Day 238

Writing exercise

…

She believed every one of his lies, the gaudier and more divorced from any semblance of possibility, the better.

….

Listening to her subject, John Terrance Wilkins Jamieson, the third, if you will, a name that in any other situation would have been one held in utter reverence, Amy quickly remembered the instructions of her handler.

‘Make him feel like you have his complete confidence, flatter him, feed the ego, draw the story out of him, it will come in layers, the first few, like topsoil, to be dug out and put aside, the next, the hard cover, the clay if you will. This will be hard to extract and require prompting, but not too much, and then, well, we shall see what we shall see.’

It hadn’t been that difficult. She knew the type, knew the levers to pull and the buttons to push, ever so gently. He was a man with a story, and he would tell it in his time, not hers, but it would come. It was not her job to sort the wheat from the chaff, just to be the one to dig.

They had been sitting in that room for an hour, she asking questions and he dodging them, making her the focus of the interview, and her bringing it back on track. Then it was time for a metaphorical yank…

“So, the people I represent are willing to pay, and pay a lot, for your story. But, and let me stress this one important point, they will pay only if I believe you have told me the truth. You’re probably thinking, I could tell this silly girl anything, and if I put just the right amount of emphasis and heart into it, I can make her believe anything. You probably could, if you wanted to, but you have to wonder, does she know anything about this? Is there more than one source? Does she know enough from all the peripheral information that is out there, truth and fiction?”

A little hardening of the tone, a little wariness creeping into his eyes. “Do you?”

“That’s for me to know and for you to find out. After all, you did ask for me, and I assume you believe that I have the credibility from previous stories that will give your story credence, set the narrative, as it were. You need me more than I need you, Mr Jamieson.”

He regarded her now with a degree of respect. “Call me John, please.”

“Wait an hour, and if I think you deserve it, I will.”

…

Jackson Jamieson, estranged father, said in an earlier interview when she was seeking background on the only son, one whom his father had hoped would take over the family business, not burn it to the ground. Shortly after that, his son had disappeared a few years back, but he still believed he was out there, somewhere. He did not recognise the man in the photo Amy had shown him, even though he had the same name. He didn’t have the scar running along the hairline on the left side of the forehead.

That was because it was not his son. Only a week before, the police had discovered that Jackson’s real son had died in a boating accident when John had been on holiday, and his remains, recently discovered and stored unidentified in a box in a lab, had a DNA test run on them, quite by accident. They had tested the wrong set of remains in another cold case. They were holding details of the remains’ identity until the fake Jackson was in custody.

As a result, the fake Jackson had been arrested, but only on the charge of impersonating a dead person, and by a quirk of fate, had been released from jail, and he had then disappeared. An APB went out, came across Amy’s desk, and she recognised Jackson as a man working as a barista at her usual coffee haunt.

She had gone to the police, but instead of arresting him, the devised a plan that would use her to get his story, and after a week, there were now in a special room, which she had described as an interview room for the media outlet she worked for, and she was going to record his story, just to make sure she didn’t get anything wrong.

And for the lead Detective on the case to step in in things got problematic.

They didn’t.

He simply wove a very believable story, woven into the fabric of the truth, what he believed to be the truth, and a set of lies, particularly well woven, from the moment he had gone overboard, hit his head, lost his memory, finally remembered who he was, and the everything that had happened from that point on was not his fault. He just happened to be in the same place at the same time, and there was nothing he could have done differently.

He took no responsibility, cursed his father as an angry, greedy, law-breaking monster who had perpetrated everything and dumped the blame on him. The only evidence the police had was his lies, and it was all circumstantial.

She believed him. She had one of those faces. And the training over the course of her career to make a subject feel at home, and safe, to tell their story in their own words, in their own time.

The story: complete and utter fairytale stuff, but she had to admit he was one of the best liars she had ever met. But as the saying goes, liars need to have good memories. It was clear that he and the real Jackson had spoken at length over the dealings with the father, and the feelings of inadequacy and inferiority forced upon him by the father; to an extent, it was almost like talking to the real Jackson.

But it was what he didn’t know about the real Jackson. The details his father and mother knew, the sort of detail the real Jackson would never have shared with anyone.

They reached the end of the interview, and Amy closed her notebook. She had been making notes and had a list of details and questions in her own particular brand of shorthand listed in it. She had seen him trying to read it, without looking like he could.

He was, nevertheless, quite confident he had won her over.

The door opened, and a man came into the room. John was immediately wary. “What are you?”

“The publisher’s Chief Editor. Just for the record, it everything you just told us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

“Of course, why would I lie?”

“To save yourself from life imprisonment for murder. We found the real John’s body, and he was definitely murdered. Since you were the only two in the boat, which you claim he fell out of, we can assume you were there at the time of his death. A confession, Richard. That’s your real name, Richard Watkins. I am arresting you on the suspicion of murdering John Jamieson….”

Amy got her story, just not the one Richard hoped it would be.

…

©  Charles Heath  2025