As soon as Terry arrived at the police station, he’d been unceremoniously arrested and bundled off to a cell, as if he were nothing more than a common criminal. They’d said they weren’t ready to interview him yet, despite him arriving on time for his appointment, and it seemed they were entitled to lock him up in the meantime, even though he hadn’t actually been charged with anything – which was a ruddy disgrace in Terry’s opinion.
The cell was small and dirty and stank of urine. Terry felt trapped, desperate, as he paced up and down, unwilling to sit down on the rank-looking bunk. As he waited for what seemed like hours, he felt more and more hemmed in, as if the room were shrinking. He found that he couldn’t stop thinking of poor Frank and Dean, caged not as a one-off travesty, because they were falsely under suspicion of something (no, not just of something, of murder), but instead were interned for ever – and he hated the thought and debated how he could set them free. Would they be able to even survive in the wild? he wondered. Would they know how to find food? Was there an organisation that could help him do it, the RSPCA perhaps? He knew he was being ridiculous, he had far more serious things to worry about than his pet rats’ wellbeing, but the more he paced, the more concerned he became, about all of his animals now, fretting about whether Maria would feed them if he was kept in overnight, God forbid – not because she was cruel or anything, just whether she’d think to, know how to, know who got which food and how much, even if she did remember. He needed to ring her.
Terry hauled his brain back to his own predicament. He tried to work out what was going on, why he was being held here, what might happen next. He needed to be prepared, know what to say. He needed to think.
Terry wound his mind around the facts, as though he were there again, as if the evening was happening right now. He is in Hyde Park, near The Serpentine. He has his client’s wife under surveillance. He hears an argument. He hears a splash. Her so-called friends leave, despite hearing it too. He dials 999. The police find nothing, are annoyed with him for wasting their time. Three days later, a body is found, by a small boy in a boat apparently. They think it may be murder. It appears that he, Terry, is the prime suspect, even though he’s the one who called the police in the first place. He’s locked in a cell at this very moment, waiting for them to interview him.
Terry fast-forwards, imagines what he will say. He tries to calm down, think clearly, assess his options. He doesn’t know what to do. He goes round in circles, getting tangled in the details of the lies he could tell. Sweat breaks out across his smooth top lip, and his tongue feels dead. He worries about everything and nothing: his pets, what Maria will think, what his client will say, what really happened that night.
And then finally, eventually, it comes to him.
Yes, that’s it.
He’ll tell the truth at last. He has no other option. He’ll confess that he was being paid to trail a woman whose husband was convinced she was having an affair; that that was why he was there, not for a nice evening stroll after all. He’ll confess that his target was Juliette Forsyth, a woman possibly familiar to the more dedicated readers of Hello! magazine. He’ll admit that his client was the illustrious Stephen Forsyth, and he might even confess the truth of their relationship, as it would probably come out in the end.
What would the police do? Would they believe him? What the heck was going to happen? Terry put his head in his hands, to stop it from moving involuntarily from side to side as if in denial, to stop his hands from trembling like an addict’s. He wished he had a paintbrush, a figure, some tiny intricate detail to tackle … an insignia perhaps. That always helped steady his hands, steady his nerves. He looked down at his shoes, his leather-soled smart shoes – he’d dressed up for the interview, almost looked quite handsome in fact, although he didn’t know why he’d bothered. So I don’t look like a creep, a murderer, he acknowledged now. He wasn’t sure if he’d been successful. He didn’t know if they’d accept his story, telling the truth didn’t always pay, not when people like Stephen Forsyth were involved.
Terry sank down on the filthy bed at last and put his head in his hands. He stifled a sob. All he’d done was try to do the right thing, save someone’s life, and now here he was, locked up like one of his poor pet rats, his own life about to be ruined.