Snowflake

by Heide Goody

  “Is this necessary?” said Sergeant Fenton.

  “Hang on. Nearly there. Then it’s right along the high street. Once upon a time that all used to be fields and you could leave your door open at night. And then left near the old train engine works. That was a glorious age of steam, back when Britain was truly great. Coal smoke, good for the lungs. And then we turned in and we were at the tip.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “Seriously?” said Sergeant Fenton.

  “Tyseley tip,” said Detective Boyce. “Near the railway museum.”

  “See?” I said.

  “We’ll check it out,” said the detective and clicked on the laptop. “What about this? You and another man – I believe you’ve referred to him as Ashbert – were also seen digging on the waste ground across the road from the flats. We have a team there now.”

  “Do you?” I said, surprised. It wasn’t a very exciting place. There wouldn’t be much there for them to do.

  “Why were you digging there?”

  “I was getting some earth to make a habitat.”

  “Habitat?”

  “Trilobites,” I said, hoping that she wouldn’t know that there was no such thing in the modern world. “I have some in Adam’s bedroom.”

  “What would be in the walk-in bathtub?”

  That threw me. I’d not shown them Adam’s bedroom when we went inside to get some clothes. And the walk-in bath hadn’t been there when Sergeant Fenton first visited. Detective Boyce read my expression with ease.

  She brought up another picture. My trilobite habitat. Little Dougie was trying to scrabble up the side. He’d be hungry for his tea. Or would it be breakfast now?

  “We’ve had a little poke around,” said Detective Boyce. “I’m curious as to why you’d have a tub of flesh-eating arthropods in your brother’s bedroom.”

  “Flesh-eating?” Well, I suppose they were.

  “This isn’t looking good, is it, Lori?” said the detective.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Let me present a scenario to you,” she said. “You can leap in any time you like to correct the minor details.”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t like your brother. You’ve recently been kicked out of your parents’ home and maybe you went to stay with him. But you’ve got a boyfriend – or is it two boyfriends?”

  “Two boyfriends?” I said, and then I thought... And the guilty little thought was oh.

  “– and you want a place of your own. Now, I’m not saying you murdered Adam purely to get a place to live, although it’s tough getting on the property ladder these days.”

  “Murdered?” I said.

  “I don’t know how you did it. But it was messy, wasn’t it? Who knew human bodies produced so much blood, eh? Maybe you considered burying him on the waste ground. Or maybe just his bones, once those little crab things had consumed his flesh. Nice touch that. And then all you had to do was dispose of the forensic evidence. The blood-soaked clothes. The rug. Did Terence know you’d killed him?”

  “No!” I said.

  “Oh, so you had an innocent man help you destroy criminal evidence?”

  “No!”

  “Ah, so he was in on it.”

  “Stop it! You’re confusing me!”

  “That’s not particularly hard to do though, is it?” said Sergeant Fenton.

  They put me in a cell. I slept. I cried. I think I cried in my sleep which is a neat trick. Whatever, my pillow was wet when they woke me up again.

  They gave me a cup of tea and some toast, which was nice of them. But then I remembered that they were trying to put me in the frame for murder and that wasn’t nice.

  Sergeant Fenton and Detective Boyce met in the interview room. It didn’t look like either of them had slept.

  “Where is your brother?” said Detective Boyce. No, good morning, Lori. No cordial greeting. Just straight in there.

  “I told you,” I said. “I don’t know. I think he’s in Spain.”

  “Yes, in Spain. But you didn’t sound very sure. Can you remember where exactly he is and what he’s doing?”

  “He said he was doing some filming.”

  “Filming. Good.”

  “He does a lot of that, but I think he said he was a last-minute replacement. I can’t quite remember the name of the place. It was one of those something-del-something names, like Costa del Sol but not that, you know?”

  “So, he’s somewhere, but that place isn’t the Costa del Sol,” said Sergeant. “Enlightening.”

  “You last argued with your brother two nights ago, you say,” said Detective Boyce.

  “That is correct.”

  “You were at James Reynold’s house at the time.”

  “I was. You can ask him.”

  “We have,” said Detective Boyce in a voice straight out of the Sinister School of Acting.

  “What’s your relationship with Mr Reynolds?” asked Sergeant Fenton.

  “We don’t have one. We just work at the same museum.”

  “You spent the night at his house.”

  “I did, but that was only because I fell asleep after we…. Well, we had a bit of a mishap with some paint and his uncle’s car.”

  “Did you now?”

  “Yes,” I said and gave a heavily edited version of the story about a friend’s car getting covered with paint.

  “Can I be clear on this point?” she said. “You had two entirely separate paint-based accidents in the course of the last thirty-six hours, and the clothes-burning and rug-dumping schemes that you’ve described for getting rid of the mess were because you’re nervous of the rubbish sorting system in your brother’s flat?”

  “Yes, that is correct,” I said, to be sure that the tape recorder captured the neat, but slightly damning summary. Why was she making me sound like such an idiot?

