So He Takes the Dog
Jonathan Buckley

for Susanne Hillen and Bruno

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

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P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…

About the author

Narratives and Lives Jonathan Buckley talks to Louise Tucker

LIFE at a Glance

Ten Great Novels

Read on

Have You Read? Other Novels by Jonathan Buckley

If You Loved This, You Might Like…Chosen by Jonathan Buckley

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

This happened ten years ago, more or less. It’s mid-morning on the second day of January, in the modest but immaculate little bungalow that is home to Benjamin and Christine Kemp. Having clambered over the stile of New Year’s Day, the Kemps are now setting out on their trek across the bleak moorland of yet another year of conjoined medium-level misery. Christine is in the kitchen. A row of brass ornaments is laid out on a tea towel on the breakfast table and she is polishing her way down the line. Her husband is there as well, reading the paper. They have recently retired, both of them. For more than forty years, from the year before he married Christine, Benjamin worked for the local council, in the rates department; Christine typed and filed medical records at the hospital for a couple of decades, after raising their daughter, Elisabeth, who at the age of nineteen married a French shopkeeper she’d met on holiday six months previously. Elisabeth then went to live in a village near Limoges, and might as well be living in a village in Tibet for all her parents see of her nowadays.

Benjamin is trying to recall who gave them that horrible brass horse with the spindly legs and massive head when Christine opens a cupboard and the door squeaks. She sighs into the cupboard, and it’s like the chill breeze that heralds the storm. ‘Are you ever going to fix this?’ she asks.

‘Yes, dear,’ replies Benjamin.

‘And when would that be?’

‘Soon.’

‘How soon?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘That would be nice. Please do it.’

‘Yes, dear.’

She closes the cupboard and opens another one. There’s a sharp hiccup of irritation and she turns round, showing him the small round handle that’s just come off in her hand. She presents it to him, Exhibit 3227 in the never-ending case of Kemp versus Kemp. ‘Why does it always take you so long to do the tiniest little job?’

‘And why is the tiniest little job always my job?’

‘You said you’d do it. It’s not as if you’re rushed off your feet, is it?’

‘No, dearest. It’s not as if I’m rushed off my feet. You’re quite right.’

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘When are you going to fix it?’

‘This afternoon, dear. After I’ve fixed the squeak that I alone can fix.’ And so on. They have each other now, all day long. Just each other, all day, every day. It’s too much; it’s not enough.

The niggling becomes a raised-voice row, and as usual it’s Benjamin who retreats. What can he say? That he hasn’t fixed the bloody cupboard door because he’s bored out of his head, today as every day, the same as she is? What would be the point? He puts down the paper and leaves the room. ‘That’s right,’ Christine calls after him, ‘you just walk away.’ She hears him picking the keys off the table in the hall. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Out.’

‘Out where?’ He doesn’t answer. ‘What about that blasted dog?’ she yells. So he takes the dog, a decision which is really going to knock a divot out of his day.

Milo, that’s the dog’s name. Milo is a sullen and overfed mongrel, part labrador, part something very much less handsome. They get into the car, Milo beside his driver, and they drive down to the seafront, where Benjamin – seeing that the tide is out – turns eastwards, towards the headland, and parks in the very last bay, where the road comes to an end against the cliffs. They walk on the beach all the way to Straight Point, and there Benjamin takes a rest. He sits on a rock, feeds a handful of biscuits to the dog, stares at the sea. The scene could not be more appropriate to his mood: the sky is a filthy old sponge, the air is thick and cold and damp, the sea is an infinite pavement of grey sludge. It’s not truly raining, but there’s so much water in the air that he’s getting soaked as he sits. He watches Milo moping around the pools, picking a path through the dull green slime that coats the rocks. When you’re feeling despondent, gazing into a mirror can make you feel worse, and this is the same: the longer he stays here, the gloomier Benjamin is becoming. He whistles for the dog, and they set off back towards town.

It was a rough night, the night before, and the sea has dumped piles of bladderwrack and rubbish in a thick continuous scum at the foot of the cliffs. Nose lowered, Milo is following the line of seaweed and flotsam, pausing now and again to root about in whatever’s been washed up. Short of breath, Benjamin stops again, and the dog disappears into a corral of stone blocks that fell off the rockface in the autumn. When Benjamin reaches the stones, Milo has moved on: his tail is visible, about fifty yards off, wagging above a hummock of sand, between two car-sized slabs. Benjamin whistles, but Milo doesn’t come to him. Having been ignored three or four times, he walks a few steps closer and sees that the dog is standing in a long wide groove that the tide has scoured in the sand, and has shoved his muzzle into a well-stuffed black bin liner. Benjamin waits. The dog’s pulling something out of the bag, a thick cable or a length of stout rope, and he’s having a good chew at it. There’s no hurry. Benjamin waits, eyes closed, dozing on his feet.

Milo is still busy with the oversized rope when Benjamin opens his eyes again. The dog’s head is snapping from one side to the other, as if playing tug-of-war, and he’s making a low snarling noise, of a sort Benjamin has never heard from him before. ‘Here, boy,’ calls Benjamin, but there is no response. He’s covered about half the distance to the bin liner when he notices there’s something peculiar about the rope, about the rigidness of it, and the sharp angle at which it’s bending. A moment later he stops – or is stopped, because he’s reacting before he knows exactly what it is he’s reacting to. Then he sees that the thing that Milo’s gnawing isn’t a rope or a cable: it’s an arm, and the bin liner is a body in a waterlogged coat, partly covered by sand. The legs, in sodden grey tracksuit bottoms, are twisted as if they’ve no bones in them, and there’s a gash in one shin, with a mush of dark green stuff coming out, where something, possibly Milo, has taken a few bites out of it. Eyeless, teeth agape, a purple-black face lies wrapped in a veil of wet hair. Beside it a naked arm emerges from the sand at a low angle, the rotted palm directed skywards, as if to make a catch. Scraps of skin dangle from the fingertips, like a shredded glove of black muslin. Worm-like things, white and slick as lard, are squirming in the earhole.

Benjamin is in shock, as who wouldn’t be? He’s a gentle old man who has reached the age of sixty-seven without ever seeing anything very nasty, and this is very nasty indeed. It’s so nasty it’s not real. Traumatised, he’s looking at the mouldering head and the empty eyes, and it’s like a display from a chamber of horrors, a dummy of a man who’s been ripped to bits. He stares and stares, as if the body might go back to being a bin liner if he stares long enough, but soon he is seeing the corpse for what it is, a dead man, a real person destroyed. And while Benjamin is being transfixed by the dead man, Milo is continuing his wrestle with the cadaver’s right arm, a struggle that ends with a gristly tearing sound and the dog flying backwards, bringing away a hand and a length of forearm, with ribbons of muscle trailing off it.

The dog goes cantering off down the beach, with the limb in his jaws. ‘Come here,’ calls Benjamin. ‘Here. Here,’ he yells. Several repetitions later, Milo at last obeys, bringing the half-arm with him. ‘Drop, boy,’ Benjamin orders. ‘Drop. Drop. Drop.’ Milo cocks his head, inviting Benjamin to wrestle the thing from him. ‘Drop. For Christ’s sake, drop.’ The beast is not trained in any way. This is another of Benjamin’s multitudinous domestic crimes: he brings this flatulent mutt into the house and can’t be bothered teaching it the basics of civilised canine behaviour. A stick is needed, something he can chuck to make the dog lay down his plaything. From the ridge of tidal debris he takes a length of wood and flings it over Milo’s head. Milo watches it fly and fall to earth. A second stick is similarly spurned. ‘Drop. Good boy. Drop. Drop.’ As a rule Benjamin doesn’t swear. Benjamin swears once or twice a year, when things with Christine get out of control, but he’s almost hysterical now. ‘Drop the bloody thing. Please, please, please drop. Put it down. Down. Put the bloody thing down. Now. Drop it. Drop.’ Milo deposits the limb on the ground, gives it a shove with his snout, and grabs it the instant Benjamin makes a move.

All Benjamin can think to do is walk towards the town and hope that Milo, losing interest, will relinquish his burden en route. As fast as he can, which isn’t fast, he strides across the sand, attended by his faithful hound. Every now and then Milo deposits his portion of corpse on the ground, turns it with his nose, and takes it up again. ‘Leave it, for Christ’s sake,’ shouts Benjamin, looking the other way. The road isn’t much further. ‘Stay. Stay there,’ yells Benjamin. ‘Sit. Stay. For God’s sake, stay.’ Milo sits, and the moment Benjamin turns his back, the dog gets up again to follow in his master’s wake. They are about a quarter of a mile from the beach-grave when, out of the corner of his eye, Benjamin glimpses Milo running alongside, his head held up, with nothing waggling out of it. The half-arm has gone. Disinclined to search for it, Benjamin scans the environs quickly, then hurries towards the car.

And that’s how we found the body, in two instalments: most of it lying close to its burial place, ravaged by seagulls and platoons of crawling wildlife, in addition to the routine self-destruction of the dead; and the right forearm and hand, a few hundred yards away, lying on a cushion of seaweed and chewed to buggery.

2

You couldn’t have called it a face: stripped of most of its edibles, it was a bonehead with a partial cladding of jellied flesh, plus the semi-attached remnants of a beard. Putting a name to the wreckage, however, was easy. Ian, for one, needed no time to make the identification: seeing the beard and the rotten trainers and the ripped-up coat, he said straight away: ‘This will be Henry.’ Under the coat there was a rag of a T-shirt and under the rag of a T-shirt there was another rag of a T-shirt, and another one under that, half a dozen of them, all of them torn and the colour of butcher’s aprons that haven’t been washed for a year. ‘One of them will have SeaShed printed on it, I’ll bet you,’ said Ian. ‘It’s Henry.’ And when they got him on the slab and started unpeeling the wrappings, the last layer before the skin had SeaShed on it.

Some seaside towns have a dolphin that swims with the fishing boats, some have an inquisitive seal that’s famous for a summer, or a monster seagull that snatches burgers from holidaymakers’ hands. This place had Henry, the hobo of the beach. A lot of people knew Henry, by sight if nothing else. If you went down to the beach at the start of the day and waited, sooner or later you’d see Henry, guaranteed. Any day, whatever the weather, you’d see him. Rip van Winkle, he was known as, or Captain Birdseye, or Robinson Crusoe, or Howard, as in Howard Hughes.

He was slightly taller than average, about six foot, and broad in the shoulders, but skinny. He looked like a once-hefty man who’d been whittled down by years of living in the open air. When he walked his T-shirts used to flap on his body like towels on the back of a chair, and the legs of his jeans were mostly empty air. In his first summer here that’s what Henry wore, every day: a pair of jeans that ended up the colour of salt and frayed halfway up to his knees, and a T-shirt advertising some long-gone medical conference in Acapulco. When the weather cooled, Henry added another T-shirt, and he kept on adding layers until, deep into his first winter on the beach, someone gave him a second-hand overcoat, the one the corpse was wearing.

He was already old-looking when he arrived, but nobody knew how many years Henry had clocked up. Look at the face and you’d think he wasn’t far short of seventy, but living rough can easily add a decade to the appearance, so all you could say was that he was somewhere between his late fifties and late sixties, probably. Watch him walking, though, and you’d be confused, because Henry used to move across the beach at the speed of a man in his prime, a fit man at that. Like a mechanical scarecrow in overdrive he’d appear by the cliffs, and within five minutes he’d have covered half a mile of sand, as though there were somewhere he had to be, an urgent appointment at the other end of the beach. Head down, as if striding into a gale, he’d follow a line close to the water’s edge, with not a glance to right or left, even when the beach was packed, and he’d keep on going, slaloming through the children, all the way to the harbour and all the way back to Straight Point. No heatwave could slow him down and no downpour could put him off: alone on the beach there was Henry, his T-shirt plastered to his ribs, the tramp in a hurry, battering his head through the deluge. You could watch him until he was out of sight, fleeing into the rain and spray, and if you waited long enough you’d see him return, most likely, charging out of the mist, his beard like a hank of sea-soaked cloth.

Ian first came across Henry only a week after starting at the station. It was late on a Sunday afternoon in August and Ian was on the beach with that month’s girlfriend. Some kids were playing volleyball and Henry – coming from the direction of the harbour – was heading right for them, full throttle, eyes fixed on the ground. He was going to plough right into the net, thought Ian, and then, ten yards short, Henry suddenly came to a stop, an absolute standstill, as if there were a glass wall running across the beach and he’d just crashed into it. The kids had noticed him now, and they were looking at him, wondering what was up, waiting for him to move, but Henry was in a world of his own. He was like a man-sized puppet dangling from invisible strings: his mouth was hanging open, his arms dangling by his sides, and his eyes were staring over to his right, towards the town. Of course, there would have been plenty to stare at on a day like this, lots of of nicely filled swimwear, but Henry didn’t seem to be seeing any of the girls. Ian and his girlfriend were quite near, near enough to notice that Henry was wearing an Adidas trainer on one foot and a Reebok on the other, and from where they were sitting it seemed that Henry wasn’t looking at anything in particular: the eyes were wide open and aimed towards the road, but they were blank, like puppet eyes. And then he did this shudder or jump, as though someone had just clapped their hands by his ears, and he was off again, swerving round the volleyball game. Off around the headland he went, oblivious of everyone.

A few weeks later Ian encountered him again, in town this time, gazing into a shop window. Ian was having a moment with a local nuisance out on the street, about a car that’d been separated from its rightful owner, and on the other side of the road there stood Henry, reading a small ad in the window. It was only a postcard with a photo of a dinghy stuck to it, but all the time Ian and this lad were talking – a good ten minutes – Henry was studying the card. When he was done, Ian crossed over and took up a position a couple of shopfronts away. Something about this dinghy was really troubling Henry. His nose was on the glass and he was frowning as if the advert simply did not make any sense. For a couple of minutes Ian kept an eye on him. Henry didn’t budge: his face was locked in this expression of bewilderment. Finally Ian went up to him. ‘Everything all right, sir?’ he asked.

Henry turned, smiled graciously, said nothing.

‘Are you OK, sir?’

‘Yes. Thank you,’ Henry responded, nodding slowly, drawling the words as if, after deep thought, he was deciding that he was indeed, on balance, OK. ‘And you?’ Henry enquired. ‘Is everything all right with you?’

‘Yes, thank you, sir.’

‘Yes,’ Henry mused, giving Ian a benign, mild, examining kind of look that made Ian feel somewhat uncomfortable. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’ It was a fresh day, a two-T-shirt day, and Henry was wearing a white buttoned-collar shirt over them, open like a jacket. Wavy lines of salt were all over his jeans, but the ensemble was remarkably clean, Ian observed. What’s more, Henry had whiter teeth than Ian, though his beard looked like something you’d find hanging off the walls of a cave and his hair was a mess, an inch-thick carpet of grey matting. You could lob a dart on to the top of his head and it wouldn’t reach the scalp. ‘Well,’ said Henry, pushing a shirt button through the wrong buttonhole, ‘I should be going. Thank you, officer.’

‘Just thought I’d check, sir.’

‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘Thank you,’ he added, with a sincerity that wasn’t altogether convincing.

‘Hope you didn’t mind me asking.’

‘No,’ replied Henry vaguely, examining askance the photo of the dinghy. ‘No. Not at all.’ His fingers fastened the buttons of his cuffs, then worked them free again. ‘Well, goodbye,’ he said, and he sauntered away, gazing at the sky, in imitation of a carefree stroll, or that’s how it seemed.

