Ending the Debt

I told Detective Constable Naomi Clarke everything I knew about Silas Reeves, and almost nothing about Kit Bellamy, which turned out to be a harder needle to thread across a table than I’d let myself imagine on the drive there.

“You’re telling me you have footage of two men making a threatening debt collection inside a commercial premises,” she said, for the third time, turning a page of her own notes without looking up, “and financial records suggesting unlicensed lending laundered through a chain of betting shops, and you’re asking me to take all of that without telling me whose debt it was.”

“I’m telling you it was Kit Bellamy’s, because you’d find that out in an afternoon anyway and I’d rather you heard it from me.” I’d rehearsed this part on the Tube, the way I used to rehearse pitch lines in the shower, and it still came out…