Play Dead by Bill James Page A

smileless, letting them in. ‘The arrest, the trial, the conviction. We gave our evidence then, dealt with cross-questioning, too. Does it drag on, then?’
    Harpur sympathized. ‘And very valuable evidence. But some tidying is still necessary,’ he said.
    â€˜Tidying?’ Gerald said.
    â€˜Several untouched elements,’ Harpur said.
    â€˜Two very senior officers sent again from another force to do “some tidying”?’ Gerald said. ‘Is it really so? Hard to understand.’
    â€˜An aftermath is like this sometimes,’ Harpur replied. ‘The exact shape of an aftermath is often hard to figure. I don’t know whether you’ve had any experience of aftermaths, but pinning an aftermath down is tricky sometimes.’ He couldn’t tell him that the Home Office - or, at least, Maud Logan Clatworthy, star of the Home Office youth team - no, couldn’t tell him that Maud believed the conviction reached only an edge of Larkspur’s organized villainy and corruption; was not much more than a token conviction, a fall-guy conviction. She thought it required a serious, incisive, follow-up pry by the original outside investigators, already knowledgeable about the area: Iles and him. To date, the mission was based only on rumour and loose talk. Maud possessed no hard information, and neither did he and Iles. Maud had intuitions, though, plus, probably, that Oxbridge first-class degree. It could give her intuitions a touch of credibility, solidity and oomph.
    â€˜Yes, Detective Chief Superintendent Harpur has always been one for a phrase,’ Iles said. ‘“Some tidying” in an “aftermath”. And
because
it’s an aftermath we might have to go over certain old material again. A quick glance at it. Forgive us that, will you, please?’ Harpur could see both Jane and Gerald were fixated on the Assistant Chief’s face crack. Very dark bruising had gone up and down: up to his eyelid and lower region of the forehead, and down almost to the corner of his mouth. You’d often see women marked like this in domestic violence courts. That comparison would probably please Iles. He liked to feel he had a link with all sorts across gender, religion, weight, class, education, medical state, race, as long as they didn’t try to get objectionably close.
    He said: ‘Miss Matson - Jane, if I may - you declared in your trial evidence and statements earlier that you and Mr Beatty - Gerald, if I may - yes, you two were crossing the Elms building site between Ritson mall and Guild Square on the night of the killing, when you saw the body of Detective Sergeant Mallen about forty metres to your left.’
    â€˜I didn’t know it was a body immediately,’ she said.
    â€˜No, quite,’ Iles said. ‘A good moon but still fairly dark.’
    â€˜It was a shape, a heap, that’s how it seemed at first.’
    â€˜You thought possibly a pile of discarded clothes,’ Iles said. ‘This is in the court narrative.’
    â€˜At first, yes. All sorts of litter on that site, the clothes possibly dumped as unwanted from a stolen suitcase,’ Jane said.
    â€˜But then you corrected?’ Iles replied.
    Gerald Beatty said: ‘Jane had drawn my attention to . . . to, well, something unusual over on our left. Yes, she thought just discarded clothes. I thought so, too. I joked that it might be an out-of-season Guy Fawkes.’
    Iles chuckled for several seconds - no, Harpur realized it was more than several: say ten - a thorough-going, durable, entirely uncontemptuous chuckle. Iles said: ‘Some jokes are all the better for avoiding too much subtlety.’
    â€˜But then she revised this,’ Gerald replied, ‘and said it looked like a man, sort of hunched on the ground, maybe ill, perhaps a heart attack. Possibly a vagrant. I wasn’t sure, but she insisted. I suppose I felt reluctant to make the detour. We