Dead Man's Footsteps

Glenn that houses gave off auras. There were plenty of others in this area, and elsewhere in the city, that were every bit as large and swanky, but they gave the impression of being lived in by ordinary, decent citizens. Just occasionally you saw a place like this one now, which seemed somehow too flash, and sent out signals, wittingly or unwittingly, that it had not been acquired by honest money.
    ‘Would you like to live here, Bella?’ he asked.
    ‘I could get used to it.’ She smiled, then looked a tad wistful.
    He shot her a sideways glance. She was a nice-looking woman, with a cheery face beneath a tangle of brown hair and no ring on her wedding finger. She always dressed in slightly dowdy clothes, as if not interested in making the best of herself, and he longed to give her a makeover. Today she was wearing a white blouse under a plain navy V-neck sweater, black woollen trousers, solid black shoes and a short green duffel coat.
    She never talked about her private life and he often wondered what she went home to. A guy, a woman, a group of flatmates? One of his colleagues had once said that Bella looked after her elderly mum, but Bella never mentioned this.
    ‘I can’t remember where it is you live,’ he said as they climbed out of the car. A gust of wind lifted the tails of his camel coat.
    ‘Hangleton,’ she said.
    ‘Right.’
    That sort of fitted. Hangleton was a pleasant, quiet residential sprawl on the west of the city, bisected by a motorway and a golf course. Lots of small houses andbungalows and neatly tended gardens. It was exactly the kind of quiet, safe area a woman might live in with her elderly mother. He suddenly had an image in his mind of a sad-looking Bella at home, caring for a sick, frail lady, munching away on her Maltesers as a substitute for any other kind of a life. Like a forlorn, caged pet.
    He rang the bell and they were ushered in by a Filipino maid, who led them through into a high-ceilinged orangery, with a view down across terraced lawns containing an infinity swimming pool and a tennis court.
    They were ushered into armchairs arranged around a marble coffee table and offered drinks. Then Stephen and Sue Klinger came in.
    Stephen was a tall, lean, rather cold-looking man in his late forties, with greying wavy hair brushed harshly back, and his cheeks were a patchwork of purple drinker’s veins. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and expensive-looking loafers, and glanced at his watch the moment after he shook Branson’s hand.
    ‘I’m afraid I have to be away in ten minutes,’ he said, his voice hard and bland, very different from the Stephen Klinger they had interviewed yesterday in his office after what had clearly been a very heavy lunch.
    ‘No problem, sir, we just have a few more quick questions for you and some for Mrs Klinger. We appreciate your taking the time to see us again.’
    He gave Sue Klinger an appreciative second glance and she smirked slyly, as if noticing. She was a serious looker, he thought. Early forties, in great shape, dressed in a brown brushed-cotton designer tracksuit and trainers that looked like they were fresh out of their box.
    And she had real come-to-bed eyes. Which he caughttwice in fast succession and then did his best to ignore, opening his notebook, deciding to focus on Stephen Klinger’s eyes, which might be easier to read.
    The maid came in with coffee and water.
    ‘Can I just recap, sir? How long had you and Ronnie Wilson been friends?’ Branson asked.
    Klinger’s eyes moved to his left, a fraction. ‘We go – went – back to our late teens,’ he said. ‘Twenty-seven – no – thirty years. Roughly.’
    As a double check, Glenn said, ‘And you told us yesterday that his relationship with his first wife, Joanna, had been difficult, but it was better with Lorraine?’
    Again the eyes moved to the left a fraction before he spoke.
    This was a neurolinguistic experiment Glenn had learned about from Roy Grace, and he sometimes found it of great assistance in assessing whether someone was telling the truth in an interview. Human brains were divided into left and right hemispheres. One was for long-term memory storage, while in the other the creative processes took place. When asked a question, people’s eyes almost invariably moved to the hemisphere they were using. In some people the memory storage was in the right hemisphere and in some the left; the creative hemisphere would be the opposite one.
    So now he knew that when