KB 2013: 8

[josephine_marrs]

summary/preview: Getting a confession isn't always easy. Giving it is even harder. Inspired by the RL story of Christopher Tapp.
content notes: noncon, reference to character deaths, dead bodies, no other content notes apply.

            The interview room was small, perhaps only six feet by six. At least half of that space was taken up by an old, shabby table that had the laminate peeling up all around the edges. The only other pieces of furniture were three hard, plastic chairs, two on one side, facing the third. The lone one had a long crack running up the back panel, and it would pop if its occupant leaned back with any force at all.
            The occupant was a tall, broad-shouldered young man, dressed in a red and white Arsenal jersey and jeans that had been faded and ripped in a calculated, expensive fashion. His blonde hair was mussed, and he had a faint, nearly-healed scar on his cheek. He leaned forward with his elbows against the table, cracked his knuckles, and waited.
            The door opened at last to admit a man and a woman. She wore a smart lavender dress and delicate silver jewelry that shone softly against her dark skin. He wore a green polo shirt that looked as if it had been worn over and over and over again, and rumpled slacks, and his only accessory was the manila folder shoved under his arm. They both slid into their chairs at the same time.
            “Good afternoon, Mr. Pendragon,” the woman said. “I’m Detective Gwen Smith, and this is my colleague, Detective Merlin Emrys.”            “Camlann’s finest,” Pendragon said, with a smirk. Smith smiled back at him; Emrys just gave him a long-suffering sort of look, and then glanced over his shoulder at the closed-circuit camera set into the corner of the room.
            “Now, I must say that you don’t have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you fail to mention something when questioned, and only bring it up later on. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
            “Do you know why you’re here?” Emrys asked briskly, as he grabbed a yellow legal pad out of the folder. He slipped a pen free of the pad and clicked the end with a long, knobby thumb.
            Pendragon gave a rueful smirk. “I reckon it probably has something to do with the joint your boys caught me smoking when they pulled me over.”
            “That’s part of it, yes,” Emrys murmured, thumbing past several pages of notes. “Any other ideas?” A long, awkward silence hung between them after that, until Emrys deigned to finally look up and fix him with another look.
            “I have no idea,” Pendragon said, with a laugh.
            “Can you tell us about what you were doing, the night of August 14^th?” Smith asked, softly.
            Pendragon leaned back in his chair, and grimaced at the loud crack as its back panel ground broken edges together. “Dunno. Can’t say as I remember back that far.”  He smirked. “Must be the cannabis.”
            “You attended a party, maybe?” Emrys asked. His tone could have been irritated, or just merely bored.
            A shrug. “Maybe. I like a good party.”
            “You have a sister named…” Smith craned her neck over to reference Emrys’ pad.  “Morgana, yes?”
            “Stepsister. Yeah.”
            “When she spoke to us, she mentioned that you had attended a party with her, on the 14^th. Does that sound familiar?”
            “Yeah, come to think of it.” He laughed. “You got her stashed somewhere around here, too?”
            “No, this was several days ago. We’ve been trying to get ahold of her again. Do you know her whereabouts?”
            Pendragon sucked his teeth. “We don’t speak all that much, actually. She comes and goes, as she pleases.”
            Emrys was scribbling on his pad, all this while.  
            “But you happened to attend this party together?” Smith inquired.
            “More like she needed a ride there, so she called me. I did her the favor and then decided to stick around after I got there. She went off and did her thing, and I did mine.”
            “You know a girl named Freya Brising?” Emrys broke in.
            Another shrug. “Doesn’t really ring a bell. Sorry.”
            “Morgana told us you met a girl by that name. Small, slender build, dark hair and eyes. Pretty girl.”
            “Morgana’s just full of all sorts of wonderful information, isn’t she? Yeah, come to think of it, I did hook up with a girl, there. She might’ve told me her name. We were busy doing other things than talking, mostly.” He gave the other man a smug, knowing grin.            Emrys did not grin back. He looked like the sorts of lads that Pendragon had pushed into lockers and dunked in toilets at school, complete with the chip on the shoulder. “Followed her home, did you?” he asked.
            “No. Not unless the party was at her house. I stayed there, enjoyed myself, went to my place the next morning.”
            “That’s it?”
            “That’s it. That’s my story, chum.”
            “A nice story, so far.”
