‘What for?’ he asked, sure of the answer, but wanting confirmation.
‘Breaking and entering,’ said the sergeant with the squint.
It was almost midnight by the time Strike got out of the police car at Scotland Yard. The last time Strike had been here, he’d been genuinely, as opposed to euphemistically, assisting the Met with their enquiries. He was taken to a new interview room on an upper floor and, again, left alone.
Bearing in mind Wardle’s warning that he’d seriously pissed off the murder investigation team he assumed he was about to meet, Strike was intending to be honest as far as was practicable, while maintaining a sensible level of self-preservation. A jury might forgive his ingress into Mrs Jameson’s flat if convinced that he’d thought the two people on the floor might have been saved, so he intended to stick stubbornly to the story of which he’d laid foundations back in Magdalen Court. Should he find the investigative team intransigent, he was holding in reserve a serviceable metaphorical stick and a tempting informational carrot, and was confident both could be deployed to good effect. He therefore took out his vape pen and resumed his quiet enjoyment of nicotine until, at shortly before one o’clock in the morning, two plainclothes officers entered the room: a flabby-looking white man of around fifty, who wore a cheap-looking suit and a constipated expression, and a woman in her mid-thirties who had shoulder-length red hair. If forced to give an opinion, Strike would have called this woman prettyish. She had a large mole on her cheek, teeth with large gaps between them, but a good complexion and attractive green eyes. He had a feeling this might be Murphy’s contact: the woman called Iverson with whom Robin’s boyfriend had once had a drunken grope. Strike wondered whether the pair been summoned from their beds to interview him, or were pulling all-nighters. The man’s uptight expression might have been explained by either.
He switched on the recording device and introduced himself as DCI Northmore and, confirming Strike’s guess, the redhead as DCI Iverson. Northmore gave the date and time, revealing himself to have extremely bad breath, which Strike could smell from four feet away. Northmore invited Strike to state his name and address, asked him to confirm that he’d waived his right to a lawyer, then informed him that Iverson was investigating the silver vault murder, whereas he was enquiring into the murder of Sofia Medina. Strike was interested in this last piece of information: the Met had evidently reconsidered their opinion that the man and woman seen in St George’s Avenue were figments of Mandy’s imagination.
Northmore consulted the written notes the uniformed officer from Harlesden had handed over, then said,
‘You say you’ve been hired to identify the body that was found at Ramsay Silver on the twentieth of June last year.’
‘That’s right,’ said Strike.
‘Who’s hired you?’
‘Can’t tell you that, sorry.’
‘You understand you’re under arrest?’ said Northmore, who had large grey pouches under his bloodshot blue eyes.
‘Yep, grasped that,’ said Strike.
‘You’ve forfeited the right to remain silent.’
‘I’ve signed a legally binding contract with my client, who wants confidentiality.’
‘Those rules don’t apply when it’s law enforcement asking the questions, Mr Strike.’
‘Nothing I did this evening has anything to do with my client. I entered Mrs Jameson’s flat,’ Strike continued – he might as well get this bit out of the way – ‘because when I looked through her window I not only saw two people lying on the floor, but signs of movement. I thought at least one of them might’ve been alive, and possibly in urgent need of medical attention.’
‘You can’t have seen any movement,’ said Northmore, and another powerful gust of gingivitis washed over Strike. ‘Unless you’re claiming you spotted maggots through the window,’ he added, with a slight sneer.
‘There was a cat in the room,’ said Strike. ‘The lads who came upstairs with me saw it scarper when I went in. The net curtains were filthy. I couldn’t tell it was an animal moving. I thought it was one of the bodies.’
‘Why didn’t you call an ambulance, if you thought there were two injured people lying on the floor?’
‘Didn’t want to waste the emergency services’ time if they were lying there alive for some reason of their own.’
‘You’ve just said they weren’t answering the door.’
‘Which is why I thought someone needed to get inside urgently and see what was going on.’
They were both, Strike knew, performing for the tape. These exchanges were preliminaries to the important business before them. Northmore was reminding Strike how much trouble he was already in; Strike was laying out the defence he intended to mount, if they really wanted to charge him. The game hadn’t truly begun.
Iverson now spoke, revealing herself, unexpectedly, to be Welsh.
‘Has your client had a baby recently? Or been pregnant, over the last year?’