by Jane Jago
Geoffrey barely heard the man’s words. His face had turned white and he stared at his hands spread on the surface of the table. Fingerprinted. He looked up at the video camera mounted on the opposite wall.
The detective rose to his feet. ‘All right, let’s go.’
He silently complied with the officer’s instructions as he was charged, photographed and finally fingerprinted. Like a doomed man presenting his bare neck for the guillotine, he mutely held out his hand to be scanned by the flat glass optical block. As the light flared beneath his palm, he felt entirely disconnected from his body, frozen. He knew the implications of the technology, that his palm and finger- and thumbprints would immediately be uploaded to a national database to be electronically sorted and matched to any print on record.
He gazed down at his hands. If not for the absence of ink on his fingertips he would have believed he was eleven years old all over again.
‘Sign here,’ said the officer.
For a moment he didn’t recognize the name printed on the statement. He moved the pen slowly, carefully trawling out the letters in his distinctive neat cursive. Geoffrey Roland Wickham. Who the hell was that?
‘That’s it, mate. The duty officer will give you back your property on the way out.’
‘Nicholas!’ The second arresting officer from the toilet block rounded the corridor corner and held out a document. The detective studied the page and looked at Geoffrey. He exchanged several quiet sentences with his colleague.
‘If I could just have a word in here.’ He ushered Geoffrey into a nearby room. ‘We might have a complication.’
Geoffrey looked up at him dumbly.
‘It appears that your sexual partner might be under age. His licence has been altered to make him older.’ He put the photocopy on the table.
‘See here?’ The officer pointed to the year of birth: 1990. ‘He’s scratched out what looks to have been a two and turned it into nought. The licence gives the birth month as May. According to him, he turned sixteen a month ago. We’re running a records check now to verify his age.’
Geoffrey looked uncomprehendingly at the small photocopied square floating on the white page and at the tiny photo-portrait of the boy, showing the same crooked grin. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘If the boy turns out to be under age you’ll be looking at a charge of sexual assault,’ the detective explained.
‘Sexual assault?’
‘A minor cannot consent to a sexual act.’
‘Consent? He came on to me . . . I didn’t know how old he was. How old does he look to you?’
‘If I was planning on screwing round with him, I’d probably make it my business to find out . . . I’ll take that,’ he said, withdrawing the page.
Geoffrey watched the photocopied image of his assassin as it slid across the table in the detective’s hand.
‘Just wait in here until we find out. Maybe you’ve got nothing to worry about.’ The detective checked his watch and left the room.
Sexual assault! Geoffrey screamed internally. If the boy was under age he was fucked. Sex with a minor – he’d go straight back to prison. His heart palpitated wildly. What if they locked him up, remanded him without bail? What if they got hold of his record, his real record, what then? That fucking stupid faggot kid, why did he have to follow me? FUCK. What was he playing at? He’d done his best to fob the idiot off, to avoid him. Then it occurred to him. They knew! They knew everything about him. The whole thing was a set-up. The boy was in on it. He struck his forehead with the base of his palm. Fuck! Fuck! Idiot! But how could they know? How could they predict his every move? Stay calm, stay calm. He scanned the walls of the interview room, looking for the overhead camera. What if they were filming him right now? Shit. What if they had been watching him the whole time? What if they had seen where he had dumped the dismembered laptop, recovered the images?
Breathe. Surely it was all a coincidence. He inhaled deeply, the way he had been taught in therapy, then exhaled, deflating his entire body.
He stared at the door. What were they doing? How long did it take to check an ID?
He leant on the table and held his face, pressing his fingers and thumbs tightly across his cheekbones. The boy was probably telling the truth. Why wouldn’t he? But even if he was over sixteen, they still had Geoffrey’s fingerprints. What if they cross-checked his prints with the fingerprint archive? They’d know exactly who he was.
Not this. ‘Not this again,’ he said aloud.
Danny, 1993
‘Do you know about fingerprints, Danny?’ asked Detective Phillip Kendall, quietly.
‘Yeah.’ Danny looked at his feet below the desk, then up at his mum. Debbie Simpson rubbed savagely at a patch of dry skin under her mascara-caked eye, her bony hands dropping repeatedly onto the black vinyl handbag on her lap. She was desperate for a cigarette.
‘Do you know how they work?’ continued the detective.
Danny shrugged. ‘Can I go home now?’
‘No, Danny, not yet. We still have more questions. We need to know what happened on Friday evening.’
Danny examined the fingers of his open hand – the plump, pink fingers of a child. Black ink still stained the tiny ridges on his skin.
‘Everybody has a different pattern on the skin of their fingers. Our skin is oily and when we touch things we leave those patterns behind. Do you understand?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Now, Danny, you told us that you didn’t go near the overpass, that you weren’t there with Benjamin, but we don’t think you were telling us the truth.’ Danny looked past the detective at a faded spot on the interview-room wall.
‘How long is this going to take?’ interrupted Debbie Simpson, heaving her handbag to her chest.
‘As long as it takes Danny to tell us about last Friday,’ Detective Kendall answered, in a calm, deliberate voice. He had all the time in the world. He lifted out a small exhibits bag from the file-tray in front of him. He smoothed the plastic flat across the contents of the bag and held it up for Danny to see.
