Chapter 16 Interrogation #2
“Yeah, that’s it! You knew something good like that and you never said?”
“Sorry. I’ll remember next time.”
—
“Have you heard from Miss Ogilvie at all, Mr. Denholm?”
“Me?” Denholm said. He was sitting at his desk. There was no indication that he ever did any work there.
“Yes, you,” Flynn said. “Apparently she said something about a toothache.”
“She’s not in the office?”
“No,” Flynn said patiently. “Did she talk about going to a dentist?”
“Mm. Something about a filling. Or a crown. Don’t remember. Sorry.”
—
“Oh, no, the peelers are back,” the Boy muttered.
“Mr. Flynn?” Inspector Vigo was standing in the open doorway of the office.
“May we come in?” he said pleasantly. He nodded a silent greeting to Evans and Denholm, ignoring the Boy.
He didn’t wait for an answer. Tapper followed him in.
“We just need you to come down to the station and give a statement, Mr. Flynn. Don’t worry, still not arresting you. ”
Tapper muttered something under his breath. It sounded like “should do.” Vigo ignored him and said, “We just need to go over a few things.”
“Are you going to cuff him?” the Boy asked Tapper.
“I’ll cuff you, you little bugger,” Tapper said.
“Hang on,” Denholm said mildly. “You can’t talk to him like that.”
“Yes, I can,” Tapper snarled. “Your bum-boy, is he? Fat faggot,” he muttered as an afterthought.
Denholm recoiled from the word. Evans whistled softly through his teeth and the Boy started to say something, but was cut off by Tapper saying, “Shut up, you little runt, or I’ll take your tiny balls and hang them on my Christmas tree. ”
“Watch it,” Evans said, getting ready to take a swing at Tapper. Denholm, looking aghast, made a choking noise.
“I’ll tell my ma what you just said,” the Boy said to Tapper, who laughed and said, “Ooh, I’m scared,” but then he had never met the Boy’s mother and was ignorant of the severity of the threat.
“Yes, no need for an argy-bargy,” Vigo said soothingly. “Mr. Flynn? If you’d be so good as to come with us.”
Flynn gripped the edge of his desk to steady himself.
The Boy patted him on the shoulder. Evans, seeing how pale Flynn had grown, said, “Take it easy, Harry,” as if steadying a nervous dog.
Flynn felt in his pocket for his cigarettes but couldn’t find them.
“Here,” Evans said, tossing him his Woodbines.
Flynn botched the catch. The Boy scooped the pack up before it hit the floor and placed it in Flynn’s hand.
“You all right, Mr. Flynn?” he whispered, gazing earnestly up into Flynn’s face.
“Yes, yes, Terence. Thank you. Sorry,” he said to the room in general, “bit wobbly. Should have eaten breakfast.”
A little guard of honour of two formed itself in the doorway.
Morituri te salutant, Flynn thought. “Good luck, Mr. Flynn,” the Boy said, as if he was indeed a gladiator going to the arena.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if they had handed him a net and a trident.
Evans even shook his hand and said, “God speed, Harry.” Denholm’s “Nothing’s as bad as it looks, Mr. Flynn” provided little in the way of comfort.
Nor was it necessarily true, in Flynn’s experience.
The room in Bow Street was little more than a cupboard with a small window set high up in the wall. It was an intimation of what a cell might be like.
“So,” Vigo said, sitting his bulk down heavily (“Oof!”) opposite Flynn.
The table between them was very narrow, and Flynn had to shift his knees so that they didn’t touch Vigo’s.
They were so close to each other, in fact, that Flynn could smell the fish that Vigo had lunched on.
He found it difficult to take his eyes off the tiny flake that had lodged itself in the detective’s moustache.
Cod or haddock? he wondered to distract himself from his surroundings.
Impossible to tell the difference, of course.
Tapper remained standing behind Flynn, his presence unnerving, but he had suffered at the hands of worse brutes than Tapper out East.
“So,” Vigo said again. He steepled his hands and rested his chin at the apex.
He seemed to be waiting for Flynn to say something.
To confess, Flynn thought. The silence between them began to feel incriminating, although not nearly as incriminating as the evidence of the scarf would be if Vigo knew about it.
“So just to check again, Mr. Flynn, sir,” Vigo said. “You were with Miss Dubois in the Lamb and Flag on the evening in question, which is the last time Miss Dubois was seen alive—”
“She’s dead?”
“Slip of the tongue, sir,” Vigo said smoothly. “The last time she was seen by anyone was with you, outside the Lamb and Flag, where you say you helped her into a taxi.”
