“Robin,” Resnick had said, his voice reasonable, soothing, “no one’s accusing you of lying, deliberately lying. We know this has been a difficult time for you, emotionally. What was happening, the rejection, you were bound to be upset. After all, this was somebody you loved and who you thought had loved you. Any of us would find that hard to cope with, hard to handle. And there you’d been, driving round all evening, desperate to see her, going over all the things you wanted to say inside your head. And then, suddenly, there she was.”
Resnick had held his moment; waited until Robin Hidden was looking back into his eyes. “Like I say, we’d any of us, situation like that, we’d find it hard to know how to react. Hard to remember, afterwards, exactly what we did or said.”
Hidden’s head went down. It wasn’t clear whether or not he was crying.
David Welch had leaned forward from the edge of his chair. “I think my client …”
“Not now,” Millington had said quietly.
“My client …”
“Not,” repeated Millington, “now.”
And not for one moment did Resnick allow his gaze to shift away, waiting for Robin Hidden’s head to come back up, blinking at him through a gauze of tears. “She t-told me,” he said, “she thought I was being s-st-stupid, p-p-pathetic. She didn’t want to talk to me. Not ever. S-she wished she’d never had anything to do with m-me, n-never seen me at all.”
Skelton was sitting bolt upright, fingertips touching, forearms resting on the edge of his desk. “And the boy, how did he respond?”
“Admits to getting angry, losing his temper.”
“He did hit her?”
“Not hit exactly, no.”
“Semantics, Charlie?”
Resnick glanced at the floor; from somewhere a splash of brown, dark and drying, had earlier attached itself to the side of his left shoe. “He says that he took a hold of her, both arms. I imagine he’s got quite a grip. Shook her around a bit, trying to get her to change her mind. That’s when she agreed to get into the car.”
Skelton sighed, swiveled his chair sideways, waited.
“They drove down towards the Castle, on into the Park. Stopped by the first roundabout on Lenton Road. What he wanted was to get her to talk about what was going on.” Resnick shifted on his seat, less than comfortable. “What he wanted, of course, was for her to change her mind, agree to keep seeing him. Anything as long as she didn’t carry on with what she was doing. Shutting him right out of her life.”
“I love you,” Robin said. Against her will, he was holding her hand.
Nancy looked through the side window of the car, up along the steadily sloping street, shadows from the gas lamps faint and blurred. Frost along the privet hedge. “I’m sorry, Robin, but I don’t love you.”
“A shame she couldn’t have lied,” Skelton said.
“She pulled her hand away and he did nothing to stop her. Got out of the car and walked back down Lenton Road; turned off right, down towards the Boulevard.”
“And he just sat there?”
“Watching her in the mirror.”
“Nothing more?”
“Never saw her again.”
“He says.”
Resnick nodded.
Skelton was back on his feet, desk to wall, wall to window, window to desk, pacing it out. “She’s gone without trace, Charlie. Good looking young woman. You know what it’s like, cases like this. Spend more time than you can afford checking on sightings by every loony and short-sighted granny from Ilkeston to Arbroath. This time it’s like a desert out there. No bugger’s seen a thing.”
Back by his desk, Skelton picked up his fountain pen and unscrewed the cap, glanced at the nib, replaced the cap, put the pen back down. Resnick shuffled around on his seat, clasped and unclasped his hands.
“Nine times out of ten, Charlie, it’s not some wandering nutter, spends his hours poring over true-life stories of serial killers like they’re the lives of the saints. You know that as well as me. It’s the husbands, boyfriends, the frustrated wives.”
The drawer to which the pictures of Alice had been consigned was close to Skelton’s right hand.
“You’re right to tread careful, Charlie, God knows. But let’s not let him get the upper hand, think he can play with us as he likes, little here, little there. We’ve got him this far, Charlie, let’s not let him slip away.”
Twenty-nine
Dana had spent the best part of the day shopping and had stopped off at the Potter’s House for a coffee on her way home. Liza, her neighbor from the flat above, Liza of the pinched laugh and squeaky bed, was sitting at a table upstairs. She had been for a tan and wax session and was recovering with a pot of Earl Grey and a slice of coffee and walnut cake. A magistrate’s clerk, Liza was filling in time before it was safe to go round to the house of the sixty-four-year-old chairman of the bench with whom she was having a furtive affair. When he had called on Liza once and Dana had opened the house door to him by mistake, she had thought he was collecting for Help the Aged. Now whenever the bed creaked over her head, Dana held her breath and waited for the call to emergency services, the sound of the ambulance siren approaching.
Dana persuaded Liza to order a fresh pot of tea and joined her in a relaxing gossip about winter cruises to warmer climes and the painful necessity of maintaining a neat bikini line. By the time they parted, Liza to visit her clandestine lover and Dana to lug her bags of shopping the remainder of the way back to Newcastle Drive, it was almost six o’clock.
Dana had opened her packages, put her new blouse carefully away, folded her new Next underwear inside the appropriate drawer, slipped the Sting CD on to the machine and started it playing. Poor old Sting, she wished he could stop worrying about the world and write another song like “Every Breath You Take.”
The bottle of chardonnay she was saving for later safe in the fridge, she opened a Bulgarian country white she had bought at Safeway, fancying a little something to take the edge off the waiting. One mouthful made her realize that she should have something to eat as well. Tipping the contents of a carton of potato and watercress soup into a pan to heat through, she found the last of the Tesco muffins at the back of the freezer and sliced it in two ready to toast.
She ate the soup in the kitchen, thumbing through some old travel brochures; before she had finished her second glass of wine she had got as far in the quick crossword as three across, nine down and it was still well short of seven o’clock. Over an hour to go and that was if he arrived on time. In desperation, she phoned her mother, who, thank heavens, was out. Oh well, Dana thought, when all else fails, run a bath.
Undressed, she picked up the Joanna Trollope paperback a friend had given her for Christmas, the gift tag poking out so she could remember who to thank. The mirrors were already hazed in steam as, with a gasp of pleasure, Dana settled herself in. She read a chapter of the book, scarcely taking it in, dropped it over the side, and closed her eyes. Charlie, she decided, was almost certainly a figment of her imagination. At least, the Charlie she had rolled around with, cuddled up to in her bed, the one who had stared at her with shocked and startled eyes the moment before he came.
It was half-past seven by the time she climbed out and began to dry herself. In the circle she had cleared with her towel in the glass, Dana caught herself wishing, not for the first time, that she could lose six or eight pounds.
When she tried it on with her new skirt that buttoned down the side, the apple green shirt looked exactly right. What it needed, of course, was a different pair of tights. Nancy had a pair, she remembered, dove gray, that would be perfect. Well, of course, had she been there she would have said go ahead.