The following day passed in much the same way, pleasantly, peacefully, though without the painting or the shopping. The rain was sporadic and gave up altogether in the late afternoon. Stephen walked as far as Ringer’s Foin and back and for the rest of the evening he watched television, eating pork pie and tomatoes and crisps and chocolate bars. It was years, not since he was a child, that he had eaten so much. Chief Superintendent Malm came on the BBC news at nine to say he was confident they would catch the Vangmoor killer this time. They were optimistic. A few more days or even hours would see the end of it.
Next day, having eaten heartily at breakfast, Stephen went back to work.
Dadda wasn’t so far sunk in misery as to spare Stephen. He looked up with sunken eyes from the inlay he was working on.
‘You’ve come back then. You’ve bloody condescended to come back. Had another one of your bloody viruses, have you?’
‘Afraid I have, Dadda. Sorry about that. I always turn up like a bad penny, though, don’t I?’
‘Aye. Have you ever thought about your bloody future if Whalbys’ goes bust? Noticed all the small businesses going bloody bust in the Three Towns this year, have you? Or d’you reckon I can do the lot on me own, a man with a sick mind like me?’
‘Good Lord, Dadda, you haven’t got a sick mind.’
Dadda turned and spat into the sawdust. ‘You’ve got a wife, you want to remember that, you’ll maybe have kids. What are you going to live on when Whalbys’ goes down the bloody drain?’
‘Actually,’ said Stephen, ‘I haven’t got a wife. Not any more.’ He gave a bright, strained smile. ‘She’s left me, we’ve split up. She walked out on me on Saturday.’
The table creaked as Dadda leant on it to heave himself up. He stood staring at Stephen with great arms hanging. ‘What are you saying?’
‘You heard me, Dadda. Lyn’s left me.’
‘I’ll not believe it!’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to. Good Lord, Dadda, we’re not the first couple to split up. We’ll get over, by or through it.’
Dadda said in a deep, dark, bitter voice, ‘There’s history repeating itself, there’s the sins of the fathers visited on the children.’
It had happened almost before Stephen knew it. One moment he was standing next to Dadda, trying to avoid his eye, the next he found himself clutched in a bear hug, held in a crushing embrace, while Dadda murmured over him just as he had done all those years ago when Brenda first went away.
‘Like father, like son,’ crooned Dadda. ‘We’ll be all in all to each other now, all in all to each other.’
Stephen was more frightened by this now than he had been then. Then it had at any rate seemed natural, natural even to the child. Now there was something horrible about being embraced by this gorilla-like man who on his own admission was halfway to madness. As a child he hadn’t wanted to hurt Dadda’s feelings by protesting, later on he had given way to Dadda in everything for the sake of peace and not to offend. He had always believed he loved Dadda. Suddenly he understood how much he hated him. With this surge of hatred he pulled himself violently away, digging his elbows into Dadda’s chest, bracing his back and jerking himself free, so that Dadda’s arms flew wide and he staggered — huge, powerful Dadda actually staggered. He gave a low cry. Stephen ran upstairs and got behind the ranks of chaises longues and three-piece suites. He stood against the wall, listening, but there were no more sounds from downstairs.
After a while he crept to the top of the stairs and looked down. Dadda was sitting on a Hepplewhite chair with the whole of the upper part of his body prone on the table top, his head on the table between his outstretched arms. Stephen tip-toed away and went back to the Victorian love seat he had been working on in oyster-coloured velvet and to which he hadn’t given a moment since the previous Thursday. At lunchtime Dadda was gone, though Stephen hadn’t heard him leave. He went out himself and was crossing the square to the Market Burger House when someone touched his sleeve.
It was Troth.
‘Oh, not again,’ Stephen said. He felt enough confidence to say that, though if it had been Lyn who was dead he might not have. ‘You don’t want to talk to me again?’
‘You don’t know what we want,’ said Troth in that tone of cunning triumph a stupid man uses when he thinks he has got the better of an adversary. ‘I never said. I might be merely warning you about parking your car on a yellow line.’ A fresh outcrop of acne made the near approach of his face offensive. Stephen slightly retreated. ‘It could be just that,’ Troth said. ‘That’s what an innocent man would presume.’
‘Good Lord, I can read, you know, I can watch TV. Any bloke in my position would jolly well know you want to talk to me about this last murder. What are we waiting for? Let’s get on with it, let’s get going.’
Troth didn’t say any more. They were only about a hundred yards from the police station. Stephen wasn’t taken into an interview room this time but into an office with a desk and chairs and filing cabinets and a view of Hilderbridge roofs. Manciple, in a lightweight grey suit, his face burned to an even darker brick red by the previous week’s sun, was sitting behind the desk and Malm was standing at the window against the light. Malm looked tired. The past weeks had aged him and whatever he might have said on television, he looked neither confident nor optimistic.
Manciple apologized to Stephen for bringing him there.
‘We’ll try not to keep you longer than is strictly necessary, Mr Whalby. We have to do our job, you’ll appreciate that.’
Stephen shrugged. Manciple was looking at him in a way he didn’t like, as if he saw into his mind. It was perhaps the most intelligent look any of these policemen had ever worn in all his encounters with them. It was a look of enlightenment. Stephen moved his eyes away.
Malm spoke. ‘Your car was seen twice in Thirlton during the weekend, Mr Whalby, once on Saturday night and once on Sunday evening, both times parked outside the village hall. Would you like to tell us what you were doing there?’
Stephen blustered a bit at first. He said it was no business of theirs. But everything, of course, was their business in a murder case. He couldn’t simply refuse to explain. After a while he admitted he had been to Thirlton and said he had been inside the village hall. It was a piece of luck for him, the merest chance, that when they asked him what had been going on there and he replied that it was a concert, he had guessed right.
Then Manciple wanted to know how well he had known Harriet Crozier.
‘I’d met her three times.’
‘Three times is ample to start a relationship,’ said Malm, adding, ‘at any rate, these days.’
Stephen wanted to laugh at that, it was so remote from any of the ideals or aims of his life, and he did feel a smile twitch his mouth.
‘Something amusing you?’ Malm asked.
‘I don’t have “relationships” with women. I’ve always been faithful to my wife.’
He felt that the dignity of this reply silenced them for a moment. Then Malm began talking of the nearness of Thirlton to the old pony level and Manciple, taking over from him, proceeded to give Stephen a straightforward and lucid account of how Harriet’s body had been brought and left there. He described with perfect accuracy what Stephen had in fact done, from his placing the body in the tunnel, having first ascertained that no car was visible on the road in either direction as far as the eye could see, to his parking the car in Thirlton and returning on foot to cut off the hair. Stephen was alarmed. He had to keep telling himself about the difference in the blood subgrouping and that he was safe.
Manciple said in his diffident apologetic way, ‘I don’t suppose you can remember what music was played at the concert.’