Chapter Fourteen
Amy is stunning. Dark skin and multicolored dreadlocks, with piercings aplenty and a bright, white smile.
The woman speaks in a creamy American accent and Chloe Spears blushes from her neck to her forehead.
Sam takes in Chloe’s mirrored body language as Amy explains that she believes she has met Denver Brady.
“Firstly, Amy, before we get into that,” Sam interjects, “does the name Charlotte Mathers mean anything to you? Other than what you may have seen on the news.”
“No, ma’am,” Amy says, “I’m here about Denver only. I believe I am the Amy character in his book.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I wasn’t sure at first,” Amy says. “To be honest, I skimmed the whole thing for a book club I joined. I just moved to London and wanted to meet new friends, so, I figured … Anyway. Sorry. Why do I think I’m Amy?
Firstly, the location is right: Venice Beach.
I still have a place there, as well as the one here in London.
I’m a professor. I split my time between UCLA in the States and, here, at London Birkbeck.
” She flicks a pink dreadlock back over her shoulder.
“That said, the ‘Amy’ person isn’t explicitly black and, as you can see, I’m a woman of color.
Plus, the Amy in How to Get Away with Murder is a hustler, a poor drug addict, and I’m far from that. ”
“Yet you’re here, claiming to be Amy?” Sam presses.
Amy doesn’t respond but smiles and reaches with her forefinger to tap her pearly front tooth. Sam gets it immediately, but she can see that Chloe is confused.
“Denver says that Amy had a gold incisor,” Amy explains to Chloe.
“I paid a small fortune to have my gold tooth replaced with white enamel. Plus, other details in the chapter match a really dodgy date I had several years ago with a British guy. Finally, Denver is a rare name and my date was with a guy named Denver.”
“Tell us about the date,” Sam says, leaning forward in her chair.
“I knew from the get-go something was wrong,” Amy sighs.
“He looked nothing like his profile picture. Then again, they never do. This is why I don’t date guys anymore.
” Next to Sam, Chloe nods eagerly, as if there’s some kind of second conversation happening between the two women that Sam can’t hear.
“His profile name was Denver. No surname. We chatted a little before the date and he said he had no social media presence, which I quite liked, but that also meant I couldn’t check him out in advance.
He said he ran a business in London and was in LA to see about opening a branch in the US.
” Amy pauses, sips her water and then continues.
“We met round about sunset, at the kidney.”
“The skateboard park at Venice Beach?” Sam checks.
“Yep. My family have always called it the kidney, after the skate bowl there that’s almost the exact same shape.
” Amy draws a bean in the air with her finger.
“Anyway, I knew immediately the guy was not it. The first thing he did was hand me a business card, as if to demonstrate his level of importance. He’d said he was six feet tall, but he was closer to five nine.
He was sicklypale—looked like he lived in a windowless basement.
His British accent kept slipping into something strong… ”
“Could it have been Romanian?” Sam offers, but Amy shakes her head slowly.
“No. I’m sure he was a native English speaker. It felt to me like he was actively trying to sound like a British royal, but he couldn’t stop switching to something else—like a Liverpool accent, Scottish maybe? Or perhaps whatever Ant and Dec speak.”
“Geordie,” Sam says, smiling to herself. It would fit perfectly with Betty’s nephew.
Amy shrugs.
“Please describe for us, in detail, what happened next,” Chloe says.
“We walked along the promenade toward Santa Monica Pier and rode the Ferris wheel. We stopped on the way and watched a woman doing pull-ups. Trying to beat a man from the crowd. Denver was determined she was hustling—faking it. He said she must have some kind of hidden hook on her wrist. But to me, she was just a strong woman who was great at pull-ups.”
“Please try to remember everything he said to you,” Sam says.
“It’s difficult, but I remember having the distinct impression that he was a bullshitter. For example, he said he had various degrees and ran a business and volunteered at a hospital and had a secretary. All kinds of lies, or what I took to be lies.”
“Why are you so convinced he was lying?” Sam presses.
“Hmm.” Amy looks up at the ceiling, concentrating. “Because he just didn’t seem that smart. I felt like he was maybe starting with a truth and then lies just built all around it.”
“How so?” Sam asks.
“For example,” Amy says, “I teach a literature module and when I mentioned that fact about myself, he said he’d read everything Charles Dickens ever wrote.
Like, he always needed to be a step beyond me.
Then, when I tried to talk to him about Oliver Twist, it was clear to me he’d maybe seen the movie or stage show, but definitely hadn’t read the book. ”
“How can you know?” Chloe asks. “Surely the story is the same?”
