Wainfleet had three communal spaces and they found Ronnie in the second one they visited. Kerr had pointed him out before they entered, and then took her to look out from the large window at the other end of the room. She made conversation for a minute or so and then turned to examine the rest of the area.

  There were twenty or so comfortable chairs situated in twos or threes, with the largest group in a semi-circle around a flatscreen television mounted on the side wall. It was switched on but was babbling away to itself; four people sat in the semi-circle – one was reading, one was sitting bolt upright but with his eyes closed, and the other two had half-turned so they had a clear view of Henry Kerr and his visitor. The only other person in the room was Ronnie Leadsom.

  He sat alone. Freeman had watched him for some seconds and then looked at the two women who were watching her – one was plumply middle-aged and the other was presumably in her twenties but frighteningly thin and drawn. Freeman smiled and nodded but received nothing in return. When she looked back at Ronnie, he hadn’t moved a muscle, as far as she could tell. He seemed to be staring intently at something in the middle distance – whether the something was situated in space or time it was impossible to say.

  She took the opportunity to study him more closely. He was smaller than his brother, smaller built, smaller boned. She noticed the beard, and the hair tied in a pony tail, with long streaks of grey running back into it from the temples. He wore jeans and a red, short-sleeved T shirt – it had the logo of a heavy metal band across the chest. His arms were tattooed. What had James Leadsom told them? Ronnie loved the girls and the girls loved Ronnie? Half-closing her eyes, she could almost see it, see him with the little-boy-lost sort of charm. But the little boy was long gone, and only the lost remained.

  When she had reached this point in her account to the team, she paused, but there were no questions yet. She said, ‘I asked Kerr whether Ronnie associated at all with other patients. He said no. He acknowledges a couple of the staff but the only person he interacts with is his brother. According to Kerr, James does virtually all of the talking but Ronnie is listening and sometimes responds – in the consultant’s words “briefly but coherently”. I showed a bit of interest and Kerr opened up to a degree. He says it’s unusual for someone to shut themselves off for as long as Ronnie has; he would expect the trauma to have caused some chaotic behaviour and outbursts as well but he’s not seen this at Wainfleet. He did let slip that Ronnie is known to have been in a downward spiral long before he arrived there, though he didn’t go into details and I didn’t ask. Bearing that in mind, though, it’s odd he’s never come to the attention of uniform. Most of them do, don’t they?’

  Greene said, ‘Perhaps he did, ma’am. And perhaps James was there to smooth it over.’

  She nodded, and said, ‘Kerr told me it’s likely Ronnie has no sense of time where the trigger event is concerned. He won’t be thinking about something that happened maybe twenty years ago – Ronnie might be thinking it happened yesterday or even this morning. It’s frozen into his conscious and unconscious minds. This is why it hasn’t healed. The rest of us get a perspective as time passes and that allows us to come to terms with traumas. For Ronnie it might be that time has not passed, and the shock hasn’t diminished at all.’

  Instinctively, as she paused, she looked at Waters and he was watching her again. This time she held his gaze as she said, ‘Does anyone have any questions or observations?’

  He said, ‘Ma’am, it doesn’t sound very likely that we’ll be interviewing Ronnie.’

  Freeman had clearly been over that in her mind. She said, ‘To a degree it depends on exactly what his brother tells us. I’m not ruling anything out at this stage but you’re correct, Chris. There might be little to be gained by putting Ronnie or the person trying to interview him through that experience – which makes this afternoon’s conversation with his brother all the more important. Tom – are all our ducks in a row?’

  Greene said in his usual, level manner, ‘All the ducks of which I am aware are lined up, ma’am.’

