She is hot. The room feels airless. It doesn’t help there are four of them in such a small room. She notices a peeling sign on the wall about how to adjust the air conditioning. She watches the officer’s finger hovering above the button on the recorder.
He pushes the button. She hears him take a deep breath before speaking.
‘Okay, this interview is being tape recorded and may be used in evidence if your case is brought to trial, the time is nineteen eighteen.’
She looks over at her son, her boy, sitting there. He is staring down at the desk, his eyes glistening, his breathing noisy through a blocked nose. She hasn’t seen him cry yet. He is self-conscious about it. Trying to hide it.
‘Present in the interview is PC James Burke, 577 and…’ He turns to the boy. ‘Please state your name, address and date of birth for the recording.’
He does as he is told, his voice quiet but clear.
‘And your solicitor, who is…’
The solicitor gives his name and firm.
‘And given your age, an appropriate adult who is…’
She coughs. ‘Helen Donovan. His mother.’
She wonders if they attempted to call Dave. Whether he had heard them ring. What he had been doing. He rarely seems to bother answering his phone, blaming work.
‘Thank you. Right, you are entitled to free and independent legal advice…’
It’s so loud to her that she thinks that maybe the others can hear her heart hammering in her chest. She wants to touch her son, just to let him know she is there. She aches to hold his hand, the soft cold skin on his fingers, squeeze it tight like when he was younger and they were crossing the road together. Constantly telling him to look both ways. She notices now in looking at his hands the thin slivers of blood near his fingernails where he’s picked at the skin when nervous despite the number of times she’s told him it will get infected. Her brother did the same thing as a kid and one of his fingers swelled up like a sausage.
‘I must caution you, so, you do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?
He nods and sniffs again.
‘Can you look up, please? I need you to explain that to me in your own words.’
He looks up, his face pink. She noticed a similar look on his face when she’d picked him up from school a year or so ago. He’d been trying to sell football stickers to his friends at an inflated price. Dave had thought that the boy should be applauded. Using his nose for business was how he’d put it. Bullying kids into giving him money was how the school had seen it. The boy hadn’t looked that confident when she’d seen him in the school office though. His little face, trying to be brave, his lower lip jutting out in defiance.
His voice wavers as he responds.
‘Okay, thank you. Now you were arrested today on an offence of robbery. Can you tell me what happened?’
He sniffs again, and mutters something.
‘What was that?’
‘Speak up,’ she says, quietly.
‘The tape won’t pick it up otherwise.’
‘I…’ He sniffs again. ‘Got arrested.’
The officer nods slightly. ‘Yes. But what happened prior to the arrest?’
‘It was Nathan’s fault.’
‘Okay.’
She can hear the faint hum of a hoover somewhere in the building.
‘Nathan told me to do it with him. I didn’t want to do it but he said I had to.’
‘Okay. So Nathan was responsible for the robbery?’
She knows Nathan, of course. A boy slightly taller than her son. Always wears his hood up, hiding hair that is thick and straggly. Has one of those faces that seems to be smirking a lot of the time. Barely says two words to her yet she hears him swearing through the thin walls of her son’s bedroom when they are both in there playing computer games. She doesn’t like him. He is one of those friends she feels her son has been stuck with rather than someone he would have chosen. Nathan is trouble, she’d thought and she’d been bloody right. She shouldn’t have just hinted that he should be dropped, she should have told her son that Nathan couldn’t come to the house anymore. But there had been other distractions and Dave had been no help, telling her that if she made a big deal of it their son would just attach himself tighter to Nathan.
‘He told me to do it.’ Her boy sniffs. ‘We were just on the field, playing football when we saw them. Nathan shouted at them, told them to come over to us. Told them to give us their money and their phones.’
‘Did they come over to you?’
‘They did but they said they couldn’t give them to us. But then we made them do it.’
What is Nathan saying in his interview, she wonders. Is he putting all the blame on her son?
‘How did you make them do it?’
He stops and sniffs again, looks down at the desk, and mutters something.
‘Speak up please,’ the officer says.
He looks up. ‘I showed them the knife.’
The sigh, tiny really, drags out of her. She bites her lip, embarrassed, wonders if the recording would have picked it up. The officer looks over briefly, but doesn’t say anything to her.
‘Okay, so, these people you asked to come over to you. Did you know them?’
‘Not really.’
‘Could you describe them?’
‘They were younger than me. A bit shorter than me. One was a bit taller, more my height.’
‘How tall are you?’
‘I don’t know, four foot ten. Something like that.’
She frowns. They don’t teach them imperial measurements at school anymore, she catches herself thinking. As if that matters.
