“A kilo of brown tar heroin perhaps?” She looked affronted. “You say I drug smuggler?”
“I must object to this line of questioning, Inspector Duffy!” Yavarov said. “This lady’s husband was murdered!”
“Look, I don’t give a crap if you smuggled in drugs or not, I’m investigating a homicide and there’s no way I can find out who killed your husband unless you give me all the details of your husband’s affairs,” I attempted.
She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. A hardness descended over her face that I recognised from years of these interrogations. She was clearly broken up over her husband’s death but come hell or high water she wasn’t going to tell me anything about Frank’s narcotics business lest she herself be implicated.
“I give you my word that this will just be between us,” I said.
She laughed bitterly. “What value word of policeman!”
“Elena, please, you don’t seem to understand how the RUC works. I’m not the drug squad, I don’t care what you’ve done or what Frank did. I just want to catch the man who did this.”
“Frank unemployed.”
There followed ten more minutes of this as first I and then McCrabban and finally Lawson attempted to get her to admit that either her husband was a drug dealer or that he had made any enemies in four decades of walking planet Earth. Elena was having none of it. There had been no bricks through windows, no threatening phone calls, no strangers accosting them on the street, no punishment beatings or threatened punishment beatings. Frank was unemployed, he didn’t associate with criminals, all the trips back to Bulgaria had merely been to visit her parents and sisters.
“Mrs Deauville, Elena, look, it’s in your interest to help us.”
“What you do now? Say you contact immigration authority and find out if my visa in order? Threaten me? Well Frank sort everything out. My visa in order!” she said, flicking ash aggressively into the ashtray in front of her.
I tried another tack. “Was everything OK between you and Mr Deauville? Any marital difficulties?”
She smiled and said something in Bulgarian to Yavarov. Addressing Lawson she said: “Now your boss try this: blame me for Frank’s death. Say I do it and unless cooperate get murder charge. Your boss good man. Yes, yes.”
“Well, you don’t have an alibi, do you?”
“No. I sleep.”
“Ever fire a crossbow, Elena?”
“I never fire crossbow. I never see crossbow. Be good policeman, search house for crossbow.”
“We already searched your house for a crossbow and didn’t find one, but that doesn’t mean anything. You could have walked it to the end of the Fisherman’s Quay and thrown it in the sea.”
“Go to crossbow shop, show crossbow shop man my photograph, ask if I buy crossbow.”
I gave Crabbie a little nod and he nodded back. “And if the crossbow shop man doesn’t remember you or you bought it at a second-hand shop does that mean you’re off the hook?” Crabbie said.
“Why I kill Frank?”
“Why do husbands kill wives and wives kill husbands?” I said.
Her violet eyes flashed. “Frank and I very happy. He lucky to have me. I lucky to have him. Why I kill him? I love him,” she said and her eyes teared up.
She didn’t mean to lose it but the tears became the full waterworks and all of us in the interview room were quite affected.
The policeman, like the doctor and the paramedic, treads a fine line between distance and humanity. Get too close to a victim or a suspect or a patient and you can lose yourself in the darkness of their case; but remain too distant from the suffering and the pain and you become a robot, a machine, a chilly sociopath. Like old Inspector Laidlaw across the sheugh you found yourself in the dilemma of either indulging in grief by proxy or imitating a stone.
No stone me.
I leaned across that big old oak table of Interview Room #1 and took her hand in mine and squeezed.
“We’ll do our best to find your husband’s killer, Elena. We want to help, we really do,” I said.
She nodded and the tears flowed and the hurt on her face could not possibly be fake. You can’t fake grief like that.
“You can’t fake grief like that,” I said to Crabbie at the coffee machine.
“Nope. I don’t think you can,” he said.
“You and Lawson keep at her. I have to pop home for half an hour to deal with a small family emergency, OK?”
“Is the baby all right?” Crabbie asked, aghast.
“The baby’s fine, mate. Just a wee issue with moving house, you know?”
“You’re moving house?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“After we get her formal statement do we let Mrs Deauville go?” Crabbie asked.
“I don’t think we can really let her go just yet, can we? She’s obviously been smuggling heroin from Bulgaria every month for the last year. How else does Frank the bank robber suddenly become Frank the pusher?”
Crabbie winced. “The poor woman’s devastated and as you yourself said that’s not quite in our purview is it, Sean?”