‘Henry, why don’t you just stop wasting everybody’s time?’ Hunt asked. ‘We’ve got CCTV footage from a neighbour of Mr and Mrs Thorpe, showing you pulling up outside their house, at speed, on the evening of Tuesday the fourteenth of July, at eleven forty-five p.m. You then leave, in fact screech away, at eleven-fifty-nine p.m.’
‘So you can see where Monika went?’ Henry asked. His throat was raw and his head felt like a mixer. He’d lost sight of what was real and what wasn’t. He couldn’t remember what he was accused of in what order. He knew they’d found ecstasy pills in Carrie’s bedroom, and his clothes in her laundry.
‘We’ve also got Monika’s DNA all over your van, Henry. Her hairs tangled in tools, her blood on the corner of a toolbox, and a gold necklace identified by her husband as belonging to Monika, who was last seen wearing it on Sunday the twelfth of July, two days before her murder.’
Henry stared at him blankly.
‘We’ve also got you speeding out of Cambridge on the A603, which is on the way to Grantchester where Monika’s body was found dumped, at twelve thirty-two a.m. on the morning of Wednesday the fifteenth of July, shortly before you headed back with Carrie Greenside, so she could collect her car.’
‘I couldn’t find her. I tried.’ His voice was a whisper.
A knock on the door interrupted the interview and an officer bent over to tell Hunt something. He smiled hawkishly.
‘Henry Nelson. The CPS have decided that, on top of the charge of possession of banned substances with intent to supply, we have now passed the threshold to charge you with first degree murder. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say…’
Henry sat forward very slowly and put his head in his cuffed hands.
‘It is now the view of this department that you willingly entered into an agreement with Ms Carrie Greenside to entrap and entice Mrs Monika Thorpe to a place of your choosing, with the intent to take her life. You drove Mrs Thorpe to a secluded spot and murdered her with a tool from the back of your van. You then sought the help of Carrie Greenside to dispose of the body. Do you have anything to say?’
Henry looked up at the detective, whose face was covered in triumph. Henry’s guts fell to his toes. The police had their story; the case was as good as solved. He didn’t stand a chance. He had a violent history, he consorted with criminals, he supplied and used drugs, and he was conducting an illicit sexual relationship with the victim, as well as his supposed accomplice. Their motive was lust-fuelled jealousy, and their alibis were each other.
‘How’s Carrie?’ he asked lamely.
‘Ms Greenside has been charged with accessory to murder and unlawful disposal of a body.’
The years he’d spent studying the locations of CCTV cameras around cities, and avoiding them, learning the back roads, had gone out of the window in a moment of recklessness because Monika had wandered off. By his own admission, he’d confronted the victim’s husband on the night of her murder, and Monika had been in his van, many times. His fate was sealed. His injured hand was a further physical testimony to recent violence. It was over.
‘Mr Nelson?’
He looked up. DI Hunt was a little man in every sense of the word, but it didn’t matter. In the world of law, Henry couldn’t win. He didn’t have enough fingers or toes to count how many times he’d told young lads inside prison that justice always prevails. But it didn’t.
‘Mr Nelson?’
Hope seeped out of his body.
He felt a tear slip down his cheek. Was it worth it? Should he give a statement to be read out in court? Just because it was his truth? No one else would care, but did he care enough?
‘I didn’t do it, and neither did Carrie.’
‘You’ve said that, but we know that’s not the case, is it? Will you at least comfort the family by passing on why you did it? Give them some solace to allow them closure? A confession might make the judge go easy on you for sentencing.’
Hunt waited.
This was how it was done. He felt the wheels come off the engine inside his head and felt everything stop. He could have jumped over the table and landed a punch, easy, but he’d given up, and he knew that Carrie had already done it. He recognised her howling voice as she’d been dragged back to her cell. It was only then he’d truly realised what was going on. Now, the detective’s face told him everything he needed to know: the bruises around his neck and the scratches down his cheeks.
Good on you, Carrie. We’ll never win, but we won’t go silently.
‘Violence obviously runs in your family, like it runs in Carrie’s,’ Hunt said.
Rage bubbled up in Henry, but it went nowhere. Hope was a fool’s game. He grinned.
‘Something funny?’ Hunt asked.
‘Not at all. Face hurt?’
‘You’ll be transferred to the nick on remand, where you’ll await trial. Goodbye, Henry. Take him down.’
They were three little words Henry thought he’d never hear again. Snapshots of life inside taunted him. His shoulders sagged forward and he imagined himself already in the witness stand being taken down the steps to the ice box, and the long journey to incarceration. He had no fight left. As officers escorted him out of the interview room, he thought of Grace. He’d kept her safe for almost two years since Vince went down. Who would look out for her now?
His cuffs clicked open and he was shoved roughly from behind, into the cell, as the door slammed shut. He sat down heavily on the plastic-covered bed. Bile burned his throat. He stared at his tattoos. He ignored the ones he’d had done inside; they were immature and irrelevant. It was the ones he’d had since then: the lotus, symbolising being born into shit, but growing out of it, regardless. The unalome, symbolising the path to enlightenment through chaos and transition. And the arrowhead, symbolising his future.
No future. He began to scratch them, gently at first, rhythmically rubbing as if trying to find some grounding in the bedlam. Then the first slivers of skin came away, stinging his flesh, but not enough to stop. The pain distracted him. His nail broke more soft skin and soon, a patch two inches long had completely rubbed away. The petals of the lotus flower disappeared, and his arm swelled with tension as blood trickled down his arm. The blood oozed along the tributaries of his physique, purging the shame all over again. It joined the bloody bandage protecting his wounded hand – a wound that would clinch the case against him, when they told the jury that Monika fought back before he smashed her skull in.