69236538256563

JIM
Nicky Forbes was on the phone when she opened the door. Her expression told me that we were the
last people she expected to see.
She was dressed already but her face was void of make-up and she wore her paleness like a mask.
She looked like she was sucking a lemon as she led us into the small kitchen and gestured to us to join
her at a small table that was set against the wall.
A smoking cigarette lay in a circular ceramic ashtray that had fag ends crushed into its base. The
table and chairs were a shiny orange pine, dented in places. The floor was tiled with small white
squares grouted in black and the cabinets were white with a wood trim around the edge.
The room was a throwback to the 1980s, nothing had been updated for years. It wasn’t what I
expected from Nicky Forbes, because I’d seen her blog, the pictures of her cooking on her AGA in a
perfectly equipped and decorated modern kitchen.
The kettle had just boiled but she didn’t offer us a drink.
‘Are you a smoker, DI Clemo?’ she asked, and she held out the cigarette packet that was on the
table.
‘No thank you,’ I said. Woodley shook his head too when she aimed the packet at him.
She dropped it back onto the table where it landed with a slap, and retrieved her half-smoked
cigarette from the ashtray.
‘I gave this up years ago,’ she said. ‘When I got pregnant with my first daughter.’
She sucked smoke in deeply, her eyes on mine, her gaze direct and challenging.
‘I’m wondering why you’re here,’ she said, exhaling the smoke slowly so that it billowed between
us, ‘when my sister is in Bristol frantically trying to get hold of somebody who’ll listen to her when
she tells them that she has evidence that Ben’s alive? I’m also wondering why you’re here when you
have a suspect in custody? Ben’s teaching assistant? Is that right? Shouldn’t you be trying to gather
some evidence against him? Maybe?’
She looked from one of us to the other, and when neither of us replied she slammed the side of her
hand on the table, a show of temper that made Woodley jump, but not me.
‘What is the matter with you people?’
Her face was angry red and her manner was that of a teacher demanding an answer. It was all about
control with her, I thought. This was an attempt at a display of control from somebody who had lost it.
But I wasn’t worried about cracking her; I knew I was a good interviewer, very good.
When I was in my first couple of years of training I spent hours with my dad, honing my
interrogation skills, role-playing until he’d caught me out with every dirty trick in the book, and then
taught me how to recognise them, and work with them.
‘You’ll hear excuses,’ Dad said to me one night. I was visiting the family home and it was after
dinner. Mum was washing up and Dad and I were talking in his study. The window was wide open
and outside the late summer heat had just folded itself away, so we were sitting in the early gloom of
a cool, velvety night. ‘Blokes will say that you aren’t a magician,’ Dad went on, ‘that you can only do
what you do. That’s bullshit. It’s whingeing. It’s for people who aren’t good enough. If you’re worth
anything, you can get the truth out of anyone. But you’ve got to be good.’
Two cut glass tumblers sat squat on the table between us, two whiskies. My dad shut the window
and switched on his desk lamp. The shade glowed dark emerald and dropped a rectangle of light onto
the surface of his desk.