The Ainstable house was a thirties semi on the northern fringe of town. The stout woman who answered the door turned out to be Mrs. Ainstable’s sister from Bradford who’d come to stay. The first thing Bowler noticed as he was ushered into the living room was a tank of tropical fish standing on top of a sideboard. The second thing was a small pale-faced woman curled up on a large settee. Grief usually ages, but in Agnes Ainstable’s case it had shrunk the mature woman into an ailing child who looked more like her sister’s daughter than her sibling.
But when she spoke, Bowler began to understand why the coroner had opted to adjourn the inquest for further enquiries. Her attitude was simple. If something as slight as a slip of the foot had deprived her of her husband, she wanted the circumstances to be laid out before her in unambiguous detail. There was nothing rational in her demands, but they were made with an intensity that would have daunted the most insensitive of men.
The upside of this was that she answered all Bowler’s questions without showing the slightest curiosity about his reasons for asking them. It was enough that they related to the further enquiries the coroner had promised her.
Yes, Andrew had once talked about his tropical fish on a local radio chat show; yes, they’d been to Corfu for their holiday this year; yes, they’d had a meal at the Taverna.
At the front door as he left, the sister said, half apologetically, “It’s her way of hanging on to him. Once she admits she knows everything there is to know, he’s gone completely, and that terrifies her. All these questions you’re asking, they mean anything or are you just going through the motions?”
“Wish I knew,” said Bowler.
He wasn’t being disingenuous. There were many ways in which the writer of the First Dialogue could have got the details it contained. He could simply have known Ainstable, be a workmate or a member of the tropical fish fancy, have travelled to Corfu on the same package holiday …the possibilities if not endless were numerous enough to leave suspicion uselessly fluid. Facts were the only hardener that a good detective took any heed of. And he was a long way short of anything he’d like to hear himself explaining to a nit-picking coroner.
Now he drove south, leaving the town behind, and speeding along Roman Way as young David Pitman had sped on his way home to Carker.
The Pitman house was a spacious whitewashed cottage in a large garden, very different from the Ainstable semi, but the grief it contained was much the same. Bowler spent a heart-rending hour being taken through a family photograph album by Mrs. Pitman, David’s mother. But he came away with confirmation that everything written in the Second Dialogue about the bazouki was accurate.
On his way back into town along Roman Way he stopped at the accident site. It was easy to identify. The tree which the bike had hit bore a scorched scar like a roughly cauterized wound. The impact of the boy’s body against the neighbouring tree had left damage less visible, but close up the bruising of the smooth beech bark was unmistakable.
He didn’t know why he’d stopped. Even Sherlock Holmes would have been hard put to glean anything significant from the scene. Without the Dialogues, there was little suspicious in either of the deaths and in both cases it was easy to think of ways the Wordman could have got hold of the information they contained.
So really he’d got nothing, which was precisely what George Headingley hoped he would get. But he hadn’t joined CID to keep the likes of old George happy.
He raised his eyes to take in the long straight road down which the Roman legions had marched for the last time seventeen hundred years ago when the order came to abandon this chilly corner of the empire to its troublesome natives. The town boundary was only a mile away but the brow of the hill completely hid any sign of its encroaching sprawl. Only one building was visible among the fields bordering the road and that was an old grey farmhouse which looked like it had been there long enough to be naturalized as part of the landscape.
You’d have a perfect view of the road from its windows, thought Bowler.
He started the MG and drove up the long potholed driveway to the house which had the initials I.A.L. and the date 1679 engraved over the door.
A woman answered his ring. At first glance to Bowler’s young eye she looked as old as the house. But the voice which demanded his business was strong, and now he saw that through a fringe of grey hairs he was being observed by a pair of bright blue eyes, and if her skin was beginning to wrinkle like an old apple’s, she still had the flush of a sweet pippin in her cheeks.
He introduced himself and learned he was speaking to Mrs. Elizabeth Locksley. When he mentioned the accident, she said, “How many times do you need to be told?”
“Someone’s been round?”
“Yes. Next morning. Lad in uniform.”
So they had been thorough. No mention of the visit in the report, which meant it was subsumed under the terse comment, No witnesses forthcoming or discovered.
“And you told him?”
“Nothing. Which was all there was to tell. We go to bed early here and sleep sound.”
“Speak for yourself,” called a man’s voice from within.
“Nowt wrong with your lugs then,” she shouted back.
“Nor my eyes either. I told you what I saw.”
Bowler looked at the woman enquiringly and she sighed and said, “If you want to waste your time …” then turned and vanished into the house.
He followed her into a long living room which, apart from the addition of a TV set on which Mad Max was playing, didn’t look like much had been done to it since the seventeenth century. A man rose from a chair. He was a giant, at least six and a half feet, and there was very little clearance between his head and the exposed crossbeams. He shook Bowler’s hand with a vigour that made him wince and said, “You’ve come to ask about the lights. Didn’t I tell you, Betty?”
“Not more than fifty times, you daft old sod,” she said, switching off the television. “So tell him, you’ll not be satisfied till you do.”
There was some exasperation in her voice but it got nowhere close to overpowering the strong affection in her gaze as she looked at the man.
“I will,” he said. “I got up to have a pee-old man’s trouble, it’ll come to you, lad, if you live that long. I looked out the landing window and I saw this headlight going down the hill there, just the one. Bike, I thought. And the bugger’s moving. Then I saw these other headlights, two on ’em, so, a car, coming this way. Out of nowhere they came. One moment dark, next there they were. Then the single light were all over the place. Till suddenly it went out. And then there were a puff of flame.”
“And what happened then?”
“Don’t know. If I’d stayed any longer I’d have pissed down the stairs and then I’d have been in trouble.”
He roared with laughter and the woman said, “You’re not wrong there, lad.”
“And did you tell this story to the other policeman who came?” asked Bowler.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Didn’t recall it till later,” said the man.
“Later?”
“Aye,” said the woman. “Later. He usually recalls things later if he recalls them at all.”
There was something going on here he didn’t yet fully understand. He decided to concentrate on the woman.
“You didn’t think it worthwhile ringing us when you heard Mr. er …?”
“Locksley,” she said.
“Your husband?” he said, looking for clarity where he could find it.
“Well, he’s not my bloody tallyman!” she said, which seemed to amuse them both greatly.
“You didn’t think to contact us?” persisted Bowler.
“What for? Sam, what night was it you saw the lights?”
“Nay, lass, that’s not fair. It was this year, but, I’m certain of that.”
“And what film would you have been watching that day whenever it was?”