The trapped images showed clearly that the truck had been driven by Matthew McCullough—the man who had died a natural death a few hours later.
And he had been alone.
“It meant we were able to go into the Sala house and work properly,” Remmert said. “The idea was that we were supposed to be checking up on McCullough, but all the time we were getting what we could on Sala.”
“And what did you get?” Garrod kept staring at the projection screen on which was a still hologram of the front of Sala’s house.
“Nothing, of course. McCullough was the guilty party.”
“Wasn’t it a little too convenient the way he dropped dead the next morning?”
Remmert snorted. “If that’s convenient, I hope I remain inconvenienced till I’m a hundred.”
“You know what I mean, Peter. If Sala was the killer, didn’t everything drop into place a little too nicely when a man he could pin the blame on was silenced the very next morning?”
“Sala isn’t pinning the blame on McCullough—I am. Anyway I don’t follow that line of reasoning. Supposing Sala had done it—would he want his tenant to attract the attention of the police by dropping dead? Besides, no matter what Pobjoy says, Sala didn’t do it. We’ve got all kinds of evidence which backs up his statement.”
“Let’s run over the evidence.”
Remmert sighed audibly but put the holoprojector on fast rewind. They had requisitioned a Scenedow from a house which was almost directly opposite Sala’s place and had made a holofilm covering the suspect’s life during the previous year. The information from the Scenedow was also stored in Retardite recorders but—because slow glass had the disadvantage of not being able to go into reverse—conventional holofilm was used for the practical work of examining evidence.
On the screen there appeared an image of the Sala house as it had been a year ago when the Scenedow had been installed. It was an ordinary two-storey frame building with a bay window downstairs supporting a small verandah on the upper level. The front garden was neatly kept and there was a garage attached to the main structure with its front flush with the building line. The windows in the top half of the garage door provided the only view of the interior.
Remmert began skipping through the reel, pausing here and there to show scenes of Sala and McCullough entering and leaving the place. Sala was a smallish thickset man with black curling hair in the centre of which his scalp could be seen glistening like polished leather. McCullough was taller and slightly stooped. He had steel-coloured hair brushed back from a long doleful face, and appeared to keep very much to his own part of the house.
“McCullough doesn’t look like a high-powered political assassin to me,” Garrod commented. “Sala does.”
“That’s about the sum total of your case against him,” Remmert said, freezing on an image of Sala working in his garden, shirt straining across a protuberant stomach. “He’s got the pycnic build.”
“The what?”
“The pycnic build—that’s the name psychiatrists have given to that shortish plumpish thick-shouldered build which occurs so often among psychotic killers. But lots of harmless people are put together in exactly the same way.”
Other images followed—diamond-clear fragments of ice snatched from the river of time—of Sala and his dark-haired wife, arguing, eating, dozing, reading, sometimes engaging in unsubtle loveplay, while all the time McCullough’s lonely and humourless face brooded at the upper windows. Sala went to and from his place of business at regular hours in a white current-model pickup truck. Fall advanced quickly into winter and the snows came, then Sala was seen using a dented five-years-old utility truck instead of the newer model.
Garrod held up his hand for the film to stop. “Was Sala’s business not going so well?”
“It’s doing all right—he seems to be a shrewd business man at his own level.”
“Did you ask him why he began using that old truck?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” Remmert replied. “In old-style detective work it’s the sort of thing which wouldn’t crop up, but in a Retardite run-through it becomes glaringly noticeable.”
“What did he say?”
“He’d been planning to keep the newer truck for only another six or eights months anyway, then somebody made him a good offer for it. Sala said he just couldn’t turn it down.”
“Did you ask him how much he got?”
“No. I didn’t care.”
Garrod jotted a note down in his pad, and motioned for the holofilm to continue. The snows receded, sifted out of existence by the greens and blossom-colours of spring and summer. Fall was approaching again when a length of blue tarpaulin appeared on the roof of the garage. It was large enough to stretch over the entire roof and an edge hung down at the front, covering the windows of the door.
“What’s the idea of that?” Garrod raised his hand again.
“His garage roof began to leak.”
“Did it look bad? I didn’t notice.”
Remmert moved back in time a little and the roof was seen with disturbed felt tiles in several places. A few days earlier and they all appeared normal.
“That happened a bit suddenly, didn’t it?”
“Beginning of September—there were a couple of freak storms. Sala is going to build a new garage so it wasn’t worth his while to have a proper repair job done on the roof.”
“Everything still clicking into place.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Look at the sloppy way the tarpaulin hangs down over the front of the garage, but Sala is very fussy about everything else.”
“It probably keeps the rain out better that way.” Remmert was beginning to sound impatient as Garrod made another note. “What could you make out of that?”
“Perhaps nothing—but when you’ve lived with slow glass as long as I have it changes your way of looking at things.” Garrod suddenly realized he was sounding pompous. “I’m sorry, Peter—is there anything of special interest between then and the night of the murder?”
“/ don’t think so, but maybe you…”
“Let’s move up to the big night,” Garrod said.
It was dark when the garage door swung open and then slid inwards with a movement which reminded Garrod of flaps being retracted on an airliner’s wing. The truck nosed its way out towards the street, the door closing automatically behind it, and the image on the screen grew brighter as light intensifiers came into play. Remmert froze the action and the driver was clearly revealed as McCullough. He was wearing a hat which shaded his eyes, but there was no mistaking the long sad countenance.
“Traffic monitors recorded him right to the northern limits of the city,” Remmert said. “Now watch the garage—the tarpaulin’s been folded back a little and you can see in.”
He speeded up the time flow, then dropped back to normal when the digital indicator in a corner of the picture showed that half an hour had passed. The dark rectangles which