“I don’t know,” Resnick said. “Not yet. Not for certain.”
“He’s showing off, isn’t he? Being clever. That’s what it is.” Dana folded her arms across her chest, fingers clenched tight. “Bastardl’
Outside, officers were knocking on doors, ringing bells, beginning to talk to neighbors, those who were still home, asking if they had noticed anything unusual, seen anyone they hadn’t recognized coming into the building, hanging about outside. Dana had been out of the flat from mid-morning until early evening; whoever had brought Nancy’s things into the flat could have done so at any point during that time. Not so far short of eight hours.
Resnick was thinking again about Nancy’s clothing, what had been returned. “How about underwear,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve any idea what she might have been wearing?”
“You mean, exactly?”
“Yes.”
Dana shook her head. “Not really.” She shrugged. “Something nice.”
“When they’re through in there, would you mind taking a look? Through the drawers. Wherever she kept things like that. You might just notice something, you never know.”
“Of course.”
“Is it okay,” Resnick asked, “if I use your phone?”
“Go ahead.”
As he dialed the number he looked back to where Dana was now sitting on the arm of the settee, hands on her thighs, wide pale face close again to tears.
Alice Skelton had been waging a silent war of attrition throughout the evening, pointedly ignoring her husband in front of the two couples who were their guests. By the start of the main course, she was well on the way to being drunk and had taken to insulting him openly.
“Jack, here,” she proclaimed, passing the redcurrant jelly, “was the man for whom the term anally retentive was invented.”
Skelton disappeared to fetch some more wine. His guests wished they could do the same.
When the phone rang a little while later, Skelton was on his feet before the second ring, praying it was for him.
“It’s probably her,” Alice’s taunt chased him from the room. “The ice maiden. Wishing you a happy New Year.”
It wasn’t; it was Resnick. Skelton listened for long enough, then told Resnick to meet him at the station as soon as he could finish up where he was.
“Something urgent?” Alice mocked. “Something they can’t possibly handle without you?”
Skelton apologized to their guests and headed for the door.
“Give her my love,” Alice shouted after him. And quietly, into the aubergine parmigiana, “The stuck-up bitch!”
“Is there anywhere you can stay?” Resnick asked. “For tonight, at least.”
“You don’t think he’ll come back?”
“No. No reason to think so, none at all. If you were really worried we could leave a man outside. I just thought you’d feel more comfortable somewhere else, that was all.”
Dana was leaning forward slightly, looking into his eyes. “I couldn’t stay with you?”
Resnick glanced around the room to see if anyone had overheard. “In the circumstances, best not.”
“All right,” Dana said. Clearly, it was not.
“Surely there’s a friend you could go to?”
“If I did stay here,” Dana persisted, “would you come back? Later?”
Resnick thought about Marian at the Polish Club, counting down the hours till midnight; thought about other things. “I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t promise. Probably not.”
Dana reached for the address book near to the phone. “I’ll find someone,” she said. “You don’t have to worry.”
“D’you want to let me have the number?” Resnick asked. “Where you’ll be.”
“There isn’t a lot of point, is there?” Dana said. He touched her arm, just below the sleeve of her sweater, and goosebumps rose to meet his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s worked out like this.”
She was just smiling, grudging, wary, as Millington approached.
“Hang on here, Graham,” Resnick said. “Make sure nothing gets missed. And see Miss Matthieson’s taken wherever she wants to go. I’m off in to see the old man.”
He paused in the doorway and glanced back inside the flat, but Dana had already moved from sight, back into her room.
Thirty-one
The station was different at night, quieter yet more intense. The blood that had been splashed across the steps and the entrance hall was fresh blood, so bright beneath the overhead lights that it glowed. A sudden shout from the cells aside, voices were muted; footsteps along the corridors, up and down the stairs, were muffled. Only the telephones, sharp and demanding, retained their shrillness.
Skelton surprised Resnick by not being in his own office, but in the CID room, standing over by the far wall in front of the large map of the city. He was wearing a dark blazer and light-gray trousers instead of the normal suit. Unusually, the top button of his shirt had been unfastened above the knot of his tie. He didn’t speak as Resnick walked in and when he did, instead of making a remark about what had happened, he said, “Since you and Elaine were divorced, Charlie, d’you ever catch yourself wishing you’d married again?”
Taken aback, uncertain how to respond, Resnick went over to where the kettle stood on a tray, lifted it up to check there was enough water inside, and switched it on at the wall.
Skelton was looking at him still, waiting for an answer.
“Sometimes,” Resnick finally said.
“I’ll be honest,” Skelton said. “Living the way you do, on your own, I thought you were a miserable bugger. Night after night, going back to that place alone. Last thing I reckoned I’d want to be, living like that.”
“Tea?” Resnick said.
Skelton shook his head and Resnick dropped a single tea bag into the least stained of the mugs.
“You get used to it, I suppose,” Skelton said. “Accommodate. Learn to appreciate the advantages. After a while, it must be difficult to live any other way.”
There were footsteps in the corridor outside and Resnick turned to watch Helen Siddons push open the door and walk in. Whichever occasion she had been called from had scarcely been informal. Her hair had been pinned up high and she was wearing a dress not unlike the one Resnick remembered from Christmas Eve, except this was blue, so pale it seemed almost all the color had leaked out of it. Somewhere along the way she had changed into flat shoes and the raincoat round her shoulders could have been a man’s.
“I asked Helen to join us,” Skelton said. “Her experience might be useful here.”
What experience? Resnick caught himself thinking. “Kettle just this second boiled,” he said. “If you want some tea.”
“When Helen was on secondment to Bristol and Avon she was involved in that Susan Rogel business, you remember?”
Something about a woman whose car was found abandoned on the Mendip Hills, somewhere between Bath and Wells. No signs of a struggle, no note, nothing to explain the disappearance; if there had been foul play, no body had been found to substantiate it, no evidence either.
“I thought the suggestion was she’d taken off of her own accord,” Resnick said. “Wasn’t there some kind of affair that had got out of hand?”
Helen Siddons drew a chair out from one of the desks and Skelton moved to help with her coat. “She’d become involved with her husband’s business partner,” Helen said. “They ran an antiques business, branches all over the south west.” She took a cigarette from a case in her bag and Resnick half expected Skelton to lean over and offer her a light but he allowed her to do it for herself. “Seems that the husband knew what was going on, had done for some while, but hadn’t said anything as the business was in a pretty shaky state and he didn’t want to rock the boat any more than it was already.” She arched back her long neck and released smoke towards the ceiling. Skelton was staring at her like a man transfixed. “When it became clear they were going to go bust anyway, he gave his wife an ultimatum. Stop seeing him or I want a divorce. The wife, Susan, she would have been happy to jump the other way but faced with the possibility her lover backed off. Preferred to carry on sneaking around, didn’t want to get married and make it all respectable, settle down.” It was the slightest of glances towards Skelton, probably no more than coincidental. “All this had made Susan ill, she’d seen a doctor, was taking all kinds of pills for stress, depression, whatever. There’s a suggestion, unproven, that she made at least one attempt on her own life. We do know that on more than one occasion she told a girl friend that she couldn’t be doing with either man any more. She just wanted to get out.”