This was the first occasion on which Ian spoke to Henry. Not long after, in January, the acquaintance was renewed, after a call from Mrs Darrow. Dear Mrs Darrow was a serial complainant. If a party started up within a mile of her house, Mrs Darrow would be on the phone within the half-hour to protest about the noise. If a camper van were to be left in a nearby car park overnight, Mrs D would be on the blower, reporting an invasion of tinkers. Now Mrs Darrow had called in to say that there was a naked man wading in the water. She could see him clearly from her window, cavorting in the sea, making a display of himself. Would we please do something about it right away? Ian was sent down to the beach to have a word with Henry.

It was a couple of degrees above freezing and an aggressive wind was slicing in off the sea. The water was chopping up heavily, but Henry was out there, frisking around in the buff while Ian stood on the shore, beckoning this nutcase to come out. Henry noticed Ian. He waved back at him and dived under, as if he thought Ian might be waving for the fun of it. Ian took a couple of steps into the water; he started yelling. Eventually Henry got the point and staggered out, starkers and shrivelled and turning blue.

‘Good morning,’ Ian called.

‘Good morning,’ Henry replied.

‘We meet again,’ said Ian, and Henry smiled, having no idea what Ian was talking about. ‘We’ve had a complaint, sir,’ Ian went on.

Long pause. ‘I see.’

‘From a lady.’

Longer pause. ‘I see.’

‘About your attire. Lack of.’

Even longer pause. ‘Yes.’

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to cover yourself up.’

Very long pause. ‘Someone has complained?’

‘Yes, sir. A lady.’

Henry looked around. There was no one in sight except Ian.

‘I take your point, sir,’ said Ian. ‘But the lady has seen you and has lodged a complaint.’

Once more Henry considered the vast frigid vacancy of the beach. ‘Got a telescope, has she?’

‘I think we must assume that she has.’

‘And I’m blocking the view?’

‘So it would appear.’

Henry’s skin had by now turned the colour of a dead mackerel and his private parts looked like three tiny acorns in a nest of singed grass. He was on the brink of hypothermia but he was talking to Ian as if they had just happened to bump into each other on a street corner. ‘Can’t she look the other way?’

‘It would appear not. Where are your clothes, sir?’ asked Ian, by now alarmed at Henry’s hue.

Henry pointed inland, but Ian could not make out what he was pointing at. Together they walked across the sand, Ian and this shaggy nude lunatic, chatting about the weather. On a low mound of sand there lay a small pile of clothes and a towel that would have done fine for lightly rubbing down a chihuahua after its bath. Ian handed him the tiny towel and Henry took it. He held it in one hand, by his side. They regarded Henry’s meagre wardrobe and the big red nylon bag lying nearby – a laundry sack, which Henry used to sleep in, until someone gave him a proper sleeping bag.

‘Do you have any swimming trunks, sir?’

‘No, I do not,’ Henry regretfully admitted.

The next day Ian bought him a pair of swimming trunks, but before long Mrs D was back on the line, offended again by the exposure of Henry’s genitals. Ian returned to the beach. The wind was Siberian and the waves were going twenty different directions at once. Henry was frolicking in groin-high water, slamming his head in the foam. Summoned, he trudged out of the sea. ‘Henry, you’re underdressed,’ Ian observed. ‘You’re not wearing them.’

At a loss, Henry frowned. ‘What?’

‘Your nice new trunks,’ Ian explained. ‘The trunks I got for you.’

‘Yes?’ Henry responded, still baffled.

‘The trunks I got you last week?’

‘Yes,’ said Henry, the light dawning.

‘You’re not wearing them.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘She’s complained again.’

A blank pause. ‘Who has?’

‘The woman.’

‘The woman?’

‘The lady with the telescope. The one who complained last week. Before we acquired the trunks.’

Long pause. ‘I see.’

‘What’s the problem? Don’t you like them? I thought you liked them.’

‘Oh no. I like them.’

‘So where are they? Over there?’ asked Ian, pointing towards a dash of red on the rocks.

‘Yes,’ Henry confirmed.

‘Why not there?’ asked Ian, pointing to Henry’s nether regions.

‘They’re not dry.’

‘Come again?’

‘It’s a horrible feeling, putting on wet clothes.’

Ian sympathised, but insisted that Henry must make himself decent. This was not to be their last conversation about Henry’s swimwear.

For almost three years Henry was here, but he was in residence intermittently, which is why nobody was worried when he’d been missing for a while. He’d left the town before, for weeks at a time, months at a stretch, so no one thought anything of it. But it was odd that he’d gone missing in winter, because previously it was always in summer that he went away.

3

The post-mortem established that Henry was not as old as had been thought, probably nearer fifty than sixty, and that he’d been under the sand for a couple of weeks or thereabouts, before the sea scooped him out to lie in the open air, where he’d remained for a day or so before the arrival of Milo. It was also discovered that he had died because someone had inserted a knife into his chest cavity. Examination of his clothing revealed two small slits in the outer T-shirt; in the layer underneath there were two matching slits, and so on, all the way through to the flesh. Decomposition and wildlife activity had made a mess of the flesh itself, but not enough to eradicate wholly the two wounds, which had been inflicted by a thin-bladed weapon held in the attacker’s right hand. One blow had pierced the heart; the other struck a rib, chipping the bone. No signs of defence injuries were discovered on the remnants of his hands, so the attack seemed to have been sudden and brief.

Henry slept on the beach near Straight Point, or in the grass above the cliffs, but most often under the bushes of The Maer, so that’s where we searched for his belongings, though nobody could be sure what belongings there were to find, other than the sleeping bag: the superfluous swimming trunks might have been discarded long ago and it was possible that every item of Henry’s clothing was on his back when he was found. For a whole day a squad combed The Maer in the quest for Henry’s estate, while another squad worked out from the crime scene, looking for a weapon. The next day we began to trawl the whole beach. Come nightfall we’d gathered a few dozen bottles and cans, a couple of camping gas cylinders, three paperbacks, half a deckchair, a syringe, enough driftwood to build a replica of the Golden Hind, and a backpack containing one lady’s hairbrush, one condom (unused), twenty-four pence in loose change and a substantial quantity of sand. And no weapon.

At this stage of a homicide enquiry we should have been talking to the victim’s family, talking to his friends, establishing the patterns of his behaviour, his habits and routines and so on. In this case, however, we were a few hundred yards behind the starting line, because we didn’t yet know the man’s full name. No identification was found on the body, so we had no route to the next of kin, and there were no known friends to interview. We knew something of the pattern of his days – sleep, go for a walk, sleep – but that was the lot. So George Whittam decides to call in the press.

Within the hour Ronnie Houghton arrives at the incident room. For the past couple of years, after a decade in telesales and advertising freesheets, Ronnie has been reporting on the misdemeanours of our district’s druggies, shoplifters, joyriders and after-hours brawlers. He’s thirty or thereabouts but as eager as a twenty-year-old, and just as naïve. One day, he knows, he’s going to get the story that will bring him the big-money transfer to London and a national byline. Eyes twitching at the thought that this might be the big one, Ronnie absorbs the facts, or the selection of facts that George has judged it useful to broadcast at this point. When the battery of his tape recorder goes flat, one minute into the briefing, Ronnie switches to shorthand, scribbling as though he’s taking dictation from God Almighty. A minute later it’s over. Half a page of notes and that’s it. ‘OK. OK,’ says Ronnie, trying not to show his disappointment, perusing his scrawl. ‘OK. I’ve got all that. Got a picture?’ he asks, but of course we haven’t got a picture – that’s one reason he’s here. SHOCK DEATH OF LOCAL CHARACTER is Ronnie’s headline. ‘We’re appealing to the public for information. If anyone out there has a recent picture of Henry, we’d like them to pass it on to us,’ says Detective Chief Inspector Whittan (sic).

That’s on the Saturday, and the next day the Reverend Beal makes his contribution. Gas heaters beside the altar supply a dash of warm colour but no heat that’s perceptible to the congregation. The windows are trickling and the air has a taste like fog. Today, therefore, only the hardcore are in attendance, packed for warmth into the front four pews, except for young Michael Trethowen, also known as Mystic Mike, who’s occupying his traditional berth nearer the back, swaddled in the customary brown duffel coat. Beal moves things along as briskly as is decent, but he takes his time with the sermon. There must be a heater up in the pulpit. It’s a head-numbingly tedious recital on the theme of the new year, the hopes thereof, the challenges thereof, the responsibilities thereof, et cetera, et cetera. Towards the end of his oration he mentions the dreadful event. His voice drops to a hush of compassion, his face is the face of a man bruised by the sufferings of the world. He urges us to take to heart the lessons of Henry’s lonely life and lonely death, to think about what his death tells us about our society, to keep the poor man and his family (wherever they may be) in our thoughts, to pray that the killer be apprehended soon. All nod solemnly, thinking: ‘Amen to the last bit anyway.’ Alice, however, doesn’t nod when told to think of Henry, even though she’s had Henry in her thoughts for longer than any of them. She simply closes her eyes and meshes her fingers on her lap, and it’s as if she’s no longer listening to Beal but instead is in touch with the soul of Henry, or calling for him silently. Her face has no expression that you could describe. It’s perfectly still and beautiful, and distant, and almost frightening. It’s like looking at the face of a praying woman on a tomb from centuries ago.

Business concluded, the Reverend Beal takes up his station outside the door for the leave-taking. Shuffling his feet on the gravel, he shakes hands with them all, has a few words for everyone, and they in turn have a few words for him.

‘Lovely sermon.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And how is your daughter?’

‘Fine, thank you.’ A halo of breath hangs around his head. ‘Keep moving,’ he’s thinking. ‘Thank you and keep moving.’ It’s like prize-giving day without the prizes. But he singles out Alice for a lingering clasp and meaningful eyes, as if she has an understanding that the rest of them lack, or perhaps it’s just because she’s the wife of a man who, he suspects, hasn’t yet found a lodging for Christ in his heart. ‘A ghastly business. Ghastly,’ he says, with a three-second look of pity. Alice bows her head and says nothing.

4

Benjamin Kemp had nothing substantial to add to his original statement. With wide and watery eyes he stared aghast at Milo and the rug on which he was slumbering, as if the dog had brought Henry’s remains into the house and spread them out around him. ‘I saw him a few times, walking on the beach,’ said Benjamin, shaking his head disbelievingly. He kept scratching the back of his head and there was a tremble round his mouth when he wasn’t talking. Christine sat on the chair opposite, watching her husband’s quivering mouth, and there was no discernible affection in her eyes, none at all. She seemed embarrassed by his lack of backbone and annoyed by the trouble he was putting her to. Looking out of the window, she frowned at the falling rain, vexed by what the day was up to. ‘And what about you, Mrs Kemp?’ asked Ian, pretending not to have noticed the discordancy of the household. ‘Is there anything you can tell us about Henry?’ She blinked, frozenly amazed by the question. Why on earth should she know anything about the disreputable old codger?

Five minutes later she was showing us out. ‘I’m sure someone will be able to give you more help,’ she said at the door, in apology for her useless spouse.

We begin the house-to-house slog, to assemble the victim profile. One of the first calls is at the home of Mr and Mrs Fazakerly, whose home overlooks The Maer. Kevin Fazakerly is an independent financial adviser; Sophie, his wife, arranges big parties, conferences, weddings, business events and so on. Lucrative lines of work, evidently. The driveway is fancy brick, scrubbed clean as the day it was laid, and the front of the house – a sort of neo-Georgian mansion, but with extra-wide windows – is likewise immaculate. No salt damage to the paintwork and it appears that no seagull has emptied its bowels anywhere on this patch of real estate. Inside, as expected, it’s a show home: you’re tempted to touch the walls to check if they’re still wet. Instantly you know there are no kids. Sophie ushers us into the kitchen, which is not a lot bigger than a squash court. We sit around the breakfast bar, a little pier of top-grade Scandinavian timber. You could perform open-heart surgery in this room, with no risk of infection.

Kevin and Sophie are both in their mid forties. Sophie is wearing tight pale jeans and white socks and narrow little white trainers with very white laces, and up top there’s an odd bright-blue zippered cardigan thing, with the zip pulled right up to the neck. She’s as tightly done up as a parachute in a backpack, so you get the feeling she might inflate to three times her size when she gets undressed. When you look at Kevin you think of some fourth-division American golfer, runner-up in the North Dakota Invitational, 1986. His hair has a retro ruler-straight parting and sticks out at the front in a little horizontal quiff, and over his shirt he has this horrible salmon-pink floppy cashmere jumper. The jeans are a bit baggier than Sophie’s, but precisely the same shade. We receive the impression that they’ve got things to say on the issue of Henry. Tea is made, biscuits arranged on a plate that perhaps has been designed solely for this function: the Jan-Arne Simonsen Biscuit Plate, £100, plus postage and packing. It is suggested we carry our cups through to the living room. We troop across the acres of laminated floor. The living room is a little longer than the driveway and under-furnished with angular scarlet chairs and a pair of low-backed sofas, all of the same design.

Side by side on one of the sofas sit Kevin and Sophie, facing the two policemen. ‘Isn’t it terrible?’ says Sophie, stroking a thumbnail rapidly with the thumb of her other hand. ‘How could it happen?’ she wants to know. Kevin pats her knee consolingly and concurs about the terribleness of what has happened, its incomprehensibility. ‘It’s awful,’ says Sophie. ‘Just awful.’ Sophie examines Kevin’s hand – his fingernails are pathologically well-maintained, the sort of hands you see in adverts for very expensive watches. ‘To think it happened on our doorstep.’ It’s another boisterous evening. The rain is ticking quickly on the windows and the trees in the front garden are in spasm. Sophie touches Kevin’s hand and he pats her knee; she touches his hand, he pats her knee. They can’t get through a minute without touching each other. When a gust rattles something metallic up the drive, Sophie grabs at a cushion. It’s as if the monster’s out there in the gloom, making an assessment of the security arrangements, and we’re their last protection.

‘His name was Henry,’ Kevin tells us, but he doesn’t know his surname. ‘He used to pitch camp out on The Maer,’ he adds, looking to his wife for verification, and Sophie agrees that Henry used to sleep on The Maer. At night, she adds, they would sometimes see him settling down for the night, in the shelter of the trees. Once or twice he waved to her, when she was at the bedroom window, and she waved back, but they never spoke. ‘Kept himself to himself,’ observes Kevin.

‘Nobody knew much about him,’ Sophie contributes. Kevin tries to recall the last time he saw Henry, but cannot; Sophie also tries, and sadly draws a blank. Twenty minutes we’re there, learning nothing, reassuring the Fazakerlys that they are not going to be murdered in their beds, but to lock up at night anyway. Of course they’ll lock up at night. They always do, always have done. Kevin as a kid used to lock his toy cupboard at night, you just know he did. They’re more likely to piss on their twelve-foot hand-woven organically dyed Turkish rug than leave a window open after bedtime.

We might as well have been interviewing ourselves, but Ian loves these house calls, even if he doesn’t take a liking to the residents, which is the case in about fifty per cent of our visits. He gets a buzz from checking out where people live, because Ian is convinced that a very large proportion of our fellow citizens are less than entirely sane, and it’s only when you get inside their houses that you see what lies behind the day-to-day normalness. Sometimes you have to look hard, but there’s inevitably something, a crack in the mask. And as far as Ian is concerned, our fruitless session with Mr and Mrs Fazakerly has proved his case. ‘Weird as Mormons,’ he murmurs, the moment Sophie has closed the door. ‘Did you see the framed menus? In the hall?’

‘I did.’

‘Signed by the chef, for fuck’s sake.’

‘And his handshake? Get more grip from an empty glove.’

‘Creepy creepy creepy. But’, Ian goes on, raising a finger for the point that would settle the issue, ‘did you clock the microwave?’

‘Everyone’s got a microwave.’

‘Yeah. But on top of it? Obvious as a bus.’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t notice?’

He taps a fingertip beside an eye, dipping an eyebrow to signify shrewdness. ‘Nothing wasted on this boy. Chief Inspector Mowbray, the early years. You were there.’

