Chapter 19
Inspector Kovac
The summons came on Friday, as a polite telephone call from a woman with a flat, dry, calm voice. She gave her name as Detective Inspector Kovac and asked whether he'd be good enough to come to Corder Street at two.
"Am I being charged?"
"With what, Mr. Wray?"
"I don't know."
"Then I'd say not." A pause, in which he heard a chair creak. "I'd like to ask you a few questions about the fourteenth of November. A matter has come up. I'd rather do it in person than on the telephone. You may bring a solicitor if you wish. I'd think about it."
He didn't bring a solicitor. He didn't have one. He had a man who had drawn up the lease on the flat in 2017, and a cousin of Dev's who did conveyancing, and neither seemed quite right for the occasion. He put on his dark suit and a tie, and stood for a while in the hall in front of the yellow coat on its hook, collar up. Then he took his own gray one from the peg beside it and went out.
Corder Street police station was a sooty brick building from 1903, with a blue lamp and a flight of worn steps. It smelled as it had in November: floor polish and damp wool and the faint metal sadness of an old radiator. The desk sergeant, a heavy woman with a pen in her hair, took his name without looking up and said, "Interview Room Two. Up the stairs, on the left. She's expecting you."
The room was small and square and had no character at all. A table. Three chairs. A recording machine with a red light that wasn't lit. On the wall, a clock, and under the clock a poster about domestic abuse, and in the corner a small high window of reinforced glass through which the afternoon came in gray and unwilling. He sat down. He put his hands on the table. After a while he moved them to his knees.
At five past two the door opened, and a woman came in with a file.
She was fifty-two, small, square and quick, with cropped iron-gray hair and a deeply lined brown face. She carried herself like someone who has spent a long time in rooms where she was the only woman and decided early on to be the most tired person there. She wore a navy suit that had been slept in. Her eyes were small and black and extremely sharp. They went over him in one complete glance, from his hair to his shoes, and settled, without hostility, on his face.
"Mr. Wray. Irene Kovac. Thank you for coming."
"Inspector."
She sat. She laid the file on the table and didn't open it. "I'll be straightforward. I've watched the video. I've read the report from Carrow. I've had a letter from a firm of solicitors in that city on behalf of a Miss Albright, which says, in six very careful paragraphs, that she's afraid." She tapped one finger on the cover. "I've also spoken to your psychologist."
"Dr. Sorel."
"Who told me nothing, which was a pleasure. A woman who understands her duty." A dry flicker crossed the lined face. "She did say she'd be happy to speak to me again, if you consent. I mention it."
"I consent."
"Good. That's a start." She settled back. "Now. That's not why I asked you here. All that is, what shall we call it, a matter of conduct. I could have sent a constable. I'm here because last Tuesday a clerk in the Highways Department sent me a box."
He waited.
"You'll know there was a claim," said Kovac. "After the bridge. The council's insurers wanted to say the railing had been properly kept up, and a lady from the Marlow Trust's solicitors wanted to say it hadn't. It's turned into a rather ugly dispute, in a dull way, with a great many forms. Part of it needed a review of every record from that night. The weather. The bridge keeper's log. The cameras." She opened the file at last. "The automatic number-plate system. There's one at each end of the Greaves Bridge. It takes every car that passes."
He felt something cold touch the back of his neck.
"I'll show you a list," said Kovac. "It's not long. It was a bad night. The south approach was closed at seven. The north was open until the barrier went up at nine. Between half past six and nine twenty, thirty-one vehicles crossed the north camera, in either direction. Most of them were buses." She turned the page toward him. "Here are the ones that matter."
She laid her finger on the sheet.
There were four lines, typed, with times. The first was at 18:52, a white van. The second at 19:44. The third was a silver Honda, registered in Halvern, at 20:31, northbound. He knew the number. He had known it for six months. It was the car that had been found in the middle of the bridge.
The fourth was at 20:52.
He read it twice.
20:52:08. Northbound. Gray Volvo V70 estate. Reg. HX11 CWR.
At first he didn't see why the registration was familiar. It was the way a word turns strange when you look at it too long. Then it slid into place with a small flat click, like a cartridge into a gun. He sat quite still with his hands on his knees and the blood going slowly out of his face.
It was his own.
"That's not," he said.
"It's your car, Mr. Wray."
"It's been in the garage since October."
"Has it?"
"I don't use it in town. I walk. It's in the lock-up under the warehouse, on Lantern Row." His mouth was dry. "It's a mistake. A misread plate. Someone with a cloned number."
"I thought of that." Kovac's voice hadn't changed. "I thought of it very early. So I rang the managing agent for your building, and she was most helpful. There's a barrier on the lock-up. It logs the fob. Yours went out at 20:31 on the fourteenth of November, and in again at 21:49." She looked up. "That's one hour and eighteen minutes. It would take about eight minutes to get to the north end of the Greaves Bridge in that weather. I timed it."
