After he’d identified Ewan’s body at three in the afternoon, Seb knew he was incapable of saying much that would make sense to the police.
He was also at risk of making an absurd statement. So he remained silent during the drive from the hospital to the police station. And during the journey, he attempted to thaw his mind from shock, in order to process the enormity of Ewan now being dead, as well as the implications for him.
The detective then left him alone in an interview room to nurse a mug of instant coffee that went cold between his limp hands. He hadn’t been arrested and wasn’t in custody, but in the small region of his mind able to function, after seeing Ewan’s corpse in a hospital morgue, he couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t a suspect.
Even now, the police might be watching him via the camera fixed beneath the ceiling, in one corner of the room. Wouldn’t they be adept through mere observation alone, at determining guilt or innocence?
What he had been told, but still struggled to accept, was that Ewan had died sometime during the night before. He had died at a guest house in Paignton, near the seafront, and inside a locked room.
The front door to the guest house had been closed and mortise-locked at ten p.m. The proprietors, an elderly married couple, had seen no one enter the building after ten p.m. The detective had shared that much with Seb after arriving at his hotel, at noon. While Seb had lingered and shivered up on Berry Head, too scared to go home, Ewan must have collected his bags from the house and made his way to Paignton.
There had been a disagreement too, between Ewan and the proprietors of the guest house, about payment owed on a room, which Ewan promised to settle later. After that, Ewan had apparently locked himself inside the same room he’d occupied for the fortnight preceding his brief stay with Seb.
Inside the single room, which he never left, Ewan had begun drinking. The owners of the B&B had heard the clink of cans inside one of his bags as he’d come in that morning. He’d died in the night. Six empty cider cans were found in the morning. So Ewan had been getting his load on. As had Seb, but across the bay in Torquay, and in far more comfortable surroundings and without the assistance of cheap cider. He’d supped half a bottle of Courvoisier to get through his own night.
There had then been a brief disturbance around three in the morning from inside Ewan’s room: ‘Cries for help. That sort of thing.’ The detective hadn’t shared much more. But for Seb, that small detail had been sufficient for him to form his own ideas about what had transpired behind drawn curtains. He never shared his theory with the detective. Though, God knew, he was tempted.
From the moment Seb met DCI Brian Leon, the police officer’s tone and mood had issued a weary acceptance concerning Ewan’s demise. He’d also seemed indifferent to the possibility of foul play. The sounds that Ewan, presumably, had made during the night in his room at the guest house were short and never repeated: ‘A quick scream. That kind of thing. Two or three, then silence. Quite upsetting for the old couple who own the place.’
Unable to summon any response from Ewan, the owners of the guest house had let themselves into Ewan’s room at nine and found him dead. ‘Beside the bed and under the window, with his arms still reaching out, like he’d been trying to get the window open. He’d pulled the curtains down on one side.’
At that point in the detective’s recitation of the details, Seb wasted no time informing Detective Leon about Ewan’s epilepsy, and of the fit that he had witnessed inside his own home. He’d also swiftly attested to drunkenness being the probable state during Ewan’s last night alive. After all, Ewan’s sounds of distress could be attributable to someone suffering a bad turn while drunk, and the guest house owners were also certain that Ewan had spent the night alone.
After the proprietor of the guest house had called an ambulance, the immediate clues to Ewan’s death were apparent to the first paramedics on the scene. As far as they, and then a doctor at the Torbay hospital were concerned, Ewan had died of heart failure. The doctor added a footnote that the cardiac arrest may have been triggered by shock, though this assumption pended further examination.