I THINK IT was fair to say that the police were less than impressed concerning the contamination of a crime scene, not least because, even as Darren was being wheeled out to the ambulance and driven away, Georgina was already starting to clean his blood off the sitting-room floor with a mop and bucket.
“Before it seeps through the cracks between the floorboards, and into the underfloor insulation,” she insisted.
My wife was nothing if not practical.
Needless to say, she was immediately stopped from cleaning up any more, and we were all ushered out of the sitting room by the two uniformed policemen who had arrived first. Indeed, we were required to leave the house altogether—until the detectives arrived—although not before I was able to collect another polo shirt from my wardrobe.
As we waited outside the front door, our neighbours, Victoria and Brian Perry, walked up the drive.
Alerted by the ambulance siren, they had come to see if everyone was all right. At least, that’s what they claimed, although I believed it was more because they wanted to know what had happened so that they could be the first to inform the rest of the village, but that might have been slightly unfair on my part.
Fortunately, the two police officers politely told them to go back home and stay there, leaving just my family of four, plus Patrick Hogg, standing on the gravel of the driveway.
It was Detective Sergeant Christine Royle who arrived next, in an unmarked car, along with her sidekick, DC Abbot.
“We meet again, Mr Newton,” she said without any warmth. “What’s been going on here then?”
Patrick stepped forward.
“Officer,” he said. “My name is Patrick Hogg. I’m a barrister. A King’s Counsel. I am here at the invitation of Mr Newton, as an observer. And I have a video on my phone of everything that happened, up to and including the stabbing of the young man.”
“Do you, indeed?” said the DS. “Then I had better see it. Please come and sit in my car.”
Patrick and the two detectives walked to the car and climbed in.
I would have much preferred it if Patrick did not show the detectives the first part of the meeting but, as he’d said, I had asked him to come as an observer, and it was a bit late now not to want his observations, including his video.
“What’s going to happen now?” Amanda asked. “I’m really worried.”
“We’ll just have to wait to see how Darren recovers,” I said.
“It’s not just Darren. What about me?”
There was not much I could say, so I said nothing.
James, meanwhile, still seemed somewhat distant.
“Where would Gary go?” I asked him.
“What do you mean?” He stared blankly at me.
“I mean, where would he be going right now?”
He shook his head. “No idea.”
“How about Bristol?” I said.
“Why would he go there?”
“How about for his passport? And for clothes? To get away.”
“And some money,” James said. “We have a bit stashed away.”
“How much?”
“A few grand. It’s in our flat, under my bed.”
I didn’t feel it was appropriate at that particular moment to ask how an impoverished university student had several thousand pounds of cash hidden under his bed. That would be a question for later.
I had the flat address on my phone. It was where I had sent James’s passport only the previous Friday.
I walked down to the police car and tapped on the window.
DC Abbot climbed out.
“My son and I think it’s possible that Gary Shipman may have gone back to Bristol, to a student flat they share. He might be trying to collect his passport and some cash they have there.”
I gave him the address of the flat.
“Thank you, sir,” said DC Abbot. “I’ll get on to Avon and Somerset to send someone to check.”
“Tell them he’s armed. He took the knife with him.”
“I will, sir.”
The constable got back into the car.
What a mess, I thought. How on earth are we going to survive this as a family?
Finally, their film show being over, the two detectives, plus Patrick Hogg, emerged from the car and walked up towards us.
“I should arrest you for wasting police time,” said DS Royle sharply, pointing straight at Amanda.
“I’m so sorry,” Amanda said quietly, unsuccessfully trying to hold back the tears.
“And your boyfriend too—that’s if he recovers. Reporting someone missing when you know they’re not is also a crime.”
“But Darren didn’t know. He’s not involved in any of this. It was all planned by Gary and James. They made me do it.”
“How did they make you do it?” asked the DS with obvious cynicism.
“Gary has a film of Darren selling some crack. He must have been set up. Gary threatened to give it to the police unless I went along with their plan. They said that all I had to do was quietly walk out of the party, drive myself to Pangbourne in Gary’s car, wait a bit, snort some ket powder, and then knock on someone’s door, claiming I couldn’t remember anything, just as Dad said earlier.”
