Janet’s flat was a mess, with clothes strewn everywhere and half-full cups of tea on the windowsill and mantelpiece. It also smelled like a drunk’s room, that peculiar mix of stale skin and the sweet-and-sour smell of booze. Gin, in Janet’s case.
Janet slumped on to a wrinkled T-shirt and a pair of jeans on the armchair, leaving Annie to fend for herself. She cleared some newspapers off a hard-backed chair and sat.
“So what is it now?” Janet asked. “You come to arrest me?”
“Not yet.”
“What, then? More questions?”
“You’ve heard Terence Payne died?”
“I’ve heard.”
“How are you doing, Janet?”
“How am I doing? Ha. That’s a good one. Well, let me see.” She started counting off on her fingers as she spoke. “Apart from not being able to sleep, apart from pacing the flat and feeling claustrophobic whenever it gets dark, apart from reliving the moment over and over again whenever I close my eyes, apart from the fact that my career’s pretty much fucked, let me see… I feel just fine.”
Annie took a deep breath. She certainly wasn’t there to make Janet feel any better, though in a way she wished she could. “You know, you really should seek some sort of counseling, Janet. The Federation will-”
“No! No, I’m not seeing any shrinks. I’ll not have them messing with my head. Not with all this shit going on. When they’ve done with me, I’ll not know whether I’m coming or going. Imagine how that would look in court.”
Annie held her hands up. “Okay. Okay. It’s your choice.” She took some papers from her briefcase. “I’ve attended Terence Payne’s postmortem, and there’s a couple of things I’d like to go over on your statement.”
“Are you saying I was lying?”
“No, not at all.”
Janet ran her hand through her lifeless, greasy hair, “Because I’m not a liar. I might have been a bit confused about the sequence of events – it all happened so fast – but I told it as I remember it.”
“Okay, Janet, that’s fine. Look, in your statement you say you hit Payne three times on the left temple and once on his wrist, and that one of the blows to the temple was delivered two-handed.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. Is that correct?”
“I couldn’t remember exactly how many times or where I hit him, but that seemed about right, yes. Why?”
“According to Dr. Mackenzie’s postmortem, you hit Payne nine times. Three on the temple, one to the wrist, one on the cheek, two to the base of the skull while he was crouching or kneeling, and two to the top of his head while he was squatting or sitting.”
Janet said nothing, and a jet from the airport streamed into the silence, filling it with the roar of engines and the promise of distant, exotic places. Anywhere but here, Annie was thinking, and she guessed that Janet probably felt the same. “Janet?”
“What? I wasn’t aware you’d asked me a question.”
“How do you respond to what I just said?”
“I don’t know. I told you, I wasn’t counting. I was just trying to save my life.”
“Are you sure you weren’t acting out of revenge for Dennis?”
“What do you mean?”
“The number of blows, the position of the victim, the violence of the blows.”
Janet turned red. “Victim! Is that what you call the bastard? Victim. When Dennis was lying there on the floor with his lifeblood pumping away, you call Terence Payne a victim. How dare you?”
“I’m sorry, Janet, but that’s the way a case would be presented in court, and you’d better get used to the idea.”
Janet said nothing.
“Why did you say what you did to the ambulance attendant?”
“What did I say?”
“ ‘Is he dead? Did I kill the bastard?’ What did you mean by that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even remember saying it.”
“It could be construed as meaning you set out to kill him, do you see?”
“I suppose it could be twisted that way, yes.”
“Did you, Janet? Did you intend to kill Terence Payne?”
“No! I told you. I was just trying to save my life. Why can’t you believe me?”
“What about the blows to the back of his head? When might those have occurred in the sequence of events?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try harder. You can do better than that.”
“Maybe when he was bent over reaching for his machete.”
“Okay. But you don’t remember delivering them?”
“No, but I suppose I must have done if you say so.”
“What about those two blows to the top of his head? Dr. Mackenzie tells me they were delivered with a lot of force. They weren’t just random hits.”
Janet shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Annie leaned forward and held Janet’s chin between thumb and forefinger, looking into her blurry, scared eyes. “Listen to me, Janet. Terence Payne was taller than you. By the angle and force of those blows, the only way they could have been delivered was if he was sitting and the attacker had plenty of time to take a huge, uninterrupted downward swing and… well, you get the picture. Come on, Janet. Talk to me. Believe it or not, I’m trying to help you.”
Janet twisted her chin from Annie’s grip and looked away. “What do you want me to say? I’d only get myself deeper in trouble.”
“Not true. You’ll get nowhere if you’re perceived as lying or covering up your actions. That’ll only lead to perjury. The truth’s your best defense. Do you think there’s a person on that jury – if that’s what it comes to – who won’t sympathize with your predicament, even if you did admit to losing it for a few moments? Give yourself a break here, Janet.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell the truth. Was that how it happened? Was he down and you just lost your temper, gave him one for Dennis. And, crack, there’s another? Is that how it happened?”
Janet jumped up and began pacing, wringing her hands. “So what if I did give him one or two for Dennis? It was nothing less than he deserved.”
“That’s what you did? You remember now?”
Janet stopped and narrowed her eyes, then she poured herself two fingers of gin and knocked it back. “Not clearly, no, but if you’re telling me that’s how it happened, I can hardly deny it, can I? Not in the face of the pathologist’s evidence.”
“Pathologists can be wrong,” Annie said, though not, she thought, about the number, strength and angle of the blows.
“But who will they believe in court?”
“I’ve told you. If it comes to that you’ll get a lot of sympathy. But it might not come to court.”
Janet sat down again, perched at the edge of the armchair. “What do you mean?”
“It’s up to the CPS. I’ll be meeting with them on Monday. In the meantime, if you want to alter your statement at all before then, now’s the time to do it.”
“It’s no good,” said Janet, holding her head in her hands and weeping. “I don’t remember it clearly. It all seemed to happen so fast, it was over before I knew what was happening, and Dennis… Dennis was dead, bleeding on my lap. That went on forever, me telling him to hang on, trying to stanch the blood.” She looked at her hands as if seeing the same thing Lady Macbeth saw, what she couldn’t wash away. “But he wouldn’t stop bleeding. I couldn’t stop it from coming out. Maybe it happened as you said. Maybe that’s the only way it could have happened. All I remember is the fear, the adrenaline, the…”