Chapter Four — Seacroft

Keith Pennington lived alone.

There was something oppressive about the house when Salters first saw it, although there was nothing visibly wrong with it. It was an ordinary house on an ordinary street in Seacroft, and yet the absence of ordinary domestic disorder seemed almost unnatural. The curtains were drawn. The garden was neat. There were no children's toys, no bicycles, no discarded shoes beside the door, none of those small indications by which a house announces that people live within it.

Pennington opened the door after the second knock.

He was a thin man with grey hair and an expression of mild surprise which Salters immediately distrusted, not because it seemed false, but because it seemed practised.

"Mr Pennington?"

"Yes."

"My name is Frank Salters."

Pennington looked at him for several seconds.

"I wondered when somebody would come."

Salters did not move.

"Why?"

Pennington smiled faintly.

"Because Daniel Mercer is dead."

There was silence between them.

The rain was still falling.

Salters looked beyond Pennington into the house.

"May I come in?"

Pennington stepped aside.

The interior was warm, clean and almost completely without personality.

Salters walked into the sitting room.

There was a fireplace, two chairs, a table, several books and a clock upon the mantel.

The clock had stopped.

Salters looked at it.

"Does that work?"

Pennington followed his gaze.

"Sometimes."

"Sometimes?"

"It loses time."

Salters approached it.

"What time does it show?"

"Eleven eighteen."

"How long has it been stopped?"

Pennington shrugged.

"I don't know."

Salters looked at him.

"Do you often forget things?"

Pennington's expression changed.

Only slightly.

But Salters saw it.

"No," he said.

And Salters knew, with the peculiar certainty that sometimes comes before proof, that Keith Pennington had just lied.