by Ese McGowan
They never went on holiday together again. He hated flying, sailing, driving. He’d had enough. Coach trips and his allotment were all he needed, and of course, Doris. There’s an enormous shed there now, where his allotment was. Adam put it there just before Alicia Mason moved in next door to us. I digress. Anyway, Doris, she clearly loved him, Frank, yes that was his name. I forget names sometimes, mostly deliberately. It’s a way to discard the people who claim them. Doris’ anecdotes of their life together were endearing, heartfelt. I had wanted to wrap her in my arms and squeeze out her mournful soul so that she could once again enjoy the sun on her freckled cheeks and hear music without pain. I thought we had become friends. The lovely lady across the road who was a refuge from the monster of a man who owned me but it didn’t last, he made sure of that. Honestly, this is what he was like.
One evening, on walking home from the station after work, I heard Adam’s voice. I followed the sound with my eyes and traced him to Doris’s doorstep where he could be seen embracing her, holding her in a bear hug, this grey curled lady with her saggy stockings and the pinny she always wore hanging crimpled and stained over her round paunchy belly, her eyes smiling through her tears, looking up adoringly at Adam. It was always the same. I had to be tentative if I were to approach as I could never be sure what story he might be spinning about me. Would she look at me, once she had spotted me staring over at them, with empathy at his version of the dependent, mentally challenged Erin Green or had he narrated the version of the tyrant, the one he could never quite escape, the version that despite his height, radiance, physique was too psychologically overpowering for him to disentangle himself from?
Sure enough, she looked up and over at me, as they all would and did at some point. She looked at me with poison. The warmth in her eyes had morphed into a glacial glare and Doris Lettinger, from that moment on, never spoke to me again. I guess that’s why I’m barely able to remember her husband’s name. I guess that’s why I don’t want her talking to Miriam. But she will. Of course she will and her age and frailty will make whatever she says the more believable.
‘Yes Boss,’ answers Detective Miriam Sykes’ constable. He looks a real piece of work and sounds positively dim. He’s a little portly and young, keen and not a person who ever intends on doing much walking I would have thought. I’m surprised she tolerates him but then, being the boss, you get this power thing going on and the weaker those beneath you, the easier the rule.
‘You know who it is?’ He’s referring to the dead man that all of them are now avoiding. The Crime Scene team will be uneasy once confined under a tent with him. Miriam feels uneasy in the open air. No one really knows what’s going on anymore, with this virus. Everything has changed.
‘It’s the guy who lives here, Joel Mason. I would think a lot of people round here know who he is. You’ve got to be bloody minded and brazen to have a party with all this going on.’ She continues, ‘What did they tell the reporting guys when they got here?’
‘Sounds like no one knew the guy had fallen off the roof. Most of them pissed off before uniform went inside but we’ve got the details of some of them who were hanging around outside. Johnson—’
‘He call it?’
‘Yeah, he said everyone was shocked when the wife came running in saying her husband was dead.’
‘And that happened when our guys were already here, about the party, when Mrs Lettinger called about the noise and social distancing?’
‘Yeah some she complained but the wife found him dead sometime before they arrived. No one seems to know when it happened exactly, but she came in screaming and was shouting the house down when our guys reached the front door. They thought it was some row or something so they’re all a bit shocked. Still outside if you want a word.’
‘Yeah, will do. No, get them out and back to the station. I’ll catch up with them later. So a guy falls from the roof and they’re all vague about when?’ He nods and she continues peering through her mirrored lenses. ‘Yeah, I’ll bet no one knows anything. They usually don’t,’ she said. Dead bodies tend to keep the usual loud mouths zipped up until they panic that they might become a suspect and then it’s a case of sieving through the cobwebs of imaginings and pure lies. ‘Ok, get knocking, and don’t be too formal, let’s try and set the lot of them at ease. Get their tongues greased, get them slippery. Once you get one of them started, they’ll all spew it out.’
‘Will do boss.’
‘Any sign of that tent yet Thomas?’ She asks her copper standing guard at the front of the house. He holds up his hand, five digits, and she walks back inside through the front door.
