Vogel studied him wearily. This wasn’t helping, and he suspected Alfonso knew it. He ignored the sarcasm and continued.
‘And after that, after you left the pub, what did you do then?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I was drunk.’
‘You don’t remember anything else that you did that day?’
‘No.’
Alfonso looked as if he didn’t care. As if he had given in.
‘Do you remember returning to your nan’s place?’
Alfonso shook his head. ‘I remember waking up there though, in the early hours of this morning.’
‘And then what?’
‘What do you mean, then what? I felt like shit, obviously. Because of what had happened and because I’d got wasted. But I decided the best thing was for me to carry on as usual. I was on lunchtime shift at the restaurant, and on Sundays lunch is always extra busy. I thought going to work might keep me sane and I was pretty sure nobody there knew I’d been arrested. Not the first time. I’d asked my nan to call me in sick, hadn’t I.’ He paused. ‘They bloody know now though, don’t they? The rest of the bloody world, too, I expect. And this time I’m facing a murder charge. I didn’t bloody do it, do you hear? I didn’t bloody do it.’
Alfonso’s voice rose to a near hysterical shriek.
Vogel carried on, keeping his own voice calm and level.
‘So you decided to go to work as usual. But from what you have told us, if you really were so drunk that you couldn’t remember what you did yesterday, then you must have had one heck of a hangover this morning, didn’t you?’
Alfonso nodded.
‘I just said that.’
‘Yet you went to work?’
‘Best thing to do with a hangover – work through it. Besides, I didn’t have to be in till almost midday,’ said Alfonso.
‘Are you a big drinker, Mr Bertorelli?’
Alfonso shook his head.
‘Only on special occasions,’ he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm again.
Again Vogel ignored it.
‘I didn’t think you were, you don’t have the look of a drinker.’
He paused. Sometimes if you left a silence interviewees would feel obliged to fill it. You could learn a lot that way, Vogel believed. But Alfonso made no attempt to fill the silence.
‘So, you are not a big drinker and yet you got so drunk that you remember nothing from the moment you entered a pub you do not remember the name of until you woke up at your nan’s place in the early hours of this morning, is that right?’
Alfonso nodded. The man looked ill. It was hard for Vogel to think of him as a cold-blooded murderer. And whoever had killed Marlena would have had to be cold-blooded in the extreme. Lacking any normal human feelings, Vogel thought. But if Bertorelli was innocent he was doing nothing to help himself.
Vogel terminated the interview and told Alfonso he would be taken to a cell to await further sessions, and would almost certainly be detained overnight. The other man seemed to sway slightly in his seat. Vogel hoped he wasn’t going to pass out again and made a mental note to remind the custody team to keep a close eye on him.
Of course, Alfonso had already spent a night in a cell, following his earlier arrest. The first time, for someone who’d never been near a police cell before, was always a nasty shock. Now he faced another night in police custody. And he now knew all too well what it was like. Vogel had been told the smell was the worst thing. The mix of disinfectant and sweat and urine. That and the total lack of privacy. En suite, the regulars were inclined to joke. But there was really nothing very funny about a toilet in full view of the slot in the cell door.
Wagstaff and Carlisle, the two DCs Vogel had first met when they’d arrived at the scene of Marlena’s death with DCI Clarke, were sent to check out the pubs within a thirty-minute walk of the nick. It was another cold wet day. As MIT officers, Nick Wagstaff, a bespectacled and prematurely grey young man, and Joe Carlisle, who would have been darkly handsome if he didn’t almost always look moody, both considered themselves rather above such routine foot-soldier activity. They were not best pleased.
‘Dunno why they couldn’t have put a couple of woodentops on this,’ grumbled Wagstaff.
‘Bastard’s probably lying through his teeth, anyway,’ muttered Carlisle. ‘And even if he did go in a pub, he could have been walking in bloody circles from what he said. How many pubs do you reckon we’re going to have to check out?’
Wagstaff had a computer printout of local public houses in his hand.
‘At least twenty,’ he said.
