have gone to bed. On the TV, likely as not, there was yet another report from some hellish zone of Africa: thousands starving, thousands dying of Aids, kids being born diseased, schools set on fire and teachers hacked to death by child-soldiers, the infantry of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Psychos, washing away their sins in the blood of the lambs.
A thin broth of sea cloud fills the mouth of the river and through the greyness, here and there, it’s just possible to make out where the sky begins, what’s hill and what’s water, which seam of the mist is a sandbank and which is a thickening of the mist. On the seafront the windows of empty guest houses gleam like slabs of wet slate. Here and there a head can be glimpsed, a hand on a radio, a newspaper being turned, a lampshade in a style that’s twenty years old. Kids are skateboarding down the middle of the road and riding their bikes across the putting greens. Names have been spray-painted on the doors of the beach huts. You can stand in the car park and hear nothing but the gasping of the sea. In winter half the town is in a coma.
We call at one of the bigger hotels, and on the afternoon of our visit the register shows that the number of guests in residence is precisely three. The previous weekend a couple from Ontario had stayed for two nights and they’d had the place to themselves. We sit in the manageress’s office, noting the names and addresses of all the people who stayed here during the period within which Henry died: that’s fewer than thirty individuals to trace, interview and eliminate, a task soon completed. Some of them came here for a break from London, one came for a break from her husband, one was a photographer taking pictures for a travel agent’s calendar, one a geologist on a working holiday, one a bibulous clarinettist on the brink of a breakdown. The clarinettist is still on the brink when he’s interviewed: he’s a jittery wisp of a man, an emaciated five-foot vegan who couldn’t bring himself to swat a wasp, let alone kill Henry. None of them could have killed Henry.
Two old blokes are sitting in the hotel bar, mumbling at each other over two-inch Scotches. One of them is our friend Mr Latimer, who slowly finds a match for our faces in the scrambled card index of his memory and greets us with a squint, as if we’re approaching from a mile off. We explain our business to his companion and from the depths of his armchair he regards us with eyes that are dissolving in their little puddles of rheum. Gravely as a High Court judge he considers the question of the dead tramp. His chin sinks into the folds of an outsized paisley cravat. He might be falling asleep, so long does he take to formulate a response, but at last he replies: ‘No. I’m sorry. Didn’t know the chap.’ It’s as if we’d asked him for the loan of a thousand quid. We take our leave, then there’s a tap on the shoulder and Yousif introduces himself, having overheard our exchange with Tweedlepissed and Tweedlestewed.
Yousif is a Lebanese lad, mid twenties, with hair like moleskin and quick dark eyes that betray an excessive eagerness to please. He works as an odd-job man and is helping to patch up the hotel in the comatose months, replacing some skirting boards, doing a bit of rewiring, unclogging the drains and so on. He himself never spoke to Henry, he tells us, but his friend Malak did, many times. Malak worked in the hotel kitchen last year. Late one night, at the end of a long shift, he went out of the back door and there was Henry, grubbing around in the bins. Everyone else had left by then, so Malak went back inside and put together a bag of food for him. They talked for a few minutes, and after that night Malak would make up a parcel of leftovers for Henry whenever he could. When he finished work, he’d leave the food on one of the little dunes, wrapped in foil, for Henry to collect. Sometimes he didn’t have to put it in the box, because he’d see Henry on the beach and they’d walk together for a while. Henry wanted to know all about Malak’s life and his family, and there was a lot to tell, because Malak had six brothers living in four different countries, and there were four sisters too, at home. ‘And cousins, so many cousins,’ says Yousif, gesturing as if to raise the spectres of Malak’s relatives on the lawns in front of the hotel. ‘And they would fire Malak’s gun, sometimes,’ he adds, securing Ian’s attention, which was beginning to slacken. ‘It was Malak’s hobby. He was a soldier and he likes guns. He has great eyes,’ he says, making a finger-pistol and taking aim at the nearest lamp-post. ‘Malak had an air rifle, a good one,’ he tells us. ‘Very expensive. In the morning, early, very early, he went down to the beach to shoot his gun. Sometimes he met Henry there. He went there and sometimes Henry would be there. He would put a small thing, a coin or something, in the sand, and he could hit it from fifty metres, every time,’ says Yousif, dumbfounded with admiration. ‘And Henry was good. Not every time, but he could hit the coin. He knew about guns.’ But how much Henry knew about guns, and how he came to know it, Yousif does not know. Malak himself didn’t know much about Henry, because Henry didn’t like to talk about himself. He liked to hear about Malak’s family but never spoke about his own, and this gave Malak the feeling that none of Henry’s people were alive. All Malak really knew about Henry was that his home was on the beach and his full name was Henry Wilson.
‘And where’s Malak now?’ Ian asks.
‘He left in September.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘Gone,’ says Yousif, with the shrug of a young man who has almost become inured to the perpetual disappointments of life in England. We suspect that Malak was last year’s one new friendship.
‘Wilson, you said?’ asks Ian, writing it down.
As expected, sharpshooter Malak has no official existence: no National Insurance, no bank account, no forwarding address. He’s moved on to some other kitchen and the chances of finding him are vanishingly slim. Malak said he would get in touch when he found a job, Yousif tells us; he promises to let us know if he hears anything.
A full day’s footslogging had established little more than that Henry had a degree of expertise in the handling of air rifles, but at the next morning prayers it turns out that Henry Wilson-Ellis-Yarrow-McBain-McCain-McSwain had another skill. A woman named Martha Swinton, in the first week of December, around the fourth or fifth, had been driving out of Knowle when her car cut out and cruised to a standstill. There was heavy fog, and Martha was turning the ignition key over and over again, praying that the thing would miraculously spark into life, when she looked up and saw this wild-looking man looming out of the fog. It was Henry – or rather, it was the homeless man from the beach, as she knew him. Purposefully Henry strode towards the immobilised car, as if he’d been summoned to rescue her, and as he came nearer he was making a gesture that she took to be threatening, before she realised he was miming the action of pulling the bonnet release. Indicating that she should stay in the car, he hoisted the bonnet, then came round to the passenger’s side and rapped on the window. Martha wound down the window. ‘I need to listen inside,’ he told her. This was something of a quandary, being stuck in the fog with this fairly frightening old man demanding admittance to your vehicle, but he waited patiently beside the door and after a few seconds, seeing her hesitation, he suggested that, if she was scared, she could step out of the car as he got in and get back in when he stepped out, so she stayed in the car and opened the door for him. ‘Thank you,’ he said, but he didn’t actually get in, not completely. Instead, he knelt on the road and bent his head into the footwell, placing an ear close to the floor. He seemed to be wearing about a dozen T-shirts, and his clothes gave off a reek of old seaweed. ‘Turn the key,’ he ordered. Martha turned the key. ‘Once more,’ he said. Martha turned the key again, and he nodded like a diagnosing doctor at whatever it was he’d been hearing. Then he got out of the car, saying nothing. ‘Again,’ he instructed her from behind the bonnet. She turned the key and a moment later Henry came round to her window. ‘We need a bit of wire,’ he told her. ‘You don’t have a bit of wire, do you? No. Of course you don’t have a bit of wire. Why would you have a bit of wire? Right. Wait here.’ These words were addressed not to Martha directly but to a point somewhere over her shoulder, as if to a back-seat passenger
