Hardy looked down, hating this. ‘I believe you, Jane, I said I believed you.’

She pulled the bureau chair out and sat back down, crying again, silently, wiping at her eyes with a Kleenex. Hardy got up off the bed and left the room.

He told Andy they had to get together the next day to go over his testimony. They made an appointment for noon, and then Hardy left him to comfort his daughter.

He had written Frannie a note saying he would probably be gone all day and she had left one for him – she was at her late ex-husband’s mother’s, Rebecca’s grandmother’s, house, and would be back by six. She hoped to see him then.

He went to his office and threw darts for twenty minutes, now and then glancing at the window to watch the rain drop out of the gray.

This was the time he was supposed to be gearing up for his defense, for the legal battle between him and Pullios on the interpretation of the evidence that Andy Fowler had allegedly killed Owen Nash. But Hardy felt that somehow the essence was being lost. It reminded him of his high-school debates where he would argue both sides of something, sometimes three or four times, in the same afternoon. As though there was no correct answer.

Oh, and he knew it was the fashion, had been since he had gone to college – don’t make value judgments. Relativity was king. There was no absolute truth. But, like it or not, he had grown up to believe that there was truth, that right differed fundamentally from wrong.

And what he was supposed to do on Monday was continue the debate. He knew that. He would call Abe Glitsky and Art Drysdale, and possibly José, as witnesses, and wind up with Andy testifying on his own behalf. He had been preparing his summation almost since the trial had begun.

The problem was that now, so far as he could sort it out, little of what really had happened had found its way into this trial, the supposed crucible of truth.

On the one hand he didn’t want to divert his attention away from his defense of Andy – he knew he should be sitting at his desk, outlining, writing key phrases and arguments to win over the jury. But the other side of him felt that now that he was satisfied that he knew what had happened he should pursue that truth singlemindedly. Only that pursuit could take Andy Fowler’s fate out of the hands of the jury, remove it from debate.

The only thing that would ultimately clear his client was an alternate explanation of events. But the time he spent on that took away from his formal defense at trial.

He threw darts.

The inventories were no help. They listed sweatbands taken from the drawers in the desks next to the bed, some weight-lifting gloves, leg warmers. Switching back to his formal trial preparation, Hardy pulled his legal pad in front of him. Should he call José as a witness and introduce everything he had found this morning? He wrote it down, looked at it and realized that nothing he had found out proved that Andy had not been on the boat Thursday morning. Prove a negative…

What about the significance and believability of the gun in the drawer? He could call Pullios and Chomorro right now and say that he, personally, had discovered a crucial bit of evidence that would demand a retrial because he could not be a witness for his own client. He would testify that the gun had not been in the drawer on Wednesday night. But proving it to a new jury would, again, be difficult. It was still possible, he had to admit, that the gun had slid forward or backward with every opening of the drawer. He could simply have overlooked it – missed it in his haste. And even if he did establish the gun’s absence, did that necessarily mean the prosecution would have the burden of proving that Andy Fowler had somehow acquired a key to the Eloise? Playing Glitsky, he came up with five reasons in five minutes why they wouldn’t.

He got up and fed his fish. He knew what he knew -the gun had been brought back to the Eloise on Thursday morning by the jealous woman who had killed her past lover, Owen Nash. She had done it to get it out of her own possession and to shift the blame to May, and on both counts the strategy had worked.

He had to hit and hit again the fact that the burden of proof was always on the prosecution. They had to prove Fowler had killed Nash – it wasn’t Hardy’s job to prove he hadn’t. What he had to do was keep the jury clear on that point. Pullios had to prove Andy’s guilt. Even if the jury thought Andy was guilty of something to some degree, he had to make the point to the jury that they weren’t to determine whether or not Andy was innocent, but rather whether the prosecution, by the evidence presented, had proved him guilty. And if not, then -although he might not be innocent – he was legally not guilty.

Innocent did not mean exactly the same thing as not guilty. It was, in this case, a crucial distinction.

Back at his desk, he pushed some buttons, then exchanged a few words with Ken Farris about the terrible weather. ‘You still at it?’ Farris asked.

‘No rest for the weary,’ Hardy said. ‘A point occurs to me, if you don’t mind helping the defense.’

‘I can go half a yard,’ Farris said, ‘though I’d prefer not to think of it as assisting the defense.’ He paused briefly. ‘Dismas, let me ask you something -I get a feeling this is more than just a job for you. You don’t think Fowler did it, do you? You wouldn’t do this as an exercise in the law.’

Hardy had been through it all before. ‘Fowler didn’t do it,’ he said. ‘I’m also trying to find out who did.’

A pause, then, ‘Why do they keep putting us through this? Getting the wrong people?’

Hardy knew it was a long story – Nash’s fame, Pullios’s ambition, Fowler’s duplicity. Suspicion and prejudice and all of the above. But Farris had asked it rhetorically and Hardy passed it by. ‘Did Owen give the key to the Eloise to any of his girlfriends?’ he asked.

‘I doubt it. The Eloise was his baby, you know. He’d have people aboard, but not without him.’

‘Did he have any other long-standing girlfriends, mistresses, whatever – besides May?’ He had to, Hardy was thinking.

‘A few weeks, once in a while a month, that was about it. He paid them off, they went their way.’

‘Do you remember him talking about any of them being bitter, angry, rejected, anything at all like that?’

‘No. I’m sorry, but there just wasn’t that much made of it, or, I should say, them. They came and went like the seasons.’ He laughed dryly. ‘No, scratch that, more like the courses of a meal. That was the big difference with May – she was around awhile.’

‘And no one else was?’

‘No. Except Celine, of course.’

Hardy sat riveted to his chair. He felt the blood draining out of his face. The rain beat on his window. Darkness was settling in. ‘Did Celine have a key to the Eloise?’ he asked, keeping his voice calm.

‘Hey, I was kidding about that. Really, a bad joke.’

‘Does she have a key?’

‘Well, I think she does, she used to. But she didn’t -’

‘I know that.’ Hardy forced himself to slow down, to speak calmly. ‘Just another something to think about. Keeping track of these keys, that’s all. But do me a favor, would you?’

‘Sure.’

‘She’s mad enough at me about all this, defending the man on trial for her father’s murder. Would you try not to mention this key business to her if you see her?’

‘Yeah, okay, no problem.’

When he hung up, he didn’t move for several minutes.

The house wasn’t there, nor was his office, nor the rain, nor the darkness outside.

The night Celine had come by for the first time she had quickly left after seeing him in his green jogging suit, the same kind Owen Nash had been wearing on the day he had been shot. Was seeing him like seeing her father’s ghost? She’d reacted, at least for a moment, as though she had… ‘You just suddenly reminded me so much of my father…’