‘Yes, OK. What was it?’

‘An item from Peggy’s purple shelf. Debbie Does Dallas.’

‘Who’s Peggy?’

In the drive, under a sort of extended porch, there is a new Mazda MX5, gold. ‘This’ll be hers,’ Ian instantly concludes. ‘The master vehicle is in the garage, bet you. Kev’s more a Mercedes kind of guy. This dinky wee machine is the lady wife’s.’

‘Who’s Peggy?’

Ian gives the Mazda a once-over. He peers through the windscreen at something on the front seat, putting the finishing touches to his profile of the Fazakerlys. ‘Granny Thistle,’ he answers. ‘She’s on the list for tomorrow morning,’ and then he explains.

The first thing you need to know about Peggy Thurlow, says Ian, is that she regards it as a point of honour never to be nice to tourists, no matter how servile they may be. She’s never been known to smile at anyone who is clearly Not From Around Here, and has a reputation for being less than overwhelmingly warm to most non-outsiders too. Peggy’s views on citizenship are hardline: you don’t really belong to this town unless you have roots that go back three generations or more. Peggy’s roots reach back to the nineteenth century and the family of her husband – the late Mr Thurlow, a cheery old fellow by all accounts, whose love of Peggy was for many people one of life’s great mysteries – have been here since the Jurassic era. Pure-bred indigenous customers are generally on firmer ground with Peggy, but she’s prone to sudden reversals. Just because you’re in her good books on a Tuesday, there’s no guarantee that you’ll still be in favour come Friday, because Peggy is a gossip magnet and as changeable as a baby. Peggy has something on everyone and you’re guilty until proven innocent in her private judicial system. She’s either for you or against you, with very little in the way of middle ground. Someone passes on a rumour that you’ve been hitting the bottle and yelling at the kids – you’re cast out into the darkness, pending evidence to the contrary. The warmth of human kindness is buried pretty deep within the heart of Peggy, but if you’re one of the happy band that has earned her approval, she couldn’t be nicer. You want a box of grade-A Cuban cigars for your recently promoted husband? Peggy will get them for you. You need an obscure magazine, Peggy will supply it for you: Japanese Malt Whisky Review, The Kite-Flyer, Canoes and Canoeists – no problem. She also has a sideline in personal finance, for those of the favoured few whose pay packets occasionally fail to meet outgoings. Rumour has it she once loaned a client a couple of grand, at very advantageous rates, to subsidise the acquisition of an E-Type Jag. Then again, woe betide anyone who doesn’t repay on the stipulated date. Some hapless sod once settled up a couple of days past the deadline and Peggy burned his ears off with a lecture on the virtue of thrift.

When we walk into Peggy’s shop the next morning, her reaction seems to suggest that she thinks she might recognise Ian, but she holds back the half-smile until he flips the badge. Ask a little kid to describe a lovely old granny and Peggy is more or less what you’d get: about five-one, approximately oval in silhouette, purple-grey candy-floss hair, soft fat face, tweedy skirt and chunky cable-knit cardigan with big leather buttons. ‘And what can I do for you gentlemen?’ she asks, and her eyes have the look that you see in people’s eyes when they learn that some unexpected money is coming to them. She’s standing behind the counter and right behind her head, at eye level, is Peggy’s purple shelf. There’s a tray of batteries and a selection of key rings and cigarette lighters, and alongside them there are Peggy’s adult videos. The slipcases have been removed and masking tape stuck on to the spines, and Peggy has written non-offensive versions of the titles on to the masking tape – or rather, that seems to be the idea, but the lettering is in thick inch-high capitals, purple, and even a ten-year-old slow-wit could work them out: S ME, F ME; EBONY GANG-B; SURFER F-FEST. It’s hard to imagine how it goes. What do the grubby punters say to her? ‘Box of matches, packet of extra-strong mints, Exchange & Mart. Oh, and Butt-F Bonanza up there, next to Keep on F-ing. Any good? Really? OK, I’ll take that as well, while you’re at it.’ Perhaps the cuddly little old porn peddler assigns you to the ranks of the damned if you ask.

Sure enough, Peggy has something on Henry – not much, but more than anyone else so far. Every twenty days, ‘regular as clock-work’, Henry would come into the shop to buy a packet of twenty cigarettes. Surprisingly, given Henry’s rootless status, Peggy seems to have been well disposed towards him: he was her only customer for unfiltered cigarettes, she says, and she always made sure she had a packet in stock, just for Henry. His name was Henry Yarrow and he used to be an engineer, but what kind of engineer, and where he was an engineer, and when, she couldn’t say. He was from Minehead, she knew that much. Earlier that morning we’d been talking to a neighbour of the Fazakerlys and she’d said that she’d heard from someone that Henry’s name was McBain, or McCain, or McSwain, or something like that. Beginning with Mc and ending with -ain, anyway. Had Peggy heard that his name was Yarrow or had he told her himself? ‘He told me that was his name,’ Peggy replies, the implication being that she is not the sort of person to pass off mere hearsay as fact.

‘Definitely Yarrow?’ asks Ian, making a note.

Peggy bristles at this, as if she’d been accused of lying. Offended, she locks her arms across her chest, a picture of indignant rectitude, with her library of red-hot muck behind her. But Ian soon wins her round, thanking her for her valuable information, nodding at the name he’s written on his pad, as if it’s a word in code and any minute now the letters will rearrange themselves and give us a vital clue. Gratitude accepted, Peggy gives us her personal impressions of Mr Yarrow: very polite, always cheerful, didn’t smell at all, except sometimes in summer, but we’re all a bit ripe then, aren’t we? Then she starts on the questioning. Where exactly was he found? When? Who found him? What did we think had happened? Any leads? Ian fends her off, with heavy use of boyish charm. In the end she settles for knowing that Henry wasn’t freshly dead when the unfortunate member of the public stumbled across him. ‘Poor man,’ Peggy laments. ‘Poor poor man.’ And her head does this slow sad shake as if her good angel is whispering in her ear: ‘Shake head sadly now.’ More than anything, you know she’s irked at not having winkled more information from us.

We resumed the house-to-house trudge and Ian soon had another case for his gallery of the weird. Within sight of the Fazakerlys’ palace there was the home of the hearty Miss Ryle, who had turned her residence into something out of Heidi. On the outside all was normal: an ordinary pebble-dashed semi, with a neat little garden out front. Inside, it was all wooden walls, wooden ceilings, damned great cowbells hanging in the hall and on the landings, photos and terrible paintings of snow and ice and rocks in every room, and all the way up the stairs. In the kitchen there were dozens of bits of cloth in frames, stitched with rustic sayings and proverbs in German and French, with borders of tiny flowers. Most of an entire wall was taken up by a huge aerial photo of some mountain-top hut, with glaciers left, right and centre, and above the fireplace in the front room there was an enormous curved horn, a monster trumpet, as long as an oar. ‘Makes your head swim when you blow it,’ grinned Miss Ryle, as if confessing to a penchant for cocaine. Miss Ryle knows nothing about Henry. She was in Switzerland for much of December, she told us. ‘I’m always in Switzerland,’ she admitted cheerily, waving a stout arm in the direction of the mighty trumpet.

And down the road, three minutes’ walk from the Heidi house, there lived Miss Leith, similarly nearing fifty, similarly single, but with a liking for inappropriately vivid make-up and fuchsia-coloured shoes. Miss Leith also had a prodigious fondness for those disgusting little porcelain figurines of cheeky shepherds wooing busty peasant lasses, and cute old hobos offering roses to winsome young lovelies on park benches, and rosy-cheeked moppets with baskets of kittens. It was like sitting in a souvenir shop, surrounded by display cases full of heart-tugging tat. From Miss Leith, however, we learned that Henry’s name was Henry Ellis, or so she’d heard from someone. She can’t recall who that someone might have been.

Not far from Miss Leith and Miss Ryle lived Mr Jonathan Imber – early fifties, also unmarried, and quite understandably so. Mr Imber, a bearded gentleman, had turned his house into a shrine to Old Spice, the famous fragrance for men. He had assembled what he believed to be (and who are we to argue?) the country’s (possibly Europe’s, but not – sadly – the world’s) most comprehensive collection of Old Spice receptacles (not merely aftershave – talcum powder, too, and deodorants), dating back to the year of the brand’s creation. Misinterpreting a facial twitch as a glimmer of interest from Ian, he began to talk us through the Old Spice story. For Mr Imber the changing shape of his aftershave flasks is a story as engrossing as the evolution of Homo sapiens. ‘My little pastime,’ he called it, and suddenly ‘pastime’ became the most miserable word in the English language, a word for people who have not enough in their lives for their allotted time, for whom time is something that has to be got through. Mr Imber knew Henry by sight, but knew nothing about him; he didn’t even know he was dead.

A check was run, and there was no Yarrow family in the Minehead area that was missing a senior member who was once an engineer, or missing a senior member who was anything, come to that. ‘Interesting,’ Ian remarked after morning prayers, after we’d been told the Minehead search had drawn a blank. ‘Why would he lie about his name?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Covering his tracks.’

‘Possible. Or he’s just saying, “Fuck off and leave me alone.” Could be that.’

‘Why the different names? Why not stick to one?’

‘Prevent himself getting bored. I don’t know.’

We had no idea. A dozen people were working on Henry and nothing but Henry. By day four we had seven different surnames, and we were getting nowhere.

Then, late one afternoon at the end of the first week, a woman came into the North Street station, laden with carrier bags. ‘I don’t know if this will be any use,’ she sighed, dumping the shopping. She pushed an envelope across the counter. Inside there was a photograph of the woman and two small girls stamping on the ruins of a sandcastle. Sweet-looking kids, her daughters presumably, deduced the lad on duty, not getting it. ‘There,’ said the woman, putting a fingernail on the picture. ‘I think that’s him, the dead man. The tramp.’ In the background, obscured by sea mist and out of focus for good measure, stood someone who might well have been Henry, perhaps watching the girls. The face wasn’t much more than a beard and two dots for eyes, but the boys in the darkroom blew it up, cropped it, did a bit of magic on it to make the features crisper, and what you had in the end still wasn’t a terrific portrait but it was a lot better than nothing, and it was all we had, so it was printed and made into a flyer, and up it went on a hundred lamp-posts.

5

Of all his war stories the one that George Whittam liked to retell most frequently was the story of Billy Renfrew, his first big case after the move from London. Billy Renfrew was seventy-two years old and lived alone in a semi-ruined cottage in the South Hams, as picturesque and uneventful a zone as you could wish to find. One morning in late summer the postman – making his first call at Billy’s house for more than a fortnight – rode up to Billy’s door and saw that it was open. He knocked, got no answer, pushed at the door and stepped inside. Then he saw Billy sitting on the floor of the hallway and a lump of Billy’s brain stuck on the wall beside him.

A labourer all his life, Billy was by nobody’s standards a prosperous man, but like many people of his age he had accumulated a few items worth stealing. There was a carriage clock on the mantelpiece, a silver cup in the kitchen, a pair of mother-of-pearl cufflinks by the bed. But none of these had been taken. On the kitchen table was his wallet, with £20 still in it. All the signs were that Billy’s visitor had whacked him when he opened the door and then run off. There were no prints on the door except Billy’s, no clues except a few yards of indistinct bicycle tyre tracks from the gate to the door, which might or might not have had anything to do with it. Enquiries soon established that Billy had few friends and no known enemies, so George and his colleagues set about interviewing everyone who lived within a mile of the cottage, then everyone within two miles, three miles, till they’d spoken to every adult and juvenile inside a five-mile radius. And from all these interviews not a scrap of illuminating information was garnered. For the best part of half a year after the killing of Billy there was no suspect. So they went back and interviewed almost everyone again, beginning with the village nearest the cottage, working outwards, and in the end, sure enough, the stress fracture occurred.

This individual was a builder-cum-plumber but business must have been bad because he was at home, fixing his van outside his garage, when George happened to drop by in the middle of the afternoon. ‘How’s it going?’ said George and he reintroduced himself, though straight away it was clear that he’d been remembered. The handyman delved around in the engine for a minute, wiped his hands on a rag, dropped the rag into the toolbox on the kerb. ‘Water pump,’ he explained, and in his eyes there was a hint that he was wondering why he’d been singled out for a repeat visit. They talked for a while about this and that: waterpumps, vans, motors. Within a minute the nervousness, never more than the slightest suggestion of unease, had gone entirely. And then, as the lad picked a spanner out of the toolbox, George looked down at the heap of pliers and drill bits and screwdrivers. The tools were all well used, smeared with oil, pitted with rust. But what attracted his attention was the hammer: the hammer was brand new. Not in itself incriminating, but George felt the dawning of suspicion, the rising of a truth moment, and the dawning grew stronger when he looked into the garage. Partly hidden behind lengths of skirting board and pipes, there was a bicycle. ‘Nice bike,’ George remarked, though it was battered and spattered and very far from nice. He established the make, pretended he was thinking of buying the very same model for his nephew. ‘Mind if I take a look?’ It was a blatant pretext, but what could be said except: ‘Help yourself’? Telling the cop to bugger off wouldn’t have made a good impression, would it? ‘Had it long?’ asked George, giving the bike a slow close scrutiny.

The interviewee was busying himself under the bonnet, acting unconcerned. ‘Didn’t hear you,’ he shouted, so George asked it again. Our man claimed he’d bought the bike a couple of months ago, second-hand. This turned out to be true, but George didn’t believe him. Half the garages in England have a bike in them, but this one, for some reason, was suddenly emitting an aura of evidence.

George took his time. He wasn’t looking for anything: he was just letting the man stew for a while, and when he was saying goodbye, a perfectly casual goodbye, he saw a shrinking in his eye and knew that this was the one. Another eight or nine hours of face work it took, but in the end our friend contradicted himself one time too often, and he owned up. From somewhere this numbskull had got hold of the idea that Billy Renfrew was some sort of miser, with thousands of pounds stashed in socks and jam jars all over the house. He’d meant to help himself to a bit of cash, that’s all, but Billy must have heard him gouging away at the lock because suddenly the door opened and there he was, effing and blinding, and there was no option but to dab him on the head with a hammer, was there?

Be patient. That, in a nutshell, is the lesson to be learned from the case of Billy Renfrew. ‘Be patient. Let nothing be wasted on you,’ George Whittam would say to us. And: ‘Every piece of information adds something to the picture, even if you can’t see it at first.’ It gave George great pleasure to sound wise, and he was good at it. ‘Elimination is progress,’ he would tell us. ‘You’re always getting nearer if you don’t stay still. Nothing is a waste of time.’ This isn’t true. Sometimes, work that feels like a complete waste of time really is a complete waste of time. But it doesn’t matter that it’s not true. From the story of Billy Renfrew one could conclude that when it comes to solving a tricky homicide you can’t beat having a sixth sense. Should a sixth sense not feature in your armoury, you need a damned great stroke of luck. These pronouncements would be truer, but less useful for the maintenance of morale among the juniors.

It was necessary to stoke morale at regular intervals. At the end of another long morning we had no useful information. We had heard about an incident at which Henry was present, that’s all. Around Christmas three years ago, in Topsham, there had been a fire. An empty house went up in smoke with such speed that by the time the fire brigade arrived on the scene the roof had gone and the top-floor windows were falling out. Something highly inflammable was in there – presumably to help the blaze – and every few minutes an explosion sent flames shooting out. A seagull got cremated, standing on a lamp-post. It was a hell of a show and it drew a good crowd. Henry was among the spectators, we were told. He stayed until the last flames were extinguished, which would have been around three or four in the morning. It was odds-on that the fire was started deliberately and of course there were people prepared to believe that the disreputable-looking old geezer who hung around till the final curtain might have been in some way involved. But Henry wasn’t involved. Within two days it was known that it had nothing to do with Henry. Three schoolkids did it. Having no TV to watch at home, Henry had stayed to watch the fire. Probably warmed himself up a bit into the bargain. End of meaningless episode. We have an anecdote, when what we need is a story.

