The Third Shadow

Thirty-eight

The following morning, Friday, I was in the south-western section of the vines finishing off the pesticide respray. It was around eleven when I felt my phone buzz suddenly into life in my pocket, my heart skipping a beat as I recognised the succession of digits which followed the UK international code as Diane's home number.

"Diane! Hi. Just a sec." Gratefully unshouldering the spray tank, I slumped down into the dappled shade, propped my aching back against a vine stake. "Hard at it I'm afraid," I panted back into the receiver.

"Rare day off for me," came the chirped response.

"Good for you. So... what's it to be then? Get the Nikes out, seven times around Albert Park?"

Diane was one of those annoying types of people who, despite now being in her late-forties, and despite various lifestyle and nutritional choices which at best could be described as questionable, was simply incapable of putting on weight in any significant way. I doubt she even owned a pair of Nikes.

"Seven times around! Hah, that's for lily-livered cissies. Was thinking about going for a round dozen actually. Changed my mind at the last moment though. Decided my day off would be more constructively spent catching up on all the episodes of my favourite soap opera I've missed over the last few weeks."

"Exercise the mind rather the body."

"Precisely."

Preliminaries over, her tone then grew sombre.

"I saw the funeral on the news last night."

She went on to describe those few brief seconds of footage which I would later search out myself over the internet in preparation for the writing of this book: Sarah propped up by the two girls, seemingly carried on their shoulders as they struggle their way out of the crematorium gates and into the waiting car of a friend or relative. A sadder, more beautiful widow it's impossible to imagine.

"There's something might have come up," I informed her, proceeding to fill her in on mine and the commander's late-evening ascent of the Pozzetta headland a few nights earlier. The whole Rocco Quaranta angle. "Pricked Nuzzo's interest for a day or so. Seems to have given up now though."

"Maybe he's right Jim." Diane's voice had taken on a gently urging tone, the same someone might use to echo a doctor's advice that a friend give up smoking. "I mean, between you, you've done all that's humanly possible. Bracewell got away, simple as that. Sometimes you've no choice but to accept things. Let it go."

Like all detectives, my retirement had indeed been tinged by the frustration of unresolved mystery. The bloated corpse of a never-to-be-identified asiatic male spotted by a dogwalker along the banks of the Tees one grim, foggy morning. Jamie Holliston, the ten-year-old who went missing on his way to school; in the unlikely event he was still alive, he would be around twenty-five now. Cases that stay with you, images which will forever haunt. Not so many though perhaps, all things considered. No matter how long it might take, no matter how many wrong turns I made, I usually got to the bitter end of things. I was determined to do the same again now.

"I just think we might be close to understanding what really happened that night. That there's something we've been overlooking, that's all. A false assmption we've based our hypotheses on."

Diane knew better than to argue with me. After a sighed, resigned comment that I was worse than a dog with a bone, she proceeded to fill me in on the latest CID room gossip.

As she did so I found myself gazing up at the twin rows of grape bunches which stretched out in front of me, ever smaller, the end of the vines so distant my seated perspective made them disappear into the foliage. Healthy grapes, each bunch as heavy as a cow's udder, thick dripping jewels of a purple not far removed from black. Now having almost finished the pesticide respray, I'd been able to confirm with my own eyes what the ministry inspection team had concluded: that, somewhat miraculously, the fanleaf virus had been contained to the upper section past the outbuilding. What was more, the earlier bunch rot problem was more limited than I had feared; was of a level, in fact, which could be deemed desirable in terms of sweetness to the overall taste. Though my yield was significantly reduced, I at least felt confident that this would be an even more palatable vintage than last year's. Something, yes. At least I had this to cling to.