The Fall by Claire McGowan Read Free Book Online Page A

to pay for them.’
    ‘I got a picture of him,’ she said suddenly. ‘On my phone. I was doing a pic of me and Mel when he come over.’ She’d whipped out her Nokia and shown him a blurred shot of the two girls in the foreground, and in the background a white man approaching. Could have been Stockbridge.
    ‘Can I?’ A phone picture wouldn’t be much use in court, but he took it and flipped through. The picture before was of Rachel with a different white man, adopting a cool gun-finger gangster pose. ‘This guy with the shaved head – who’s that?’
    She went cagey. ‘Dunno. Some fella at the club.’
    ‘Would he have seen anything?’
    ‘Dunno. Dunno who he was.’
    Rachel Johnson was pretty, yes, but he was fairly sure she wasn’t telling him the truth. In the end, though, both girls identified Stockbridge at once in the parade. In the past, Hegarty’d seen white witnesses fail to identify black suspects, since ‘they all look the same, don’t they?’ But both black girls knew Stockbridge at once.
    ‘That’s him,’ Mel had said, giving the man the finger through the reflective glass. ‘That’s the bastard. Hope he rots.’
    Heading down to the interview room, Hegarty spotted one of the search guys he’d sent round to Stockbridge’s flat yesterday. ‘You get the shoes?’ The bald guy nodded. It was all round the station that whoever knocked off Anthony Johnson had also stamped on his hand, breaking the fingers. It was the kind of thing that made the officers really want to nail someone for the crime. They’d have blood all over them for sure, the shoes of whoever did it. If there was still any doubt about that.
Charlotte
    Eventually, on that endless Saturday, Charlotte had fallen asleep across the orange plastic chairs. When she woke she had no idea what time it was, but they had definitely missed Britain’s Got Talent . The strip-lighting fractured on her tired eyes.
    There were voices in the corridor, behind the shatter-proof glass with the posters about legal aid and benefit fraud and not slapping your wife about. Charlotte sat up, feeling sweat under her armpits.
    ‘Leave off, I can walk meself.’ A woman’s voice, and in the corridor, a girl walking tall and proud, her hair like a gold and bronze halo about her face. Charlotte recognised the girls from the club, the one with the afro, still in her shimmering silver dress from the night before. Her legs went on about a mile, and behind her, slinking against the wall, was the shorter one who’d shouted at Dan, her hair flat with over-straightening. That girl looked like she’d been crying. It was what Charlotte’s own face looked like in the yellowing glass, ravaged, screwed up like a dam against the tears inside. Their eyes met, and the other girl looked away.
    Charlotte tried to put her thoughts in order. The guy at the club was dead. Murder, the policeman had said. God, it was so hard to remember – everything was slipping out of her head soapy-slick. So, what – Dan got in a fight with him? But he’d been away such a short time, just a few minutes. And he was fine, wasn’t he? No bruises, no blood. Wouldn’t she have known if Dan had been in a fight?
    She had another memory. Dan, a few weeks ago, shouting at her: I don’t give a fuck what kind of flowers we have!
    He’d been at the table surrounded by spreadsheets, working on a Saturday again. She was trying to get him to finalise the wedding details, take an interest in it.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, after two hours of her hurt silence.
    ‘It’s our wedding. Excuse me if I thought you might care.’
    Running hands through his hair, his face haggard. ‘I’m sorry. Sometimes I just feel like there’s no way out.’
    The waiting-room TV, set on news, scrolled on and on as the hours dragged forward. Eventually she slept again across the hard chairs, the ridges digging into her spine, woken by the noise of people coming in as much as by her own creeping, rising panic.