every detail in their reports. I wondered if there was anything that maybe you hadn't written up at the time. I'm thinking particularly about paint. Because the one thing they haven't lost is the cardigan. And after they found that, they came and took paint samples from our house."
"And why would I tell you about anything like that, always supposing there were anything like that? It's scarcely normal practice. After all, one could say you were suspects."
"We were witnesses, not suspects," Weird said angrily. "And you should do it because if you don't and we are murdered, you'll have a difficult time squaring matters with God and your conscience."
"And because scientists are supposed to care about the truth," Alex added. Time to go out on a limb, he thought. "And I get the feeling that you're a man who sees truth as his province. As opposed to the police, who generally just seem to want a result."
Soanes leaned an elbow on the desk and fingered his lower lip, revealing its inner moist fleshiness. He looked at them as if he was considering long and hard. Then he sat up decisively and flipped open the cardboard folder that was the only other item on his desk. He glanced at the contents then looked up and met their expectant eyes. "My report dealt principally with blood and semen. The blood was all Rosie Duff's, the semen was assumed to belong to her killer. Because whoever deposited the semen was a secretor, we were able to establish his blood group." He flipped over a couple of pages. "There was some fiber evidence. Cheap brown industrial carpet and a couple of fibers from a charcoal-gray carpet used by several vehicle manufacturers in their midrange cars. Some dog hairs that were compatible with the springer spaniel belonging to the landlord of the pub where she worked. All of that was covered fully in my report."
He caught Alex's look of disappointment and gave a small smile. "And then there are my notes."
He pulled out a sheaf of handwritten notes. He squinted at them for a moment, then took a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon glasses from his waistcoat pocket and perched them on his nose. "My writing has always been something of a trial," he said dryly. "I've not looked at this for years. Now, where are we? Blood?semen?mud." He turned a couple of pages covered in a tiny, dense script. "Hairs?Here we go?paint." He stabbed the page with a finger. He looked up. "What do you know about paint?"
"Emulsion for walls, gloss for woodwork," Weird said. "That's what I know about paint."
Soanes smiled for the first time. "Paint consists of three principal components. There's the carrier, which is normally some sort of polymer. That's the solid stuff that ends up on your overalls if you don't clean it off straight away. Then there's the solvent, which is usually an organic liquid. The carrier is dissolved in the solvent to create a coating with a consistency suitable for a brush or roller. The solvent seldom has any forensic significance because it will usually have evaporated long since. Finally, there's the pigment, which is what gives the color. Among the most commonly used pigments are titanium dioxide and zinc oxide for white, phthalocyanines for blue, zinc chromate for yellow and copper oxide for red. But every batch of paint has its own microscopic signature. So it's possible to analyze a paint stain and say what kind of paint it is. There are whole libraries of paint samples that we can compare individual examples to.
"And of course, as well as the paint itself, we look at the physical stain. Is it a spatter? Is it a drop? Is it a scraping?" He held up his finger. "Before you ask anymore, I'm no expert here. This is not my area of specialism."
"You could have fooled me," Weird said. "So what do your notes say about the paint on Rosie's cardie?"
"Your friend does like to get to the point, does he not?" Soanes said to Alex, thankfully more amused than irritated.
"We know how valuable your time is, that's all," Alex said, wincing inside at his sycophancy.
Soanes returned to his notes. "True," he said. "The paint in question was a pale blue aliphatic polyurethane enamel. Not a common house paint. More the sort of thing you'd find on a boat, or something made of fiberglass. We didn't get any direct matches, though it did resemble a couple of marine paints in our