  “Since we last spoke, some further evidence has come to light,” said Detective Boyce. She started a video clip on her laptop and I saw straightaway that it was CCTV from the garage forecourt. It showed me pulling up in the Jaguar. The picture quality was really good. The lighting really brought out the red of the paint on the Jaguar body and roof.

  “That’s some nice protective overalls you’ve got on there,” said Detective Boyce. “Our forensics guys wear them to avoid contaminating a crime scene.”

  “Actually, it’s a beekeeping suit,” I said.

  “You know, maybe you didn’t kill Adam in the flat,” said Sergeant Fenton.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Or maybe you thought you had but you’d left the job half done.”

  “I really didn’t,” I said.

  “There’s no sound on the CCTV footage,” said Detective Boyce, “but the store manager distinctly remembers hearing screams coming from inside your car. The boot.”

  “I need to explain about the screaming,” I said. I was about to say that it was a funny story, but in the short time that I’d known her, I’d come to realise that Sergeant Fenton’s sense of humour was not very well developed.

  “Yes, you do,” said the sergeant. “You should know that we have arrested your accomplice.”

  “Who? James?”

  “Oh, so it was James who assisted you?”

  This was terrible news. I couldn’t believe that things were getting so out of hand. I pictured the police taking James away while Theo watched, and it felt unbelievably awful.

  So,” said Detective Boyce, “you – what? – inveigled him into helping you conceal the crime?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if it was your idea or his?”

  “No, I don’t know what ‘inveigled’ means.”

  “Did he help you?” said Sergeant Fenton. “We have him in another room and he’s telling us all manner of interesting things. You’d best give your side of the story before he blames it all on you.”

  “Blames me for what?” I demanded, more tired and flustered and unhappy than I’d ever been before. �
��Murdering Adam, who isn’t dead? And how was I supposed to have killed him? With my bare hands?”

  Sergeant Fenton dipped into a fat wallet, pulled out a pair of plastic bags and put them on the table. I saw that they contained Ashbert’s knife and replica gun.

  “Ah!” I laughed. “Wow, I can see that this looks bad, but you’ll laugh when I tell you what those are for.” They both looked at me. “Right, well my boyfriend wants to be more like James Bond. A little bit of a life lesson and little bit of role play.” I winked.

  “Now, which boyfriend wants to play at being James Bond?” said the sergeant. “Is that Ashbert or James?”

  This was so messed up. I took a deep breath.

  “Okay, let me tell you about the foxes,” I started.

  Chapter 27

  I learned something interesting about police stations during my time there. I don’t know if they’re all like this, but the one I spent the night in had a tunnel! It went next door to the magistrates’ court, which I thought was a great idea. There should be more tunnels in the world for those times when you can’t face the weather or the neighbours or whatever. One moment I was in a cell and a few minutes later I was in a courtroom. James was there too. I looked across at him. He looked awful.

  We weren’t there as long as I expected. I thought there might be a trial or we might be sentenced or something but it turned out we were only there to establish if we were to be granted bail, and we were released pending further investigation, which sounded ominous, but I was grateful to be away from the place. It took a few more minutes to do paperwork and have our belongings back and then James and I were outside the building, free to go.

  We stood, numbly facing the office buildings across the road.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said.

  “What for?” he said, not looking at me.

  I struggled to think what it was I was sorry for.

  “I think,” I said, carefully. “I think I’m an idiot.”

  He nodded reflectively and licked his lips.

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?” I asked.

  He thought about it long and hard.

  “You’re one of the nice ones,” he said. He slapped his pockets. “I think I’d best go home and see how my son is.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I could walk with you, if you like.”

  He pulled a strange grimace – not an unkind expression but a pained one.

  “You know,” he said, “I think I need to be alone with my own thoughts for a bit.”

  “Oh. Sure,” I said and, thinking that a man who had just spent a night alone in a cell but still needed time alone with his thoughts probably had a lot of thoughts to think, I waved him off.

  And that was it. I was alone too.

  “Psst!”

  I looked behind me.

  “Psst!”

  I checked my phone to make sure it wasn’t on.

  “Psst!”

  I looked up.

  There was a figure in a green hoodie clinging to the outer wall of the police station, two storeys up.

  “What are you doing up there?” I hissed.

  “I’m stuck!” Ashbert replied.

  “But what were you doing?”

  He shuffled his feet and adjusted his grip. It looked quite windy up there. I wondered how long he’d been standing there.

  “Is this a jailbreak?” I said.

  “Surprise!” he said.

  Oh, God. Of course, that’s what he was doing. He had said many times that he just wanted to make me happy, so it probably seemed like a logical thing to him.

  “You could get killed!” I hissed.

  “I was only doing what you told me.”

  “What?”

  “Like James Bond.”

  “But not killing yourself by climbing up buildings and…”

  “It’s just like we practised down the park.”

  My mouth formed a question and then I thought.

  “Poker,” I said, flatly.

  “What?”

  “Poker. I said you should go learn poker.”

  “Oh. Not…?”

  “No. Not parkour.”

  I began to turn away. A policeman walking by looked up and saw Ashbert.

  “Oi! You! Get down!”

  “I was just practising my parkour,” said Ashbert.

