Another officer, a much younger one, climbed into the seat beside her and turned around to introduce himself.
“Hi, Jack, I’m Detective Constable Miles. Thank you so much for coming down to the station. We’re going to make this as quick as we can, but we do want to make sure we’re not missing anything. Have you got everything you need?”
I nodded, though it wasn’t true. I had lost Gabe. He was the only thing I needed. Nothing else mattered.
Just run me through the timings once more,” the woman sitting opposite me said. Her voice was kind, gentle even, but her words made me want to cry—or scream—or do something. I was so tired. I hadn’t slept for over twenty-four hours, and I had spent the night dodging security officers and climbing through ceilings before coming home to the most traumatic experience I had ever witnessed. My vision was blurred with tiredness. Most of all I was numb and dazed with a grief I hadn’t even started to accept, let alone process.
Now I was sitting in an interview room with DC Miles, the young officer from the car, and his partner, DS Malik. She was watching me across the table with a mixture of patience and sympathy.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t.”
“I know. I know this is really hard. But you’ve been so helpful leading us through Gabe’s associates and so on—we just want to make sure we have the sequence of events absolutely correct, and then we can let you go.”
I wanted to put my head in my hands—shut everything out. But I could do this. I had to do this. For Gabe.
I took a deep breath and steeled myself for one last rendition.
“I left the police station at…” I began, and then stopped in confusion. What had I said before? I couldn’t remember the timings anymore. The events of the night were starting to blur. “I’m sorry—I’m just so tired. I think it was about two a.m. Or no, later. I remember seeing it was two a.m. in the interview room.” I rubbed my eyes, feeling my head swim with exhaustion. “I got an Uber back to Arden Alliance, where I’d left the car. You can probably check the pickup time on the app if you need to know exactly. Then I got into my own car and drove home.”
“And your phone was switched off for all this?”
“Not switched off—the battery had gone. I don’t know when. I called the Uber on it, so it was working when I left the station, but it must have gone down after that.”
“And you weren’t using satnav or anything?”
I shook my head.
“No, our car doesn’t have it, it’s too old. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but why does this matter? What does my satnav have to do with Gabe’s death?”
“We’re just trying to get as clear a picture as possible,” DC Miles said. His voice should have been soothing—his tone was clearly meant to be sympathetic—but for some reason all of my hackles went up.
“But I’ve told you all this, I’ve already told you. This is like—it’s Kafkaesque. My husband is dead and you’re asking me about my phone battery?”
“And you got home when?” DS Malik asked, as if I hadn’t spoken. Her voice was kind, but brisker, as if she sensed that sympathy wasn’t what I wanted.
“I think it was sometime around four a.m.—I remember looking at the clock on the dashboard as I turned into our road. I parked, then opened the front door and I found—” I shut my eyes, remembering the horror. The image of Gabe’s mutilated throat rose up in front of my eyes and I opened them again, feeling a jolt of that remembered terror and disbelief. “Well, you saw.”
“No footwear marks, no sign of a struggle?”
“None.” I shook my head. “Any footprints you saw—that was me. There was nothing, no sign of anyone leaving—just a smear of blood on the living room door handle. I remember that. Because I saw it first, and I knew something was wrong.”
“And Gabe, how was he sitting when you found him?”
“He was kind of slumped over his computer,” I said. The numbness was stealing back over me, and I felt myself beginning to shake again, not uncontrollably like before, more a strange, steady shivering in spite of the warmth of the interview room and the hot mug of coffee clasped between my hands. “If it hadn’t been for the blood, I might have thought he was just asleep. He was—” I swallowed, almost unable to think about it. “He was still wearing his noise-canceling headphones. I think whoever killed him—whoever killed him, they must have come up from behind and—”
I stopped. I couldn’t say it. Something in my throat seemed to close up and I just shook my head.
“And then you did what?” DC Miles asked.
“I tried to lift him up. I thought—I don’t know. I think I thought maybe he’d passed out, hit his head or something. I’m not sure what I thought. I kind of pushed him back in his chair; he was really heavy and at first I wasn’t sure if I could move him—and then all of a sudden his weight shifted and he kind of flopped and I saw—I saw his—” I stopped. “His neck, it was—” I stopped again, breathing deeply through my nose, trying to hold it together.
For a long moment Malik and Miles said nothing, just watched me trying to control myself, and then Malik pushed a box of tissues across the desk and said softly, “I’m sorry. I know how hard this is. What did you do after that? This was around four a.m., yes?”
“M-maybe.” I swallowed, blinking away the blurriness in my vision. “Maybe later. I honestly don’t know. I think I went into shock. I just curled up on the sofa and—I kind of lost it. I couldn’t—I couldn’t process what was happening.”
My hands were shaking harder now. So hard that I was becoming afraid of dropping my coffee. I couldn’t drink it anyway. Instead, I put the mug down and held on to my knees to try to stop the trembling. How could I explain what had happened—the way my system had simply refused to compute this sequence of events? I thought of Gabe, coding late into the night, swearing each time his program crashed. Error: an unhandled exception has occurred. That was how I had felt. I had blue-screened. If only I could show Malik and Miles the error message—make them understand.
“I just… I just shut down,” I said. My voice was a whisper. “I can’t explain it. I didn’t pass out or anything but I just—I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. I know it was stupid. I should have called right away. I know that. I just—I couldn’t. I couldn’t process it.”
I swallowed again. It felt like the tears I should be shedding were stuck in my throat. I hadn’t wept since I had found Gabe’s body—perhaps because I knew that if I gave way, I might not be able to stop.
“I’m sorry.” I looked up at them both, hearing the tremble in my voice. “I’m so sorry. If I could go back and call you right away, I would, but I can’t change what happened, and I’ve told you everything I know. My husband is dead.” The last word came out as a wail. I don’t even know why I said it—I knew they had to do their job; I wasn’t pleading for special treatment on account of Gabe. I just needed to say it. To hear the words coming out of my own mouth, to try to make it real.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to let it out—the unbearable grief and exhaustion. Why? Why couldn’t I cry? It felt like something inside me was broken.
Perhaps the officers saw the desperation in my face, because DC Miles exchanged a glance with DS Malik and she shrugged, and then nodded.
“We’re terminating the interview with Jacintha Cross. The time is… eight oh two a.m. on Sunday, fifth February.”
She clicked off the recorder and then leaned forward to me.
“Thank you, Jack. I know that can’t have been easy, but you’ve been really helpful. We’re going to hang on to your phone, okay? But if you need to call anyone, you’re welcome to use the phone here.”
“Can I go home, then?” I asked. My voice was croaky. Malik grimaced sympathetically and shook her head.
“I’m really sorry. It’s still a crime scene. Have you got anyone you can stay with in the meantime?”
I shut my eyes, trying to think, running through the list of people I could call on. My brain felt like it was short-circuited, little fritzes of false connections flashing up and disrupting my attempts at figuring this out. Gabe—slumped over his computer. Gabe—his head flung back, his throat spewing out of his skin, like something out of Alien. Gabe. Gabe.
“My sister,” I said at last. “I could go to my sister. She lives in North London. Could you call her?”
“Sure. What’s her name?”
“Helena. Helena Wick. 07422…” I ground to a halt. Shit. What was Hel’s number? I’d learned it by heart years ago, back when I first started doing penetration testing and didn’t have Gabe to call on if things went south. But I was so tired I could barely remember my own name, let alone anything more complicated. “07422…” I tried again, and this time the remaining digits came with a rush, like a nursery rhyme, reeled off without pause. “I think that’s right. It’s a long time since I dialed it from memory.”