            “Thank you. You, ah, got her number written down on there? I wouldn’t mind giving her a ring again. She was fun.”
            “No, I can’t give you her number,” Emrys said, in that same, killjoy tone. He flipped open his manila folder. “Wouldn’t do you any good.” He started to place glossy photographs on the table. “This the sort of fun you had with her?”
            Her body was sprawled on her bed, long dark hair trailing every which way. She was naked. She, and her bedsheets, were covered in blood. Her throat had been cut.
            Pendragon swallowed hard, his good humor lost. “I didn’t do that.”
            “Care to take a lie detector test, chum?” Emrys asked, baring his teeth a little.
            “Sure. I’ll take a test, I’ll give you DNA, whatever you need. I’m not a murderer.”
            “Thank you, Mr. Pendragon,” Smith said. “That will be very helpful.” She rose from her seat and exited the room.
            The two men stared at each other across the table.
            “You drink at this party?” Emrys asked.
            “Of course. The fuck’s the point of going to a party if you won’t enjoy yourself?”
            “How many drinks did you have?”
            “Dunno. I don’t count them.”
            “So you were drunk when you were ‘having fun’ with Freya.”
            “Yeah. So was she.”
            “Smoke some cannabis?”
            Pendragon threw up his hands. “Sure. Yeah.”
            “So you can’t rightly remember what exactly you did to her that night.”
            “Well, I didn’t fucking kill her!”
            “When did you leave the party?”
            “I don’t know.”
            “You can’t remember.”
            “I don’t watch the clock when I’m at a party.” He enunciated his words painstakingly, in his irritation. “I drink, I smoke, I fuck, I have fun. I know that’s really hard for someone like you to understand.”
            “Where’d you go after the party?”
            “Home! I told you!”
            “Straight home?” Emrys sounded skeptical. “You said you gave Morgana a ride. Are you telling me you drove her home, drunk and stoned?”
            “No, I’m not stupid. She, um…we drove around, a bit. Some guy she met there, he drove.”
            “So now it’s you and Morgana and this mystery man, in your car. Did Freya come with you?”
            There was a pause. “Yeah.”
            “And you took Freya home, too?”
            “Stands to reason we would’ve. Be a decent thing to do.”
            “Did you follow her into the house, when you took her home?”
            “No.”  
            “Where did you go when you ‘drove around, a bit’?”
            Pendragon rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “I dunno. I fell asleep.”
            “So you can’t give me an accounting for your whereabouts after you supposedly left Freya at her house.”
            “Maybe not every little bit, no. When I woke up, I was at home.”
            “When you came to, after this long night of drinking and getting high, you were home.”
            “That’s what I said,” Pendragon snarled.
            The door opened with a loud click, and Pendragon’s gaze snapped up. Smith was back, with a plastic kit.
            “Since you gave consent to take DNA, Mr. Pendragon, I’d like to collect a hair sample and a cheek swab. I can show you the authorization papers from the Inspector, if you’d like to see them.”
            “Take whatever you need. I want to get this over with.”
            Smith opened the kit, took out some rubber gloves, and put them on. They were dark purple.
            “Matches your dress, there,” Pendragon said, and smiled.
            “They do, don’t they?” Smith chuckled, and edged round the table toward him. She was petite enough, but it was still a snug fit. “I’ll take the hair sample, first. I’ll try not to pull too hard, but I need a hair with the root material on it.”
            Pendragon tilted his head back, as her fingers stroked over his scalp. It was firm, and the gloves caught at his hair a bit, but it was not wholly unpleasant.
            “There we are,” Smith said, as she tugged a strand free, and placed it in an envelope. “Do you mind if I call you Arthur?” she asked, as she labeled it.
            “You? Not at all. You’re nice.” He grinned at her again, then gave a pointed look across the table. Emrys just stared at his pad, and scribbled.
            “Well, we all have our jobs to do, and we all do them in our own ways,” Smith said amiably, as she unwrapped a sterile swab. “Can you hold your mouth open for me? Excellent.” The sample taken, she secured and labeled it, then came back round the table.    Emrys got up to replace her, opening a set of handcuffs.
            “We’ll be detaining you for possession of cannabis,” he said. “Get up.” Arthur  gave Smith a look as if to say, ‘Can you believe this?’, and sat there, glaring up at Emrys for a long moment before he rose with a cynical laugh. “Turn around.” Arthur took his sweet time doing that, too. “And while you spend the night here, we’ll see if we can’t schedule that lie detector test for you.”

