LITMIR.BIZ

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to go back to school, did you?’

      ‘Well, no. We hit it off pretty well, you see, from the beginning. She started coming down to the arcades regular. I was a bit surprised, to be honest – she was a bit too upmarket for me, if you know what I mean. Not my usual type. But she was dead keen. Yeah, dead keen. And I didn’t say no. Well, you don’t, do you?’

      The curious smell was definitely coming from Holmes. Fry discounted the sweet smell of alcohol, the rank bite of cigarette smoke. No drugs she had ever come across smelled quite like that. Perhaps it was something to do with the motorbike leathers. Some kind of oil used to soften up the leather maybe, which was now being evaporated by the heat and humidity in the interview room. But to produce that sort of stink it would have to have been something like rancid pig fat.

      ‘Didn’t Laura get into trouble at school for breaking the rules?’ she asked.

      ‘Dunno. She never said. She wouldn’t have given a toss anyway.’

      ‘But her parents might have.’

      Holmes shrugged. ‘She didn’t talk about them much.’

      ‘Basically, you would say that Laura instigated the relationship?’ asked Hitchens.

      ‘What? Oh, yeah. She started it, all right. Dead keen, like I said.’

      ‘Had she had other boyfriends?’

      ‘Sure. She was no Little Miss Innocent. Don’t go getting that idea.’

      Fry leaned forward to put her next question.

      ‘When did you start having sex with her, Simeon?’

      Holmes looked from Hitchens to Fry, the worry that had been behind the grin coming to the surface now.

      ‘Look, this is about who killed her, right? That’s what you lot are bothered about. I mean, you’re not going to come on heavy about the age thing, are you?’

      ‘What do you mean, Simeon?’

      ‘Well, she told me she was sixteen, you know, but …’

      ‘You knew she was younger, didn’t you?’

      Holmes looked at Hitchens appealingly. ‘You’re not interested in that, are you? It isn’t important now, is it? Now she’s dead.’

      ‘That’s what I think too,’ said Hitchens.

      ‘Right. Well, I didn’t want you thinking I was making excuses, like. But, to be honest, she was gasping for it, big time. Couldn’t wait to get my trousers off. Being frank, like.’

      ‘Oh really?’

      ‘Well, it’s right. She wanted to do it all the time. We used to go into the park, or we’d get on the bike and drive out somewhere into the country. Up on the hills. She liked that.’

      ‘So you had sex often?’

      ‘All the time – well, every time we met, if we had long enough. And sometimes when we didn’t have long enough, too, if you know what I mean. Yeah.’

      Fry thought if Holmes grinned again she would have to slap the cuffs on him and read him his rights on a charge of offensive behaviour.

      ‘Was she a virgin before she met you?’ she asked.

      ‘No way.’

      ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘Well, look, for one thing you can tell when you do it the first time, you know. By how they react and other things.’ He hesitated, looking sideways at Fry. ‘Anyway, she knew what it was all about, all right. In any case, the lad that she’d asked about me, he’d already had her himself. He told me about her. Reckoned there had been others too.’

      ‘Plenty of boyfriends, then.’

      ‘Yeah. She was dead keen on the blokes.’

      ‘Were there other boyfriends while you were seeing her, perhaps?’

      ‘Dunno really. Could have been, I suppose. She never mentioned to me if she had.’

      ‘It wouldn’t be unusual, for the sort of girl you seem to be describing. She might even do it deliberately, to make you jealous.’

      ‘I’m not the jealous type,’ said Holmes. Then his smile shrank and faded, and he looked at Fry again. ‘Oh yeah, I see what you’re getting at. You’ve got an idea that I got jealous of some other bloke and bashed her, right? Well, you can forget that right off. She was OK, Laura, good fun. But things like that don’t last, you know? We all move on. It’s what I would have expected, for either her or me to find someone else and it’d be over. A good few weeks together, and that’s it. It wasn’t a problem. I didn’t see her as much in the holidays anyway – she couldn’t get away from the parents, you know.’

      ‘We have a witness who saw Laura talking to a young man on the path behind the Mount shortly before she was killed on Saturday night,’ said Hitchens.

      ‘It wasn’t me, mate. I’ve already told the other bloke where I was. I was at Matlock Bath with about fifty other bikers.’

      ‘Yes, so you said.’ Officers were already busy checking out the names and places Holmes had given to DS Morgan. Depending on what they came back with, the youth might have to be sent home for now.

      Fry would be pleased to get out of the interview room soon to get some fresh air, because the smell was becoming overpowering. She noticed Hitchens pull out a handkerchief as if to wipe his nose, but keeping it there a long time.

      ‘Besides,’ said Holmes, ‘I’ve never been near her place. Did someone say it was me they saw?’

      ‘Not specifically,’ said Hitchens.

      ‘There you are then.’

      Holmes was relaxing now. Fry hated to see him relaxing. He might start to grin again. ‘When you had sex with Laura,’ she said, ‘did you like to bite her?’

      He stared at her with distaste. ‘Get lost,’ he said.

      ‘You refuse to answer?’

      ‘It’s none of your business.’

      ‘Would you be willing to let us take a mould of your teeth?’ asked Hitchens.

      ‘What the hell for?’

      ‘To help eliminate you from our enquiries, Simeon. If you didn’t harm Laura Vernon, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about.’

      Simeon Holmes wasn’t quite so stupid as he pretended. Fry could see him figuring it out. A question about his sexual techniques, and a request for a mould from his teeth. They hadn’t exactly been subtle with their questions. Because of his casual manner, Holmes might be easy to underestimate. But he had a choice now. He could work out that a mould might prove his guilt, if he was guilty. But if he was innocent, it might also clear him and get the police off his back. Fry and Hitchens both waited patiently to see which way he would jump.

      ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

      Hitchens’s face fell in disappointment. But before he could say anything else, there was a knock on the door and DS Rennie stuck his head into the room. He did a quick double take at the fetid atmosphere and his face screwed up in disgust. Hitchens announced a break in the interview, switched off the tapes, and went out into the corridor to speak to Rennie.

      Left alone with Simeon Holmes, Fry was able to study him afresh. The young man met her eyes directly. But a layer of affectation seemed to have dropped away from him in the last few minutes, the final shreds of some assumed role dissipating as DI Hitchens left the room. Fry couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She didn’t think he had been lying during the interview. And yet … How old was Holmes? Seventeen?

      ‘You must be in the sixth form at the Community School now, Simeon,’ she said.

      Holmes raised his eyebrows,

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