If nothing else, he listened, or was silent anyway, because he didn’t know what to say, where to start, and because everything that had happened up to now meant something different to what it had meant before. He needed to look at all of it again in peace but, for now, scenes were flashing at random in his head. His eyes were fixed on his colleague’s face and he took in the sense of urgency and alarm in his voice, but in his head he was somewhere else. He was standing in the glaring heat of a garden, waiting two hours for the prosecutor to arrive, though the August roads were empty of traffic. Where had he gone first? He was standing outside the door up in the tower with the prosecutor’s hand clapping him on the shoulder as they loaded the body, fat legs and blond hair dangling, into the metal coffin. Of course he hadn’t wanted to take the marshal off this high-profile case to put some clever investigator on it. All that stuff about ‘your expertise,’ and all that considerate help.