            Arthur had to give them one thing – they were quick. He was sitting strapped to the machine before lunchtime. Smith wasn’t there, but Emrys was; he was leaning against the wall next to the door that led into the testing room. He didn’t deign to look up at Arthur as he walked past. He was staring at a set of photographs that he held in his hands. What its exact topic was, Arthur didn’t know, but he had an inkling that he had seen it yesterday. The memory of it made his stomach turn.

            Then he was back in that cramped room, in the shitty chair with the broken back, waiting.
            Smith and Emrys finally graced him with their presence.“Good afternoon, Arthur,” Smith greeted.
            “Afternoon, Detective Smith. You look nice. Emrys. Somebody use your ears for handles last night? They look bigger.”
            Emrys clasped his hands together, and rested his chin on them. His pad rested between his elbows. Smith had the folder, this time.
            Arthur stared at it. “Are my results in there? Do I get to go home?”
            “The test results are here, yes,” Smith said. She bit her lip, as if she were keenly disappointed in something.
            “You failed the test,” Emrys said.
            Arthur blinked. “No. I couldn’t have.”
            Emrys reached over, flicked a piece of paper from the folder with a flourish, and shoved it at him. “Says here that you did. Go on, read it.”
            He did. It said…what they said that it did.
            “This is bullshit,” he sputtered. “These tests, they’re all bullshit, anything can throw you off.”
            “They weren’t bullshit when you volunteered to take one,” Emrys said. His cheeks briefly dimpled with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
            “I hadn’t slept well! I was tired. I was hungry! You were standing there by the door, trying to intimidate me!”
            “Oh, is that it? Did my big bad ears intimidate you?”
            “You had those pictures from yesterday.”
            “Did I? Was I in the room with you? Did I speak to you at all today, before this moment?” Emrys made a show of looking at the results. “Doesn’t say anything to that effect in the report,” he said, to Smith, and then wheeled on Arthur again.  “Is your DNA on her body bullshit, too?”
            “I didn’t kill her!”
            “Are you really sick of bullshit? Are you? Well then, let’s cut the bullshit, shall we? Tell us what really happened that night.”
            “I’ve told you everything I know!”
            “No, you’ve told us all the convenient things, all the things that easily spring to your mind. But now you’re going to have to think a little harder, aren’t you? You’re going to have to tell us the truth.”
            Smith opened the folder. There were photographs inside of it.
            “Now, we are going to show you some pictures,” Emrys went on. “But these aren’t from yesterday. We took these this morning.” He slapped one down in front of Arthur. “What’s that?”
            “It’s a knife.” His voice was hoarse with confusion and outrage.
            “It’s a bloody knife, isn’t it?” It was, literally. The thing was crusted with gore.
            “Is that what killed her?”
            “You tell me. We found it in the boot of your car.”
            Arthur’s head snapped upward. “No, you didn’t! I mean, you couldn’t have!”
            “I beg to differ.”
            “That’s not mine! I didn’t put it there.”
            “Well, who did?”
            “I don’t know!”
            “Do you normally just let random people store things in your car?”
            “No, but –“
            “You know another interesting thing about this knife? It’s one that happens to be missing from the butcher block in Freya’s house. All the others are there, but this one was taken.” Emrys tapped the photo, then picked it up and gave it a look before he placed it back in Smith’s folder. “Nice choice, I must say.”
            “I didn’t use it, I didn’t put it in there. The…The other guy must have.”
            “But you don’t know their name, and you’d never met them before that night, and yet you gave them the keys to your car and sat back and let them do whatever they liked with it while you slept.”
            Arthur threw up his hands. “He was with Morgana. They hooked up at the party – she was taken with him, and we were both shitfaced, and he wasn’t, so I let him drive. I was being responsible!”
            “You were being responsible. But you don’t know his name.”
            “Fine, it was – It was Mort. Morty.” He snapped his fingers. “Mordred.”
            Emrys snorted. “Mordred. That’s a really ominous name, isn’t it?”
            “Oh, fuck you! Like you’ve any room to judge people’s names. You’ve got a fucking cartoon wizard’s name, for fuck’s sake!”
            “This Mordred have a last name?”
            “I have no idea what it is. That’s all I know. ”
            “There is another reason why this is so disconcerting to us,” Smith interjected. “You see, when we spoke to Morgana, she didn’t mention another man, at all. She only spoke of leaving the party with you, and Freya.”
            Arthur just stared at the tabletop and shook his head.
            “Why d’you think that might be?” Emrys asked.
            “She…maybe she’s covering for him. She gets…obsessed with her boyfriends.”
            “And she’d rather throw her own brother under the bus, instead?”
            Arthur licked his lips. “Like I said, we’re not as close as we used to be.” 

