‘Do you still have the letter?’
‘I’m afraid not. I run a lean filing system. Everything but essential business correspondence and contracts gets answered and junked straight away.’
‘You must remember the details, surely, Mr Jennings,’ said Troy. ‘After what you’ve just told us it must have been a bit of a bombshell.’
‘Hardly that. Ten years had gone by. I’d published several more books and garnered my own share of personal misery. It occurred to me once that perhaps my child’s death was some sort of repayment for what I’d done to Gerald. Though that seems a bit hard on Ava.’
Not to mention the nipper, thought Troy in his corner.
‘Anyway, as far as I recall, the note simply said that in his capacity as secretary he had been asked to invite me to give a talk. The rest of it was devoted to persuading me against the idea. “Painful memories, impossible situation, sleeping dogs”. His prose style hadn’t improved. At first my inclination was to take the hint and not go. But the more I thought about it the more certain I became that, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, this was not what Gerald wanted. So, as you know, I accepted.’
He was looking extremely tired now. Strained and somewhat lost and perturbed, as if he had followed a certain path and it had led him to a surprising and unwanted destination. His smooth, tanned skin was mottled and chalky and stretched too tightly over his skull. The line of his nose jutted, sharp as a knife. Violet lines crisscrossed the fine skin beneath his eyes as if it had been savagely pinched. When, in answer to Barnaby’s next question, he started to speak, his voice was quite without colour. He sounded almost bored.
The chief inspector wondered whether Jennings was genuinely exhausted or deliberately conserving his energy so that he would be alert throughout this, the most crucial stage in the whole interview. Barnaby had paused before speaking, withdrawing his attention momentarily from the immediate present to dwell briefly on the extraordinary tapestry that had so recently been unrolled before him. Namely, the tragic life and times of Liam Hanlon aka Gerald Hadleigh.
This burdensome knowledge, coupled with a recollection of the all-too-detailed blow-ups on the incident-room wall, stimulated in Barnaby’s mind feelings of the keenest pity. In what a poignant light did the small child - escaping from one terror only to find, crouching at the end of his life another, unspeakably worse - now appear. And if you were responsible, Jennings, vowed the chief inspector, for twice stealing that life I will have you. By Christ I will! None of this showed on his face, which was entirely noncommittal.
‘I assume, Mr Jennings, you will now be offering us an entirely new, or perhaps I should say “re-written”, version of what happened on Monday evening.’
‘I’ve nothing to change regarding the first half. Everything was exactly as I’ve previously stated, except for my feelings of course. I was surprised at how moved I was at my first sight of him. Driving over I’d felt nothing more than mild curiosity as to how he was keeping, coupled with a vague hope that I could somehow make him understand why I had done what I’d done all those years ago. Yet, though I was never conscious during our relationship of feeling affection, this latest meeting did evoke precisely that response. Gerald, on the other hand, hardly looked at me. But I was determined to speak to him. I’d arrived early hoping to do just that but St John was already there. As you know, I accomplished it eventually by getting him out of the house and bolting the door.
‘I went back into the sitting room and what happened next was very distressing. He just went to pieces. Backed off from me, flailing his arms and shouting, “Go away, go away”. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘Why not just do as he asked,’ said Troy and was swiftly frowned on for interrupting.
‘I started talking quietly. Saying how happy I’d been to hear from him, to see him again. That I meant him no harm and just wanted to explain things. Eventually he calmed down a little and slumped into one of the armchairs. I drew up a stool and sat with him. And then I told him what I’ve told you. I described my disappointments, my sad marriage, my lost child. I said if he had spent years thinking my life was nothing but success and happiness and all at his expense he could not have been more wrong.
‘And then I talked about the letters that came after Far Away Hills. Sent to me but written to him. I had kept a few and offered to bring them over for him to read. Above all I tried to explain that I’d stolen his story to give it to the world, not for my own advancement.’ Absorbed as he was in his narration, Jennings did not miss the sudden gleam of mockery in the chief inspector’s eyes. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘self-justification if you like, but not only that. I was trying to do something about his hurt, perhaps repair some of the damage. Give me some credit.’