‘Let’s move round,’ said Needham who was quite surefooted in his boots. I slithered on. ‘Give us some room,’ he said to the techies, who stepped well back to allow for Needham’s circumference. ‘So you left the body but took the car keys,’ he said to me conversationally.
‘I didn’t drive the damn — ’
‘How’re you doing in there, Prof?’ Needham called.
Professor Earnshaw Meyers, the white-haired Home Office pathologist, was sitting comfortably on the rear seat next to the slumped corpse. ‘Just finishing,’ he said, scratching away with a fountain pen on a pad of forms on top of his fat aluminium briefcase that was lying across his knees. I stuck my head around the corner. Meyers looked absolutely ancient, with sparse white hair and parchment skin, but apparently he’d always looked like that and was nowhere near retirement age. ‘Mr Honeysett,’ he said by way of greeting without bothering to look up. We had met before. He finished scribbling, pocketed the pad and pen and slid his bum out of the car. The smells of blood, urine and faeces that came out with him nearly made me retch.
‘What have you got for me then, Prof?’ Needham said chummily. ‘And don’t make it too polysyllabic, I’m not in the mood.’
‘One dead male, aged between sixty and sixty-five, I’d say. Not particularly tall but you’ll get all that later. Trauma to the front of the skull, abrasions to the face and hands. Could have been an accident but — ’
‘Did you run over him, Honeysett?’ Needham interrupted.
‘As I told Deeks — ’
‘Go on, sorry,’ he said to Meyers.
‘His injuries appear to be consistent with having been involved in a vehicular accident, though his head injury suggests some kind of attack prior to that. Could turn out to be the Gobi. I estimate the time of — ’
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘The what?’ The Gobi? What was he talking about? The desert? Some kind of ghost?
‘Good Old Blunt Instrument,’ Needham supplied. ‘Did you hit him with your car jack?’
‘I never saw the bl-’
‘Sorry, Prof, you were saying about the time of death?’
‘About six, seven hours ago. Sometime between five and six this morning.’
‘You said it could have been an accident. So he wasn’t killed in the car?’
‘Oh no. It looks very much like he entered the car after he received his injuries. And died quite some time later. Enough time to move about and lose a considerable amount of blood. That’s all I’m going to say at this stage.’ He nodded to us. ‘Gentlemen.’ Then he took off down the hill, swinging his aluminium case like a schoolboy on a field trip.
‘Right,’ Needham said. ‘Who is he, Chris? Don’t touch the car.’
I bent down, hands on my knees for support, and took a long look at the dead guy. Even before his accident or fateful meeting with the Gobi he’d been no oil painting. He had large fleshy ears, now looking waxy, practically no lips and false teeth. I knew this because his mouth hung open and the upper plate of his dentures had fallen down, giving him a double row of shark’s teeth at the bottom. His sparse, bloody hair still had some dark in it. He wore a cream weatherproof jacket and olive green, well-worn cords, now half pulled down after Meyers had taken the rectal temperature. Accident or murder, there was no dignity in the man’s death.
I shook my head. ‘Never. .’
‘. . seen him before in your life,’ Needham finished for me. ‘All right, let’s go and we’ll have a nice long chat down the station.’
The Bath cop shop is a no-frills concrete lump of ugliness, sitting shamelessly between St John’s and the Manvers Street Baptist Church. No amount of flowerpots on the outside or corporate colour scheming on the inside was going to dispel the air of architectural depression that the concrete walls sweated out. Even the Superintendent seemed heavier, slower, unhappier when walking its hard-wearing carpets and looked gloomier than ever once we had all settled in a cheerless interview room. Deeks was there too. After he had done the preliminaries with the tape — time, date, who was there and the fact that I’d waived my right to have a solicitor present at this stage — Needham began to patiently ask me the same damn questions over and over. How come my keys were missing? When had I first noticed I’d lost them? When could they have been stolen? Who was the dead guy, where had I met him, did we have an argument, what did I hit him with, did I run over him? Perhaps I was going to drive him to hospital and he died on the way and I panicked? Completely understandable, he assured me. Best come clean now, save us all a lot of bother. Or did I find him already hurt and then decide to give him a lift? Did I crash through the gate then bail out when I found he had croaked on the back seat? Deeks supplied the odd question but mainly it was the good old Needham-Honeysett ding-dong. Cop-shop tea arrived and was drunk — Needham produced a plastic dispenser of sweeteners from his pocket and stirred in a hailstorm of them with his biro — while my stomach rumbled indelicately in protest and then it all started again from the beginning with exactly the same questions. Their patience and capacity for going over the same ground for hours and hours always astounded me and drove me up the wall. Which is of course where they wanted me. There was no way Needham thought even for one minute that I had bashed the guy’s head in, then stuffed him in the back of my car and parked it in the middle of a field for someone to find. If he did then police would be swarming all over Mill House by now and I’d be wearing paper clothes while all my gear was on its way to a forensics lab in Chepstow to be analysed for traces of blood. But of course he still had to do the due process and good copper thing and I was all he had so we spent the afternoon angry and bored at the same time, with rumbling sour stomachs from too much tepid quick-brew while futility filled the space between us like a fog.
All this was eventually followed by a written statement. I hung around for another half-hour waiting to sign the printed version. Needham grabbed it from under my biro almost before I’d finished my signature. We were all as irritated as each other. ‘Right, you can go. We’ll do it all over again as soon as we know who he was.’
Naturally I didn’t say so but I had the unenviable certainty that the dead man’s name was Albert.
The one good thing about autumn and winter as far as I could make out was the plentiful and cheap supply of pheasants. For many landowners it was the shoots that kept them from going under and new ones were springing up everywhere. Pheasant shooting had become the fashionable pastime for townies now. At some companies it had even replaced paintball games as a team building exercise. They taught their employees to shoot, then took them to the country and let them blast pheasants out of the sky to boost their morale. The staff’s, not the pheasants’, obviously. (It struck me that you had to be quite sure of your staff’s loyalty to hand them all a shotgun, though.) It was rumoured that at some shoots the bag was so great that the majority of it was simply buried. The upshot (sorry) of all this was that the price of pheasant was tumbling and had now fallen to that of non-cardboard chicken.
It was dark and still raining by the time I left Manvers Street behind. By now I was seriously hungry. I just made it to Bartlett amp; Sons, the butcher’s in Green Street, before they closed their doors, then rattled home on the Norton with a brace of pheasant strapped to the tank. When I splashed into the waterlogged yard I could see light up in the studio — Annis was working late. I was thoroughly wet and cheesed off with the day, and famished. I stabled the Norton and promised myself that I’d devour the first edible thing I clapped eyes on when I got inside. I walked into the kitchen. At the end of the long table stood a big stripy pumpkin, an annual gift from one of our neighbours in the valley. Not exactly convenience food. Okay the second thing then. I found some seriously ripe cheese oozing on to a plate in the pantry and set to work on it. I instantly felt better. Not exactly at one with the world but better. I could faintly hear the phone ring in my little office in the attic but had no intention of answering it. Now or ever.