by Ese McGowan
‘So, tell it to me like I’m a five-year-old. When did the argument in the background about the garden wall take place?’
‘Earlier that day.’
‘So you called Adam twice that day?’
‘Yes. Earlier and then after the party, or when I left after I saw Erin and Joel leave the downstairs bathroom and go upstairs together.’
‘And you’re saying Erin Green called you after this happened? After Joel Mason died? After we arrived at the scene?’
‘No,’ she flustered. ‘I just told you that. I called Adam during the day, he was in the garden and again after I left the party. Erin called me in the afternoon of the day Joel died. Before he died. When she’s telling you they locked her up the spare room and took away her phone.’
‘So yesterday afternoon, Erin Green called you?’
‘Yes. I’m sure it was yesterday.’
‘But you can’t be certain?’
‘I’m in shock Detective Sykes. We all are. Our friend was murdered. And I told you. I deleted my call history.’
‘And you say you were friends with Joel? Because a few minutes ago it didn’t sound a lot like you had much time for either of the Masons.’
‘Yes I was friends with Joel. Look, I knew him from a few years back, ok? Now you know. We worked together.’
Yes Mabel, we all did, didn’t we? Just before I met Adam and you know exactly why I was in the downstairs bathroom with him don’t you?
18
Adam Konstantas, interview reconvened. Erin Green is now under self-imposed lock down in cell nine. Detective Miriam Sykes has lambasted one of her officers for not having moved her sooner. She still has not interviewed Erin.
She clicks on the tape recorder. It isn’t perfect recording from a speaker phone but it will have to do for now. Someone, she hopes, will have to let their guard down. She wants this investigation closed down as soon as possible. Most of the police officers in the station have opted to work from home now. It’s surreal and they’re all banking on the public never finding this out. No one is convinced a police force working from home will be accepted by the tax payer. It’s a bit of an oxymoron.
Tomorrow morning, what little forensics they could pull together with so many having trampled over everything at the crime scene with their sloppy hands and drunken dragging feet, will be on her desk.
She clicks the archaic grubby button on the phone to connect the call from the switchboard.
‘Thanks for getting back in touch Adam,’ she says. ‘We’ve had a hard time tracking you down again.’
‘Sorry, I had to go out.’
‘Yes, you mentioned you were going to, despite the advice to stay home. Where did you need to go so urgently, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Alicia asked me to pick her up, from her parents. She needs to be with the kids and of course, they aren’t allowed near the grandparents.’
‘Where did you take her to Adam?’
‘Oh, well, home, here on the street.’
‘Specifically, is Alicia staying with you now?’ This just gets weirder and weirder. Does no one care how this looks?
‘Yes.’
‘And will Erin be ok with this set up would you think?’
‘Look, I broke up with Erin weeks ago. Everyone knows that. Hasn’t anyone told you that yet?’
‘Possibly. But at some point she may leave the station here and she’ll need a place to stay herself and I’m not happy to place her in an acrimonious situation in which the last time you were all together a man died. Mrs Mason will not be allowed to stay there once Miss Green is released from the station. Is that clear Mr Konstantas?’
‘Yes, when your lot get out of her house, it won’t be a problem, will it?’
‘If she’s happy to stay in the place her husband dropped to his death in. I would be concerned for her mental health and those of the children.’
‘The kids aren’t Joel’s.’
‘Whose are they?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Are they your kids Adam?’
‘No.’ He has hesitated. She will note that down. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about Erin? She’s the suspect after all.’
‘I decide who the suspect is but yes, feel free to carry on. Don’t let me stop you.’
‘Erin and I live together, that’s all this is, well we did. I don’t want her coming back now. It’s my house as much as it is hers We bought a house together, me and her. So that makes things complicated and I met Alicia on a film set and we hit it off.’
‘I’m not a divorce lawyer Mr Konstantas. Do I need to point out to you that we are in the midst of a pandemic and I have a duty of care to ensure no one is walking the street once they leave the police station? Have I made myself clear?’
‘So you’ve definitely got her there then? She been charged yet?’
‘She is here of her own accord. Now, when exactly did you strike up a relationship with Mrs Mason? How long ago?’
