So He Takes the Dog

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.