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Colleran didn’t keep me waiting, but appeared just before ten to eight. I was at once relieved that he hadn’t given me a larger opportunity to have second thoughts, and on the verge of panic because the critical moment was less than a minute away. I pressed myself back into a shadowy doorway. Colleran passed without seeming to notice anything. I stepped out of the doorway to give my arm freedom to move and, as part of the same fluid movement, swung the hammer as hard as I could. Colleran must have sensed or heard something then, because he turned his head to the left, so that the hammer caught him above and slightly to the front of the ear, rather than on the crown of his head, as I’d aimed for. All the same, I heard the crack of bone, felt a sharp shock followed by a yielding resistance, a sensation at the same time satisfying and nauseating. Colleran collapsed onto the ground.
For at least a vital two seconds, probably longer, I found that my body would not obey my willed instruction to move. Then I was running the few steps to the bike, wrapping the hammer in a copy of the Daily Star that I’d brought along expressly for that purpose, dropping it into my pannier and clumsily hopping on the bike, then heading for the river as fast as I could pedal against a strong wind that had come up all of a sudden. As far as I could tell, Colleran hadn’t made any sound except for the soft “clump” as he collapsed.
A good twelve days passed before I had my first visit from the detectives.
By the end of that first meeting, I was already thinking of the detectives as “the two Ronnies”, and I imagined that I wasn’t the only one to whom this comparison had occurred. They were, naturally, of contrasting physical types though neither of them resembled one of the original Ronnies. Detective Sergeant Roy (not Ronald) Browne was a gaunt, cadaverous figure with a heavy five-o’clock shadow (at 10 am) who, in spite of a slight stoop, contrived to give the impression of being even taller than, at 1.85 metres, he actually was. Unlike him, Detective Constable Vicky (not Veronica) Dennis could not be described as skinny though she carried not a gram of superfluous weight. I believe the type is known as “hard body” and (though know nothing about the subject) I hadn’t a moment’s doubt that she would make a useful boxer. What’s more, her posture suggested that she was well aware of the fact.
“You’re an acquaintance of Dr. Benjamin Colleran, isn’t that the case?”
I noticed that Browne had used the present tense. I’d have to be careful to do the same.
“From Queen Mary? I’ve met him maybe a couple of times. ‘Acquaintance’ might be a bit of a stretch.”
“How did you happen to meet him?”
“He taught — still teaches, for all I know — a course that my former girlfriend was doing.”
“That would be Lucy Duchesne?”
I’d been about to correct Browne’s pronunciation of “Lucy” when I noticed that he’d rendered “Duchesne” flawlessly. I smiled.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You describe Ms. Duchesne as your ‘former’ girlfriend. When did you split up?”
“Nearly three months ago. Ten weeks. Eleven nearly.”
“And why, may I ask?”
“Indeed you may, detective sergeant. I’ve asked myself many times. I’d ask Lucie if she gave me the opportunity.” Browne waited expectantly. “We had a row. I can only assume that Lucie thought it was more serious than I did. I went for a walk to cool off and, when I got back, she’d taken her things and gone. I haven’t seen her since. It all seems …” But I had no desire to tell him how it seemed.
“Was the ‘row’ about Colleran?”
“About Colleran? What a …” I attempted to mime “ridiculous idea” without actually putting it on the record. “Now that I think of it, I suppose he was at the root of it. Lucie had been drinking with him in the student bar and was late home. I overreacted. I told her repeatedly and at length that she could and should have phoned to let me know she’d be late.”
“You overreacted. Why was that, do you think?”
“Annoyed that I’d missed the fun, I suppose.”
“Did you suspect that Colleran and Lucie had been having a sexual relationship?”
“No,” I responded, truthfully and firmly.
“Because they had. I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it. Colleran told his head of department that he couldn’t mark Lucie’s essays or exam papers because of a conflict of interest. That means they were having an affair.”
“Or that they’d just had a one night stand,” I pointed out. “Or …” But I didn’t want to be accused of deliberately obstructing a police investigation.
“Oh, I see. When you said you didn’t suspect them of having a sexual relationship, you meant that you knew it for a fact. Did she tell you?”
“She … she said they’d slept together. Just that night. I …” Should I tell them that I believed that he’d coerced her? If I came out with it later they were bound to wonder why I hadn’t mentioned it before. On the other hand, I was pretty sure it was a bad idea to volunteer information unnecessarily. Apart from that, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to offer a convincing explanation of why Lucie maintained that she’d been a willing participant when in fact she hadn’t.
“Why are you asking about this anyway? Has something happened to Lucie?”
“As far as we have been able to determine, she’s spending a few weeks with her family in the Pyrenees. No, we’re investigating the attempted murder of Dr. Colleran.”
Merely attempted? “What happened to him?”