  And Waters thought, was that just the tiniest little dig at the senior investigating officer? Hadn’t the detective inspector been slightly bemused yesterday afternoon when he explained to Waters and Murray the unexpected departure of their boss? If she sensed it, Freeman did not react. She gave her swift final look around the group that signalled the end of a meeting, and said, ‘OK. There’s no point in changing the personnel now. Chris and I will conduct the second interview with James Leadsom.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  There had been a difference of opinion as to whether James Leadsom would arrive accompanied by a lawyer of some sort, but he came alone. Waters met him down in reception and saw that the man had shaved and that he was dressed more smartly than he had been yesterday – the thought struck him that Leadsom had come ready to be taken into custody. Waters had said to Freeman that in his opinion they were unlikely to hear anything that would lead to Leadsom’s own arrest, and he had a moment of doubt as he escorted him back to the interview room where they had spoken on the first occasion. If the interviewee made an admission of guilt in a serious matter, Freeman might find herself on the wrong side of the video camera lens after all.

  She was already present and waiting – there were to be no games today, no sweating of the suspect by making him wait and drink mugs of stale, watery station tea. She stood up, Waters noticed, perhaps deliberately acknowledging that Leadsom had done the same thing when she entered the room on their previous meeting. She thanked him for coming and said she hoped he’d had sufficient time to get the advice he required. It was formal, polite and business-like – Waters could not recall another interview setting off quite like this one.

  Freeman said as they all took their seats, ‘Just the preliminaries then, Mr Leadsom. May I call you James, by the way?’

  A thesis could be written on how names are used in police interviews – it is sufficient here to say that Leadsom said she could, and that this too subtly altered the way things were likely to proceed.

  ‘Thank you, then, James. We are making a video and audio record of this interview. You are here under your own volition, having offered to help us with our inquiry into the death of Sylvie Favreau. You indicated yesterday that you would be able to assist us in this matter. Is that correct? This is just formal stuff, for the record.’

  He said it was correct, and she continued, ‘You are not under caution but if I feel that you should be, I will tell you so and what your rights are. You haven’t brought any legal representatives with you but you do have the right to pause proceedings should you decide later that you would like someone present with you.’

  Leadsom nodded and caught Waters’ eye for a second or two. He was a difficult man to read. There were none of the obvious signals betraying anxiety or fear – no altered or irregular breathing, no clammy skin, no shifting in his seat every few seconds, no frightened rabbit stare. He was simply waiting for the woman in charge to get the preliminaries out of the way, and Waters could not help wondering to himself – what on earth is he going to tell us when she has done so?

  Freeman sat back in her chair then, and did something rather odd – she turned her palms towards her face and curled her fingers inwards as if examining her nails, perhaps thinking she ought to get them done. Waters had never noticed until that moment that the senior investigating officer’s fingernails were immaculately manicured and painted a subtle, pearlescent pink, almost but not quite a natural flesh colour. She made in general few obvious concessions to her femininity, and therefore when one was noticed it seemed to take on a greater significance.

  After this moment of apparent distraction, she looked at Leadsom and said, ‘So, James – going back to where we left off yesterday, how did Sylvie Favreau die?’

  Smith might have laughed and said in his awful mock-German accent, ‘Yes, alvays begin with ze easy one…’ But Leadsom did not flinch. He had clearly decided how he was going to tell this story; if Freeman’s first delivery had been designed to unsettle him, it had failed.

  He said, ‘I was in London when I got the call about a body being found. I went down to Wissingham as I was the landowner, and I made a statement to the police, which you’ve no doubt read. It was short and it was the truth. I’d never met the girl. Obviously there was speculation she’d been at the festival but no one seemed able to prove she was, and even if she had been, so what? It wasn’t a commercial thing. There were no tickets, people came and went as they pleased. No health and safety in those days.’

  He paused as if expecting questions already but Freeman only said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘I went back to London the same day, after they’d spoken to me. I was aware of it all going on in the background but it wasn’t headline news where I was, not in the city.’

