“You’ll be glad to hear,” Banks said, “that your alibi still seems to hold water.”
Jelačić frowned. “Water? Hold water? What you mean?”
“I mean we believe you were playing cards at Mile Pavelič’s house at the time Deborah Harrison was killed.”
“I already tell you that. So why you come here?”
“To ask you some questions.”
Jelačić grunted.
“First of all, when exactly did you come here from Eastvale?”
“Was last year. September.”
“So the St. Mary’s girls would have been back at school for a while before you left?”
“Yes. Two weeks.”
Banks leaned forward and flicked his ash into an overflowing tin ashtray, which looked as if it had been stolen from a pub. “Now the last time we talked,” he said, “you swore blind you’d never seen Deborah Harrison, or at most that you might just have seen her once or twice, in passing.”
“Is true.”
“Now I’m asking you to rethink. I’m giving you another chance to tell the truth, Ive. There’s no blame attached to this now. You’re not a suspect. But you might be a witness.”
“I saw nothing.”
Banks nodded towards the TV set. “I don’t suppose you watch the news,” he said. “But for your information Owen Pierce was found not guilty and released earlier today.”
“He is free?” Jelačić stared open-mouthed, then began to laugh. “Then you failed. You let the guilty man go free. Always that happens here.” He shook his head. “Such a crazy country.”
“Yes, well at least we don’t shoot them first and ask questions later. But that’s beside the point. He may or may not have committed the crime, but officially he didn’t and we’re reopening the case. Which is why I’m here. Now why is trying to get the tiniest scrap of help from you like getting blood out of a stone, Ive? Can you tell me that?”
Jelačić shrugged. “I know nothing.”
“Don’t you care what happened to Deborah Harrison?”
“Deborah Harrison. Deborah Harrison. Silly little English rich girl. Why I care? More girls killed in my homeland. Who cares about them? My father and mother die. My girlfriend is killed. But to you that means nothing. Nobody cares.”
“‘Any man’s death diminishes me.’ John Donne wrote that. Have you never heard it, Ive? Have you never heard of the concept that we’re all in this together, all part of mankind?”
Jelačić just looked at Banks, incomprehension written on his features.
“Why don’t you answer my questions?” Banks went on. “You saw the girl, you’ve admitted as much. You must have seen her quite often when you were working outside.”
“I work inside and out. Clean church. Cut grass…”
“Right. So you liked to watch the St. Mary’s girls-we know you did-and you must have noticed Deborah. She was very striking and she complained about your making lewd gestures towards her.”
“I never-”
“Ive, spare me the bullshit, please. I’ve heard enough of it to last a lifetime. Nobody’s going to arrest you or deport you for this. Bloody hell, they might even give you a medal if you tell us anything that leads to the killer.”
Jelačić’s eyes lit up. “Medal? You mean there is reward?”
“It was a joke, Ive,” said Banks. “No, there isn’t a reward. We just expect you to do your duty like any other decent, law-abiding citizen.”
“I see nothing.”
“Did you ever notice anyone hanging around the graveyard looking suspicious?”
“No.”
“Did you ever see Deborah Harrison meet anyone in St. Mary’s churchyard?”
He shook his head.
“Did she ever linger around there, as if she was going to meet someone, or was up to something?”
Again, he shook his head, but not before Banks noticed something flicker behind his eyes, some memory, some sign of recognition.
“What is it?” Banks asked.
“What is what? Is nothing.”
“You remembered something?”
But it was gone. “No,” said Jelačić. “Like I say, I only see her when she walk home sometimes. She never stay, never meet anyone. That is all.”
He was lying about something, Banks was certain. But he was equally certain Jelačić was too stubborn to part with whatever he had remembered right now. Banks would have to find more leverage. Sometimes he wished he had the freedom and power of certain other police forces in certain other countries-the freedom and power to torture and beat the truth out of Jelačić, for example-but only sometimes.
There was no point going on. Banks said goodbye and opened the door to leave. Before he had got ten feet away from the flat, he heard the sound on Jelačić’s television shoot up loud again.
III
It was late that Wednesday evening when Owen finally got home. After he had picked up his belongings from the prison, he decided he didn’t want to spend even one or two hours of such a beautiful day-his first moments of freedom in over six months-trapped in a car with Gordon Wharton. So he begged off, walked into town and just wandered aimlessly for a while, savoring his liberty. Late in the afternoon, he went into a pub on Boar Lane and had a pint of bitter and a roast beef sandwich, which almost made him gag after months of prison food. Then he walked over to the bus station, and by a circuitous route and a surprising number of changes, he managed to get himself back to Eastvale.
When Owen finally put his key in the lock, the door swung open by itself. He stood in the silence for a moment but could hear nothing. That seemed wrong. He knew there should have been a familiar sound, even if he couldn’t, right now, remember what it was. His house had never been in such complete silence. No place ever is. And there was an odd smell. Dust he had expected, after so long away, perhaps mildew, too. He couldn’t expect Ivor or Siobhan next door to do his cleaning for him. But this was something else. He stayed by the door listening for a while, then went into the living-room.
It looked like the aftermath of a jumble sale. Someone had pulled the books from the shelves, then ripped out pages and tossed them on the floor. Some of the torn pages had curled up, as if they had been wet and had dried out. Compact disc cases lay strewn, shattered and cracked, along with them. The discs themselves were mostly at the other side of the room, where marks on the wall showed that they had probably been flipped like Frisbees. The TV screen had been smashed. Scrawled on the wall beside the door, in giant, spidery red letters, were the words “JAILS TOO GOOD FOR FILTHY FUCKING PERVERTS LIKE YOU!”
Owen sagged against the wall and let his bag drop to the floor. Just for a moment, he longed for the stark simplicity of his prison cell again, the intractable order of prison life. This was too much. He didn’t feel he could cope.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped over the debris and went into the study. His photos and negs lay ripped and snipped up all over the carpet. None of them looked salvageable, not even the inoffensive landscapes. His cameras lay beside them, lenses cracked in spider-web patterns. His art books had also been taken from their shelves and pages of reproductions ripped out by the handfuclass="underline" Gauguin, Cézanne, Renoir, Titian, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Monet, Caravaggio, Rubens, everything. That was bad enough-all or any of that was bad enough-but the thing he hadn’t dared look at until last, the thing he had sensed as soon as he entered but hadn’t quite grasped, was the worst of all.
The aquarium stood in darkness and silence, lights, pumps and filters switched off. The fish floated on the water’s surface-danios, guppies, angelfish, jewelfish, zebrafish-their once-bright colors faded in death. It looked as if the intruder had simply switched off their life-support and left them to die. For Owen, this was the last straw. Misguided vindictiveness against himself he could understand, but such cruelty directed against the harmless, helpless fish was beyond his ken.