‘Mrs Mason?’ I’m back in the garden and craning my neck because I’m pretty sure when Miriam span around that she clocked me. I don’t care. I have to know and I can just about hear them. Alicia Mason is sitting on the sofa in the front room. As I told you, she plays the role of victim well. It’s carnage in here and even if there were a fight and they’re all already lying and in collusion about it, it would be a tough thing to prove in this pit of iniquity. There is crap everywhere. Even cigarette butts stubbed out on the floor. I know, I saw them doing it. What is it with people’s decorum at a party and the distinct bankruptcy of it when they are drunk? You can bet the people who did this wouldn’t even have a party in their own house. ‘Mrs Mason?’ she repeats. She isn’t much moved by the woman seated clutching her knees and rocking gently. It’s such a poor show. Like she mimicked it from a crap movie she once watched with her dead husband. She looks dishevelled, half clothed as if she dressed in a hurry. And she did and not for the first time. Miriam wants a picture taken of her and signals to the crime photographer to do so. The expression on this woman’s face doesn’t read as shock and neither does it transcend as heartbreak. ‘Mrs Mason,’ third time and now she looks up. It’s vomit inducing.
‘Did you see what happened to your husband?’ She shakes her head. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’ I know what you’re thinking, how can I hear all this? Because neither of these women do muted tones and I have exceptionally good hearing which has been more of a problem for me than not. Alicia shrugs her shoulders and now she is shivering but it’s very contrived. ‘Mrs Mason,’ presses Miriam. It’s not a good idea to play games with Miriam. She is too black and white. Grey areas are not her thing, and she will at some point make that clear, I’m sure. ‘It’s Alicia isn’t it? Can I call you that?’ She nods. This is a perfect example of someone who hasn’t quite decided what story she is going to spin, thinks Miriam, she has her eyes statically placed on Alicia’s and her posture is commanding. She’s taking no prisoners here and she shouldn’t because the people she’ll talk to will all tell lies.
Maybe I will too.
‘You’ll have to come down to the station with me as I need to ask you a few questions. I’ll try to keep it as brief as I can but we need to go over this place, as I’m sure you’ll understand, it’s a crime scene.’
‘What about the virus?’ says Alicia coldly. She should have thought about that before the party as it didn’t seem to have bothered her much then. And that’s the sum of it. Nothing more and interestingly, no rebuttal to it being a crime, his death. Nothing from her that this was simply a bad accident.
‘Do you know if your husband had taken any drugs last night or how much he had had to drink?’ asks Miriam. Alicia shrugs her shoulders again. Must hurt doing that so regularly. If she keeps this act up then Miriam will put a picture of awkward indifference at the forefront of her mind over this woman. It’s a weird thing to be doing right now, standing within a metre of a suspect or witness or victim as I’m sure Alicia will paint it, risking your life with every inhalation of breath.
‘Can we call anyone to come and sit with you, to pick you up from the station later?’ And why she’s offering support here is nothing more than irksome to me. Does she look like she needs any support? Have I got this wrong about you Miriam? Please don’t tell me you’re actually fooled by this vile huma
n being rocking and swaying in front of you? Please do something that reassures me you’re not buying into this bullshit.
‘My parents,’ ah, she speaks.
‘No problem, I’ll get one of my guys to organise that for you. If you come with me, you can wait in my car until I have the place secure, ok?’ She nods. And then Miriam continues. ‘The cars are fitted with screens and disinfected regularly so there should be no problem with contamination’, to which Alicia responds,
‘Erin Green killed him.’
‘Sorry?’ asks Miriam. ‘What did you say?’ Because her voice had suddenly become so icily clear and succinct that Miriam has had to check her ears that Alicia had spoken the words.
‘She lives next door. She pushed him off the roof.’
‘And you know that for sure do you? You saw her do it? Because when I asked you some moments ago if you saw what happened to your husband you shook your head to the negative.’
