So He Takes the Dog

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.