Sometimes he thought: We can't be as ordinary, as dull as we seem, and wondered if it were some defect in himself which diminished them all so that he invested them with his own inadequacy, his own pessimism. Sometimes, too, he would take from the bureau drawer the family photograph album which seemed to document their ordinariness: his parents stiffly posed against the rail of Cromer promenade and at Whipsnade Zoo, himself ridiculous in cap and gown at his degree ceremony. Only one held any real interest for him, the sepia studio photograph of his great-grandfather in the First World War, perched sideways on an artificial wall with, beside him, a huge aspidistra in a Benares jar. He would gaze intensely across seventy-four years at that gentle-faced vulnerable boy who looked, in the ill-fitting, high-buttoned serge and the grotesquely over-large cap more like an orphaned poor-law child than a soldier. He must have been under twenty when it was taken. And he had survived Passchendaele, the Ypres Salient, and had been discharged wounded and gassed early in 1918 with strength enough at least to father a son, but for little else. That life, he told himself, could not have been ordinary. His great-grandfather had survived four years of horror with courage, endurance and a stoical acceptance of what his God or luck had dealt him.
But if not ordinary, the life seemed now of absolutely no importance to anyone. It had preserved a family, that was all. And how much did that matter? But now it struck him that his father's life had held a not-dissimilar stoicism. You couldn't, perhaps, equate fifty years with Hobbs and Wainwright with four years in France, but both had required that same dignified and stoical acceptance. He wished that he could talk to his father about his great-grandfather, about his father's early life. But it never seemed possible and he knew that what held him back was less an inhibiting shyness than the fear that, even if he broke through this strange barrier of reticence and inarticulateness, there would be nothing there. And yet surely it hadn't always been like that. He remembered the Christmas of 1968 when his father had bought him his first science book, The Wonder Book of Science for Children. On Christmas morning they had sat for hours together, slowly turning the pages while his father first read and then explained. He still had the book. He still occasionally looked at the diagrams. 'How television works', 'What happens when we are X-rayed', 'Newton and the apple', 'The marvel of modern ships'. And his father had said, 'I would have liked to have been a scientist if things had been different.' It was the only time in his life that his father had given any indication that there could have been for him, for them, a fuller, a different life. But things had not been different and now he knew that they never would be. He thought, 'We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they're small and mean enough so that we can feel in control.'
Only once had the routine of their predictable days been interrupted by an event which was unexpected, dramatic. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday his father had taken the family Morris and had disappeared. Three days later he was found, sitting in the car on the top of Beachy Head, looking out to sea. It had been called a nervous breakdown due to overwork and Mr Wainwright had given him two weeks' holiday. His father had never explained what had happened, colluding in the official view that it had been a temporary amnesia. Neither of his parents had ever referred to it again.
The flat was on the fourth and top floor of a rectangular modern block. The sitting room at the front had a glass door giving on to a narrow balcony sufficient to hold two chairs. The kitchen was small but had a flap which could be lifted to provide a table just large enough for the three of them to eat. There were only two bedrooms, his parents' at the front and his own, much smaller, giving a view of the car park, the row of breeze-block garages and the town. The sitting room had a wall-mounted gas fire to augment the background central heating, and after they had moved in his parents had surrounded this with a false mantelshelf on which his mother could display the small treasures brought from the Clapham home. He remembered the morning when they had viewed the flat, his mother stepping out on to the balcony and saying, 'Look, Father, it's just like being on the deck of a liner', and she had turned almost with animation as if remembering that store of old movie magazines she kept, the pictures of befurred film stars on the gangplanks, the ship festooned with streamers and flags, hearing in imagination the hoots of the pilot boat, the band playing on the quay. And indeed his parents had, from the start, seen the flat as a glamorous change from their small terraced house. In summer they would move the two easy chairs so that they faced the window and the sea. In winter they reversed them and huddled round the gas fire. But neither the winter gales, nor the uncomfortable heat when summer beat on the glass, ever drew from either of them a word of regret for the old life.
They had sold their car when his father retired and the single-car garage was used to house Jonathan's secondhand Ford Fiesta. He garaged it and swung back the door. Locking it he thought how very private the flats were. Nearly all of them were occupied by retired couples whose routine seemed to be to walk during the morning, meet their friends for afternoon tea and to be home before seven. By the time he returned from work the block was quiet and the rear curtains drawn. He wondered if Caroline had guessed or had known just how private his comings and goings could be. Outside the flat he hesitated for a moment, key in hand, wishing he could postpone the moment of meeting. But any longer wait would seem unnatural; they must have been listening for the lift.
His mother almost ran towards him.
'It's terrible, isn't it? That poor girl. Dad and I heard it on the local radio. But at least they found the Whistler. That's one worry over. He'll not go on killing again after her.'
He said: 'They think that he died before Miss Robarts did, so that it may not have been the Whistler.'
'But of course it was the Whistler. She died in the same way, didn't she? Who else would it be?'
'That's what the police are trying to find out. They've been at the station all morning. They didn't get round to seeing me until nearly twelve.'
'What did they want to see you for? They can't think you had anything to do with it?'
'Of course not, Mother. They're interviewing everyone, everyone who knew her, that is. Anyway, I have an alibi.'
'An alibi? What alibi? Why would you want an alibi?'
'I don't want one, but as it happens I have one. I went to supper last night with a girl from the station.'
Immediately her face brightened, pleasure at the news momentarily eclipsing the horror of the murder. She said: 'Who invited you then, Jonathan?'
'A girl at the station. I told you.'
'Well, I know it's a girl. What kind of girl? Why don't you bring her home? You know that this is your home just as much as it is Dad's and mine. You can always bring your friends here. Why not ask her to tea next Saturday or Sunday? I'd have everything very nice, your granny's best tea service, I wouldn't let you down.'