Garibaldi looked across the table in Interview Room 2. ‘Thank you for coming in.’
Emily Francis looked uncomfortable. It was probably the first time she had ever been in a station.
‘I’m not being charged or anything am I?’
‘Not at all,’ said Garibaldi, ‘it’s just that we’ve got a few further questions and thought it would be better to go through them here.’
‘So I don’t need a solicitor or anything?’
Garibaldi shook his head. ‘You’re welcome to get one if you want but all you’re doing is helping us with our enquiries.’
Garibaldi picked up a copy of the Standard open at the page of Emily’s article. ‘How’s this gone down?’ he said.
‘The Standard loved it.’
‘And what about Forum?’
‘They weren’t so keen. Worried about bad publicity I suppose, though I did point out that I didn’t mention them.’
Garibaldi picked up another paper from the table – the Mail this time. ‘Didn’t take this lot long to get on to it, did it? Maybe Forum were right to be a bit concerned.’
‘I don’t see that I did anything wrong—’ 212
‘We’re not saying you did.’
‘The fact is that I was attacked. The fact is that Giles Gallen was murdered. And we both work for the same tutoring firm. Look—’ Emily broke off, as if she were losing patience with her self-justification, ‘OK, I really want to be a journalist, that’s no secret, and so I saw the opportunity and took it. I had this feature on tutoring that I wrote some time ago and so I offered it to the Standard and they took it. All I had to do was make a few changes …’
‘And what kind of changes would they be?’ said DS Gardner.
‘Well, the original was a kind of exposé, you know Secret Diary of a Private Tutor kind of thing, giving the lowdown, telling the truths. It didn’t seem appropriate to offer that, so I took out all the juicy bits.’
‘Do you have a copy of that original article?’ said Garibaldi.
Emily looked flustered. ‘Well, yes, but …’
‘I’d love to see it, just out of interest you understand. Nothing more.’
Emily’s eyes darted from side to side. ‘I’d love to give it to you but the thing is I’ve actually pitched it to some editors and I’m waiting for them to get back so maybe …’
‘Not to worry, Emily,’ said Garibaldi holding up his hand. ‘Not to worry. It’s just that the more I find out about this whole private tutoring thing the more I’m fascinated. Anyway …’ He put down the papers and picked up his notes. ‘I’m interested in what you say about changing that article, about taking out the juicy bits because, you see Emily, and this is why we’ve called you in today, we think you might have been taking out some other juicy bits.’
‘I’m sorry?’ 213
‘The account you gave us of the Saturday evening you spent with Giles at the pub and at the Forum party …’
Garibaldi paused. He loved creating silences like this, the chance they gave to look closely at a face and evaluate the reaction.
‘I don’t understand.’ Emily seemed unruffled but Garibaldi could tell her mind was whirring, busily rebooting and refreshing, trying to work out what was coming.
‘I thought you said I wasn’t in trouble.’
‘I’m not saying you are.’ Garibaldi scanned his notes. He didn’t need to but he knew it had an unnerving effect, as if referring to something already written gave more weight to the spoken words. ‘All I’m saying is that in what you’ve told us about that evening you’ve done what you did to that article – you’ve left out the juicy bits. And just as I would very much like to see that original article so would I like to hear the full version of that Saturday night. In the case of the article, you have every right not to show us it – or at least you do at the moment, who knows what might happen in the future? – but in the case of the Saturday night, as this is part of a murder investigation you have a duty to give us what is often referred to as the whole truth.’
Emily shifted in her seat. Her inner computations had finished. She knew the game was up.
‘Which bit of the evening are you talking about?’
‘You know which bit, Emily.’
‘I’m not sure I do.’ She wasn’t giving in too easily.
‘We’ve got CCTV footage.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of the side door to the Red Lion. The one you use to go to the loos. If you turn that way, that is.’
Emily’s defiance shrivelled. Her nod of acknowledgement was slow and resigned. 214
‘We could show you the footage,’ said Gardner, ‘but if you tell us the truth we won’t need to.’
‘Take your time,’ said Garibaldi.
Emily gathered herself. ‘Look, it was really silly. I mean nothing like that had ever happened between us before. Ever. And I hadn’t expected it to. But Giles was in a strange mood at the pub and I’d had quite a bit to drink and I suppose we’d been flirting in a way all evening. I’d been teasing him about being a supertutor and about what he got up to in Italy with the other tutor …’
‘What did he get up to?’
‘Nothing. Or at least that’s what he claimed. So I was teasing, flirting. I wasn’t with him much at the party but then at the pub it was different and just before we were all thinking of going he made this suggestion …’ Emily broke off and looked across the table at Garibaldi and Gardner. ‘Do I really have to spell it out? How much detail do you need?’
