Belinda Bauer - Rubbernecker

‘All in good time,’ said Williams. ‘We’re trying to get hold of your mother now.’

‘My mother ? Why?’

‘She needs to be with you.’

‘She won’t come,’ said the boy.

‘Why not?’

‘She doesn’t like me that much.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ said Williams, even though he thought it might be.

The suspect shrugged and then shivered. Williams could see the gooseflesh on his chest from here. It reminded him of drying the boys after swimming when they were younger. Rubbing warmth back into them while their teeth chattered.

He fetched an old blue sweatshirt from Lost Property.

‘Here, put this on.’

Patrick Fort took it from him warily and held it up, wrinkling his nose. The slogan on the front said LITERACY AINT EVERYTHING.

‘It has sick on the sleeve,’ he said, pushing it to the other end of the slatted bench. ‘And no apostrophe.’ Then he looked around the cell and said, ‘Do you have a dustpan and brush?’

Williams sighed and withdrew, shaking his head.

Sergeant Wendy Price passed on her way from the machine with a cup of grey coffee. ‘What’s up?’

Williams jerked a thumb at the cell door. ‘Kid’s got a severed head in his fridge but he wants a bloody feather duster to do a bit of housework.’

She grinned and leaned up to peer through the flap. ‘Oh, him ,’ she said.

‘You know him?’

‘He came in a few days ago with blood on his hands and said he wanted to report a murder. When he saw I’d clocked the blood, he legged it. I chased him halfway to Splott!’

‘You gave up before the war memorial,’ Patrick corrected her.

Sergeant Price blushed and snapped the flap shut.

She lowered her voice and added, ‘I think he knew Darren Owens.’

Williams looked at her sharply. Darren Owens who had been found in the park, up to his elbows in a disembowelled jogger? ‘What makes you think that?’ he asked.

Sergeant Price shrugged. ‘They said something to each other in Reception. I don’t know what, but I’d definitely say they’d met before.’ She lifted her cardboard cup in a toast of ‘You’re welcome,’ and disappeared through a doorway.

Emrys Williams watched her go, and – with a growing sense of foreboding – wondered just how much he’d really discovered when he opened that fridge door this morning.

If the boy knew Darren Owens, then a severed head might be just the start of it.

He looked through the flap again with new eyes.

This is how things change .

When Sarah Fort finally got the call, it wasn’t the one she’d been expecting.

A Sergeant Price told her that Patrick had been arrested.

‘For what?’ Sarah asked. ‘Not wearing his helmet?’

‘Resisting arrest, theft and murder,’ said the officer, apparently reading off a list.

‘ Murder? ’ said Sarah.

‘Yes,’ she answered, as if this was old news.

‘Murder of whom ?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that at this stage.’

‘Oh,’ said Sarah, because she didn’t know what else to say. She thought of the picture of the dead girl, and of the countless birds and animals Patrick had dissected over the years, and wondered whether he really did have it in him to kill a person.

Probably.

Didn’t everyone have it in them, if circumstances were bad enough?

‘Has he admitted it?’ she asked.

‘We haven’t questioned him yet. Is it true that he’s handicapped?’

Sarah had long since stopped getting angry about handicapped . Everything was a matter of degree. Patrick was handicapped, in the most literal way, by his condition – just as she was handicapped by him .

She said, ‘He has Asperger’s Syndrome.’

‘Is that like Alzheimer’s?’

‘No, it’s like autism. He finds it difficult to interact with people.’

‘Oh.’ Sergeant Price sounded disappointed. ‘We thought he was just rude.’

‘Yes,’ said Sarah, ‘he is rude. But he can’t help it.’

‘Hm,’ said Sergeant Price. ‘That’s what my sister says about her kids. But they can’t all be bloody autistic, can they?’

‘Probably not,’ agreed Sarah.

The officer sighed heavily. ‘Well then, in that case, he needs to be interviewed in the company of an appropriate adult. Can you come down to Cardiff?’

Sarah thought about that for so long that the officer said, ‘Hello?’

‘Hello,’ said Sarah back. ‘Yes, of course.’

She hung up and stared across the kitchen for an hour or two.

Then she fed Ollie and went to work, feeling better than she had in a long, long time.

Emrys Williams told DCI White to expect Mrs Fort any time now. Then he hung about, reluctant to go home, hoping White would remember him when it came to putting a team together – and when he spoke to the press. He also wanted to tell the head-in-the-fridge story to the day crew in person.

That was worth it. Colleagues laughed and shook their heads and said ‘lucky bastard’; WPC Dyer made a little paper nameplate for his desk that read HEAD BOY, and, before the hour was up, some joker had put a doll’s head in the vending machine where the Curly-Wurlys ought to be. It all gave him a warm glow.

And then – just after nine a.m. – a well-spoken young man came in, identified himself as Dr David Spicer and said he had come to report the theft of a head from the university medical school.

And just like that, the Big One was over. Emrys Williams could almost hear his career farting around the room like a balloon, and dropping into a corner, all sad and shrivelled and a bit of an embarrassment.

Patrick Fort was not a murderer; not a crazed killer; nothing to do with Darren Owens and his empty jogger. The Big One was just a student prank that had gone beyond the bounds of the acceptable because the student in question had a tentative grasp on what was normal human behaviour and what was not.

Williams felt the disappointment like a physical thing – a sharp pang in his belly and a burning neck of shame.

This was what they’d all remember now, every time they opened the staff-room fridge.

Still, he was not the type of man to leave someone else to clean up his mess, so he told Wendy Price he’d sort this one out on his own time, and then ushered Dr Spicer over to his desk and took his statement.

The more Spicer talked, the more it all made sense to Detective Sergeant Emrys Williams. Patrick Fort had been expelled and had apparently taken the head out of some kind of revenge.

‘He can’t help it,’ said Dr Spicer.

‘So we’ve been told,’ sighed Williams.

‘He’s not a bad kid. As long as we get the head back, I doubt the university will want to press charges.’

‘That’s very generous.’

‘What will happen to him?’ said the young doctor.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Williams, because that was true. ‘Would you mind reading that, Dr Spicer, and then signing your name at the bottom?’

Williams watched Spicer read the statement carefully and then sign his name.

‘Thank you.’

‘Not at all,’ said Spicer, standing up. ‘Where’s the head?’

‘It’s with our forensics team.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I would very much like to get it back to the university as soon as possible.’

‘Of course,’ said Williams. ‘But until we decide whether to charge Patrick Fort with a crime, the head is evidence.’