‘Like what?’ I was interested professionally, although a major difference between my role and that of the police when talking to people is that I have no authority. The people I speak to can clam up, get up and walk away, refuse to let me over the threshold. I can’t ‘detain’ anyone for questioning.
Sinclair set down the cup and winced: an irritable, grumpy old man not wanting to explain. Nevertheless, he began to answer my question, his hands gesturing expressively as he spoke. His wrists were bony, jutting from his pullover, and I wondered if he lived alone, and if he’d let mealtimes slide in the weeks since he’d retired.
‘Take a mugging,’ he began. ‘It’s all a blur to the victim – didn’t get a good look at the mugger and so on. But they do mention it had just started raining. Well, we take that one concrete detail and build on it: what sounds were there when it started raining? Was it cold or warm? Had anyone just passed them? Do they remember what colour coat the person was wearing?’
‘Appealing to the senses?’ I saw what he meant.
‘That’s what memories are made of.’
Like a smell bringing back a particular time in life, or a piece of music triggering a memory. I thought about it. There had been precious few sense memories in Damien’s story when I spoke to him: ‘it was freezing’ was one, the smell in the cottage another.
‘I wasn’t in on those interviews,’ Sinclair said. ‘Beswick’s recollection was hazy at times because of the drugs, but it still fit the known facts. Fit like a glove. Now, if his new version is a load of tripe, then keeping it vague, ill-defined and sketchy is safer for him. If you’re lying you keep it simple, say the minimum, so there’s less to trip you up. Telling the truth you can elaborate, illustrate your story, you don’t need to worry about contradicting yourself. The memories are solid. The details are there.’
I looked out to the hills while I considered what he’d said. A fierce gust of wind rattled the hawthorn and a crow landed on the dry stone wall at the bottom of the garden, its plumage dark and ragged.
‘One thing he did say was that the door was unlocked. Why would Charlie not lock up?’ I said.
‘Maybe he was coming in and out, fetching things from the car. And he was expecting Libby, remember.’
‘But the lights were off: that’s what drew Damien to the cottage,’ I said. ‘He thought it was empty.’
Sinclair shook his head. ‘It’s more likely he turned them off after.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a natural impulse, to conceal a crime. The criminal will want to hide the body, delay detection, obscure the truth.’
‘Damien said he was sick by the gate.’ Another clear detail – was it a lie?
‘That’s right,’ Sinclair confirmed.
‘And he saw a man walking down the hill,’ I said.
Sinclair frowned, creases rippling across his wide brow. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’
‘Someone coming down the hill as Damien was going up from the bus,’ I said.
‘We’d nothing like that on house-to-house. There was no mention of that,’ he said. ‘We hadn’t any witnesses in the vicinity, not a soul.’ Sinclair closed his eyes for a moment. I waited. ‘Did Beswick imply that this man might be the real killer?’ he asked, sarcasm ripe in his tone.
‘Yes,’ I admitted.
He gave a snort. ‘There you go, then. He knows we have no other suspects so he conjures someone out of thin air.’
Was that the case? Damien inventing a bogeyman in the dark – a shadowy figure who’d never come forward? Something, someone to give his retraction more credence.
‘Why was Libby a suspect?’ I asked him.
‘She found the body, she’d been at the scene, she had a close relationship to the deceased. We had to eliminate her. Standard practice.’
‘But what motive would she have?’ Above the slopes of Kinder, a bird was cruising on a slipstream.
‘Lover’s tiff. He tells her he’s going back to the wife and she loses it. Or she tells him about the baby and he wants to send her packing.’ He paused. ‘She had the baby all right?’
‘Yes, a girl.’
He dipped his chin, satisfied. ‘It’s always a sensitive area.’ He went on: ‘Those close to the victim are key candidates for the crime. No one likes putting a person who has just lost a loved one through a bout of questioning, and it is done with great sensitivity, but it has to be done.’
‘And you never had any doubts that you got the right man?’
‘None,’ he said simply.
There was a knock at the door and I got to my feet as Sinclair did. ‘Thank you. If I think of anything else, can I ring you?’
He paused, then: ‘Yes.’
At the door there was a nurse; she bore a lapel badge with her name on and the logo Macmillan Cancer Support. She smiled then looked past me to Sinclair. ‘Good afternoon, Geoff.’
I said goodbye. She stood aside to let me pass, then went in.
A host of tiny clues fell into place: the man’s jaundiced colour, his lack of hair or eyebrows, his skeletal frame, his ‘retirement’, the way he’d winced at one point as he set his cup down. Geoff Sinclair was battling cancer.
Why had he agreed to see me? I felt slightly guilty that I’d pushed to meet him: surely a sick person had other priorities. But then I talked myself round: wasn’t I just being patronizing? Sick or not, Geoff Sinclair was a grown-up, more than capable of deciding for himself whether to respond to my request. Perhaps it was it a welcome distraction from his enforced rest. Or maybe he felt obliged, on Libby’s account. Whichever, for me there had been progress, not much I grant you, but enough to feel I could usefully take things further.
EIGHT
Ipicked up Jamie and paid Abi for her time. Although I had chores to do, I could take the baby with me.
Pushing her up the road to the centre of Withington, near where we live, I enjoyed the walk. The wind and rain had ebbed away, taking the clouds too and leaving a high blue sky where gulls wheeled and cried. The sun, its light suffused, warm and golden, made the colour of the leaves sing bronze and crimson, copper and nut brown. In the sycamores by the fire station, starlings thronged the branches, yattering at each other. Someone had been cutting back conifers in the graveyard by the church and the crisp scent of pine sap bit the air.
They’d pulled the old cinema down. Cine City. The iconic building, originally called The Scala, had been the third picture house to open in the whole of the country but it had fallen into neglect, failing to compete with the multiplexes and all attempts to save it had floundered. Now there was a gaping hole. Ongoing wrangles between the developer and the city planners had delayed the start of building work. I’d seen some of the designs in the South Manchester Reporter, our local free sheet – apartments above shopping units: glass, wood and steel, like a thousand other buildings in a thousand other towns. It made me want to weep. The White Lion pub, with its distinctive round clock tower, stood alongside the gap at the junction of the main roads and marked the southernmost end of the high street. The pub was boarded up, too. Would that be next?
Along the high street some work had been done to improve the area, creating wider pavements and parking bays, but there was no disguising the fact that Withington was a struggling centre. The stretch of shops was punctuated by empty units bristling with To Let and For Sale signs. The businesses that survived were a mix of discount outlets, low-cost hair and beauty salons, newsagents and the odd gem, like the vegetarian café and the chemist. The health food shop had gone, succumbing after years. It was where I had spent much of my hard-earned cash on tofu and lentils and the like. One sector was thriving: rental agencies. There were tons of them, set up to find accommodation for students and young professionals. Match single people with the plethora of flats and apartments built in the boom years. Would they find takers for the ones that would be built on the old cinema site?