them like an arm rest. Yes, it was a dull and pedestrian existence, but there was something to be said for that. Better than starving or being shot at or being swept away by a tsunami. Better than being a murder suspect. Definitely better than being dead.
Afterwards, after he was ejected from the self-same sofa, Wendy told him that their home life together had become ‘a living death’, which Vince thought was going a bit far. Now she’d probably happily settle for a living death instead of, well, a dead death. Vince missed that sofa. He had felt safe and comfortable on it. It had been a lifeboat and now he was drowning.
‘You don’t remember being at Ms Easton’s house – Thisldo – last night at about eleven p.m.?’ the Spanish Inquisitor pressed on relentlessly. ‘You were seen on a neighbour’s security camera.’
‘My house as well, not just Wendy’s,’ he corrected dully. ‘I’m still paying the mortgage. And I’m not not living there by choice.’ Was that a double negative? he wondered.
‘Or,’ she said, ignoring this remark, ‘do you remember speaking to a man who lives in the neighbouring house, a Mr …’ – she consulted her notes – ‘a Mr Benjamin Lincoln?’
‘Benny. Yes. It slipped my mind. Sorry.’
‘Slipped your mind?’
Vince had half expected Inspector Marriot to arrest him on the spot, but he was told he was free to go. ‘We’d like you to come back in tomorrow, if you don’t mind, Mr Ives.’
‘How was she killed?’ he asked. ‘I mean I know it was a head injury, but how? What did they use as a weapon?’
‘A golf club, Mr Ives. A golf club.’
What was he supposed to do now? he wondered. Perhaps he could go for a walk, he thought, clear his head. They wouldn’t let him have the dog, it was ‘being tested for DNA’. Did they think Sparky had killed Wendy? No, the inspector said, looking at him sadly as if she felt sorry for him being such a fool. ‘In case the dog attacked the killer.’
He didn’t walk, he caught a bus. By chance he was hovering indecisively next to a stop when a bus drew up and, in an uncharacteristic act of spontaneity, he simply stepped on board. It was the first time he’d been on a bus in twenty years. Who was driving his company car now? he wondered as he settled in the seat. He had given it no thought when it was his, now he thought of it fondly, almost the way he thought of Sparky.
The bus said Middlesbrough on the front but it may as well have said The First Circle of Hell. And what did it matter anyway? He just needed to get away, leave it all behind. If only he could leave himself behind. Vince supposed that if he disappeared the police would presume he was guilty, but he was past caring. Perhaps they would issue one of those things they had on American cop shows? BOLOs, that’s what they were called, wasn’t it? Be on the lookout for. Running for the border, he thought, like a man in a book or a film, although he was neither, he was a man in his own life, and that life was falling apart. And there was no border to run for, unless you counted the invisible administrative one between North Yorkshire and Teesside. Vince didn’t even get that far. He got off the bus in Whitby in case he fell asleep and ended up in limbo, or Middlesbrough, which was much the same thing, and then walked along the beach as far as he could before the tide started chasing him and he climbed up a set of steps slippery with seaweed on to the pavement that ran along the front.
He passed a small hotel overlooking the sea and, to his surprise, realized that it was the Seashell – Andy Bragg’s place. He’d only been here a couple of times, and in the car. Everything seemed different when you were on foot. (Much slower, for a start.) He wondered about going in and drowning his sorrows, unburdening his problems to a sympathetic ear (You’ll never guess what happened to me today, Andy), but he knew that Andy didn’t have much of a sympathetic ear, his wife, Rhoda, even less of one. Times like this you needed a (friend) friend, but he couldn’t think of a single one. He had tried Tommy’s house phone, hoping that perhaps Crystal would be