Sergeant Hunter looked at the beautiful pale woman sat across the table from him. Her lawyer looked out of place in the scruffy interview room – in his pinstriped suit and yellow silk handkerchief he would have been more at home in a gentleman’s club; he had that air about him, as if this was all beneath him. Sergeant Hunter didn’t think he needed to ask any more questions; she was the fourth woman he’d interviewed in the last two days and she was just repeating the same boring account of the evening – they’d obviously all got together and colluded to make sure they got their stories straight, despite the monumental acrimony they’d had towards each other by the time they’d left Hyde Park, according to Terry Kingston.
Now there was an odd bloke, Sergeant Hunter thought. He’d seemed like such a creep at first, but it turned out he’d been the only one who’d tried to save the dead woman, after her so-called friends had all just upped and left her to her fate. And it appeared he’d only lied at first to try to protect his half-brother – it seemed now they were finally getting to the bottom of exactly what had happened it was Terry Kingston who had more morals than the rest of them put together.
Sergeant Hunter wasn’t interested in the interview with this woman. They’d had the pathologist’s report back and nothing she was saying added to it. No, it seemed he’d have to let her go. He asked her a few more questions, just for the hell of it. Let her sweat a bit, he’d thought. Even if it did turn out she was criminally in the clear, which seemed likely, seeing as the funeral had already been approved to go ahead (what had become of the British criminal-justice system!), morally she and her friends were guilty as hell in his book. Typical selfish middle-class values, he told himself, somewhat bigotedly – give me my Sandra and the lads at the snooker club any day over these stuck-up cows.
Sergeant Hunter took a final glance through his notes to check he’d covered everything. He looked up, saw her frightened frigid face next to her lawyer’s fleshy smug one, sighed and said, ‘OK, madam, that’s all, you’re free to go.’