4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © Elizabeth Day 2017
Cover photograph © Willie Maldonado/The Image Bank/Getty Images
Cover designed by Anna Morrison
Elizabeth Day asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008194307
Ebook edition: July 2017 ISBN: 9780008194284
Version: 2018-03-09
For my friends
noun
1. a social gathering of invited guests, typically involving eating, drinking and entertainment.
2. a formally constituted political group that contests elections and attempts to form or take part in a government, e.g. ‘faction’, e.g. ‘the party’s election manifesto’.
3. a person or people forming one side in an agreement or dispute, e.g. ‘the guilty party’.
Contents
THE INTERVIEW ROOM IS SMALL AND SQUARE. A table, three plastic chairs, a high frosted window, the glass grimy with dust, strip lighting; our faces cast in dingy yellow shadow.
Two cups of tea: one for the female police officer, one for me. White with two sugars. Too much milk, but I’m not in a position to complain. The rim of my cup is patterned with indentations where, a few minutes previously, I bit into the polystyrene.
The walls are off-white. They remind me of the squash courts at the RAC on Pall Mall where, just a few days ago, I demolished an opponent who was several positions ahead of me in the club rankings. He was a banker. Florid face. Baggy shorts. Surprisingly lean thigh muscles. I dispatched him fairly swiftly: serve, slice, smash. The rubber thwack of the ball as it pinged into concrete, a dark green full stop at the end of each rally. Grunting. Swearing. Eventual defeat. Aggression contained within four walls.
The police station has a similar feel: a sort of bristling masculinity even though only one of the two officers interviewing me is male. The woman has clearly been designated ‘good cop’. It was she who offered me the tea, said it would be beneficial. She also suggested two sugars.
‘You know,’ she added, meeting my gaze, ‘after the shock.’
It’s true, I hadn’t expected the police to turn up on my doorstep this morning. It’s only the second time in my thirty-nine years that I have found myself interviewed by the authorities. On both occasions, it has been because of Ben. Which is odd, really, given that he’s my best friend. You’d expect best friends to take better care of each other.
The female police officer is short with rounded shoulders and a pleasant, freckled face. Her hair has been dyed that indeterminate colour inexplicably beloved of middle-aged women, which is neither brown nor blonde but somewhere in between. A kind of beige. Brittle at the ends.
Her colleague is tall. One of those men whose height is his defining feature. He stooped when he walked through the door, holding a sheaf of papers in hands the colour of supermarket ham. Grey suit with a white mark on the lapel. Toothpaste, perhaps. Or the left-behind smear of a baby’s breakfast. He is, I’d guess, in his early thirties.
The two of them sit across the table from me, backs to the door. The chairs have moulded seats with letterbox apertures in the back. We used to stack these chairs for school assemblies and end-of-term concerts at Burtonbury. A lifetime ago, and yet no time at all. Sometimes it seems as close as the next minute. Pencil shavings and plimsoll rubber, the scuffed mark of a trainer against the classroom skirting board. Dormitories with sagging beds. The creak of a spring as a boy shifted in his sleep. That constant feeling of unease. That was before I met Ben, of course. Before he saved