Cath Staincliffe - Dead Wrong

Ray came out. ‘We lost, penalty shoot-out.’ He seemed devastated.

I’d only a dim grasp of what that meant. ‘No goals?’ I ventured.

‘No. And the poor sod who missed will be blamed for losing the whole match. Southgate, he’s called. Yup, that’s how he’ll be remembered – as the bloke who lost the penalty shoot-out.’

‘Wine?’ I offered as consolation.

‘I’ve got some lager.’ He re-emerged with a can and we sat together for a while as he came down from the match, swapping bits of news about the children and school, and agreeing what still needed to be done for Tom’s party.

That night, I dreamt about a knife. I’d lost it in the supermarket. Mrs Deason was asking for it: she wanted it back. Then the police burst in. They knew I was guilty. I reared awake in a state of panic. A dream. Just a dream.

I went quietly downstairs and made myself a cup of elderflower tea with honey. I needed to let the images ebb away. I hate it when aspects of the job invade my night’s sleep. It wasn’t as if things had got particularly hairy. Not like previous cases when I’d been threatened, assaulted, even shot at. Stupid dream. Be all right if it revealed any answers, but it didn’t.

OK, I admitted to myself, it’s the knife. Blame the knife. I have a fear of knives. I’d been stabbed once, here in this kitchen, sitting at this very table. Even being shot at hadn’t come close to the terror I’d felt as the man held the blade near my neck and whispered threats. Spittle on his lips…

I resisted the impulse to jump up and try to run away from the fears. Instead I practised the exercise I’d been taught, playing out the memory, letting it run to the part where he raised his arm, then changing the outcome. I was strong, stronger than him; I grabbed his wrist, wrested the knife from him, broke it in my bare hands, led him away, handed him over to the custodian at the door. I went through it again, and by then I was sleepy enough to return to bed.

I felt a flash of irritation with the dog down the road, who began to bark as soon as I turned off my light. I worked out that it had been eight days since I’d seen Victor Wallace and started to work on the case. All that time for my fears about knives to surface. Not bad, eight days. was making progress.

I was nearly off when a taxi came clattering down the road and there was much slamming of doors and jovial farewells. But soon it was quiet again.

And then it was morning.

Something happens to the clock between getting up and the time we have to leave for school. I never actually see it happen, but instead of ticking neatly round minute by minute, it takes great leaps from one figure on the dial to one across the other side. Even more unnerving is the fact that this erratic behaviour is synchronised with all the digital timepieces in the house.

One moment we’re making toast, the lunches are packed and there’s loads of time, and the next we’re terribly late, Maddie’s lost her shoes and there’s Vimto leaking from Tom’s lunchbox.

Returning from school to my office I took ten minutes to drink a cup of coffee, check my mail and messages, come to terms with Maddie’s parting words: ‘I hate you, pigbum, you always make me late’ – and regain a reasonable pulse-rate.

My rent was due for the office. I wrote a cheque for the Dobsons and left it upstairs on their kitchen table. It was a modest sum; I certainly couldn’t have rented a shoebox for that amount from anyone else.

I rang Rebecca Henderson to check whether she had spoken to Debbie Gosforth as promised. She was out but her secretary Alison remembered typing and posting the letter the previous morning. She’d have got it by now. I’d collected the photos of the stalker and I put them in the folder with my other notes. They were adequate to prove that G had been loitering outside Debbie Gosforth’s house on that occasion. Not an offence as such. Neither was stalking, come to that, only if it could be proved there was intent to cause harm. Most stalking cases were prosecuted for other crimes, like malicious damage or assault. You could keep up a campaign of terror against someone for years and the law could do little about it. That was Rebecca Henderson’s worry, and Debbie’s. Mine was getting the man’s name and address as soon as possible.

I put the Gosforth file away and got out the Wallace one. I made notes on my meetings with Mrs Siddiq, Dr Khan, Zeb Khan and Mrs Deason. I have a system of dividing the page into sections. In the first I’d enter facts or alleged facts – what people said they had seen or done or heard, along with times and dates, that sort of thing. In the second section I’d enter anything I wanted to remember about that person’s attitude and opinions, their reactions and the impression they had made on me. In the final section I’d jot down all my own hunches and suspicions, questions that went unanswered and doubts I had. I’d allow myself to spin wild scenarios about what the truth might be.

Of course, this was for my eyes only; I’d be appalled if anyone else ever saw it. In a clearcut case there’d be little or nothing in the final section, but as I worked on these reports I was struck by how many queries I had and how muddy everything seemed.

The Siddiqs were witnesses but I got a definite sense that they had some stake in the case. Their reactions hinted at some other involvement; they were not just objective observers. Of course, they did work for a relative of Dr Khan…I kept coming back to the fact that they’d left Ahktar to bleed to death. Was their guilt a reason for the extra baggage that they brought to the case? Was that the explanation for all the bad vibes?

Zeb Khan I labelled volatile. He’d reacted aggressively to my visit, even more so when I’d asked about his row with Joey D and when I’d mentioned Emma. He’d been unclear at first about what time in the evening he had seen the two friends arguing. Was that simply the effect of drugs? Had anyone else seen the row? Could he have imagined it, been hallucinating? There was no clue as to what they might have argued about.

Was Zeb a physically violent man? Could he have become embroiled in an argument with his cousin and then, when it ended in tragedy, somehow set Luke up to take the rap?

And if Mr Siddiq was in charge of security at the Cash and Carry, surely Zeb would know him! Even if Zeb was based at the clothing importers up Cheetham Hill Road, he’d still have some passing knowledge of Rashid Siddiq, wouldn’t he? I knew for a fact that Siddiq visited J.K. Imports – I’d followed him there.

As for Joey D, he had seen or heard or done something that night that led him to flee, fearing for his safety. He was known to carry a knife similar to the one that killed Ahktar, and he arrived home shocked and scared. I was surprised the police hadn’t become more suspicious, given the timing of his flight from home.

Mrs Deason would have been completely plausible. He’d already run away twice that year, she’d said, coming back when the money ran out or things got too heavy. She’d told them about his knife, the argument they’d had about it, the fact that she’d taken it from him. She had shown them it. Proof. So there was no reason to connect the knife used on Ahktar to Joey. The police had plenty of evidence pointing to Luke as it was. Mrs Deason’s account fitted the known facts. Their interest in Joey D would have focused on the knife. His weapon could safely be ruled out of the enquiry.

My interest however was more wide-ranging, and I wasn’t satisfied, not by a long chalk. I’d uncovered a more disturbing version of Joey D’s involvement in the events of that night, but I couldn’t go any further without talking to him. There was no point in reporting what I’d learned to the police because I knew Mrs Deason would perjure herself to the hilt to protect her grandson, and she would be totally convincing.