Sometimes I saw the delay as a sign that, despite their investigation of houses, boats and cars, the police had found nothing against me and would soon be forced to admit their mistake. At other less confident moments I saw the delay in more sinister terms. I imagined that somehow or another they had assembled a few miserable scraps of evidence against me and were simply waiting for the right moment to return. The uncertainty lurked in my gut, I couldn’t eat, I slept badly, yet on this morning, as each morning before it, I got into a company car and drove to Hartford as if life were perfectly normal. I had told George and the others about my arrest, I had made no bones about being under suspicion. I had even managed to make a thin joke about the possibility of being arrested again. They may have noticed how shaken I was, they may even have suspected that so far as my relationship with Sylvie was concerned there was unlikely to be smoke without fire, but on the face of it they refused to take the idea seriously and studiously avoided the subject, as if the outcome of the investigations was so much a foregone conclusion that it required no comment.
