All the Colors of Darkness

“None.”

“What next, then?”

Annie glanced back at the car, then over the river at the woods. “I think we’d better make a few inquiries around the theater, if there’s anyone there at this time of day,” she said. “But now that we’ve got his address, we should call at his home first. God forbid there’s someone there waiting for him.”

B R A N W E L L C O U R T branches off Market Street just a hundred yards or so south of the square. A broad, cobbled street lined with plane trees on both sides, its main features of interest are a pub called the Cock & Bull and the Roman Catholic church. The houses, among the oldest in Eastvale, are all weathered limestone with f lagstone roofs, cheek by jowl but varying greatly in width and height, often with ginnels running between them. Many have been renovated and divided into f lats.

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Number 26 had a purple door with the name mark g. hardcastle engraved in a brass plate beside the doorbell to the upper f loor. Just in case there was somebody home, Annie rang. She could hear the sound echo inside the building, but nothing else. Nobody came down the stairs.

Annie tried the keys she had taken from the pocket of Mark Hardcastle’s wind cheater. The third one fit and led them into a whitewashed hall and a f light of uneven wooden stairs. A raincoat hung on one of the hooks behind the door. A few letters lay scattered on the f loor. Annie picked them up to examine later, then climbed the narrow creaking staircase, Winsome behind her.

The f lat, once the upper f loor of a small cottage, was tiny. There was hardly space in the living room for the television set and sofa, and the dining area was a narrow passage with a table and four chairs between the living room and the kitchen which was nothing more than a few feet of linoleum-covered f loor surrounded by countertop, tall storage cupboard, oven and fridge. The toilet was beyond the kitchen, a sort of capsule attached to the side of the building at the back. A ladder led up from the dining area to the converted loft with the double bed at the center of the claustrophobic inverted V of timber beams. Annie climbed up. There was barely room for a bedside table and a chest of drawers. Very quaint, Annie thought, but almost uninhabitable. It made her little cottage in Harkside feel like Harewood House.

“Strange place to live, isn’t it?” said Winsome, catching up with her in the attic and standing with her head and shoulders bowed, not because of reverence, but because she was over six feet tall and there was no way she could stand upright there.

“Definitely bijou.”

“At least there’s no one waiting for him at home.”

“I doubt there’d be room,” said Annie.

The bed had been slept in, its f lower-patterned duvet askew, pillows used, but it was impossible to tell whether one or two people had lain there. Winsome checked the dresser drawers and found only socks, underwear and a few folded T-shirts. A well-thumbed Penguin Plays volume of Tennessee Williams sat on the bedside table next to the reading lamp.

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Downstairs again, they checked the kitchen cabinets, which held a few pots and pans and tins of mushroom soup, salmon and tuna, along with various condiments. The fridge was home to several wilt-ing lettuce leaves, an almost empty tub of Flora, some wafer-sliced ham with a sell-by date of May 21 and a half-full carton of semi- skimmed milk. There were two butter-and-garlic Chickens Kiev and a stone-baked margherita pizza in the freezer. The tiny sideboard in the dining area held knives, forks and spoons and a set of plain white plates and bowls. Three bottles of bargain-price wine and a selection of cookbooks sat on top of it. Half a loaf of stale Hovis almost filled the bread box.

In the living room, there were no family photographs on the mantelpiece, and there certainly wasn’t a convenient suicide note propped up against the brass clock. In the bookcase next to the television were a few popular paperbacks, a French-English dictionary, several his-torical books on costumes and a cheap Complete Works of Shakespeare.

The few DVDs Mark Hardcastle owned centered on TV comedy and drama— The Catherine Tate Show, That Mitchell & Webb Look, Doctor Who and Life on Mars. There were also a few “carry-on” movies and some old John Wayne Westerns. The CDs were mostly operas and show tunes: South Pacific, Chicago, Oklahoma. A search behind the cushions of the sofa yielded a twenty-pence piece and a white button.

Hanging over the fireplace was an old poster for a Stoke-on-Trent repertory production of Look Back in Anger, with Mark Hardcastle’s name listed in the stage credits.

Annie scanned the letters she had left on the coffee table. The oldest was postmarked the previous week, and they were either utility bills or special offers. Still, Annie thought, that was hardly surprising.

Since e-mail, letter writing had become a dying art. People just didn’t write to one another anymore. She remembered a pen pal she had once had in Australia when she was very young, how exciting it had been receiving airmail letters with the “Sydney” postmark and the exotic stamps and reading all about Bondi Beach and The Rock. She wondered if people had pen pals these days. She wondered what hers was doing now.

“What do you think?” Winsome asked.

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“There’s nothing really personal here, have you noticed?” Annie said. “No address book, no diary. Not even a computer or a telephone.

It’s as if he only lived here part-time, or he only lived part of his life here.”

“Maybe he did,” Winsome offered.