Garibaldi leaned forward. ‘Did you, Miss Francis, have sexual intercourse with Giles Gallen in the garden of the Red Lion on that Saturday night?’
‘Well …’ Emily shook her head, a mixture of disappointment and embarrassment. ‘How relevant are these details?’
‘We won’t know until we hear them.’
‘OK. Sexual intercourse? No.’
‘But you got up to something in that garden?’
‘We couldn’t do it standing up. He was too …’
‘So you didn’t have sexual intercourse but you did something else?’
‘Do I really have to answer this?’
‘I’m afraid you do.’
‘Yeah. We did something else. He … I …’
She paused, her eyes darting from one to the other, pleading not to have to spell it out. 215
Garibaldi said nothing, his eyes fixed on her in a steady gaze. Now was not a time to look at Milly Gardner.
‘I gave him … look I really don’t see how—’
‘Thank you, Miss Francis,’ cut in Garibaldi. ‘You wonder why we’re asking you about this and I quite understand your concern, but the thing is if you’ve chosen to exclude this very important element of the events of that Saturday night we are concerned that you may not have been entirely truthful about other things.’
‘Such as?’
Garibaldi looked at Gardner. She took up the baton.
‘Such as,’ said Gardner, ‘whether you were privy to some secret that Giles Gallen shared with you, whether you were threatened at knife point and told to keep quiet because there were in fact things that you knew.’
‘I’ve told you already. There’s nothing I know.’
‘Why should we believe that?’ said Garibaldi. ‘You lied to us about what happened between you and Gallen that night —’
‘I didn’t lie! I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. I just …’
‘You just didn’t tell us.’
‘It didn’t seem relevant.’
‘Didn’t seem relevant?’ said Garibaldi. ‘Sex – or something close to it – some kind of job, let’s say, with a man who hours later was stabbed to death a mile or so away.’
‘So you’re saying I lied by omission?’
Omission. Emission. Now wasn’t the time for a pun.
‘We’re not playing lawyers here, Miss Francis, even if that may have been what you studied at university.’
‘I studied Psychology.’
‘I see.’
He had no idea what he saw, apart from further evidence 216that he found Emily Francis’s generation irritating beyond words.
He leant forward, rested his elbows on the table and clasped his hands. ‘The thing that puzzles me is that you spent a large part of Saturday evening with Giles Gallen. Pub before the party. Pub after the party. Pub garden after the party. In all that time did he say nothing that might suggest some secret?’
Emily Francis shook her head. ‘That’s the thing about secrets. They’re not secrets if you tell anyone.’
‘It’s psychology you studied, right? Not philosophy.’
No smile. Total seriousness.
‘The question that I’m really asking myself here,’ said Garibaldi, ‘is why you were threatened at knife point and told to keep quiet, why you were told to remember what happened to Giles Gallen if you had no idea what you needed to be quiet about. Strange, isn’t it?’
‘Very strange. I don’t understand it at all.’
‘There is one possibility, though, which is also nagging away at me. I don’t want to think it’s true but the thought won’t go …’
Emily looked at him expectantly.
‘And that’s the possibility that your account of the attack isn’t completely truthful.’
‘You think I’ve left out the juicy bits?’
‘I’m not talking omission here, Miss Francis.’
‘You think I made it up? Why the fuck would I make it up?’
‘Exactly,’ said Garibaldi, ‘why would you?’
Emily sat back in her chair and folded her arms. Her gaze swivelled back and forth between Garibaldi and Gardner, her eyes bright and defiant.
‘So the question I’m asking here,’ said Garibaldi, ‘is why 217would your attacker say those things to you if you have no idea what he could be talking about? You see my problem. Maybe he didn’t say those things—’
Emily banged her fist on the table. ‘He did say those things!’
‘Or maybe you do know whatever Giles Gallen knew.’
Another fist bang. ‘I don’t know!’
‘So if neither of those things is true why did the attack happen at all?’
Emily raised her fist for a third time but thought better of it. ‘Exactly. And do you know what? Sometimes I think it was a mistake. Sometimes I think they maybe got the wrong person.’
The wrong person. It was the second time Emily had said it. When he first spoke to her she’d suggested that Giles Gallen may have been murdered in a case of mistaken identity. And here she was saying the same about her assault.
To suggest one case of mistaken identity looked like misfortune, to suggest two …
Garibaldi looked across the table at Emily Francis, thinking of her and Giles Gallen in the Red Lion pub garden. Lines from Larkin came to him – the ones in High Windows about seeing a couple of kids and guessing he’s fucking her …
Giles Gallen may not have been doing that (or able to do that) with Emily Francis on that particular Saturday night but he found it difficult to believe that he hadn’t done it with her before.
Was that why he found it difficult to see Giles Gallen as the squeaky-clean character his old schoolmate had described?
Was that why he also found it difficult to believe anything that Emily Francis said?