by Mark Dawson
She unlocked the door and went inside.
The man looked up.
“Hello, sir,” she said.
He gave a shallow nod. She looked at him: he had dark hair, a single comma of which uncurled over his forehead. She guessed he was in his mid-forties, with the usual lines and marks at the corners of his eyes, the edges of his mouth and nose. It was his eyes, though, that caught her attention: they were blue, icily cold and dispassionate. Dalisay was right. He was cold. He looked up at her and she had to swallow down a twist of apprehension.
“You’re English?”
“Yes.”
“Do you speak Filipino?”
“No.”
“I can speak English,” she said. She took out her recorder and laid it on the table. “I’m going to use this.”
He shrugged.
“What is your name?”
“John Smith.”
“I’m Officer Hernandez. I’m in charge of the investigation into what happened at the hotel.”
Smith nodded, but said nothing.
“Have you been offered a lawyer?”
“I don’t want one.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded.
“Suspect confirms with a nod that he is not requesting a lawyer,” she said for the benefit of the recording.
“What do you do, Mr. Smith?”
“I’m a cook.”
“And what are you doing in Manila? Holiday?”
“Something like that.”
“I think you should talk to me about what happened.”
The man looked straight at her but didn’t speak.
“Mr. Smith?”
There was an expression of disconsolation on his face. She had interviewed many suspects over the course of her career, and their reactions could be easily categorised: anger from those who knew that they had been caught, slyness from those who thought that they were clever enough to talk their way free, confusion and despair from those who often turned out to be innocent. Smith’s reaction was more akin to confusion, but there was more to it than that.
“Mr. Smith?”
“I can’t remember what happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can ask me whatever you like. I’ll answer honestly as best I can.”
“But…?”
“There are long stretches of yesterday evening that I can’t remember.”
“So tell me what you do remember. Let’s start with that. Who was the girl?”
Smith sighed, splayed his fingers on the table and looked down at them. “Her name is Jessica Sanchez.”
“How do you know her?”
“We were in a relationship. A long time ago. Years.”
“So why were you with her last night?”
“She said that she wanted to speak to me. She said it was important.”
“About?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“You’re not in a position to be selective with the questions you answer, Mr. Smith.”
He paused and then decided to speak. “She said that she had a child and that the child was mine.”
“And what did she want? Money?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You didn’t talk about it?”
“I don’t remember what we talked about.”
She felt frustration. Smith’s attitude was honest and confronting, all at once. He wasn’t doing himself any favours. “What do you remember?”
“I remember getting to the hotel, checking in, going to my room. I went to Intramuros and Binondo and then I went back to the hotel. I’d been out all day, so I was hot. I took a shower, listened to music for a little while and then got changed and went out. I was hungry, so I bought kwek kwek from a street vendor and then I went to the bar.”
“Which bar?”
“The Lazy Lizard.”
“In Poblacion?”
He nodded. “Jessica was there when I got there.”
“What time was this?”
“Eight.”
“And then?”
“We spoke.”
“About?”
“Small talk. Nothing in particular. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time and there was a lot to catch up on.”
“But not the child?”
“I don’t remember.”
“So you had a drink?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you got drunk.”
“I don’t remember ordering anything other than orange juice.”
“There were two empty bottles of vodka in your room, Mr. Smith. Cans of beer, too.”
“I know. I saw them. I don’t remember buying them.”
“Are you an alcoholic, Mr. Smith?”
He stared at her. “Did you find my book?”
“Answer the question, please.”
“Yes, I am. I haven’t had a drink for several years.”
“Until last night.”
“I can’t remember.”
“You keep saying that, Mr. Smith. It’s not helping you. Unless you tell me what happened so I can investigate it, I’ll have to fill in the blanks from the evidence. If I do that, you’re going to be charged with murder.”
Smith paused; Josie could see that he was considering what to say next.
“When I was drinking,” he said, “I used to have blackouts. They don’t affect everyone who drinks, and those who are affected get them in different ways. I used to get them very badly. I’d wake up in places with no idea how I’d got there. I’d wake up with women and I didn’t know their names. It was embarrassing, and, in the end, it got to be frightening. It was one of the reasons that I stopped drinking.”
“You think the reason you can’t remember what happened is because you blacked out?”
“I can’t think of another reason.”
“I’ll be honest with you. At some point between you meeting Miss Sanchez at eight and the cleaner coming into your room this morning, she was killed. At the moment, Mr. Smith, it looks very bad for you. Unless you can give me another reason why she was found dead in the bathroom while you were asleep, I’m not going to have any choice other than to charge you. Can you do that?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. I can’t remember.”
“Fine.”
