Simon Kernick - Severed

She makes me go through it again twice, and when I finish successfully for the second time she looks satisfied and vaguely pleased with herself.

'I think we might be able to get you out of this,' she says. 'There's still a long way to go, but at least we're on the right track.'

I tell her that's good, remembering that years ago Adine once told me she'd wanted to become a lawyer because she had a keen interest in the pursuit of justice. Those were her exact words: a keen interest in the pursuit of justice. I realize, somewhat belatedly, that she must have been bullshitting.

'OK,' she says, standing up with her notebook, 'I think we're ready to face the music.'

Two detectives are doing the questioning, although a camera mounted on the wall suggests that other people are probably watching and listening in. They sit at the opposite end of a formica table to Adine and me. The senior of the two, who introduces himself as DI Mike Bolt of the National Crime Squad, is tall and broad-shouldered with short, neatly cropped hair that's undergoing the transformation from blond to grey. He's a good-looking guy in his late thirties, with a lean, angular face and twinkling blue eyes that look like they don't miss much. He also has a deep S-shaped scar on his chin, and two more on his left cheek, giving him the appearance of a vaguely glamorous soap opera gangster. His colleague, DS Mo Khan, a little Asian guy with a barrel body and a very big head, is about the same age, possibly a year or two older, and from the beginning, his dark, heavily lidded eyes watch me with a constant mild scepticism.

They start off by asking me to tell them in my own words what happened at the Cosick house. I tell them the truth, and they appear to accept it. They then ask me to describe my day, and I'm momentarily caught out. I wasn't at the showroom today, so I can't say that. I can't tell them anything that can be proved wrong.

Adine buys me breathing space by intervening and asking, with a nicely refined tone of incredulity, what relevance this could possibly have.

'We're just trying to build up a picture,' Bolt answers, smiling affably at Adine, as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

By this time, I've got a story. It's not a very good one, but it'll have to do. Trying to do my own line in affable, I explain that I wasn't feeling too great this morning, so I stayed in bed. I'd recovered by lunchtime, and that was when I got a call from my old army colleague and friend Lucas, saying he needed help. From there, I keep to the story I agreed with Adine, finishing up with me back at Cosick's place. It all sounds quite believable to my ears, and again, both men appear to accept it, although there's still a faint light of scepticism in DS Khan's eyes.

'Did Mr Lukersson tell you what was in the case?' asks Bolt.

'No.'

'You didn't ask?'

'I did. He told me it was best I didn't know.'

'And you accepted that?'

'I didn't like it, but yes, I accepted it. The thing is, Lucas was a very good friend of mine. I trusted him not to get me involved in something that would get me into a lot of trouble.'

The lie comes easily, and I experience a nasty twinge of guilt at the extent of my betrayal. I wish I wasn't doing this.

Bolt nods sympathetically. He looks like he understands, but I'm not fooled for a moment.

'And what was Mr Lukersson's relationship with Eddie Cosick?' he asks.

'He was very vague. I got the feeling that they must have had some kind of business dealing.'

'But Mr Lukersson was a private detective,' says Mo Khan, leaning forward in his seat. 'What kind of business dealing could he have had with a Bosnian gangster?'

'I don't know.'

Bolt looks puzzled. 'And you didn't ask any of these kinds of questions when you discovered the body of Ben Mason, the man you describe as Snowy? When clearly you must have realized that Mr Lukersson was involving you in something that was going to get you into a huge amount of trouble?'

'Yes I did, but Lucas was panicking. He said he had to get out of there. I tried to talk to him, but he left in a hurry.'

'How did he leave?'

'In his car.'

'You didn't go with him?'

I know what they're doing because I've told them this already. They want to lull me into a false sense of security, then trip me up. I'm ready for them, though, and once again I answer the question, telling them that I left on foot.

'Which way did you go?' asks Mo.

I give Adine's high-heeled, black leather court shoe a barely perceptible tap under the table – a sign we've agreed to use when I need a couple of seconds to think.

'Why's this relevant, DS Khan?' she asks.

'We're trying to build up a picture, Ms King,' he says, giving the same stock answer as Bolt did earlier. He pronounces the Ms mzzz, then looks at me.

I have to be careful here. It's got to be a route they can't check easily.

'I walked,' I answer, 'up the Kingsland Road. I got a cab near the top and got it to drop me off home.'

'What were you wearing?'

'Sorry?'

'What were you wearing today when you left the scene of Ben Mason's murder?'

'A pair of jeans and a shirt,' I answer casually.

Khan asks me to describe the shirt, and I tell him it was white, which might have been true when I went into the brothel but definitely wasn't by the time I came out.

'And you didn't see Lucas again until when?'

'When he picked me up to go to Eddie Cosick's house.'

'And you still didn't ask him about the contents of the case, or his relationship with Mr Cosick?'

Khan's tone is perfectly reasonable, but I know he's beginning to lay on the pressure. I force myself to remain calm, but it's difficult. I'm exhausted. The anti-interrogation techniques I've been taught don't help because I'm not trying to withhold information. Quite the reverse. I want to appear to be co-operative.

'I asked,' I say, sounding weary, 'but he still wouldn't tell me. He kept saying it was best I didn't know, and he was acting very tense.'

'And you still went with him?'

I nod. 'Yes, I still went with him.'

And so it goes on. A slow, tortuous process of answering one set of questions, moving on to answer another set, then going back over something else. It's nothing like the movies or the TV, where the interrogations tend to be fast and dramatic. It's more like a very long and very dull game of chess. The advantage I have is that they don't really have any idea what's going on. The murders of Snowy and Cosick and his crew, and even the brothel fire, don't make any obvious sense, so it's difficult for them to theorize. They can only look at the facts. I was at both murder scenes, but there's nothing to suggest that I was actually responsible for them. There was some blood on the sweater I was wearing when I was arrested, which came from Lucas, but nowhere near enough for me to have tortured Cosick and cut the throats of his two bodyguards. And there's no motive whatsoever for me doing the same to Snowy. So, in the end, what have they actually got?

Not a lot.

But the point is, they know something's wrong.

When they start to go through the events at Cosick's house for something like the fourth time, Adine finally grows weary. 'My client's already answered these questions numerous times, detective inspector, and he's been an extremely co-operative witness, so can we just move on, or better still, release him on bail so that he can go home and get some sleep?'

Bolt smiles patiently, fixing her with piercing eyes. 'As you'll appreciate, Miss King, we just want to make sure we've got everything right. This is a large-scale murder inquiry, and Mr Tyler is the only person who knows what went on who's still alive. It's essential that we cover every possible angle.'