Cath Staincliffe - Crying Out Loud

‘Never found.’ He pulled a face. ‘Beswick said he’d chucked it away – wouldn’t or couldn’t say where.’

‘Was it his knife?’

‘No. He said it was at the cottage, on the work surface. When Charlie came at him, Beswick grabbed it. One stab wound to the stomach. But Beswick’s narrative of events matched everything at the scene. Everything,’ he repeated, locking those large eyes on mine. ‘There were no loose ends, no discrepancies. He’s wasting your time.’

Personally I thought the absence of the murder weapon was rather a loose end but I didn’t want to aggravate him. I wasn’t going to just drop it, though. ‘Did you interview him?’ I asked.

‘No.’ He took another sip of his tea.

I was disappointed, thinking he wouldn’t have as much information if he hadn’t heard it first-hand. ‘But Damien was at the cottage,’ I pointed out. ‘He’d have picked up details from being there, wouldn’t he, even if he hadn’t been the one to attack Charlie? Like where the body was and the fact that Charlie had been stabbed?’

Sinclair’s eyes, wide and glassy, like blue mints, bore into me. ‘It’s possible,’ he allowed. His long fingers curled round his mug.

‘How much detail did he give?’ I asked. ‘He could barely remember anything when I asked him to talk me through it,’ I said. ‘Surely the police would expect it to be coherent and detailed.’

‘He’d taken drugs that day, on the way to the cottage – did he tell you that?’

Annoyance flickered inside me; Sinclair noticed and gave a little nod. If Damien had been doped up, it could well affect his recollection of events.

‘What you’re not taking into account,’ Sinclair said, ‘is that the detectives talking to him would have been trained in advanced interview techniques. You have a suspect who says they can’t remember and there are ways and means to access those memories.’

‘Like what?’ I was interested professionally, although a major difference between my role and that of the police when talking to people is that I have no authority. The people I speak to can clam up, get up and walk away, refuse to let me over the threshold. I can’t ‘detain’ anyone for questioning.

Sinclair set down the cup and winced: an irritable, grumpy old man not wanting to explain. Nevertheless, he began to answer my question, his hands gesturing expressively as he spoke. His wrists were bony, jutting from his pullover, and I wondered if he lived alone, and if he’d let mealtimes slide in the weeks since he’d retired.

‘Take a mugging,’ he began. ‘It’s all a blur to the victim – didn’t get a good look at the mugger and so on. But they do mention it had just started raining. Well, we take that one concrete detail and build on it: what sounds were there when it started raining? Was it cold or warm? Had anyone just passed them? Do they remember what colour coat the person was wearing?’

‘Appealing to the senses?’ I saw what he meant.

‘That’s what memories are made of.’

Like a smell bringing back a particular time in life, or a piece of music triggering a memory. I thought about it. There had been precious few sense memories in Damien’s story when I spoke to him: ‘it was freezing’ was one, the smell in the cottage another.

‘I wasn’t in on those interviews,’ Sinclair said. ‘Beswick’s recollection was hazy at times because of the drugs, but it still fit the known facts. Fit like a glove. Now, if his new version is a load of tripe, then keeping it vague, ill-defined and sketchy is safer for him. If you’re lying you keep it simple, say the minimum, so there’s less to trip you up. Telling the truth you can elaborate, illustrate your story, you don’t need to worry about contradicting yourself. The memories are solid. The details are there.’

I looked out to the hills while I considered what he’d said. A fierce gust of wind rattled the hawthorn and a crow landed on the dry stone wall at the bottom of the garden, its plumage dark and ragged.

‘One thing he did say was that the door was unlocked. Why would Charlie not lock up?’ I said.

‘Maybe he was coming in and out, fetching things from the car. And he was expecting Libby, remember.’

‘But the lights were off: that’s what drew Damien to the cottage,’ I said. ‘He thought it was empty.’

Sinclair shook his head. ‘It’s more likely he turned them off after.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a natural impulse, to conceal a crime. The criminal will want to hide the body, delay detection, obscure the truth.’

‘Damien said he was sick by the gate.’ Another clear detail – was it a lie?

‘That’s right,’ Sinclair confirmed.

‘And he saw a man walking down the hill,’ I said.

Sinclair frowned, creases rippling across his wide brow. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’

‘Someone coming down the hill as Damien was going up from the bus,’ I said.

‘We’d nothing like that on house-to-house. There was no mention of that,’ he said. ‘We hadn’t any witnesses in the vicinity, not a soul.’ Sinclair closed his eyes for a moment. I waited. ‘Did Beswick imply that this man might be the real killer?’ he asked, sarcasm ripe in his tone.

‘Yes,’ I admitted.

He gave a snort. ‘There you go, then. He knows we have no other suspects so he conjures someone out of thin air.’

Was that the case? Damien inventing a bogeyman in the dark – a shadowy figure who’d never come forward? Something, someone to give his retraction more credence.

‘Why was Libby a suspect?’ I asked him.

‘She found the body, she’d been at the scene, she had a close relationship to the deceased. We had to eliminate her. Standard practice.’

‘But what motive would she have?’ Above the slopes of Kinder, a bird was cruising on a slipstream.

‘Lover’s tiff. He tells her he’s going back to the wife and she loses it. Or she tells him about the baby and he wants to send her packing.’ He paused. ‘She had the baby all right?’

‘Yes, a girl.’

He dipped his chin, satisfied. ‘It’s always a sensitive area.’ He went on: ‘Those close to the victim are key candidates for the crime. No one likes putting a person who has just lost a loved one through a bout of questioning, and it is done with great sensitivity, but it has to be done.’

‘And you never had any doubts that you got the right man?’

‘None,’ he said simply.

There was a knock at the door and I got to my feet as Sinclair did. ‘Thank you. If I think of anything else, can I ring you?’

He paused, then: ‘Yes.’

At the door there was a nurse; she bore a lapel badge with her name on and the logo Macmillan Cancer Support. She smiled then looked past me to Sinclair. ‘Good afternoon, Geoff.’

I said goodbye. She stood aside to let me pass, then went in.

A host of tiny clues fell into place: the man’s jaundiced colour, his lack of hair or eyebrows, his skeletal frame, his ‘retirement’, the way he’d winced at one point as he set his cup down. Geoff Sinclair was battling cancer.

Why had he agreed to see me? I felt slightly guilty that I’d pushed to meet him: surely a sick person had other priorities. But then I talked myself round: wasn’t I just being patronizing? Sick or not, Geoff Sinclair was a grown-up, more than capable of deciding for himself whether to respond to my request. Perhaps it was it a welcome distraction from his enforced rest. Or maybe he felt obliged, on Libby’s account. Whichever, for me there had been progress, not much I grant you, but enough to feel I could usefully take things further.

Ipicked up Jamie and paid Abi for her time. Although I had chores to do, I could take the baby with me.