In the afternoon, as in the morning, we meet people who can’t bring themselves to say it but obviously had never thought that Henry was much of an adornment to the locality. Equally obviously, none of them had ever wished him dead. They confirm that Henry was prone to going missing for a week or two, every now and again. No one has a clue where he went. Everyone is sorry he’s gone.

No, that’s not right: Mr Latimer wasn’t sorry. Formerly an airline pilot, today a gin-pickled old fascist, Mr Latimer would have had Henry clapped in irons and set to work in a chain gang if he’d had any say in the matter. ‘The Wandering Jew,’ he called him, giving us a look to gauge if we are men enough to take his strong straight talking. Between sentences his jaws made fierce little champing movements, as if chewing on tiny cubes of hard rubber. Occasionally, he reported, he saw Henry in the town, ‘watching people’. There was something not right in the way he followed people with his eyes. It wasn’t just rude: ‘You felt he was up to something,’ said Mr Latimer, but he declined to specify to what manner of thing Henry might have been up. And once he came across him on the top of the cliffs. ‘Ogling a young woman,’ he said, with a sneer, then paused for us to work out what he meant. ‘Messing with himself,’ he elucidated, displeased at our failure to participate in his disgust. We shouldn’t pity such people, Mr Latimer insisted, affronted by the permissiveness he’d discerned in us. This isn’t the eighteenth century, after all. Our society makes provision for the unfortunate, and anyone who lives like that man lived is doing so through his own choice and for no other reason.

And in the same afternoon we encountered Ferrari man, a taxi driver who lived in a flat with Ferrari-red carpets and Ferrari-red curtains and model Ferraris all over the place, on the windowsills, on chairs, under chairs. It was like a plague of scarlet metal mice. Magnetic Ferraris were stuck on the fridge. The phone was in the shape of a Ferrari. It was news to him that Henry’s name was Henry. It hadn’t registered with him that Henry was missing until he saw the posters. Another futile conversation, but mercifully brief, and for Ian this character was the highlight of the day, of course.

An hour after the visit to the Ferrari man we’re in the pub, where Mary – Ian’s new girlfriend – is waiting, with her friend Rachelle. It’s one minute past six and they are the only people in the place. This is the first time we’ve met, so Ian undertakes the introductions. ‘Mary Usher, John Donohue. John my colleague, Mary my girl. Rachelle, John. John my colleague, Rachelle my girl’s best friend.’

‘Nicely done,’ says Mary, giving him a smack on the arm.

‘He won’t be staying long. Has to get home to his wife,’ Ian whispers loudly to Rachelle, getting another whack from Mary, then he’s off to the bar.

‘Hello,’ says Mary. For some reason her boyfriend has omitted to mention that Mary is startling to look at, with whiteblonde hair and a wide frank face and grey-blue eyes that are as clear as a child. We shake hands.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ says Rachelle, reaching over the table. A year or two younger than Mary, she’s dark and small and sinewy, like a marathon runner. She and Mary have known each other since they were at infants’ school together, she explains timidly, as if she feels herself to be under an obligation to establish at once her right to be here. She works in a café up the top of the hill, she says, and she seems almost grateful that the name of the place is recognised. We talk for a minute, then Ian is back from the bar and straight away he’s gabbing on about Mr Ferrari.

‘Incredible,’ he tells them. ‘Like a boy’s bedroom, but he’s what, fifty?’

‘Thereabouts.’

‘Fifty, and he’s got these little cars everywhere. Ferrari lamps, Ferrari mugs. Everything screaming red. Would give you a migraine after five minutes.’

‘So what do you think?’ asks Mary quietly. ‘About –’

‘Henry?’ says Ian, though the question wasn’t addressed to him. ‘Can’t give too much away,’ he explains, with a wink for Rachelle. ‘But I think it’s safe to say that we’re looking for a man. Ninety per cent of murderers are male. The women are domestics, one way or another, nearly all of them. They take a hammer to the husband, or the father who’s been molesting them for years.’

‘Or stick a knife in the boyfriend,’ adds Mary.

‘Rarely, but it happens. But Henry was nobody’s boyfriend. OK, another interesting thing,’ continues Ian, overexcited by his first murder, determined to impress Rachelle as much as Mary, ‘is that victim and killer are usually of similar age and similar economic status. Once in a while a millionaire gets wiped out by one of the lower orders, but as a rule it’s yob kicks yob to death, dodgy businessman wipes out his partner, husband kills wife. So all we’ve got to do is find us another middle-aged down-and-out male and we’re home and dry.’

Leaning forward, pressing her hands between her knees, Rachelle laughs on cue. Encouraged, Ian gives his audience a welter of facts and figures – it’s his homework rehashed, some of it misremembered. ‘The crucial periods are the last twenty-four hours of the victim’s life and the first twenty-four hours after the discovery of the body. Forty per cent of detections occur within two days of the murder being reported,’ he tells wide-eyed Rachelle. ‘Now we’re past that point, and the odds get longer as time passes. But, on the bright side, sixty per cent aren’t solved in the first forty-eight hours, and it’s early days.’

Another thing about Ian, it turns out, is that he’s as jealous as a cat, and when the barman, a good-looking boy with mighty forearms and a complicated haircut, comes over to collect the empties, the smile that Mary gives the intruder wrecks Ian’s concentration in mid-sentence, as intended. You can almost see his brain clenching.

‘Heard what you were talking about,’ says the barman. ‘So what do you think?’

‘You just said you heard,’ Ian reminds him, reddening faintly.

‘Yeah. But,’ the lad replies, apparently deaf to Ian’s tone. His hand is lingering on Mary’s glass, his bare arm an inch or two from her face.

‘But what?’

‘But do we know him?’ he goes on, narrowing his eyes in a way that’s meant to suggest mystery.

‘Do we know him? Who?’

‘Who did it.’

‘What’s your name?’ asks Ian.

‘Josh.’

‘Josh, what the fuck are you talking about?’

Amiably, as if his ears have edited out the expletive, Josh continues: ‘I mean we know the person who did it, but the police don’t know him yet. It’s someone who lives here, isn’t it? Got to be. Must be someone who went out there to do him, who knew where he were, otherwise what you looking at? Some bloke is stretching his legs on the beach, comes across your man, doesn’t like the look on his face, cuts him up. I mean, I don’t think so.’ He steps back, eyebrows raised, greatly pleased with his reasoning.

Ian drains his glass and passes it over. ‘Thank you, Josh,’ he says, giving him a thin wide smile. ‘Something to think about.’

‘Stands to reason, don’t it?’

‘It does. You’re wasted in this job. The police need men like you.’

Nicked at last by the edge of Ian’s voice, Josh hesitates on the point of responding.

‘We do,’ says Ian. ‘Believe me.’

At the realisation of what we are, Josh blinks as though at onion fumes. ‘You police?’ he asks.

‘We police,’ Ian confirms.

‘Wow. That’s –’ He smiles to himself, as if until this moment we’d been wearing a disguise that he should have seen through. ‘Bugger me.’

‘Indeed,’ says Ian. ‘Your round, John.’

With a shrug and a grin for Mary, this time unreciprocated, Josh withdraws.

‘Sherlock the barman,’ Ian mutters.

Mary gives him a reproving smile. ‘But he has a point, doesn’t he?’ she says. ‘It made sense to me.’

‘What you reckon, John?’ Ian enquires, feigning deep selfdoubt. ‘Reckon he’s got a point?’

‘I reckon he just wants to feel involved.’

‘I tend to agree, John.’

‘But we don’t know that Henry was nobody’s boyfriend.’

‘You what?’

‘We don’t know that Henry was nobody’s boyfriend.’

‘No, we don’t absolutely know it. But unlikely.’

‘Not impossible.’

‘Very very very unlikely.’

‘Quite unlikely, but you never know. Even Hitler had a girlfriend.’

‘Hitler had a nice house and decent clothes and a big black car.’

‘Some women don’t care about nice houses.’

‘No woman’s going to go for a man with woodlice in his hair. Isn’t that right, ladies?’ says Ian, a proposition at which they both nod. From the way Mary puts a hand on his leg, from the way she curls his hand into hers, you can tell that she worries about him, imagining that one night he’s going to corner a drug-crazed thug in an alleyway and end up with a blade through his liver. ‘We’ll get him. Sooner or later,’ says Ian, giving the promise of a man whose word is his bond. Leaning back, his arms flat along the top of the banquette, he looks like a character on TV, the overconfident young cop. But he does truly believe that we’ll get him, and the next morning, as if in vindication of his baseless faith, the very first visit turns out to be our first promising one, the first to give us anything you might call a lead.

Mr Gaskin is a pensioner, eighty-ish. He opens his front door cautiously, as people of his age tend to do, and opens it just wide enough to make a gap he can stand in. We often get a brief look of dread when we say who we are, but with Mr Gaskin all anxiety vanishes from his face when we identify ourselves and explain why we’re here. Solemnly courteous, gratified to be have been called upon to do his duty as a citizen, he invites us in. ‘I’m not sure I can be of much help,’ he apologises, and in his bearing and his voice there’s a sadness that seems long-standing. He’s a diminutive chap and extremely unsturdy. The skin on the back of his hands is like greaseproof paper with thin blue wires running under it, and the bones of his face are as sharp as a carving in wood. He is wearing a crisp white shirt and iridescent blue tie, though it’s soon revealed that he hasn’t been anywhere today and isn’t going anywhere after we’ve gone. In the front room a big leather armchair is aligned four-square with the TV. Beside the chair stands a table laden with books and a standard lamp with fat tassels. Obviously this chair is the only one in regular use, and on the mantelpiece there’s a big framed picture of a bride and groom, in the middle of a flock of smaller pictures. You know without looking closely that the bride is Mrs Gaskin and that Mrs Gaskin is deceased. There are photographs all over the place, on every wall and shelf, and the face of Mrs Gaskin seems to be in most of them.

We sit around a table, Mr Gaskin facing us, the blue-wired hands locked lightly on the table top. From the window by which we’re sitting Mr Gaskin can see the upper reaches of the path that zigzags down to the end of the beach road, and the start of the path that cuts through the trees, across the High Land of Orcombe. Many times he saw Henry heading over the High Land, or made out his figure down on the sand, sometimes making up a bed for himself against the sea wall, but as he recalls there was only one occasion on which he talked to him. Speaking gravely and with precision, as though from a witness box, he tells us about the evening in the autumn of the year before last, when he came across Henry. About six o’clock, it was, and he’d decided to take a stroll because there was a particularly beautiful sunset. The tide was low, so he went down on to the beach, and no sooner had he turned the corner of the headland, into the next bay, than he heard a loud crack and there was Henry, twenty or thirty yards away, with his back to him, close to the cliff. At Henry’s feet there was a pile of four or five wooden crates that must have been washed ashore and he was striking the pile with a long metal spike, the sort that’s used for raising a barrier around a hole in the road. ‘He was striking the crates with great force. Remarkable violence,’ says Mr Gaskin, and he pauses, unnerved anew at the sight of Henry and the crates. ‘As if slaughtering an animal. He was in a frenzy, I’d say. Yes. That’s not too strong. A frenzy.’

Then Henry turned and saw him, whereupon he lowered the spike and bowed, a deep and extravagant bow, like a swordsman’s bow to a rival in a duel. Henry wished him good evening and they talked for a minute or two. They talked about the fire that Henry was going to build. The rest of their conversation has been forgotten now, but Mr Gaskin does remember with some clarity three things about their meeting. The first of these is the peculiarity of Henry’s speech, the slowness of it, and the silences. ‘He had this air of being baffled, and I couldn’t decide if he was a thoughtful chap or a little lacking in grey matter. He seemed perplexed by me or by himself, but it wasn’t clear which,’ muses Mr Gaskin, and Ian writes it down, nodding in recognition. Every minute or so, as well, Henry would yawn, very widely, without covering his mouth, yet he did not appear tired. ‘It was a tic, I suppose, but most unnerving,’ he tells us. ‘And I think he had a Midlands accent. That’s the last thing.’

‘By “think” –?’ Ian asks.

‘I detected a flatness in the voice. In some of the vowels.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘I’m sure of what I heard, yes. I’m not wholly sure about the accent. Where it was from, I mean.’

‘But something like a Midlands accent?’

‘That’s how it sounded to me.’

‘Interesting,’ Ian comments. ‘I didn’t pick that up.’

‘You talked to him?’ asks Mr Gaskin, and the next minute Ian’s chatting to him about the swimming incident and the unnamed snoop with the telescope, which makes Mr Gaskin smile, with a wistful fondness, as though at the wackiness of a shared acquaintance. ‘One other thing occurs to me,’ he says, apparently prompted by something in Ian’s story, and he tells us that several times he saw Henry walking on the clifftops or the beach with a girl, a fair-haired girl, a bit on the plump side, average height. By girl he means under thirty, a few years under thirty. When he saw her with Henry he had a feeling that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen her. Ian asks if he could be a little more specific about her appearance, and Mr Gaskin presses his fingers to his temples, trying to squeeze a memory to the surface. Grimacing at the effort, he looks out of the window. We wait. Eventually he recalls that the girl was with Henry late one evening last summer, on the beach. Henry had his jeans rolled up and was collecting rubbish in a fertiliser bag. Behind him was the girl. She was wearing a purple swimming costume, a bikini, bright purple. Mr Gaskin puts a hand to his brow and closes his eyes, summoning the scene on the beach. We wait a little longer. ‘I’m sorry. It’s gone. I can’t see her face,’ he complains, at which Ian lets out a small laugh. Mr Gaskin opens his eyes and blinks at him, confused.

‘See the bikini, don’t see the face,’ Ian explains. ‘I can undertand that. I have that problem myself.’

‘Oh,’ replies Mr Gaskin. ‘I see. Yes.’ He smiles weakly, before again gazing out of the window.

‘This is useful,’ says Ian, tapping his notebook. ‘Thank you.’

Mr Gaskin follows us to the door in silence, his burden of sadness now increased by the failure of his memory. ‘If anything else comes to mind,’ he says, ‘shall I call the station?’

‘Please,’ says Ian. He writes down our names and phone numbers for Mr Gaskin, then shakes his hand.

6

Oswald and Son, greengrocers, began trading in 1947, from a shop on the outskirts of Exeter. Forty years later, the business having been left high and dry by the opening of a supermarket half a mile away, James Oswald, son of the son, was forced to shut down. Not long after, a new traffic system narrowed the pavement outside what had once been the Oswalds’ shop and clogged the road with cars and lorries from rush hour to rush hour. Marooned in what had become a moribund location, the former Oswald premises were left untenanted for years. The windows disappeared under billboards; the roof began to disintegrate. Then, one Sunday afternoon in November, while stuck in a traffic jam, Alice noticed the derelict shop.

At this point Alice had been working with Katharine Giles for no more than a couple of months. The operation was being run from the kitchen of Katharine’s house and a lock-up garage near Katharine’s house, an unsatisfactory arrangement but one to which there seemed to be no affordable alternative. Until, that is, Alice saw the shop and decided, feeling the seed of an idea instantly taking root, to take a closer look. She picked off a corner of a poster to peer through the sooty glass; she went round the back and found a small yard and a loading bay. The building had been neglected for so long there wasn’t even an agent’s board on it, but Alice soon tracked them down and made them an offer: she and her partner would refurbish the shop and pay the rates on it, but would pay no rent; they would have a lease for a year and after that they would be on one month’s notice to quit, should a long-term tenant come along. This offer, submitted in writing, was unacceptable. A second letter, elaborating on the humanitarian nature of their enterprise, and for good measure reiterating that the restoration of these dilapidated premises could only be of benefit to the landlords, who at present were lumbered with an asset of negligible commercial value, was likewise rebutted in the fewest possible words.

