Complicity

I sit down in the grey plastic chair in the featureless room with McDu

McDu

I swallow, take a long sigh and look at him. "Crying," I tell him. He looks surprised. The Welsh boyo looks to one side.

"Crying, Cameron?" McDu

McDu

Another deep breath. "So I've been grieving for him." And another. "Is that all right?"

McDu

The Welsh guy clears his throat and picks up his briefcase. He takes out some papers and another tape recorder. He passes an A4 sheet over to me. "Just read out the words on this sheet of paper, all right, Colley?"

I read the words through first; looks like it's the statement our man phoned in after Sir Rufus was flame-grilled; Welsh Nationalist extremists apparently claiming responsibility.

"Any particular voice?" I ask. "Michael Caine, John Wayne, Tom Jones?"

"Let's try your own voice first, eh?" steely-eyes says. "Then we'll try you with a Welsh accent." He smiles, the way I imagine a prop forward smiles just before he bites your ear off.

"Cigarette?"

Ta."

Afternoon session. McDu

"So?" I say, sitting back in the grey plastic seat. I'm wearing a blue prison-issue shirt — open-neck, of course — and the jeans I was wearing when they arrested me. They don't hug so well without the belt; bum's a little saggy, to tell the truth, but fashion isn't my top priority these days.

"Well," McDu

"Good, good," I nod.

"And the times for you getting down to London for the attack on Oliver, if you include the times you — or whoever — were seen in the toilets at Tottenham Court Road, are looking very tight; there was a delay on all the flights from Edinburgh into Heathrow that day… makes it impossible, really."

"Great," I say, rocking back and forward in my seat. "Brilliant."

"Unless," he says, "you had a double in Edinburgh or a lot of people are lying, it means you'd have to have an accomplice in London; somebody you'd hired to… ah, make the collection." McDu

"Well, look," I say, "put me on an identity parade —»

"Now, now, Cameron," McDu

"Come on, McDu

McDu

"Eh? What do you mean?"

Oh, he's got me now; I'm interested, I'm leaning forward, elbows on table, face forward. Hooked, in other words. Whatever he's going to try and sell me, I'm buying.

"Cameron," he says, like he's just come to some big decision, and sucks air through his teeth, "you know I don't think it's you."

"Oh, great!" I say, and laugh, sitting back and looking round the room at the bare paint walls and the constable sitting by the door. "Then what the fuck am I —?"

"It's not just me, Cameron," he says tolerantly. "You know that."

"Then what —?"

"Let me be frank with you, Cameron."

"Oh, be as frank as you like, Detective Inspector."

"I don't think it's you, Cameron, but I think you know who it is."

I put my hand to my brow, looking down and shaking my head, then sigh theatrically and look at him, letting my shoulders slump. "Well, I don't know who it is, McDu

"No, you can't tell me yet," McDu

McDu

"— Lake District," McDu

"Just think," I repeat. I nod at the DI. He nods back. "Just think," I say again. McDu

Summer in Strathspeld: the first really hot day that year, air warm and thick with the coconut smell of gorse — swathed richly yellow on the hills — and the sweet sharpness of pine resin, lying dropleted on the rough trunks in thick translucent bubbles. Insects buzzed and butterflies filled the glades with silent flashes of colour; in the fields the corncrake stooped and zoomed, its strange, percussive call stuttering through the scent-laden air.

Andy and I went down by the river and the loch, clambering up the rocks upstream then back down, watching fish jump lazily out on the calm loch, or strike at the insects speckling those flat waters, jaws snapping underneath; dispatching, swallowing, leaving ripples. We climbed some trees looking for nests but didn't find any.