Nancy Phelan was adamant that Gary had done nothing to really hurt her, she had never felt in any actual danger. It had simply got out of hand.
“Then he didn’t strike you?” Resnick had asked.
“No.”
“Never as much as touched you?” A pause and then, pressing her fingers to her scalp, “I suppose he did grab my hair.”
“And you weren’t frightened?”
“No, he was.”
Resnick thought about that as he listened to Lynn describing the marks on the boy’s face, the swelling that had all but closed one eye, the bruise coming out strongly, yellow and purple and darkening.
“She said, the mother, that he’d fallen,” Resnick said. Lynn nodded. “Running out the back door. The door was actually off, I don’t know, she and Gary, they were putting it back on when the boy came running. Went smack into it.”
“It’s plausible, surely?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t believe her?”
Lynn crossed and recrossed her legs. “In different circumstances, I might. But this Gary James, his record …”
“Nothing to suggest any violence towards the children.”
“Something must have got him in a state before he got to the Housing Office. Something more than simply having to wait.”
“Well …” Resnick got to his feet, walked round from behind his desk. Through the glass he could see Divine speaking into the telephone, Kevin Naylor painstakingly making notes, the pen in that awkward-seeming grip he used, as if it were an implement he was still struggling to control. … “Best have a word with social services.” He checked his watch. “If they’ve knocked off early for the day, you can try the emergency duty team.” Though not for long, he thought, rumor was that with the next wave of cuts they were to be axed. Which would mean the likes of Karl waiting till past Boxing Day.
Lynn paused at the door. “James, sir, are we keeping him in?”
Resnick made a face. “Christmas. I’d not want to, not if it can be avoided.”
“But if the boy’s at risk?”
“I know. Let’s get someone round there, get him to a doctor, have him properly examined. Till then young Gary James can kick his heels.”
“Right.” Lynn stepped out into Divine’s raucous laughter and the sound of an ambulance going past outside, another victim of the festivities on the way to Queen’s. She paused near her desk and turned back towards the open door to Resnick’s office. “I don’t suppose there’s any good trying to talk to his probation officer? Might throw some light, one way or another.”
“You could always try,” Resnick said. His expression suggested she would probably be wasting her time. Relationships with the probation service were not the most trusting, either way; and this wasn’t the most propitious of times.
“I’ll check anyway,” Lynn said over her shoulder, “see whose client he is.”
“Pam Van Allen.”
Lynn was looking at him.
“I gave Neil Park a call. Earlier.”
“But you’ve not spoken to her, sir, Van Allen?”
Resnick shook his head.
“You don’t mind if I …”
“You go ahead.”
Back at his desk, for a moment Resnick closed his eyes; he could see her walking out of sight, Pam Van Allen, a meeting that had turned out badly, her hair glinting silver-gray against the light. “Pressure, Charlie,” her senior, Neil Park had said later. “Male, high-ranking, used to telling people what to do and expecting them to do it. She resented it.” Resnick didn’t think he would have any luck there. If Lynn could talk to her, so much the better. Even so, he found himself staring at the phone, part of him wanting to call.
“Sir,” Lynn knocked on his door and pushed it wide enough for her head to lean in. “She’s gone home for the day. For the holiday.”
“All right,” Resnick said, “we’ll hang on, see what social services have to say. Oh, and Lynn …”
“Yes?”
“This business at home-whatever it is-if you need to talk about it …”
For the first time in a while, she found something close to a smile. “Thanks.”
Back across the CID room her phone once again was ringing. Someone was humming “Silent Night.” From somewhere, Divine had acquired a paper hat, red and green, and he was wearing it as he read off an entry from the VDU, a sprig of mistletoe poking hopefully from his breast pocket.
Six
“So what was he like?” Nancy’s flatmate, Dana, asked, her voice blurred beneath the rush and splatter of the shower.
“What was who like?”
“Your kidnapper, who else?”
Nancy pulled her head clear from the spray of water. Opaque, through the thick, flowered plastic of the curtain, she could see Dana on the loo, all but naked, taking a pee. Six months ago, when they had started sharing, Nancy would have been, well, not shocked, but certainly embarrassed. Neither would she have felt comfortable doing what she was doing now, turning off the shower and pulling back the curtain, stepping out on to the tiled floor to dry herself down.
“So?” Dana said, glancing up. “Was he sexy or what?”
Nancy gave a wry smile. “Hardly.” She remembered the patchy hair, faint around his mouth, the way he had perspired, the nervous jerki-ness of his hands, hollow of his eyes. “Besides, situations like that, sexiness doesn’t come into it.”
“Doesn’t it?” Dana said. Pulling off a length of toilet paper, she folded the sheets again and then again before dabbing between her legs. “Somehow I thought it did.”
Nancy was vigorously toweling her hair. “That’s because you think it comes into everything.”
Dana laughed and sent water flushing round the bowl. “What was he like then?” she said.
“A boy. A kid.”
“So?” Dana arched a camp eyebrow and laughed some more.
The time Nancy had come home unexpected and found her flatmate grappling with a seventeen-year-old on the living-room carpet had been, in more ways than one, a revelation. “He’s advanced for his age,” Dana had explained. “Two A-levels already. Working hard for his Cambridge entrance.”
“I noticed,” Nancy had said. What she’d noticed were the marks on the youth’s back as he’d pulled his Simple Minds T-shirt on over his head.
“Didn’t I tell you,” Nancy said now, “this Gary, we went to the same school?”
“No, really?”
“Yes, two years below me.”
“And that’s his name? Gary?”
“Uh-hum.”
“And you remembered him?” Dana was standing slightly on tiptoe before the bathroom mirror, examining her breasts.
“Not at all.”
“Then he remembered you.”
Nancy wound the first towel around her head and reached for another. “I used to go out with this boy, he was a friend of Gary’s big brother.”
“You see, it all makes sense. There he was, Gary, adoring you from afar and you never as much as noticed him. The stuff that pimply wet dreams are made of.”
Nancy grimaced and laughed and pretended to throw up over the toilet bowl.
“You don’t think this is a lump, do you? Look, here?”
Serious, Nancy stared at her friend’s left breast. “I don’t know. I can’t see any …”’
“Feel.”
Nancy reached out a hand and Dana took it, guiding it to the right spot.
“Well?”
Pressing down with her fingertips, Nancy rolled the flesh across and back; there was something there, the smallest knot of muscle possibly, not a lump. “No,” she said, “I think you’re fine. Nothing to worry about at all.”
“Of course not,” Dana smiled. Another of her friends, just thirty-five, was due in hospital for a mastectomy first thing in the new year.
“Can I borrow your hairdryer?” Nancy asked. “Mine’s on the blink.” And then at the bathroom door-“This do tonight, we don’t have to get too dressed up, do we?”
Dana’s smile was genuine this time. “Only to the nines.”
What might have helped, Nancy thought, on her way to the bedroom, if this afternoon had been more of a fright than actually it was, it might have done something to bring me on, get this blasted period of mine moving.