Jamaica Plain (9780738736396) by Colin Campbell Page B

he’d be on a plane home.
    â€œLet me make this easy for you. Try receiving instead of transmitting for a change. First, there’ll be no charges against you. Second, you answer all my questions in the negative and you’ll be walking out of here in half an hour.”
    Sergeant Rooney coughed loudly and shook his head. He held one finger up.
    Grant amended his speech. “One hour. So let’s keep things simple.”
    Sullivan twitched. The Irish prisoner with the black eye took his property bag and glanced at the nervous Englishman. Rooney barked an order and the prisoner tucked the bag under one arm and left. Grant tilted his head to one side. “Okay?”
    Sullivan nodded, which wasn’t much different than his twitch, so Grant pressed for an answer. The skinny wretch spoke in a whisper. “Okay.”
    Grant waved a hand at the sergeant. “We’re good to go. That way, is it?”
    Sergeant Rooney pointed at the door into the station and pressed the release button. The lock buzzed and Grant pushed the door open. He gestured for Sullivan to go through, then followed, carrying a sheaf of papers and a pair of audiotapes. The door slammed shut behind them.
    A short walk down two internal corridors and they were at the door he’d gone through twice already, in the opposite direction. There was a lock-release button on the wall next to it. He pressed it and led the way into the reception area. It was still busy. He navigated through the crowd to a room at the far end marked Interview 1 . He used the key he’d been given and opened the door. Sullivan threw nervous glances at the faces around him, then went inside.
    Grant followed and closed the door.
    Outside, a figure wearing a grey sweatshirt with the hood up looked through the glass of the front doors, then signaled to someone around the corner. There were just twenty-five minutes to go.
    The interview room was cramped and square and completely functional. There was a solid metal table pushed against the far wall, with two heavy chairs on either side. A twin tape-recording deck sat on the table with the tape caddies open and empty. A wired glass window with vertical shades let in morning sunshine from Washington Street. Apart from that, the room was empty.
    Grant indicated for Sullivan to sit on the far side of the table, then pulled out a chair nearest the tape deck. He waited for Sullivan to sit down, then sat himself. He shuffled the papers into a neat square and began unwrapping the cellophane from the twin pack of tapes. “Right, Freddy. Here’s how it goes.”
    He looked for a waste bin for the cellophane. There wasn’t one.
    â€œThis is a formal interview just so we can say it’s been done, but the objective is this. There’s no evidence. No witnesses. You deny everything. Interview over. You go home. I write the crime off. Undetected.”
    It went against the grain. Grant put a brave face on it, but this was the opposite of everything he stood for. Bad guys did bad things. It was up to the good guys to stop them. Grant was one of the good guys. Always had been. This didn’t feel like being a good guy.
    Sullivan looked like he was giving serious consideration to Grant’s words. The concentration on his face was nothing new. Grant remembered it from the days before the Sullivan family emigrated, a great day for Ravenscliffe. If someone asked Sullivan whether the sky was up or down, he would still spend a long time making his mind up. “I say that—then I’m out of here?”
    â€œGone baby gone.”
    Sullivan smiled. “Filmed that around here.”
    Grant stopped loading the tapes. “What?”
    â€œ Gone Baby Gone . They filmed that in JP.”
    â€œThe missing kid film?”
    â€œYeah. Set in Boston. Some of it in Jamaica Plain.”
    â€œYou get a part in it? Walk-on? Background?”
    â€œNaw. They didn’t want my face getting