Then Alice went directly, in person, to the owners of the property, and that was that, because no one, however obtuse or tightfisted he may be, can resist the ardent goodness of Alice. Confronted with Alice, when Alice’s mind is made up, no man could argue for long. When she sits down and looks at you with those unwavering deep green eyes, you know that here is a woman who is sincere and highly principled and absolutely intent on achieving her purpose. And, of course, she’s attractive, too, very attractive, which helps in the disarming process. To refuse her would be ungracious. You’d feel that you’d behaved unworthily in taking issue with her, and the landlords duly, rapidly, acceded to her request. It’s the same when she’s drumming up donations and sponsorship. Nobody ever says ‘No’ when Alice visits in person. They must dread her visitations, the lovely and implacable spirit of charity.

Before the year’s end Alice and Katharine took over the shop, and at the time of Henry’s death that’s where they were, flanked on one side by a hairdresser who somehow stayed solvent on the revenue from three customers per day and on the other by a boarded-up betting shop. Every morning Alice would set off in their resprayed post-office van to drive around the county or even further afield, gathering discarded books from libraries and colleges and anywhere else that had surplus printed matter to offload. In the afternoon, if she hadn’t returned too late, she helped Katharine to sort the haul into packages for dispersal to various wretched zones of the earth, where kids who owned nothing would learn about the world and the English language from out-of-date guidebooks and novels with pages missing, and battered old dictionaries and atlases held together with tape and glue applied by Alice and Katharine and their ever-changing crew of volunteers. It was also Alice’s job to phone the regular donors, to cold-call the potential benefactors. Above the desk – a castoff from the insurance broker in the next street – was stuck a picture of a wizened woman sitting on an oil drum in front of a shack of corrugated iron. The bags under her eyes were like tiny leather purses, but she was only forty years old, said Katharine. She lived in Mozambique and at the time the picture was taken she was learning to read, helped by the books that Alice and Katharine had sent. Now she was running a mobile library, taking books to her neighbours on a donkey-drawn cart. All round the walls there were photographs like this one, displayed like images of the saints. By the door there was one of a pretty eight-year-old. Before school she had to work on her parents’ scrap of land; when school was finished she picked up the hoe and the spade again. Of an evening, when the outdoors work was done, she had chores to do in the house, and then her homework, but when the homework was completed she sat down at the table and read to her parents by the light of a kerosene lamp. Her name was Josephine. In the photograph she was sitting at the table, the household’s one table, with the unlit lamp beside her, grinning over a ragged copy of Tarka the Otter. It came from a man in Appledore, Katharine explained, delighted at the extraordinariness of the book’s destiny.

Thousands of books passed through her warehouse every year, and Katharine seemed to know the destination of each one. She was in her mid-fifties then. Her son was a layabout junkie and she was cursed with sciatica, but Katharine’s enthusiasm could not be dimmed. Each donation of books was received as a kid would receive a Christmas present, and she packed them up as if the books were as precious as barrels of water. Katharine believed that the day was coming in which everyone would have access to the books they need for their education. What’s more, the inequality of men and women would soon be eliminated, all over the world, if not in her lifetime, then within the lifetime of her son’s generation. She really did believe this would happen, and to play her part in the realisation of this vision she worked like a demon, earning barely enough to pay the mortgage, with a small surplus for handouts to the freeloading son. We read about gold-diggers: the lusty young girlfriend of the rich and ailing dotard; the errant wife with an eye for the life insurance and a violent boyfriend in tow; the high-maintenance flint-heart, siphoning hubby’s bank account until the well runs dry, whereupon it’ll be time to snare another sap. These women exist. But a pathological love of cash is predominantly a male vice. For most women, life is not about money. What tends to be important with women is value of a different kind, the value of life itself.

After we married, we lived modestly: small house, boring car, two weeks’ holiday a year. As long as we had sufficient cash to cover the outgoings and save a little, Alice was content with that. We were both content with it. And when we began to consider changing our lives, we did the sums and decided together that it was the right thing to do: we could afford it, we should take the chance. And so, in perfect agreement, we determinedly took a wrong turn. Had Alice shown the slightest misgiving about the dip in household income, we wouldn’t have done it – and then, two or three years down the line, perhaps we’d have taken a different wrong turn.

One day, in a queue at the supermarket checkout, Alice got talking to Margaret Whittam, and a month later, such is Alice’s charm, we were guests at the Whittams’ house-warming party. As the party was breaking up, we stood with George at the door of the conservatory, looking out at the garden. ‘The job might not be great but it’s tolerable, yes? You don’t look like a man at his wits’ end.’

‘It could be better.’

‘For ninety-five per cent of people it could be better,’ George countered, raising a hand to stay Alice’s objection. ‘But the time has come to make a change. You feel that. I understand.’

‘We both feel it,’ Alice interjected.

‘Fine, fine. But the job is bearable, for the time being. So my advice would be: don’t rush. Think carefully.’

‘We have,’ said Alice.

‘You must see a lot of unhappy people in your line of work,’ he remarked, emanating the wisdom of the life-seasoned policeman, though he’d yet to touch forty.

‘Nothing but, most days.’

‘Well, you’d get a lot more of that.’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s not the problem,’ Alice told him. ‘He’s had enough of just writing out the cheques. And people never see him as being on their side. You’re there to minimise your employer’s costs, that’s how they see it, isn’t it, John?’

‘Usually.’

‘Well, they’re right, aren’t they?’ George commented.

‘But he’s there to help put things back together, as well. He’s not out to rob them, but that’s what they think.’

‘So you want to be popular, John? Is that it?’

‘Not –’

‘He doesn’t want to be popular,’ Alice interrupted. ‘He wants to be in a different part of the process.’

‘John deals with the aftermath, I deal with the aftermath. We’re latecomers, both of us.’

‘You know what I mean,’ retorted Alice, an undertone of impatience in her voice.

Sipping his champagne, George cast a quick sidelong glance at Alice, an approving glance that was intended to go unobserved. ‘You mean catching the bad men.’

‘That makes it sound silly. But if you want to put it that way, yes.’

George nodded and said nothing, and surveyed the garden with an expression of mild perplexity.

‘It’s a bit late in the day for a career switch,’ said Alice. ‘Is that what you’re thinking?’

‘No. Not at all. It’s not too late.’

‘So what is it? Tell me.’

Lowering his glass, George turned to regard the insistent and beguiling Alice for an extended moment, meeting her eye. ‘Look, Alice. John,’ he said at last. ‘It can be tough, I know, what you’re doing now. Going to see people whose homes have gone up in smoke. Calling at a flat that’s been torn apart. Things that can’t be replaced, gone for ever. It doesn’t make you feel good. It can be distressing. I know. But it’s nothing,’ he told her. ‘Take my word for it, it’s nothing,’ he repeated, facing the garden rather than us, and Alice’s face took on an attentive and slightly fearful and quietly resolute expression, an expression like that which, later, would sometimes appear when the Reverend Beal was on the top of his form, expounding on the ineffable mysteries of God’s love. ‘How long have you been married?’ he asked, as if suddenly starting an interview.

‘Going on four years.’

‘You seem happy, leaving the job aside for the moment. You and John. You seem very close. Not all couples are. Tell me if this is none of my business.’

‘Yes, we’re happy,’ Alice replied. ‘John?’

‘Happy. Confirmed.’

‘Good,’ said George, in full sagacious mode. Father of two teenaged girls, high-flying officer of the law, he drew a long breath and took a last sip of champagne before going on. ‘Look, it’s a terrific job, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t do anything else. But the things that people are capable of doing to each other,’ he went on, directing a scowl at the floor. ‘I don’t think anything could surprise me any more. The madness that comes over people. The vicious idiocy. It’s unimaginable,’ he said, turning away, and he wandered off to find a fresh bottle.

The words of this conversation are the gist of it, a reconstruction, not a copy, but those last three phrases were what was said by Detective Inspector Whittam, verbatim. He poured our drinks, chinked glasses. Smiling at the garden of his big new house, he said: ‘let me tell you about the day I lost my virginity.’

For more than thirty years these two brothers had lived together, migrating from one pocket of slum accommodation to another in various east London locales before settling in a caravan in the breaker’s yard that they ran in Bethnal Green. In the evenings they drank together in a pub across the road from the yard. At six o’clock every evening they’d take their places at their table in the corner and there they would remain until eleven, downing pint after pint after pint, like drinking machines. You’d get a nod out of them, if you were lucky, and hardly a word passed between them. One night, though, they went home and had an argument, over a game of cards. Brother A brought the disagreement to a close by going to bed: his berth was at one end of the caravan and his sibling’s was at the other. While Brother A was asleep, Brother B came into his cubicle and struck him a few times – maybe twenty-five times – between the eyes, with a torque wrench. This done, Brother B closed the door and retired to bed, leaving the body of Brother A where it lay. Every evening, through September, October, November, December, Brother B went to the pub across the road. Silent as a bollard he sat next to the void that had been his brother’s place, and at night he went home to sleep in his bed, separated from the mouldering corpse by a few feet of space and a very thin wall. ‘Gone away,’ he replied, if anyone asked, and that was enough to satisfy anyone who could be bothered to enquire as to the whereabouts of the absent man. A few people noticed a smell hanging around the piles of car parts, a sewer smell that was emanating from the vicinity of the caravan, but hygiene had never been the brothers’ strong point and nobody was inclined to make an issue of it. So the remains of Brother A were left to dwindle undisturbed until Christmas Eve, when some unexplained mental event induced Brother B, as last orders were called, to mutter to the woman sitting at the next table, a woman who had never been in the pub before and just happened to be there because she was visiting her nephew and his new wife, ‘Get the police.’ Thinking they were in the presence of a psychiatric case, and a dangerous-looking psychiatric case at that, the woman edged away. ‘Get the police,’ he repeated, louder, and then he started shouting. ‘Get the fucking police. For fuck’s sake get the police.’ He burst into tears, but carried on drinking his pint until the police arrived.

The detectives, young George Whittam among them, entered the caravan to find this thing that was halfway to being a mummy, dressed in brown pyjamas, lying on the foulest mattress in Western Europe. ‘It was really something special,’ George marvelled. ‘Most of him had drained away into the mattress, and there were so many dead flies, you could have filled a bath with them.’ We listened to his cautionary tale. He described the scene for us so vividly, with such relish: the stink when they opened the door; the brown mulch of a bed with the sticky rind of a corpse lying on it; the demented drunk man stamping on the heaps of flies as if it had been the insects that had killed his brother. We listened and we felt that we were almost there in the caravan with George Whittam, the young constable, as he stared at the bed and tried to stop the shake in his hand. But a case like the deranged brother must come along once in a decade, we told ourselves. There’s an element of bravado in the telling of the story too. ‘The man who looked on darkness and is not afraid,’ joked Alice afterwards, on our way home. And the brothers were from London, after all. London’s a different world. Life down here is more sedate. It’s not murder or GBH every day of the week. And the satisfactions of justice will outweigh whatever unpleasantness may lie in store. We can handle whatever happens. We love each other. We are happy.

So the decision was made and the reaction to George Whittam’s warning was nothing more than a pause, a hesitancy that was soon overcome. But George was right. You can’t completely imagine it, and what it does to you is unimaginable – or, to be more precise, we didn’t imagine what it would do to us. When you deal with violence and its consequences every week, when every day you’re talking to people you know are lying to you, then perhaps it’s inevitable that you become a different person. In the beginning it’s a performance: you play the part of the hard man, the man with no illusions, the cynic. You learn quickly how it’s done. You observe and imitate, but at the outset there’s a difference between the role and the real person, between who you are being and who you are. Here’s a picture of a girl, can’t be older than eighteen, a prostitute, slashed so badly by her punter she was having to hold one side of her face in place when she crawled out of the park on her knees. ‘Poor kid,’ you say, and you pass the picture on without another word, but your eyes are prickling and you’re hoping that the bastard gets sentenced by a judge whose values come straight out of the rule book of Genghis Khan. A couple of years on there’s the blistered beetroot face of Evie Challoner, whose boyfriend has doused her with a kettleful of boiling water to make her ugly, so her ex-husband, who wants her back, won’t want her back any longer. At this you shake your head, and the weary shake of the head isn’t too far from representing what you feel, because the convulsion of pity isn’t there any more. ‘Christ,’ you mutter, and you get on with the work. In fact, you’re not so sure what you feel now. It’s as though you’ve spoken your character’s lines for so long that you’ve come to think like him, most of the time, and whenever you’re not thinking like him, when you get a pang, you wonder sometimes where it’s come from, if you’ve just slipped out of one character and into another one, the one you used to play all the time. And the home that Alice created and maintained, the pleasant and tranquil and orderly home environment, was intended to be something like a refuge for both of us. It was the place where life was restored to what was dependable and true, a place where the guises of working life were cast off, its contaminations rinsed away.

By agreement we had a house rule: no shop talk in front of Luke. But from someone else he heard the story of the dead man on the beach, and one evening, on his way to bed, he stopped on the stairs and asked, ‘Why did someone kill that man?’ Sitting side by side on the top step, we talked about Henry for a while. ‘Why didn’t he have somewhere to live?’ he asked. ‘Who did it?’ He rested his chin on his knees, pondering his father’s less than entirely satisfactory answers, not frightened, it seemed, by the thought of the uncaught killer, but unhappy at the unfairness of homeless Henry’s death.

It was half an hour or more before Alice came downstairs from Luke’s room. ‘He wanted me to stay,’ she said, taking food from the fridge. ‘It’s upset him.’ There was no sense that blame was being apportioned – there was never that, not until the day of judgement. Rather, it was as though we all had the misfortune to be living in a place with an unhealthy climate, or night-long noise outside. Over the meal there would have been some kind of conversation about Henry, a brief conversation, perhaps with a mention for Henry’s mysterious female companion, but there was nothing much to say about the case of Henry and by then it was understood that if nothing was offered, Alice would not enquire. Trusting her husband to do all that could be done, she would prepare the evening’s meal, watch the evening’s TV with him, and the following Sunday they would go to church together, where Alice would pray and think about Henry’s soul, in the belief or the hope that all will be well, that in the end – if not on this earth – the innocent will have their reward.

At 10.30 or thereabouts on the night that Luke was upset, Alice would have gone to bed. On the TV, likely as not, there was yet another report from some hellish zone of Africa: thousands starving, thousands dying of Aids, kids being born diseased, schools set on fire and teachers hacked to death by child-soldiers, the infantry of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Psychos, washing away their sins in the blood of the lambs.

7

A thin broth of sea cloud fills the mouth of the river and through the greyness, here and there, it’s just possible to make out where the sky begins, what’s hill and what’s water, which seam of the mist is a sandbank and which is a thickening of the mist. On the seafront the windows of empty guest houses gleam like slabs of wet slate. Here and there a head can be glimpsed, a hand on a radio, a newspaper being turned, a lampshade in a style that’s twenty years old. Kids are skateboarding down the middle of the road and riding their bikes across the putting greens. Names have been spray-painted on the doors of the beach huts. You can stand in the car park and hear nothing but the gasping of the sea. In winter half the town is in a coma.

