‘It’s so unfair.’
‘As maybe, but unfair false accusations are not evidence. It is still better for you to say nothing at this stage. Trust me.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll try.’
‘At least we now know why they went all the way to Wales to arrest you.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘So that they could search your phone and computer for sexual images of children before you heard about Joe Bradbury’s allegations and destroyed them.’
‘I assure you, they won’t find any such images,’ I said. ‘Not unless Joe has managed to store them there remotely.’ I was suddenly worried. ‘He can’t do that, can he?’
‘I wouldn’t think so, not without sending them as emails and showing his hand as being the one responsible.’
That reassured me, but only slightly. Joe was a bit of a wizard with computers and I wouldn’t put anything beyond him at present.
‘Are you ready to continue?’ Harriet asked.
‘I suppose so.’
But I wasn’t looking forward to it. And with good reason.
14
‘I ask you again, Mr Gordon-Russell,’ DCI Priestly said when we were all again in the interview room with the recording restarted. ‘Was the reason you killed your wife because she found out about your sexual depravity with her niece?’
I still felt uneasy. I wanted to shout, No, of course not, you fool. Not only did I not kill my wife, but I have never had any sexual feelings towards any young children, let alone my wife’s niece.
But, instead, all I said was ‘No comment.’
I could see that the DCI took my reply as a minor victory. In his eyes, it clearly implied my guilt.
I felt sweaty and unwell.
But the DCI wasn’t finished. Not by a long way.
‘Does the name Tracy Higgins mean anything to you?’
I blushed.
I know I blushed. I could feel the warmth of the blood in my neck and face.
‘No comment,’ I said.
But the policeman had seen. And both he and I knew he’d seen.
‘Did you not admit to having sexual intercourse with Tracy Higgins when she was under the age of sixteen and was therefore still a child?’
‘No comment.’
‘And did that admission not result in your name being placed on the sex offenders register.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘No comment.’
How mistakes in your past can come back to haunt you.
I’d been in my first week as an undergraduate at Cambridge when, at a freshers’ party in my college, I’d been approached by a beautiful young woman with very long legs and a very short skirt. She told me that she’d also just started at the university, and wasn’t it fun to be finally living away from home.
One thing had led to another and, at her express invitation, we had ended up indulging in the pleasures of the flesh in my room. Only at one o’clock in the morning had I discovered that things were not as they appeared, when the college security officer banged on my door.
The young woman’s father had turned up at the porter’s lodge enquiring after the whereabouts of his fifteen-year-old daughter, whom he had dropped off there earlier in the evening.
In spite of the fact that she had lied to me about being another student at the college, and that she had fully consented to our sexual activity, I had been arrested for having had intercourse with a minor, with her father demanding loudly that I be sent down for a long stretch in the slammer.
I should have contested the charge in court as the law at the time actually stated that a man under the age of twenty-four who had sex with a girl over thirteen but under sixteen was not guilty of an offence if it was consensual and he had reasonable grounds to believe that she was older. But I was a frightened naive nineteen-year-old and I was badly advised to accept an official police caution because, I was told, that that would be the end of the matter and my university career would not be affected.
What I hadn’t realised at the time was that, by accepting the police caution, I was not only admitting guilt of an illegal act but also acquiring a permanent criminal record. As such, my name had been added to the then newly created sex offenders register for five years and, even though that period had long since passed, the police obviously still had a record of it.
And it didn’t look good.
I so wanted to explain the circumstances, to make the chief inspector realise that it had been a huge misunderstanding and that I wasn’t the one at fault, but I could see that what Harriet had said was right. He believed the worst of me and no amount of explanation would ever change that.
‘Still fond of young girls, are you, Mr Gordon-Russell?’
‘No comment.’
The grilling lasted another half-hour or so but, basically, the DCI asked the same few questions over and over again, and he received the same answer — ‘No comment’. Eventually, he gave up and terminated the interview.
Harriet and I went back into the legal consultation room.
‘I think that went pretty well,’ she said when the door was closed.
‘Pretty well?’ I said with incredulity. ‘I thought it was disastrous.’
‘But it showed they have nothing on you other than Joe’s tittle-tattle, innuendos and the dragging up of past events. Don’t forget, they can’t raise that previous conviction in court as evidence in this case.’
‘It wasn’t a conviction,’ I corrected. ‘It was a police caution.’
‘Okay, I agree,’ Harriet said. ‘Technically a caution is not a conviction, but you know what I mean. And they concentrated all their efforts on the child-abuse thing instead of confronting the reason for your arrest. It shows that they have nothing new to connect you with the murder of your wife. Not enough, I would have thought, to charge you, anyway.’
‘So what happens now?’ I asked.
‘We wait.’
‘For how long?’
‘Legally they can detain you for twenty-four hours, thirty-six with the agreement of a senior officer, a superintendent or above, and they’re almost certain to get that in a murder case. After that they have to apply to a court to keep you longer, up to a maximum of ninety-six hours in total, but I don’t think they have enough to convince a magistrate to extend that long. Then they have to either charge you or let you go. Of course, we’re assuming they won’t find anything incriminating on your phone or computer in the meantime.’
That was beginning to worry me more and more. One hears such dreadful stories of how hackers can remotely get into other people’s computers to do all sorts of stuff such as turn on their webcams to spy on them. God knows what Joe Bradbury might have done to mine.
‘I’ll try and find out some information from them,’ Harriet said. ‘Like if they intend to interview you again today, which I think is most unlikely as they will need time to trawl through your hard drive. I have to get back to London now but I can come back again in the morning if necessary.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘You just have to sit and wait.’
‘In a cell?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ She smiled a sort of lopsided apologetic smile. ‘I could ask them if they have anything you can read but I wouldn’t hold out much hope. They consider that sitting in a cell alone with nothing to do is part of the process of encouraging a prisoner to confess.’
‘Well, I certainly won’t be doing that,’ I said. ‘But something to read would be good.’