‘Get you a drink?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘Not hungry?’
‘Not yet.’ She was looking at the screen, not quite managing to disguise her curiosity. ‘Whatever’s on here, you’ll be the first to know,’ Rebus assured her.
‘I’ll leave you to it then.’ She began humming a tune as she returned to the bar. Rebus settled down to work.
A few dozen files. Most of them seemed to be individual photographs. He clicked through all of them. The camp, the dig, the history group. Then a few of Joe Collins, followed by Helen Carter, Stefan Novack and a man Rebus guessed must be Jimmy Hess’s grandad Frank. All four looked to be seated in armchairs in different living rooms. Keith had interviewed them in their own homes.
All that remained were the four audio files. Rebus managed to turn the volume up. Even so he had to angle his ear towards the small speaker on the front of the console. First up was Novack. The recording lasted just under fifty minutes. Rebus had mixed feelings as he listened to Keith’s voice; he wished again that he’d known him better in life, taken the trouble to get to know him. On the few occasions when he had phoned the house and Keith had answered, all he’d done was ask to speak to Samantha–no how are you? How’s work? How’s life treating you?
Keith was a good interviewer. He started with general chat, getting Novack used to talking. And when the questions began, they were increasingly forensic until they concentrated on the suspected poisoning and the murder of Sergeant Davies. Novack, however, had little to say on either subject. It wasn’t that he sounded evasive; it was simply that he didn’t know much.
‘Please remember, I had been released from the camp by then.’
‘But you kept in touch with the friends you’d made–sent them letters. I’m guessing they wrote back with news and gossip. And then later when you returned and started your new life…’
‘I would tell you if I could, Keith, believe me.’
The same was true of the revolver displayed in The Glen–Novack had no reason to doubt Joe Collins’ story of how he’d found it.
‘I think you have more details already than I do,’ he told Keith at one point.
Slowly the questioning petered out and they were back to general chat.
Helen Carter was next, Keith managing only twenty or so minutes with her before she drifted off to sleep. He must have known he was against the clock, because the questioning was brisker, the preliminaries curtailed–and he kept his voice raised to combat her hearing issues. He was interested in her job at the camp dispensary, her relationship with (and eventual marriage to) an internee called Friedrich. But quickly he zeroed in on her sister Chrissy and Sergeant Gareth Davies.
‘It shocked her to her core,’ Helen Carter said, voice croaky. ‘Took her years to recover. Poets write about the madness of love–but to kill a man? Nothing romantic about that, let me tell you.’
Had Chrissy been seeing Davies’s killer behind his back?
‘Hoffman? She hardly knew him–maybe smiled at him once or twice in passing. Pleasantries, you know. Thinking was, he admired her from afar but never plucked up the courage to do anything about it.’
Keith: ‘Except execute Sergeant Davies.’
‘Horrible thing to happen. We had military police crawling all over the place. But it was a day or two before they found Gareth’s revolver hidden beneath Hoffman’s mattress. He had a room of his own–didn’t share with the others. Perk of being put in charge of one bit of the camp. Wasn’t liked, though, not too many tears shed when the firing squad did their duty.’
‘What about the revolver in The Glen? It couldn’t be the one used to kill Sergeant Davies?’
‘You keep asking us about that. All I can tell you is that it turned up some time after the camp had closed, and Joe’s story is he found it washed ashore.’
‘Why put it on display?’
‘A talking point, isn’t it? No more to it than that. Your tea’s getting cold, Keith, and I’m getting tired. I know you mean well, but the past is the past is the past…’
The next file was Joe Collins himself. Keith had hardly got started before Collins cut him off.
‘It’s all about this murder, isn’t it? The murder and the poisoning–those are your interest rather than the camp itself?’
‘I’m not sure I’d agree completely with—’
‘Ach, it’s the truth and you know it. The murder weapon was found hidden in Hoffman’s quarters.’
‘Yet he protested his innocence to the end, according to the records.’
‘Which did not delay his appointment with the firing squad.’
‘They executed him in the camp, didn’t they?’
‘At dawn. We were to remain in our bunks, the doors locked. We were all awake, though; I doubt many of us had got much sleep. He made noises as he was led out.’
‘Noises?’
‘Begging for mercy, I think. Then the gunshots and the terrible silence. He was buried somewhere outside the camp. I don’t think there was ever a marker of any kind. The digging you are doing will not bring his bones to light.’
‘That’s not why we’re excavating.’
‘The money you want to spend on the camp, would it not be of more use to the community in other ways?’
Instead of answering, Keith had another question ready. ‘The revolver you say you found—’
‘The revolver I did find. This obsession will do you no good, Keith. You think I had something to do with the crime? Sergeant Davies’s revolver was taken away by the authorities as evidence. What happened to it afterwards no one knows.’
‘Tossed into the sea, perhaps?’
‘What does it