“How did you get the ketamine?” asked the detective.
“Gary gave it to me. In the Red Lion during the afternoon. That’s when he also made the needle mark on my neck. Out the back. I had to hide it from Darren. And it bloody hurt.”
No one expressed any sympathy towards her, not even her mother.
“Gary promised it was all I had to do. But then James called me last week and said I had to go missing again, and to tell the van story, or Gary would send the film to the police.”
“That sounds suspiciously like blackmail to me,” said the DS. She turned her gaze towards James. “So what have you to say for yourself?”
James just stared at the ground. It was clear he had nothing to say for himself, or for anyone else.
“And as for you, Mr Newton, you should have come to us rather than conducting your own Hercule Poirot impression. Then this stabbing could have been avoided.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
“And don’t think you’re getting off scot-free either,” she said, pointing at Georgina. “What possessed you to degrade a crime scene with a mop? Tampering with evidence can constitute perverting the course of justice. In fact, I have half a mind to arrest all of you.”
“I’m not sure that would be sensible,” Patrick Hogg stated calmly.
And mostly, good sense prevailed.
DS Royle and DC Abbot finally left our house at about half past ten, by which time everyone was exhausted.
Each of my family was asked in turn to give their own account of the events leading up to and including the stabbing.
“Do I need legal representation?” I asked.
“That depends on whether you’ve done anything wrong,” answered the detective.
How deep would she delve? I thought. As deep as the Thames under Goring Bridge?
I decided against the need for a solicitor, at least for myself for now. But I wondered if James should have one, and maybe Amanda as well.
In the end, both of my children refused the detective’s request to give any further voluntary statements anyway, exercising their right to remain silent.
I suppose you couldn’t blame them.
While all the talking was going on—or not—a forensic team measured, photographed, and swabbed everything in the sitting room, as well as the drops of Darren’s blood that had dripped from the knife as Gary had run across the hall as he’d made his escape.
“Why do you bother?” I asked DS Royle, “when you’ve got everything that happened recorded on video?”
“Protocol,” she answered. “And also because the defence might claim that the footage is inadmissible as evidence because it was made without Gary Shipman’s express permission. So it’s best to get everything else done properly at the beginning.”
“Does it require his permission? You surely don’t need a person’s consent to capture their image on a security camera. And it’s my house, so I should decide.”
“You or I might think that was a reasonable argument, but you never know what his lawyers are going to say in court. They can be slimy bastards.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Patrick, who had been listening to the exchange.
“Present company excluded.” She almost smiled.
There were two significant pieces of news that were reported to us during the evening.
The first was that Darren Williamson had managed to cling to life during the seventeen-mile journey to the Royal Berkshire Hospital, and also that he’d survived emergency surgery to stop the internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen.
Although he was still in a serious condition, the doctors were now expecting him to make a full recovery.
And the second piece of news was that a team of firearms officers from the Avon and Somerset Police had detained Gary Shipman as he tried to leave the flat in Bristol with a bag containing his passport, some clothes, and the hidden cash, together with two burner phones.
Patrick Hogg, KC, went home to Upper Basildon.
I went out with him to his car.
“Thank you for coming,” I said. “I’m sorry you got more than you bargained for.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” he said with a smile. “Not often a criminal barrister gets to witness such a serious crime firsthand. Most of the time, in court, we have to rely on what other people say to try and work out what really happened. And I don’t suppose we get it right even half the time.”
“Well, thanks to your video, everyone will know the true facts of this one.”
“Yes, and I’m glad Darren is going to be all right and that the police have caught Gary. But I would advise your son to get a good fraud solicitor, and quickly. He could be in a lot of trouble.”
“Can you recommend one?”
“I’ll send you an email.”
We shook hands, and then he climbed into his car and drove away.
Amanda wanted to go to Reading to see Darren, but she was told by the hospital that, after his surgery, he would be spending the night in the intensive care unit, and visitors were not allowed.
Consequently, we all went upstairs to our own home beds, and I wondered if it might be for the last time that we were together only as our nuclear family of four.
I lay awake for a while, going over and over in my mind everything that had occurred earlier that evening.
“Are you still awake?” Georgina asked quietly into the darkness.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Do you really want a divorce?”