The room was extremely quiet. In the corner the clock ticked. It was an old clock with a loud second hand, and the sound went through him with an odd, sharp clearness, each beat like the tap of a finger on a pane.
"I was at home," he said.
It came out like a reflex. It came out in his own voice, evenly, as it had for the sergeant, for the coroner, for a woman in a green chair. He heard it, and for the first time in his life it sounded to him exactly like what it was: a sentence said so often that it had stopped meaning anything.
"You told Sergeant Cairns that."
"Yes."
"You told him you'd had a drink and gone to bed at about nine."
"Yes."
"And you told the coroner."
"Yes."
"On oath."
"Yes."
"Mr. Wray." She leaned forward, put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands. "I'm going to ask you a simple question, and I'd like you to take your time. Were you on the Greaves Bridge on the night your wife died?"
"No."
"Are you certain?"
"I'd remember."
"Would you?"
He opened his mouth and found he had nothing to say. It was a wall of white. He stood against it with both hands out and felt, as he had in the green chair, the faint pressure behind it. Not a picture. A coldness. A smell of wet iron. The sense of something small, light and soft, caught on something rough, moving in the wind.
He said, "I don't remember."
"You don't remember being on the bridge."
"I don't remember being anywhere." It came out in a whisper. "I remember the kitchen. I remember her going out. I remember a whisky. And then the telephone."
"Two hours."
"Yes."
"Nearly three."
"I know."
"It's a long time," said Kovac, "to be unaccounted for."
She didn't press him. That was what he remembered afterward, with a kind of dumb gratitude: she sat on the other side of the table in the gray light, her small black eyes on his face, and let him not answer. She was neither kind nor unkind. She waited, the way a good doctor waits, hands folded, for the moment when the patient could breathe again.
When he could, she said: "I want to be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying you pushed your wife. I've looked at the railing. I've looked at the engineer's report. That rail was rotten, Mr. Wray. A brace was missing. It had been reported eleven times. It could have given way under a child." Her mouth twisted. "I don't know what happened. I have an old man in a hut who's said some very odd things to the council, and a missing scarf, and an investigation that was closed on the strength of a sergeant's tidy mind. And I have this."
She laid her finger on the line.
"Your car. At eight fifty-two. Thirteen minutes after the keeper rang the emergency number. You'd have got there as the first patrol was still on its way." A pause. "You'd have been on that bridge, in the rain, with her car, and the hazard lights going, and the rail wrapped in tape. And you've told two officers of the law, and a coroner, and your own doctor, that you never left your flat."
"I didn't know."
"You didn't know."
"I swear to you."
"I'd like to believe you." She said it quite simply. "I think I do. But I've been doing this a long time, and I know what a man looks like who's lying, and I know what a man looks like who's been told something about himself that he can't take in. It's not the same face." She closed the file. "You look like the second kind. And that, Mr. Wray, is in some ways worse. Because it means someone has been telling you a story about that night for six months, and you've been telling it back, and neither of you was there."
"Who?"
"I couldn't say."
"Cairns?"
"Sergeant Cairns has an excellent record." The black eyes were steady. "And a golf handicap he shares with a number of people I'd rather not name. I'll look into it. Quietly." She stood. "In the meantime I'd like you to do three things."
He looked up.
"One. You will not go back to Carrow."
"Inspector—"
"Two. You'll stay away from the family. Mrs. Dunne has been in touch with me, and she's frightened, and a frightened barrister is the most dangerous creature on God's earth." The tired face didn't smile. "And three. You'll try, with your doctor, with whatever help you can find, to remember where you were between half past eight and ten to ten." She picked up the file. "Because if somebody saw you on that bridge, they'll say so. And it won't be me they say it to."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean it's a small city. And someone has been very careful about what I was shown." She went to the door. "I didn't find that number by accident, Mr. Wray. It was put in the box."
"Put in?"
"On top," said Kovac. "Where I'd see it first. In a clerk's neat hand, with a yellow tab." She pulled open the door, and the corridor's yellow light fell across the floor. "Somebody wanted me to ask you that question. And I haven't yet decided whether they did it to help you or to hang you."
She went out.
He sat alone in Interview Room Two with the red light of the machine dark beside him, the clock ticking on the wall, and the poster about domestic abuse watching him from above with its large flat patient eyes. After a few minutes he heard her heels on the stairs, going down, brisk and uneven, like a woman carrying more than she'd expected. Then a door.
He put his face in his hands.
He didn't weep. He was past it. What he felt was something larger and colder and quieter, a kind of enormous clearness, like a man standing on a high place in the dark when the clouds have drawn off. For the first time he saw below him, in outline, the shape of the thing he had been walking toward.
I was on the bridge.
I stood where she stood.
And I don't remember a minute of it.