Revenger

49

Chrystal Prentice was sitting in an interview room at Kennington police station, with a female police officer and a cup of hot, sweet tea for company, waiting to be interviewed. She was trying to decide what to say. They were going to expect honest answers, but Snoopy’s mate had helped save their lives. So if he wanted to keep out of all this, she owed it to him to do what he’d asked. And it felt like what Snoopy would have wanted, too. That was the deciding thing, really: what Snoopy would have wanted.

Poor Snoopy. It was all Chrystal could do to stop herself crying at the memory of him lying on that storeroom floor, and equally hard to drive that memory from her mind.

The door opened and as the female PC excused herself and left two other people came in. The first one introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Brian Walcott. He was black, about thirty-five, Chrystal reckoned, dressed in a basic suit and tie and quite fit, really, for a policeman. The second one was a woman. She introduced herself as Detective Inspector Mara Keane, which made her Walcott’s boss, and in her heels she towered over him, though he wasn’t exactly short. When Keane spoke her voice was soft and quite low, like a newsreader on the TV: the kind of voice that made you believe whatever it was saying.

‘So, you were working at the Dutchman’s Head… what happened?’ Keane said, giving Chrystal a look that was not in any way aggressive, but which still made it plain to the younger woman that she was being sized up, too.

‘Well, I got talking to one of the customers,’ Chrystal began, trying to keep those terrible images away from her mind. ‘He was sitting at the bar, and he said something about being scared of flying, and I said that was, like, well funny,’ cos I am too, terrified.’

‘And this man, was he the one who ended up in the Lion Market with you?’ Keane asked.

Chrystal nodded, trying to hold back the tears.

‘Did he give you his name?’

‘He just said his name was…’ Chrystal could feel herself welling up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Then she covered her mouth to hide her trembling lips.

‘Take your time,’ said Keane.

Chrystal took a deep breath and said, ‘Snoopy. He said his name was Snoopy.’

‘And this Snoopy, was he drinking alone?’

Chrystal couldn’t quite manage a direct lie. ‘Yeah, well, he must’ve been, mustn’t he? Otherwise he wouldn’t have been talking to me.’

‘I don’t know, you tell me. Was he alone?’

‘Yeah… yeah, he was alone.’

Both women knew that wasn’t the truth. Walcott did, too. He wanted to press Chrystal harder, but before he could, Keane changed the subject.

‘So tell me how you got from the pub to the Lion Market.’

Chrystal sighed heavily, as though she’d been holding her breath: maybe she had been, she wasn’t sure. The relief was evident in her voice as she explained how they had left the pub, bumped into the rioters and rescued another woman. She described Snoopy firing at the rioters and being hit by one of their bullets before they reached the Lion Market.

Walcott had been asking a lot of the questions: ‘So when you got to the shop, who was there?’

‘Er… me, Snoopy, the woman he’d rescued from the car and Maninder and Ajay, obviously,’ cos it’s their shop.’

Now Keane came back into the interview. ‘The woman from the car, that was…’ She consulted her notes: ‘Paula Miklosko?’

‘Yeah, Paula, that was her.’

‘And how would you say she was — her physical and mental condition, I mean?’

‘She was well out of it. She’d been punched and that and she was, like, all shaking and in shock.’

‘So how did she get from the car to the Lion Market?’ Keane did not raise her voice at all when she asked the question. She didn’t have to.

Chrystal scrambled for time. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘If she was out of it and in shock, how did she manage to get from the car, where she was rescued, to the shop?’

‘She come with us, didn’t she?’

Keane frowned. ‘So she ran, is that it? She managed to run fast enough not to be caught by this mob… even though she was in shock?’

‘Well, we helped her.’

‘You and Snoopy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘At the same time that he was turning round to shoot at people?’

Chrystal hated this. She was trying to do the right thing, but every question just made her dig herself deeper and deeper into trouble. ‘I don’t know! It was mental out there. How am I supposed to remember everything?’

Keane nodded. Again she backed off, like an angler who lets the line run out when the fish has already been hooked. ‘All right, let’s get back to the market. You were there and you were tending to Snoopy’s wounded arm, and there was a big mob outside. So then what happened? Did the mob attack?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Were any shots fired at them… from inside the shop?’ ‘They might have been, I don’t know.’

Now Walcott intervened again, sounding impatient: ‘Come off it, Chrystal. If a gun goes off in the same room you’re in, you know all about it. Were any shots fired from the shop at the mob outside?’

‘Yeah… maybe… two or three.’

Keane again: ‘So who fired them?’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t looking. I was doing Snoopy’s arm.’

‘So he definitely didn’t fire the shots?’

‘Well, no, how could he?’

‘Which means it had to be one of the two Panus.’

‘Well, yeah, maybe… Like I said, I didn’t see.’

‘Then what?’

‘Me and Maninder went down to the cellar with Paula.’

‘What happened to the other two: Ajay Panu and Snoopy?’

Keane asked.

‘Snoopy went out the back, in case anyone came in that way.’ Chrystal bit her lip as she felt it start to tremble again.

‘So… what about Ajay Panu, where did he go?’

Chrystal gave a helpless shrug of her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Like I said, I was in the cellar.’

‘Did you at any time see him shoot at anyone?’

‘Ajay?’ Chrystal asked her voice rising in surprise. ‘No! He never!’

‘But he joined you in the cellar — Ajay, I mean…’

‘Yeah, he did, right at the end. Just before the explosion.’

‘Tell me about the explosion. Do you know what it was that exploded?’

‘No, it just, like, happened — know what I mean?’

‘Then what did you do?’

‘We just waited, you know, down in the cellar. We were too scared to go upstairs, to be honest.’

‘I understand,’ said DI Keane. ‘So let’s leave it there, shall we? It’s getting late and you’ve had a very shocking, traumatic experience. So what I want you to do, Chrystal, is to think about all the things that you and I have discussed. And when you’re feeling better we can talk again. We’ll start with Snoopy’s friend… the one who was drinking with him at the pub… the one you’ve been trying so hard not to talk about just now.’