‘What about it?’
‘Where were you?’
‘Here.’
‘All night?’
‘All night.’
‘And Tuesday, last night?’
‘Same. Stayed in alone, watching the TV so I did.’
‘I see.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing. How long have you been in the building trade?’
‘I’m forty-nine. I dug my first hole when I was fourteen. You work it out, I was never any good with numbers.’
‘A long time.’
‘Long enough. Never done anything else.’
‘Ever been in trouble with the police?’
‘Few times. I came over here as a labourer. When a bunch of labourers have had enough stout…you must have seen the results…being a copper, like.’
‘Convictions for violence, then.’
‘Yes. When I was a youngster. I calmed down once I got married. Calmed down more once I started out on my own.’
‘So we’ll have a record of you?’
‘Nothing you can use in court. They’re all spent now, my convictions, they’re all spent.’
‘But your fingerprints will be on file.’
‘Reckon they will.’
‘Tell me about Mr Kerr. Thomas “Toddy” Kerr.’
‘What about him?’
‘Did you kill him too?’
‘I didn’t kill anybody.’ Said with controlled temper.
‘Look at it from our point of view, “Toddy” Kerr owed you money.’
‘He owed a lot of people, and he didn’t owe me anything like what Williams owed me.’
‘But he owed you, and his brains got beaten out of his skull with an instrument that would not be dissimilar to a short length of scaffolding.’ Hennessey paused, but Richardson didn’t react. ‘And you couldn’t offer an alibi.’
‘So?’
‘Well, Williams owed you money, you were seen and heard to threaten him with a short length of scaffolding and shortly afterwards his brains were beaten out of his head, and you have no alibi for the time the murder is believed to have taken place.’
‘That’s because I don’t need one, for either murder.’
‘Can’t ignore the coincidence, though.’
‘Can’t convict on coincidence, though.’
‘And you know that. Puts you in the frame, puts you well in the frame. You’re always around when people get their brains removed forcibly from the inside of their head.’
‘Where else would you remove them from?’
‘Point to you.’ Hennessey inclined his head, but Richardson was talking, and in situations like this Hennessey had often found that people trip themselves up. ‘But you see our point?’
‘I see no point at all, Chief Inspector. Especially since you’re forgetting one thing. You’re forgetting that if you kill someone you’ll definitely not get your money back.’
‘Perhaps you didn’t consider that when your temper was well up.’
‘I didn’t consider it because I didn’t kill them. I didn’t kill Williams and his wife and I didn’t kill Kerr. Felt like it, but that’s not a crime. Besides which, Kerr wasn’t buried, he was left out in the open, the Williamses were buried.’
‘A minor difference. The main point is that you have the motivation in both cases, you have the passion that was required in both cases, and you have the physical strength to carry out both murders, and you have the strength to dig the shallow grave.’
‘I didn’t kill them, or Kerr.’
‘Let me pick your brains.’
‘I didn’t know Englishmen believed the Irish had brains.’
‘People like Joyce and Yeats and one or two others I could name, you mean? A hole?’
‘They come in all shapes and sizes.’
‘In the ground.’
‘Where else?’
‘This time of year, local soil, six feet long, three feet wide, three feet deep.’
‘Yes…I can see that.’
‘How long would it take to dig?’
‘Depends.’
‘On?’
‘On the person, or persons, on the equipment…a weak person with a trowel would take a week, a man with a mechanical digger would take ten minutes.’
‘Could it be dug in the hours of darkness at this time of year? Say six hours?’
‘Possibly. A grave digger takes a full day to dig one grave.’
‘Could you do it? The hole I described, I mean?’
‘Possibly. But I didn’t.’
‘No?’
‘No. Will that be all? I’ve got a business that’s nose-diving.’
‘Yes. For now.’ Hennessey stood. ‘I’d like to take a length of scaffolding from the rear of your vehicle.’
‘So long as you bring it back.’
Hennessey drove to the Williamses’ bungalow. He saw Yellich’s fawn-coloured Escort, the other vehicles he didn’t recognize.
He saw the media being kept at bay by a blue and white police tape, all anxious to get footage and photographs and to see the Williamses’ bungalow which was not unlike many thousands of similar bungalows in the United Kingdom. It was the interior of the building that mattered, yet here, for no reason that Hennessey could understand, was the media, anxious to see and to photograph a roof and a line of brickwork. He parked his car, pushed through the scrum of press and entered the house. Yellich stood in the hallway looking pleased with himself.
‘Anything, Yellich?’
‘Yes, boss. Something of great importance, something very solemn.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s a murder scene.’ Toby Partridge peered at Hennessey from around a corner. At first a small, bespectacled head, as if disembodied from the rest of him, said, ‘It’s a murder scene,’ and then he stepped round the corner from the bedroom into the hall and when, as if head and body were joined, he said, ‘Oh yes, most definitely, it’s a lovely, lovely murder scene.’
‘Mr Partridge.’ Hennessey raised his eyebrows at the short, slight figure of the man who he thought about twenty-four or -five.
‘Doctor.’ Partridge smiled. ‘I’ve been doctored, oh yes. And this is as fine a murder scene as ever you’ll find. Oh, yes.’
‘You see what first put me onto it was the smell of bleach, even now you can discern it, but a few days ago it must have been overpowering.’
‘It was,’ Hennessey said. ‘I thought it was a clean household.’
‘Oh, it’s more than that, oh yes.’ Partridge danced about excitedly. ‘I mean, what householders use bleach in this quantity? Few, I’ll be bound. The point is that here something has been cleaned up. This house is a sanitized crime scene, oh yes, very much so. Then it was ransacked, but before it was ransacked it was the scene of a dreadful crime. So we ask ourselves, what has been tidied up?’
‘A murder. Don’t tell me.’
‘Oh, I should think so. More than one, really. Can’t fully sanitize a crime scene, very difficult, oh yes, oh my, yes, very difficult.’ Partridge twitched nervously, rodent-like.
‘You’ve made your point.’ Hennessey found Partridge’s nervous, excitable eccentricity difficult to take. That he was due to retire in a few years’ time and would thus avoid Partridge when he, Partridge, would be in his thirties and forties and presumably even more unbearable than he is found to be at present, was a thought which was a source of some great comfort to Hennessey.
‘Little, little…little.’
‘What?’
‘Specks…little…little…little…but everywhere.’ Partridge waved his arms about as if conducting an orchestra. Tiny…tiny…specks.’
‘Of?’
‘Oh, blood. Oh yes…lots of them. The bleach has clearly cleaned up most of the mess, but blood has a habit of getting into the smallest of cracks, the most minute hole will be a home for a spot of blood. Found a lot under the carpet.’
‘A lot?’
‘Microscopically speaking. Under the edge of the carpet. A little in the cracks between the skirting board and the floor. There are two main areas of blood. Here in the hallway where we stand, at the entrance to the main bedroom. A lot of blood…microscopically speaking, we found around here…in all directions…the other main area is in the living room, just through here.’ Partridge pushed between Yellich and Hennessey, a small figure between two towering police officers, and stood in the centre of the living room. ‘Goes up as well as down,’ he beamed.