A Thing of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

exhaustion.
    ‘You really have inherited your father’s gift for tact, Will,’ Mother said.
    ‘Are you saying that this Darlene murdered someone?’ Sergeant Wilkinson said, suddenly alert. All three of us looked at him and knew that he would play no part in the solving of this crime.
    I went upstairs to bed, and must have managed to sleep, because the next thing of which I was aware was Brian shaking me awake and saying, ‘The detectives are here,’ followed by the resentful j’accuse of, ‘How could you sleep?’
    It was early — 7.00 a.m. There were two detectives in the kitchen when I entered. If they were annoyed at such an early call, neither of them showed it. They were both in their early forties, I estimated, and both were lean and well groomed. Beside them, the bleary Sergeant Wilkinson looked like a very poor relation indeed. Good detectives create an unsettling impression that they are in possession of information that might be to one’s disadvantage. The detectives in my mother’s kitchen were adepts in this regard. I didn’t like them one little bit, and immediately took refuge in the mildly satisfying fact that both of them were going bald, one more rapidly than the other. I knew when they turned their bland and disconcertingly neutral gaze upon me that they were considering me as a suspect as well as a witness, and I had just about had my fill of being suspected of crimes I didn’t commit. Of course it was their job to believe the worst of everyone. A suspect’s innocence would always be a disappointment to them.
    Anxious to begin my move to Paul Clutterbuck’s house, I answered their inquiries graciously, at least until one of them suggested, with a mock innocuousness that was insulting, that there was something odd about my search of the lanes.
    ‘You say you left the house almost immediately.’
    ‘Yes, to search the back yard.’
    ‘And then later you wandered about the streets.’
    ‘I didn’t “wander” about the streets. I was looking for the person who had done this. Obviously.’
    ‘Yes, obviously,’ he said, but his tone suggested that for him the obviousness lay in an altogether different direction.
    ‘I don’t care for your tone,’ I said.
    ‘Oh dear. I guess that means we don’t have a future together,’ he said, with an ugly little sneer.
    ‘What Detective Strachan is getting at,’ said his companion, ‘is that you might not have been hunting for the culprit, but checking on the success of an accomplice.’
    ‘I am perfectly aware of what he is insinuating, and it is gratuitous and offensive.’
    ‘So our visit here hasn’t been a complete waste of time then,’ said Detective Strachan.
    At this point Mother came into the kitchen, and the demeanour of the detectives changed immediately. They weren’t exactly charming — they couldn’t draw on reserves of a quality they comprehensively lacked — but Mother has a way of encouraging the best in people or, at any rate, discouraging the worst. Her intervention meant that the rest of the interview went smoothly.
    They had been in the house longer than I had thought. Before I’d come downstairs photographs had been taken, the room had been dusted for fingerprints, and a sample of the blood on the floor had been sent for analysis. They left an hour after my interview had been completed. After helping Brian and Mother clean up the kitchen, I took my suitcase and headed to Clutterbuck’s house to take up residence there. It was a little more than a fifteen-minute walk across Princes Park, over Royal Parade and into Parkville. I knocked on his front door at 9.15 a.m., expecting his housekeeper to answer. There was no response, so I knocked again. I had turned and begun climbing the few steps up to the pavement, when the door opened and a woman’s voice called, ‘Paul thought it might be you. That is, if you’re William Power.’
    The woman who uttered these words was definitely not Paul Clutterbuck’s