We call at one of the bigger hotels, and on the afternoon of our visit the register shows that the number of guests in residence is precisely three. The previous weekend a couple from Ontario had stayed for two nights and they’d had the place to themselves. We sit in the manageress’s office, noting the names and addresses of all the people who stayed here during the period within which Henry died: that’s fewer than thirty individuals to trace, interview and eliminate, a task soon completed. Some of them came here for a break from London, one came for a break from her husband, one was a photographer taking pictures for a travel agent’s calendar, one a geologist on a working holiday, one a bibulous clarinettist on the brink of a breakdown. The clarinettist is still on the brink when he’s interviewed: he’s a jittery wisp of a man, an emaciated five-foot vegan who couldn’t bring himself to swat a wasp, let alone kill Henry. None of them could have killed Henry.

Two old blokes are sitting in the hotel bar, mumbling at each other over two-inch Scotches. One of them is our friend Mr Latimer, who slowly finds a match for our faces in the scrambled card index of his memory and greets us with a squint, as if we’re approaching from a mile off. We explain our business to his companion and from the depths of his armchair he regards us with eyes that are dissolving in their little puddles of rheum. Gravely as a High Court judge he considers the question of the dead tramp. His chin sinks into the folds of an outsized paisley cravat. He might be falling asleep, so long does he take to formulate a response, but at last he replies: ‘No. I’m sorry. Didn’t know the chap.’ It’s as if we’d asked him for the loan of a thousand quid. We take our leave, then there’s a tap on the shoulder and Yousif introduces himself, having overheard our exchange with Tweedlepissed and Tweedlestewed.

Yousif is a Lebanese lad, mid twenties, with hair like moleskin and quick dark eyes that betray an excessive eagerness to please. He works as an odd-job man and is helping to patch up the hotel in the comatose months, replacing some skirting boards, doing a bit of rewiring, unclogging the drains and so on. He himself never spoke to Henry, he tells us, but his friend Malak did, many times. Malak worked in the hotel kitchen last year. Late one night, at the end of a long shift, he went out of the back door and there was Henry, grubbing around in the bins. Everyone else had left by then, so Malak went back inside and put together a bag of food for him. They talked for a few minutes, and after that night Malak would make up a parcel of leftovers for Henry whenever he could. When he finished work, he’d leave the food on one of the little dunes, wrapped in foil, for Henry to collect. Sometimes he didn’t have to put it in the box, because he’d see Henry on the beach and they’d walk together for a while. Henry wanted to know all about Malak’s life and his family, and there was a lot to tell, because Malak had six brothers living in four different countries, and there were four sisters too, at home. ‘And cousins, so many cousins,’ says Yousif, gesturing as if to raise the spectres of Malak’s relatives on the lawns in front of the hotel. ‘And they would fire Malak’s gun, sometimes,’ he adds, securing Ian’s attention, which was beginning to slacken. ‘It was Malak’s hobby. He was a soldier and he likes guns. He has great eyes,’ he says, making a finger-pistol and taking aim at the nearest lamp-post. ‘Malak had an air rifle, a good one,’ he tells us. ‘Very expensive. In the morning, early, very early, he went down to the beach to shoot his gun. Sometimes he met Henry there. He went there and sometimes Henry would be there. He would put a small thing, a coin or something, in the sand, and he could hit it from fifty metres, every time,’ says Yousif, dumbfounded with admiration. ‘And Henry was good. Not every time, but he could hit the coin. He knew about guns.’ But how much Henry knew about guns, and how he came to know it, Yousif does not know. Malak himself didn’t know much about Henry, because Henry didn’t like to talk about himself. He liked to hear about Malak’s family but never spoke about his own, and this gave Malak the feeling that none of Henry’s people were alive. All Malak really knew about Henry was that his home was on the beach and his full name was Henry Wilson.

‘And where’s Malak now?’ Ian asks.

‘He left in September.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘Gone,’ says Yousif, with the shrug of a young man who has almost become inured to the perpetual disappointments of life in England. We suspect that Malak was last year’s one new friendship.

‘Wilson, you said?’ asks Ian, writing it down.

As expected, sharpshooter Malak has no official existence: no National Insurance, no bank account, no forwarding address. He’s moved on to some other kitchen and the chances of finding him are vanishingly slim. Malak said he would get in touch when he found a job, Yousif tells us; he promises to let us know if he hears anything.

A full day’s footslogging had established little more than that Henry had a degree of expertise in the handling of air rifles, but at the next morning prayers it turns out that Henry Wilson-Ellis-Yarrow-McBain-McCain-McSwain had another skill. A woman named Martha Swinton, in the first week of December, around the fourth or fifth, had been driving out of Knowle when her car cut out and cruised to a standstill. There was heavy fog, and Martha was turning the ignition key over and over again, praying that the thing would miraculously spark into life, when she looked up and saw this wild-looking man looming out of the fog. It was Henry – or rather, it was the homeless man from the beach, as she knew him. Purposefully Henry strode towards the immobilised car, as if he’d been summoned to rescue her, and as he came nearer he was making a gesture that she took to be threatening, before she realised he was miming the action of pulling the bonnet release. Indicating that she should stay in the car, he hoisted the bonnet, then came round to the passenger’s side and rapped on the window. Martha wound down the window. ‘I need to listen inside,’ he told her. This was something of a quandary, being stuck in the fog with this fairly frightening old man demanding admittance to your vehicle, but he waited patiently beside the door and after a few seconds, seeing her hesitation, he suggested that, if she was scared, she could step out of the car as he got in and get back in when he stepped out, so she stayed in the car and opened the door for him. ‘Thank you,’ he said, but he didn’t actually get in, not completely. Instead, he knelt on the road and bent his head into the footwell, placing an ear close to the floor. He seemed to be wearing about a dozen T-shirts, and his clothes gave off a reek of old seaweed. ‘Turn the key,’ he ordered. Martha turned the key. ‘Once more,’ he said. Martha turned the key again, and he nodded like a diagnosing doctor at whatever it was he’d been hearing. Then he got out of the car, saying nothing. ‘Again,’ he instructed her from behind the bonnet. She turned the key and a moment later Henry came round to her window. ‘We need a bit of wire,’ he told her. ‘You don’t have a bit of wire, do you? No. Of course you don’t have a bit of wire. Why would you have a bit of wire? Right. Wait here.’ These words were addressed not to Martha directly but to a point somewhere over her shoulder, as if to a back-seat passenger whose incompetence was to blame for the situation. He loped down the hill, vanishing into the mist. Martha waited and half an hour later, just as she’d decided that Henry wasn’t coming back, he reappeared, looking angry. He didn’t speak, but went straight back under the bonnet. She could hear him muttering loudly while he worked, perhaps to himself, but perhaps to her as well. ‘Turn the switch and the light bulb comes on but what’s happened to make it come on? What’s the science? Do you know? No, you don’t have a clue,’ she heard. He was going on about televisions and computers and telephones, and how we don’t understand anything. The implication seemed to be that only trained mechanics should be allowed to drive cars. Martha did not take issue. In mid-mutter he interrupted himself with a shout of ‘Again!’. The car started and Henry slammed the bonnet with more force than required. He crouched at the roadside, wiping his hands on the wet grass. ‘That’ll do for a mile or two,’ he said. ‘Tell your garage it’s the fuel pump relay. What’s your name?’ he asked, quite aggressively, with no pause between the statement and the question.

‘Martha Swinton,’ she replied and immediately, before she could thank him for the repair, he’d turned his back and was walking away as if there were another car awaiting his attention somewhere in the murk.

Like Henry and Malak playing snipers on the beach, the episode of Martha’s car adds a bit of colour to the victim profile, but neither story gets us very far, and as we listen to the report, imagining the scene, we’re all thinking the same thing: this case is a runner; Henry will be with us for ever. At a stretch you could argue that Henry’s trick with the bit of wire gives some credibility to the tale told to Peggy Thurlow, but you don’t have to be an engineer to know what to do when a fuel pump relay is on the blink. And the one fact of obvious significance – that Henry was definitely alive in the first week of December – is superseded within minutes, because one of the lads has spoken to a Mrs Turley, who was visiting her sister on the morning of 9 December – the day of her wedding anniversary, so she remembers the date clearly – and saw Henry sitting on the sea wall. It’s the latest reliable sighting we’ve had so far and we’re never to get a later one.

‘OK,’ says George Whittam, summing up. ‘Still among the living on the ninth. Understands motors. Handy with a rifle. Another alias. Is that it?’ His eyes have the look of a man facing hours of futile paperwork, but George likes to end with a flourish, and now he lifts a manila folder from the desk and produces the picture, a dozen copies of it. Wearing the SeaShed T-shirt and the swimming trunks that Ian bought for him, Henry sits on a boulder, peering at the sea, with one hand on his whiskers in a venerable hermit kind of pose. It’s a good photo: a bit arty, but clear. Last night a young woman had phoned, extremely upset, having just heard that Henry was dead. An hour later she walked into Ilfracombe station and delivered the photo, taken by herself last October.

‘Fair-haired, plump, average height, twenties?’ someone asks.

‘Redhead,’ says George, as he hands the name and address to Ian. ‘For you two,’ he says. ‘Cherchez la femme.’

8

The door opens and we’re looking at a young woman in grey tracksuit leggings and a baggy grey T-shirt, late twenties, not slim, five-six or five-seven. Her hair, gathered in a twist and secured with a pair of chopsticks, is a colour that some people might classify as red but most would describe as fair or strawberry blonde. We both know at once that we’re looking at Henry’s walking companion, and at least one of us is thinking it’s odd that her face didn’t make much of an impression on Tom Gaskin, because it’s not the kind of face you see every day of the week. There’s something Slavic about the breadth and slope of her cheekbones, and about her eyes, which are narrow and deep-set, and set slightly at an upward angle. The nose, small and somewhat flattened at the bridge, is interesting too, and rather delicate, whereas her mouth is wide and full-lipped, with a distinct ridge above the upper lip, and her jaw is deep and heavy, almost masculine, some would say. Her brow juts out a little, which tends to give her a brooding appearance, and her skin isn’t terrific. You couldn’t imagine anyone describing Hannah Rowe as pretty, but nobody with functioning visual apparatus could deny that her face has strength, an unusual strength.

She shakes hands with both of us: her grip is strong and her skin surprisingly rough. She precedes us up the stairs to her flat, into a room that has no curtains or blinds. The floorboards are unvarnished and there’s just one rug in the middle of the room, a big square of thick chalk-coloured wool with a small square of turquoise inset at one end. There’s hardly any furniture: a futon against the wall near the edge of the rug, a couple of leather beanbags, one wicker armchair, that’s the lot. A few books are lying on the floor, and there are some shelves of books and cassettes in the corner opposite the futon, above the TV and hifi and a tree branch that’s propped against the wall, stripped of its bark and as white as veal. The walls are a colour that seems off-white at first, but as the hour passes and the light changes in the room it acquires a tinge that’s greenish-grey, and in the centre of one wall there’s a row of photographs, each the size of a magazine page. All these pictures show the same thing – a field and a drystone wall – and all were taken from exactly the same place, so the wall runs diagonally across the top right-hand corner, but the images are different, because the light is not the same in any two, so in some the wall is grey and in others black or fawn or even pink, while the field itself is not the same hue of green from one shot to the next. And by the door there are some of pieces of cloth, pressed under glass. They’re not patterned or embroidered, like the samples in the Heidi house. These are just scraps of material, each dyed a single colour: a blue, a red, a yellow. One of them is black. That’s all it is: a bit of black rag. Ian notices it on his way in and you can see that he’s instantly decided that we’ve an arty poser on our hands.

Hannah waves us towards the futon and the armchair. Crossing her ankles, she sits down on the floor, swiftly, easily, and her back is absolutely straight when she’s sitting, like someone who does a lot of yoga. For a few seconds she stares into the floor and a profound frown appears, as if she’s seeing on the floorboards a picture of Henry. ‘So,’ she whispers, and she glances up, but at the sky, not at either of us. ‘You found him on the second?’

‘He was found on the second of January, yes,’ replies Ian, employing the tone you’d take with relatives of the bereaved.

‘Where?’

‘On the beach. Midway between the end of the road and Straight Point.’

She nods, once again gazing downwards. ‘And he was murdered.’

‘He’d been stabbed.’

Now she begins to pick at a loose strip of wood in the floor, a splinter two or three inches long. It makes a buzzing sound as she plucks it, which she does repeatedly. Tears are budding in her eyes. ‘When?’ she asks.

‘We don’t know for certain. Mid December. Around then.’

‘So he was out there for two weeks?’

‘Possibly.’

‘And where is he now?’

‘The body’s in the mortuary. We need to find the next of kin.’ Ian waits for her to respond, but she’s pinching at her lip as she regards the sky and there’s no sign that a reply is imminent.

Perceiving that we’re dealing with someone who’s in a less than entirely stable state of mind, Ian quietly clears his throat. ‘Your picture. It was taken in October. Is that right?’

‘That’s right,’ she replies abstractedly.

‘And when was the last time you saw him? Can you recall?’

Hannah is gazing out of the window, but you can’t tell whether she’s thinking about the question or counting the clouds. She presses her fingers to her eyes, then examines her fingertips. ‘End of November,’ she says at last. ‘The last Thursday in November.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Can you tell us about his state of mind? Did he seem worried about anything?’

‘It was getting colder. He was worried about that.’

‘Anything apart from that? Did he say anything about any difficulties he’d had with anyone, any argument?’

‘No.’

‘He didn’t talk about any people he’d seen recently?’

‘No.’

‘No incident of any kind?’

‘No. Obviously.’

‘Why obviously?’

‘Because I’d have said at the start, wouldn’t I? Henry’s dead. You want to find out who killed him. I want to find out who killed him. If I had a clue, I’d have said.’

Ian counts voicelessly to five and takes out his notebook. ‘So nothing out of the ordinary,’ he says, pretending to write. ‘Can you tell us anything about his family?’

For a good half-minute Hannah remains silent, sullenly messing with the floorboard, then she shakes her head. ‘I don’t think he had any,’ she says.

‘Did he tell you he didn’t have any family?’

‘The few times he spoke about his parents, it made me think that they were no longer alive. He never mentioned any other relatives.’

‘But did he ever actually state that he had no family? Explicitly?’

‘No,’ she says, dragging the word out, losing patience. ‘He never actually said that. Explicitly. I think he was on his own. I think he’d been on his own for a long time.’

‘So would you say you knew him well?’

‘No. Of course not,’ she says, twanging the strip of wood.

‘But as well as anyone around here?’

‘Possibly. Probably. I don’t know. Possibly. If he had any family I think he’d have told me.’

‘We heard that Henry was often seen walking with a young woman. Might that have been you?’

‘“Often seen”,’ she quotes under her breath, in a tone of bitter amusement.

‘So it was you, do you think?’

‘I suppose it was. Who had us under surveillance?’

‘You were noticed.’

‘I wouldn’t say often.’

‘What then?’

‘From time to time we went for a walk,’ she concedes.

This requires from Ian a count of ten. ‘You last saw him more than a month before he was discovered, yes?’ he continues.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Would you have expected to see him during that period?’

‘No.’

‘So you saw him less frequently than once a month, on average?’

‘No.’

‘More frequently?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘But in December you didn’t have any reason to think something might be wrong?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ she answers, turning to look directly at him for the first time since opening the door. ‘I didn’t have any reason because I was not here. I’ve been in London. I went to London at Christmas and when I got back I saw the poster and I brought the picture in,’ she says to Ian. ‘So you can strike me off the list of suspects.’

‘We don’t have a list, Ms Rowe,’ says Ian, writing. ‘What was Henry’s surname, do you know?’

‘Baldwin,’ she says and Ian gives a small wry grin which Hannah, though she’s no longer facing him, notices.

‘What’s funny?’ she demands.

‘I wouldn’t say funny,’ Ian tells her. ‘Baldwin’s about the tenth name we’ve had for him. We’ve had Wilson, Ellis, McBain. And Yarrow. We’ve had others as well.’

