people wearing clothes that didn’t suit them, clocks in public places that showed the wrong time, houses with brown window-frames, hot-air hand dryers.
Sam had the impression that Jackie Napier had been expecting Grint to take the lead, and resented this hijacking of proceedings by a newcomer who wasn’t even local, but Grint had decided Sam should direct the interview and had so far contributed nothing. He was sitting in the far corner of the room, using a radiator as a footstool. Sam thought his disaffected schoolboy posture was inappropriate, and would have preferred him to put his feet on the floor, but he had no illusions about who was in charge. Wherever I go, someone else turns out to be in charge, he thought. It worried him only indirectly: he spent a lot of time wondering if he ought to try to assert himself more, and always ended up concluding that he’d rather not have power over others, not if he could help it. What he would have liked was for those with power to behave as he would if he were them.
‘I’m not criticising you,’ he told Jackie. ‘You’ve given us some very useful information, and, as you say, two days isn’t a long time.’
‘No, it isn’t. What am I supposed to do, ring the police and say, “Excuse me, but I saw a dead body on a property website, except now it’s disappeared?” Who’s to say it was ever there at all? No one would have believed me. I’d have looked like an idiot.’
‘And yet you did come forward,’ Sam pointed out.
‘Well, I couldn’t just leave it, could I? I mean, maybe I imagined it, maybe it was never there at all, but I’ve still got to tell someone, haven’t I? What if I didn’t imagine it? I worried about it till it did my head in, asked all my mates – waste of time, they all gave me different advice. Some said, “Don’t be daft, you couldn’t have seen it”, some said, “You’ve got to tell someone”. Most just laughed at me, to be honest. It wasn’t funny, you know,’ she said indignantly, as if Sam had said it was. ‘Monday morning, I woke up and thought, this is going to bug me if I don’t get it off my chest. It shouldn’t be my responsibility, should it? No one pays me to worry about people getting murdered. So I rang the police.’ Her accent sounded like Essex to Sam, but perhaps it was Cambridge. Was there such a thing? he wondered. If so, it wasn’t one of the better known regional accents, like Brummie or Scouse.
‘You did the right thing,’ he said.
Jackie nodded. ‘I’ll swear to you right now: I didn’t imagine it. That’s just not me, I’m not an imagination sort of person. Do you know what I mean?’
Sam did. Jackie Napier was about as different from Connie Bowskill as it was possible to be. They were at opposite ends of the scale. With a dead woman lying in her own blood smack bang in the middle of the space between them.
‘Two things about me . . .’ Jackie counted them off on her fingers. ‘One: I’m as loyal as they come. If I’m on your side, I’m on your side for keeps. Two: I live in the real world, not fantasy land. I don’t get ideas, I don’t kid myself about my life, pretend it’s better than it is: I prefer to see things how they really are.’
Did she mean she didn’t get ideas above her station? Sam wondered. Fancy, far-fetched ideas? Or ideas, period? She’d given him one: maybe he could garnish his deficiencies with a bit of inverted boasting. He imagined himself saying to Proust, ‘Two things about me, sir: I avoid confrontation wherever I can, and I let my DCs run rings around me.’ That would go down well – about as well as Sam’s having devoted today to helping Ian Grint with his maybe-real-and-maybe-not murder, as if he had no cases of his own to attend to.
‘What time was it when you saw the woman’s body on Roundthehouses?’ he asked Jackie.
‘I told DC Grint: about quarter past, twenty past one.’
And Grint could have told Sam. But Sam was glad he hadn’t, now that he’d got this far, now that Jackie was looking at him, finally, and no longer grimaced at everything he said. When, earlier, he’d asked to be debriefed, Grint had chuckled and said, ‘Too much effort, not enough