‘Ok, so before someone else tells you this, it was a few years ago. I don’t remember exactly. I forgot all about it to be honest but I never claimed to have never known Alicia before she moved next door.’ Panic has penetrated Adam’s tongue. The truth is spewing out. He is terrified of what Miriam may have already been made aware of. Better to be transparent in the lie, surrounding the lie than to cushion it with more fabrication.
‘Are you sure about that? Erin Green is quite certain you pervaded, both of you, to have never met. That you insisted you had never met before working on a film set. I have a written statement from her. Is she lying?’
‘Detective Sykes,’ he pauses and adds a sage tone which he is convinced will penetrate through to Miriam as it has worked so well with everyone he has ever encountered before over the years. ‘If Erin had asked me I would have told her. She made an assumption. But, in truth, I suppose I had given her the impression we hadn’t met before and then, maybe, that I hardly recollected it which is sort of true which I accept could be seen as a truth. However, I didn’t set out to do it, to be with Alicia and our relationship was over way before all that started, me and Erin.’
‘How long have you been with Erin. How many years?’
‘Five, six, I haven’t been counting. Only the days until she’d be leaving,’ he tells her.
‘You say you met Mrs Mason years before and began an affair with her all that time ago or just a friendship? I will check so better to be honest here, Mr Konstantas.’
‘Yes, it began when we met.’
‘And was that before or after you met Erin?’
‘Before.’
‘And referring to my notes from just now. You say you were counting the days from when “she’d” be leaving. Was that the plan? To have Erin removed because it doesn’t sound a whole lot like she has any idea about this idea, and you mention as she has, that you both own the property.’
‘Yes, I did say that because we do both own it. When I said I was counting I was speaking metaphorically, with hope—’
‘Hope that she would get locked up for something she didn’t do or hope that she would stumble off a roof at a party but it went horribly wrong?’
That’s thrown him. You can hear the heavy, weighted shortening of his panting for breath. His reserved demeanour is vertiginous. ‘I didn’t set out to hurt her,’ he scrambles. ‘We didn’t keep anything from her so if she says we did, she’s lying but sounds like she’s lying about everything else so…’ Miriam lets him run away with it. If it sounds like bullshit, it usually is.
‘I can’t understand why people might have said there was tension between Joel and I.’ He has recovered his steely composure. ‘Look Detective, Joel and Alicia had always had an open relationship. They started off like that. She was successful, he was successful and they were friends and most of all they are, were, incredibly open-minded people and when they married they committed to each other that they wouldn’t punish each other for finding other people a
ttractive. Joel was involved with us, intrinsically.’
‘But you remarked to me that you felt uncomfortable with him, in the garden, when you were talking to him about the wall, yesterday afternoon before the party,’ reminds Miriam.
‘Oh, well I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ he replies, smugly.
‘You did put it like that. It didn’t come out of my mouth.’
‘Right,’ he responds in a way anyone would return the communication with the back of their hand. You’d want to but you wouldn’t do it. ‘I didn’t mean it quite like that and earlier I wasn’t being entirely open with you, yet here I am, clearing all of this up.’
‘If you say so. And the video? Did this cause some tension between you and Joel?’
‘What video? Who told you that? Erin?’ Perhaps fatigues is plaguing Adam’s recollections of his lies.
‘You did Adam,’ insists Miriam.
Steely edge once again, slipped into sloppy word wriggling. ‘Look, all that was a joke. There was no video because Erin is saying we did something we didn’t do. It’s in her imagination. We let her think there was one, we didn’t deny it but just like her accusation of us locking her up, it didn’t happen and by the way, we weren’t the only ones at the party. Ask them about her, about what happened.’
‘You said to me earlier, I quote, “Don’t you want to watch it?” you know, the video of me and Alicia,” to her husband Joel Mason, over the garden wall that adjoins your two respective properties. And that conversation took place, according to several witnesses yesterday afternoon, prior to the death of Joel Mason.’
‘I definitely didn’t say that. You must be confused.’
‘I’m not,’ assures Miriam. ‘Andreas Andersen, your neighbour, says that you were bragging about this video to him in the street.’
‘What do you mean by that? That’s totally untrue. Why would he say that?’
‘You tell me Adam,’ said Miriam.