  Leadsom seemed to realise how that might have sounded to them. He said, ‘What I mean is, it literally wasn’t mentioned in the news, the media. I looked out for it. Girls get killed. I’m not saying all the time, but… And I’m not saying I forgot about it but it was something that happened to someone I didn’t know on some land I happened to own.’

  Freeman had said to Waters beforehand, ask anything you like, whenever you like. He said now, ‘Where was Ronnie at this time, when you’d returned to London?’

  Leadsom said, ‘I can’t say for certain. I assumed he was back in his usual haunts in the city but I didn’t hear from him for a while. This wasn’t unusual, we didn’t live in each other’s pockets. I knew he’d turn up if he needed some cash.’

  Freeman said, ‘So he didn’t have a job as such?’

  That was probably for DI Greene, who was still perplexed that they had not been able to locate Ronnie Leadsom via the tithes everyone else was paying to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

  Leadsom said, ‘No. Like I said before, he was always looking for ways into the music business, but he wasn’t going to begin at the bottom. I gave him some money at different times to get something off the ground but it never really happened. He was only young, just a kid. I viewed it as part of his education. He never properly finished school.’

  To an outside observer, perhaps a guest in the recording room, this might appear to be a police interview lacking direction and purpose but Waters understood what Freeman was doing – they were getting background on Ronnie, of course, but James Leadsom was getting into the habit of talking to them; all of us enjoy being listened to properly, and it doesn’t happen very often, if we’re honest.

  She said, ‘Was he expelled?’

  ‘No, not in the end. He just stopped going, and they stopped trying to make him.’

  Waters said, ‘What about your parents? Weren’t they involved in that?’

  This time the response took a little longer to formulate itself, though nothing on the surface gave Leadsom’s feelings away.

  ‘It was only me, really, by then. And long before it, if I’m honest. Older brother, in loco parentis. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’

  Freeman nodded and said, ‘It sounds like this was a lot of responsibility for you. You can’t have been that much older than Ronnie.’

  ‘Eight years. But I was already making money. One of the city whizz-kids, in those days…’

  Said with obvious irony at his own expense – there was for Waters already a note of sadness in this story. He was certain too that these notes of sadness would sooner or later form themselves into a tragic melody – from the man’s manner it was clear now that he really did know what had happened to Sylvie Favreau.

  ‘Anyway, this isn’t about me. A couple of months after we’d moved back to London, I got a call from one of Ronnie’s girlfriends. She said he was in a bad way. This wasn’t that unusual either but she told me he’d been in A and E, and now he was in her flat. She didn’t know what to do with him, and would I come and collect him. Which I did. As far as I could make out, he’d been on a bender for about a week. I took him back to my place and it took me about another week to straighten him out. This was the worst he’d ever been. And I knew it was different.’

  There was a moment of absolute silence in the interview room. Waters was reminded in some odd way of that breathless pause before Professor Lindsay lifted the lid of Sylvie’s coffin. What was about to be revealed? In one way you knew, of course, and yet…

  ‘When I’d got him sobered up, I remember, one night I started giving him a right bollocking. It was time to grow up, take some responsibility, and he just started crying, like a kid. Like he was five years old. He’d never done that. He’s always been a bit emotional – either over-the-top happy or everything’s hopeless. There’s a name for that.’

  Freeman said, ‘Bi-polar,’ and Leadsom nodded.

  ‘Yeah. But he was a tough kid in his own way. Had to be, and he’d always bounce back. This time something had pushed him over the edge. That same night he told me what it was.’

  James had remembered the people Ronnie told him about. He’d met Seth for at least two years before that last year, when the girl was found. Seth was always among the first to show up at the festivals, sometimes being there a week before anything began. Leadsom described him – a tall, imposing sort of bloke, with the long hair, a funny sort of red colour, and the beard to go with it. It was obvious he was some sort of leader in whatever it was the people were following. He said, ‘People always want a leader, don’t they? It’s human nature.’

