Chapter Twenty-Three #2
He made it sound as if it had been glimpsed making its own way through the copse. The witness must have been Mrs. Billings.
I was outwitted. I began to hyperventilate, and they fetched me a paper bag.
Once my breathing was back to normal, DS Khan said we should take a break. She and Parker left the room.
“I think they’re going to charge you,” Tarquin said somberly.
“But I didn’t do it!” I said, and now I was telling the truth. I suspected Tarquin knew that as well. I just didn’t know whose side he was on.
He smiled a rueful smile. “They were going to have to choose between you and James eventually,” he said.
“James got his story in first and they obviously think it’s a better one.
To be honest, repeating “I didn’t do it!
” isn’t much of a story, more a refrain.
Now we need to think about how we’re going to approach this. ”
He recommended that from then on I continued with the “no comment” style of defense, which is harder to stick to than you’d think because they keep trying to pique your interest with little nuggets, like “you were seen talking to Lennie for a long time at the party.” Which was not true, I only spoke to him for a few minutes and nobody saw, I wanted to tell them.
But after some practice, I got the hang of it.
And it seemed to be going better until they left the room again, then returned to say:
“Daisy Dixon, I’m charging you with the death by dangerous driving of Lennie Green.”
“Charging?!” I said. “But that’s not how he died.” They knew it wasn’t how he died—they’d just told me—but I suppose details like that aren’t important when you’re stitching someone up.
“Charging,” DS Khan said, and before I knew it I was in the cells again, looking forward to an overnight stay. The police didn’t want to give me bail, so it was off to the magistrate’s court in the morning.
So now it was serious. Or even more serious than it had been before because now, not only did we have a murder victim—another murder victim—there was a risk that we were about to have the corresponding prison sentence. Only with the wrong person serving it.
And that, I had no doubt, was going to come about through the collusion of my husband and my lawyer.
That lawyer was making out that I was lucky because they’d charged me with dangerous driving and not murder.
“I suspect that’s because they don’t know yet if it’s you or your beau who strangled him, so they’re not confident they’ll make murder stick. Who is it anyway? The gentleman you’re having an affair with? Was it Mr. Newman? If it’s someone else, you shouldn’t protect him, you know.”
“It’s no one. I’m not having an affair.” Although I wondered again if I was wrong to protest; it could be my way out of this.
“Anyway, you’ll almost certainly get bail,” Tarquin said. “And if they keep it as death by dangerous driving, you’ll get a much lesser sentence. You could be out in a few years. Best-case scenario, one or two. But they could up it to murder later in the process.”
“Just get me bail, please,” I said.
In the cell, I ate what I could of my tea—the chicken nuggets were not Waitrose nuggets—and tried to find patterns in the stains on the walls.
I thought about what I was missing at home and felt homesick for the boring meals, the dramas I’d watched a hundred times, the heart-sink feeling when another tile fell off the roof.
I even missed James’s snippy comments and the time I would spend wishing him away.
I had a sleepless night, with the plastic mattress and thin blanket and the shouts of other captives on their way to and from other cells, but it was a time and a place to think.
First I thought, inevitably, about how I was married to a fraudster and a double murderer, and also, how I no longer needed to find a way to continue Lennie’s work because it hadn’t been me who killed him.
Instead, I would be going to prison for a crime I didn’t commit, and Lennie had died in vain.
What a waste. I moved on to the phone. It seemed reasonable to think that James had taken it at the same time he had killed Lennie, and from that it seemed fair to assume there had been something on there he didn’t want anyone to see and that he’d removed whatever it was by now.
And the bag! The bag! I cursed myself for the lapse in concentration that let James find the priest hole and the bag.
Then I thought about Tarquin and I began to think a thought that had previously been reserved for James, and briefly Mrs. B: How could I kill my solicitor?
It seemed fiendish to think of doing to death this young lawyer, with his mischievous, some might say delinquent, children, but if I’d only learned one thing from all of this, it was that it was dog-eat-dog in the world of covering up a crime.
My motive gave me pause for thought because the point of killing him was that, otherwise, I would go to prison for a killing that I hadn’t done, but I would leave the philosophy for another day.
If I left things to run their course, I would go to trial and James and Tarquin would conspire in making things as easy as possible for the prosecution.
I didn’t know what would happen if Tarquin was no more. There was always the risk that the same firm might just send another corrupt lawyer, but at least they would have had a warning: They couldn’t fit me up and still sleep safely in their beds.
I didn’t want to do it, though. I didn’t hate Tarquin like I hated James; in fact, I was rather warming to him.
I would need to force myself to be businesslike about it and eliminate him as a clear and present danger.
I would have to become hard-nosed and ruthless.
But only for a day, then I had the rest of life in which to assuage my guilt.
I asked myself if I was really sure Tarquin was corrupt.
He had said I shouldn’t protect my alleged boyfriend, which would be good advice, if there was such a boyfriend.
But that would be what anyone would say.
It wasn’t evidence of good intentions. I referred myself back to the hard-nosed, ruthless version of me: Did I want to spend years in prison mulling that over?