‘You sure it was a man?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘Dunno. The way he walked.’ Damien shrugged, rolled back his head, eyes open.
‘Black or white?’
‘White.’ He sounded definite.
What else could I ask? Sight, sound, touch… ‘Did he smell?’
‘Bit personal, innit?’ he quipped, then the merriment in his face dissolved into something else. Sadness, fatigue. I wasn’t sure where that had come from.
‘Close your eyes,’ I said. He did. ‘Try to relax. You’re going up the hill; you pass two cars, a Mondeo and a Volvo. You round the bend, he’s coming down. You pass each other…’ I waited.
‘What’s the point,’ he complained, ‘I can’t remember.’ His face was pinched, mouth trembling. ‘You think I made him up. You’re trying to trick me.’ His voice rose. ‘You don’t believe me! Why d’you even bother coming back?’ The outburst came out of the blue; a flash of temper but I didn’t feel threatened.
‘Shall I go?’ I asked quietly.
In the silence I heard his breath stuttering. ‘It’s just hard. It’s all fucking hard. I don’t remember any more about him, only what I said already.’ His voice was tight with frustration.
‘OK. Carry on.’
He sighed.
‘Damien,’ I encouraged him, ‘you’re doing very well – you’ve told me a lot more than last time and it all helps. So, you pass this man, he’s your sort of height, a white guy, dark coat, backpack and he’s out of breath.’ That last detail snagged in my mind but I didn’t have time to consider it any further then. ‘What next?’
‘I go up a bit more and the cottage is there, set off up the road a bit. There’s a car.’
‘What sort?’
‘Audi, on the drive. It’s locked up. No lights at the house. I go up to the door, listen. Nothing from inside. Then an engine starts up somewhere and I wait to see if they’re coming this way, but they don’t. The windows are shut. I’m gonna check round the back but first I try the door and it just opens.’ Damien swallowed.
‘What can you see?’
‘Nothing, it’s too dark. I use my lighter.’ He stopped. Breathed out noisily and put his head in his hands.
‘Stay there,’ I warned him, ‘what can you see?’
‘He’s on the floor, a big guy, half on his side, one leg under him.’
‘Show me.’
Damien looked askance but I tilted my head by way of invitation and he got up. He grinned self-consciously then positioned himself on the floor, left shoulder down, head twisted to the left so he was in profile. Left knee bent up underneath him, right arm across his stomach. Half foetal, half prone.
‘OK,’ I told him.
He got up, sat back in the chair, rubbed at his face. Closed his eyes without any prompting. ‘I could see the blood, smell it. And the smell of shit.’
This was what Libby had found a couple of hours later, coming to meet her lover, running late, eager to tell him her good news: that they were having a child. The future full of promise. Opening the cottage door, snapping on the light. The shock, like a brick wall. Her world collapsing.
‘What else do you remember?’
‘I felt sick, nearly was sick there. I know the bloke’s dead. I wanna get out of there.’ Damien lowered his voice. ‘I check his pockets.’
‘Which ones?’
‘Just his jeans, the one that’s easy to reach, at the right, and his back pocket. Empty.’
‘What does he feel like?’
He was outraged. ‘What sort of question’s that?’
‘Was he cold, stiff?’
‘I dunno,’ he said hotly. ‘I didn’t touch him, innit?’ Was his agitation because this was all make-believe and in truth Damien had stabbed Charlie then rooted through his clothes while the man lay dying? Or shame at scavenging from a corpse? Or some insecurity about his sexuality? That he’d been touching a man, and a dead man at that.
‘Why are you so bothered by that?’ I asked him.
His face closed down. ‘I’m not,’ he said flatly.
‘What happened then?’
‘I used the lighter to have a look round.’ He sounded calmer.
‘The cottage?’
‘Just the kitchen. Seen the wallet on the worktop. Flick it open and there’s tenners in there, some change. I’m out of there.’
‘Wait,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Anything else in the room?’
‘Car keys, next to the wallet.’
‘You could have taken the car?’ I was surprised he hadn’t.
‘Oh, yeah, and get stopped for dangerous driving,’ he sneered.
‘You a bad driver?’
‘Never learnt. Couldn’t afford to. It shows.’
‘But you like cars; you remember the makes and models.’
‘And?’ he scowled.
Now I was the one veering off course. ‘OK, in the kitchen – can you see a knife?’
‘No.’
‘But you knew he’d been stabbed?’
‘All that blood. There was blood on his hands, on his shirt where he’s holding his stomach, you know? His shirt is blue and yellow check but there’s this massive patch on his front, on his sleeve. And the floor. Obvious. And they said on the news later-’
‘Stick with what you actually saw. No knife?’
‘No knife.’
‘Then you came out…’
‘Yeah, fast.’
‘Did you shut the door?’
‘Yeah, I think.’
It would make sense if he’d been running away; like Geoff Sinclair said, the impulse to hide the victim. ‘And then?’
‘Went for the bus-’
‘Whoa! Slow it down.’ He’d talked about being sick last time. And I expected him to have stronger sense memories after the shock of finding the body (or killing the man) than before. Adrenalin’s a powerful hormone; it increases the heart rate and blood flow and primes us to fight or flee. Heightened sensory perception would be part of that response.
‘You come out of the house. Close your eyes.’
‘I was freaking, like it’s some bad trip, I’m speeding, it’s not real. Like I’m gonna pass out.’
‘What else do you feel?’
‘Cold.’
‘Colder than in the house?’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘Can you see anyone, hear anything?’
‘No.’ Then he corrected himself, adding quickly: ‘Ticking.’
A clock? Inside his head. ‘What?’ I asked him.
‘The car,’ he said.
‘The car’s ticking?’
‘Like it’s cooling down.’ He frowned, looking as puzzled as I felt. ‘It was warm,’ he went on slowly. ‘I put my hand on it; I was gonna throw up. I put my hand on the bonnet.’
I couldn’t work out what this meant but it seemed out of place. Not wanting to interrupt his flow I motioned for him to continue.
‘Then I got to the gate and threw up. It was rank, man.’
‘Then?’
‘I go down the hill and sit in the bus shelter. I didn’t see anyone. Some cars pass by and the bus comes and I get back into town. Go and score.’
Why didn’t you report it if you really were innocent? I wondered still. If the incident had shaken him as badly as he said, wouldn’t he have been desperate to tell someone?
‘The smell,’ he said, ‘that was the worst, and the blood. After that I was really using a lot, anything I could get down my neck, trying to wipe it out. I was in a bad place, a really bad place.’ He began to rock as he talked, his arms wrapped tight about his stomach, another in the repertoire of his nervous tics but this spoke to me of a deeper trauma. ‘I got slung out of the flat I was staying. Chloe didn’t want to know. In the end, when the coppers picked me up and started going on about it, it just seemed easier to go along with it. Give them what they wanted and get rid. It could have happened like I told them. And they feed you in here, clothe you. That’s where I was at. But it’s not like that. Prison, it’s-’ He broke off. ‘I can’t do time.’ He echoed the words from our first meeting. ‘See that?’ Urgently he pulled up his sleeve, revealed an angry gash, crusted with scabs, maybe half a centimetre wide, six or seven long on his forearm. ‘Cut with a broken biro.’