  “I don’t ruddy care,” said the policeman, producing his handcuffs.

  I started to walk away. The policeman called out to me.

  “Hey. You know this man?”

  I shook my head. “Not as well as I thought.”

  Chapter 28

  On the long walk back to Adam’s flat, I too was alone with my thoughts. Unfortunately, I didn’t have many thoughts worth thinking and so checked my phone instead.

  I saw straight away that Cookie had been busy in the last few days. Apparently, I had managed to get a text successfully sent to her. It said Police invested thank I cured Adam. I really don’t know what it says about Cookie, but apparently, she understood that I meant to say the police had arrested me and thought that I’d killed Adam. Since then she’d taken to social media in a big way. She’d set up an online petition for my release, and she’d used some pictures from my blog to create what looked like a viral campaign. Using Florrie’s face, twisted in anguish, was a stroke of genius. The strip that she’d take it from was one where Florrie was wrestling with a recipe that used a “cup” as a measure, and Florrie is going through her collection of cups, wondering which one is the right size. I sent Cookie a text to let her know that I was out. I also saw that I had an email from someone whose name I didn’t recognise. I reckoned I could read that once I was back in the flat, after a long bath and a bit of a nap.

  There was crime scene tape across the door to Adam’s flat and a policeman inside who told me that I wasn’t allowed back in until they’d finished processing the scene, whatever that meant. I gave him instructions about feeding the trilobites, hoping they’d like corned beef. I told him to write the instructions down but he didn’t.

  As I left the building, Ashbert dropped from a first-floor balcony onto the pavement in front of me and gave me a wide smile.

  “Don’t let Bernadette catch you doing that,” I said, shaking my head. “Or the police. In fact, don’t let the police catch you doing anything.” I frowned. “How did you get away from that copper at the police station?”

  “A little saut de précision to a low wall, a saut de chat over a bollard and into the gardens behind the courthouse.”

  “I thought you were stuck.”

  “A man with handcuffs and a Taser is a great motivator,” he said.

  “We can’t get into the flat,” I said.

  “I saw.”

  “God knows where we’re going to stay.”

  “Then that’s something he and I have in common,” he said smugly.

  “Oh?”

  He took on what I think was meant to be a bold and manly stance, which was sort of fifty percent Henry VIII and fifty percent knitwear catalogue man. “I, your perfect man, shall take the lead and provide for us. We can have a roof over our heads tonight, no problem.”

  “Goody.”

  “Remember me saying I’d got some camping and survival gear?”

  “Oh. Yeah!” I was impressed. It was a genuinely brilliant idea.

  He went to retrieve his equipment from the tool store at the back of the flats.

  “So where are we going?” I asked him as he set off under the considerable weight of the tent and two giant rucksacks.

  “We just need somewhere a little bit out of the way with grassy areas,” he said. “Any ideas?”

  I gave it some thought.

  “I do have an idea,” I said.

  We made our way across town to the park where I’d released the foxes with James a few nights ago. It took a lot longer to get there on the bus, or maybe it only seemed that way because Ashbert was carrying so much luggage that I had to steer him around so that he d
idn’t send pensioners flying like skittles.

  As afternoon greyed into evening, we walked into the park. Ashbert immediately approved.

  “We need to find somewhere to pitch the tent that is fairly flat, but not at the bottom of a hollow, as it might flood,” he said.

  “Surely the most important thing is to pitch it somewhere that’s out of sight of the local busybodies or muggers,” I suggested.

  We searched around and identified a couple of potential spots, but Ashbert muttered darkly about possible lightning strikes or insect invasions. After a while he declared that the perfect spot would be the small island in the centre of the park’s ornamental lake.

  “Don’t be daft, how will we get there?” I said.

  “I will wade across with all the stuff and then come back for you,” he said. “Easy!”

  I wasn’t convinced, but he removed his trainers and socks, rolled his trousers right up and stepped in. He howled when he stepped on a stone, so he backed up and looked around for something to protect his feet. I tried to use the time to persuade him that we didn’t need to camp on the island, but by now he was getting properly carried away with his role as Bear Grylls, so after a few minutes he was wearing bizarre flip-flops made from crushed cans and elastic bands that he’d found in the bin. He went back into the water and this time he made it across. Remarkably, the water didn’t come above his mid-thigh at any point, so he got the tent and rucksacks over without incident. This meant that it was my turn.

  I tried to view it as a romantic adventure, but I couldn’t help feeling like a Disney princess who needed to be carried by the man, like she was some sort of pathetic and useless creature. He tried to scoop me up into his arms in exactly that style, but I told him that wasn’t happening so he gave me a piggy back instead. As he waded across I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the island and not on the surrounding murk, but I couldn’t help myself. I definitely saw fish in there, and I wondered if Ashbert could feel them brushing his legs or whether they automatically avoided him. I could also see all sorts of obstacles, like car tyres and bits of bike. It crossed my mind that if Ashbert tripped over something we were both in for a soaking. We made it over though, and Ashbert erected the tent within the small cluster of trees and bushes. The tent was green, so it was helpfully camouflaged as well.