Danny crossed his legs and looked away.
‘We found this crayon box below the overpass, do you recognize it?’
Danny shook his head.
‘You don’t remember taking a box of crayons like these from the newsagent in the Regency Arcade earlier that day, when you were there with Graham?’
‘Nuh, I never took nothin’. We never went to any newsagent’s.’
‘Then why do you think that your thumbprint, the special pattern made only by your thumb, was found on this box?’
‘I don’t know! Graham might’ve put it there.’
‘Graham? Was Graham at the overpass?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you weren’t there, Danny, when did your fingers come in contact with the crayon box?’
‘I dunno, we have crayons like that at school. Somebody might have got them from there.’
‘Your palm and fingerprints have been found on the handrail at the overpass.’
‘Been there millions of times.’
‘To the overpass? I thought you never went that way. Didn’t you tell us you hadn’t been there for months?’
‘I never went there on Friday.’
‘But you’ve been to the overpass many times?’
‘I’ve walked home across the bridge.’
‘And to get to the bridge you have to cross the wasteland?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you have been to the wasteland.’
‘Yeah, I already said so.’
‘With Graham?’
‘Sometimes . . .’
‘Well, we think that you and Graham were there again on Friday afternoon.’
Danny held his hand over his mouth, clutching his chin. He shook his head.
‘You see, Danny, we know you were there because that was where we found Benjamin, and we found some things near Benjamin that tell us you were there. Now maybe you were there by yourself
. . .’
For the first time in the interview Danny’s eyes showed real fear. He shook his head twice. Debbie Simpson had had enough. ‘Just say if you were there, Danny. For God’s sake, did you have anything to do with what happened to this kid or not?’ Her upper lip twitched and she blinked several times – the interview seemed to have careened off the map and into alien territory, even for a Simpson. ‘I tell you what, Danny . . .’
‘Mrs Simpson, in order to clarify his version of events, Danny needs to know that you’re there for him. That you won’t be angry with him.’
‘Angry with him!’ she repeated indignantly.
‘That you’ll support him, whatever happens.’
‘Just get it over with, Danny, if you was there. Just tell the truth.’ Apparently there was a first time for everything.
‘Do you think we’ll find your fingerprints on the crayon that was at the scene?
‘Don’t know anything about any crayons. I didn’t touch him, I swear.’
A knock at the door was quietly answered by Detective Metcalfe.
‘I am beginning to wonder, Danny, looking at the evidence, whether you were at the overpass by yourself on Friday afternoon,’ Kendall continued.
‘I wasn’t at the overpass.’
Kendall peered down at a page handed to him by the second detective. ‘Well, according to Graham Harris,’ Danny’s eyes widened, ‘the last time he saw Benjamin, he was with you. He says that he wanted to take him to the nearest police station, but you wouldn’t let him.’
‘He’s a liar,’ Danny shot back.
Kendall noticed the muscles on the boy’s jaw clenching and releasing as he stared defiantly back. ‘He says you suggested leaving Benjamin by the river and that he wanted to call the police but you wouldn’t let him.’
His heart sank. There were so many near-truths in this account it was obvious that Graham was spilling his guts in the interview room on the other side of the building.
‘Well, is that true?’
Danny was confused. He had been denying even going to the Regency Arcade that Friday afternoon, denying he was with Graham, denying he had ever clapped eyes on Benjamin.
‘Is Graham telling us the truth about that day, Danny?’
The stony-faced eleven-year-old jiggled his knee up and down under the table, cornered now, nowhere to turn.
‘Because he says that when he last saw Benjamin, you were leading him down Barracks Lane in the direction of the overpass. Is that true, Danny?’
‘No.’
‘So Graham is telling us lies, is he?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why do you think Graham would say that you were both with Benjamin, that you led him by the hand through Battery Cove, away from the downtown area towards the docks, that he wanted to return the child to safety and that you led him away?’
‘Because he’s lying, trying to blame me.’
‘For what, Danny?’
‘For everything! He’s trying to blame it all on me.’
‘But you weren’t at the Regency Arcade. You’ve never even seen Benjamin Allen. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling us? But we know that you’re lying, Danny, because we have you both on CCTV footage leading the child away from the shopping centre. You’re wearing a very distinctive red and white Adidas windcheater, the one we took from your house earlier today, and Graham is wearing his yellow jacket. Graham knows that, Danny. That’s why Graham has stopped lying about it and started telling the truth.’
Danny stared straight ahead, his mind searching frantically for a way out of the maze. It found none.
‘Danny, was you there?’ asked his mother.
‘He’s a bloody liar,’ cried Danny.
‘Given how many different stories you’ve already told us, Danny, I’m not so sure.’
‘It was his idea.’ He clenched his fists and put them under the table against his thighs.
‘What was, Danny?’
‘To take a kid.’
Phillip Kendall shot his colleague a knowing look. Here it comes.
‘It was Graham’s idea to take that kid.’ Danny appeared on the verge of tears, but none ever came. ‘He hates babies. Graham wanted to take a kid . . .’ continued Danny, unevenly. Now that he was ready to implicate himself to put the blame on Graham, the words were sticking like gravel in the back of his throat.
