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“Um… yes, maybe just after. I remember seeing it was about two a.m. while I was still inside the station.”
“Sure. Okay, and then you took an Uber back to your car, and drove home, arriving about…” She checked something in her notebook. “About four a.m. Is that right?”
“I think so. Maybe a bit after.”
“Right. It’s just… look, maybe you can help us out here, Jack, but we’re struggling to make these timings add up. It’s about half an hour’s drive from the station to where you say you left the car.”
I frowned more deeply. I didn’t like that you say. Surely they knew damn well where I had left the car? It was a police officer who’d picked me up.
“That sounds about right,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.
“Then another half hour… let’s be generous and say forty-five minutes from Arden Alliance to your house. So that takes us to three fifteen at the latest. But you didn’t call 999 until almost five a.m. That’s… well, look, it’s a big chunk of time unaccounted for.”
I felt a brief flash of anger flare inside me but pushed it back down. It was their job to tie up all the loose ends, I knew that. But it took everything I had not to snap, Shouldn’t you be catching Gabe’s killer instead of grilling me?
I took a deep breath.
“Well, first of all, I was incredibly tired driving back and I took a couple of wrong turns. I’m not sure how much it added to the journey, but I’d be really surprised if I made it back much before four.”
“Okay.”
“And then, as I said”—like I told you already was the subtext I was trying not to underline too heavily here—“I went into some kind of shock when I found Gabe’s body. I know I should have dialed 999 the second I found him, but I just—I didn’t. I couldn’t. Don’t you understand that? It isn’t every day you stumble across—” I stopped, the memories rising up, threatening to choke me. “Across your hus—” My voice was wobbling, and I changed tack, trying to keep in control of the situation. “But look, it doesn’t matter anyway—surely you can tell that Gabe was dead long before I got home? I told you—the blood was sticky and clotting, and it’s not just that; I rang him from the station, and he didn’t pick up. I think—”
I stopped again, trying to control my wavering voice, which was going high and plaintive as a child’s. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
DS Malik said nothing, just watched me trying to get ahold of myself and then silently pushed a box of tissues towards me. I snatched one, almost angrily, and balled it in my fist.
“I think he was dead then,” I said. My voice was flat and hard with the effort of not giving way to my tears. “When I called. I thought at the time it was strange. He was planning to wait up—we’d talked about ordering food—but it isn’t just that. Gabe would never, never have left me hanging like that. He never relaxed until I was home safe. By two a.m. he would have been beside himself with worry; there’s no way he would have let his phone go to voicemail like that—not if he were alive. I think he was killed before two a.m. Which means all this”—I waved a hand at the recorder, encompassing their questions and their obsession with my timeline—“is complete bullshit. At two a.m. I was in the police station across town. You know that. This—this is just a huge waste of time.”
I was breathing hard. I had come in here hoping, expecting even, to be given an update on Gabe’s case, to be told they had a lead. Instead… the feeling was brittle with disbelief. Instead Hel was right. I was being treated like a suspect.
“Okay,” Malik said smoothly, changing tack. “Thanks for clarifying the timeline a little, Jack, that’s really helpful. Can you tell us what you did after you found your husband’s body?”
“I told you.” My voice was shaking in spite of my attempt to keep it level. “I tried to move him, I tried to wake him up—and then when I realized how—how h-hopeless it really was, I went and curled up on the sofa. I was there for… I don’t know. Maybe twenty minutes? Maybe longer.”
“You didn’t touch his computer?”
“What?” That question was a surprise. “No. No, of course not! I didn’t give a damn about his computer.”
“You didn’t remove anything? You didn’t notice anything was missing?”
“I didn’t remove anything?” I was totally confused now. “What are you talking about? It was a desktop, there was nothing to remove. Do you mean a drive or something?”
“A hard drive,” Miles said with an encouraging smile, like he was trying to be good cop to Malik’s… I don’t know. Fucking ridiculous cop. “Did you take out Gabe’s hard drive, Jack?”
“No! Absolutely not!” I stared at him, trying to read his expression. “I didn’t touch his computer. Wait, are you saying the hard drive is missing?”
“And what about the kitchen knife?” Malik asked now, from the other side of the table. I turned to face her, feeling dizzy with the abrupt about turn.
“Kitchen knife?”
“Do you recognize this?” She pushed a photograph across the table and then spoke to the tape recorder.
“I’m showing Jacintha Cross a photograph of a large kitchen knife with a logo in Japanese script.”
My heart seemed to skip a beat.
I did recognize it. It was—it was our knife. Gabe’s knife, in fact, the big solid Japanese one that he used for slicing and jointing, and which had cost the best part of three hundred pounds. He had added it to our wedding list in spite of my protests that it was crazy to spend that much on a knife—and in return he’d given way on the ridiculous faux sheepskin rug I’d wanted for the bathroom, which had got instantly matted and stained with toothpaste and shower water. The rug had lasted until our second wedding anniversary, when I had given up and thrown it out. The knife was still sharp as ever, and in practically daily use.
