Harry’s eyes travelled slowly from Hitchens to Tailby. At first he had looked unimpressed, now he looked stubborn.
‘The Mount girl, is it?’
‘The Vernon family live at the Mount,’ explained Hitchens for Tailby’s sake. ‘That’s the name of the house.’
‘The remains haven’t yet been formally identified, Mr Dickinson,’ said Tailby. ‘Until they have, we can’t commit ourselves to a positive statement in that regard. However, it is generally known that we have been conducting an extensive search for a fifteen-year-old female by that name for some hours. In the circumstances there would seem to be a strong degree of possibility that the remains discovered in the vicinity may be those of Laura Vernon.’
An old carriage clock in an oak case ticked quietly to itself on the mantelpiece, providing the only sound in the room as it counted off the seconds. Fry thought that time seemed to be passing particularly slowly within the room, as if it was sealed off from the rest of the world in a time zone of its own, where normal rules didn’t apply.
‘You talk like a proper pillock, don’t you?’ said Harry.
Tailby’s jaw muscles tightened, but he restrained himself.
‘We’d like to hear from you how you came to find the trainer, Mr Dickinson.’
‘I’ve told it –’
‘Yes, I know you’ve told it before. Just tell us again, please.’
‘I’ve got other things to do, you know.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Tailby coolly. ‘It’s dominoes night.’
Harry took his pipe from the pocket of his jacket and poked at the contents of the ceramic bowl. His movements were slow and relaxed, and his expression was studiously placid. Hitchens began to stir, but Tailby quelled him with a movement of his hand.
‘You’ll no doubt understand one day,’ said Harry. ‘That at my age you can’t go rushing up and down hill twice in one afternoon and be in any fit state to go out of the house later on, without having a bit of a kip in between. I don’t have the energy for it any more. There’s no fighting it.’ He ran a hand across his neatly groomed hair, smoothing down the grey, Brylcreemed strands. ‘No matter how many dead bodies you’ve found.’
‘The sooner we get it over with, the sooner we’ll be able to leave you in peace.’
‘I can’t do anything more than that, not even for some top-brass copper and all his big words. All this coming and going and folk clattering about the house – it wears me out.’
Tailby sighed. ‘We’d really like to hear your story in your own words, Mr Dickinson. Just tell us the story, will you?’
Harry stared at him defiantly. ‘The story. Aye, well. Do you want it with hand gestures or without, this story?’
To Diane Fry there seemed to be something wrong with the scene, a sort of subtle reversal. It was as though the two detectives were waiting to be interviewed by the old man, not the other way round. Hitchens and Tailby were unsettled, shifting uncomfortably in their hard chairs, not sure what to say to break the moment. Harry, though, was totally at ease, calm and still, his feet planted in front of him on a worn patch of carpet. He had placed himself with his back to the window, so that he was outlined against the view of the street, a faint aura forming around his head and shoulders. Hitchens and Tailby were looking into the light, waiting for the old man to speak again.
‘Without, then, is it?’
‘Without, if you like, Mr Dickinson.’
‘I was out with Jess.’
‘Jess?’
‘My dog.’
‘Of course. You were walking your dog.’
Harry lit a taper, puffed on his pipe. He seemed to be waiting, to see if Tailby were going to take up the story himself.
‘I were walking my dog, like you say. We always go down that way. I told the lad. Sergeant Cooper’s –’
‘Sergeant Cooper’s lad, yes.’
‘Interrupt a lot, don’t you?’ said Harry. ‘Is that a, what you call it, interview technique?’
Fry thought she detected the ghost of a smile on Tailby’s face. Hitchens, though, so genial at the office, did not look like smiling.
‘Do go on, Mr Dickinson,’ said Tailby.
‘We always go down to the foot of Raven’s Side. Jess likes to run by the stream. After the rabbits. Not that she ever catches any. It’s a game, do you follow?’
Harry puffed smoke into the room. It drifted in a small cloud towards the ceiling, gathering round the glass bowl that hung on tiny chains below a sixty-watt light bulb. A wide patch of ceiling paper in the centre of the room was stained yellow with smoke.
Fry watched the moving cloud, and realized that the old man must sit every day in this same chair, in this room, to smoke his pipe. What was his wife doing meanwhile? Watching Coronation Street or Casualty on the colour television in the next room? And what did Harry do while he was smoking? There were a few books on a shelf set into the alcove formed by the chimney breast. The titles she could make out were The Miners in Crisis and War and Trade Unions in Britain, Choose Freedom and The Ripper and the Royals. There seemed to be only one novel – Robert Harris’s Fatherland. It was lined up with the other books, all regimented into a neat row between two carved oak bookends. Three or four issues of the Guardian were pushed into a magazine rack by the hearth. But there was no television here, no radio, no stereo. Once the newspaper had been read, it would leave nothing for the old man to do. Nothing but to listen to the ticking of the clock, and to think.
Fry became aware of Harry’s eyes on her. She felt suddenly as though he could read her thoughts. But she could not read his in return. His expression was impassive. He had the air of an aristocrat, forced to suffer an indignity but enduring it with composure.
‘A game, Harry …’ prompted Hitchens. He had less patience than the DCI. And every time he called the old man ‘Harry’ it seemed to stiffen his shoulders a little bit more. Tailby was politer, more tolerant. Fry liked to observe these things in her senior officers. If she made enough observations, perhaps she would be able to analyse them, put them through the computer, produce the ideal set of character traits for a budding DCI to aim for.
‘Sometimes she fetches things,’ said Harry. ‘I sit on a rock, smoke my pipe, watch the stream and the birds. Sometimes there’s otters, after the fish. If you sit still, they don’t notice you.’
Tailby was nodding. Maybe he was a keen naturalist. Fry didn’t have much knowledge of wildlife. There hadn’t been a lot of it in Birmingham, apart from the pigeons and the stray dogs.
‘And while I sit, Jess brings me things. Sticks, like. Or a stone, in her mouth. Sometimes she finds something dead.’
Harry paused. It was the first time Fry had seen him hesitate unintentionally. He was thinking back over his last words, as if surprised by what he had said. Then he shrugged.
‘I mean a stoat or a blackbird. A squirrel once. If they’re fresh dead and not been marked too bad, there’s a bloke over at Hathersage will have ‘em for his freezer.’
‘What?’
‘He stuffs ’em,’ said Harry. ‘All legal. He’s got a licence and everything.’
‘A taxidermist,’ said Hitchens.
Fry could see Tailby frown. Harry puffed on his pipe with extra vigour, as if he had just won a minor victory.
‘But today, Mr Dickinson?’ said Tailby.
‘Ah, today. Today,