Grafton allowed himself a quick smirk.
“Nevertheless,” Resnick said, “man with a record of violence, currently on probation, already subjected the missing woman to an actual assault, we wouldn’t be dropping him from our inquiries entirely. Would we?”
Grafton stared down at him through narrowed eyes.
“A watching brief, Charlie, your team.” Skelton was back on his feet, quick to intervene. “Not priority, though; that’s Nancy Phelan’s boyfriends, they’re down to you. Reg …”
“Here we bloody go!” stage-whispered Cossall
“… the guests at the hotel, if you please. Malcolm’s arranging for you to have some extra bodies.”
“Old ones he’s done with, is that, then?”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing, sir. You’re all right.”
As Skelton continued, Cossall leaned towards Resnick, talking behind the back of his hand. “Ever occur to you, Charlie, if any one of us was going home to his little semi of an evening, carving up corpses and stuffing ’em into plastic bags, our Malcolm up there’s your man?”
There had been fifty-seven guests at the dinner: Andrew Clarke’s assistant had provided the names, almost all of the addresses. Times of departure would be ascertained and, where possible, double-checked; modes of transport, makes and types of car. When was the last time that evening they remembered seeing Nancy Phelan? Where had that been? Who had she been with?
Once that had been done, answers compared and tabulated, leads and questions followed up, the lists, still slowly being compiled, of the hotel’s other clients would be waiting. Somewhere between three and four hundred in total-without casual callers at the bar.
Reg Cossall, extra bodies or no, was going to have his work cut out.
Resnick was in his office with Lynn Kellogg, Naylor, and Divine, looking at the names Dana Matthieson had supplied of the four men Nancy had recently been involved with. Patrick McAllister. Eric Capaldi. James Guillery. Robin Hidden. Divine had already talked to McAllister on the phone and was due to call on him that afternoon. Naylor had made contact with Guillery’s parents, who had informed him their son was on holiday in Italy, skiing, and wasn’t expected back until after the New Year. Eric Capaldi’s answerphone offered some blurry piano music and not a lot else. Robin Hidden had so far remained, well, hidden.
“It’s not possible,” Kevin Naylor said, “there’s others? I mean, that her flatmate didn’t know about?”
“As far as I know,” Dana had said. “This’s who she’d been seeing. The only ones she talked about, anyway.”
“You think there could have been someone else, then? That she never mentioned.”
“It’s always possible.”
“Was she secretive, though? Things like that?”
“Not specially. But, you know … there’s always somebody, isn’t there? Whatever reason, the one you won’t talk about, not even to your best friend.”
Is there? Resnick had thought.
And then-yes, of course.
Now, prompted by Naylor’s question, he thought of Andrew Clarke. Was that the kind of relationship Dana had been hinting at? Older, married, somebody where she worked?
“The receptionist from the Housing Office,” Resnick said.
“Penny Langridge,” Lynn read from her notes.
“Have a word with her, see if there was anything between Nancy Phelan and any of her colleagues, something she might not have wanted broadcast about.”
“Quick knee-trembler back of the typing pool,” Divine grinned. “That the sort of thing?”
Lynn shot him a quick angry look. Any other time, Resnick thought, she would have had a sharp remark to go with it. But now part of her mind was on other things.
The minute Resnick was alone in his office the phone rang: it was Graham Millington calling from his in-laws in Taunton, just this minute heard about the missing girl on the news and wondering if they could use him back at the station.
Fourteen
Graham Milllington had met his wife in the Ladies’ lavatory of Creek Road Primary School, a little after eleven in the morning and caught short in the middle of a talk to forty-seven ten-year-olds. Millington, not his wife.
One thing he hated above all others, worse than charging into the ruck of a Friday night bar-room fight with glass flying, barging into the Trent End on a Saturday afternoon to collar the smart-arse bastard who’s just felled the visiting goalie with a sharpened fifty-pence piece to the head, was standing in front of a class of kids in his best suit and behavior, lecturing them on the dangers of solvent abuse and underage drinking. Knowing sneers on their scrubbed little faces.
And this particular morning, fielding the usual sporadic questions about airplane glue and which brands set to work fastest, he was overcome by a sharp sudden pain deep behind his scrotum, an urgent message that he needed to pee.
“I wonder …” he stammered to the deputy headteacher, sitting at the corner table, filling out what suspiciously resembled a job application. “Could you …?”
The nature of Millington’s discomfort was clear for all to see.
“First right down the corridor, second left.”
Millington remembered it wrong, first right, first left instead. He was just easing himself through his fly, looking wildly for the appropriate stall, when, with a swift whoosh of water, Madeleine Johnstone stepped out from the cubicle in her bottle-green Laura Ashley dress, pale green tights, sensible shoes.
“Sorry, I …”
“Here,” Madeleine said, pushing open the cubicle door, “you’d better go in here.” And then, as he dived past her, slamming the door shut and fumbling the bolt across, “I’ll keep watch outside.”
Something wrong, she thought, out there in the corridor surrounded by all that project work on Third World hunger, a man of his age with problems of the prostate.
He had met her next in the Victoria Centre, Madeleine backing out of the Early Learning Centre, weighed down with plastic bags of presents for her sister with the twins, Millington whistling his way across to Thorntons, mind set on a quarter-pound of peppermint creams, maybe the odd Viennese Whirl.
“Sorry!” as he cannoned into her and a slew of carefully designed and educationally approved packages spilled around his feet.
He knew that she had recognized him by the way her eyes flickered downwards in the direction of his trousers, checking that he wasn’t flashing at her in artificially reproduced daylight.
Millington picked up a package of brightly colored balls (eighteen months to three years) and set it in her hand. She suggested tea and led him to the coffee bar in Next, where he perched uncomfortably on a black leather stool and ate a tea cake that tasted oddly of lemon.
“It’s because they use the same board,” Madeleine explained, “for making the salad and buttering those.”
The girl who served them was black and disdainful and her dark hair was curled like spun glass.
“She lovely, isn’t she?” Madeleine said, following Millington’s hopeless gaze.
Even Millington, perhaps not the most sensitive of men, understood this meant what about me? Look at me.
Madeleine was broad at the shoulders, narrow to the hips, good strong calves that suggested lots of schoolgirl hockey or netball or both. She had brown hair a few shades short of chestnut, a healthy down on her upper lip, eyes that were disconcertingly blue. A complexion like that, Millington wagered a week’s wages she came from somewhere south, Sussex or Kent or farther southwest, soft winds and cream.
Some detective, it had taken him till now to check the third finger of her left hand.
“They’re not for me, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Madeleine glanced at the bags by her feet “My sister. Twins. It runs in the family.”
Something inside Millington shuddered.
“It’s considered old-fashioned, nowadays, isn’t it?” Madeleine said. “For men to wear wedding rings.”