  Neither Freeman nor Waters answered him, and Leadsom continued, ‘I got to know this bloke a bit – he was the one who came to negotiate if anything was needed or something was going wrong. But he always said they didn’t have leaders, they believed in a new order for the New Age. A new social consciousness. He was full of all that stuff, and convincing with it. It wasn’t hard to see why these gullible kids thought he was a guru or something. I don’t think he was on the make – it was an ego-trip for him.’

  For the first time, Freeman nudged James Leadsom – she said, ‘And was Seth involved in what happened to Sylvie Favreau?’

  He answered her in the same even way he had told the story so far. ‘Not directly. But you need to know about him to understand the whole thing,’ and she nodded and asked him to continue.

  ‘In the last year I was there – the one before it happened – Seth’s brother was with him. Now, Ronnie has his issues as I’ve told you, but this kid…’

  Waters saw a change in Leadsom’s expression, as if a figure had appeared for a split second in his peripheral vision and distracted him – a figure, a silhouette, a shadow on the very edge of consciousness. It was momentary, but there was something akin to fear in Leadsom’s eyes.

  He said, ‘He had the hair and the beard like Seth, and you’d think it was just a bit of big-brother hero worship, but this kid had… Well, it was the way he looked at you, for one thing. He’d stare right into you, and you’d look away – as you do – and when you looked back he was still staring right into you. As if he was looking for something in particular, and he couldn’t find it. And he had a weird smile, like he knew something you didn’t, all the time.’

  Waters, collecting the details along the way, said, ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Saul.’

  Waters remarked that wasn’t a common name, and Leadsom’s response was unexpected. He said, ‘Do you know your bible?’

  Where is Smith when you need him, with his grammar school education? Probably sailing round the estuary at Marston or planning a trip to buy some of the day’s catch at Wells. But Waters wasn’t entirely lost this time. He said, ‘I know the story of the road to Damascus.’

  Leadsom said, ‘Yeah? Well, that’s all you need to know here. He changed his name, didn’t he?’

  Freeman was looking at Waters expectantly; he considered for a moment whether he was on the right track with this, and then said, ‘I think that Saul became Paul after his conversion.’

  Leadsom nodded and said, ‘Well, this guy was going in the other direction. I found out later his name was really Paul.’

  Waters explained to Freeman – ‘Saul was a leader among those who were stoning Christians to death. He was struck blind on the road to Damascus. When he regained his sight he took up the faith and became… Well, Saint Paul.’

  Freeman’s expression could only be described as a little withering. She said to Waters, ‘Yes, I’ve heard the story. I’m just waiting for James to tell us what it has to do with our investigation.’

  Leadsom said, ‘I only met this kid a few times in the year before the last festival. I didn’t like him but he attached himself to Ronnie straight off. He was into all sorts of weird stuff – all the alternative craziness that was going around because of the millennium. Most of you lot are too young to remember what that was like. Lots of people had convinced themselves the world was going to end…’

  And then, in a different voice, Leadsom said, ‘And I suppose for some of them it did.’

  There was a long silence. James Leadsom seemed to have lost himself somewhere in his own story. Eventually Freeman said quietly, ‘And Sylvie was one of them.’

  Leadsom said, ‘What I’m telling you is partly what Ronnie told me that night and partly what I found out later. Twenty years is a long time. I can’t remember exactly which bits are which.’

  She said, ‘It’s fine, James. Tell it in your way.’

  Freeman was handling Leadsom quite differently to any other interviewee Waters had seen her with – he wondered whether Murray and Sterling had noticed the same thing as they watched this on the screen.

  Leadsom said, ‘Anyway… This character had kept in touch with Ronnie after the festival. When they met up again at the next one, the last one – this is how Ronnie told it to me – he was like a twenty-four-hours-a-day presence. He couldn’t shake him off. But Ronnie had met this girl he liked. He had a big camper van and I think she moved into it a couple of hours after they met. Like I said, the girls loved Ronnie…’