‘Dunno. Maybe. Zeb was well into toot – cocaine,’ he added for my benefit.
‘Did he get it from Joey?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t think so. Just something Ahktar said one time about how much he spent on it and how miserable he still was.’
‘But Joey could have got it for him?’
‘Oh, yeah. Joey’d do anything if he thought it got him in with you. He’s like a little kid really.’
I asked Luke what he’d been told of the sequence of events that night – or what had been implied by the police and the prosecution.
He blew a breath out, shifted in his seat. ‘They reckon I stabbed him. Outside the club, there’s a small alley behind the side entrance, there’s bins there. That’s where they found us. Together,’ he whispered. ‘It’s quiet round there. The taxis and that, the buses, town – it’s all in the other direction.’
‘Who found you?’
‘Dunno, someone rang an ambulance, don’t know who. It was too late for Ahktar.’
‘Were you awake?’
‘No, they couldn’t rouse me.’
‘And the witnesses they’ve got?’
He pressed his hands onto his knees and swayed in the chair ‘They saw me and Ahktar fighting, shouting, they say I had a knife. They say I stabbed him.’ He spaced out his words, trying to hold himself together. ‘I didn’t,’ he insisted, ‘I didn’t.’
But they identified him.
‘Did you have a knife?’
‘No,’ he was emphatic, ‘I’ve never carried a knife. They’re saying I borrowed it or took it, it’s like one Joey D had.’
‘Could Joey have hurt Ahktar?’
‘No, he’s all mouth. He’s no hard man. He’d run a mile.’
‘The knife was there?’
He rolled his eyes back and blinked hard. ‘It was still in him – there was just one wound. My fingerprints were on the knife.’
Even worse. But there was more than one way to get prints on a knife – trying to remove it, for example.
Before I left I asked Luke to keep thinking about that night and stressed that if he remembered any other details, to tell me about them. I had left my card with reception, it would be given to Luke at an appropriate time, presumably once they’d checked it hadn’t been soaked with hallucinogens.
I told him who I planned to talk to and made sure he had no objection to me asking my questions. I also asked him to consider hypnosis. His amnesia, probably due to the cocktail of drink and drugs he’d taken, was a terrible obstacle to his defence. And while information from somebody under hypnosis probably wouldn’t be admitted in court, it could still help me to find witnesses to the crime and might even give a lead as to who’d stabbed Ahktar.
I knew it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility for Luke to have done it, but then it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility for me to win the Lottery. Except I don’t buy tickets. I prefer to work with probabilities. And Luke probably didn’t kill Ahktar. Someone else probably did, and they were escaping detection. The police had enough evidence to believe that a reasonable jury would find Luke guilty. The thought made me uneasy. Much of their case rested on the witnesses they’d got. It was vital I found out what they’d seen and established whether they could have been mistaken or whether I was up to my neck in a lost cause.
I stood up and went to the partition, motioned to the guard who was standing along the corridor.
‘When you see his parents,’ Luke said, ‘will you tell them I’m sorry, tell them I didn’t do it? They think I did. They wouldn’t talk to my dad. Tell them.’
‘I will.’ If they’ll talk to me, I added to myself.
