‘I explained that—’ The island had white sands and curling, creamy ocean waves, all beneath a shimmering sky.
‘Five hours later!’
‘Yes. I was—’ Plus a beautiful bird of paradise with a furled rainbow tail.
‘But surely there’s a telephone here? I distinctly recall paying several extremely large bills.’
And who runs those up? ‘I didn’t get back from play school until one, Brian. The police came and explained what had happened and then the reporters arrived . . .’ Sue’s voice quavered. A cloud hung over the brazen meridian. ‘They just pushed past.’
‘They wouldn’t have pushed past me,’ cried Brian, fiddling up Llohe. ‘Licensed manipulators of populist greed.’
‘I rang as soon as they’d gone but—’
‘But, but. But by then that Morse clone and his fascist sidekick were at the school acting as if they were in some cretinous telly series. God - I could have written better dialogue in my sleep.’
I didn’t think he was a fascist. I thought he was sweet. He’s got a little girl who would just love a picture of Hector.
‘They must have burned up the road getting there. Banking on us not having time to talk. Trying to trick me.’
‘Trick you, Brian?’ Momentarily Sue was so surprised she forgot her ironic counterpoint. ‘Trick you into what?’
‘Well . . .’ Brian stared hard at his wife as if testing her ingenuousness. There was a long pause. The problem was a tricky one. How to find out what a person knows without asking them, in so many words, how much they know. Oh hell.
‘I mean - take for instance all those asinine questions. What time did we get home and go to bed? Did we go out again? Did we hear the car leave? I don’t know what you told them.’
‘That I went up around quarter to eleven, that I couldn’t get off to sleep and that I did hear the car leave.’ Sue looked up from her quietly folded hands. ‘What did you tell them, Brian?’
‘What d’you mean, you couldn’t sleep? You were well away when I came up. Snoring your head off.’
Sue, who always pretended to be well away whenever Brian was in the bedroom, lifted her wide, earth-mother shoulders in a resigned sort of way.
‘You didn’t say I’d gone out for a bit of a walk then?’
‘No. Did you?’
‘After I’d finished checking the homework. Round the Green. Just to blow—’ Brian restored the letters on the fridge to their most popularly accepted distribution. ‘God - that’s typical of you, that is. Bloody typical.’
Sue started to cry. Brian picked up the Guardian, came across a Make This The Year You Learn To Write advertisement and vented his wrath by cutting it out and sending it to Jeffrey Archer.
That night Midsomer Worthy was slow to settle. The Old Dun Cow was packed with professional journalists and morbid nosy parkers jostling for the locals’ attention. The air was shot through with sparkling dialogue along the lines of: I suppose, living here, you must have known him - Oh, sorry, what are you drinking by the way?
And not a manjack among the villagers was found wanting. Lowering doubles and triples at the speed of light, they told what they knew, then conjured from the ripe atmosphere what they did not. And although none of them got it even remotely right, the dead man would still have been astonished at the luxurious complexity of their imaginings. All left the hostelry at closing time, tired and emotional, aware of nothing so much as value given and a job well done.
Several of them staggered past Plover’s Rest which, though now sealed, still showed a police presence. And the pod was still there. Troy had gone home, but Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby was inside reading through information which had come in during the day, drinking coffee and waiting for the airport police at Heathrow to return his call. He was whacked and on the point of giving up when the telephone rang.
They were sorry for the delay. There had been several flights to Finland on the eighth but at this hour the relevant offices were locked so it had taken some time to raise the information he required. But they were now in a position to inform him that none of the flights in question had carried a passenger travelling under the name of Max Jennings.
The Woman in Black
Barnaby was in the incident room early next morning, bad-tempered, greatly disturbed by his own anxieties and unrefreshed. He had spent the night drifting in and out of sleep and bad dreams. He couldn’t remember what the dreams were but woke fighting for breath and wrestling with the duvet, which seemed to be pressing itself over his nose and mouth.
He had got up at six in the winter’s dark, switched off the alarm and made himself some tea. Then later, as Joyce slept on, followed this with a delicious and deeply unhealthy fried breakfast, sneering at a wistful-looking kitten as he turned the bacon. The postman came while he was eating. Two gardening catalogues and the phone bill.