13 Minutes-9780575097407 by Pinborough Sarah

Author:Pinborough, Sarah
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575097407
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2016-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

Thirty-Four

It was a small room with a standard-issue desk, Jamie and Aiden on one side, Caitlin Bennett and her sergeant on the other. The walls were blue but there was nothing vivid in the colour. A dead blue. Drained of life. Dulled into despair. It still somehow managed to clash with the green industrial carpet and black plastic chairs. Combined with the sickly yellow strip lights and lack of windows, the effect was mildly claustrophobic. Jamie suspected that was intentional. A clunky tape-recording machine sat on the shelf and was rolling, though it wasn’t getting much from Aiden to save for later. He’d been mostly silent through the opening questions other than acknowledging who he was.

He was scared, Jamie could see it even if Caitlin Bennett couldn’t. Or maybe Bennett had seen too many scared young men sitting in interview and didn’t have time to be sympathetic. Plus fear and guilt weren’t mutually exclusive – maybe guilty people were more scared than the innocent. Still, looking at Aiden it would be easy to mistake that fear for surly arrogance. He’d pushed his chair back slightly and his long legs were stretched out in front of him, one foot over the other. His arms were folded across his chest and dark hair hung over his eyes, slicing across the sharp blue of his irises as he scowled at the cheap Formica tabletop. He hadn’t touched his tea and a brown film had formed on the surface as it cooled.

‘Your version of events presents a problem for me, Aiden,’ she said coolly. ‘You said you dropped Rebecca Crisp at her house at midnight and then went straight home in the early morning of Saturday ninth January. Why would you say that?’

Jamie looked at the kid, who still refused to lift his eyes. ‘Whatever’s going on, just tell her the truth, mate,’ he said. ‘If you haven’t done anything wrong then there’s no point in lying.’ He wondered if he was being naïve. Criminal law hadn’t been his speciality, but there were plenty of cases of the police charging the wrong man. Or at least arresting them and letting the media wreck their lives before fresh evidence proved their innocence.

Bennett had a brown folder in front of her – an ominous item that clearly held some truth in it that Aiden wasn’t sharing. Why had he clammed up like this? Surely he knew it couldn’t do him any good? Unless maybe he’s guilty, a small serpent voice said quietly in the back of Jamie’s mind. Unless maybe that. He crushed it.

‘Mr Kennedy refuses to acknowledge the question.’ She opened the folder and carefully took out two grainy printed photographs. There were time stamps at the bottom of each but from where he was sitting Jamie couldn’t read them. He saw Aiden swallow hard, though. That wasn’t a good sign. His own heart was starting to race and he wasn’t even the one under suspicion.

‘Since you are, by your silence, sticking to your previous story, let me show you what CCTV cameras picked up that night.

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