Post Mortem, Gary Bell [best fiction novels .txt] 📗

‘Did you know any of the deceased?’ I asked.

‘Barely. Band 3 staff – officers – they would’ve known them well enough, but they’re each responsible for up to a hundred inmates. The prison holds an average of thirteen hundred at any time with over two thousand moved in and out each month. I’d usually process anywhere from, Jesus, fifty to a hundred newcomers a day.’

‘Were you blamed?’ Zara asked in a tone I didn’t like, one that was entirely opposite to the one she’d adopted with Andre. ‘After your car was searched, did your colleagues turn on you?’

‘Some. The ones who found the bodies.’ She turned her face to the potting shed, an adjustment of only a couple of inches that somehow took her miles away. ‘I don’t resent them for that. We’re supposed to be on the same team. Nobody wants to find a cheat on their team, do they? But they’re wrong. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened. I feel for their families, of course. Their parents …’ She turned back to us; more accurately, to Zara. ‘But nobody forced them to smoke that crap.’

I could actually see the strain on Zara’s face, her sharp, occasionally brilliant mind working overtime to veto whatever her mouth wanted to say.

‘Who searched your vehicle again?’ I intervened. ‘It wasn’t colleagues of yours?’

‘No, they were independents from the Prison Investigation Unit.’

‘And you don’t have any grudges with anybody at work, or outside of work for that matter?’

‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘And the neighbours wouldn’t go that far.’

‘What about the fathers of your children?’ I asked.

‘God no. They’re long out of the picture.’

I nodded, eyes trailing to the back of the land; there was a fence there, and behind it the flowers grew wild and purple. They looked almost exotic. ‘And there definitely wasn’t anybody else that might’ve had access to your car?’ The subject had been well traversed, but I was looking for a fresh response now that we were out of the blanket of her brother’s presence. ‘There was nobody who – I don’t know – might’ve slipped the contraband in there to encourage you to take it into the prison grounds?’

A hint of a frown knitted her eyebrows below the edge of her bandana. ‘Nobody has access to my car except for me.’

‘I appreciate that, but with all due respect, as I said yesterday, if you truly were the only person capable of getting into your vehicle, and the drugs really were found inside your vehicle, which by all accounts they were, then it doesn’t present the jury with a whole lot of reasonable doubt, does it?’

She didn’t answer. Whatever frown had been forming crumbled back to that familiar melancholic gaze.

‘However,’ I went on, ‘as I also mentioned before, if we submit that you were acting under the assumption that you were carrying plain tobacco onto the premises, then I think we have a serious shot at challenging the prosecution’s ability to prove your mens rea. The punishments for smuggling List C articles are considerably more lenient than those involving List A drugs.’

Still no answer. A mumble perhaps, almost inaudible.

I decided to get serious. ‘We’re running out of time to update our defence statement. If we delay it much longer, and then you decide to change your story, it may result in the jury drawing an adverse inference against you before we’ve even begun. The prosecution will jump on that. A trial is only fair if both sides, prosecution and defence, disclose their full plans of attack to one another in advance, to grant the opposing side a reasonable chance to prepare a counter-argument. If, on the other hand, you knew what was in your car all along, and somebody else did put you up to it, if you were pressured into smug—’

‘If my mum says she didn’t know,’ Roland interjected hatefully from the fence, ‘then she didn’t know.’

In our ludicrous quartet we were quiet then, as if this twelve-year-old boy’s really was the ultimate word.

Then, before we could continue, music started blaring from somewhere nearby. I wouldn’t have paid it any mind if not for Charli’s face, which visibly blanched at the sound.

The music circled the perimeter of Honeybone Allotments, drawing nearer; a high-performance engine growled through twin exhausts, and the combined racket reverberated from the perfect horseshoe of buildings across the road until it sounded like something out of Apocalypse Now, except that ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ had been replaced by Wagner’s lesser known foray into thumping jungle beats.

Whatever change I had been looking for in Charli Meadows finally occurred. Her brown eyes swelled. She yanked off her gardening gloves and bandana. That same fight-or-flight tension that had marred her son’s reception of us now stiffened her into a fragile, scarecrow paralysis. Zara and I followed her gaze back to the road and we all sat as erect as a trio of meerkats assessing the Kalahari.

The car, an immaculate white Audi RS8, came to a smooth stop, leaving a foot between the kerb and its custom gold alloys. The music followed its engine into deathly silence as the driver stepped out.

During this arrival, it was something altogether subtler that stole my attention. It was the downstairs window of the house next door to Charli’s on the right. At the sound of the car, the netting had twitched aside, and a tiny old lady had appeared, shaking her head. By the time the driver had opened his door, the netting had fallen back into place.

For all his former attitude, Charli’s son Roland now looked like a much smaller boy, eyes popping as if Father Christmas had just parked up his sleigh and brought his bottomless sack to Low Hall Lane. ‘Deacon!’ he cried, not bothering to accuse this much cooler customer of being a spy sent here from the school.

It wasn’t a bottomless sack that Deacon was carrying. It was a shopping bag in the distinguishable shade