Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

So the detective was faced with a quandary. He could work on the basis that a crime had been committed and treat Tom and Rebecca as useful witnesses. He would show great courtesy, of course, without ever losing sight of the possibility that these two might be the killers: iron law of any murder inquiry, don't rule anybody out.

But there was a risk to that approach. If he eventually charged them the information he had gleaned while treating them as mere witnesses would be compromised. Interviewing suspects was a wholly different business: they had to be formally cautioned and told their rights, with a solicitor present. So while the detective might very much like to have Tom Byrne and Rebecca Merton talk with their guard down, he couldn't get away with that indefinitely. This, Tom understood, was the policeman's dilemma.

A harsh beam of light swept across the driveway: it would be Julian. Without waiting for permission, Rebecca broke off and walked towards his car. Tom saw the look of apprehension on the detective's face: if he regarded Rebecca as a potential suspect, he wouldn't want her chatting with the son of the deceased, filling his head with her version of events.

‘I'll tell you what I think we should do,’ the detective said suddenly. ‘Why don't we all go down to the station? We can have a chat, take a full witness statement from you both and then we can see how things look in the morning.’

‘After the autopsy, you mean.’

‘Yes. That should make things much clearer. Am I right, Mr Byrne?’

The police moved fast after that. Tom was sure it was because they wanted any time Rebecca had with Julian kept to a minimum.

‘We have a car here. Why don't we take you down to the police station right away?’ the detective said.

‘We'll be fine. We've got our own car.’

‘You've both undergone a traumatic experience tonight. Our guidelines on victim support say that often people who have experienced trauma are too shocked to drive. Even when they don't realize it.’

Tom acquiesced, though he could not abandon the suspicion that the detective's primary, if unauthorized, purpose was to give the Saab a quick once-over, before his not-at-all-suspects had a chance to clean it up.

They were taken to Kentish Town police station, a horrible, poky hole of a place, full of fluorescent-lit rooms and hard plastic chairs. They were interviewed separately, as Tom fully expected. And, no less predictably, the lead detective decided to interview Tom first. He soon realized Rebecca Merton's connection to events in the news. Tom explained that that was why they had been to see Goldman, because he was an old friend of her father's and, to Tom's great relief, the detective pressed the point no further. Doubtless, he was saving that line of inquiry for the day when Rebecca and Tom were upgraded to official suspects – rather than objects of mere, unofficial suspicion – and he could question them properly.

The prospect filled Tom with dread. As if this whole business was not complicated enough already. Where on earth would you start? With the gun in Gerald Merton's hotel room? With the notebook? With DIN? And how would Rebecca explain why she had not reported the burglary at her home?

Tom thought again of Jay Sherrill. He knew he ought to phone him, at least go through the motions of bringing him up to speed. But what the hell would he say? ‘Oh hi, Jay. Look, funnily enough I'm helping some police with their inquiries here too. Isn't that a coincidence?’ It would all sound too far-fetched, too wild. He had already thrown Sherrill the morsel about Merton as a former vigilante. The rest would have to come later. This was a puzzle, Tom was now convinced, that would only be solved by him and Rebecca – without any help or interference from a police department, whether in London or New York.

‘Come this way, please.’ A junior officer led them both to some electronic gizmo, like the one at American airports, where you press your finger on a glass and have your prints taken.

‘Why do we have to do this?’ Tom asked, earning a glare from Rebecca. ‘Will these prints be entered on a database? How long will they be kept?’

The detective smiled. ‘Once a civil liberties lawyer, always a civil liberties lawyer, eh, Mr Byrne?’ He told them they had nothing to worry about; this was only to exclude them from the inquiry, to enable the police to identify any prints they picked up from the scene. ‘It's voluntary: you can say no if you want. But if you say yes, it will help.’ The details would be destroyed and, no, they would not be added to the national database.

Tom was hardly reassured. He guessed that if someone had broken into Henry Goldman's home, the intruder would have taken the elementary precaution of wearing gloves. Which meant the only prints that would be on the door, the walls, the study desk and on Goldman himself would belong to him and Rebecca.

Finally, some three and a half hours after they had first driven past Hampstead Heath, the detective told them he would hope to have autopsy results in the morning: if Goldman had died from natural causes, no trace of any poison or narcotics in his bloodstream, then this would not be a murder inquiry at all. Tom and Rebecca would hear no more about it. And with that he sent them on their way.

They stepped outside into the chill air of a prematurely autumnal night and realized they had no means of transport. Tom was poised to go back inside the police station and ask for the number of a local mini-cab company when a taxi came by, its orange light glowing with the promise of refuge. They fell in and headed east.

His head was pounding. He had had only a few hours sleep since Sunday night, thanks to a combination of the Fantonis, Miranda and the flight from New York, and it was now officially Wednesday morning. And he wasn't thirty any more. But the exhaustion went deeper than mere lack of sleep. It was the fatigue that comes from long and sustained frustration, continued grappling with a problem that refuses to be solved.

Both he and Rebecca were too tired to talk. He looked out of the window. No matter how much had changed in London, it still seemed dead at night. Not in the bits they show the tourists, the West End or the theatre district, but in the London of Londoners, the places where people lived. That was still one of the obvious contrasts with New York: the absence of delis, coffee shops and bookstores that functioned late into the night.

A few hours ago Stoke Newington Church Street would doubtless have been humming, men in bicycle helmets emerging with a single bag of shopping from the organic supermarket, couples perusing the shelves of the Film Shop, ‘specializing in world cinema’. Tom imagined the kind of people who lived here, the right-on lawyers and leftie NGO staffers. In another life, it could so easily have been him. But right now, there was nobody around. Just a couple of stragglers emptied out of the bars and a slow beast of a street-cleaning vehicle, flashing and beeping along the kerb.

He didn't want to be here, bouncing once more up and down the speed-bumped, concussion-inducing streets of the London Borough of Hackney. He had wanted to go back to Rebecca's flat or, more ambitiously, his hotel, if only to get some rest, but she had rejected that idea instantly. In the police car, he had tried to touch her hand but she had brushed him away; not angrily exactly, but with a sort of suppressed irritation, as if now were not the time. He wondered if she had misunderstood him, if she thought he had been claiming an attachment that was not yet certain, rather than simply consoling her.

She had been terrified, that much was clear. He guessed that Rebecca Merton, hardened no doubt by a few years in A &E, had nevertheless not had much experience of either the police or the law. The very words – questioning, witness, crime scene – were enough to make most people lose their heads. Hence the error in the 999 call.