Page 46 of A Slow Fire Burning

Egg pursed his lips, his expression pained.

“Do you think this is funny, Laura?” Eyebrow asked. “Do you think this is a joke?”

“Itisa fucking joke, yes! Because I’ve already told you about Daniel Sutherland. I’ve already told you, we argued, shoved each other around a bit, and that was it. I did not stab him. We’ve been over all this and you’ve got nothing—you’ve got fuck all, haven’t you, it’s just that you haven’t found anyone else, so now you’ve got me back in here, and you’re harassing me?”

She turned to Nervous Guy. “They need to put up or shut up, don’t they?” Nervous Guy looked down at the notepad in front of him, its pages blank. Fuck’s sake, he really wasn’t much use, was he? “You need to charge me or let me go.”

Egg leaned back in his chair and looked her in the eye as he calmly explained that, in addition to a witness who had seen her, bloody and agitated, leaving the scene of the crime around the time of Daniel Sutherland’s death, they had her DNA on his body, andhis on hers. They also had the fact that she had stolen a watch from him. Moreover, he said, the analysis that had been carried out on her T-shirt showed that, although the majority of the blood present in the fabric belonged to her, a small but significant amount had been detected that belonged to Daniel Sutherland.

“Can you explain that, Laura?” Egg asked. “If, as you say, Daniel was still alive and well when you left, how do you explain the presence ofhisblood onyourclothing?”

•••

Turns out,Daniel had said, sometime in the early hours, when he’d finished for the second time,gimp-fucking isn’t really my thing. It came out of nowhere, that. She hadn’t been ready for the casual cruelty of it. She knew Daniel wasn’t exactly anice guy—she wouldn’t have gone with him if he had been, she didn’t like nice guys, nice guys usually turned out to be the worst—but she hadn’t expectedthat. She hadn’t expected him to push her away, to laugh when she stumbled and fell—not a forced laugh either, a real one, as though he genuinely thought it was funny. When she got up, she could hardly see for rage; she went for him so fast she caught him off guard. She saw the look on his face. For a moment, just a fraction of a second, he was afraid.

•••

“Laura?” Eyebrow this time,leaning forward over the table. “Can you? Can you explain the presence of Sutherland’s blood on your T-shirt?”

“I bit him,” Laura said.

“You bit him?” Eyebrow repeated, deadly serious, and as hard as Laura tried to mirror Eyebrow’s straight face, she just couldn’t; she started to laugh again, because how could she not? This wasserious, itwasdeadly fucking serious, and she looked across the table at the detectives and she laughed and laughed and they, for their part, looked unhappy (Egg) and self-satisfied (Eyebrow).

At her side, Nervous Guy twitched. He raised his palms, spread his fingers, and looked at her as if to say,What the fuck?“I bit him hard, here”—Laura pointed to a place on her neck, above the clavicle—“and I drew blood. I had blood in my mouth, on my lips, I wiped it away. I must have got it on my shirt.”

Eyebrow smirked, shaking her head as she did. “Is that it?” she asked. “Is that your explanation?”

“It is, yeah. Ask your forensics people,” Laura said. “Ask them if there was a bite on his neck.”

“Given the position of his stab wounds,” Egg said quietly, “it’s possible that we wouldn’t be able to tell—”

“Hah!” Laura barked, leaning back in her chair with a smile, victorious.

“But I don’t think it’s very likely that a bite would account for the blood that we found, unless the bite was extremely deep. Was it?” Egg asked.

Laura swallowed. “Well, no. I’m not a fucking vampire, am I? There was a bit of a scuffle. Something broke, maybe a plate, a glass, I don’t know. A glass. Was there glass on the floor? Bet there was. He had blood on his... on his hand, I think, and he pushed me—yes, he pushed me in the face, because I remember, I had it, I had blood on my face, when I got home. He pushed me in the face, and maybe again on my chest, as he moved past me.” Beside her, Nervous Guy scribbled furiously on his notepad.

“You didn’t mention this before, Laura,” Egg said. “Why didn’t you say any of this before?”

“It didn’t matter,” Laura said. “It didn’t—”

“Of course itmattered—it matters when you lie to the police,”Egg said, his voice strained. “Why wouldn’t you just tell us that? Why would you lie about something like this?”

“Whywouldn’tI lie?” Laura snapped. “I was already in trouble—I’m always in fucking trouble—I just didn’t want to make it worse. I lied, all right?” She was shouting. “I lied then but I’m telling the truth now.”

From somewhere—Laura couldn’t say where; perhaps she had a bag of tricks beneath the table—Eyebrow pulled out a plastic bag, which she placed on the table between them. Laura stared at it.

“What can you tell us about this, Laura?” Eyebrow asked.

Laura opened her mouth and then closed it again. “What can I...?” She was going to laugh again; she bit down hard on her lower lip. “What can I tell you about it? It’s a knife, by the looks of things. It’s a small... smallish knife. It has a black handle. Wooden, I suppose. There’s something on the blade. I have no idea what it is, but I’m guessing—”

“Don’t guess,” Nervous Guy interjected sharply.

“Yeah. Okay. Good point. What can I tell you about it? I can tell you it looks like a knife that I’ve never seen before.”

Egg nodded. “All right. Well, would it surprise you to hear that we found this knife in your flat?”

Laura shook her head. “No... I mean,yes! Yes, of course it would fucking surprise me, I just told you I’d never seen it before, it’s not mine. It’s not.” She got to her feet. “It’s not!”

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