            The interview went on for…well, Arthur didn’t know how long. There was no clock on the wall of the room. Only the camera.
            At the end of the session, Emrys showed him another piece of paper. “Due to the circumstances of the case, the Magistrates’ Court has granted a warrant of further detention. So you’ll be staying with us for a while longer.” He stood up, handcuffs rattling. “Get up and turn around.” 

            The phone they let him use looked as if it had been there from before he’d been born. The receiver smelled like vomit.
            The other end rang and rang and rang.
            “Who is this? Morgana?”
            “Dad! It’s me. I’m in jail.”
            The next word was rife with disappointment. “Arthur. What did you do this time?”
            “They stopped me, and brought me in, and they were holding me because I had a bit of pot, but—“
            “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
            “But now they’re saying I killed someone.”
            There was something that sounded like a sigh, on the other end.
            “Dad, I need help. Please.”
            The sigh turned into a laugh. “You know, that’s funny. You and your sister both, you go for months and months without calling, but when you do, you always need something…”
            “Dad, this is serious! They’re calling me a murderer! Please!”
            “And how am I to know what you did and didn’t do?”
            “D’you really…how could you even think—“
            “You put yourself in this position. You get yourself out.”
            “Dad!!”
            There was a soft click, and the dialtone kicked in. 

            “So. Here’s the situation. Here’s what we know.” Smith’s voice was calm and quiet and soothing. The skin on her hands was smooth and soft-looking. She often leaned toward him, as if she were going to reach out and touch him, even though she never did.
            “Your DNA matches the semen that was found inside her, and the hairs that were found on her body, and the skin that was found under her fingernails. You were with her that night and left the party with her, and took her home. The murder weapon was found in the boot of your car. And no one remembers seeing a man such as you’ve described to us.” Her expression looked sad. “Things don’t look good for you, Arthur.”
            “It was him. I know it.”
            “Without your sister to help you corroborate that, it’s very hard for us to believe you.”
            “He was waiting out by the cars. I don’t remember much about him.”
            “So…she didn’t actually meet him at the party?” Her tone was polite, as if she hated to let him know that she was doubting him.
            “Well, yes and no. She met him there, out by the cars, but I got the impression she knew him from somewhere, before. She was happy to see him.”
            “So she introduced you, and you let him drive you home?”
            “Well…she didn’t introduce us, no. She…gets all wrapped up in the people she likes, so she only pays attention to them.”
            “And you can’t remember any more about what this man looked like?”
            “Just…dark hair. Dark clothes. I wasn’t really paying attention to him. Just what I saw from behind.”
            Smith nodded, and looked at the pad that she and Emrys shared, as if searching for something to help him. “How did you get the scratch on your cheek, Arthur?” she asked, peering at the faint pink line there when her gaze rose again.
            “Morgana and Freya got into it.”
            “They got into a fight?” Smith began to write. “This is some new information. What can you tell me about that?”
