The Girl Who Stole the Apple

Mrs Gupta snapped. ‘Of course I’d recognise him. Do you think I’m stupid or gaga, just because I’m old? The man had a tattoo on his neck. I couldn’t see what of, but it was all over the side of his neck. He was very tall. And his nose was bent, like it had been broken in the past. And he was as bald as a coot. So why wouldn’t I recognise him? I tell you the moment I set eyes on him I knew he was a bad man.’

‘Thank you,’ the detective constable said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’’

Mrs Gupta took a sip of tea. Then she put her cup and saucer down on the glass-topped coffee table and leant back on the sofa. She just needed to shut her eyes and go to sleep. She was sure that when she woke up, the headache would be gone and she’d feel better.

‘Can you see yourselves out?’ she said.

‘Of course,’ the WPC said. Mrs Gupta opened her eyes briefly. The two of them were standing in front of her. They glanced at each other, then back at her. Mrs Gupta smiled at them. They had been so kind. They were both so smartly turned out, she in her uniform and him in his suit. And they were both wearing matching black leather gloves. The WPC bent down towards her. There was a cushion in her hands, the big one from the armchair.

‘Is that for me?’ she said. ‘How kind.’

It was and it wasn’t. Because the kind WPC pressed the cushion over her face and held it there. For a number of seconds, the old woman’s arms thrashed madly. Then, with surprising suddenness, they stopped, frozen briefly in mid-air before flopping down. When the policewoman removed the cushion, Mrs Gupta looked as if she had fallen into a deep sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

When Maggie Rogers woke, her head was drumming with a hangover. For several minutes she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and unable to move. It had been four a.m. when she finally went to bed, so it was no surprise that there was daylight streaming through her flimsy curtains. She fumbled for her mobile. It was almost midday and the explosion in the shop seemed an age away, an improbable bad dream. Except it wasn’t either of those things. What on earth was she going to do? She had hoped that after a few hours of oblivion, things would become clearer and make some sort of sense. But it was quite the opposite. Closing her eyes had brought not peace, but disturbing dreams pockmarked with wild, long-buried memories. She rolled over to the edge of the bed, heaved herself onto her feet and staggered through to the kitchen. It wasn’t much of a journey. Her flat had barely enough room to seat a cat, let alone swing one. She removed a mug from the cupboard, filled it to the brim with water and downed it in one. She had consumed the best part of a bottle of white wine on her return to the flat, but the throbbing in her head wasn’t, she reckoned, so much a punishment for that as the consequence of stress. She scrabbled around in her handbag, located some paracetamol and swallowed three capsules with another mug of water.

An hour later, she rose from her bed again. This time she showered and dressed — flesh-coloured pants and bra, a pair of jeans, trainers and a purple cheese-cloth top designed to hang down over her thighs and hide a multitude of physical imperfections. Normally she couldn’t stop eating, but today her appetite had gone walkabout. She made herself a strong cup of tea and forced herself to take the last banana from the white plate that was currently acting as her fruit bowl. She peeled back the blackened skin, took a reluctant bite and switched on the TV. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was on screen. She shut her eyes, hoping that the noise would drown out her thoughts, until the posh voice was replaced by the nasal tones of the broadcaster moving onto a new story. The words ‘fire-bombing of a shop’ jumped out at her. She opened her eyes and sat forward. ‘Let’s go straight to the press conference,’ she heard, and instantly they did. A uniformed policeman and a man in a dark suit were sitting side by side behind a table. The uniformed guy introduced himself and uttered several platitudes before passing the mike to the guy in the suit, who had chosen exactly the wrong moment to take a sip of water from the glass in front of him. Detective Inspector Reid — for that was how he was introduced — spluttered, and went red in the face. There was a long pause while he had a coughing fit. Eventually, trying hard not to look embarrassed, he started to speak. He, like his colleague, dealt only in banalities: there is nothing to be alarmed about, we are jumping to no conclusions at this stage, we are pursuing various lines of enquiry and so on, ad nauseam. Even Maggie felt her brain glazing over and she had a very personal interest in the case. If the news presenter had been hoping for a dramatic revelation, there wasn’t any sign of one so far. Eventually DI Reid dribbled to a halt.

‘Can I just ask a question?’ There was a pause while the camera found the speaker. His voice was flat and grating. ‘My sources tell me that your main line of enquiry is that the attack was racially motivated.’

Reid’s face came back into view. He was looking more comfortable now. ‘All I can say at this stage is that we are pursuing various lines of enquiry.’

‘So you’re not denying it then?’ the reporter said.

‘I am not denying or admitting anything.’ He leant forward slightly, looking straight into the camera. ‘All I will say is that I urge anyone who was in the vicinity of the incident between eight and nine p.m. last night to please come forward and give us a witness statement. Any information, however trivial, could be important.’

Reid and his superior stood up and left the room and the broadcast returned to the studio. Maggie killed the TV with the remote and pushed the last of the banana into her mouth, gagging slightly on the overripe taste. She took a pull at her lukewarm tea and screwed up her face in thought.

She was still trying — and mostly failing — to think when five minutes later the doorbell rang. She wasn’t expecting anyone, so when she opened the front door she was neither surprised nor unsurprised to find a vaguely familiar figure on her doorstep.

‘Detective Constable West,’ the woman said, as if they had never met.

‘Of course,’ Maggie said. It was the detective who had asked her a few brief questions the night before, in the street opposite the devastated shop. She was middle-aged, with a snub nose, sunken eyes and a grey bob of hair. The previous night she had been sporting a dark green outfit that was long out of fashion. She was still wearing it.

Maggie invited her in. ‘Cup of tea?’

West shook her head. The encouraging smile that had been sewn onto her face the previous night was nowhere to be seen. She seemed embarrassed to be there. The cosy voice had gone too. ‘I’d like you to put your coat on and come down to the station with me, dear,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind.’ She said this pleasantly, but her tone suggested that Maggie didn’t actually have any choice in the matter. Old-fashioned and school-marmish — like her fashion sense. Maggie knocked back the rest of her tea and scrambled around for her snakeskin-print parka. ‘Is it likely to take long?’ she asked.

West’s mouth twitched. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

* * *

On arrival at the police station West showed her into an empty interview room. ‘Some of my colleagues want to ask you a few questions,’ she said and disappeared, shutting the door behind her. Maggie sat down and took stock of the room — a small rectangular table in the centre, four functional chairs, recording equipment on the table to her left, CCTV camera high on the wall. No windows.

There was a no

ise at the door, but when it opened, it wasn’t West who came in. ‘I am Detective Inspector Reid and this is Detective Sergeant Ashcroft.’ The man making the introductions had closely cropped grey hair, a dark blue suit and eyes that peered warily from under bushy eyebrows. Maggie recognised him from the TV press conference. He placed a cup of tea on the table, sat down opposite her and opened a red folder. Ashcroft — dark grey suit, white shirt, no tie and face like a bulldog — sat down next to him and stared at her.

‘I’ve been reading your statement,’ Reid said.

Maggie wasn’t sure how to respond, so she sipped her tea and said nothing. Not having something to say wasn’t her usual style, but then these weren’t usual circumstances.

‘An interesting account,’ he said, though it was clear from the stress he laid on the word ‘interesting’ that he wasn’t being entirely complimentary.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, rising to the bait.

He gave a deep breath and turned to his colleague. ‘How shall I put it, Sergeant? It seems . . . partial?’