‘And we can’t have a single bloody drink,’ responded Carlisle.
The tenth pub they visited was the Dunster Arms, which seemed to them a rather insalubrious hostelry in need of a deal of TLC. As they were only temporarily based at Charing Cross the two officers were unaware that it was a regular haunt of a number of their police colleagues. And it was actually a busy and curiously popular little place, with relatively low overheads, which provided a fair income for its landlord who escaped from it to play golf in Portugal as often as he could. He was currently away. His stand-in, Jim Marshal, a retired landlord himself, was behind the bar. Wagstaff showed Marshal a mugshot of Alfonso.
‘Have you ever seen this man in here?’ asked the detective.
‘Don’t think so,’ responded the stand-in.
‘It would have been yesterday, lunchtime, and perhaps through the afternoon,’ persisted Wagstaff. ‘Were you behind the bar then?’
Jim Marshal nodded, looking down at the picture.
‘Definitely not seen him, not yesterday anyway,’ he said.
‘How can you be so sure?’ asked Carlisle.
Marshal jabbed a stubby finger at Alfonso’s black goatee beard. ‘Pretty distinctive, isn’t he?’ he said. ‘Anyway, I never forget a face.’
‘How many times have you heard that?’ muttered Wagstaff as he and Carlisle continued down the street to the next pub on their list.
‘Not for the last time, that’s for sure,’ said Carlisle. ‘Come on, let’s get this over with. Then perhaps we can have a pint or two ourselves.’
During the course of that evening the two officers dutifully visited every one of the twenty pubs on their list, and drew a complete blank. No one remembered seeing Alfonso Bertorelli at any time on the previous day.
‘Just what I bloody expected,’ said Carlisle. ‘We’ve been handed this Bertorelli on a plate, trussed up like a chicken with all the trimmings. Trust our new assistant SIO not to be satisfied though. Typical of the nit-picking bastard, from what I’ve heard.’
‘Yeah. No wonder they call him the Geek. He prefers problems to solutions. And if there aren’t any he invents them.’
The two men continued to grumble cheerily as they made their way back to the station.
Meanwhile, at the Dunster Arms, Jim Marshal was hoping he would never see either detective again. Because the stand-in landlord had not been behind the bar the previous day. He had deliberately lied to the police officers.
Marshal, something of a serial philanderer, was in the middle of an extremely messy divorce. The previous morning his neighbour at the marital home in Ealing, from which Marshal had been barred for several months, had phoned to say that his wife was in the process of dumping all his personal belongings into a skip on the driveway. Clothes, books, his stamp collection, and his fishing gear. The missus had warned him that was what she was going to do if he didn’t move his stuff out pronto, but Marshal, reduced to sleeping on the sofa of an old friend whose patience was beginning to run out, had nowhere else to keep it. In any case, he still owned half the marital home, and he hadn’t really believed his wife would carry out her threat.
More fool him, he reflected. Anyway, upon getting the bad news he had called on a Dunster Arms regular, already in attendance as usual, to step behind the bar while he rushed to Ealing in an attempt to salvage his belongings. He’d promised the man double money if he would run the bar un
til his return. The man knew what he was about, having managed a number of pubs in his time. He had also been sacked from at least two of them for putting his hand in the till. Marshal knew that the Dunster’s landlord would never leave him in charge again if it were revealed that he’d let such a character run the bar, however pressing his reasons. Particularly on a Saturday. And Marshal needed the money, desperately. He was unlikely at his age ever to get a proper full-time job again, and he had lawyers to pay.
Marshal, basically an honest man except in his dealings with women, didn’t feel comfortable about what he’d done. But he’d not had a choice, he told himself. He’d had to lie.
The first results obtained from forensic examination of the trainers found in the rubbish bin outside Alfonso’s nan’s house, which had been fast-tracked in view of the seriousness of the crime, came back the following day just before noon. They were much as expected. Alfonso’s fingerprints were all over the shoes. There were no other prints. And the size and tread of the trainers matched exactly the footprint that Vogel had spotted at the crime scene.
