The Fall Read Online Free PDF

noting down the blood he’d walked in. That was going to be a right nightmare to explain away, but at least they had Stockbridge in custody.
    ‘It’s weird, right?’ Susan Jones had a thick Brummie accent. ‘He’s confessed straight up, says he did it, but not a word about the bottle.’
    ‘Did it all get recorded?’
    ‘Yeah – well, most.’
    ‘Most?’
    ‘He just started talking. All calm, like.’
    Hegarty had noticed the calm, too. ‘Let me speak to him, before you go traipsing all over the case.’ My case, was what he wanted to say. This was the one, he could feel it. He’d be a DS, running his own teams. He already had his Part 1, aced the Q&A, and now this. He could almost taste it. ‘You coming in for the interview?’
    Susan seemed a bit more interested in the Double Decker she’d just bought out of the vending machine. ‘You’re doing it?’ She sprayed chocolate over the case-notes she was carrying.
    Hegarty winced. ‘No one else here, is there? Come on.’
    ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him.’ Daniel Stockbridge did seem almost robotically calm. His clothes looked too good for the grimy interview room, expensive leather, things Hegarty only saw on the pages of Esquire .
    He started his tape recorder, saying, ‘Interview with Daniel Stockbridge, DC Matthew Hegarty and DC Susan Jones. Daniel Stockbridge, you have been arrested on suspicion of the murder of Anthony Johnson. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence. Do you understand the caution?’
    ‘You already asked me that.’
    ‘Do you have anything to say to the charge?’
    The man looked away. ‘This is ridiculous.’
    Hegarty continued. ‘You understand you have a right to legal counsel?’
    ‘Look, just get on with it. I want to go home.’
    Hegarty glanced at Susan. ‘OK. Can you repeat what you said just before, sir, for the tape?’
    Stockbridge flexed his hand. ‘I hit him. Look, my knuckles are cracked. But it wasn’t that hard. I missed the first time.’
    ‘You went for him twice?’
    ‘But not hard. He seemed OK.’
    ‘What do you mean by “OK”?’
    ‘I mean, he staggered back. Didn’t fall over.’ Stockbridge frowned, as if struggling to remember. ‘Then, well, I left. I was ashamed – it’s not like me.’
    ‘And why did you hit him?’
    ‘I was annoyed.’
    Hegarty raised his eyebrows. ‘Annoyed?’
    ‘Angry.’ Stockbridge folded his bruised hands on the chipboard table. ‘He said my card was stopped, but I’m not— I mean, that would never happen.’
    ‘Ah yes, your card.’ The platinum Haussmann’s Mastercard, abandoned in the blood-stained office, had easily led them to Stockbridge. The bank had been more than willing to give out their employee’s address. Strangely willing. ‘But it had been cancelled, as it happens. Your employer blocked all expense accounts over the weekend. To stop abuse, I gather.’
    For the first time Stockbridge showed some emotion. ‘It’s not like that, for Christ’s sake. I use it all the time. It’s interchangeable with my personal account.’
    ‘Interchangeable.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Hegarty had to get a full receipt in triplicate if he bought so much as a packet of Hob-Nobs out of petty cash. ‘But not working. Maybe that’s why you were so annoyed , as you put it.’
    The man was granite. ‘Maybe. There was also the fact that my bank was collapsing.’
    ‘Hmm. Do you know why you’re here, Mr Stockbridge?’ Remind the cool bastard that he’d spilled someone’s blood all over the floor just hours before.
    Stockbridge put his head in his hands. ‘You said he’s dead. And I don’t know, that’s terrible . . . But I’m telling you, he was fine when I left.’
    ‘When you were arrested, you said . . . Can you remind us, DC Jones?’
    Susan read out in her flat Midlands tones, ‘ “It’s the guy from the