“Not at all,” Amy says. “Oliver Twist is a tragic book. It’s crammed full of murder, infanticide, child abuse, domestic violence, animal cruelty. It’s really, truly heartbreaking.”
“But when I saw it in the West End—” Chloe begins.
“Exactly!” Amy almost yells with enthusiasm for the topic. “You saw little kids tap-dancing, right? And singing ‘Food, Glorious Food!’ Not in the book. The book is something to cry over, not sing about. It really quite annoys me that Oliver is so glamorized.”
“So Denver pretended to be smarter than he really is. Anything more?”
“We left the rides and walked back toward Venice,” Amy continues. “It was dark by now and I was ready for the date to end. So I told him honestly. I thanked him for his time and wished him well.”
“Ouch,” Chloe says. “How did he react?”
“He thought I was joking,” Amy says. “He was so far up in his own ego, he thought I was flirting. Then—and I’ll never forget this—he started unbuttoning his shirt.”
“What did you do?” Chloe says.
“I said ‘Na-ah. Don’t you get that belly out!’” Amy says, and Chloe suppresses a smile.
Sam gestures for Amy to go on. “He just kept on stripping. Right there on the beach. He said he loved skinny-dipping. And I told him that I was leaving now, that no man should behave as he was doing and asked him not to contact me again.”
“Good for you,” Sam says, genuinely impressed. She knew so many women don’t voice their rejection for fear of triggering a bad reaction. Treading on eggshells, just like her mother did, doesn’t keep people safe for long.
Amy shrugs. “He blew up. Told me I had no idea who he was or what he was capable of.”
“Whoa,” Chloe says.
“Mm-hmm,” confirms Amy, nodding. “I ended it right there. I didn’t even make another excuse, just walked away. I went and met some girlfriends and we laughed about it.”
“And next thing you know, you’re a victim in How to Get Away with Murder?” Sam asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” Amy replies. “It reads like some kind of revenge porn to me.”
“Revenge porn…” Sam ponders the idea. “That’s exactly what makes it the strangest chapter in the book by far, and you’ve just explained why. It’s violent sexual fantasy.”
“Guys don’t take rejection well,” Chloe states. “Not that I’d really know.” Amy smiles.
“Amy, can you confirm if this is the man you met?” Sam asks, showing the woman a picture of Andrei Albescu on her phone. Amy takes her time, staring closely and zooming in.
“Well, I’m one hundred percent sure that he is not Denver,” Amy says. “Denver had blue eyes and a softer jawline. He had a milky complexion and mousy-blond hair—he wasn’t dark-haired and heavy-browed like this guy. Denver was completely average-looking.”
“And around five foot nine, you say? Not a tall man?” Sam continues.
“That’s correct.”
Sam is keen to draw the interview to a close so she can think through the repercussions of yet another chunk of the book proving to be a lie.
“I’ll need you to sit with our sketch artist and our technical expert,” she says, to wrap things up, “so they can prepare an image and information for public circulation—”
“Wait a second, ma’am,” Amy says, “I haven’t told you the juicy bit yet.”
“There’s more?” Chloe asks.
“It’s in another chapter of the book. The chapter about the old lady?”
“You mean Betty?” says Sam.
“Poor, lovely Betty,” Amy sighs. “Betty reminds me of my Grammy. Anyway, Betty had this ring, right? A ring that he stole? Guess what our boy Denver was wearing on his pinky finger. In the moonlight, it looked like it was glowing.”
Sam knows it’ll take the sketch artist a while to draw Denver’s face from Amy’s memory, and DC Chen said there was little hope of finding an online dating profile from years earlier, but he’d agreed to try.
So, Sam spends the evening reading statements from Charlotte Mathers’ family, friends, teachers and those who came into and out of her home.
She knows she should be finishing Denver’s book—there are only two chapters left—but she’s still only got limited concentration and she’s desperate to figure out who placed that tracker in Charlotte’s bag.
Even though she trusts that Tina is focusing on the detail, she can’t resist thinking about Charlotte’s case instead of Denver’s book.
She’s more convinced than ever that Charlotte’s killer and the author of How to Get Away with Murder are two separate men, and finding the child’s murderer has always been her priority.
Toni rests his head on her leg and occasionally licks her hand or the piece of paper in it.
In the background, the TV is on mute, but it’s not an Only Fools and Horses rerun tonight.
It’s Harry’s press conference, requesting Andrei Albescu to come forward as a person of interest in the Denver Brady case.