‘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
