‘No camera,’ Scobie muttered. ‘Budget constraints.’
Maybe he could lay all of this at the feet of Superintendent McQuarrie.
‘Oh, that’s convenient.’
A camera, Scobie realised, would have frozen Nick Jarrett in time, his position on the floor, his gloved hands, the knife before it was moved from one hand to the other. Yeo and Pullen had a point, that was for sure.
‘Those cuts on Kellock’s forearm,’ said Pullen. ‘What’s that about, do you know?’
Scobie frowned uncomprehendingly.
‘You didn’t notice the neat grouping? Three shallow, parallel, non-life-threatening cuts?’
‘Defence wounds,’ Scobie said.
‘Defence,’ scoffed Yeo. ‘I’d say van Alphen and Kellock have their defence pretty well sewn up, wouldn’t you, DC Sutton?’
‘Sir?’
Pullen leaned forward. ‘We need your on-scene notes, DC Sutton. Now, please.’
Scobie swallowed and looked at the wall behind her and said, in creaking tones, ‘I lost my notebook.’
‘Lost? Oh, that’s a good one.’
They kept him there until early evening. When he came out he saw Pam Murphy in the corridor. He tried to rally. ‘I thought you were away on an intensive?’
She was young and bright and healthy and he couldn’t stand it. ‘Just finished the first week. They let us go home for the weekend.’
‘Well, good luck.’
‘Thanks, Scobie.’
Pam knocked on van Alphen’s door. ‘Got a moment, Sarge?’
He waved her in. He looked deeply fatigued.
‘Heard about Nick Jarrett, Sarge,’ she said carefully.
He scowled. ‘This afternoon I was chewed on by a couple of shooting board dogs.’
‘Everything okay?’
He shrugged. ‘They’ve got nothing. Take a seat. What can I do for you?’
‘Thought I could pick your brains, Sarge.’
‘About?’
‘Interview techniques.’
‘Interview techniques?’ said van Alphen, faintly mocking.
Normally Ellen Destry would have been Pam’s first choice, but Ellen was snowed under, looked distracted, even miserable. Plus, Pam felt a little guilty because she was leaving the uniformed branch and moving on to plainclothes. She didn’t want van Alphen, her old uniformed sergeant, to think that she was a snob, had no more time for her old colleagues.
‘I have to write an essay,’ she said. ‘Worth twenty-five per cent of my marks.’
‘Essay? You should be out cracking heads.’
Pam smiled at him across his tidy, gleaming desk and said, ‘Well, you’re a dinosaur, Sarge. Me, I’m up-and-coming. Three thousand words by Monday morning, so I’ll have to work all weekend. Questioning witnesses versus questioning suspects. What to ask, what not to ask. Establishing mood and rhythm. Using psychology and body language. Etcetera, etcetera.’
Van Alphen stared at her in disbelief. His expression said that he relied on experience and instinct, techniques learned on the job, not in a classroom, and which didn’t have fancy names like ‘body language’.
‘Murph, you know how to interrogate people,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you in action. You’re good at it. Just write what you know.’
‘What I know doesn’t add up to three thousand words, Sarge.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have gone to detective school, should you?’ he said, with a sharkish smile.
‘Oh, thanks a lot,’ Pam said, getting to her feet.
He waved her down. ‘Take it easy, take it easy. I realise you have to get on in this game, you don’t want to be stuck behind a desk or the wheel of a patrol car.’
She gave him a sympathetic smile. He must hate being desk-bound. ‘You’ll be cleared for duty soon, Sarge, don’t worry.’
His lean, saturnine face relaxed into what passed for a warm smile. ‘As you say, Murph, I’m a dinosaur. Three thousand words! Jesus.’
‘Exactly,’ said Pam, who was accustomed to writing terse arrest reports, in which narrative flow, tone and even grammatical sentences were a handicap.
‘You said psychology. It’s all psychology.’
Pam wrote the word on her pad and looked at him expectantly.
‘You’re interviewing a suspect,’ said van Alphen. ‘You want him or her at a disadvantage.’
Pam nodded. She knew that but had never labelled it before. It was instinct. ‘How do you achieve that, Sarge?’
‘Little things, and you let them accumulate. For example, use of their first name, not their surname, helps to undermine them. The use of silence-let it build until they’re desperate to fill it. Fire a series of answers to unasked questions at them, your tone frankly disbelieving: “So you say you don’t know how the knife got under your mattress?” for example.’
Pam scribbled to keep up.
‘You used the term “body language”, Murph. Terrible expression, but I guess it explains what one does in an interview room. You let your face and body show contempt, doubt, ridicule, sometimes sympathy. You get in their faces, pat them gently on the wrist, exchange scoffing looks with your partner, slam your palm down hard on the table, stuff like that.’
All things Pam had done. ‘Sarge,’ she said dutifully.
‘And you vary your approach, keep them unsettled. Kind, then cruel.’
‘Sarge.’
In the corridor outside, and in the nearby offices, were the sounds of voices, laughter, footsteps, doors slamming-familiar sounds that Pam badly missed. She glanced at her watch. She’d spend thirty more minutes with the sarge, then drive home and relax in the bath. ‘But what about their body language, Sarge?’
‘What about it?’
Pam flicked back to her lecture notes. ‘If they have their legs together, ankles crossed and hands in their laps they’re protecting their genitals-fending off trouble, in other words.’
‘If you say so,’ scoffed van Alphen, rocking back in his chair and slamming one booted foot and then the other onto the top of his desk, giving her a wry look.
Pam grinned. ‘If they touch their nose and lips, it means they’re stressed. There are many capillaries in the nose and lips. Blood rushes there…’
Van Alphen drew his slender hands down his narrow cheeks comically.
‘Arms folded across the chest is another protective gesture- protecting the heart, concealing powerful emotions,’ Pam said.
‘A little book learning is a fine thing, Murph,’ van Alphen said. He paused. ‘On the subject of psychology: you need to find out what they want.’
‘Their “dominant need”,’ Pam said brightly. ‘Respect, safety, flattery, sympathy. One should stimulate or exaggerate this need, then finally offer to gratify it in return for a confession or co-operation.’
‘So why the fuck are you asking me all this?’ growled van Alphen, not unkindly.
‘It’s questioning techniques, Sarge. I know the psychology: I just need to know how to frame questions.’
‘But it’s all psychology,’ insisted van Alphen. ‘For example, if a suspect’s tired, you fire hard questions at him.’
‘The wording, Sarge.’
‘Apart from who, what, where, when and why?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, try to get at motive. Ask things like: “Can you think of any reason why someone would want to kill him?” or “Did they argue over money?” or “Was she involved with another man?” Obvious, surely.’
‘Sarge.’
‘Psychology,’ insisted van Alphen. ‘Just when they think an interview is over-you’re going out the door, in fact-you turn back and hit them with what’s really on your mind. Or you ask a series of absurd, grotesque or mild questions to throw them off balance, then hit them with the million-dollar question. Or you give them back their answers twisted slightly, to see what corrections they make.’
Pam scribbled, her head down, commas of hair brushing her jaw.
‘You throw them a series of quick questions requiring short, simple answers, then suddenly lob a difficult one at them, a trick question. Or they answer, but you look at them quizzically until they qualify it to fill the silence. It’s answers that matter, not questions. The absences in answers, their tone, and the specifics that can be challenged or disproved or that contradict other specifics.’