21

Christian

We waited for my new lawyer to show, and it was not a long wait, because my father-in-law would have stopped at nothing to make it happen, and to make it happen quickly.

Kevin Steel, the criminal lawyer that Leo’s regular lawyer had found for me, had never met my father-in-law because Kevin, apparently the rising star at Hunter, Butterfield and Ash, was not the kind of lawyer that Leo had ever needed. Kevin – he insisted on Kevin rather than Mr Steel – was a working-class Geordie, nowhere near as posh as I was expecting, but reportedly very good and very expensive.

Leo was taking care of all that.

DCI Stoner looked me in the eye and I saw with a sickening clarity that he had no doubt that I had caved in James Caine’s skull.

‘And so you went to the hotel,’ he said conversationally.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But nothing happened.’

DCI Stoner smirked, as if we were enjoying a joke together. He glanced at DI Ure and then back at me.

Kevin Steel silently took notes by my side.

DCI Stoner’s friendly voice dripped with disbelief.

‘You didn’t confront Caine? What? You went all the way from your home in Camden Town to his hotel in Portland Place and then you – what?’

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. It sounded pathetic, I knew.

‘I went home. I didn’t go inside. I just thought – I was frightened. I was scared of what I might do if I asked for his room number and they let me go up there. Or if I told them I wanted to see him and he came down to the lobby. I was terrified of what I might do to him. And I was even more terrified of what he might say to me.’ I swallowed something down. ‘I was scared of what he might tell me.’

DCI Stoner was smiling as if he really liked me, and he understood my fears, but he did not believe a word I was saying.

‘You … just … went … home.’

‘Yes. Because when I got there, it all felt like a bad idea. It felt like nothing good could come of it.’

And so I went back home, feeling ashamed and relieved at all once, and wanting my loving world restored, wanting my wife back. And then Tara came home from the day at her parents’ place and when I told her that some weirdo called James Caine had been round to look at the house she said that he was one of the sad bastards who trailed her all over social media because they had maybe seen a picture of her somewhere.

It was exactly what I wanted to hear.

‘So – just to be clear – absolutely no contact with James Caine at the hotel?’

‘No.’

‘How about this?’ DCI Stoner said reasonably, the playground bully explaining why he is about to take your dinner money and flush your head down the boys’ toilet and why it is a perfectly rational course of action. ‘I think you did see him at the hotel and you went up to his room because neither of you wanted a scene in public and then you lost that famous temper. You didn’t mean to murder him. You just wanted to teach him a lesson. But things got right out of hand. Is that what happened, Christian?’