Hannah resumes picking at the splinter, one pluck per second. ‘Well,’ she says with a shrug, ‘Baldwin it was. That’s what he told me.’ Chewing at her lip, in something like a sulk, she looks out of the window, reading the sky.

At this point it should be said that in addition to the tracksuit leggings and the shapeless T-shirt, Hannah does not seem to be wearing very much, and Ian is having difficulty, at times, in maintaining a respectful sight line. After the naming of Henry, when Hannah’s attention has returned to the world outside, Ian takes the opportunity for another sly appraisal of the comely bosom, and his gaze is continuing southwards when Hannah quickly turns round, as if remembering something she wanted to say. What happens now is that she turns away from Ian, who for most of the next ten minutes might as well be elsewhere, and asks of his colleague, as if out of whimsical curiosity, ‘Do you ever speak?’

‘I tend to be the listener.’

‘Like good cop, bad cop? Talking cop, listening cop?’

‘Something along those lines.’

For an instant Hannah comes close to smiling. ‘He was nice to talk to, you know?’ she says, letting the tears run. ‘He was such a nice man.’ For a few seconds she maintains eye contact, then her eyes change with a flash of anguish that makes them widen, as if startled by herself. ‘Fuck,’ she says through clenched teeth, swiping the tears off her face, but you can’t tell if she’s cursing her own crying or the fate of her murdered friend. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,’ she repeats passionlessly, glaring at the wall, at the sky, at her wetted hands. Her fury expelled, she turns back to the favoured policeman, presenting herself as someone who is now ready to talk. And talk she does, at length, as if she’s been called as a character witness for Henry Whoever.

It is important to her that we should appreciate his resourcefulness, his toughness, his gentleness, his refusal to complain about the lousy hand that life had dealt him. Despite the kindness of Malak (whose name is invoked like the name of the Good Samaritan), there were days on which Henry ate nothing, but Henry didn’t moan about going hungry – he simply remarked on it, as you or I might comment on a day on which the sun didn’t shine. In short, indigent yet uncomplaining, Henry had a rare air of dignity about him. Henry was charismatic. Henry was his own man.

‘Which is the reason we’re here,’ mutters Ian, who has been studying a fish tank that stands in a corner of the room, a fish tank filled with clear water and one-quarter filled with shells, crab claws, stones and miscellaneous beach debris, but apparently devoid of fish. ‘When he went AWOL, where did he get to? Any idea?’ he asks, addressing the side of Hannah’s face.

‘Last year it was Penzance, during the summer,’ she replies, as though the question had been put not by Ian but by his companion. And he was in Plymouth too, on the same trip. Why he’d gone there, how he’d got there, how long he’d spent there, she can’t say. When he came back from his travels he usually didn’t seem to know where he’d been. Once he was away for a short time, no more than a week, and when she next saw him a bus ticket fell out of his pocket while they were talking, and he picked it up and looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. And a couple of years back, she remembers, Henry reappeared wearing a T-shirt that had come from some car museum, yet Henry was almost certain he hadn’t been to any such place.

‘Almost certain?’ Ian interjects, having decided that the fishless fish tank is evidence in favour of the judgement he’d made on the basis of the black rag by the door.

‘That’s right,’ Hannah responds coolly, again to the non-speaker.

‘So he was confused,’ Ian summarises. ‘Mentally confused.’

‘That’s not how I’d put it.’

‘How would you put it?’

‘He was confused when he saw the ticket. When I asked him about the museum. But from day to day his mental state wasn’t confused.’

Mimicking the perplexity of the dense, Ian scratches his head, scowling at the effort of thinking. ‘You’re going to have to run that one by me again,’ he says. ‘He goes walkabout for a few days and when he comes back here he doesn’t have a clue where he’s been but his mind isn’t confused? I’m not getting it.’

Bestowing on Ian a brief irritated glance, Hannah explains, speaking slowly to the wall behind him. ‘When you talked to Henry he wasn’t confused. He made sense. He understood what you were saying to him. He answered in sentences. OK? But when he came back from his walkabout, as you put it, he seemed to have lost the time that he’d been away. It was as if he’d been sleepwalking. Make sense to you now?’

‘In my experience, when people wake up after sleepwalking they tend to be confused.’

‘He was, at first, a bit. But he wasn’t confused in the way you meant it.’

‘And how did I mean it?’

‘On the way to ga-ga. He was more blank than confused.’

‘So if you said to him, “Henry, where were you yesterday?” he’d say, “I haven’t a clue?” Is that right?’

‘He’d remember stuff. Things he’d seen.’

‘In that case he wasn’t blank, was he?’

‘Not entirely, no. He’d remember bits and pieces, but they wouldn’t join up. Things would be vague. Like remembering a dream.’

‘Sounds to me like he needed medical attention.’

‘That’s not the sort of help he needed.’

‘What sort did he need?’

‘Some money wouldn’t have gone amiss,’ Hannah replies. Asked whether Henry was as vague about the more distant past as he was about the weeks just gone, she confirms that he was and smiles faintly to herself as she says it, as if Henry had cleverly anticipated the problems his vagueness would cause after he’d gone. He once lived in London, many years ago. Sometimes he talked about buildings or places in the city and he’d struggle to see them clearly, because it was so long since he’d been there. He said that explicitly. Did Henry ever name any friends or acquaintances he might once have had? No, there were no names, none that she could recall at the moment. How did Henry come to be homeless, did she know that? She knew that he’d lost his job and that he lost his home as a consequence. What was the job? Henry didn’t say. Where was it? Henry didn’t say. How long ago? Henry didn’t say.

‘You didn’t ask him?’ Ian intervenes.

‘If he wanted to tell me more, he’d have told me more,’ Hannah firmly replies, as if repeating a rule that Ian had forgotten. ‘If he didn’t, he’d change the subject. He’d shrug and go quiet, and that would be the end of it.’ Again she consults the sky, which seems to bring the recollection of a particular episode with Henry. She is about to speak, then halts herself, narrowing her eyes, putting her thoughts in order. ‘With Henry the past was dead,’ she says, and grimaces at herself, because that’s not quite right. ‘It was irrelevant to him. He was lonely and bored a lot of the time, but he never gave the impression of being nostalgic for the life he’d lost. Or hardly ever. There was no bitterness in him. What was gone was gone. He was where he was, and he was making the best of it. But occasionally he’d remember something,’ Hannah goes on, offering a rueful smile. She inspects a finger, attending to a speck of dirt caught under a nail before continuing. ‘He’d be struck by a memory. It would just seem to hit him, out of nowhere. Little things: what something looked like. A street, a market, a face. He’d be really jolted by it, and delighted, for a while, then he’d begin to get sad and he’d do this,’ she says, with a swat of the hand. ‘Move on. No dwelling on the past.’

Stifling a yawn that appears rhetorical, Ian closes his notebook. ‘Cuts down the topics for conversation, doesn’t it? If your past is off the menu,’ he observes. ‘You say you liked talking to him. What was there to talk about? I mean, it’s not as if he’d had an action-packed day at the office.’

The crudity of the question makes Hannah sigh. They talked about the things they could see, she explains. They talked about what she’d been doing since the last time he saw her, about things that had happened in the town, about the weather, the news, the things people talk about.

Ian’s notebook goes into a pocket; it’s time to wind up. ‘But he never named anyone he knew? He saw faces but they had no names?’ he asks in conclusion.

‘No.’

‘Remarkable.’

‘That’s the way it was,’ says Hannah, again not to Ian. She’s staring at the photographs of the field with the drystone wall, remembering something about Henry, it appears.

‘Well, if you think of anything else, call us on this number,’ Ian finishes, depositing a card on the floor beside her knee.

She gives the card a second of her attention. Henry could tell when it was going to rain, she adds. His fingers would swell up and shrink with the changing air pressure. The pulse in his wrists would become so prominent, it was like looking at the flank of a frog as it breathed. He was like a human barometer, never wrong, she says.

The next day new flyers were issued, using Hannah’s photograph instead of the fuzzy beach snap, and stations in London were given the new improved mugshot. The response was silence. It felt as if we were lobbing marbles into a bog.

9

One Monday lunchtime we take a message from Tom Gaskin, saying he has some information that might be useful and asking us to drop by his house, whenever was convenient, so as soon as the paperwork is out of the way, around five, we drive over there. As when we’d left him all those days ago, he’s sitting at the table in the window, wearing a crisp white shirt, though on this occasion the tie is a stripy blue-and-yellow cricket-club number. When he sees us arrive he gives us a stiff slow wave of the forearm, a tired and polite little gesture, like the wave of a man at a car park barrier greeting the five hundredth driver of the day. You get the impression he’s been sitting there for hours, staring out at the sea and the hills.

He seats us around the table, asks if either of us would like tea or coffee, glances at the view from his window, passes comment on the weather. He asks us how the investigation is proceeding and immediately revokes the question, apologising for its impertinence. Then there is no longer any way of delaying. Stroking the backs of his hands, as if trying to rub the creases out of his skin, he begins. ‘This may not be of any consequence,’ he says, and gives the scratches in the table top a quizzical look, as if distracted for a moment by the problem of how the table came to be scratched. ‘Well, you can tell me if it’s of any consequence, can’t you?’ he continues. ‘I was sitting here, last Sunday, in this very seat, last Sunday lunchtime. It was shortly after one o’clock. I know that, because the news had just started. On the radio. I was sitting here and I looked over that way, towards where that boat is.’ He points steadily towards the horizon, leaving his finger in mid air until we have both looked in the indicated direction. What had caught his attention was a kite, a bright-pink kite, that had come loose and was flying across the beach. Then he saw this young man, a rather unkempt character, walking very slowly, round and round the same spot, close to the sea wall, where Henry sometimes used to bed down for the night. Round and round he went, examining the ground, as though he’d dropped something, then he sat down on the parapet and stayed there for quite a time, looking out at the sea, which was also a bit peculiar, Tom thought, because it wasn’t a nice day. Lightly raining, in fact. After that he walked off, around the headland. An hour later he came back and resumed his search of the sand. This went on for another ten minutes or so. Quite odd behaviour, Tom thought, but in itself perhaps not worth remarking on. ‘Some folk like the rain, don’t they?’ he adds. ‘I quite like it myself.’

It would be difficult to be more long-winded than Tom Gaskin, and we know that this conversation is going to yield nothing that could not have been relayed to us over the phone. And that’s the reason for all the words, to disguise the fact that our presence isn’t strictly necessary, not for us, anyway. Tom Gaskin is the loneliest man in town.

‘Unkempt?’ asks Ian, applying a full stop with an audible tap that he hopes will convey a need for greater momentum.

‘That’s right. But the thing is,’ Tom resumes, dragging his chair closer to the table, ‘on Tuesday, after lunchtime, soon after 1.30, I saw the same young man, on a bicycle this time, one of those mountain bikes. He was riding on the sand, and he stopped in the same place and stayed there for a quarter of an hour I’d say, looking around, before he went off towards Straight Point. And again he was gone for an hour or so.’

‘Definitely the same person?’ Ian enquires. ‘I mean, it’s quite a distance down to the beach. I don’t think I could positively identify someone from this range.’

It was unequivocally the same person, says Tom, and to support his certainty he pulls back the curtain to reveal a huge pair of binoculars on the sill. He used to be a teacher, he explains, a schoolteacher. Biology was his subject, and zoology was always his great love, ornithology in particular. He does a lot of birdwatching, locally and all over the country and abroad, since Helen died, which was eight years ago now, almost. Last year he went to Spain, for the migration, and the year before that as well, he tells us, adjusting the curtains, then he notices the fleeting impatience of Ian’s expression. ‘I’ve wandered off the point,’ he observes, shaking his head. ‘That was always my problem. At home and in the classroom. Always meandering. But where was I?’ he asks with a smile for Ian in which there seems to be dismay, bordering on alarm, at his own incoherence.

‘Definitely the same person.’

‘Oh yes. It was. No question about it. And on Thursday he was there again. The middle of the day, on his bicycle, same place. The same young man. Definitely the same person. Three times within five days, that’s what you’d call a pattern of behaviour, isn’t it?’

‘It’s certainly notable,’ says Ian, making a note.

Tom waits for the pen to stop moving. ‘And four times in a week, that’s suspicious, I’d say,’ he adds, and is gratified to see the upturn of Ian’s eyebrows.

‘He was there yesterday?’

‘He was. Two o’clock. Same chap. But on this occasion he went that way,’ he says, pointing to the path across the High Land.

‘Could you describe him?’

Indeed Tom could describe him. Most eyewitnesses can give you two or three points, if you’re lucky. Even if they’d had a good clear look, a long look, by the following day it’s likely that all that’s left in the memory bank is ‘blue eyes’, ‘tall’, ‘well-built’. And when you bring the suspect in, he has blue eyes all right, but he’s five-nine and no more well-built than Joe Average. But he has a finger missing from one hand, which nobody noticed. You could point someone in the direction of a particular person for five minutes, tell them to memorise what they are seeing, and twenty-four hours later not much would remain. Tom, though, he gives us height, narrowness of shoulders, approximate weight and age, hairstyle and colour, colour of jacket, colour of trousers, make of trainers (‘the ones with the tick’), colour of laces (‘bright blue’), oddity of gait (‘hunched, flatfooted, listing’), general demeanour (‘very agitated’), size of hands (‘unusually large’). No eye colour, but otherwise all you could hope for.

There’s so much detail that Ian is struggling to keep pace. ‘This is a very precise description, sir,’ he says, turning the page.

‘Birdwatchers tend to be observant people,’ Tom replies, but he lets Ian finish his notes before adding, with a little grin for himself: ‘I followed him, you see.’

‘You followed him?’

‘I did. I was curious. I wanted to find out what he was up to,’ says Tom forthrightly, giving each of us a level look.

‘And what was he up to?’

‘Well, he walked over the headland, to the steps, and he went down to the beach. He walked part of the way to Straight Point, then stopped, and seemed to be searching again. Going round and round in circles. That’s what prompted me to call you,’ Tom says, and now he reaches back and takes from the sideboard a large-scale Ordnance Survey map. He spreads it open on the table, turning the south side towards us, and places a finger with care on the midpoint of the bay. ‘He was standing there. For two or three minutes I observed him and he didn’t move more than a few yards from that spot. Looking on the ground, he was, scraping at the sand with his foot. Then he was staring out to sea for a while and after a minute or so it seemed to occur to him that he might be being watched, which is when he saw me.’

‘How did he react when he saw you?’

‘I couldn’t see any reaction of any kind. He seemed to notice me and then he carried on looking at the sea. He didn’t move from there,’ he says, tapping the map. ‘This is where your chap was found, isn’t it? So this person might know something,’ Tom suggests, almost childishly pleased at the possibility that he may have helped, and we agree that this would appear to be likely. We ask him to phone us right away should another sighting occur. ‘Of course, of course,’ he replies keenly, looking out at the hill with anticipation, as if it were a stage on which a show was soon to begin. ‘If he comes, I’ll see him. I have nothing better to do on a Sunday,’ he jokes, but he means it, and there’s a small fading in his eyes that tells us that he knows that we know that he means it. He allows us to regard him for a moment. We look at him and at the underused room, a room that smells of furniture polish and tedium. It’s easy to imagine the Sundays here: read the papers, a cup of tea and sandwich for lunch, an hour or two sitting at the table, watching the hills and the sea, an hour or two with a book before a microwaved meal for one, a bit of TV, perhaps with a glass of something, then bed. Dead Henry and the shifty lad are a godsend for Tom. ‘Well,’ he says, with a questioning undertone, slapping his thighs lightly, acknowledging that our conversation is concluded while inviting us, tentatively, to share our thoughts with him. We can do nothing more than thank him and ask him again to call us. He gives his thighs another slap, impelling himself to stand.

