Death of a Hollow Man by Caroline Graham

Author:Caroline Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781631940118
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem Press
Published: 2017-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Barnaby had hardly set foot in the scene dock before Harold, incandescent with rage, sprang before them like a greyhound in the slips. “So there you are!” he cried, as if to a pair of recalcitrant children. “How dare you leave me while one and then the other of the company is interviewed? It’s not as if you aren’t aware of my position. How am I supposed to keep control when they see me constantly passed over like…like the boot boy!”

“I’m sorry you’re upset, Harold,” said Barnaby soothingly. “Please…sit down.” He indicated a rustic arbor on which dusty blue paper roses were impaled. Reluctantly, simmeringly, Harold lowered himself.

“You see,” continued the chief inspector, “everyone has had a story to tell. Sometimes these are mutually supportive, sometimes they contradict each other, but what I need at the end of the day is the viewpoint of someone who knows the group through and through. Someone perceptive, intelligent, and observant, who can help me to draw all the information together and perhaps see some underlying pattern in this dreadful affair. This is why I left you until the last.” He looked concernedly at Harold. “I thought you’d understand that.”

“Of course, Tom. I sensed that something like that was behind it all. But I would have appreciated a discreet word. To have been kept informed.”

Barnaby’s look of regret deepened. Troy, sitting just to the side of Harold in a deck chair (Relatively Speaking) watched with proprietorial pleasure. You could almost hear the steam hissing out of the old geezer (or geyser, revised the sergeant wittily), and see self-importance taking its place. Next would come complacency, the most fertile ground for the forcing of revelation. (Not fear or anger, as is commonly supposed.) Troy tried to catch his chief’s eye to indicate his appreciation of the maneuver, but without success. Barnaby’s concentration was total.

Actors, thought the sergeant, wearing the shade of a contemptuous smile. You’d have to get up early to find one to match the DCI. He had as many expressions to his face and shades to his voice as a mangy dog had fleas. He could imitate the dove and the scorpion and even the donkey if he thought it would serve his ends. More than once Troy had seen him shaking his head in apparent dumb bewilderment while witnesses feeling secure in his incomprehension happily babbled on, quite missing the echo of the turnkey’s tread. And he had a special smile seen only at the moment of closing in. Troy practiced that smile sometimes at home in the bathroom mirror and frightened himself half to death. Now, Barnaby was congratulating Harold on the excellence of his production.

“Thank you, Tom. Not an easy play, but I pride myself on a challenge, as you know. I wasn’t altogether delighted with Act One, but the second half was a great improvement. So intense. And then to end like that…” He clicked his tongue. “And of course any sort of screw-up, people immediately blame the director.”

“I’m afraid that’s the case,” agreed Barnaby, marveling at Harold’s grasp of the essentials.

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