‘Okay. How old is Nathan?’
‘Twelve.’
‘And he’s got a description of brown hair, slim, about five foot two. Is that right?’
The boy nods.
‘Speak up for the recording please.’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay and you’re five foot, how else would you describe yourself?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Come on, you must know what you look like.’
‘I don’t know. Brown hair, sort of.’
‘Sort of or definitely?’
‘I don’t know. Could be black, maybe.’
‘It’s not black,’ she says. Then she looks at the officer. Again, his expression is unreadable. The solicitor shuffles his notes.
‘Okay, we have exhibit 435 which is a medium-sized kitchen knife.’
It is her vegetable knife on the table top, wrapped in a plastic bag. It must have been missing for a few days and she’d not even noticed. It doesn’t say much about them getting their five-a-day. The edge is so blunt that it can’t do much more than softer vegetables anyway, a few mushrooms, maybe an onion. She would swear as she attempted to saw her way through a couple of carrots. The handle is worn.
‘Is this the knife you showed to the others?’
‘Yes. I didn’t mean to do anything with it. Just Nathan told me to show it to them.’
‘Okay, so did they give you anything?’
‘The bigger one gave us his phone. The smaller one gave Nathan his money.’
‘Right.’
‘Nathan took the money out and then threw the wallet into a puddle. The smaller one was crying.’
‘What did you say then?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You were just standing there? Were you still pointing the knife at them?’
The boy looks down again, mutters.
‘Speak up.’
‘Yes.’
‘Even though you had already got the stuff from them?’
‘Yes.’
She should have noticed the knife was missing. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to ask him where it was but if she had mentioned it, kept going on about it, it might have made him pause. She assumed that Nathan must have bullied him into taking the knife with them.
‘What happened then?’
‘Just told them to run away and not tell anyone.’
‘And did they run away?’
‘Yes.’
‘So between you telling them to go and them leaving, you said nothing else?’
Her boy looks down.
She is sure she’s stopped breathing. The palms of her hands are damp. She rubs them slowly on the knees of her jeans.
The officer takes a deep breath before speaking. ‘Okay. One of the boys has said that before he ran off to go and find help, that before he turned to go, that you spat at him.’
He looks down, a louder sniff.
‘Did you spit at him?’ the officer asks.
‘No.’
‘Really? So he made it up?’
The boy looks up. ‘I just, as he was going…’ He sniffs again, though the tears are very close now, she notices. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’
The officer looks down at his notes, the room silent again. The solicitor shuffles, stretching as if he has pins and needles.
‘What were you planning to do with the phone?’
‘Sell it.’
‘Where?’
The boy looks away, first to her, and then to his solicitor. The solicitor looks up from his notes and shakes his head quickly.
‘No comment,’ the boy says, struggling over the words.
She looks down to see her hand is shaking and reaches over to hold it with the other.
The officer nods. ‘Okay. Is there anything else you’ve got to say?’
He sniffs and waits for a moment. ‘No.’
‘Are you sorry for what you did?’ the officer asks.
The boy nods.
‘You’ve got to say it for the recording.’
‘Yes, I am.’
She wonders if he is just sorry he got caught.
‘Do you think what you did was a nice thing to do?’ the officer asks.
‘No,’ the boy says, sounding annoyed. The tone of voice he often uses with her, even for banal everyday things, like when she asks whether he wants any tomato sauce on his chips.
The officer looks down at his notes. He clicks his pen.
‘Well, if that’s everything. Nothing else anyone wants to say? Robbie, is there anything you would like to add?’
Her boy looks up and shakes his head.
‘Right, well, if that’s the case, this interview is concluded at nineteen thirty six hours.’
He reaches over and switches off the recorder. ‘Are you all right?’ the officer asks. She is surprised on looking up that he is talking to her.
‘Well, no, of course I’m not. You’re interviewing Nathan about all this, aren’t you?’
The officer blinks. ‘We will, yes. We need to hear his side of the story.’
‘It’s just. We’re not that kind of family, you know what I mean? He’s from a good home and…’ She stops, beginning to cry. ‘I just don’t believe he would do something like this, he’s not…’
The solicitor sighs slightly, collecting up his notes.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ Robbie says, and starts to cry. She leans over and hugs him. The officer waits.
by Joanna Garbutt
Joanna Garbutt’s stories have been recently been broadcast on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and published in Literary Mama and Porridge. Her novel-in-progress was longlisted in the 2022 Bridport Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award. Her website is www.joannagarbutt.co.uk
Aayo Magazine 
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