Josie stood.
He looked up at her. “What will happen next?”
“You’ll be moved to a detention facility.”
“And then?”
“If you’re charged, you’ll go to trial. For a case like this, you won’t have long to wait. A month, maybe. You’ll need to find a lawyer.”
“Do I get a phone call?”
“Who would you like to call?”
“A friend. I need to tell him what’s happened.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course. I’ll speak to someone for you.”
She slid the chair back beneath the table. The interview had been disconcerting. The man’s attitude confused her: he was open about his memory problems when most would never have admitted to them; he answered her questions with seeming honesty; and, above all, he was fatalistic.
Josie found that unsettling.
“I’ll arrange your call,” she said.
She opened the door, stepped outside, and locked it again.
Yes, she thought. It was the fatalism that had perturbed her. It was, she realised, as if Smith couldn’t remember what had happened but that he was refusing to give himself the benefit of the doubt. It was almost as if a murder was something that he could consider himself doing.
19
MILTON WAS taken from the interview room to a smaller room, where he was photographed and had his fingerprints taken. The officer asked him to undress, and then he was photographed again. They took swabs from his mouth, scraped out the material from beneath his nails and then took blood.
Milton cooperated without complaint, but it was an intensely uncomfortable experience for a man who had
been so used to sliding beneath the surface of things; the last time he had been arrested, the Russian secret service had located him and sent an agent to the Texan jail where he was being held in order to bail him out. There were people who would have given a lot to know where he was now, especially when he was so compromised. He was travelling under false papers, but that was no guarantee that his anonymity would be maintained. His legal predicament was bad enough, but, beyond that, he was vulnerable in so many other ways.
They went through his possessions. They took his fake passport, his wallet, the Ronson lighter that his father had given him, his cigarettes and the handful of loose change that he had collected in his pockets.
He did not protest and, once the formalities of his booking were completed, he was led down into the basement of the building to a holding cell. It was a twenty-by-twenty space with a set of substantial iron bars that divided the room into two. Two cameras had been fixed to the ceiling, their motors buzzing as they panned left and right to take in all of the room. Milton looked through the bars at the collection of men staring back at him. The cage was full to overflowing, with the bench seats around the sides all taken and another ten or so milling around in the centre. The occupants glared with baleful malevolence as his cuffs were removed.
There were just two officers down here: the man who had brought him down from the custody suite and the officer who was in the basement to watch the detainees. Both men were armed, but neither moved with the caution that would have been prudent; they would have been much more careful if they had an inkling of Milton’s past and the things of which he was capable.
The custody officer unlocked and opened the cage door.
Milton saw the butt of his pistol jutting out from his holster and knew how easy it would be to relieve him of the weapon. He felt the prickle of adrenaline, the itch in his palms, but he drew in a breath and allowed the moment to pass.
This was not the time to make an attempt at leaving. Even if he was able to disarm the two officers, there was a good chance his actions would bring unwelcome attention. The men in the cell would likely make a noise, and then there was the matter of the two cameras overhead. He was in the basement of a police building. If he was compromised, he would have to fight his way out, through the ground floor and then out onto the street.
He might make it, but he didn’t like the odds. And he would have to kill.
He wasn’t prepared to do that.
20
MILTON TRIED to gauge the time as best he could, but it was dark in the basement and there was no window where he could assess the passage of time. Police officers came and went, delivering new suspects to be detained and taking others away again, but no one came for him. He waited for the chance to make his phone call, deciding that he would contact Hicks, but it seemed as if he had been forgotten. When he tried to speak to one of the guards to remind him that he was still waiting, the man shrugged and pretended that he didn’t understand English.
There was no point in pushing it. Milton sat down to wait it out.
MILTON GUESSED it was another two hours before they came for him.
“Hey,” the guard said, “English. Come here.”
Milton stood and came to the door of the cell. “Phone call,” he said, extending his thumb and little finger and putting them to his mouth and ear.
“Hands.”
The guard opened the slot at waist height and told Milton to slide his hands through so that he could cuff him. Milton did as he was told and didn’t react as the cuffs bit into the skin around his wrists. He withdrew his hands and stepped back as the door was pushed back.
“Out.”
Milton stepped out of the cell.
“Phone call,” Milton said.
“No phone call,” the man grunted.
“Where am I going?”
“Transfer,” he said with an unpleasant smirk.
“To where?”
“Bilibid.”
“What’s that?”
“Prison.”
“In Manila?”
“Move.”
The guard took out his baton and used it to prod Milton in the back. He walked on, the guard jabbing him between the shoulders to ensure that he kept going.
