‘And I have no idea what it was either.’
‘Did you go?’
‘Yes. Well, I nearly didn’t. I thought long and hard about it, but in the end I decided it might be something important. As I say, it was so unusual for him to contact me.’
‘Did it occur to you it might be about Annette?’
‘To be honest, yes. Only because it was pretty much the last thing we talked about. I couldn’t think of anything else that he would have to say to me.’
‘What time did you arrive at Aldern Way, sir?’
‘About ten a.m. It was Naomi who let me in. Reece was out in the garden at the back, mowing the lawn and burning some rubbish.’
‘How did he seem?’
‘I thought he was very stressed about something, really vague and absent-minded. He looked surprised to see me, even seemed to have forgotten that he’d invited me.’
‘So what did he want to tell you?’
‘Nothing, so far as I could tell. It was all very mysterious. I came away none the wiser. In fact, I wondered if there was something he was anxious to talk about, but he didn’t want to mention it while Naomi was there.’
‘You think Naomi shouldn’t have been there? He wanted to see you on your own?’
‘And it went wrong for some reason, yes. It was very odd. And of course that was the last time I saw him.’
‘He went missing later that same day,’ said Cooper.
‘That’s shocking. Awful.’
‘I need you to tell me the truth, Mr Slaney.’
Slaney laid his hands on the table, as if to draw attention to them. Cooper couldn’t help looking, and noticed something odd straightaway. He could see that Slaney’s right hand was distinctly larger than his left. The knuckles were thicker, the fingers longer, the palm spread more widely on the surface of the table.
He supposed some occupations might cause the development of one hand so much more than the other. He doubted accountancy was one of them, though. No matter how many years you spent tapping an electronic calculator, it wouldn’t give you a hand like that. It looked as though it could crush a rock.
‘Well, you’re right,’ said Slaney. ‘I haven’t been completely honest with you.’
‘I’m sorry if I don’t look completely surprised.’
‘You guessed?’
‘I can usually tell when a person is hiding something, though I may not always be able to tell what it is.’
‘Does that come from experience, Inspector?’
‘Yes, but often with the wrong sort of people.’
‘This may not be exactly what you want to hear, though.’
‘Try me.’
‘He made a fool of me, you know. He convinced me I’d seen Annette.’
‘Who did? Reece Bower.’
‘He’s a very clever man. Was a clever man, perhaps I should say. He fooled Annette for a long time too. She thought his affair with Madeleine Betts was over.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘She thought that was his only affair. Oh, yes. He was a charmer. Very persuasive. But they say that about psychopaths, don’t they? They can be charming. That’s what makes them such successful manipulators.’
‘How did he convince you that you’d seen Annette, sir?’
‘He was on at me about it constantly,’ said Slaney. ‘Showing me photographs of her, telling me over and over that we had to keep our eyes open, that one of us would see her walking down the street one day. We’d get a glimpse of her going into a shop or disappearing round a corner. And we’d know it was her from that momentary flash of recognition. Looking back now, he practically brainwashed me into expecting to see her at any moment. To be perfectly honest — and I didn’t say this to the officers who interviewed me at the time — but I thought I saw Annette twice before that last occasion.’
‘In Buxton?’
‘Yes. They were just as Reece said — momentary glimpses of a woman walking down the street. One time I thought I saw her turning a corner as I was driving through the traffic lights on Terrace Road. By the time I managed to stop the car, she’d vanished into Spring Gardens. I looked in the shops, walked through the shopping arcade, staring at strange women until I was in danger of getting myself arrested. I gave up in the end. And when I got back to my car, I’d got a ticket on my windscreen for illegal parking.’
‘But you were convinced you’d seen her,’ said Cooper.
‘I wasn’t sure that first time. I tried to be logical and kept telling myself I’d imagined a resemblance in a complete stranger. I tried to laugh it off. And then it happened again, and even a third time.’
‘Was it the same woman?’
Slaney shrugged. ‘How can I know now? I spotted her once sitting in the window of a restaurant at The Quadrant with another woman, and then finally there was the incident outside Waitrose. By the third time, I was fully convinced it was Annette I’d seen.’
‘Because of the make of car she was driving and the coat she was wearing.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But you only reported the one sighting. That final one...’
Slaney smiled sadly. ‘I didn’t want those police officers to think I was mad.’
Cooper recalled his own feelings after he thought he recognised Annette Bower at the Opera House the previous night. Like Evan Slaney, he’d spent too long looking at photographs of Annette. And he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not even to Chloe Young. Now she probably did think he was mad.
‘As you can imagine, I was very angry,’ said Slaney. ‘Angry not only that he was probably responsible for my daughter’s death, but that he allowed me to believe she was still alive all these years. As far as I’m concerned, he killed Annette twice.’
‘So Reece Bower used you.’
Slaney nodded. ‘Looking back now,’ he said, ‘I have a feeling the photographs that Reece showed me were all deliberately a bit vague or out of focus. There were no posed shots. They just caught my daughter from odd angles from which she was only just recognisable. The human memory is an odd thing, isn’t it? Given the right sort of prompting and manipulation, we can convince ourselves we remember anything.’
‘You must have felt very betrayed.’
‘Certainly.’
Cooper leaned forward and watched him closely.
‘And was that why you killed him, Mr Slaney?’
Evan Slaney’s face fell into an expression of incredulity. It looked so cartoonishly ludicrous that, despite himself, Cooper almost laughed at the sight of it.
‘Me?’ said Slaney. ‘No, you’ve got that completely wrong, Detective Inspector. I hated Reece for that. But I didn’t kill him. I could never conceive of doing such a thing.’
Cooper sat back in surprise. For some reason, he felt he believed what Slaney was saying. But he couldn’t be wrong, could he? There was just some evidence missing.
There was a knock on the door and Cooper was called out of the interview. Dev Sharma stood in the corridor.
‘What is it, Dev? It must be important.’
‘We haven’t completed the search of Mr Slaney’s house yet, but I thought you’d like to know about this straightaway, sir.’
Cooper saw he was carrying a small plastic evidence bag.
‘What’s in the bag?’
‘A knife,’ said Sharma.
Cooper looked more closely. ‘But not just any knife,’ he said. ‘If I’m not mistaken, it’s a woodcarver’s knife.’
‘The blade is about three and half inches long, with a birch wood handle. The make is Mora.’
‘Where was it found?’
‘In the hollow base of an antique lamp. A Chinese porcelain dragon.’
Cooper put his foot down as he drove through Baslow towards Bakewell. He arrived at the house in Over Haddon just as Frances Swann pulled up in her white Citroën.