‘Someone did. Someone saw her,’ she answered coolly and enunciates each word just so she’s clear that she’s sure about what she’s saying.
‘Did they now?’ Miriam responds circumspectly. She dials into her mobile. ‘Yeah, it’s me. Can someone go round next door, number—’
‘49,’ advises Alicia.
’49, Erin Green. Take her in. I want a word.’
Fuck. Based on what? Hearsay?
She puts the phone to her chest and looks back to Alicia. ‘Erin live with anyone, Alicia?’
‘Yeah, but he’s nothing to do with it, he was here,’ she replies confidently delivering her information, devoid of any emotion. And this isn’t a lie but at the same time it is. You’ll see.
‘And your husband Joel is here. Someone move the body? That what you’re telling me?’ asks Miriam, knowing this is exactly what didn’t happen. Positioning the dead guy to match a fall next door so perfectly by a bunch of inebriated idiots was impossible by morons and also impossible by experts. It can never work. The red carotid splatters make that pure farce.
‘No,’ she snaps, ‘Joel was on the roof with Erin and Adam was with me downstairs, in the kitchen.’ Sounds like she isn’t quite sure, thinks Miriam. She picks up on the delay in Alicia’s voice but you know what, that wreck of a woman, the sudden shock of becoming a widow, the rocking and swaying and mumbling tones, that’s all dissipated. The real venomous Alicia has awoken and forgotten her act, until she collects herself and remembers to feel upset all over again.
‘That right?’ says Miriam. Alicia doesn’t react. ‘Lacey, can you take Mrs Mason down to the station?’ She asks one of the officers who obliges and guides Alicia to stand. ‘Lacey has a Covid 19 screen in her car too, so I take it that won’t be a problem?’ Alicia stares straight ahead and Miriam mumbles under her breath something like, ‘No, thought not.’
I need to get back in the house before they come knocking but I still need to see what Miriam does first. They can wait. Hell, I could be taking a bath. They can’t arrest me based on that. Alicia might hate me so much that she might have killed her own husband and is simply stitching me up.
Then again, maybe I did kill him.
Miriam wants to take a further look around and make sure there is nothing the crime photographer has missed. Something pretty peculiar stinks in this setup. She dials into her phone again. ‘Yeah, me again. Make sure you take whoever the hell Adam is when you pick up Erin Green; he lives with her.’ Yeah, you do that because he isn’t here. He’s in the house you’re in somewhere. Take a look around Miriam. She continues, ‘Yep. And if he’s not there I want him found…Ah, so people are talking, good.’ That won’t be good for me. ‘Don’t forget to keep your distance yeah?’ It’s ironic, isn’t it Miriam? Something inside you is telling you this is going to be one of those investigations where you end up talking to a hoard of people who all have something to say about each other and who won’t, as far as it sounds, be put off by the risk of contagion, being held at a two-metre distance in public, on their doorsteps, loud enough for all to hear. This is going to get very messy. Miriam needs to know that this will be all talk no doubt and probably irrelevant and she’ll have to gauge a lot of it with follow-ups on the telephone if she wants to stay out of hospital long enough to work out who is covering up for who and who is stitching who up. Lovely.
‘Wish it would rain,’ she mutters under her breath once outside, as she watches Alicia bend her body into the police car as the curtain twitching begins.
She turns and retraces her steps back to the body of Joel Mason lying fractured on the slate tiles out back. I can hear someone banging at my door but they can wait, I’m watching Miriam. She’s looking up at the roof. It doesn’t seem a natural thing to have wandered out onto that roof. It isn’t. I know.
She steps further back into the garden, searching with her eyes for a flattening to the pitched roof. There’s something there. She walks back inside the house. The smell of the place has started to peak, a mixture of fetid alcohol and stale breath is thickening the air. She climbs the stairs and there is debris here too, discarded food, even a condom. I hear her remark on it, disgusted. The thin rim of civility had clearly ebbed away at this party. There had to be many aggrieved people, people who had not felt comfortable within the debauchery, people who had felt appalled by the leap out of decency as if wild animals had been released from their confinement for the first and only time.
