'Depends.'
'I worked with you.'
She laughed again, more open this time. 'That was easy, Frank. You scarcely thought of me as a woman at all.'
Joanne, when he spoke to her, was taciturn, distracted, her mind elsewhere.
'How's Katherine?'
'Oh, you know, much the same.'
'I don't suppose she's there?'
He could hear voices, muffled, Joanne with her hand, he imagined, not quite covering the phone.
'No, Frank, I'm sorry, no.'
Which, in the circumstances, probably meant yes. Joanne currying favour. He didn't push it.
They exchanged a few words about Christmas, Joanne's plans for New Year's Eve, and that was that. As soon as the call was over, suddenly hungry, Elder made himself bacon and eggs, slices of soft white bread buttered and folded over, more coffee. Switching on the radio, he worked his way through the pre-sets: a low rumble from down near the bootstraps which the DJ informed him came from the late, great Johnny Cash; something languidly classical; someone with a faint Scottish accent explaining the intricacies of European Union budgeting; fevered commentary on Coventry versus West Ham; a jolt of violent, acerbic sound, like the contents of an old-fashioned kitchen being demolished around someone playing electric guitar – the thrash metal he'd read about somewhere?
Opting for the orchestral concert, he angled his legs round on the settee. Maddy's killer: had she known him or had she been taken by surprise? Opening the envelope, he looked at the photographs of the wounds. Vicious and deep. Vicious and yet whoever had delivered them had retained a degree of control, of calm; calm enough not to have left any apparent clues, to have taken scrupulous care. Controlled anger: anger and control.
Training, then?
Elder closed his eyes.
Army? SAS?
Under the wash of music, he drifted off.
All that coffee, he thought, waking fifteen minutes later to the sound of the announcer's voice and bright applause, how could I fall asleep?
He tried the TV. On one channel, a disparate group of men and women were clambering their way, laboriously, through the jungle; on another, the same people, or others that looked just like them, were sitting around on settees, not speaking, doing nothing at all. So easy to switch off.
The volume of traffic had eased back. High up where he was, he could see the strange, muted glow thrown up by the city, a false, unchanging day for night. Back down in Cornwall the sky would be close to black and scored through with stars, Cassiopeia, Pegasus, the Plough.
He pictured Maddy walking – running? – though a dark space he had not yet seen, except in photographs. The movement of branches in the wind. Foxes following a trail across back gardens; the cry, unworldly, of cats on heat. Clouds across the moon.
Something moving in the thickets of shrub and bush down by the old railway line.
A voice.
Did he call out?
Maddy. Her name.
Trying to conjure up her face as she turned towards the sound, Elder could only see her eyes picked out green in the shadow of the cathedral light, her mouth broadening into a smile and then closing round his in a kiss.
You didn't have her, Frank. Just wanted to… But somehow you let her get stuck inside your head.
Freeing the cord from the hook around which it had been looped, Elder lowered the blind. Another small whiskey before turning in. The sheets unwelcoming and cold. After catnapping as he had, he thought it would be hard to get to sleep, but not so. A few small shifts of position and the next thing he knew he was stretching awake by habit, the hands on his watch showing six o'clock.
17
Shaded green, the narrow swathe of designated parkland stretched west to east across page 29 in the London A-Z, Highgate towards Stroud Green and beyond. The best approach to the particular section he wanted was unclear from the map and Elder drove into a crescent off the main road and parked between a crowded skip and a long-abandoned Nissan with its windows smashed and the engine half-removed. From there, following a sign, he walked along a narrow alley between houses, bypassing both a discarded fridge and a dismembered supermarket trolley, before finding himself on a track leading to a two-storey wooden building he assumed to be the community centre.
Broadening out, the path led towards a children's ' nursery on the right, a five-a-side pitch and play centre further along; a fence, broken down in several places, separated it from the slope, tangled and overgrown, that angled steeply towards the muddy track below.
Elder stood quite still, tuning out, as best he could, the faint morning discord from the nearby flats, the traffic sounds from either side. Some twenty metres off, a female blackbird scuffled through dry leaves, before flying shrilly away into the far trees. The sky was a watery blue, shaded over, here and there, with grey. Elder could see his breath, off-white, on the air.
She had walked here, Maddy; stopped for a moment, alerted by a sound.
Or, jogging, had she paused and bent forward, hands on hips, catching her breath?
Elder turned through a slow circle: how close, even at night, could someone get without being heard or seen?
In his imagination, he saw a shadow stepping silently out of the dark.
Why didn't Maddy run? And if she did, why, fit and strong as she was, did she not get away?
Because she knew him, surely.
Close. Her breath upon his face. Laughing, as they stumbled out from the doorway on to the cobbled street. Did she take his hand or slip her arm through his?
Carefully, Elder made his way down towards the old railway track, while above him, whistling cheerfully, a man pushed a buggy containing a well-wrapped toddler towards the nursery. Walking briskly, a woman appeared with her dog and then, as quickly, disappeared. From the reports he had read, the diagrams, Maddy had been attacked above and then been pushed or fallen, the last, fatal blows most likely delivered close by where he now stood.
In all probability, her assailant had continued to stab her after she was dead. No weapon found. Remembering the severity and extent of the wounds, Elder saw him wiping the excess of blood off upon the grass, the ground.
How long had it taken?
How long?
Longer, possibly, to have cleared away all telltale traces than to have committed the crime itself.
How long had it been before someone else had come along, stopped perhaps, thinking they had heard something, and looked down, but, seeing nothing, continued on their way?
And the murderer, which way had he gone?
To the east, the track ran on below Crouch Hill and all the way, almost, to Finsbury Park, a myriad of small side roads with easy access leading off on either side; westwards, it opened out on to Shepherd's Hill, adjacent to the main road leading north towards the motorway. A car conveniently parked. Light traffic flow. Maddy's killer could have been tucked up by midnight, leaving her body to the elements, the foxes and the rodents, small insects, crows.
Elder saw again the post-mortem photographs of her face, the wounds, open, not quite scabbed over, to her torso and along the insides of her arms.
Climbing back up, Elder raised the collar of his coat against the freshness of the wind; mud clung to the cuffs of his trousers, the soles of his shoes.
Back in the street where he had parked, a pair of thirteen-year-olds was considering the possibility of liberating the Astra's radio; seeing Elder approaching, they spat thoughtfully at the ground and strolled, hands in pockets, nonchalantly away.
Off duty, Vanessa was wearing a denim skirt and black woollen tights, calf-length reddish leather boots, a denim jacket over a high-necked purple sweater that seemed to have shrunk in the wash. Her dark hair was curly and closely framed her face; her lipstick, newly applied, was a vivid shade of red.