“Your trouble, young lady,” Alice said, “you’re altogether too smart behind the ears.”
“It’s what comes of having such clever parents,” Kate replied.
Half out of her chair, Alice leaned sharply forwards, about to wipe the smile from her daughter’s face with the back of her hand. Kate stared back at her, daring her to do exactly that. Alice picked up her cup and saucer and left the room.
With a slow shake of his head, Skelton sighed.
“Did you have a good time last night?” Kate asked, this time as though she might have cared.
“It was all right, I suppose.”
“But not great?”
Skelton almost smiled. “Not great.”
“Neither was mine.”
“Your party?”
“All so boring and predictable. People getting drunk as fast as they were able, chucking up all over someone else’s floor.”
“Tom there?”
Tom was Kate’s latest, a student from the university, a bit of a highflier; in Skelton’s eyes a welcome change from the last love of her life, an unemployed goth who wore black from head to toe and claimed to be on quite good terms with the Devil.
“He was there for a bit.”
“You didn’t have a row?”
Kate shook her head. “He hates parties like that, says they’re all a bunch of immature wankers.”
Skelton managed to stop himself reacting to her choice of word; besides, it sounded as if Tom had got it pretty right. “Why on earth stay? Why not leave when he did?”
“Because he didn’t ask me. And besides, they’re my friends.”
The same friends, Skelton was thinking, you used to take E with at all-night raves.
“I hope you’re not expecting,” Kate said, “me to hang round here all day. I mean, just ’cause it’s Christmas.”
The day wore on in silent attrition. The turkey was dry on the outside, overcooked, pink, and tinged with blood close to the bone. Alice accomplished the moves from sherry to champagne to cherry brandy without breaking stride. Kate spent an hour in the bath, as long again on the phone, and then announced she was going out, not to wait up. As it was beginning to get dark Skelton appeared at the living-room door in his navy-blue track suit, new Asics running shoes.
“In training for something, Jack?” Alice asked, glancing up. “Running away?”
Before the front door had closed, she was back with her Barbara Vine.
When Skelton returned almost an hour later, Alice was sitting with the lights out, feet up, settee pulled close to the fire. She was smoking a cigarette, a liqueur glass nearby on the floor.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” Skelton asked.
“There was a call for you,” Alice said. “From the station.” And as he crossed the room. “Don’t hurry. It wasn’t from her.”
The pavement outside the police station was littered with broken glass. Crepe paper and tinsel hung, disconsolate, from nearby railings. In the waiting area, a young woman with half her ginger hair shaved to stubble and the remainder tightly plaited, was nursing a black mongrel dog bleeding from a badly cut ear.
“What’s this, the Humane Society all of a sudden?” Skelton said to the officer on desk duty.
“Every day except Christmas, sir.”
When Skelton went close to the dog it barked and showed its teeth.
Upstairs in his office, door to the CID room open, Resnick was talking to a well-built woman Skelton took to be in her early to mid-thirties. Friend of the girl who’d gone missing, he assumed. Not a bad looker in a blousy sort of a way. At opposite sides of the room, Lynn Kellogg and Kevin Naylor were on the phones.
“When you’ve a minute, Charlie,” Skelton called from the doorway, “all right?”
He was tipping ready-ground decaf into the gold filter of his new coffee machine when Resnick knocked and walked in.
“So, Charlie, where are we? Not throwing up panic signals too soon?”
Resnick waited until the superintendent had added the water, flipped the switch to on. New machine or no, he was thinking, it’ll still be too weak to stand. When Skelton was back behind his desk, Resnick took a seat himself and relayed Dana Matthieson’s concern over her flatmate, Nancy Phelan.
“That’s not the same woman involved in that incident yesterday? Phelan?”
“At the Housing Office, yes.”
“Threatened, wasn’t she?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“The man responsible …”
“Gary James, sir.”
“We released him.”
“Last night, yes.”
“No suggestion he might have been involved?”
Resnick shook his head. “Not as far as we know.”
“What happened at the Housing place, was it personal between them?”
“Not as far as we know.”
“We know damn all.”
“Very little, so far.”
Skelton crossed to the side of the room; the coffee had all but finished dripping through.
“Black, Charlie?”
“Thanks.” When the superintendent held up the glass pot of coffee, Resnick was alarmed: you could see right through it.
“You’ve got someone out having a word with him, James, all the same?”
“Not yet, sir.”
Skelton sat back down. “Boyfriend?” he asked.
“No one special, not at the moment. Not according to her flatmate. She gave us some names, though. We’ve started checking them out.”
“Family?”
“We’re in touch.”
Skelton squeezed the arms of his chair. He had never noticed before the way Alice’s eyes followed him from that photograph on his desk; carefully, with forefinger and thumb, he angled her away until all she could see was the blackening brick of the city beyond the window. “How long since anyone saw her last?”
“Nineteen hours, give or take.”
“Around midnight, then.”
“I think, sir,” Resnick said, reaching down to rest his coffee on the floor, “the last person to see her, so far as we know, it was likely me.”
He had the superintendent’s attention now, taking him through Nancy Phelan’s unscheduled visit to the station, his chance meeting with her later in the hotel courtyard, the engine ticking over just beyond the edge of his vision, the car.
“Make? Number?”
Resnick shook his head. “Saloon, four-door probably. Standard size and shape. Astra, something close.”
“Color?”
“Black, possibly. Certainly dark. Dark blue. Maroon.”
“Damn it, Charlie, there’s a lot of difference.”
“There wasn’t a lot of light.”
“I know, and you had no reason to pay special attention.”
Which doesn’t stop me, Resnick thought, from thinking that I should.
“We can’t be certain, presumably, the car was waiting for her?”
“No.”
“You didn’t see her get into it?”
“No.”
“So she could have been going back into the hotel?”
“It’s possible, but from what she said … I’d guess she was about to leave.”
Skelton leaned back, locked his fingers behind his head.
“If the car, any car, had gone past me,” Resnick said, “between there and the castle, I think I’d have noticed. But all he had to do was turn right instead of left, I’d never have seen him.”
“He?” Skelton said.
Elbows on his knees, Resnick brushed a hand across his forehead, closed his eyes.
Eleven
Dana Matthieson was sitting on the edge of a chair in Resnick’s office, trying to concentrate while he double-checked the names of people who had been at the dinner, the connections between them, making sure it had all been noted down. The door to the outer office was open a couple of inches, enough to let the overlapping conversations, occasional bursts of anger or laughter slide through. It was difficult not to keep thinking about Nancy, where she might be.
“This name here,” Resnick said, “Yvonne Warden …”
“Andrew’s assistant. She’d have the list of invitations, everything would go through her.”
“And Andrew is?”
“Andrew Clarke. The senior partner.”