            “In the car. Morgana said something smart to her. She’d turned round – she was sitting in the front seat, and Freya was next to me, and they were pulling at each other’s hair. I just…wanted to break it up.”
            “And she scratched your face, then? Freya, I mean.”
            His finger tapped over the faint line she’d left. “Yeah.”
            “Did that make you angry?”
            “I was annoyed. That’s all.”           

            “Here’s what I think happened,” Emrys said, in their next interview together. He and Smith were switching shifts, now, like sentries relieving each other during a long night’s watch. “You had some fun at the party, you said goodnight to your sister, and then you took Freya home to have a little more fun, somewhere more private. Only she didn’t want to have any more fun with you, did she? She fought back. She scratched you. You didn’t like that. So you grabbed a knife from her butcher block, and you started stabbing her in the kitchen. And she ran up to her room, and you followed her up the stairs, and you pinned her down on her bed and slit her throat. And then you took the knife with you, and you slid it into your boot, right up against the near edge, where you figured no one but you would know where it was. A little trophy. And then you went home.”
            Arthur just laughed bitterly, and shook his head. “You’ll believe what you want to believe.”
            “I believe in evidence. And the evidence all puts you in that house there, with Freya. When I see that mystery man Mordred here in front of me, and I’ll believe that he exists. Not before.” 

            “Are you sure you didn’t get out of the car at Freya’s house?” Smith asked.
            “It’s foggy. I know that I  wanted to make sure she was all right, after the tiff.”
            “You comforted her?”
            “I kissed her goodnight. I remember that.”
            “Do you remember where you did that? In her house?”
            “I don’t…maybe I walked her to the door. I can’t remember.”
            “Would she have opened her door while you were there?”
            “I guess so.”
            “And if she had…would you remember what the inside of her house looked like?”
            Arthur closed his eyes. They felt gritty. By now, he had seen so many photographs, so many times, that he felt that the details of them were burrowing their way into his memory. “I’m wanting to say that the door opened into the kitchen. And I could see the stairway, leading up, behind her.” He folded his arms, and stared at the tabletop. It was similar to the linoleum that had been in Freya’s kitchen, in the pictures. He could almost imagine blood on it, dark and sticky. He closed his eyes, and licked dry lips.            

            He saw the things in the photographs when he closed his eyes. He could imagine the blood spatter on the kitchen floor, on the walls, the smears leading up the stairwell. Freya and her dark hair, and her legs spread wide, and all that blood.
            He found himself trying to envision Mort’s face, but he couldn’t, not quite.
            He tried to imagine how that knife got into his car. How could he have handled such a thing, crusted with blood as it had been? His imaginings would be so vivid that, when he would open his eyes and peer at his fingernails, he would wonder how on earth they were so clean.
            He did not try to call his father again. He knew it would be no use. And he had always known that, with Morgana. She screened her calls, and his had always gone to her voice mail. She’d call him, not the other way around.
            He sighed, and hung his head in his hands. “No one will,” he murmured softly. “No one will.” 

