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‘I left David because I was afraid. I could just about cope with his women. At least that meant he left me alone. But he was very violent. You never knew what would start him off. The dinner wasn’t right, the car wouldn’t start. I could put up with it for myself but when he started on Jamie ... I told him to go and when he wouldn’t I packed all his stuff, put it outside and had the locks changed. But even then I had to get a court order to stop him molesting us.’

‘Does he have access to the boy?’

‘No.’ There was a hard, unhappy, yet satisfied set to her lips. ‘He applied but I blocked it. I fought. I wouldn’t trust him to keep his fists to himself.’

‘And do you know if he has a ... liaison with someone at the moment?’

‘Bound to. David’s never without a woman for long. He’s sex mad.’

As she said this Barnaby had a vivid recollection of his first sight of the man sitting close to Katherine Lacey in the kitchen of Tye House. He had mistrusted his own quick assumption at that time. Shades of D.H. Lawrence. And those wonderful torrid grainy films of his childhood: Double Indemnity. The Postman always Rings Twice. It was all there: the beautiful bride, the inadequate husband, the lusty stud. So obvious, such a cliché. And yet, and yet ... How often the obvious turned out to be the truth.

But Barnaby saw no point in pretending that he had recognized any signs of guilt as the couple had become aware of his presence and broken apart. Whiteley had looked depressed and irritable, Katherine merely interested and concerned. And there was something so cool about the girclass="underline" an almost asexual purity in her beauty. He could imagine her body being offered up to its legal possessor when all the knots were properly tied, not without love necessarily, but perhaps with a moderate degree of fond attachment. It was harder to imagine her being swept away by a passion so strong it was worth risking a gilded future for.

David Whiteley was something else: amoral, self-interested and now known to be violent. Barnaby did not find it too difficult to visualize him in the role of murderer. But the death of Miss Simpson had been curiously nonviolent, almost subtle. Barnaby could not see the farm manager annotating Julius Caesar and he could never, with those brawny arms and legs, have climbed through the larder window. Nor could Barnaby see him committing murder to save any neck but his own.

Mechanically he gave the wheel another spin. He could not escape the comparison with Russian roulette. Five spins got you nowhere. The sixth could blow your mind. He drained the coffee, pleased to see nothing nearer to animate life in the bottom of the mug than a sweet dark primeval sludge. And then the phone rang.

Policewoman Brierley said, ‘I’ve got a Mrs Sweeney on the line, sir. She asked to speak to whoever was in charge of the inquiry about Miss Simpson.’

‘Put her on.’

‘It’s Mrs Sweeney here of the Black Boy. To whom am I speaking?’

‘Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby.’

‘Are you the gentleman what came in for a half and a ploughman’s the other day?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well I think you ought to come over. There’s something funny happening at the Rainbirds’.’

‘What sort of thing?’ The voice, which he recalled as flatly lugubrious, now positively rippled with excitement.

‘I don’t rightly know ... it’s almost like someone singing only it’s not like any singing I ever heard ... more like wailing, really. It’s been going on for ages.’

Afterwards Barnaby remembered that moment very clearly. As he replaced the receiver he had the strongest sense that the machinery of the case, which had seemingly ground almost to a halt with alibis, unproven and unprovable statements and, on the part of at least two people, the deliberate wish to deceive, was now moving again. Although he could not know with what speed the machinery would gather force or that a hand, as yet unknown to him, would hurl a spanner into the works with such terrible repercussions.

There must have been fifty people standing at the gate of Tranquillada. As soon as Troy cut the engine he and Barnaby could hear the sounds. A terrible keening. Mrs Sweeney left the gathering and hurried to meet them.

‘Since I talked to you I rung the bell but nobody came. I felt I had to do something.’

The two men walked up the path. No one attempted to follow. That in itself underlined the feeling of dread that permeated the hot still air. Normally, reflected Barnaby, you had to hold them back. He and Troy stood on the step. The threnody continued. Barnaby wondered how anything so apparently emotionless could produce such an effect on the heart of the listener. It stopped and started with inhuman regularity, like a needle stuck on a record. After using the knocker with no result Barnaby crouched down and shouted through the letter box: ‘Mr Rainbird ... open this door.’

The lament escalated a notch or two, became almost a screech, then suddenly stopped. Immediately the crowd fell silent. Barnaby rapped the knocker hard again. The sounds were like pistol shots in the quiet street.

‘Shall I have a go at the door, sir?’ Troy was excited. He kept looking at the people by the gate, at Barnaby and at the house, underlining the importance of his position.

‘Window’s quicker. Try to find one open first.’ As Troy ran down the side of the house Barnaby looked again at the group. Instinctively they had drawn closer together. Their shadows fell, short and squat, on the warm pavement. One woman had a toddler in her arms. As Barnaby watched she turned the child’s face away from the bungalow and into her breast. The ceramic stork stared indifferently at them all.

Barnaby turned back and noticed, for the first time, a neat pile of mushrooms on the step. What the hell was keeping Troy? He’d been gone long enough to climb in and out of half a dozen windows. Barnaby was about to raise his fist again when he heard the click of the latch and the door swung open. Troy stared blankly at the chief inspector. He didn’t speak, just stood aside for Barnaby to enter. As the older man did so he felt his skin prickle as if someone had laid a frost-covered web against his face.

He walked through the hall past a red telephone dangling on its flex, past the scarlet-stippled wall and doors, glancing into each room as he went, finding them empty. He looked for the source of a silence more terrible than the sounds had ever been and found it in the lounge.

He stood for a moment on the threshold sick with horror. There was blood everywhere. On the floor, on the walls, on the furniture, on the curtains. But most of all on Dennis Rainbird. He looked as if he had been bathed in blood. His face, like that of a warrior brave, glistened with fingers of red. Red matted his hair and gloved his hands. He wore a red soaking wet tie and a red-flowered shirt. His knees and his shoes were red. Red tears rolled down his cheeks.

Barnaby turned back into the hall. ‘Don’t just prop the wall up. Get on the phone and get things moving.’ Then as Troy moved somnambulistically across the hall, ‘Don’t touch that, you bloody fool! Use the set in the car. And don’t open that door again without something on your hands. Anyone’d think you’d been in the force five minutes instead of five years.’

‘I’m sorry ...’ Troy produced a handkerchief.

Barnaby returned to the lounge. He made his way towards the two figures in the centre of the room, placing his feet carefully on whatever unstained patches of carpet he could find.

How could one person have shed so much blood? Wasn’t there something vaguely theatrical about the scene? Surely an over-enthusiastic stage manager had been at work hurling buckets of the stuff about, preparing for a performance of Grand Guignol. And the strange thing was that over and above the sweep of disbelief and horror Barnaby felt his memory give a powerful kick. Déjà vu. But how could that be? Surely if he had experienced anything even faintly like this spectacularly nightmarish scene in the past he could hardly have forgotten?