The DNA results from the blood spattered on the shoes would not be delivered for several days, but Vogel had little doubt that it would prove to be Marlena’s blood.
Vogel had decided not to mention the bloody shoes to Alfonso until he’d received the fingerprint results. Then, along with DC Jones, he interviewed Alfonso for the second time, and challenged him strongly.
This time Alfonso, appearing even more agitated after a night in the cells, was accompanied by Christopher Margolia, his lawyer of choice, who had returned late the previous night from his trip to Prague.
‘It seems certain that the trainers found in the bin at your nan’s are yours. They match a footprint found at the murder scene, and we are confident that the blood on them will prove a match with that of the victim,’ Vogel said.
Alfonso looked bemused.
‘I didn’t put any trainers or shoes of any kind in the bin,’ he said. ‘At my nan’s? Why would I? If I were guilty of anything I’d dump the shoes I’d been wearing as far away as possible from my nan’s or anywhere else I stayed, wouldn’t I?’
There were obvious similarities with the circumstances of Alfonso’s earlier arrest. And his last remark echoed Vogel’s own thoughts, but that wasn’t nearly enough to prevent what was fast becoming inevitable. Vogel said nothing. This time Alfonso did fill the silence.
‘What makes you think they’re my shoes anyway?’ he asked.
‘They’re the right size, and they were found at your place of residence,’ Vogel recited patiently.
He placed a photograph on the table at which Alfonso was sitting.
‘But why don’t you tell me,’ he said. ‘Are these your trainers?’
Alfonso looked down at the picture. His face had been pale before, now it was like parchment.
‘They l-look like mine,’ he said eventually. ‘An old pair of Adidas I’ve had for years. I don’t wear them very often. I should have thrown them out really . . .’
Vogel put another photograph on the table. This time a shot of the footprint clearly marked in the blood on the floor of Marlena’s sitting room.
Only the side of the woman’s head was in the picture. Nonetheless Vogel saw the other man flinch away from the image before him.
‘You may or may not be aware that this is a footprint from an Adidas trainer,’ said Vogel. ‘It’s rather distinctive, is it not?’
‘Is it? I don’t know. I don’t go around looking at the bottom of people’s feet too often.’
Again a flash of what Vogel was beginning to realize was Alfonso’s natural sharpness. His customary mild wit and deftness of speech had been pretty much stamped out by then, but Vogel could still detect something remaining of the more usual Alfonso Bertorelli.
It was time to fire the next broadside.
‘You should also know that we’ve had the results of the fingerprint check made on these trainers,’ Vogel continued. ‘They are covered in your prints.’
‘B-but, if they’re my trainers they would be,’ Alfonso stumbled. ‘Somebody must have stolen them. I’ve told you: I’m being framed. You have to see that now. Whoever dumped all that stuff on me before – the bike, the hoody, Michelle’s bag – they must have taken my trainers then returned them. I’m being set up again. Someone’s out to get me. It’s obvious . . .’
Alfonso’s bottom lip began to tremble. For one awful moment Vogel thought the man was going to cry. He so hated it when that happened.
‘I think my client needs a break,’ interjected Margolia.
Vogel addressed the lawyer directly. ‘Look, let’s just see if we can clear all this up as quickly as possible, for everybody’s sake, shall we?’ he asked.
‘Please proceed with care, then, Mr Vogel,’ murmured Margolia.
Vogel inclined his head very slightly. He didn’t want any more interruptions. He had further questions to ask, to which answers were urgently required. He made his voice as gentle as possible.
‘Mr Bertorelli, when you were previously arrested at your grandmother’s home you were asked to check if anything had been stolen, either belonging to you or your grandmother, were you not?’
‘Well, yes, but . . .’
‘And you said that nothing was missing, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but I’d forgotten about those old trainers. I didn’t even know they were at my nan’s. I can’t remember when I last wore them even.’
‘It would seem that you wore them on Saturday evening, Mr Bertorelli, when you visited your old friend.’
Alfonso’s lower lip was trembling again, and this time he lost control. He began to cry, his shoulders shook, an animallike wail filled the room. Briefly, Vogel looked away.
