Finally:
“Hello, I’m Tarquin, Tarquin Noble.” A man, aged around forty, held his hand out. He looked slightly frazzled; his tie was askew and his hair was so untidy, I wondered briefly if we were related. “I’m your solicitor,” he said.
“Do you know why you’re here, Daisy?” DC Parker asked me as we all sat in the interview room.
“No.”
“Really? After all that was going on at your property yesterday? We’d like to ask you about Lennie Green.”
Beside me, my solicitor reached for his briefcase to take out a notepad. As the briefcase swung open, glitter scattered across us andover the table. “Sorry,” he said. “Kids got into it. They think this is hilarious.”
Instinctively, I started to wipe it off the table, but I transferred most of it onto myself, and for the rest of that day, everything I touched shimmered afterward.
“Lennie Green,” DC Parker repeated, getting back to the point. “Tell us about him.”
“I didn’t know him. Don’t know him.”
“You don’t have to know someone to run them over. The majority of victims and perpetrators in these incidents are strangers to each other.”
My heart dropped to my feet and, I think, further.How did they know?
“I didn’t run him over,” I said, telling myself it wasn’t quite a lie. “Run over” suggested to me that the wheels went over him, when that wasn’t exactly how it was. “I don’t know what happened to him.”
“That’s not what your husband said.”
Chapter Fourteen
“What did James say?” I asked, my voice high as I felt myself starting to panic. James had helped me dispose of the body. James had got rid of the car. It was all his idea. After that, James couldn’t have said I ran Lennie over because James was implicated. And what had he said about Mr. Newman?
“You tell us,” said DS Khan.
“Well, I wasn’t there, I don’t know what he said to you,” I pointed out, trying to buy myself thinking time. It worked. I had a revelation. A recalling, actually—finally all those hours watching crime dramas had paid off—I remembered an episode ofThe Billin which the police lied to get the culprit to confess. This must be what they were doing now. Maybe DS Khan had even seen the same episode.
I smiled. “I don’t believe he said anything to you,” I said. “Apart from maybe ‘what were you doing in our graveyard yesterday?’” I folded my arms and sat back, victorious.
And I was victorious. They tried, for quite some time, with different angles, different questions, different allegations, insistent that James had thrown me under a bus, but I had them licked. I stuck to my story: I only met Lennie once, at the party, I didn’t see him afterward. Although, really, that was what caused the problem: I didn’t see him.
I told it the first time, I told it a second time, I told it a third time. I told it over and over and over. I could have told it in my sleep. I kept it simple. I didn’t add any embellishments or introduce any other characters who might have tied me up in knots at a later date. I was something of a natural at this. And every time DS Khan said, “That’s not what James said,” or “James says you know something about it,” I told her she was lying. She didn’t seem to like that much and she stuck to her story as well, until I started to wonder if she really was telling the truth.
What had James said? Was he being interviewed too? He’d said he was going to phone them when he got to work, but he’d seemed free as a bird when I called him about a solicitor. It had been midmorning before the police arrived at Langley Hall—was that long enough for them to have interviewed James first? Had he had to wait for his brief? Was it this same one? Was James also covered in glitter?
And if they had interviewed James, had he told them everything straightaway? That wouldn’t take long but didn’t sound at all like the James I’d come to know and want to murder.
On the balance of probabilities, Khan was lying, but I didn’t feel that in my heart.
Next, Khan leaned forward, looked at her laptop, and tapped a few keys. She turned the screen to face us. “Can you explain why you were driving like a nun on your departure from the party, Daisy?”
And Tarquin and I watched CCTV footage of me driving the car away from Margery’s house, doing about five miles per hour in a thirty zone.
For a moment, I felt panic begin, but I was getting good at this now and after a couple of seconds, I calmed myself down and thought clearly. Should I ask for a few minutes with my solicitor, or would that assure them that they were onto something? Should I just own up to having had a drink? After all, I was borderline for the drink drive limit and sailing close to the wind was not evidence of a hit-and-run, and they couldn’t breathalyze me now. Should I just say “no comment,” or would that, again, convince them that they were right? Then I had a better idea.
“I was wearing stilettos,” I said. “They’re not the best thing for driving in. I should have taken more sensible shoes. The heel got caught and I couldn’t control the pedals properly. I was going to stop and sort it out, but then it came free, so I just carried on.”
“There you go, simple as that,” Tarquin said, his work done for him.
We went through three comfort breaks, four small, bitter coffees, and one stale sandwich that I couldn’t finish. My eyes began to droop, my solicitor seemed to be counting the tiles on the ceiling, and once, when I called DS Khan a liar, I swear I saw DC Parker snigger.
Then Khan changed the subject. “We’ve had the postmortem results for Douglas—Doug—Newman today. Drowning.”
