“The charges were eventually dropped?”
“Yes, but by then, the investigation had dragged on, and Daddy had been in prison for three or four months. He lost friends; he lost his job. When he got out, he was a crushed man. He drank more heavily than he ever had and ate almost nothing. I saw him lose kilos by the day and wither away. In 1960 he committed suicide by hanging.”
In the gloomy room, Dawson could see Sarbah’s eyes moisten and swell. “I’m very sorry to hear that, sir.”
“In effect,” Sarbah said morosely, “the accusation, the imprisonment, the disgrace all slowly tortured him to death, and I blame Simon for it because he falsely accused Daddy.”
“Could it be that he did see someone in the room whom he misidentified?”
“No,” Sarbah said, his jaw set like stone. “He deliberately made it up.”
“Why would a boy make up a story like that?” Dawson asked.
“Spite,” Sarbah snapped, as though the word was poison he had to disgorge. “He was a malevolent child who hated me and hated my father, not the least because R.E. had a running tirade against Tiberius that he let his children hear and breathe day in, day out.”
In his mind, Dawson wondered instead whether Simon might have blurted Tiberius’s name under suggestive police questioning. Tiberius was probably a fairly strong suspect at the time, given the public displays of antagonism between him and R.E. Sometimes a frightened child says what he thinks adults want to hear. Apart from that, Dawson knew of many cases in which one detective, particularly the most senior on the team, pressures his junior officers to focus on a particular suspect and either get a confession or a solid accusatory statement from an eyewitness.
“The murder was never solved?” he asked Sarbah.
“Never,” he said, shaking his head slowly in sad disgust.
“Who then took care of you and your half brothers?”
“We were split up between R.E.’s siblings-I went to a sister of his, and Simon and Cecil went to a brother.”
“What was your experience like with your step-aunt?”
Sarbah curled his lip. “I hated it. She treated me as if I wasn’t there.”
“Did you see your half siblings much after that?”
“Yes, but we didn’t speak.”
Dawson reflected for a while on this man’s joyless life ridden with trauma, death, and neglect. No wonder he was angry. The question was whether he was angry enough to kill.
Sarbah stood up and went to the sideboard in his dining area and removed two framed photographs from the top of it.
