continues. “Tell Greg I’ll come late. When Theo’s asleep. I want to do bedtime. It could be the last one for a while.”
72
PETE
AS I UNDRESSED BEFORE lying down on Greg’s sofa, something fell out of my pocket. It was a card the police had given me. Headed Your Release from Custody, it explained that Inappropriate contact with anyone linked to your case, either directly or indirectly, through a third party or social media, may constitute a criminal offense. If found guilty, you could face up to life imprisonment.
Life imprisonment. Could this really get any worse? And what constituted “inappropriate contact,” anyway?
When we got to the police station my lawyer, Mark Cooper, had gone to speak to the police on his own. He’d told me to expect that—it was part of the process, apparently, the “disclosure.” He came back somber but encouraging.
“Well, they’re not obliged to tell me everything, but even so I’d say they’ve got very little. My advice is, we stick to ‘no comment.’ ”
“Do we have to? It just feels wrong, somehow. When I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Let me explain something.” Mark Cooper was no older than me, but he had the pale, flabby look of someone who’d spent too much time sitting in these grubby rooms with their flickering strip lights and discarded paper cups. “In this country, the criminal law is based on an adversarial system. That means it’s the police’s goal to get a suspect arrested, charged, and brought to trial, not to worry about whether he’s actually guilty—that’s someone else’s job. On top of that, they face intense pressure to improve their conviction rates. The police are trained in interviewing techniques, and they’re often very good at getting suspects to say something that, however innocent, will help to convict them later. Or, even worse, getting them to tell a small lie that will undermine all the rest of their evidence when it comes out in court. Right now, if they had enough evidence to charge you, they’d have done it. So our objective is to leave here today with that situation unchanged, and the surest way to do that is to answer ‘no comment.’ ”
I understood his logic, but it had been agony. When the policeman—a pleasant, cheerful man who introduced himself as Detective Inspector Richards—cautioned me, and got to the words, “If you do not mention now something which you mention later, a court might ask you why you didn’t mention it at the first opportunity,” I shot Mark an anguished glance. He only shook his head warningly.
When the caution was out of the way, DI Richards asked the first question. “I understand that you transferred to St. Alexander’s with your premature baby in an ambulance. That must have been a very difficult time for you.”
“On the advice of my solicitor, I am answering, ‘No comment.’ ”
DI Richards looked pained. “We’ve agreed to speak to you today to hear your side of the story, Pete. I’m neutral in this—I’m just trying to see what’s happened.”
“On the advice of my solicitor, I am answering, ‘No comment.’ ”
“No one’s currently accused you of any crime, Pete. We just want to make sure we’ve got your version of events as well as NHS Resolution’s.”
“On the advice of my solicitor, I am answering, ‘No comment.’ ”
DI Richards shrugged and picked up a document. “You told the NHS investigators you were in a state of complete panic when you got to the intensive care unit. Does that sound right to you, that you were panicking?”
I hesitated. Had I really said that? “On the advice of my solicitor, I am answering, ‘No comment.’ ”
“I can understand why you’d be anxious, Pete. You’d had a conversation with the paramedics in the ambulance, hadn’t you? They’d told you your little boy was probably going to be brain-damaged. That must have been hard.”
“On the advice of my solicitor, I am answering, ‘No comment.’ ”
And so it went on. Even when he asked about Bronagh, and whether I’d been in touch with her since leaving the NICU. I blinked but managed to say, “On the advice of my solicitor, I am answering, ‘No comment.’ ”
And then there’d been the moment, near the end of the interview, when he’d sprung on me that they’d gotten a warrant to examine my computer. I must have looked anxious, because then he asked whether they’d find anything on it that related to the investigation.
I started to shake my head, then remembered. “On the advice of my solicitor, I am answering, ‘No comment.’ ” But