‘Everyone’s saying we weren’t social distancing, that they weren’t at the party, it was the eve of the tighter lock down and we all wanted to let off steam before everything was shut down completely. The whole neighbourhood was there, and no one was complaining about it then and loads of friends from work, a lot of Erin’s friends actually. And you know, Mabel, her best friend, thought Erin’s behaviour was bordering on crazy and that she and Joel were doing something in the downstairs bathroom. Maybe they were having an affair. Have you thought of that? That she’s trying to cover up her involvement with him and push the blame onto us? Onto Alicia and I because we were having an affair?’
‘I ask the questions Adam. Not the other way around,’ informs Miriam.
‘Ok. You should know that Erin was drugged up as usual, drunk as well probably but I was with Alicia all evening. The whole entire evening and I was not there when Joel fell off the roof. Was pushed off the roof. I didn’t see anything but she definitely went off somewhere with Joel, upstairs. And that had to have been to the roof. Ask Mabel. She saw them. I don’t know what time exactly but I noticed she and him were neither where they were supposed to be when I looked in from the garden, because Alicia and I nipped over the wall to my place when he fell off the roof, before he fell obviously.’
‘Supposed to be? Can you explain what you mean by that?’ asked Miriam.
‘Nothing. Just that none of us were supposed to go anywhere. We were all on lockdown.’
‘And yet you weren’t.’
‘It was one last party.’
‘Erin states that she was locked in your spare bedroom room where you drugged her for some days and that she couldn’t have gone anywhere of her own accord, let alone upstairs with Joel. And from that I take it that she was in no state to have gone anywhere at all which is why you just said where she was “supposed to be”. Is that why she climbed over the wall that night, before Joel Mason died, running away from you? Or running away from Joel Mason?’
No, actually I said I was locked up before and he made me go to the party and yes I was drugged because they drugged me but I left and he has nothing on me. He didn’t see me go upstairs with Joel. He didn’t see me leave. He didn’t know where I’d gone and that’s bothering him.
‘She wasn’t running away from anyone. She’s the killer here, not any of us.’
‘Fair enough,’ retorts Miriam drily. ‘How long has Mabel worked with Erin, can you recall?’
‘I don’t know,’ he’s agitated, thrown by the sudden question, thrown by the accusations. ‘She was working with Mabel when I met her.’
‘So Erin probably knew Joel before— from work?’
‘No. That’s wrong,’ spits Adam.
‘Why so defensive Adam?’
‘I’m not but you’re asking me questions that you should be asking her. I don’t know anything about her knowing Joel.’
‘Yet you told me you didn’t know Alicia and then you did. You certainly inferred even if you had met before that it was inconsequential, am I right? Erin is insistent that you pretended not to have known her before she moved in. She also insists that you and Alicia locked her in her room and drugged her.’
‘Seriously. Why do you keep saying that? She’s lying. She told you Alicia and I had sex in the kitchen to wind her up, didn’t she? She’s full of shit. What happened was that I fell asleep next door on Alicia’s sofa the night she says we did that. I was so drunk I couldn’t have had sex with anyone and that’s a fact. Ask anyone.’
‘We have, Adam. We have. And it all looks a little pre-planned, both times, almost identical timings yet separate nights. Maybe too planned wouldn’t you say?’
‘What the fuck has me sleeping with Alicia have to do with any of this? With Joel’s murder?’
‘It tells me that you’re a little on the fence with your account, Adam, if nothing else.’
19
It has been a long day.
Interview with Jason Bartlett’s wife, Abigail Bartlett, Number 17 Shakespeare Street, backs onto the Mason’s rear garden.
‘Mabel has gripe against Erin,’ Abigail tells her. ‘She didn’t get furloughed and wasn’t promoted alongside Erin, so take what you want from that, from what she says about the whole thing. My sister works with them. She’s not keen on either of them, Erin or Mabel but she has no reason to make anything up about them.’
‘And Dana and her husband, she’s estranged from him. He’s been long gone, hiding somewhere. They’re loan sharks. Humble little Dana. Don’t be fooled by her. She had her husband operate some bullshit money lending faux investment scheme. You invest your money and get a high return, and you’re locked in and lose everything if they go under which no one knows about, I mean, they never made that clear to anyone and they lend to small time builders who are renowned for going bankrupt. Maybe now, with the Government’s financial supporting schemes, they’ll be exposed but I know that Erin found out about them, if that means anything. It gives Dana a motive to stitch her up. Her mother was going to invest with her paltry amount of savings and Erin stopped her which pissed off Dana big time. She had to kiss goodbye to her holiday in the Seychelles. That’s what she told Pearl. Everyone goes to Pearl to bitch about Erin and Erin’s so stupid because she thinks Pearl is her friend.’