They passed through two heavy doors and then out of the building through an exit into a yard. There was a Toyota HiAce parked alongside the building. It was painted white, with the livery of the national police added in blue and red. The rear doors were open, offering access into a compartment that was kept separate from the driver and his passenger by a wire mesh cage. The guard prodded Milton in the back once again and, still biting his tongue, he reached for the door frame with his cuffed hands and pulled himself inside.
The doors were slammed shut. The vehicle was not air-conditioned and the rear wasn’t ventilated. The temperature inside the cage must have been more than a hundred degrees.
There were bench seats on either side of the vehicle and Milton lowered himself onto one of them and waited for the driver and another guard to get into the front. The driver started the engine and, with a creak from its suspension, the HiAce pulled out of the jail compound and onto the road outside.
THE BENCH seat was uncomfortable. It was directly over the wheel arch and it vibrated unpleasantly every time the van bounced over uneven stretches of road. The two men in the front of the van spoke in Filipino. Milton was unable to understand their discussion and quickly tuned it out.
He tried to assess his situation. He located west by looking for the sun. It was in the afternoon, and he was able to judge that they were headed in a generally southerly direction. They passed signs for Makati and Taguig and ignored the turn-off that was marked for the airport. He estimated that they had been travelling for around ninety minutes at a speed of around sixty miles an hour. Milton did not know the geography of the island, but, based on his assumptions, he suspected that they were around ninety miles to the south of the capital.
They turned off the main road at Alabang. They continued, the road becoming smaller and narrower as it passed through a series of villages and hamlets. Vegetation thronged on either side and, as Milton turned his head to glance at a clutch of children watching them go by, he caught sight of a road sign. It was in English and read INSULAR PRISON ROAD. They continued for another five minutes, eventually slowing and pulling onto a driveway that terminated at a large iron gate. There was a checkpoint next to the gate and the driver wound down his window so that he could speak with the guard. The guard stepped out of the hut, put his hands to the window, and looked in at Milton. He went back to the driver, exchanged a curt word, and then opened the gate.
The van drove through.
Milton looked ahead through the windshield. They were approaching a large white building with two towers on either side. The parapet atop the walls had been crenelated and a vinyl banner had been strung up above the entrance. The banner contained a mixture of English and Filipino, but Milton was able to see WELCOME! and, beneath that, NEW BILIBID PRISON.
They drove into the main prison compound. Milton looked out and saw tall brick walls that were topped with razor wire with elevated guard posts every hundred feet or so. He saw armed guards in the posts and powerful-looking spotlights. Vast palm trees swayed outside the walls, their fronds sixty and seventy feet above the ground. The buildings were simple, whitewashed and substantial. The van followed the road around to an admissions area and, as they slowed, Milton was able to catch a glance through another gate into a courtyard, where he saw hundreds of men. They milled about in groups; some sat on the ground, while others ran or worked out. Milton saw a man in a pair of bright blue shorts lying on an improvised weight bench; he was lifting an iron bar that had been fitted to two cylinders of concrete.
The van stopped by an open entrance. Two armed guards opened the doors of the van and indicated that Milton should step down. Harsh, bright light streamed into the back of the HiAce and Milton blinked into it as he descended. One of the guards
held a pair of leg irons, and he bent and closed the shackles around Milton’s ankles. They were attached to a chain with just enough play to allow Milton to take a step. A second chain was attached to his handcuffs and, with Milton now duly trussed up, the guard indicated that Milton should go through the archway and into the darkened space beyond.
21
MILTON PAID close attention as he shuffled through the arch and into a building beyond it. They were still outside the main prison compound, close enough to the courtyard that he had seen earlier to hear the sound of a basketball bouncing against the ground and the clamour of dozens of voices. Every forward step took him farther away from his liberty, but he was already beyond the point where he could have done anything to go back.
He was shackled and the guards were armed; what was he going to do?
The new building was evidently dedicated to the processing of new inmates. Papers were handed over to a man sitting behind a desk. He looked up to regard Milton, and, with a disdainful flick of his hand, he indicated that Milton should continue into the gloomy room beyond.
Milton was shoved in the back and nearly tripped, the chain clanking as it went taut and then loose once more. The guards followed close behind him as he emerged into a wide space. There was a long table with a stack of prison uniforms wrapped in plastic sheaths. In the middle of the room was a pile of shoes, each pair tied together by the laces. There was a mirror on the wall and, opposite it, a coiled fire hose with a dripping nozzle.
He was delivered into the custody of two guards. They were also armed, with pistols holstered on their belts. One of the guards stepped around and unlocked the cuffs that secured Milton’s arms and legs. The man removed them, the chains ringing against each other, and Milton took the opportunity to massage his wrists.
