He told the jury that on the night of the 10th he had been so drunk he could only remember what had happened in little isolated snatches. He had gotten drunk that afternoon — ‘I took on a double helping of Dutch courage’ is how he put it — before taking on Linda.

After she left to meet Quentin, he remembered deciding to confront them. On the way to Quentin’s bungalow, he swung into the country club for a couple of quick ones. He could not, he said, remember telling the bartender he could ‘read about the rest of it in the papers’, or saying anything to him at all. He remembered buying beer in the Handy-Pik, but not the dishtowels. ‘Why would I want dishtowels?’ he asked, and one of the papers reported that three of the lady jurors shuddered.

Later, much later, he speculated to me about the clerk who had testified on the subject of those dishtowels, and I think it’s worth jotting down what he said. ‘Suppose that, during their canvass for witnesses,’ Andy said one day in the exercise yard, ‘they stumble on this fellow who sold me the beer that night. By then three days have gone by. The facts of the case have been broadsided in all the papers. Maybe they ganged up on the guy, five or six cops, plus the dick from the attorney general’s office, plus the DA’s assistant. Memory is a pretty subjective thing, Red. They could have started out with “Isn’t it possible that he purchased four or five dishtowels?” and worked their way up from there. If enough people want you to remember something, that can be a pretty powerful persuader.’

I agreed that it could.

‘But there’s one even more powerful,’ Andy went on in that musing way of his. ‘I think it’s at least possible that he convinced himself. It was the limelight. Reporters asking him questions, his picture in the papers … all topped, of course, by his star turn in court. I’m not saying that he deliberately falsified his story, or perjured himself. I think it’s possible that lie could have passed a lie detector test with flying colours, or sworn on his mother’s sacred name that I bought those dishtowels. But still … memory is such a goddam subjective thing.

‘I know this much: even though my own lawyer thought I had to be lying about half my story, he never bought that business about the dishtowels. It’s crazy on the face of it. I was pig-drunk, too drunk to have been thinking about muffling the gunshots. If I’d done it, I just would have let them rip.’

He went up to the turnout and parked there. He drank beer and smoked cigarettes. He watched the lights downstairs in Quentin’s place go out. He watched a single light go on upstairs … and fifteen minutes later he watched that one go out. He said he could guess the rest.

‘Mr Dufresne, did you then go up to Glenn Quentin’s house and kill the two of them?’ his lawyer thundered.

‘No, I did not,’ Andy answered. By midnight, he said, he was sobering up. He was also feeling the first signs of a bad hangover. He decided to go home and sleep it off and think about the whole thing in a more adult fashion the next day. ‘At that time, as I drove home, I was beginning to think that the wisest course would be to simply let her go to Reno and get her divorce.’

‘Thank you, Mr Dufresne.’

The DA popped up.

‘You divorced her in the quickest way you could think of, didn’t you? You divorced her with a .38 revolver wrapped in dishtowels, didn’t you?’

‘No sir, I did not,’ Andy said calmly.

‘And then you shot her lover.’

‘No, sir.’

‘You mean you shot Quentin first?’

‘I mean I didn’t shoot either one of them. I drank two quarts of beer and smoked however many cigarettes that the police found at the turnout. Then I drove home and went to bed.’

‘You told the jury that between 24 August and 10 September, you were feeling suicidal.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Suicidal enough to buy a revolver.’

‘Yes.’

‘Would it bother you overmuch, Mr Dufresne, if I told you that you do not seem to me to be the suicidal type?’

‘No,’ Andy said, ‘but you don’t impress me as being terribly sensitive, and I doubt very much that, if I were feeling suicidal, I would take my problem to you.’

There was a slight tense titter in the courtroom at this, but it won him no points with the jury.

‘Did you take your .38 with you on the night of September?’

‘No; as I’ve already testified —’

‘Oh, yes!’ The DA smiled sarcastically. ‘You threw it into the river, didn’t you? The Royal River. On the afternoon of 9 September.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘One day before the murders.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘That’s convenient, isn’t it?’

‘It’s neither convenient nor inconvenient. Only the truth.’

‘I believe you heard Lieutenant Mincher’s testimony?’ Mincher had been in charge of the party which had dragged the stretch of the Royal near Pond Bridge, from which Andy had testified he had thrown the gun. The police had not found it. ‘Yes, sir. You know I heard it.’

Then you heard him testify that they found no gun, although they dragged for three days. That was rather convenient, too, wasn’t it?’

‘Convenience aside, it’s a fact that they didn’t find the gun,’ Andy responded calmly. ‘But I should like to point out to both you and the jury that the Pond Road Bridge is very close to where the Royal River empties into the Bay of Yarmouth. The current is strong. The gun may have been carried out into the bay itself.’

‘And so no comparison can be made between the riflings on the bullets taken from the bloodstained corpses of your wife and Mr Glenn Quentin and the riflings on the barrel of your gun. That’s correct, isn’t it, Mr Dufresne?’

‘Yes.’

That’s also rather convenient, isn’t it?’

At that, according to the papers, Andy displayed one of the few slight emotional reactions he allowed himself during the entire six-week period of the trial. A slight, bitter smile crossed his face.

‘Since I am innocent of this crime, sir, and since I am telling the truth about throwing my gun into the river the day before the crime took place, then it seems to me decidedly inconvenient that the gun was never found.’

The DA hammered at him for two days. He re-read the Handy-Pik clerk’s testimony about the dishtowels to Andy. Andy repeated that he could not recall buying them, but admitted that he also couldn’t remember not buying them.

Was it true that Andy and Linda Dufresne had taken out a joint insurance policy in early 1947? Yes, that was true. And if acquitted, wasn’t it true that Andy stood to gain $50,000 in benefits? True. And wasn’t it true that he had gone up to Glenn Quentin’s house with murder in his heart, and wasn’t it also true that he had indeed committed murder twice over? No, it was not true. Then what did he think had happened, since there had been no signs of robbery?

‘I have no way of knowing that, sir,’ Andy said quietly.

The case went to the jury at one p.m. on a snowy Wednesday afternoon. The twelve jurymen and women came back at three-thirty. The bailiff said they would have been back earlier, but they had held off in order to enjoy a nice chicken dinner from Bentley’s Restaurant at the county’s expense. They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring’s crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.

The DA had asked him what he thought had happened, and Andy slipped the question — but he did have an idea, and I got it out of him late one evening in 1955. It had taken those seven years for us to progress from nodding acquaintances to fairly close friends — but I never felt really close to Andy until 1960 or so, and I believe I was the only one who ever did get really close to him. Both being long-timers, we were in the same cellblock from beginning to end, although I was halfway down the corridor from him.

‘What do I think?’ He laughed — but there was no humour in the sound. ‘I think there was a lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could ever get together in the same short span of time again. I think it must have been some stranger, just passing through. Maybe someone who had a flat tyre on that road after I went home. Maybe a burglar. Maybe a psychopath. He killed them, that’s all. And I’m here.’