Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [10]
In the interrogation room, Sheppard waited while Pepin collected himself. The suspect had been leaning forward with his elbows on the table, staring at his folded hands, but then sat up and rubbed the back of his wrist across his runny nose and sniffed, pressing his forearms across his wet eyes. He cleared his throat, crossed his arms, and seemed strong suddenly, focused and ready. “All right,” he said, “ask away.” He was a large man, heavy-boned and sausage-fingered with coarse black hair bristling on his arms, so thickly, Sheppard thought, that you could rest a pencil on it. He grew his black mustache down to his beard and had combed his thick black hair straight back. He looked like a biker, a Hells Angel, so if you weren’t careful you might underestimate his intelligence. And there was an undeniable handsomeness about him, a startling confidence in his barrel-chested physicality and sloe-eyed gaze—a surprisingly regal charisma, Sheppard observed. He looked like a Jewish Henry VIII.
“Let’s backtrack a little,” Sheppard said. “Where were you today? Take me through it.”
He had the basic story but now wanted Pepin to expand it, to tell it again so he could watch for the telltale signs: details dropped or added, narrative inconsistencies, lies and their microgestures—split-second tells—with the body giving you away as blatantly as a kid waving behind a TV reporter. There were too many of these to count: liars often turned their shoulders away from the questioner, increased their blinking, or fiddled with the nearest thing they could find. Like actors, they needed props. They breathed shallowly. Their eyes darted. They swallowed excessively when the mouth went dry. Their pupils dilated, widening visibly, like a camera shutter expanding. They had a whole array of facial tics, whether crinkling the nose, tightening the lips, or narrowing their eyes, miniexertions that carved lines in the face over time, grooves you could learn to read like hieroglyphics. Of course, Sheppard thought, a lie didn’t become untruth until another person was present. After that—especially during an interrogation—it was like an invisible, physical thing between two people, push and push back, something Sheppard felt in his very core. Yet truth tellers had their own tics: they stared off to the left, their gaze drifting inward, memory taking over. They went still when they spoke and weren’t necessarily articulate. In fact, verbosity or fluency—seamless storytelling—was to be trusted least of all. But when they told the truth, ironically, the innocent often appeared utterly arrested.
“Did you go to work this morning?” Sheppard asked.
“I was going to, but then I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to see my wife. I had a surprise for her.”
“And what was that?”
“A present for her birthday,” Pepin said. “I’d bought us a trip.”
“To where?”
“Australia.”
Sheppard raised his eyebrows. “How long were you going away for?”
“Indefinitely.”
“You mean weeks? Months?”
Pepin shrugged. “I mean we didn’t have a return date.”
It took all of Sheppard’s willpower at this revelation not to turn around and stare at the one-way glass. “And had you been planning this for a while?”
“No,” Pepin said, “not exactly.”
“Well, yes or no?”
“We’d talked about it last year. Alice mentioned that she’d always wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef. But I hadn’t planned it or anything. We hadn’t.”
“So it was a spur of the moment sort of thing.”
“Yes.”
“That’s quite a trip for the spur of the moment.”
Pepin shrugged.
“It’s not even really a trip,” Sheppard said. “It’s more like a permanent vacation.”
“We didn’t talk about it like that.”
“When did you buy the tickets?”
Pepin sat back, looking away sheepishly. “This morning.”
For the first time since they’d talked, Sheppard’s gut tingled. “And when was Alice’s birthday?”
“Next week.”
“But you had to give her the gift today?”
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t contain yourself? Couldn’t wait until she got home?”
“No.”
Sheppard considered this. “When were you leaving?”
“Tonight.”
Sheppard nodded. He picked up his pencil and tapped