‘Yet you went to work?’
‘Best thing to do with a hangover — work through it. Besides, I didn’t have to be in till almost midday,’ said Alfonso.
‘Are you a big drinker, Mr Bertorelli?’
Alfonso shook his head.
‘Only on special occasions,’ he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm again.
Again Vogel ignored it.
‘I didn’t think you were, you don’t have the look of a drinker.’
He paused. Sometimes if you left a silence interviewees would feel obliged to fill it. You could learn a lot that way, Vogel believed. But Alfonso made no attempt to fill the silence.
‘So, you are not a big drinker and yet you got so drunk that you remember nothing from the moment you entered a pub you do not remember the name of until you woke up at your nan’s place in the early hours of this morning, is that right?’
Alfonso nodded. The man looked ill. It was hard for Vogel to think of him as a cold-blooded murderer. And whoever had killed Marlena would have had to be cold-blooded in the extreme. Lacking any normal human feelings, Vogel thought. But if Bertorelli was innocent he was doing nothing to help himself.
Vogel terminated the interview and told Alfonso he would be taken to a cell to await further sessions, and would almost certainly be detained overnight. The other man seemed to sway slightly in his seat. Vogel hoped he wasn’t going to pass out again and made a mental note to remind the custody team to keep a close eye on him.
Of course, Alfonso had already spent a night in a cell, following his earlier arrest. The first time, for someone who’d never been near a police cell before, was always a nasty shock. Now he faced another night in police custody. And he now knew all too well what it was like. Vogel had been told the smell was the worst thing. The mix of disinfectant and sweat and urine. That and the total lack of privacy. En suite, the regulars were inclined to joke. But there was really nothing very funny about a toilet in full view of the slot in the cell door.
Wagstaff and Carlisle, the two DCs Vogel had first met when they’d arrived at the scene of Marlena’s death with DCI Clarke, were sent to check out the pubs within a thirty-minute walk of the nick. It was another cold wet day. As MIT officers, Nick Wagstaff, a bespectacled and prematurely grey young man, and Joe Carlisle, who would have been darkly handsome if he didn’t almost always look moody, both considered themselves rather above such routine foot-soldier activity. They were not best pleased.
‘Dunno why they couldn’t have put a couple of woodentops on this,’ grumbled Wagstaff.
‘Bastard’s probably lying through his teeth, anyway,’ muttered Carlisle. ‘And even if he did go in a pub, he could have been walking in bloody circles from what he said. How many pubs do you reckon we’re going to have to check out?’
Wagstaff had a computer printout of local public houses in his hand.
‘At least twenty,’ he said.
‘And we can’t have a single bloody drink,’ responded Carlisle.
The tenth pub they visited was the Dunster Arms, which seemed to them a rather insalubrious hostelry in need of a deal of TLC. As they were only temporarily based at Charing Cross the two officers were unaware that it was a regular haunt of a number of their police colleagues. And it was actually a busy and curiously popular little place, with relatively low overheads, which provided a fair income for its landlord who escaped from it to play golf in Portugal as often as he could. He was currently away. His stand-in, Jim Marshal, a retired landlord himself, was behind the bar. Wagstaff showed Marshal a mugshot of Alfonso.
‘Have you ever seen this man in here?’ asked the detective.
‘Don’t think so,’ responded the stand-in.
‘It would have been yesterday, lunchtime, and perhaps through the afternoon,’ persisted Wagstaff. ‘Were you behind the bar then?’
Jim Marshal nodded, looking down at the picture.
‘Definitely not seen him, not yesterday anyway,’ he said.
‘How can you be so sure?’ asked Carlisle.
Marshal jabbed a stubby finger at Alfonso’s black goatee beard. ‘Pretty distinctive, isn’t he?’ he said. ‘Anyway, I never forget a face.’
‘How many times have you heard that?’ muttered Wagstaff as he and Carlisle continued down the street to the next pub on their list.
‘Not for the last time, that’s for sure,’ said Carlisle. ‘Come on, let’s get this over with. Then perhaps we can have a pint or two ourselves.’
During the course of that evening the two officers dutifully visited every one of the twenty pubs on their list, and drew a complete blank. No one remembered seeing Alfonso Bertorelli at any time on the previous day.
‘Just what I bloody expected,’ said Carlisle. ‘We’ve been handed this Bertorelli on a plate, trussed up like a chicken with all the trimmings. Trust our new assistant SIO not to be satisfied though. Typical of the nit-picking bastard, from what I’ve heard.’
‘Yeah. No wonder they call him the Geek. He prefers problems to solutions. And if there aren’t any he invents them.’
The two men continued to grumble cheerily as they made their way back to the station.
Meanwhile, at the Dunster Arms, Jim Marshal was hoping he would never see either detective again. Because the stand-in landlord had not been behind the bar the previous day. He had deliberately lied to the police officers.
Marshal, something of a serial philanderer, was in the middle of an extremely messy divorce. The previous morning his neighbour at the marital home in Ealing, from which Marshal had been barred for several months, had phoned to say that his wife was in the process of dumping all his personal belongings into a skip on the driveway. Clothes, books, his stamp collection, and his fishing gear. The missus had warned him that was what she was going to do if he didn’t move his stuff out pronto, but Marshal, reduced to sleeping on the sofa of an old friend whose patience was beginning to run out, had nowhere else to keep it. In any case, he still owned half the marital home, and he hadn’t really believed his wife would carry out her threat.
More fool him, he reflected. Anyway, upon getting the bad news he had called on a Dunster Arms regular, already in attendance as usual, to step behind the bar while he rushed to Ealing in an attempt to salvage his belongings. He’d promised the man double money if he would run the bar until his return. The man knew what he was about, having managed a number of pubs in his time. He had also been sacked from at least two of them for putting his hand in the till. Marshal knew that the Dunster’s landlord would never leave him in charge again if it were revealed that he’d let such a character run the bar, however pressing his reasons. Particularly on a Saturday. And Marshal needed the money, desperately. He was unlikely at his age ever to get a proper full-time job again, and he had lawyers to pay.
Marshal, basically an honest man except in his dealings with women, didn’t feel comfortable about what he’d done. But he’d not had a choice, he told himself. He’d had to lie.
The first results obtained from forensic examination of the trainers found in the rubbish bin outside Alfonso’s nan’s house, which had been fast-tracked in view of the seriousness of the crime, came back the following day just before noon. They were much as expected. Alfonso’s fingerprints were all over the shoes. There were no other prints. And the size and tread of the trainers matched exactly the footprint that Vogel had spotted at the crime scene.
The DNA results from the blood spattered on the shoes would not be delivered for several days, but Vogel had little doubt that it would prove to be Marlena’s blood.
Vogel had decided not to mention the bloody shoes to Alfonso until he’d received the fingerprint results. Then, along with DC Jones, he interviewed Alfonso for the second time, and challenged him strongly.