‘I want you to try and get behind what has been said already. Apparently straightforward remarks can often conceal something more complicated. Compare different people’s version of the same event. And easy does it. Five of the six people you’ll be talking to will have committed no offence whatsoever.’
Unnecessary to add it could well prove to be six out of six. Everyone knew how much real meat was on the plate.
‘I’d also like information about the day leading up to the meeting which, until now, has not been fully explored. Something untoward may have occurred but not been thought worth mentioning.’
At this point a uniformed sergeant asked if any decision had been reached regarding Max Jennings.
‘He’ll be released later this morning. I’ve nothing to hold him on.’
‘I was wondering, sir.’ Inspector Meredith spoke with a politeness so mannered and artificial he could have strayed in from a Restoration comedy.
‘Yes?’
‘I was going over both of Clapton’s statements last night.’ Well, bully for you, Ian. ‘Could I ask if you yourself have any ideas as to what he might have been doing between eleven and midnight on the night of the murder?’
‘Sergeant Troy seems to think he was hanging around a house in the village where a young girl, one of his pupils, lives.’
‘I see. Thank you, sir.’
Meredith had the extraordinary ability to write his thoughts across his face with absolute precision and without moving a muscle. What he was presently thinking was, ‘You should have mentioned that without being asked. Who now is hugging information to themselves?’
Troy said, almost matching the frozen politesse: ‘There is a note to that effect on the back-up file, sir.’
After the outdoor team had gone about their business Barnaby withdrew to his desk at the back of the room. No need to seek the sanctuary of his office now for peace and quiet. The telephones, so clamorous a mere seven days ago, rang only intermittently. Occasionally someone used a computer, but to check facts rather than add new information. A good two thirds of the machines were idle. A winding down of energy was visibly taking place, a procedure satisfyingly normal at the successful conclusion of a case and depressingly frustrating otherwise.
Barnaby switched on his own monitor and brought up the detailed notes from Amy Lyddiard’s interview. But he had hardly started to read when a call came in from the Garda in Dublin. This was far from being a rare occurrence. Contact was maintained almost daily, often in connection with the movements of known or suspected terrorists. But now the call was in response to Barnaby’s request for information on Liam Hanlon’s former companion and procurer.
The bottom line on Conor Neilson was about as final as you could hope to get. A man going under that name for the past twenty years, which was as long as the police had known him, had been fished out of the Liffey eighteen months previously. His feet had been jammed into paint kettles filled with cement, his throat had been cut and his ears sliced off. He was known to have links with protection rackets, drug-running and prostitution.
Barnaby, asked then if this was the man he was looking for, said he wouldn’t be at all surprised. Further details were promised by fax and the chief inspector thanked his informant, gave assurances that the matter was not urgent and rang off. It seemed to him that what he had just heard brought a dreadful symmetry to the matter under investigation. That two men, yoked together against a background of violence from their earliest years should, quite unconnectedly, end so.
Barnaby, disturbed and restless, got up and started to move about. Images proliferated in his mind. A little boy weeping through a mess of freshly bleeding offal. A man, blown apart by a shotgun, lying in an unknown grave, his mouth stopped by earth. Another standing upright, drowned, a great gash across his neck. Around him a floating stain suffused brown water and the gills of his wound, fish belly pale, gradually widened. Last and perhaps most terrible (Barnaby had fetched up opposite the Ryvita panels), were the battered remains of Gerald Hadleigh.
Old tags, quotations, half-remembered lines haunted Barnaby - thicker than water . . . who would have thought the old man . . . of coral are his bones . . . blood-boltered Banquo smiles . . . as old as Cain . . . every tear from every eye . . .
He couldn’t stop staring at the photographs.
Directly after leaving the gym Brian also left the school premises. Pleading stomach cramps, he arranged for someone to double up on the only teaching period he had that afternoon and decamped. He couldn’t put enough distance between himself and that terrible place where he had been so thoroughly eunuchised.