invention of the wheel.
The doctor's surgery was in the same place, but with wire mesh over the windows, and the greengrocer's was now a mini-market. I smiled at the memories and checked the street names.
He invited me in, speaking very softly, and told me to sit down. He was wearing pantaloons, a T-shirt with a meaningless message emblazoned across it and modest dreadlocks. He must have been fifty, but was refusing to grow up. The room was overfurnished with stuffed cushions and frills, and primitive paintings of Caribbean scenes on the walls.
At a guess, it had belonged to his mother. He was out on licence, so I knew he'd be no trouble. One word out of place and he could be back inside to serve the rest of his sentence. Well, that's what we tell them.
'I'm looking for a girl,' I began. 'A white girl with purple hair.'
'I know no such girl,' he replied.
'How about back in 1975? Did you know her then?'
'No, I not know her.'
'You had a girlfriend called Daphne Turnbull.'
'Yes.'
'She died in a fire.'
'Yes.'
'And you didn't know a girl with purple hair?'
'Who is she, this girl?'
'That's what I'm trying to find out. You remember the fire?'
'I hear about the fire, but I live in Halifax at the time.'
He was a founder member of the Campaign for Simplified English. The first rule is that you only speak in the present tense. 'With Daphne?'
I asked.
'We live together for a while, but she leave me.'
'Why did she leave you?'
He shrugged and half-smiled. 'Women?'
'Was her daughter, Jasmine, yours?'
'No.'
I'd read the interviews with him and knew he had a good alibi, but he could have hired someone to start the blaze. At the time he'd been my definite number-one suspect, although I'd never met him. Now I wanted to eliminate him, but I still wasn't sure. I rarely have hunches and don't trust my feelings about people. Evidence is what counts. I quizzed him about his relationship with Daphne and kept returning to the girl with purple hair, but he was adamant that he didn't know her.
Talking about the fire didn't disturb him at all. It was just history to him.
I thanked him for his help and left. I'd parked at the top of his street and as I neared the car a woman came round the corner. There are some women you see and you think: Corf She's beautiful; and there are others who deprive you of even that simple ability. You gawp, slack-jawed, and realise you are flat lining but don't care, because this would be as good a time and place as any to drop down dead. Her hair shone like spun anthracite and she wore a white dress with buttons down the front. It was short, above her knees, and the seamstress had been very economical with the buttons. She turned to wait and a little girl with braided hair and a matching dress followed her round the corner, gravely avoiding the cracks between the flagstones.
I mumbled something original and amusing, like: 'Lovely morning,' and was rewarded with a smile that kicked my cardiac system back into action. In the car I gazed at the digital clock and wondered if there was any hope for me. It was seven forty-three in the evening. I sat for a few seconds, deciding whether to go through the town centre or do a detour, and started the engine. Neither. I did a left down the street parallel to the one Pretty lived in and a left and another left at the bottom of the hill. I pulled across the road and parked.
The woman and her little girl were now coming down towards me. Mum was tiring of the slow progress so she took her daughter's hand and led her for a while. They passed a few gateways then turned into one and mounted the steps. She knocked, the door opened almost immediately and mother and daughter disappeared inside. I stared at the door for a couple of minutes, long enough for a welcoming kiss and for her to settle in the easy chair I'd just left, and pointed the car homewards.
Oh dear, I thought. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
What would I do without Jacquie to come back to? She smiled and kissed me in a mirror-image of the scene I'd imagined forty minutes earlier.
We had coffee and shop-bought cake and talked about our days. One of her assistants was causing trouble and the rents in the mall were going up. I rambled meaninglessly about what went off behind closed doors in this wicked world we lived in.
'You're stressed out,' she told me.
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm not very good company.'
'How are the midge bites?'
'Agonising.' I smiled as I said it.
She went away for a while and returned carrying a box filled with coloured bottles, like a paintbox. She placed it on the coffee table alongside me and drew a chair up directly in front of mine. 'Prince Charles swears by lavender oil,' she said.
'Right,' I replied. 'Right.' If it was good enough for him it was good enough for Charlie Priest.
She lit three small porcelain burners about the room and turned the lights low. I relaxed. I had a feeling I was in for a treat. Jacquie sat facing me and took my hand. 'First the lavender, to absorb all your stresses,' she whispered. I watched her long fingers caress my wrists, her scarlet nails skimming my skin but not touching it. She did my fingers, one by one, and I discovered things about myself that I'd never imagined.
'And now the aloe vera,' she said.
I breathed deeply and closed my eyes, and wished this could go on forever. She removed my shoes and socks and stroked my feet, fingertips and exotic oils mingling together so I couldn't tell touch from smell, pleasure from torture, arousal from relaxation. I stopped trying.
'This is where the problem is,' Jacquie told me. She was massaging my neck now, harder than before, her thumbs probing muscle, searching for knots. 'You're tight here.' I let my head loll up and down in agreement. It could have been the most magical evening of my life, but it wasn't. She cured the itching and the stress; all I had now was confusion and frustration.
It was the hottest night of the year, which didn't help. I lay on my bed with just a sheet over me and the window open. When the blackbird on the roof started singing at about three thirty I got up and read a book. I don't mind him singing, but he will insist on tapping time with his foot, and he has no sense of rhythm. At seven I went to work.
Terence John Alderdice, Dave told me, remembered Duncan Roberts but was mystified about the girl. 'He reckoned Duncan was. a right plonker,'
Dave said. 'He was quite friendly with him the first year. They became mates on day one and were in the same tutorial group, whatever that means, then drifted apart as they found more kindred spirits, as you do. He said Duncan developed some repulsive habits. They were in a hall of residence, and Duncan took great pleasure in never washing his plate or coffee mug. He just used them over and over again.'
'Sounds delightful,' I said.
'In the second year,' he continued, 'Alderdice said Duncan just gave up studying. He lost interest and moved into a squat with a bunch of other dead-beats. Alderdice didn't see much of him again and never saw him with a girl and doesn't remember ever seeing one with purple hair.
So there. How did you go on?'
'Similar. Waste of time. Except that the cycle is repeating itself. I saw Pretty's girlfriend come to visit, just as I left. Black girl, early twenties, with a little daughter, 'bout five.'
Dave said: 'Number three lining up for the chop. What can we do about it?'
'Not much. I'll have a word with his probation officer, see if he's any suggestions. She was gorgeous.'
'The little girl?'
'No, turnip brain, the mother. The little girl was… little.'
