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eight days missing
chapter 23
alex
The room is small and grey and bland. Two hard plastic chairs have been placed either side of a large square table, on which sits an oddly old-fashioned machine with dials and graph paper and a long stylus. The polygrapher stands in front of the table, his arms by his sides. His posture is a study in neutrality, neither alert nor relaxed.
‘Ashton Hyatt,’ the polygrapher says, extending his hand to me. ‘I’m sorry to be meeting you in such circumstances.’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Lieutenant Bates says.
Hyatt shuts the door behind her and motions for me to take one of the two chairs. He’s a thin man, mid-forties, beige in every way: the kind of person you’d struggle to remember five minutes after meeting him, if not for the striking blaze of white hair in the centre of his cropped brown curls.
He tells me to place my feet flat on the floor, with my hands on my knees. I do so, my stomach fizzing with nerves. He loops cables around my chest and I stiffen self-consciously as he attaches sticky pads to my pulse points. The room is stuffy and airless, despite the noisy conditioning unit in a solitary window high up one wall.
Just routine, Bates said yesterday, when she called me into the precinct and asked me to take a lie-detector test. As if shewas simply dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s, when we both know her discovery of what happened in Kirkwood Place has changed everything.
I’ve liaised with American lawyers on a number of client cases over the years, and I’m aware polygraphs are much more common in the US, particularly in situations like this. But it’s neverroutinewhen it happens to you.
‘I won’t ask you to relax,’ Hyatt says now. ‘If youdidn’tfind this stressful, then we’d worry. Your heart rate’s likely up a notch. That’s normal.’
He takes a seat opposite me and pulls a legal pad towards him, making a couple of notations before switching the machine on. Immediately, the needle begins to scratch four blue lines across the graph paper.
‘Some of these questions will seem obvious,’ Hyatt says. ‘And I’ll likely repeat some. I’m not looking to trip you up, OK?’
I swallow. I should have nothing to fear, but my palms are sweaty and my heart feels like it’s going to burst out of my chest.
‘OK, then. Here we go. Is your name Alexa Martini?’ Hyatt asks.
I nod.
‘I need you to give me a verbal answer.’
‘Sorry. Yes.’
He glances at the scratch marks on the graph paper and makes a note. ‘Is your birth date January first, 1990?’
‘Yes.’
The mundane questions continue.Were you born in the United States?
Is London, England, your place of residence?
Are you age twenty-nine?
Do you work as an attorney?
‘No,’ I say.
The needles instantly leap across the page, a massif of blue spikes. Hyatt peers at them and writes something on his legal pad. ‘Is the legal firm of Muysken Ritter in London your place of employment?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll ask the question again. Are you an attorney?’
‘I’m a lawyer,’ I say.
His expression clears. ‘Ah. Yes. Of course. Two countries divided by a common language.’