‘Did you find the girl?’ he asks abruptly at the door, as though startled by the sudden recollection of what he’d told us on our first visit.

‘Yes, we found her.’

Putting his hand over his heart, Tom releases a tremulous breath. ‘Oh good, good,’ he says, so relieved you’d think we were talking about a girl who’d been kidnapped. ‘Can she help you?’

‘We hope so,’ says Ian. ‘We have to hurry, John. That meeting starts at six.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry. Thank you for coming by,’ says Tom, with a long handshake for both of us.

‘And thank you again for the information.’

‘I hope it’s useful,’ says Tom. As we begin to move away, he takes a step backwards into the hall. Under the light bulb the skin of his face looks as thin as a film of flesh-coloured plastic.

‘I think it will be.’

‘I hope so,’ he says. ‘I hope so,’ he repeats, smiling, disappearing slowly behind the closing door.

The meeting at six is in the pub, with Mary and Rachelle, but the girls aren’t there when we arrive. ‘It’s da poliss,’ Josh calls across the bar. ‘How’s it going? Any breakthrough?’ There’s no breakthrough, he’s told, but as soon as there is he’ll be the first to know. Josh pours the pints, smirkingly watching Ian, who’s checking his watch every few seconds. ‘I’ll tell you what you should do,’ he says, taking care to place each glass plumb centre on its mat, to crank up the tension a bit. He wipes a scatter of droplets off the bar, as Ian bears the drinks away. ‘What you should do is talk to a woman called Hannah Rowe. Lives near here. I can give you the address if you like.’

‘Why should we be talking to Ms Rowe?’

‘Because Ms Rowe knew the old man, that’s why,’ says Josh, giving a cheery mock-simpleton’s grin.

‘And who is Ms Rowe?’

‘She did this,’ Josh answers, indicating the whole room. ‘Painted the walls, the ceiling, the lot. And that’s hers as well,’ he says, pointing to a picture on a nearby pillar, a painting of the esplanade under mist, with a sea as dark as engine oil behind it. ‘Interesting girl. She’s very good. Not cheap,’ he says, examining the walls, approving the quality of the work, ‘but worth every penny.’ And here, perhaps, it is intended that an innuendo be heard. It’s possible, though, that the tone exists only in the memory of what was said, overdubbed on to it.

Then Mary and Rachelle arrive. ‘John’s just on his way home,’ says Ian to Rachelle, but John stays for another one, and a third.

10

For the best part of twenty years Jim Jackson worked in a timberyard, but then one Monday morning, blurred by the residue of a weekend’s heroic boozing, he lost his focus at an inopportune moment and lopped half of his right hand clean off with a bandsaw, and after that, one way and another, he wasn’t much good for anything and spent most of the day at home or in the park, drinking and sleeping and drinking some more. In the evenings he might smack his wife about a bit, and from time to time he’d read a bedtime story to his daughter, Jemima, and then, often as not, he’d do something with his daughter that was their little secret and stayed their little secret long after bedtime stories came to an end, until the day Jemima forgot to bolt the bathroom door and her mother walked in and saw Jemima cleaning herself up. So Jim received a hefty sentence and Jim’s wife jettisoned his surname and took herself and her daughter off to the other end of the country, where Jemima Kingham, despite the best efforts of her mother, grew into a desperate and highly volatile young woman, given to dicing her arms with razors and fucking any deadbeat who’d share his bag of glue with her. Jemima was a mess, but she knew she was a mess and when, aged eighteen, she found herself pregnant for the third time, she decided she’d see this one through and would do everything she could to make the kid’s life a good one.

Jessie, her daughter, was born in February 1971. The father, whose name is lost to us, presented himself at the hospital the day after Jessie’s arrival. He put a bunch of flowers on the bed, kissed the baby, sat with Jemima for an hour or two. ‘I’ll be going then,’ he said, giving Jemima a peck on the cheek, and that was the end of his participation in the project. His vanishing was no great surprise to Jemima, nor a great setback, and she knuckled down to the project of raising Jessie alone. She’d do anything to provide for the girl. Saturdays and Sundays were for her daughter; the rest of the week she worked herself stupid. She cleaned other people’s houses during the day and cleaned offices in the evening. For a whole year she scarcely saw daylight, putting in nine hours in a basement laundry before going off to swab hospital corridors through the night. ‘Trust nobody,’ she’d tell the girl. ‘Don’t owe anything to anyone.’ In 1987 she was working in a flower shop from nine to five, in a pub from eight to midnight, and was giving after-hours blowjobs for a fiver. ‘Stay away from boys,’ she would tell Jessie, and Jessie managed to stay away from them until she was fifteen, when Ryan Tate lurched into her life.

With Ryan too you wonder how much of the script was written for him, long before he came along. Semi-employed brawlers and boozers feature prominently in the roll-call of Ryan’s ancestors, and the family tree is richly festooned with convictions for burglary, theft, arson, assault and – in the case of the paternal grandfather – grievous bodily harm, the consequence of a dispute over a bet that ended with a Swiss penknife through the face of the simpleton who had dared to impugn the honesty of the senior Mr Tate. You look at where he came from and you feel they might as well have stamped ‘Go to gaol’ on Ryan’s birth certificate, though you wouldn’t have known he’d go as badly wrong as he did. He had one advantage over Jessie: both parents were around. On the other hand, they were present only in the technical sense for much of the time, because Mr and Mrs Tate were the family’s elite drinkers, never sober for as long as Ryan could remember. At the time of Ryan’s arrest neither parent was in work. His father, Dave, had for years been a man with no visible means of support. Aileen, his mother, had recently been working at a supermarket, a rare interlude of gainful employment that had ended when she was observed waving her husband through the checkout with four unpurchased bottles of vodka in his coat pockets, a routine which had probably been in operation from the day she started the job. As for Ryan, having continued the family tradition by renouncing education at the earliest opportunity, he did a bit of building work here and there, supplementing his income with regular ventures into breaking and entering, and regular spells in custody. He was also a courier for a local dealer, who paid him in cash and dope, and he’d inherited the family predilection for knife work. The Accident and Emergency waiting room should have had a bench named after him.

The third person in this story is Abby Atalay, also aged fifteen. Abby and her parents and her younger sister shared a flat with her childless aunt and uncle, above the kebab shop that the aunt and uncle ran. Money was tight, but the Atalays weren’t poor in the way the Tates and the Kinghams were poor, and they were all perfectly law-abiding. An unexceptional, not terribly bright, somewhat overweight and vulnerable kid, Abby was also half-Turkish, which may be of relevance. Nothing ever happened to Abby, until she had the misfortune to go to the same party as Ryan Tate one night, and get drunk for the first time in her life, and let herself get fucked by him. She imagined that this semiconscious coupling might mean something.

Ryan Tate lived less than half a mile from Jessie Kingham and went to the same school, but it seems their paths never crossed, not in any significant way, before Ryan was eighteen. The fateful meeting took place in April 1987, a month after the party, outside the florist’s where Jessie’s mother worked. Taking a fancy to her, Ryan offered her a cigarette. The cigarette was declined. They talked for a bit. Ryan offered Jessie one of the cans of lager he had in his bag. This too was declined. Ryan then took a rose from a bucket outside the shop, snapped off the moist end and handed the flower to Jessie. Noticing what was going on, Jessie’s mother came out to demand payment. Jemima knew about the Tates and didn’t like the look of Ryan one bit. To Jemima the eyes of a Ryan Tate were the eyes of a hopeless and very dangerous young man, and she could see in him more than a passing resemblance to her daughter’s father. To Jessie, however, the fierce blue eyes of Ryan Tate gave off the charisma of someone who knew how life really was, and the thick violet scar that ran across his jaw didn’t do his image any harm either. Her mother, upon being told by Ryan that payment was unfortunately out of the question due to lack of funds, sent him on his way, in a manner that made it clear to Jessie that his banishment was intended to be permanent. Less than a week later, Ryan came across Jessie outside the pub where her mother worked. The following day they had sex in Ryan’s flat, in the middle of the afternoon, while his parents snored in front of the TV, pissed out of their heads. Three or four times a week they’d do it, for the next couple of months, always in Ryan’s bedroom. Often his parents were at home, and usually they had no idea that Ryan and Jessie were there too.

At around 7.30 p.m. on 17 June 1987, Ryan Tate helped himself to a couple of beers from his parents’ supply, then helped himself to a car that some idiot had left unlocked in a backstreet. He drove past Jessie’s place and, as luck would have it, she was at home. With money from her mother’s purse they bought some more drink. At about eight o’clock they saw a friend of Ryan’s, Trevor Driscoll, walking down the street. He got into the car and they returned to the off-licence, where Trevor contributed a six-pack of lager to the evening’s intake. For an hour they drove around town, with Ryan swigging his lager as he cruised the high street in the stolen car. They dropped in on another off-licence, so Jessie could buy some more cans while Ryan nicked a half-bottle of whisky. Then, shortly before 9.30, they passed the Atalays’ shop and there was Abby, talking to a friend. Since the party Ryan had seen Abby a few times on the street. In Abby’s mind perhaps their relationship had a future. Perhaps she thought that there were some issues to resolve and that now might be the time to resolve them. And perhaps she thought that Trevor Driscoll was Jessie’s boyfriend. She said goodbye to her friend and climbed into the car. Ten minutes later Trevor Driscoll got out of the car outside his brother’s house, and Ryan Tate, Jessie Kingham and Abby Atalay drove up on to Dartmoor.

From here on there are two different versions of events. Ryan Tate claimed that Jessie had known from the start about Abby Atalay, and that there was nothing going on between himself and Abby any longer, but that Jessie – who was drunk by the time they reached the hills – turned on Abby when Abby tried to kiss him. It was a warm night. They’d parked the car and walked a distance, taking the whisky and some beers with them, but as soon as they sat down Abby flung herself at him and the girls had a fight, which ended when Abby got hurt, though why he found himself incapable of keeping the girls apart was something he could never adequately explain. When he saw the blood, and understood what had happened, he panicked. He admitted that. He panicked and he helped Jessie do what she did. Jessie, for her part, said she knew nothing about Abby and Abby knew nothing about her, until they were in the car together, after they’d dropped Trevor Driscoll. The three of them had a huge argument. Ryan stopped in a lay-by and got out of the car, to get away from them, but they both followed him. They were both yelling at him, but Abby was drunk on the whisky and went bananas, so Ryan hit her. Then Jessie just sort of froze. Which is why she did nothing to stop what Ryan then did to Abby.

So one of them, for some reason that we’re unlikely ever to know, hit Abby Atalay very hard with a small rock, hard enough to knock her senseless. Not long afterwards they returned to the car and drove until they came to a petrol station. There they are on CCTV: Jessie in the passenger seat, slurping a beer, laughing at something Ryan says to her as he steadies himself against the pump while he fills the petrol can; and Ryan joking with the cashier, unaware that there’s a streak of blood on the underside of his arm. Abby, meanwhile, had regained some degree of consciousness and begun to crawl away, but she’d covered only a very short distance by the time Ryan and Jessie got back, so they found her easily enough and cracked her with a rock once more. They then doused her with petrol and set fire to her. In the opinion of the pathologist, Abby was not quite dead at this moment, but a few seconds later she would have been: a lifetime’s allowance of pain packed into half a minute. Ryan or Jessie emptied the can over Abby and went back to the car to wait for the fire to die down. Satisfied with their work, they drove the car a couple of miles, rolled it into a ditch and torched it. They then set off on the twelve-mile hike back home.

By midnight Abby’s parents had reported her missing. At two o’clock Jessie’s mother had phoned the police to say that her daughter had disappeared. Smoke-stained and spattered with Abby’s blood, Jessie and Ryan reeled home in the middle of the morning. Within a few hours they were both charged. It took the jury less than an hour to find them guilty, and they only took that long so as not to appear to have rushed the verdict.

Listening to the story of the murder of Abby Atalay, Alice cried. On the kitchen table lay pictures of the killer teens: pea-brained, psychotic Ryan Tate, whose face says he knows that everyone knows he’s lying and he could not give a flying fuck what anyone thinks; and pea-brained, confused Jessie Kingham, who looks terrified by what’s happening to her and yet, at the same time, not unpleasantly surprised at finding herself notorious. ‘They feel no remorse?’ asked Alice, peering at their faces, incredulous at their depravity. All that could be said for a fact was that each was claiming that the other was responsible and that neither had expressed the slightest remorse so far. Jessie perhaps was beginning to feel it, however. Soon she’d go berserk with it and take a jump from a second-storey landing, which would break her neck and leave her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, an outcome that she seemed to accept with equanimity, as a concluding retribution. But with Ryan Tate it was different. You looked at that face and you knew that for him the death of Abby Atalay was no more important than a dog getting run over in the street. That’s how it seemed at the time and that’s how it’s seemed ever since. Jessie Kingham was the one who killed Abby Atalay, he’ll tell you, and it’s as if he’s telling you that Elvis shot JFK and defying you to tell him that he doesn’t believe a word of what he’s saying. ‘There’s no one there,’ Alice concluded, staring at his face, meeting the challenge of his empty gaze. Ryan Tate was never mentioned at home again. It was soon afterwards that Alice became a churchgoer.

As with violence among the Tates, godliness among the Pierces was something of a tradition, albeit – unlike the volcanic idiocy of the Tate dynasty – a tradition that recently had fallen into abeyance. Great-grandfather Joseph Pierce, the fountainhead of the river of piety, was a much-honoured man of the cloth, for whose son, Julian, the discovery of the same religious vocation would appear to have been as natural a process as the discovery of the desire to walk or speak. With the career of Elisabeth, the first Pierce daughter in three generations, the transmission of the holy gene suffered something of a setback, or so it appeared for a time. Obediently, even willingly devout as a girl, Elisabeth was diverted from the path of righteousness by the experience of university, the study of medicine and betrothal to the unswervingly secular Mr Jameson, a man for whom the Financial Times share index was the truest mirror of the real world, just as Gray’s Anatomy became the touchstone for Dr Elisabeth. Yet the agonised death of her husband, killed by cancer within two years of the birth of their only child, seems to have been the catalyst for an outbreak of faith in the soul of Dr Elisabeth. This faith sustained her for the rest of her life. To her great credit, though, she never preached to her daughter. She never so much as invited her to accompany her to church, and Alice’s belief remained dormant for years, until Dr Elisabeth’s final illness, when something began to change in Alice, as she would later say, in the light of her mother’s selfless preparation for her own death, from cancer also, and several years short of the average span.

On the day of the funeral she went back into the church after the business at the graveside was done. There was motherless Alice alone in the empty church, smaller than life-size under the high stone ceiling. A pillar of sunlight smacked the paving to the side of her, as if the finger of the Lord had fired a shot of revelation in her direction and missed by a couple of yards. Dry-eyed, Alice was looking at the brass eagle on the lectern, at the place where the coffin had rested on its trestle throughout the service, at all the vacant pews, as if imagining the faces of everyone who had been there. She turned and smiled, and there was a sort of shadowing in her gaze, a dimming that never leaves the eyes of some people after bereavement, and never left Alice. But still whatever it was she believed remained covert and undefined for a while longer. The subterranean stream that flowed down from the heights of Joseph Pierce broke into the open only when those two ambassadors of the devil, Ryan Tate and Jessie Kingham, did their worst. There was no discussion, only a quiet announcement of intention: ‘I’m going to church tomorrow.’ She was happy to go alone, Alice said, as her mother had said to her, and at first she went alone, gradually becoming someone different. A photo of grandfather Pierce, the blessed Julian, occupies the centre of the very first page of one of the family albums, a veritable lighthouse of virtue, radiating probity through rimless glasses, with a dog collar as bright and stiff as a band of ivory and a haircut like the helmet of God’s foot soldier.

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