Detective Metcalfe passed him a cup of water. Danny drank from it.
‘And you were looking for one in the Regency Arcade Shopping Centre?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And that was where you first saw Benjamin?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Tell us what happened?’
‘He was just standing there . . . outside the shop, playing with the doors, swinging on the handle. Graham was laughing at him and he started giggling.’
‘Did Graham speak to him?’
Danny twisted his mouth and shook his head. ‘Nuh, he just started walking and when the baby followed us out he held his hand.’
‘You all left together?’
‘Yeah, but I never touched him. You can see in the picture from the video, Graham’s got his hand, not me.’ Danny knew exactly what he was doing, and so did the detectives, but for the moment their job was not to confront Danny’s self-serving lies and half-truths but to open him up gently to let the story slip out whole onto the interview-room table where it could later be dissected. Get him talking, keep him talking. Capitalize on his motivation to lay the blame on Graham.
Like all good liars, Danny knew when to concede a point, when to admit what was no longer deniable, how to stick to either side of the facts and deftly manipulate or leave out the details that would hang him. If Graham was going to spill his guts, Danny sure as hell wasn’t going to stay silent. Let Graham be the fall guy. Graham was lying through his teeth anyway, crying like a baby, trying to blame him when it was all his fault.
Graham, 1993
Detective Sergeant Stuart Grisham unloaded a tray of boxed juices and tea in Styrofoam cups. Senior Detective Sergeant Harry Townsend repositioned his chair to face the anxious child on the other side of the table. The boy was flanked by his mother and father and watched closely by an attending solicitor. Christine Harris folded her arms across her chest.
Townsend held his big hands together, thoughtfully fingering the edge of a paisley tie with spatula-like thumbs.
Graham Harris blinked back at him like a frightened gerbil.
‘If we can just go back a bit to the part where you and Danny decided to skip school for the day.’
Graham’s eyes darted in his mother’s direction. She glared back. ‘You said that was Danny’s idea.’
He nodded warily.
‘But you’d skipped school together before?’
‘Few times . . . not lately.’
‘He knows better than to hang around with Danny. We tried to put a stop to it,’ his mother interrupted.
Townsend nodded tolerantly and leant further forward, speaking directly to Graham. ‘But mates sometimes don’t listen to their parents, do they? And Danny was your friend, right?’
‘Yeah . . .’
‘Do you always do what Danny tells you to?’
‘No.’
‘You weren’t scared of him?’
‘He gets me into trouble . . .’ He looked again at his mother, who was measuring his every word.
‘That’s why I sit away from him in class,’ he lied.
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Sometimes he makes me do things.’
The detective waited.
‘Like nicking and other stuff . . . and smashing things in people’s front gardens.’
‘Graham.’ Denis Harris sighed.
‘So he’s the boss?’ Townsend continued.
‘Other kids are afraid of him, but sometimes I tell Danny to do things and he does,’ he said, lighting up proudly.
‘What do you tell Danny to do?’
‘Just stupid things
, nothing bad . . . He’ll do anything. He’s not afraid of teachers.’
‘He’s a hard man, is he? Tough, like?’
‘Sometimes he is. He’s tough, but sometimes he’s like a girl – he plays with stuffed toys and he’s already eleven.’ Graham nibbled at the straw of his blackcurrant juice box.
The backwards and forwards of Townsend’s casual questioning laid the foundation for probing deeper into the inconsistencies of Graham’s story.
‘So after you’d decided to wag school together you just wandered around all these different places and then went to the Regency Arcade and nicked some things?’
‘Danny wanted to steal some pink sunglasses off a stand outside Soul Patterson’s but I ran away,’ said Graham, painting himself as an innocent.
‘What would a tough guy like Danny want with those?’
Graham shrugged. ‘He wrote bad words in crayon on the toilet wall.’
‘You saw him do that?’ said Townsend, studying him carefully and flagging something in his notes.
‘Yeah . . .’
‘Did you use the crayons?’
A brief look of panic crossed his face. ‘No, I never . . .’
The detective turned to another page in his notebook. ‘And later you came across a lost boy?’
‘Yeah, we saw that boy with his mum and then later when he was lost we were just helping him.’
Townsend caught the other detective’s eye.
‘So you saw the same boy before?’
Graham’s expression became furtive.
‘Were you looking for little boys, then?’
He shook his head. Christine Harris glanced up at the solicitor.
‘Why did you lead the boy out of the shopping centre, instead of looking for his mother?’
‘I don’t know. It was Danny’s idea.’
‘But you had hold of his hand. Where did you and Danny plan to take him?’
‘We didn’t know where his mum was. I wanted to take him to the police station but Danny wouldn’t let me.’
‘Do you remember calling him over about an hour earlier?’ He gestured with his finger. ‘Like this?’
‘No.’ He pulled his feet up onto his chair and swivelled towards his mother. He seemed to understand the implications of the question. ‘I never, Mum.’
‘Just tell them what you told me, about what Danny said to you,’ she urged impatiently.
