The Mother by T.M. Logan

Author:T.M. Logan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zaffre Publishing

35

Two hours later, we grab a late lunch at a drive-through McDonald’s in Melksham, eating it in a church car park further down the road. It’s good to spend time with Jodie when she’s sober, she’s thoughtful and kind, and I start to realise that the jokey banter is just a part of the armour she wears to deflect from the harsh realities of her life and her past. She tells me about her own stints in prison, for drugs and shoplifting. I tell her I wish we’d known each other back then, thank her again for her help today.

‘Obviously I’m up for this, Heather,’ she says through a mouthful of cheeseburger. ‘You know that, right? Afternoon cruising, listening to some tunes, grabbing a Maccies. Me and you doing the Sherlock thing, solving your own cold case or whatever – it’s miles better than sitting in the bloody hostel being bored to death.’

‘But?’

‘But . . . I don’t really get what you’re expecting to happen. Do you think this guy’s just going to hold his hands up and say “Oh yes, you got me, I knew it was a stitch-up and I never said nothing. Please put me in the cuffs and take me away.” I’ve been arrested more times than I can remember, and most of them cops wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. Let alone cough to banging up an innocent person.’

She’s right, of course. It’s a slim hope. But it’s not nothing.

‘He might not even realise he knows it,’ I say. ‘We add what we’ve discovered to what he found out back then, maybe it throws a whole new light on Liam’s death. Maybe something that was overlooked.’

‘OK.’ She shrugs, and I can tell she’s just humouring me. ‘Like a missing link or something.’

‘Exactly. And in any case, I just want one chance to look him in the eye and ask him. Just the two of us. I want to see if there’s anything, even a flicker of a doubt. Then I’ll know.’

‘You think you’ll be able to tell?’

My job feels like it was a million years ago; the psychology degree even longer ago than that. But I had a few skills that had not been dulled and deadened by prison life – a few abilities that had been sharpened instead. Like the ability to read people, to judge them.

‘I used to interview people for a living, in my old life. I was good at it. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people, maybe more than a thousand, and after a while you get to know body language. You know when someone’s bending the truth a little bit, when they’re making things up on the fly and when they’re flat-out lying. You know who can be trusted and who can’t. It’s the one skill I’ve got that had plenty of use in prison.’

‘Everyone lies in prison,’ she says. ‘The truth is too bloody depressing.’

‘Sure. But I have to try everything,’ I say. ‘This guy, he’s retired, he’s done his thirty years and he’s got his nice police pension, he’s safe.

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