Free Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce Page B

Richie. I’m Dave and I’m from CID. You know what CID is, don’t you?”
    “You think I’ve done something to her, don’t you?”
    “We have her bike, Richie. It has your fingerprints all over it.”
    I look at my lawyer like, Is this a joke? She just makes a little nod, encouraging me to answer. I go cold and then I feel a wave of heat roll over me. “Well, that would be because I ride it with her all the time.”
    “You have a car,” says the fat copper, looking at me for the first time. He has an incredible, high reedy voice for such a fat bloke. He sounds like he’s nine years old, except there’s menace in his voice. “Why would you need a bike?”
    “For cycling,” I says. “And by the way, I gave her the bike. It was my bike and I fixed it up for her and gave it to her. The chain was always coming off. It would have my fingerprints on it, wouldn’t it?”
    The other one, Dave, the sad one, leans in. “We know she was pregnant.”
    “What?” I say. “What? How could you know that?”
    “Was it your child she was having, Richie?”
    “Is having,” I say. “Is having. How do you know that?”
    “Her pregnancy was confirmed by her GP.”
    “Thought that was confidential,” I say to my lawyer. “Wasn’t it?”
    “How old was Tara?” says the fat one. He can’t say his R’s. He says Tawa.
    “Have you found her?” I ask.
    “Can I have a word?” my lawyer says to the policemen.
    DAVE, FRIENDLY DAVE, DEAD-STRAIGHT Dave, sad Dave, my mate Dave, steps outside with my lawyer, leaving me with the uniformed bobbie and the incredible hulk still fingering his collar. Only now he’s looking at me with dead-fish eyes. He sniffs. Then he does it again. Sniffs. Like he’s telling me he can smell something.
    After a moment they come back in. Sit down again.
    Dave says, “Richie, you must have known that Tara was under the age of sexual consent, which is sixteen in this country. But for the moment, for the moment, I’m quite prepared to let that go. I want to make things easy on you and I can guess how hard things have been for you.”
    “What things?”
    “Were you the father, Richie?”
    “I thought doctors weren’t supposed to reveal confidential information,” I say.
    “In situations like this, it’s different.”
    “What is this situation?”
    “For God’s sake!” says the fat one with his squeaky voice. Then he actually wipes his own spittle off his own black trousers.
    “Richie, we know you had a lot of very angry rows with Tara. We also know that you have a pretty hot temper.”
    “Violent temper,” says the fat one.
    “No.”
    “We’ve got information about your violent temper. We found some records about a case in which you badly beat up a young man in a disco pub.”
    I turn to my lawyer. She’s busy scribbling. She’s not behaving like the lawyers you see on TV. “Why are you here?” I shout. “You’re saying nothing!”
    The lines crease even further around the copper’s face. He looks incredibly depressed. “Richie, I’m going to say something now in front of these other people and it shames me to have to say it. Things happen. Some years back, Richie, I used to take a drink. Not anymore, but I did then. One night I went home drunk. I’d been married for twelve years and I had three lovely children. My wife and I got into an argument.”
    My lawyer stops scribbling, and she looks up at him.
    “That’s all I remember, I swear to you,” says Dave. His blue eyes are burning into me. “Then in the morning I woke up and I found my wife sitting at the kitchen table. Her face was a terrible mess, Richie. Puffed and swollen. Split lip. Two black eyes. I don’t remember anything about it, Richie, I swear to you now as God is my judge.”
    I look at him. He’s leaning forward and gazing deep into my eyes, like he wants to look right into my soul and back again. His eyebrows are raised. I look at my lawyer. I glance at the fat cop, and at the uniformed cop. They