me squirm a little.

‘But, as I told Jan, I think I did go there. In 1989, I mean. She gave me a key. I’m sure that’s what happened. I must have been there. It must have been her that I saw being killed.’

She tucks a biro behind her ear and darts a look at Jan who catches it deftly.

‘Forgive me for being blunt, Mr Shute. But it’s not a very confident account of yourself. I wonder whether on reflection you didn’t in fact see Ms Mackintosh being killed. I wonder whether the years of being in the wilderness, shall we say, have dulled your memory somewhat? I mean it’s not unheard of for people to become highly prone to suggestion when under stress. Can you be sure that this officer, DI Conway, is it, didn’t take advantage of your suggestibility?’

Jan drops her head, bracing for what she knows is coming.

‘I am not suggestible, Mrs Khan. It was me. I was there. I did not kill her and I saw her being killed.’

Nasreen pushes herself back from the table and exhales. ‘Is that what we’re going with?’ she says, more to Jan than me.

‘That’s what we’re going with,’ I say, and then add, ‘but I have some more information.’ I am about to reach into the pocket of my coat when I am stopped.

‘Don’t worry about any of that for now,’ Nasreen says. ‘Why don’t you start by telling me everything that you remember about that night?’ She takes up her pen and writes in a soft-backed blue notebook as I talk.

I tell her how the door had been unlocked, and step by step what I had told the police about Ebadi’s flat. Nasreen is deaf to the nuances of the drama. Instead she listens as if she is a hawk looking for mice, scurrying through the narrative. Describe him. Everything you can remember. What did you see? What was he wearing? What was she wearing? Where were they standing or sitting? What was in his hand? Where were they when the argument started? Exactly where? What was playing on the radio?

‘The record player,’ I say, correcting her. I want to tell her about how I think I know him, the killer, and that I know something about him. But I can’t. I can’t tell her what has happened to the cash. But I can tell her how Grace gave it to me. I reach into my pocket for the letter but I am held back by Nasreen’s hand.

‘The record player then, could you see who changed the record or switched the player off?’

‘It wasn’t switched off exactly. He, the guy, took the record and threw it against the wall. It broke in two,’ I say, holding the letter out.

‘How do you know that?’ she says, suddenly alert.

‘Because I heard it,’ I say.

‘You heard it break?’

‘Yes.’

‘In two? Pieces?’

‘Yes. Why?’ I say, puzzled by something that is obviously hiding in the question.

‘In two,’ says Jan. ‘You couldn’t have heard it break, in two.’

I feel my eyes roll. ‘Then I saw it. What’s the difference?’

‘Where was it when you saw it later on?’ Nasreen says.

‘I don’t know. On the floor, I think. Yes, on the floor. I think it ended up by the window somewhere.’

‘And the sleeve. Did you see that?’ she says quickly.

I close my eyes and try to claw the memory closer to the foreground. ‘On the sofa maybe. Yes, leaning against the base of the sofa. I think.’

Nasreen looks over at Jan and beckons her over to her laptop which she opens.

‘Look at these scene pictures they uploaded to the Digital Case System,’ she says to Jan.

Jan looks over Nasreen’s shoulder and then a look of realisation crests over her.

‘Exactly where he says it was,’ Jan mutters.

‘Looks like he was there, all right,’ Nasreen says.

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,’ I say.

‘But hang on, I can’t see the record itself. Is there a picture of the room by the windows?’ Jan asks.

‘No, the photos only go to here,’ Nasreen says, pointing to the screen. ‘Okay. Jan, can you get a request to the Crown over please? Tell them that we want that record sleeve examined for prints and compared against our client’s arrest dabs.’

Jan nods.

‘And the record itself, too. They must have it as an exhibit somewhere, I’d have thought.’

Jan scribbles a note and looks back at the screen. ‘Wait a sec,’ she says, catching something. ‘Enlarge that pic there. Isn’t that a bit of a record, there? Looks like it could be.’

Nasreen frowns at the screen and nods. ‘You might be right, Jan. Good eyes,’ she says and then turns to me. ‘We will do our best to get this information from the Crown. But you should be aware that we don’t even know at this point what in terms of real evidence they have retained. The police did not initially have this as a murder. Some of the scene was photographed and preserved for the inquest. But we have no idea how much from the original scene exhibits they still have.’

‘But how can that be? Aren’t they relying on that for their case? I mean, to prove I was there. DNA, prints and all that?’

Nasreen laces her fingers together so the red polished ends are aligned.

‘No, Mr Shute. That is not what they are doing at all. Their evidence of your presence at the scene comes entirely from your admissions in the interviews. If, and I mean if, they still have any of the items from the room, they might be able to do a fingerprint lift but DNA is out of the question. If they didn’t do it at the time – and frankly, they wouldn’t have even for most murders back then – any DNA would have degraded by now. And that’s if they preserved it properly.’

‘So why are we asking for things they probably don’t have?’

‘Because you never know. And the sleeve they could well have,’ she says.

They then begin to draw the interview to a close. Nasreen puts her pens and her notebook into a neat stack.

‘Wait. There’s this. You have to read this,’ I say, finally finding the space to show them the letter. ‘It’s from Grace.’

‘Grace?’

‘He means Michelle. She didn’t like “Michelle”,’ Jan says.

I hand the letter to Nasreen. By the time she finishes reading it, her brows are crossed and she slides it across the table to Jan who skims through it.

‘This is good, Xander,’ Jan says, stabbing the letter with her finger. ‘She’d given you the money anyway, so that won’t hold as a motive.’

‘It definitely helps,’ Nasreen adds. ‘I mean, the Crown doesn’t have to prove motive in this country, Mr Shute, but if they have one it never hurts.’

‘So, what now?’ I say.

‘I’d still like to know what happened to it,’ Nasreen says, in a way that implies that she doesn’t expect an immediate answer.

‘You need to be ready to enter your plea at the next hearing,’ she continues. ‘I take it from you that is not guilty. We are not arguing diminished responsibility or insanity. Just a straight not guilty. Then we get some directions from the judge and wait for trial. In the meantime, the prosecution will serve whatever evidence they want to rely on, and once we have it we send them a document telling them what your defence is and then we can get some disclosure.’

‘Disclosure?’ I say.

‘Yes. If they have anything which could help your case, they have to give it to us, disclose it. And, of course, we wait to hear about whether they have the record or the sleeve that we will have asked for and if they do, what the fingerprint tests show.’

‘What are we hoping for?’ I say.

‘Well, best ways, there are prints on it that don’t belong to you or the deceased but a third party, our alternative candidate. And even better if the Police National Computer turns up an identity for our man. Worst ways, we get nothing, but lose nothing. I’m assuming you didn’t touch it, Mr Shute? Where you saw it and where it is on the photograph, is that where they left it? The deceased or her murderer?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I say, but the truth is that whatever I do remember dwindles to almost nothing when I am scrabbling about, desperate to remember. I don’t know what I touched.

‘Then we are all good,’ she says, and stands to shake my hand.

I offer mine but withdraw it when I see her face. She smiles at me instead and opens the door to show us out.

Jan leaves the building with me and we walk to Temple Station a few minutes away. ‘That letter is good,’ she says, once we get there. ‘Same paper, same handwriting as the others the police have. And Nasreen. She’s my first choice for your case.’

I manage a smile.

‘But we still need to know where the money is. They could put you through the mill for that.’

I wipe a hand across my face and watch as she turns and disappears through the barriers and down the stairs, deep underground. Once she has gone I walk the other way towards the river. Now this is done, I have to speak to Seb. I don’t want to, but he has left me no choice.