Inspector Nightingale was still alive, they told me that much before they sat me down on the wrong side of the interview table, and had been taken to the brand new trauma centre at UCH listed as ‘stable’， a term which covered a multitude of sins.
I checked the time. It was three thirty in the morning, less than four hours after Nightingale had been shot. If you work for any time in a large institution you start to get an instinctive feel for its bureaucratic ebb and flow. I could feel the hammer coming down, and since I’d only been a copper for two years, the fact that I could feel it coming meant that it was a very big hammer indeed. I had a shrewd idea about who’d put the hammer in motion, but there was nothing I could do but stay sitting on the wrong side of the interview table with my cup of bad coffee and two chocolate biscuits.
Sometimes you have to stand still and take the first blow. That way you can see what the other man has in his hand, expose his intentions and, if that sort of thing is important to you, put yourself unequivocally on the right side of the law. And if the blow is so heavy that it puts you down? That’s just a risk you have to take.
The blunt instrument chosen caught me by surprise, although I made sure I kept my face neutral when Seawoll and Detective Sergeant Stephanopoulos entered the interview room and sat down opposite me. Stephanopoulos slapped a folder down on the table. It was far too thick to have been generated in the last couple of hours, so most of it must have been padding. She gave me a thin smile as she ripped the cellophane off the audio cassettes and slotted them into the dual tape machine. One of those tapes was for me, or my legal representative, to prevent me being quoted out of context; the other was for the police to prove that I had copped to the charge without them having to beat me around the back, thighs and buttocks with a sock full of ball bearings. Both of the tapes were redundant because where I sat was neatly framed in the viewfinder of a CCTV camera mounted just above the door. The live feed went to the observation room down the corridor where, judging from the theatrical way Seawoll and Stephanopoulos had made their entrance, someone of ACPO rank was watching – the Deputy Assistant Commissioner at the very least.
The tape machine was turned on, Seawoll identified me, himself and Stephanopouois as being present and reminded me that I was not under arrest but merely helping police with their inquiries. Theoretically I could stand up and walk out any time I liked, provided I didn’t mind kissing my career in the police goodbye. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted.
Seawoll asked me, for the record, to outline the nature of the operation that Nightingale and I had been running when he was shot.
‘You really want that on the record?’ I asked.
Seawoll nodded, so I gave the full account: our theory that Henry Pyke was a revenant, a vampire ghost bent on revenge who was acting out the traditional story of Punch and Judy using real people as puppets, and that together we had devised a way to put ourselves into the story so that Nightingale could track Henry Pyke’s bones and destroy them. Stephanopoulos couldn’t suppress a wince when I talked about the magical aspects of the case – Seawoll was unreadable. When we got to the shooting he asked me whether I recognised the gunman.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Who is he?’
‘His name is Christopher Pinkman,’ said Seawoll, ‘and he denies that he shot anyone. He claims he was walking home from the opera when two men attacked him in the street.’
‘How does he explain the gun?’ I asked.
‘He claims there wasn’t a gun,’ said Seawoll. ‘He stated that the last thing he remembers was leaving the opera, and the very next thing is being kicked in the head by you.’
‘That and the excruciating pain from the fractured bones in his lower leg,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Plus some serious bruising and contusions from when he was thrown to the ground.’
‘Was he tested for gunshot residue?’ I asked.
‘He teaches chemistry at Westminster School,’ said Stephanopoulos.
‘Bugger,’ I said. The gunshot residue test was notoriously unreliable, and if the suspect handled chemicals for a living then no forensic witness on earth was going to testify in court that it was likely, let alone conclusive, that he’d fired a gun. A horrible suspicion formed in my mind.
‘You did find a gun – right?’ I asked.
‘No firearm was recovered from the scene,’ said Stephanopoulos.
‘I kicked it along the pavement,’ I said.
‘No firearm was recovered,’ said Stephanopoulos slowly.