“He was the victim of a hammer attack. It left him with a fractured skull. Possible brain damage.”
“Brain damage? Possible brain damage? You mean …?”
“He’s in a coma. There’s apparently a chance that he’ll recover but the doctors are unwilling to quantify it, at least to us.”
“Is he suffering? In pain?”
“That’s thought to be unlikely but, again, nobody can be entirely sure.”
Not dead, and possibly in pain but, if so, unable to communicate that fact. This was a long way from what I had planned. I felt sick. I must have looked it, too.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“Um, yes. It’s a bit upsetting. Shocking even.”
“But you said you’d met Dr. Colleran just the once.” This was the first time the detective constable had spoken. “That he was barely an acquaintance?”
“It’s true. It’s just that I tend to be unusually empathic where pain and injury are concerned. Just a quirk of my personality. I can’t hear about a hammer attack without imagining that it’s happening to me.” Where the hell had that come from?
“Is there any reason why you should imagine this particular hammer attack might happen to you?” Dennis again. Brown shot her a strange look. I merely looked puzzled, as if I had no idea how to respond to the question, as indeed I hadn’t.
Browne said that was all the needed from me for the moment and that they’d get in touch if they wanted to ask me any more questions. They left me alone.
I have no clear recollection of how the next few days passed. Thinking about Colleran’s condition was almost unbearable but, to my relief, I seemed to be able to go for considerable periods, hours at a time, without thinking about it. I endured only one sleepless night in the several days that passed before my next encounter with Detective Constable Vicky Dennis. Surprisingly enough, that took place in the newsagent’s.
Since becoming a blogger, and perhaps even a little bit before, I’d stopped buying a newspaper regularly, instead I began to cherrypick items that interested me from a variety of newspaper and other news websites. After the attack on Colleran I had, without making an intentional decision, begun to avoid national news, which was probably why the detectives’ disclosure that he hadn’t been killed had been such a surprise. Immediately after they’d left, I began to search the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent sites for mentions of his name. The Telegraph had a short item dated the day after the assault which indicated that he’d been seriously injured but had survived. It was clear that the police were treating the case as an attempted murder but there was nothing to indicate whether they had any suspects or thought that an arrest was imminent.
I found myself obsessively checking headlines for a clue to the state of the investigation, often going into a newsagent’s where I’d scan the row of dailies without buying one. It was in one such shop that I ran into the DC.
“Well, this is a surprise,” I muttered, feeling as if I’d been caught in some kind of incriminating action. To dissemble my interest in the newspapers, I grabbed a cycling magazine.
“Are you the athletic type, then?”
“God, no, not really. I buy this occasionally, just to … um.”
“But you do ride a bike?”
“Yes. In fact, I’m thinking of getting a new one. I was going to buy this for the ads.”
“You should look online. We think Colleran’s attacker may have made his … or her, getaway on a bike.”
Her? Was she been open-minded about the suspects list, or trying to lull me into a false sense of security?
“How can you tell that?” It seemed a question that a genuinely interested member of the public might ask.
“That’s not something I can tell you. Evidence that might be used in court, if we ever manage to charge anybody.”
“Not going well, then?”
“The DS and I don’t see entirely eye to eye. But that’s nothing unusual. Did you and Lucie ever go cycling together?”
“Not really.”
“But she has a bike, too.”
“Yes. It’s handy for getting to college. I don’t think she uses it much apart from that.”
Before I had time to think about what I was doing, I heard myself ask the DC if she had time for a coffee “or something”. To my surprise, she accepted readily. I then pushed my luck and suggested that, as it was already noon, perhaps we should get some lunch. I could see what I was doing, and the rational part of me was insisting that it didn’t make sense. I was testing her, acting on the belief that she wouldn’t want to get into a social situation with a suspect. Therefore, if she agreed to have lunch with me, it followed that, for the time being, I wasn’t under suspicion. The flaw in that approach was that I was quite certain that I wasn’t Vicky Dennis’s type, any more than she was mine, so it was odds on that she’d blow me off anyway, whether I was a suspect or not. And then I’d be no wiser, but would have exacerbated my anxieties. But Vicky surprised me again, by suggesting a nearby café.
Over bacon rolls and strong milky tea, I at first tried to avoid seeming too interested in the attack on Colleran but Vicky, while cagey, was evidently willing to talk about certain aspects of the case. It crossed my mind that there was no reason why I shouldn’t be interested: Colleran was somebody I had met, and the circumstances were interesting in themselves. So, while I already had the information that I wanted — I was not a suspect, at least not yet — I allowed myself the luxury of a little gentle probing. Vicky revealed that certain “material” had been discovered at the scene and was now undergoing testing for DNA. They’d shortly know whether there was a match. I surmised that this must come from the tights which, I’d noticed after I’d got home that night, had been ripped at some point during the attack or its aftermath.
