‘No.’
‘Well, Mrs Clapton.’ Barnaby now entered upon his marathon struggle to part company from the fierce embrace of the armchair. ‘No, no. It’s all right. I can manage.’
‘We called on Mr St John,’ said Troy, averting his eyes for fear of laughter, ‘but he was out.’
‘Yes. It’s market day. He draws his pension and does the shopping and then his research at the library. Goes in at nine and catches the four o’clock bus back. You won’t find Laura at home either. She opens her shop at ten so she’d probably have left home before all this was discovered.’
‘What shop would that be?’ asked Sergeant Troy, closing his notebook.
‘The Spinning Wheel. Antiques. In Causton High Street.’
Barnaby, now fully upright, recognised the name. He had bought Joyce an outrageously priced Victorian footstool there for her birthday last year.
‘I shall have to ask you for some fingerprints I’m afraid, Mrs Clapton. Purely for purposes of elimination.’
‘Oh dear.’ Worry shadowed her eyes, which, without the hugely magnifying lenses, were small, blinky and weak as a rabbit’s. ‘My husband wouldn’t like that. He’s very into civil liberties.’
‘They’ll just be on a strip - not filed. And destroyed when our investigations are complete. In your presence, if that is what you would prefer.’
‘I see.’
‘There’s a portable incident room on the Green, as I expect you noticed.’ Barnaby spoke firmly, as if her popping in was as good as settled. ‘Or you and Mr Clapton might like to come to the station.’
By now they had reached the door. Fastened to one of the stripped wooden panels by Blu-tack was a painting of a dragon. His tail was wrapped around his body, the arrowed tip covering his nostrils and held in place by a wing membrane. Above his head in primary colours were the words: ‘Thank You For Not Smoking In Our Home’.
The creature’s expression of guilty naughtiness, alarm at being discovered and a lurking, laughing confidence that it would be forgiven was so precisely that of a well-loved child caught in similar defiant circumstances that Troy chuckled silently and Barnaby laughed out loud.
‘Who did this?’
‘Me. That’s Hector.’
‘It’s very good.’
‘Thank you.’ Sue blushed with pleasure. ‘He’s in all my stories.’
‘Do you ever sell your paintings, Mrs Clapton?’ asked Troy.
‘Ohh . . . well . . .’ Her face became transfigured.
‘Only my little girl, she’d just love him. In her room like.’
‘I could . . . I suppose . . . Yes.’
‘Fine. I’ll be in touch.’
They were all on the step by this time. As Barnaby and Troy left, Kitty Fosse, now in the company of two more reporters, both male, a man with a camera on his shoulder and a woman waving a long cylinder of yellow fluff pushed through the gate and zoomed, like a swarm of hornets, up the path. The policemen stood aside, judging, correctly, that their target was Sue.
‘So,’ said the chief inspector as they walked away. ‘What do you make of all that, sergeant?’
‘Covering for him, isn’t she?’
‘It looks like it. I wonder what Mr C. was actually up to while he was supposed to be “well away” last night.’
‘The smart move would be to talk to him before she does.’ Barnaby turned for a last look at Trevelyan Villas. The Press had disappeared inside. ‘And if you can get us to Causton Comprehensive within the next twenty minutes I’d say we have a very good chance of doing just that.’
‘On these roads?’ They had reached the car. Troy struggled to open the door which had frozen to the frame. He grinned. ‘No problem.’
In the gymnasium Brian was organising his play-construction group. Everyone but Denzil was spread around on the high-gloss, honey-coloured parquet. They sat cross-legged and back to back or lay acumbent. Denzil hung upside down from the ropes, his hands gripping and squeezing the rubber rings. Veins corded his neck and sweat hung from his lobes like drops of crystal.
‘Come along now, Denzil,’ called Brian. ‘We’re ready to start.’
Denzil showed no sign of having heard nor did Brian expect him to, for from the beginning he had made it plain that his modus operandi would be one of democratic openness. He knew that to assert the dialectic of belonging they needed to erase the official academic landscape and impose their own. Their meetings were not to be class/teacher confrontations but periods of adventurous exploration during which they would all reach out and spontaneously reveal their dreams, longings and frustrations which Brian would then shape and organise into a full-length drama provisionally entitled Slangwhang For Five Mute Voices.