I don’t.
‘And you have a problem with Erin too?’
‘No, not like that I don’t. I don’t like her but I think people around here are making up a whole load of crap to cover up what they’ve been up to.’
‘Your husband said they have given you anxiety problems.’
‘I’d rather not have to hear their parties and wish our gardens weren’t adjoining but I’m not a jabbering wreck. And it’s a whole lot worse now, in this pandemic with everyone at home so yes it makes me anxious but I have nothing personal against Erin or any of them. I don’t know them really. I’m just fed up with all the noise.’
‘Yes, your husband told me that.’
‘You end up living and dying by their schedule, their partie
s, the irregular parties mid-week, all week long, every weekend. They have parties all the time, no exaggeration. Maybe she’s telling you the truth about them locking her in. I wouldn’t put it past them. I didn’t see her around for a couple of days. I thought she was away again which was odd because they had stopped most travel, because of the virus. Don’t know why you’d want to go anywhere now anyhow. And then I wondered if they’d split up. Alicia and Adam definitely had something going on as I’m sure my husband has already told you.’
20
It’s a new morning but it feels the same as yesterday. This entire investigation is impossible, thinks Miriam and in a way, ridiculous. A street of people. A symbol of discord. Complaints more than evidence. And the forensics have produced nothing more than expected. A whole lot of DNA that will point to absolutely no one. There is so much DNA found on the stairwell up to the roof, on the steep bannister that each and every person who attended that house that night is a suspect, else there is no suspect and the man simply slipped or culled his own life.
What, if any, motive exists is the frayed thread of the insinuation that Erin Green had formed a prior relationship with the victim, Joel Mason. So she may have worked with him once. Miriam has worked with hundreds of people and she can barely recall their faces let alone their names. It’s what happens, with all of us.
And then of course is the tenuous account of Adam Konstantas. Pretends one minute to find the situation of him sleeping with someone else’s wife a little awkward and then contradicts himself that Alicia and Joel had an open relationship that he was calmly part of. Then there is the somewhat hostile nature of Alicia. She hardly bears a semblance to a grieving widow and this is not shock. She cares less about that than she does her insistence that Erin Green is the murderer and she has no evidence of that at all. In fact, she doesn’t even want to talk about it, yet she has shifted her refuge from her parents’ house to Erin Green’s house to reside with Erin Green’s recently separated fiancé, Adam. And that really is stunningly mental, thinks Miriam. It stinks of hostility. It’s an antagonistic act. Exactly where is Erin Green supposed to go when we kick her out of here? She’s established that she no longer even has a healthy, indeed friendly, relationship with her own mother and it should be noted that Erin has spent now twenty-four hours in self-induced police custody, charged with absolutely nothing at all, yet. She’s in a cell and last night, the officers locked it. They have to if it’s occupied. It isn’t a boarding house. Then Miriam thinks about Mabel, her so-called friend or colleague or who knows? And Dana, who according to others had herself embarked on a relationship with Adam and then there is Pearl Ritter who has to be one of the snidest pensioners Miriam has ever encounter and she has encountered a fair few, her mother-in-law for one. And what really do any of these women have to offer other than spite? Mabel insists she saw Erin go up to the roof, followed by Joel and that’s it. Isn’t it more sinister that he followed her up there rather than the other way around? It looks more like he was out to do Erin harm and maybe this happened and she defended herself. And why, if she was feeling threatened by him, as the fumble in the downstairs bathroom was described by Mabel as more of a scuffle, a discorded conversation than anything benign, why did she not simply go home? Why did she climb those stairs? Was she drugged beyond a reasonable functioning mind? Did Adam and Alicia really lock her in her room the days leading up to Joel Mason’s death? Why have Adam and Alicia repeated the exact same sexual encounter in Erin’s Kitchen at around the same night on seemingly consecutive nights? Seems calculated. Designed to confuse a witness.