You’d like to think.
At the top of the stairs a small door stands ajar. A door at least three-quarters of the height and width of the bedroom doors. She pushes it open to reveal a narrow and steep staircase, no higher than a couple of metres. Carefully, side stepping up she reaches the top step where again there is another door, and extremely cumbersomely, she opens it. She struggles to understand why this is even here and how no one before now has ever broken their neck toppling from the stairs whilst trying to open it. Kicking the bottom of the door, as if something is scraping against it, the opening reveals a flattening of the roof. Nothing here appears particularly regular to this house. This is not part of the original build. Looking out over the other rooftops along the street, those of which she can see without teetering too far over and those which are not visually obscured, it becomes clear how highly unlikely there is to be another roof like this. The panorama of rooves are pitched. I should know. I’ve climbed up here. This has been engineered recently, at least in the last decade and oddly, it appears to be a viewing platform. There is little in the surrounding environment that would make one want to have a viewing platform here, no landmarks or anything, no picturesque visual escapes from the urban setting.
That’s right. So it’s for something else, isn’t it? Plenty of room for a chair.
Whomever decided to come up here had done so to complete a very private conversation. If Erin Green did indeed climb onto to this flat roof with Joel Mason, she’d have had a hard time pushing him off without falling herself but Miriam has no illusions that this is not impossible. Anything is possible with human beings when they feel threatened whether justly or not. Anyone can be a killer.
That’s true. Anyone can be a killer.
Looking down at the body, her eyes follow the path of roof tiles which have come away with Joel’s descent. His broken dead body is about to be covered by the tent. Forensics have finally arrived. Miriam needs answers and she knows the lies are about to come at her like a tidal wave. Something about Alicia Mason sets her ill at ease, there’s no doubt about that. This is going to be a long and drawn out filtration. This street feels like an atmosphere of resentment of people who came together with drugs and alcohol who grew their resentments as they watched each other decay and verge from the confinements of previously controlled behaviour before all rules were abandoned and no one was looking, like a bunch of hunting dogs. Then of course, who of these people will drop down with the virus before she discovers what has really happened here?
It sure as hell won’t be me.
4
Back at the statio
n Miriam is gathering up her notepads and pouring a coffee. It’s a peculiar setting in this once hustling and noisy office. Desks have been moved wide apart and the staff halved. You can’t help but feel disturbed by it all, a weight pulling you down which you try and must resist.
‘Marley not in today Boss?’ asks one of her sergeants.
‘Nah, on my own for a bit. He’s self-isolating. Out for two weeks. His wife has a temperature.’
‘Yeah, I’ll bet,’ he says, ‘They’re trying for a baby aren’t they?’
‘No, she really does have a temperature and a cough, not that she wants to admit it and he won’t like you for saying that!’ she jokes with him. ‘The wife in room three?’ He nods. ‘And Erin Green?’
‘Next door, in four.’ I am, and the sound proofing in this police station is shockingly bad. ‘She’s asked for a pen and pad.’
‘Writing a memoire is she?’
‘Something like that,’ he replies. And here it all begins, thinks Miriam.
‘Leave her in there for a while. Let’s see what she puts down in ink,’ she tells him.
5
Interview with Alicia Mason, interview room three, the room adjacent to mine.
‘Ok, do you need a coffee or some water before we begin?’ Miriam is in the room. The door is still ajar. I can hear the scraping of chairs and the milk white obscured room divide is fairly ineffective. Who the hell designed this place? A changing room designer for a low budget clothing store. It’s like people who talk about serious shit in front of their kids thinking that they take nothing in and understand zilch. They are always wrong about that and never realise until the scarring appears if they ever realise at all.
‘I’ve had one thanks,’ replies Alicia, devoid of emotion so behaving like her normal self. ‘I’ve been waiting a while. I did ask for a blanket—’ She is sitting on a chair and I can’t tell if she is looking at the figure through the milky glass, me, or if she is merely avoiding eye contact with Miriam. Her head’s at a weird angle.
