So He Takes the Dog. Jonathan Buckley

stabbed.’

      Now she begins to pick at a loose strip of wood in the floor, a splinter two or three inches long. It makes a buzzing sound as she plucks it, which she does repeatedly. Tears are budding in her eyes. ‘When?’ she asks.

      ‘We don’t know for certain. Mid December. Around then.’

      ‘So he was out there for two weeks?’

      ‘Possibly.’

      ‘And where is he now?’

      ‘The body’s in the mortuary. We need to find the next of kin.’ Ian waits for her to respond, but she’s pinching at her lip as she regards the sky and there’s no sign that a reply is imminent.

      Perceiving that we’re dealing with someone who’s in a less than entirely stable state of mind, Ian quietly clears his throat. ‘Your picture. It was taken in October. Is that right?’

      ‘That’s right,’ she replies abstractedly.

      ‘And when was the last time you saw him? Can you recall?’

      Hannah is gazing out of the window, but you can’t tell whether she’s thinking about the question or counting the clouds. She presses her fingers to her eyes, then examines her fingertips. ‘End of November,’ she says at last. ‘The last Thursday in November.’

      ‘You’re sure about that?’

      ‘Absolutely.’

      ‘Can you tell us about his state of mind? Did he seem worried about anything?’

      ‘It was getting colder. He was worried about that.’

      ‘Anything apart from that? Did he say anything about any difficulties he’d had with anyone, any argument?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘He didn’t talk about any people he’d seen recently?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘No incident of any kind?’

      ‘No. Obviously.’

      ‘Why obviously?’

      ‘Because I’d have said at the start, wouldn’t I? Henry’s dead. You want to find out who killed him. I want to find out who killed him. If I had a clue, I’d have said.’

      Ian counts voicelessly to five and takes out his notebook. ‘So nothing out of the ordinary,’ he says, pretending to write. ‘Can you tell us anything about his family?’

      For a good half-minute Hannah remains silent, sullenly messing with the floorboard, then she shakes her head. ‘I don’t think he had any,’ she says.

      ‘Did he tell you he didn’t have any family?’

      ‘The few times he spoke about his parents, it made me think that they were no longer alive. He never mentioned any other relatives.’

      ‘But did he ever actually state that he had no family? Explicitly?’

      ‘No,’ she says, dragging the word out, losing patience. ‘He never actually said that. Explicitly. I think he was on his own. I think he’d been on his own for a long time.’

      ‘So would you say you knew him well?’

      ‘No. Of course not,’ she says, twanging the strip of wood.

      ‘But as well as anyone around here?’

      ‘Possibly. Probably. I don’t know. Possibly. If he had any family I think he’d have told me.’

      ‘We heard that Henry was often seen walking with a young woman. Might that have been you?’

      ‘“Often seen”,’ she quotes under her breath, in a tone of bitter amusement.

      ‘So it was you, do you think?’

      ‘I suppose it was. Who had us under surveillance?’

      ‘You were noticed.’

      ‘I wouldn’t say often.’

      ‘What then?’

      ‘From time to time we went for a walk,’ she concedes.

      This requires from Ian a count of ten. ‘You last saw him more than a month before he was discovered, yes?’ he continues.

      ‘That’s what I said.’

      ‘Would you have expected to see him during that period?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘So you saw him less frequently than once a month, on average?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘More frequently?’

      ‘Sometimes.’

      ‘But in December you didn’t have any reason to think something might be wrong?’

      ‘No, I didn’t,’ she answers, turning to look directly at him for the first time since opening the door. ‘I didn’t have any reason because I was not here. I’ve been in London. I went to London at Christmas and when I got back I saw the poster and I brought the picture in,’ she says to Ian. ‘So you can strike me off the list of suspects.’

      ‘We don’t have a list, Ms Rowe,’ says Ian, writing. ‘What was Henry’s surname, do you know?’

      ‘Baldwin,’ she says and Ian gives a small wry grin which Hannah, though she’s no longer facing him, notices.

      ‘What’s funny?’ she demands.

      ‘I wouldn’t say funny,’ Ian tells her. ‘Baldwin’s about the tenth name we’ve had for him. We’ve had Wilson, Ellis, McBain. And Yarrow. We’ve had others as well.’

      Hannah resumes picking at the splinter, one pluck per second. ‘Well,’ she says with a shrug, ‘Baldwin it was. That’s what he told me.’ Chewing at her lip, in something like a sulk, she looks out of the window, reading the sky.

      At this point it should be said that in addition to the tracksuit leggings and the shapeless T-shirt, Hannah does not seem to be wearing very much, and Ian is having difficulty, at times, in maintaining a respectful sight line. After the naming of Henry, when Hannah’s attention has returned to the world outside, Ian takes the opportunity for another sly appraisal of the comely bosom, and his gaze is continuing southwards when Hannah quickly turns round, as if remembering something she wanted to say. What happens now is that she turns away from Ian, who for most of the next ten minutes might as well be elsewhere, and asks of his colleague, as if out of whimsical curiosity, ‘Do you ever speak?’

      ‘I tend to be the listener.’

      ‘Like good cop, bad cop? Talking cop, listening cop?’

      ‘Something along those lines.’

      For an instant Hannah comes close to smiling. ‘He was nice to talk to, you know?’ she says, letting the tears run. ‘He was such a nice man.’ For a few seconds she maintains eye contact, then her eyes change with a flash of anguish that makes them widen, as if startled by herself. ‘Fuck,’ she says through clenched teeth, swiping the tears off her face, but you can’t tell if she’s cursing her own crying or the fate of her murdered friend. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,’ she repeats passionlessly, glaring at the wall, at the sky, at her wetted hands. Her fury expelled, she turns back to the favoured policeman, presenting herself as someone who is now ready to talk. And talk she does, at length, as if she’s been called as a character witness for Henry Whoever.

      It is important to her that we should appreciate his resourcefulness, his toughness, his gentleness, his refusal to complain about the lousy hand that life had dealt him. Despite the kindness of Malak (whose name is invoked like the name of the Good Samaritan), there were days on which Henry ate nothing, but Henry didn’t moan about going hungry – he simply remarked on it, as you or I might comment on a day on which the sun didn’t shine. In short,