I’d since burned what was left of the tights, together with the newspaper in which I’d wrapped the hammer. My DNA wasn’t on record, so I wasn’t particularly worried about a match. At least not yet. I was annoyed with myself for leaving any evidence behind but my annoyance was somewhat tempered by the realization that no real harm had been done. I reassured myself that, now that the attack on Colleran was over, the scope for further errors was greatly reduced.
Obviously, when one cracks somebody’s skull with a hammer, there’s a high probability that one will be spattered with blood, bone splinters and/or brain tissue from the victim. I’d dealt with this risk by wearing (with the exception of the tights) clothes that I’d bought from Oxfam especially for the purpose and afterwards washed thoroughly and redonated to the Notting Hill Housing Trust.
Vicky also told me that, while the actual crime had not been recorded by closed circuit tv — I’d been very careful about that — they had footage of a hooded figure on a bike heading eastwards along the river within a few minutes of the assault. The police believed was that this might be the assailant preparing to dispose of the weapon. Of course, the hammer could have been thrown in the river at any point but there were several good reasons why Rotherhithe was a likely spot, so a search by divers of the river bed in that area had been ordered. You never knew your luck. The hammer wasn’t all that heavy but its relatively high mass meant there was a good chance it might not have been washed downstream.
This, I admit, did give me pause. I’d worn cycling gloves to and from the scene but, to avoid any risk that the hammer might slip, I’d removed them for the actual blow. I had, of course, wiped the handle thoroughly before ditching the hammer in the river. For grip, the handle had an uneven rubber-like surface. That meant it was almost impossible to wipe thoroughly, though I thought it also meant it would be unlikely to retain fingerprints in the first place. In any case, I hadn’t expected it to be recoverable. Still, not yet time to panic. Vicky had admitted that it was a long shot.
Apart from the few minor anxieties that it occasioned, our lunch was a success. I can’t quite say how it happened but I came away from it with Vicky’s mobile phone number and a tentative arrangement for a further meeting “in a few days”. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I reassured myself with the thought that, at the very least, it meant I hadn’t fallen under suspicion.
In spite of the reassurance, I recognized in myself the signs of mounting anxiety. If I was to avoid giving myself away to the detectives, I needed to get myself calm and to appraise the situation coolly. I hadn’t disposed of the bicycle after the attack. I was known to have one, of course. I took the view that there was nothing particularly identifiable about it that was likely to show up in the CCTV images of the presumed attacker heading off to dispose of the weapon in the river. I’d bought the bike secondhand in a market nearly two years before and it was painted a featureless dark blue. There was nothing remarkable about it. If I wanted to soothe my agitation with exercise, there was nothing to stop me from taking a long cycle ride instead of a long walk. But in these circumstances of indecision, I’ve always found walking more to my taste than cycling. And, in any case, I hadn’t ridden the bike since that night.
“Do you think our attacker might be a woman?”
Vicky had agreed to meet me in a bar on Liverpool Road. Though, as I’ve already mentioned, she was decidedly not my type and I was under no illusion as to my being hers, there was no denying that she was a strikingly good-looking and unabashedly sexy woman, and I was enjoying being seen in her company. Our encounter was not in any sense a date but I was aware that that would not be apparent to an outside observer. To all appearances, we were a man and a woman meeting in a bar in Islington and carrying on a whispered, intense and seemingly intimate conversation. It’s good for a man’s ego to be seen in such a situation with a woman like Vicky. I liked it and, I was a little surprised to discover, I quite liked her as a person. I hoped we could repeat the experience.
I knew immediately which attack she had in mind and it didn’t cross my mind to play dumb. “A woman? I don’t see why not. Have you any reason to think it might be?”
“That’s just it. I don’t think we have. The sergeant disagrees. He says a hammer is a woman’s weapon, and that the one used in this case fits the bill particularly well. Heavy enough to do the damage, yet small and light enough to be wielded by a member of the weaker sex.”
I was sure that Browne hadn’t actually uttered the term “weaker sex” though Vicky had probably been correct to understand that that was what he meant. But that wasn’t the thing that struck me about what she’d just said.
“A hammer? You’ve found the weapon, then?”
“Afraid not. But we’ve a good idea of the size, shape and weight from the effect it had on Colleran’s skull. Also, we can tell that the attacker is neither particularly tall nor particularly strong. It could be a woman. I’m just not convinced.”
“Why not?”
“I think the sergeant’s jumping to conclusions. A hammer is, I admit, a suitable weapon for a woman. Therefore, when a hammer is used in an attack, we should look at women first? It doesn’t follow.”
“No, it doesn’t. But it does mean that you shouldn’t concentrate your attention solely on men.”
At that, Vicky just nodded and gave me a vague and rather absent smile.