LITMIR.BIZ

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of disposable latex gloves.

      ‘Oh, my God,’ Janet Dawson moaned.

      ‘It’s just a precaution.’ Lucy checked along the door’s edge and down the edge of the door-jamb. ‘There’s no sign of any damage here.’

      ‘I don’t think anyone forced entry. I mean, there’s no damage anywhere. And it’s not like there’s any sign of a scuffle. Nothing’s broken, there’re no blood spots or anything.’

      ‘So, if someone came into the house this way,’ Lucy said, ‘your father must have let them in willingly.’

      ‘I suppose so.’ Janet Dawson gave a weak, forced smile. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

      Lucy didn’t mention that most of the violence in modern society was inflicted by persons known to the victim. Instead, she said, ‘How many of your father’s house-callers are in the habit of coming to the back door?’

      ‘I must admit … I can’t think of any who would do that, or why.’

      They crossed the garden together. It was smoothly turfed aside from a crazy-paved path, with a brick platform on the right covered in potted plants. At odds with all this neatness, the back gate hung ajar.

      ‘The gate was like this, this morning?’ Lucy asked, again noting an absence of damage, which meant that this hadn’t been forced open either.

      ‘Exactly like it is now.’

      ‘We shouldn’t necessarily read something bad into this,’ Lucy said. ‘There are lots of possibilities here at present.’

      Internally, however, she’d closed in on three main ones: a) an intruder had approached the house from the rear and had got inside that way, because Harry Hopkins had forgotten to lock up; or b) Harry Hopkins had gone outside himself, leaving the property by the back door and the back gate, and for some unknown reason had still not returned; or c) neither of those unpleasant alternatives had happened, and he was simply going about his everyday business, absent from home at this moment, again having neglected to lock up (and having left his hat and coat behind), and by pure coincidence had also been absent every time in the last three days when his daughter had phoned the house.

      You wouldn’t earn a police commendation for working out which of those options seemed least likely.

      Lucy stepped through into the back alley. ‘How often have you tried to contact your father in the last few days, Janet?’

      The woman followed her out. ‘First it was every few hours, but then … I mean yesterday and last night, it was once every ten minutes.’

      ‘Is your father hard of hearing, by any chance?’

      ‘He wears a hearing aid, but no … he can hear when the phone’s ringing. He normally answers straight away.’

      Lucy surveyed the alley. It was narrow, cobbled, and little more than a service passage running behind the row of houses. At present, it was clear of vehicles, or bins, or sacks of rubbish. On the other side, a high red-brick wall rose about ten feet, screening off the rest of the estate.

      Lucy wasn’t comforted by this. A narrow backstreet hidden from view on one side.

      She turned back to the gate – and stopped in her tracks. Like the house’s front door, the back gate had been painted a bright canary-yellow, but on the outside it had been spattered top to bottom with dried black trickle stains.

      ‘This is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’ she said.

      ‘Oh.’ Janet Dawson looked genuinely surprised. ‘Dad’ll go mad if he sees that. He hates scruffiness.’

      ‘He’d scrub it off, would he? Even though it’s on the outside?’

      ‘Certainly. As soon as he saw it.’

      Which likely means this has happened since he went missing, Lucy thought to herself. Or did it happen at the time he went missing?

      She wondered what might have caused it. A vehicle travelling at speed would have kicked up ground water, spraying the gate, though not today of course; it was sunny today, unusually warm for mid-September. She glanced around. The cobblestones were bone-dry. Thinking about it, the last time they’d had proper rain – the sort that would leave proper puddles – was on Tuesday afternoon.

      Three days ago.

      Alan Rodwell was somewhere in his late twenties, bald, bespectacled and bearded. He stood barefoot on his front doorstep, wearing mismatched shorts and a T-shirt, blinking at Lucy’s warrant card as she explained who she was and why she was here. A few seconds later, his wife, Sam, came down the hall from the kitchen. She was about the same age, a petite woman, also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but with flipflops on her feet. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and plain, pale features still marked with makeup from the previous night.

      ‘We haven’t seen Harry for a couple of days,’ Alan Rodwell said, shaking his head.

      ‘When do you think you last saw him?’ Lucy asked.

      ‘Oh, I don’t know. Could be a week ago, easily. I don’t keep a record.’

      ‘So definitely not since last Tuesday?’

      ‘Nah, no way.’

      ‘Do you ever hear him?’ Lucy asked. ‘I mean through the dividing wall between the houses?’

      ‘Oh, yeah.’ This time it was the woman who answered. ‘In fact, you can hear his TV now. It’s been on for ages. It was on all night last night, and … oh?’

      Only belatedly did this seem to strike her as strange.

      ‘It was on all night?’ Lucy asked.

      ‘And the night before, I think. And … maybe … hell, I don’t know … maybe the night before that, as well.’

      For the last three days in fact, Lucy thought.

      ‘It never occurred to you, maybe, to go and knock on his door?’

      Oddly, the couple glanced at each other with half-smiles, as if they were harbouring some mischievous secret.

      ‘We don’t really like to complain,’ Alan Rodwell said. ‘I’ll be honest, Harry does that quite a bit with us.’

      ‘I’m sorry?’ Lucy said.

      ‘Whenever we’ve got friends round,’ Sam Rodwell explained. ‘During the summer holidays usually. He gets upset if our barbecues go on too late and comes around, making a fuss. We don’t want to do that back to him … he’d just think it was retaliation.’

      ‘And, you know …’ Alan Rodwell shrugged. ‘Complaining’s not really our thing.’

      Lucy looked at them askance. ‘I didn’t mean knock on his door to complain, I mean to check if everything was all right.’

      ‘Oh …’ Their impish smiles faded.

      They shuffled their feet awkwardly but didn’t look guilty or afraid. Hardened criminals often had the ability to brazen things out when they were under suspicion; they could put on a front that even a seasoned detective might find it difficult to penetrate. But when ordinary people like these two had done something wrong, there were usually clear signs. Not so on this occasion. It was as though it hadn’t even struck them yet that they might be in the frame.

      ‘You’ve been hearing his television play continuously since – when?’ Lucy said. ‘Could it have been as far back as last Tuesday?’

      ‘Around then, I suppose,’ Sam Rodwell replied. ‘Tuesday night was probably the first night we heard when it hadn’t been turned off.’

      ‘That’s right,’ her husband agreed. ‘We were in bed and I could hear gunfire – like movie gunfire, you know. And cowboy film music. I said to Sam, “Christ, Harry’s pulling a late one.”’

      Lucy

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