LITMIR.BIZ

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as though at onion fumes. ‘You police?’ he asks.

      ‘We police,’ Ian confirms.

      ‘Wow. That’s –’ He smiles to himself, as if until this moment we’d been wearing a disguise that he should have seen through. ‘Bugger me.’

      ‘Indeed,’ says Ian. ‘Your round, John.’

      With a shrug and a grin for Mary, this time unreciprocated, Josh withdraws.

      ‘Sherlock the barman,’ Ian mutters.

      Mary gives him a reproving smile. ‘But he has a point, doesn’t he?’ she says. ‘It made sense to me.’

      ‘What you reckon, John?’ Ian enquires, feigning deep selfdoubt. ‘Reckon he’s got a point?’

      ‘I reckon he just wants to feel involved.’

      ‘I tend to agree, John.’

      ‘But we don’t know that Henry was nobody’s boyfriend.’

      ‘You what?’

      ‘We don’t know that Henry was nobody’s boyfriend.’

      ‘No, we don’t absolutely know it. But unlikely.’

      ‘Not impossible.’

      ‘Very very very unlikely.’

      ‘Quite unlikely, but you never know. Even Hitler had a girlfriend.’

      ‘Hitler had a nice house and decent clothes and a big black car.’

      ‘Some women don’t care about nice houses.’

      ‘No woman’s going to go for a man with woodlice in his hair. Isn’t that right, ladies?’ says Ian, a proposition at which they both nod. From the way Mary puts a hand on his leg, from the way she curls his hand into hers, you can tell that she worries about him, imagining that one night he’s going to corner a drug-crazed thug in an alleyway and end up with a blade through his liver. ‘We’ll get him. Sooner or later,’ says Ian, giving the promise of a man whose word is his bond. Leaning back, his arms flat along the top of the banquette, he looks like a character on TV, the overconfident young cop. But he does truly believe that we’ll get him, and the next morning, as if in vindication of his baseless faith, the very first visit turns out to be our first promising one, the first to give us anything you might call a lead.

      Mr Gaskin is a pensioner, eighty-ish. He opens his front door cautiously, as people of his age tend to do, and opens it just wide enough to make a gap he can stand in. We often get a brief look of dread when we say who we are, but with Mr Gaskin all anxiety vanishes from his face when we identify ourselves and explain why we’re here. Solemnly courteous, gratified to be have been called upon to do his duty as a citizen, he invites us in. ‘I’m not sure I can be of much help,’ he apologises, and in his bearing and his voice there’s a sadness that seems long-standing. He’s a diminutive chap and extremely unsturdy. The skin on the back of his hands is like greaseproof paper with thin blue wires running under it, and the bones of his face are as sharp as a carving in wood. He is wearing a crisp white shirt and iridescent blue tie, though it’s soon revealed that he hasn’t been anywhere today and isn’t going anywhere after we’ve gone. In the front room a big leather armchair is aligned four-square with the TV. Beside the chair stands a table laden with books and a standard lamp with fat tassels. Obviously this chair is the only one in regular use, and on the mantelpiece there’s a big framed picture of a bride and groom, in the middle of a flock of smaller pictures. You know without looking closely that the bride is Mrs Gaskin and that Mrs Gaskin is deceased. There are photographs all over the place, on every wall and shelf, and the face of Mrs Gaskin seems to be in most of them.

      We sit around a table, Mr Gaskin facing us, the blue-wired hands locked lightly on the table top. From the window by which we’re sitting Mr Gaskin can see the upper reaches of the path that zigzags down to the end of the beach road, and the start of the path that cuts through the trees, across the High Land of Orcombe. Many times he saw Henry heading over the High Land, or made out his figure down on the sand, sometimes making up a bed for himself against the sea wall, but as he recalls there was only one occasion on which he talked to him. Speaking gravely and with precision, as though from a witness box, he tells us about the evening in the autumn of the year before last, when he came across Henry. About six o’clock, it was, and he’d decided to take a stroll because there was a particularly beautiful sunset. The tide was low, so he went down on to the beach, and no sooner had he turned the corner of the headland, into the next bay, than he heard a loud crack and there was Henry, twenty or thirty yards away, with his back to him, close to the cliff. At Henry’s feet there was a pile of four or five wooden crates that must have been washed ashore and he was striking the pile with a long metal spike, the sort that’s used for raising a barrier around a hole in the road. ‘He was striking the crates with great force. Remarkable violence,’ says Mr Gaskin, and he pauses, unnerved anew at the sight of Henry and the crates. ‘As if slaughtering an animal. He was in a frenzy, I’d say. Yes. That’s not too strong. A frenzy.’

      Then Henry turned and saw him, whereupon he lowered the spike and bowed, a deep and extravagant bow, like a swordsman’s bow to a rival in a duel. Henry wished him good evening and they talked for a minute or two. They talked about the fire that Henry was going to build. The rest of their conversation has been forgotten now, but Mr Gaskin does remember with some clarity three things about their meeting. The first of these is the peculiarity of Henry’s speech, the slowness of it, and the silences. ‘He had this air of being baffled, and I couldn’t decide if he was a thoughtful chap or a little lacking in grey matter. He seemed perplexed by me or by himself, but it wasn’t clear which,’ muses Mr Gaskin, and Ian writes it down, nodding in recognition. Every minute or so, as well, Henry would yawn, very widely, without covering his mouth, yet he did not appear tired. ‘It was a tic, I suppose, but most unnerving,’ he tells us. ‘And I think he had a Midlands accent. That’s the last thing.’

      ‘By “think” –?’ Ian asks.

      ‘I detected a flatness in the voice. In some of the vowels.’

      ‘You’re sure of that?’

      ‘I’m sure of what I heard, yes. I’m not wholly sure about the accent. Where it was from, I mean.’

      ‘But something like a Midlands accent?’

      ‘That’s how it sounded to me.’

      ‘Interesting,’ Ian comments. ‘I didn’t pick that up.’

      ‘You talked to him?’ asks Mr Gaskin, and the next minute Ian’s chatting to him about the swimming incident and the unnamed snoop with the telescope, which makes Mr Gaskin smile, with a wistful fondness, as though at the wackiness of a shared acquaintance. ‘One other thing occurs to me,’ he says, apparently prompted by something in Ian’s story, and he tells us that several times he saw Henry walking on the clifftops or the beach with a girl, a fair-haired girl, a bit on the plump side, average height. By girl he means under thirty, a few years under thirty. When he saw her with Henry he had a feeling that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen her. Ian asks if he could be a little more specific about her appearance, and Mr Gaskin presses his fingers to his temples, trying to squeeze a memory to the surface. Grimacing at the effort, he looks out of the window. We wait. Eventually he recalls that the girl was with Henry late one evening last summer, on the beach. Henry had his jeans rolled up and was collecting rubbish in a fertiliser bag. Behind him was the girl. She was wearing a purple swimming costume, a bikini, bright purple. Mr Gaskin puts a hand to his brow and closes his eyes, summoning the scene on the beach. We wait a little longer. ‘I’m sorry. It’s gone. I can’t see her face,’ he complains, at which Ian lets out a small laugh. Mr Gaskin opens his eyes and blinks at him, confused.

      ‘See the bikini, don’t see the face,’ Ian explains. ‘I can undertand that. I have that problem myself.’

      ‘Oh,’ replies Mr Gaskin. ‘I see. Yes.’ He smiles weakly, before again gazing out of the window.

      ‘This is useful,’ says Ian, tapping

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