The Third Shadow

Thirty-one

When the alarm clock shrilled the next morning I resisted the temptation of reaching for the snooze button as I had in previous days. Threw the bedsheet back instead, shot bolt upright.

In a strange kind of way, the previous evening's conversation with Diane had acted as a tonic. Even though my advances had been definitively spurned - put on a dissatisfying purgatorial hold at least - it had been good to have someone to talk with, all the same. A confidante to offload to. I was feeling lighter, yes; more energised than I had done in quite a while.  I'd had enough of wallowing in self pity, I decided. Of drinking far too much, feeling listless. What would my father have said?  Life doesnt stop till  it stops. Nothing you can do but get on with it lad. Something like that. Something blunt and northern and irrefutable.

After scrambling some eggs and tossing back a pot of coffee, I headed straight out for the vines. There's something about repetitive manual labour - grasp bunch, inspect, spray, duck under branches, grasp next bunch - something about being submersed in the green wonder of nature, which helps concentrate a man's mind.

Money was tight, there was no getting away from it, but maybe there were things I could do. Sell directly from the vineyard for one, the wine tapped directly into the buyer's own container. Enough traffic passed by below on the coast road. The advertising sign would have to be a rough-and-ready homemade affair, but that was much less of a problem than the offputting state of the access road up the hill. I wondered how much it would cost to run a wire from entrance up to bungalow, install some kind of rudimentary intercom system. Much more than a man as heavily in debt as I could afford, without doubt; like so many others things, it was modernisation which would just have to wait for now.

But yes: on-site sales. Even at less than cost price, a little immediate cashflow might just help keep my head above turbulent financial waters. If the worst came to the worst I could always sell the van - bought new less than two years earlier - swap it for an older model. I'd get by, I told myself. By hook or by crook, somehow I'd make it through.

Thus heartened, I found my thoughts drifting from here and now to the more distant and fanciful. What would it be like, I wondered, should Diane really come out to live with me at some future point? The pair of us brown and wrinkled from the sun, two wizened walnuts growing old together. Lazy summer days with towels stretched out on the rocks, the shadows of passing gulls skipping over our faces, the mist of the crashing spray rhythmically cooling our skin. Trips to the fish stall near the harbour to choose something for lunch: squid, baby octopus, mussels so fresh they spit at you. Ice-cream-licking strolls along the prom, evenings out in the bars and pizzerias. And during those frenzied little periods which punctuate a winemaker's year - springtime spraying, autumn harvest - she'd be right there beside. Bending her back, getting stuck in. The satisfying clack of cold ones tapped together at the end of a long day, the golden evening twilight playing through her hair. And at night, her warm, deeply breathing body would be beside me, the three dimensions of her bound tight in my arms...

But these were dangerous thoughts, I knew. As dastardly as a desert mirage. Best left unimagined, ignored.

*

As I munched at my lunchtime panino - today washed down by nothing stronger than water - I switched on the regional news. It was a sad-eyed, contrite-looking Nuzzo who gazed out at the assembled journalists, almost as if it were he rather than Lee Bracewell standing accused. The logos on the microphone covers clustered before him now included BBC, ITN and Channel Four. They captured the same phrase I remembered from the day he'd taken me for ice-cream: I followed the signposts. Gone then, replaced by images of a happy, bouncing basset hound. The hero of the hour.

Had it been my case, I wondered a few minutes later as I headed back out into the furnace of the early afternoon, would I have done anything differently? Whilst it was true I hadn't been entirely convinced by the supposed trail Bracewell had left - had been suspicious of the fact that signor Caputo's spade and the broken Glenfiddich bottle had both been left  in the hire car - it was also true that I'd never once suspected that his brother's body would have been found so close to the holiday home. And it was true what Nuzzo had said that day, that as a retired police officer I could afford myself the kind of imagination that a serving one couldn't. He or she is obliged only to sift the available evidence, shape it into the most likely or obvious investigative route. Is obliged, in short, to follow the signposts.