‘What circumstances would those be?’
‘Look, I stayed with some mates in Derby when I came out of the army, you know that. The doctors had told me I was a mess. I felt really pissed off that I’d spent all that time to reach my discharge date, and then suddenly there was no future for me.’
‘Had you planned a future after the army? I presume you must have. You knew your discharge was approaching.’
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‘I thought of setting up a little business,’ said Thorpe. ‘A shop.’
‘Anything in particular?’
‘Weapons. Only legal stuff, obviously. Air rifles, slingshots, crossbows, samurai swords. That sort of stuff.’
‘Samurai swords?’
There’s a lot of demand. And I know about weapons.’
‘Do you, indeed?’
‘It was my main interest,’ said Thorpe. ‘In the army, I mean.’
‘But according to your regiment, you spent most of your time as a mortar man.’
‘I was an infantryman in the beginning, same as everyone else. Then I got into a mortar unit. You have to know about weapons. I mean, that’s what it’s all about.’
The don’t know much about mortars,’ said Fry. ‘But I’ve a feeling they’re a bit different from Samurai swords. A bit more twenty-first century.’
‘I can learn. I knew blokes who collected stuff like that. Two of my friends in Derby were going to come into the business with me. We were going to use the money we’d saved to start up a shop.’
‘So what went wrong, Mr Thorpe?’
‘Like I told you, it was the illness. It knocked the stuffing out of me at first and I couldn’t see the future any more. There just didn’t seem any point in putting all that work into starting a business. I’d never have seen any of the profit. That’s the way it looked at the time.’
‘I understand.’
Thorpe sneered. ‘Do you?’
Cooper could see that Thorpe was gaining more confidence as he talked. But that wasn’t a bad thing - at least he was talking. It was a sign that he felt on safe ground.
‘So you parted ways with your friends in Derby?’
Thorpe hesitated. ‘Yeah.’
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‘Was there some kind of problem?’
‘No.’
‘It would be understandable if they were unhappy with your decision. Did they go ahead on the shop idea without you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Mr Thorpe, we do have the address you gave in Derby at the time, so we can always go and ask them.’
Thorpe shook his head. ‘I left, that was all. I got on a bus and came back here. I knew there’d be plenty of places I could sleep and not be worried about people getting up close to me like they did in the city.’
‘OK. And then what?’
‘And then nothing,’ said Thorpe. ‘That’s pretty much my life. I’m just hanging around waiting for it to finish. I’ll be glad when it’s over, to be honest.’
‘Where were you sleeping rough before Raymond Proctor let you use one of his caravans?’
‘Bus shelters are a good place. No one uses them after the buses stop running at night. And around here, field barns. A lot of them are abandoned now.’
‘But you did decide to look up other old friends, didn’t you?’ said Fry.
‘What?’
‘I’m sure that’s what I would do, in the circumstances.’
Now Thorpe had started to look uncomfortable. ‘What old friends?’
‘There must be some that you’d like to tell us about.’
Thorpe could sense that they had reached dangerous ground. His eyes flickered to the door of the interview room.
Fry didn’t need to look at her file for the next question.
‘For example,’ she said, ‘in April you visited your old friend Mansell Quinn. Twice.’
‘Oh.’
‘Now, that might be something that you would forget about, Mr Thorpe, given the exciting and varied life that
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I
you’ve led. But I imagine those two visits were very memorable indeed to your friend Quinn. After all, you were
