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eponymous
he had concluded long ago that one of the best things to do with women was not to try entirely understanding them. Acceptance is an important step on the path to happiness and peace.
His usual preferences in creating a Word document? Oh yes – Smith has moved with the times.
He always chooses Times New Roman for serious correspondence, and the font size is 12, which looks tidy when it is printed. To make all this easier to view on the screen, he moves the slider in the bottom right corner to 150%.
Gerald Fitch had taken a bag, some clothes and those personal possessions – there had been some degree of planning and forethought. But he had left behind his mobile phone. Smith wondered whether it had been found switched on or off. Either way, leaving it behind was perhaps a deliberate act because smart people know they can be traced through them, and not only by the police. Looked at in one way, you could argue this suggested Gerald Fitch really didn’t want to be found – and then you have to wonder why. And at that moment Smith thought that this wasn’t so different to the old job – you
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There is something odd here, and it might be what isn’t here. The questions were coming quickly now, and he put up a mental hand to slow them down, telling them to get themselves into some sort of line, to form an orderly queue, in the proper British manner.
Three qualities perhaps seem to be present in all of them, and the first of these is having a peculiar kind of attention – one might call it active attention. Where most of us see, they look: when most of us hear, they listen. Brilliant naturalists have similar abilities – their eyesight and hearing seem phenomenal but not so, it is in the ways of looking and listening. It’s all in the mind. Ironically, these are the individuals most likely to be called absent-minded by the rest of us because that kind of heightened inner focus comes at a cost to our lives in the workaday world.
From her manner of speech, Smith had guessed she wasn’t an educated person – educated in the sense of university-processed – but he made that assessment in an entirely objective way. It was not a value judgement in any sense – after all, in that respect he was not an educated person himself. Nevertheless, she was articulate, which suggested to him that behind whatever persona she had thought appropriate for this meeting there was no lack of native intelligence.
coffee helps one to do, tea helps one to think, and he needed to think.
It’s an eternal conflict and neolithic couples probably argued about whether it was worth keeping any of those old antlers at the back of the cave.
Smith looked older, more tanned, fitter and perhaps happier but the brain was still functioning exactly as before.
dissimulate
If active attention is the first necessary quality in the mind of a successful detective, the second might be something one could call informed expectation.
Perhaps, but it’s wise to begin as we mean to go on.
As Smith had explained to various young, would-be detectives over the years, when you first catch a glimpse of it, the thing you must never do is to immediately run after it, crashing through the undergrowth and frightening every creature that lives there into hiding. Smith simply acknowledged McGuire’s comment with a meaningful look and waited for more – sooner or later it would come.
If you move silently through the undergrowth of people’s lives, you can get close to the truths that dwell there.
You only need to make one mis-step to find yourself falling to your death from the top of a cliff; people shake their heads and say he’d never done anything like it before, but that’s rather missing the point, isn’t it?
Another fork in the trail had appeared now, another potential line of inquiry: they are easy to miss.
What you are asking, of course, is do you think he was capable of committing suicide? It’s a rare quality or, depending on one’s point of view, an unfortunate flaw, but few of us are capable of carrying it out when faced with such a moment of choice. And surely, Smith thought, in most cases it is less to do with moral or religious doubts than with the fundamental, primitive will to live; had Gerald Fitch’s difficulties been such he had lost that?
one of the keys to success in life is knowing and understanding one’s own limitations.
There are times when one might as well lie back and think of England. And this was one of the things he liked about her – these moments of girlish enthusiasm and excitement when she seemed much more than just ten years younger than him.
And the point of this process? Ideas can become fixed in our minds – they become parts of a linear sequence. They get stuck in one place. Often it’s the sensible place – we don’t go to the garage with the idea of getting a filling in a tooth repaired or to a travel agent to buy a loaf of bread – but difficult investigations require a different sort of thinking. Sometimes people call it outside the box, others call it left field: Smith thought of it as shuffling the pack and laying out the cards in an almost Tarot-like fashion. Sometimes there’s an odd conjunction, flint against metal, which
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It’s remarkable, Smith thought, how quickly the shorthand grows between people, how all the superfluous bits disappear.
When you commit, it has to be to the whole person or it isn’t really commitment. You have to take the rough with the smooth. And he was never more than a little edgy.
They do say, he thought to himself, it only lasts seven months, that first romantic love.
‘If we had that information, I believe it would be worth going to that place, yes. You have to, or it’s a loose end forever more. You can’t leave those lying around.’
Woodlands where he’d waited once before, giving the rain a minute or two to cease. He wound down the windows a little and the smell of it wafted into the car – petrichor, the magical scent released when the golden blood of the gods touches the arid rocks of the earth. The older you get, he thought, the more evocative such things become. It smells like a secret.
