Chapter Two — Frank Salters

Frank Salters had never liked murder scenes.

This was not because they frightened him, as one young detective had once suggested, nor because he possessed some morbid fascination with them, as another had rather unfairly concluded, but because a murder scene was almost always a lie. The dead man told the truth, certainly, but he told it in a language nobody immediately understood, while the living, whether through fear, vanity, guilt or simple confusion, filled the surrounding darkness with explanations which had to be stripped away one by one before anything resembling reality could be seen.

Salters arrived shortly after one o'clock and stood for several minutes beneath the rain without approaching the body. He was a tall, somewhat stooped man in his fifties, with a face which appeared permanently tired and eyes which had the unsettling habit of remaining fixed upon things long after other people had ceased to look at them. He listened while the uniformed officer gave him the preliminary account, but his attention was elsewhere. He was looking at the pavement.

The officer finished.

"Robbery appears to be the obvious possibility."

Salters turned slowly towards him.

"Does it?"

The officer hesitated.

"His belongings are still here."

"Exactly."

"Then perhaps it wasn't robbery."

Salters continued looking at the body.

"Perhaps."

He walked forward at last.

Mercer was lying partly on his side, one arm beneath him and the other stretched awkwardly across the wet pavement. His coat was soaked, but not uniformly. Salters crouched beside him, careful not to disturb anything, and studied the man's shoes. There was mud upon the left heel, but almost none upon the right. The soles were wet, although the upper portion of the leather had been protected from the rain more than it should have been.

Salters frowned.

He looked at the wall.

Then at the pavement.

Then at the body again.

It was a habit of his, this movement between objects, because Salters believed that things became comprehensible only in relation to one another. A shoe meant little. A wet pavement meant little. A dead man meant very little until the three were considered together.

He reached into his coat for a notebook.

"Who found him?"

"Taxi driver."

"Where is he?"

"With the officers."

"Get his statement, but don't ask him leading questions."

The officer looked puzzled.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean don't tell him what he saw."

Salters stood.

"People are remarkably willing to remember things they have never actually seen."

He looked once more towards the body.

Then he noticed the man's right hand.

Something pale was protruding slightly from the sleeve.

Paper.

Salters bent down and examined it without touching.

"Photograph that before removing it."

The officer called for the photographer.

Salters stepped away.

The rain continued falling.

Beyond the passage, Leeds carried on with its nocturnal existence, indifferent to the dead man lying in the darkness. Somewhere in the distance a bus moved along the Headrow, its windows illuminated like a floating room, and from farther away still came the low, continuous rumble of the railway.

Salters listened to it.

He had the strange feeling that the city had begun speaking.