“I did.”
“Did she need help?”
“Well, no…”
“And then what did you do?”
Flynn sensed that a series of traps were being laid for him and that sooner or later he would walk into one of them. If he hadn’t already.
“I had another drink—in the Lamb and Flag—and then I went home.”
“So that’s it—taxi, drink, home?”
“Yes.”
“Because we have a witness who says that they saw you outside said pub, arguing with Miss Dubois.”
“We didn’t argue. What witness? Who?”
“Barman at the Lamb and Flag. Said you were having, and I quote, ‘a real ding-dong’ with Miss Dubois. And Miss Ibsen—you remember her—she says she noticed that you had several bruises and cuts on your face the morning after your date with Miss Dubois.”
“Did she wallop you one?” Tapper asked.
“I think she was seeing someone,” Flynn said. “I think she was going to meet her lover.” Was he growing delirious? He felt shivery. Not malaria, he thought, not now.
“ ‘Lover,’ ” Tapper said, sniggering as if Flynn had said something filthy. “That’s the Frogs for you. All that parlayvoo and jennusayquar just leads to a load of howsyourfather.”
“Tapper,” Vigo said, “no need for that. There was another man?” he said, turning to Flynn. “She was someone else’s girlfriend as well as yours, you mean?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.” Flynn sighed. Oh, what was the point in denial? Even to his own ears it sounded like a tired refrain. “She said she was late for Zheel.”
“What is that? Zheel? How do you spell it?” Tapper asked.
“No idea.”
Something was lurking on the seabed of Flynn’s memory, something that wanted to be dredged to the surface so that it could see the light of day. What? His nerves were too stretched to allow rational thought.
“Mr. Flynn,” Vigo said, sending the memory plunging back to the seabed, “can I suggest a different version of events? That you were in a struggle with Miss Dubois and acquired your injuries while she was defending herself from an assault by you.”
“Knew a woman once who killed a man with the heel of her shoe,” Tapper said conversationally.
“Thank you, Tapper,” Vigo said.
“I didn’t attack her. I would never attack a woman.”
“But you would attack a man?”
“You’re putting words in my mouth!”
“No need to get worked up, sir.”
“I’m not worked up!”
Flynn’s mouth was so dry that his voice was now no more than an overwrought croak. “I wouldn’t mind a glass of water.”
“Tapper—get the gentleman a glass of water.”
Tapper returned and dumped a glass of water in front of Flynn. Some spilt on to the cracked veneer surface of the desk. “Now look what you’ve done,” the constable said. For a moment Flynn thought Tapper was going to hit him.
“Now, now, don’t start,” Vigo said to Tapper. Tapper retreated resentfully and stood near the door.
Flynn understood what was happening to him.
A plot was being fabricated—a series of fictions was being woven around him until he was trapped in the web with no way out.
Only…what if it wasn’t a series of fictions?
He no longer felt certain of anything, but then he remembered something else. “She said she was being watched.”
“Watched?” Vigo said doubtfully. “Sounds to me like you’ve been reading too much John Buchan. Good writer, by the way.”
“Never read him,” Tapper said.
“You’ve never read anything, Tapper.”
“I read the Express, sir.”
“She said they were going to sacrifice her,” Flynn said.
“Sacrifice?” Tapper jeered. “What is that—devil worship? Are you a Satanist, Mr. Flynn?”
“No! Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Calm down, Mr. Flynn,” Vigo said. “Tell me, are we going to be fishing your French lady friend out of the Thames? Digging her up in Epping Forest? Dragging her out of a sewer?”
“I don’t know what happened to her or where she is. I can’t state it more plainly than that.”
Vigo sighed heavily as if he had been let down by Flynn, although it might equally have been Tapper who disappointed him.
“Right!” he said, suddenly jumping to his feet like a much more athletic man.
He startled Flynn so much that he jumped up too.
Tapper’s heavy hand on his shoulder pushed him back down into the chair.
“It’s fine,” Vigo said to Tapper, waving his hand dismissively. “We’re finished with Mr. Flynn.”
“We are?” a disgruntled Tapper said, echoing Flynn’s own surprise.
It didn’t matter whether or not he had killed Delphine Dubois, did it? Flynn feared he might be done for either way.
Flynn thought that Tapper was going to bar his exit from the room, but at the last moment he opened the door and let him out. Vigo shouted after them, “Take the gentleman’s fingerprints before he goes, Tapper.”