Free The Light of Day: A Novel by Graham Swift Page A

murder. Going out with a bang.
    “You weren’t exactly ‘let out’ the first time, were you? You didn’t exactly just leave.”
    So there it was. Another flash of flint. He might even be more interested in me (since Sarah was in the bag), in playing games with me. The way you needle a suspect (I remember) you already know is marked down. Your last case. Make a meal.
    Grey, weary eyes. Soft then sharp, then soft again. A touch of the headmaster, a touch of the dad. A family man. A wife and kids (I guessed right), the kids grown up now. He’d made it through—and so had they. They didn’t see him in police mode: leaning on a suspect, stepping round a corpse. He’d come home and somehow make the switch. Soon he’d be home for good.
    I might have been him (he might have been me). Two DIs. Except he had the seniority—by years of service—and I wasn’t even a real DI.
    Though he had to call me “sir,” technically speaking. But didn’t that much.
    And if I’d been him I’d have made DCI. He’d got where he was—which wasn’t so far—by graft and slog mostly. I could tell. He could tell I could tell. And if he’d made DCI he might have been talking to me differently, he might really have pulled rank. Instead of being so keen to let me know that in four weeks he’d have no rank at all.
    “Eighty-nine, wasn’t it?”
    This might have been me. Raking over old dirt and thinking of my retirement while some poor sad cow was in on a murder charge.
    He let it drop, for now: ammunition he could bring out later.
    “So—what was it to you?” he said.
    “Mrs. Nash was my client.”
    “But you’d done the job—more than done the job. The job was done when you watched Miss Lazic go through to Departures and you phoned Mrs. Nash to tell her.”
    “La
zitch,
” I said. He kept saying it wrong.
    “La
zitch.
That was all Mrs. Nash had asked you to do.”
    “What she actually said was ‘Watch them.’ ”
    Watch them, George.
    “ ‘Watch them’? So you carried on watching just him. You followed Mr. Nash all the way back—to ‘make sure,’ so you’ve stated—till he drove into Beecham Close, then you turned round and drove home.”
    “Yes.”
    “But then, minutes later, before you reached home, you turned round again and drove back.”
    “Right.”
    “Why? Why should you have done that?”
    Another flinty stare, as if he’d practised it over the years—and as if for a moment I’d become prime suspect.
    And why not, why not? If it could have halved Sarah’s guilt, or taken it away: all my idea, my mad, murderous plan. Seeing Bob into the trap then making myself scarce. But I’d got cold feet. Driven back. Too late.
    And I must have been giving it off in waves.
    “An—intuition,” I said.
    “Intuition?”
    “I thought—I’ve stated this already—I thought something bad was going to happen.”
    “You mean you thought Mr. Nash was going to be murdered?”
    (Suppose I’d said, “Yes?”)
    “I thought I might prevent it.”
    “It? You didn’t.”
    “How is she?” I said.
    I heard the crack in my voice. I might have been saying to him: And here’s my motive, loud and clear.
    “She’s not very happy. She’s in a state of shock.” His eyes flicked away for an instant. “The constable’s notes say”—he put a finger on his file—“that you said he should let you through because, quote, you ‘knew what you were doing.’ Do you remember saying that?”
    “I suppose so.”
    (Let me through, I’m a detective.)
    “And
did
you—did you know what you were doing?” He hardly left a pause. “It seems to me you didn’t know what you were doing, you didn’t know what you were doing at all. Because if you knew what you were doing, that suggests you knew exactly what had happened.”
    The eyes back on mine. Bad tactics. A full stretch of service and hadn’t he learnt to go easy on the fixing stare? Look away, get up, turn your back, let silence pass. Then they blab.
    But they