“You give us a lift to the police station, pal,” Harry said, already on his feet, putting on his coat, “and I’ll tell you on the way.”
“Charlie …”
Skelton pushed his way into Resnick’s office without knocking, no gesture of recognition towards Millington, who was sitting this side of the desk.
“Field the girl’s parents for me, will you? They’re downstairs kicking up a stink and I’ve got to finish this statement for the press and okay it at headquarters.”
“I thought that was none of my concern any more. Inspector Siddons, isn’t she liaising with the Phelans? Or did I get that wrong?” There was an edge to Resnick’s voice that took the superintendent by surprise. Resnick, too.
“Christ, Charlie …”
It was the first time in memory Resnick had seen Skelton with his shirt in less than good order, his tie at half-mast. He knew he should be feeling more sorry for him than he was, but he was in the middle of a bad day, too. Not so long before he’d had Robin Hidden on the phone in tears, sobbing out every word; best part of fifteen minutes it had taken him to calm the lad down, agree to talk to him if he came in. Resnick glanced at his watch: that’d be any time now.
“Charlie, if I had the slightest idea where she was, I’d get her on to it. Truth is, so far this morning she hasn’t showed.”
With a mumbled word and a nod, Graham Millington slipped away to his own desk; he could see all too well which way this particular conversation was going and the last thing he wanted to find himself doing was trying to appease a distraught father with a build like a good light-heavyweight.
“Graham,” Resnick said.
Oh, shit! Millington thought, not quite through the door.
“Why not see if Lynn’s still around? Have a word with the Phelans together. If Inspector Siddons arrives, she can take over.”
“If I’m going to deal with it,” Millington said, “I’d sooner it was from start to finish.”
Resnick gave Skelton a quick glance and the superintendent nodded. “Fine.”
“What if they want to listen to the tape? The one with their daughter’s voice?”
“Yes,” Skelton agreed, hanging his head. “Let them hear it all. They should have heard it in the first place. I was wrong.” He looked at Resnick for several seconds, then left the room.
Helen Siddons had not been wasting her time. She had acquired the original tapes and their packaging from the radio stations and had them sent off for forensic analysis, though by then so many hands would have touched them as to render that next to useless. But it was a process that had to be gone through. In case. She had listened to the second recording and compared it to the first, taken both to two experts and sat with them, listening through headphones, each nuance, again and again.
These things they were agreed upon: the northern accent identified on the first tape, less obvious on the second, was almost certainly not a primary accent. Certain elements in the phrasing, the softness of some of the vowel sounds, suggested Southern Ireland. Not Dublin, perhaps. More rural. A childhood spent there and then a move to England, the northwest, not Liverpool, but harsher-Manchester, possibly, Bury, Leigh, one of those faded cotton towns.
And the note sent in the Susan Rogel case, Helen Siddons wanted to know, was there any way of telling whether it was written by the same person?
There could be, in certain instances it might be possible, but she had to understand, written and spoken registers were so different. The farthest either of them was prepared to go, it could not be discounted the source was the same man.
For Helen that was enough. All of the suspects in the Rogel case, everyone the police had interviewed, seventeen in all, transcripts of their interviews would have to be double-checked, some would have to be contacted again if necessary She was quite convinced now, the perpetrator in both instances was the same: and, more likely than not, he was already known.
Forty-two
All day, Lynn had been aware of this uneasy sense of expectation. Through the usual raft of paperwork, the follow-up interviews on the Park burglaries, a session with Maureen Madden about an alleged rape victim who had, twice now, recanted on her evidence and who they thought was being threatened, all through the haze of sexual badinage with which Divine and his cronies clouded every day, the constant ringing of telephones, the unthinking cups of tea, she could never shake off the feeling of waiting for something to happen.
Distracted, Resnick had paused at her desk in the late afternoon, asking for news of her father, automatically passing good wishes.
“Pint?” Kevin Naylor called, putting on his coat by the door.
Lynn looked at her watch. “I’ll see.”
When finally she went down the stairs, out past the custody sergeant’s office, the entrance to the police cells, she knew it was Michael she was looking for-exchanging words with the constable at reception, kicking his heels on the street outside. He was nowhere.
Knowing that she’d regret it, promising herself she wouldn’t stay too long, Lynn headed across the street to the pub.
“You ask me,” Divine’s voice rose above the noise, “she’s been dead since a couple of hours after she was lifted.”
Lynn wasn’t about to waste her breath telling him that nobody had.
“What about this ransom business?” Kevin Naylor asked.
“Load of bollocks, isn’t it? Some clever-clogs tossing us a-bloody-round. You know yourself, it’s happened before.”
“Come on, Mark,” Lynn couldn’t keep sitting there saying nothing, “her voice was on the tape.”
“So? What’s to stop him forcing that out of her first?”
“All in two hours?”
Divine raised his eyes towards the smoky ceiling. Why were some women always so literal, jumping on every word you said as if it were gospel? “Okay, maybe it was a bit longer. Two hours, four, six, what’s it matter?”
“To Nancy Phelan or to us?”
Divine emptied his glass and pushed it along the table towards Kevin Naylor, his shout this time. “All that matters, what we should be looking for is a body. Never mind all this undercover crap out there in the sticks.”
“Wasn’t what you said at the time,” Naylor reminded him. “Not with another Early Starter on your plate.”
“You can talk! Here, you should’ve seen our Kev and this Gloria, tongue’d dropped any further from his mouth he’d been hoovering up the floor with it.”
Oh, God, Lynn thought, here we go again. “I’m off,” she said, getting to her feet.
“Not now, look, I’m just getting these in. Pint or a half?”
Lynn thought of what was waiting for her at home, half a frozen pizza, a bundle of ironing, her mother’s call. “All right,” sitting back down, “but make it a half.”
A light rain had started to fall, not enough to persuade Lynn to use her umbrella as she took the cut-through beside Paul Smith’s shop and came out by the Cross Keys, opposite the Fletcher Gate car park. Later the temperature was due to drop and most likely it would freeze. Last night, on the bypass out near Retford, a Fiesta had skidded on black ice and collided with a lorry loaded high with scrap; a family of five, mother, dad, two lads, a baby of sixteen months, all but wiped out. Only the baby had survived. She thought about her own good fortune, the car that had come so close to clipping her when she had swung, blinded, wide from her lane.
As she turned through the archway and began to cross the courtyard, the keys were in her hand.
Midway across, she hesitated, looked around. Muted by curtains or lace, lights showed from windows here and there about the square. Soft, the sounds of television sets, radios overlapping. A cat, ginger and white, padding its way along the balcony to the right.
Michael was on the landing, halfway up the stairs, sitting with his back against the wall, legs outstretched, breath on the air, a newspaper folded open in his hands.