Harry’s eyes went away for a moment. “Bits,” he admitted.
“Like what?”
“The morning. At home, you know. With my family.”
“Wife and kids?
“Mum and sisters.”
“What time did you get to work?” Joseph wanted to engineer Harry’s thoughts into some form of timeline. It might help to slot the pieces together, to remember things that had been forgotten.
“I’m not sure. I guess it were the normal time. Don’t remember. Mr Nadderley would have been on my case if I were late.”
“So, you got in on time, normal day and all that? What were you doing, or what would you have been doing, if you can’t remember?”
“It was all tidy up, wasn’t it? Place was chaos the night before, what with the fire and that.”
Ray smiled. “Right, so we’ve established you remember that. Wonder what else you can tell us?”
“Nothing,” Harry rasped.
“What time did you leave the docks?”
“I don’t remember leaving the docks.”
Ray barely gave him time to finish his answer. “Why did you need to go and see Tommy Jay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who did you talk to there?” Another quick-fire question as Ray tried to throw Harry off guard. Catch him out so that his mouth answered quicker than his brain.
“I can’t remember.”
“What’s your business with him?”
“I can’t remember.”
Ray paused, tipping his head to the side a little as if he’d misheard something. Harry didn’t react. He hadn’t realised that he had done exactly what Ray had guessed he might.
“You can’t remember what your business is with Tommy Jay? I’ve got to be honest, Harry, I think if I had business with one of the South East London’s most notable criminals, I would know what it was. I might not want to say, certainly not to the police, but I’d know.”
Harry shook his head and sighed. “I don’t remember being there. I don’t remember why I was there. I can’t argue with the fact I was, can I?” He gestured at his face.
“You mean, you had nothing to do with him beforehand?”
“Never,” Harry insisted, pleading his innocence. “Listen. I don’t get involved in all that. You have to believe me. I got my mum; I got my sisters. I’m the one putting money in the house, putting food in the bloody cupboards.”
Something had snapped inside him. If he’d been told to keep his mouth shut and say nothing by someone, that advice wasn’t being heeded now.
“If I ain’t at work, they’ve got nothing. They’re done for, ain’t they? I can’t be risking it. I can’t be risking nothing. If you think for one moment I’d be stupid enough to mix with them and lose everything, and I mean everything, not just for me, but for them and all, then you ain’t got a clue.” Tears formed in the corner of his crusted eyes. One or two found their way through the cracks and crags of his broken face.
“Well, that leaves us with a real little conundrum, doesn’t it?” Ray’s voice remained impassive. If he’d been moved by Harry’s pleas, he didn’t show it. “You say you’d have nothing to do with Tommy Jay, because you stand to lose everything, but we find you outside his warehouse, then someone comes along and beats you to a bloody pulp just minutes later. Now, somewhere in that story, we’ve got a missing part. If you really want to help yourself Harry, you need to help us.”
Harry looked at them both defiantly, first Ray then Joseph. “I don’t remember,” he said firmly.
*
“That boy is going to crack,” Ray said as they exited the ward. “I’m not too worried about that. What I am worried about is the fact that he is going to crack.”
“What do you mean?” Joseph wondered if he had misheard his partner.
“He’s going to tell us what we need to know. I know that. Thing is, I imagine whoever doesn’t want him to talk also knows that. It’s probably why we found him getting the living daylights knocked out of him.”
“You don’t think they’ll try and kill him?” It sounded drastic to Joseph, but not implausible, especially if he did know the identity of Gerald’s killer. Or indeed, had carried out the killing himself on someone else’s orders.
“I’d guess that what we interrupted was a warning. He keeps his mouth shut and he’ll be okay sort of thing. If we hadn’t been there, then it would have been all right for him. He could have had a day off work, come back in, passed it off as some sort of bar-room brawl or something.”
Dread filled Joseph as he realised what they’d done. What he’d done. “But because we stopped the attack, because we saw it happen and where he was, we’ll have to put him under the spotlight. We’ll push him until he tells us what he knows, or…”
“Someone will shut him up first.” Ray frowned. He clearly didn’t like the situation they found themselves in.
“So how do we help him?”
“Help might be a bit of a reach. He’s involved in this somehow. Whatever we do is going to result in him not being there to look after his family. I doubt there’s any part of him that would call that help.”
“What then?”
“If the best we can do is stop him from having to turn on the people he’s involved with, we at least get to stop him being killed. And the only way we do that is by solving this case quickly.”