‘For the record, you do not know that, Mr Vogel,’ said Margolia.
Vogel ignored the lawyer and made himself stare straight at Alfonso, trying to keep his face expressionless.
‘Mr Bertorelli, how do you feel about women?’ he asked, remembering the man’s reaction when he’d suggested he was gay.
Bertorelli stopped crying. ‘I like women,’ he said.
‘Do you?’ A sudden thought had occurred to Vogel.
‘Yes. I’d never hurt a woman, if that’s what you’re getting at.’
‘I was rather more interested in your relationships with women. Have you ever had a real relationship with a woman, Mr Bertorelli?’
‘What? Of course I have.’
‘Have you ever actually had sex with a woman?’ Vogel continued mercilessly.
‘That’s enough, Mr Vogel,’ thundered Christopher Margolia.
Bertorelli looked horrified. Shocked to the core. But in spite of his lawyer’s intervention, he answered the question.
‘Of course I have,’ he said again, and once more started to weep hysterically.
Vogel was not convinced. Could Bertorelli be the oldest virgin in town? Was that one of his secrets? And, if so, how relevant was it? Had the man grown to hate women because he’d never had a woman of his own, never had an intimate relationship? Was that what had led him to kill? But why Marlena?
There could be no doubt that Marlena had invited her killer into her home. And she’d been drinking champagne with him, or her; champagne which the murderous visitor almost certainly brought along as a gift. A fatal gift.
Forensics had reported that substantial traces of gamma hydroxybutyrate had been found in Marlena’s almost empty glass at the crime scene. GHB is a central nervous system depressant, not unlike the more common date rape drug Rohypnol, but it comes in a clear liquid form, thus making its presence in a translucent drink like champagne less detectable, in spite of its slightly salty taste.
Alfonso Bertorelli was not a big man. Vogel considered that he would not be a particularly strong man. But a dose of GHB would render a much younger and fitter woman than Marlena incapable of resisting assault. She would have been unable to do much more than watch as unspeakable atrocities were committe
d on her, until, mercifully, her life finally ebbed away . . .
Vogel realized that he had drifted off. He turned his attention back to the present, and to the man sitting opposite him, who had started to weep again.
Alfonso had no verifiable alibi for the approximate time, or for any time after 11.30 a.m. on the day Marlena had met such a vicious and violent death. The team had been unable to confirm that he had visited a public house, and even if it were to be proved that he’d been drinking in a pub he may well still have had time to murder Marleen McTavish. He may not have been as drunk as he’d suggested, or indeed, not drunk at all.
The evidence against Bertorelli in connection with this and the other incidents seemed to be growing day by day. Vogel might still think some of it a little too neat, a bit too convenient, but if someone was framing Alfonso Bertorelli then they were making an extremely good fist of it.
And Bertorelli, who’d lived in London or thereabouts all his life and might well have been staying in King’s Cross with his nan at the time of the two murders there fifteen years earlier, really wasn’t helping himself. He just kept repeating that he had no idea where he’d been during the period when Marlena was killed.
Vogel could no longer prevent the inevitable. DCI Nobby Clarke was very different to his previous boss, DI Tom Forest. She did not bluster. It was hard to imagine that she would ever rush proceedings or cut corners in order to obtain a conviction that might later prove to be unsafe. Clarke was thoughtful and highly intelligent. It was no accident that she was the golden girl of the Homicide and Serious Crime Squad. But she had, understandably, started to push Vogel. The evidence against Bertorelli was substantial and further forensic reports were likely to add more weight. Indeed, Vogel could not even explain to himself why he was still reluctant to charge the man. Ultimately, Clarke told Vogel she could see no reason for further delay. Unless Vogel could come up with a damned good reason why not, she wanted Bertorelli charged.
Wearily Vogel got to his feet and looked down at the quivering wreck of a man before him. A man for whom, whatever the outcome of the chain of events Vogel was about to put into motion, life would never be the same again.
Friends to Die For Page 21