            “Why do you think there wouldn’t be any fingerprints on the knife?” Smith asked. They had already covered the ‘I didn’t touch it’ part of Arthur’s story. Now this was more of an imaginative exercise. To explain how a bloody knife would magically teleport itself inside his car, if he didn't touch it. Only by being creative, would he be able to convince them that he really had not had anything to do with it.
            “He must have worn a glove.”  
            “Hmm, well, there was only one glove in her kitchen sink. Where do you think the other one would have gone, Arthur?” Smith was gentle, but relentless. She didn’t believe him, either. It hurt to think that no one did, but somehow, with someone as nice as she was, it smarted even more.
            “Maybe he…Mort. He has it.”
            “He didn’t leave it in the boot?”
            “No. He wouldn’t. Because it’d have his fingerprints inside it.”
            “That’s very clever thinking, Arthur.” She seemed to like it when he was inventive, like that. She always wrote those things down. 

            They would be gone for long moments, deliberating, getting more paperwork, more evidence. When they were gone, the only sound in the room was the buzzing of the fluorescent lights. He would fall asleep in his seat, sometimes. 

                        He found he couldn’t remember much, besides this shitty room and the shitty chairs and the shitty, bitter coffee and the soggy sandwiches they brought in. And the scenes in the pictures.
            No one came to see him, but Smith and Emrys. The imaginings in his head were his only other company.
            The fluorescent buzzing and the loneliness were unbearable constants.
            “I just don’t understand. I don’t understand why I’d do something like that,” he told himself.       

            “I know you’re tired, and that it seems like you’ve been here forever. But, we can only question you for so long. We’re just trying to get all we can out of this. Why don’t you write it down? Write down what you think could have happened to Freya. Then we can review it later, when you’re not here.”
            This opportunity to write, himself, was something special. The pad Smith offered was white, and clean, and crisp. Her pen was the nice kind, with an ergonomic sort of grip. The black ink flowed smoothly as he wrote everything down. He drew on everything they’d told him, trying to imagine how it would have happened. Everything that they’d decided could have happened, if Mort had somehow never been there. Hypothetically. Imaginatively.           

            Emrys shoved one more piece of paper at him. It was typed. The words he’d written were still in black and white, just in print now, instead of his unsteady handwriting.
            “So that’s the confession that you wrote out. Sign here, to certify that you’ve reviewed your accounting of the events, and we’ll be done with this interview.”
            Arthur rubbed his eyes. They were red around the edges. “A confession. So that’s what you call it.” He couldn’t bear to look up at Smith. He knew that her expression would still be kind and sad, as it always had been.
            He blinked away tears, and signed it.
            The bunk in his cell was hard, but it was also horizontal, and it was dark and cool. It felt good to lie down and sleep. 

            The old man shook his head at the detritus that littered the riverbank. He carried a trash bag with him on his walks, and he collected each piece of refuse that could be easily accessed from the well-worn path. Plastic bags, discarded bottles, even a dingy yellow rubber glove; such things were picked up and put in the bag to be properly disposed of. It was a shame that other people couldn’t be so considerate of the riverway, but he did what he could.
            Up ahead, he heard his dog barking excitedly. He called to it, but it wouldn’t come. At first he didn’t mind, but when he had called several times, only to be ignored, he went off the path and into the trees to see what was keeping it.
            She was half in, half out of some bushes in the tangled undergrowth. She had long, dark, wavy hair. The rest of her was dark and discolored, now, but an expert eye could still see the bruises on either side of her throat and across her windpipe. Morgana had been found again, at last. 

            It was a beautiful day, not only for a walk, but to begin a new journey. His stay here had been eventful and entertaining, but he had done all he could do, here.
            Bathed in early autumn sunlight, the dark-haired young man in dark clothes began his journey out of town. He hummed happily to himself as he walked.
            How could he not be happy and content? The world was always so full of opportunities. They were endless.