if the tears were mixing with his blood, making him go floppy and frantic? It was at school, the day he was accused of stealing from the charity fund. Somebody nicked the money raised from the charity bed-push and he was suspected. He could remember now that mingled feeling of impotence, righteousness and desperation. He almost got expelled for that and he was entirely innocent. Who had done it had never been fully explained but he had his suspicions: that bloody rugby lot had laughed their socks off. Carl Butcher and his friends, Jeff bloody Cooper among them. Harvey felt back there now, back waiting outside the head's office on that awful green sofa, knowing that his mum and dad were on the way, and knowing, with a terrible certainty in one so young, that they would side with the headmaster and would indeed argue for whatever sentence was passed to be increased. It was a feeling of isolation and of being involved in something far too big and serious for anyone so small. How old was he then? Eleven? Maybe twelve . . . He was a grown man now, of course, but still that same feeling welled up from wherever it was kept, tidily tucked away for when it was needed. He put his head in his hands and felt the tears begin to well against his palms.
He sat and shook, rocking himself back and forth and muttering against an unyielding adversity.
'Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,' he said slowly and in a sort of terrible whisper. 'What the fuck am I going to do?'
'Hello?' Josh had left the office door open and someone was leaning over the counter and looking through the open gap.
'Oh, hello, Chief Inspector.' Harvey jumped up and moved to the door. 'All right?'
Chapter Twenty-three
'Are you all right, Mr Briscow?' Jarvin and Allen both looked at him with concern. Harvey wiped his nose on the long-sleeve Sepultura shirt he was wearing.
'Er, yeah, yeah. Touch of the flu.' He stood in the doorway and felt his eyes beginning to brim over with tears. He also felt the Superman One on the desk behind him burning a hole in the back of his trousers.
'We wondered if we might have another few words with you. But if this is a bad time . . .' Jarvin's sympathy made Harvey close his eyes for a moment to block out the desire to tell him everything. This caused the tears to well up and begin to trickle gently down both cheeks. He opened them again and shook his head.
'No, no problem,' he sniffed. 'Let me just clear up a bit. We're in a mess. Ah, is that Josh?' He looked over Jarvin's shoulder and then as both men turned he stepped swiftly backwards and slammed the door. 'Right,' he muttered, 'get it together, Briscow.' He rushed to the desk, grabbed the comic, thrust it into the drawer, slammed it shut and locked it.
'Mr Briscow?' Jarvin's voice from the shop was surprisingly clear.
'Yeehes?' Harvey sang his reply as he finished locking up, trying desperately not to jingle the keys; then, grabbing the dirty towel from the bathroom, which was draped over the back of the sofa, he rubbed it all over his face. At a run he got back to the door and opened it. 'There we are.' He beamed at them, his face a mess of mingled tears, snot and grey matter from the towel. 'Thought it was Josh coming back but it wasn't. Come in, come in.'
'Well, only if you're sure . . .' Jarvin stepped forward slowly, 'and if you wanted to clean up . . .'
'All done.' Harvey beamed the more. 'All done, just then, I cleaned up. No problem. Come in, come in.' Once more he lifted the flap of the counter so that they could walk through into the back and once more he felt as if he was inviting something rather large and unlikely into his space, like bringing a walrus into a Ford Cortina. But this time he felt more in control.
'You forgot to ask me the other day, didn't you?' He was still smiling, with glistening eyes, when they were all sat back in their places, him at the desk but facing away from it into the room, Jarvin on the sofa, Allen in the frankly unsafe wooden chair behind the door.
'Forgot to ask you?'
'My whereabouts. You've been asking everyone their whereabouts on the day of the murder, Sunday