A year later, there was still no explanation.
Colin Kerr spoke now. Not expansively, and seldom about anything that interested the police, but enough to make his former silence seem stranger rather than less so. He talked to his family. He complained about food. He had resumed running under supervision, first in tedious circuits of the hospital grounds and later on a treadmill. His doctors called this progress.
He never explained Steve Penderhurst.
He never mentioned Ben Macklin again.
David had researched the name, of course. There wasn't much to find, although what existed was suggestive in the irritating way of facts which refused to become evidence.
Macklin had once been Steve's business partner. Their company had done reasonably well until the partnership ended badly, with Macklin receiving considerably less than he believed himself entitled to. Steve had possessed the better lawyers and, apparently, the better reading of the agreements. There had been talk of litigation which went nowhere. Former colleagues remembered Macklin as furious. One described him as apoplectic. Another said simply that he had never been the same afterwards.
Steve, meanwhile, started another company and prospered.
David understood that part.
The rest was foggier. Macklin had apparently dropped out of everything, and developed an interest in the occult. There were references to Satanism, although David could never establish whether this represented religion, philosophy, provocation or merely the retrospective embroidery people applied to somebody once he became interesting. An old photograph showed Macklin among a group of solemn-looking people dressed mostly in black.
There was no evidence Macklin had ever met Colin Kerr.
David had no recollection of ever meeting Macklin.
Then Macklin developed cancer. Treatment continued for years. Eventually, one morning, he died.
About an hour later, Colin Kerr began speaking.
Ben Macklin is dead.
After three years of silence.
David occasionally returned to the material, usually late at night, but he had stopped expecting it to yield anything. There was nothing to solve. Macklin was dead. Steve was dead. Colin remembered nothing he was prepared or able to explain.
And David had his own unreliable contribution.
He still remembered the first accident.
That memory had survived police interviews, courtrooms, alcohol calculations, psychiatric explanations and the steady erosion of time. He no longer trusted it. He wasn't an idiot. Memory was reconstructive; shock distorted perception; darkness did the rest. Darkness in May? Yes, Steve inexplicably leaving late that day when David happened to be driving by.
David remembered.
Steve had been at the side of the road.
Not approaching it. Not halfway across. At the side.
David remembered seeing him there as the crossing came towards him. He remembered knowing there was no need to stop because Steve hadn't begun to cross.
Then the impact.
A heavy concussion through the front of the car. The terrible, unmistakable sound of having struck something substantial.
Even then, for perhaps a second, David hadn't thought of Steve.
How could it be Steve?
Steve was over there.
That remained the strangest part. Not the collision itself, nor the police arriving, nor the ambulance. His strongest memory was what came immediately afterwards: stopping the car, turning, looking back—
and seeing Steve Penderhurst lying injured in the road.
David remembered the surprise.
Not horror at first.
Surprise.
Because Steve wasn't supposed to be there.
Years later, David could still summon the other image more easily than the real one: Steve standing safely at the side of the crossing, waiting for him to pass.
There were explanations for that.
There were explanations for almost everything.
Nobody ever established how Colin Kerr knew Ben Macklin was dead.
After a while, people stopped asking.