He looked older than in the wedding photographs Jo had found online – barely recognisable, in fact. It had been taken out of doors, and in the background was a beach, blurred by the distance. He stood looking to the left of the camera, his hands in his pockets. It was what a critic might have called an honest portrait in black and white; a thin-faced, middle-aged man gazing into the distance, but whether into the distant past or the distant future it was impossible to say. The expression was that of a man resigned. It was in its own way a striking image, not least because it was technically
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It had not been an uninteresting life, and on balance he’d probably done more good than harm. One cannot ask for more than that, perhaps.
The grubby reality of an investigator’s life was probably beginning to dawn upon young Mr Diver – the fact you sometimes have to be as devious and deceitful as the people you’re after, hoping and praying your motivations are better because that’s the only justification, and perhaps the only difference between the two of you.
People have a need. They have a need to label, to name things. It is something to do with security. Things without names are dangerous. Things without names create uncertainty which can lead to insecurity.
It was a lead as flimsy as the untidy wire mesh fence between himself and the edge of the cliff. If you stumbled and fell into it, that fence would only break your fall somewhat; you’d continue on, sliding down that steep slope and landing in an undignified heap somewhere near the bottom of it. He recognised the moment of self-doubt as an occupational hazard. In a long investigation there can be plenty of them, especially when your instincts and hunches are directing the work of many officers and spending hundreds of thousands of pounds. On this occasion the costs would only be a footnote in
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Moments later Carol returned, followed by a tall, sashaying sort of person – in order, that’s what one noticed first, followed by the brassy-blonde hair in a ponytail, the jet-black eyebrows and the moustache which might or might not have been dyed some colour between those above it. Marilyn’s figure was good but from which side of the great divide it was impossible to say – nevertheless, he moved with the confidence born of many victories in the gender-identity wars. Indeed, thought Smith, if this was the Marilyn of five years ago, he was in the presence of a pioneer, a veritable
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‘Mmm. It’s the camera man.’
A secret account implied a secret life, and Smith had found no supporting evidence the man was likely to have one – he had the sense that Gerald was more probably a victim than a criminal mastermind. No – it was the second possibility Smith found intriguing. Unless Gerald was a man who always kept a few thousand in notes under a mattress, he had planned this disappearance. It was to some extent premeditated.
As soon as he was through the door, he said a cheerful hello to the room and they answered ‘Hello, Geoff!’ – this made a couple of them smile because it was a routine, a ritual really, and they like routines and rituals. Milly thought this must be because it makes the world seem more predictable, and safer. If you’ve spent decades of your life feeling afraid because you don’t fit in and frightening things keep happening, being somewhere where the same things happen every day must be a relief. They’d had a staff training day last year about the risks of institutionalisation but Milly still
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This will be one of Geoff’s pictures. See how the ball is bouncing. The small black dog is jumping for the ball. Black dog, red collar, blue ball. The sand is all silvers and golds. This is a painting of many colours.
Random events and choices are not as common in our lives as they sometimes seem to be; as the day wore on he thought to himself more than once that his entire philosophy of investigation – if he had such a thing – rested on the suspicion, on the belief, that coincidences almost never are coincidences.
Smith recognised some of the places and views. And then he found he had lost ten or perhaps twenty seconds of his life. They had simply gone and he would never get them back. He had been staring at a sequence of three pictures, matching pictures by the same hand, and identically framed. Three extraordinary paintings of Gerald Fitch’s photographs.
When they choose another name for themselves, people who wish to begin anew rarely do so randomly – surprisingly often there is some hidden link to their past, some means of holding onto it, of not quite letting go.
It was a familiar feeling, the sense that step by step the net was closing, and one Smith had not expected to experience again.
there was a moment, one of those in which a part of us sees the rest of us and is a little surprised: he seemed to be as sharply focused as he had been when on a job ten or even twenty years ago.
That’s the thing with a job, isn’t it? It gets you out of the house…
Smith was thinking how odd it was that both cases he’d taken with DDA had ended up as moral mazes. With Anthony Hills, he, Smith, had used his skills, albeit unknowingly, to get the charges dropped against a guilty man, frustrating the work of his former colleagues at Kings Lake Central in the process, and now with Gerald Fitch, having found the man, against considerable odds, he had given his word not to tell the people who had offered him the case, and the work, in the first place.
To me, the whole business was tainted money. I don’t mean there was anything corrupt, not that at all. It was tainted by my own sense of failure – which at that time was universal. I just wanted to get out of that life completely. I’d felt that way for a long time.’
Smith had seen it often enough before, the release that comes from finally being able to tell your story. It’s a pity that in the age of instant communication, patient listening has become a lost art.
Smith thought how right he had been about recognising that moment when you should stop paddling – the moment of resignation and acceptance. It’s often the moment when peace will come, if you are open to it and ready for it.
piquancy”.
It teaches you that everything is temporary – the only constant is change. The shoreline is the perfect metaphor. It shifts moment by moment, wave after wave, grain by grain. People used to ask why I was always photographing the same places but I never was. Living here, I’ve seen more sunrises than most people do in their whole lives but I’ve never seen two the same.’
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger: perhaps it makes us more interesting, too.
