‘When you got no answer, you went in?’
‘I went in and I found her.’ He nodded, dropping his eyes to the paper before him. He smoothed out the pages with his palms, chewing on his bottom lip. ‘Yep.’
‘You performed CPR?’ I said, unmoved by the tears springing to his eyes, having watched literally hundreds of suspects across my policing career crying crocodile tears. ‘And you called an ambulance?’
‘And the police, yep.’
‘What did the other guests do?’
‘The guy, the electrician’—Rob drew a long breath—‘he’d heard the knocking. He came and saw briefly what was going on, but then he left. Think it was all a bit much for him. The smell of the blood was really powerful. You could taste it in the air. The young couple, they just went out when they got up. The old couple got up, but they cleared out pretty quickly as well. They never came and looked in. They saw there was some kind of drama, I think, and stayed away.’
‘You were the only person on the floor that morning who went into the room between discovering the body and seeing the paramedics in?’
‘Yes.’
‘The blood in the carpet,’ I said. ‘Was it wet or was it dry?’
Rob looked at me. The emotion fell from his face as he tried to remember. ‘Dry, I guess.’
‘You guess?’
‘I suppose you could find out for sure,’ Rob said. ‘I mean, I was kneeling down beside her. If it was wet, it would be on the knees of my pants. And on my shoes and stuff.’
I stood looking at the little publican, waiting for him to fill the agonising silence with more, but he was so tangled up in the memory of what had happened that he just sat there looking right through the centre of my chest, as though he could see out the other side. I snapped him out of it by saying, ‘You’re going to open the pub tonight.’
He squinted up at me. ‘I am?’
‘Yes.’
‘Won’t that seem sort of … insensitive?’
‘I care as much about how it seems, Mr Winter, as I do about what cat litter costs in Kazakhstan. I want a big crowd of locals down here mingling and talking about the crime. Spreading rumours and innuendo, pointing fingers and getting loose lipped. Call it a vigil, if you want. Say you’ll give every dollar of the takings to Chloe’s family. I don’t care. Just don’t say it was me asking you to open the place up.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because then it’ll look like what it is,’ I said. ‘A fishing expedition.’
Rob put his hands in his pockets, took them out again, rubbed his mouth. ‘This is a small town, detective. A person’s standing is important around here. I don’t want people thinking I’ve used a girl’s murder as … as a promotional activity for my business.’
‘Get over yourself, Mr Winter,’ I said. ‘How good can your reputation around here be if you’re not the sort of person who’d sacrifice it in a heartbeat to aid police in catching a killer?’
Rob thought about that. Thought hard, trying to unpick the tangled logic, to figure out if doing a seemingly terrible but actually good thing made him a good or bad person. I left him to work on giving himself a headache and went out into the day.
I knew Bridie was at my elbow by the smell of her: watermelon shampoo and freshly washed linen. I struggled again not to put an arm around her neck and draw her near to me, instead finishing off my update to Gail Caplan while she waited patiently nearby. My watch said 2 p.m.
‘Sorry to bother you.’
‘You couldn’t bother me if you tried, Birds.’ I put the phone away. ‘What’s up?’
‘Do you know where we’re staying tonight?’
‘No idea.’ I rubbed my forehead. ‘I haven’t thought that far ahead.’
‘That’s cool.’
‘You’re probably bored out of your mind,’ I said. ‘And you’ve got nowhere to chill out. You’re supposed to be getting yourself settled into the room I made for you at my apartment.’
‘I have my own room?’
