“How about this? What happened to her was so appalling she couldn’t face being dragged through it again, in front of witnesses, knowing that he would be there watching her.”
“Melodramatic, Inspector.”
“Better than being smug.”
“And rude.”
Resnick made himself stand straight and still and with an effort brought his breathing back under control. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Apology accepted.”
“He was given an official warning,” Resnick said, “as to his future behavior.”
“Towards the girl?”
Resnick nodded.
“As far as your knowledge goes, has he seen her again?”
“No.”
“Has he made any attempt to?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then how is planting a police car at the end of his street to be construed? Exactly.”
“I’ve explained …”
“You know nothing about it.”
“Exactly.”
Suzanne Olds was smoothly to her feet. “If I were in your shoes, Inspector, I’d be at pains to find out. On this occasion I was able to persuade Mr. Carew an informal approach might be best; if he’s given any further cause for complaint, I suspect he won’t be as charitable. Oh …” pausing at the door, a trace of warmth around the edges of her smile, “… and there’s a smudge of jam, just there …” With one long, painted fingernail she traced a line down the silk of her blouse. “… the corner of your handkerchief and cold water, that should do the trick. Good day, Inspector. I know my way out.”
“Where’s Lynn Kellogg?” Resnick demanded, pushing angrily into the CID room.
“RSPCA,” said Naylor. “PDSA. One of those.”
Divine sat at the furthest end of the room, one-half of his face like a battered pumpkin several days after Halloween.
“You!” Resnick said, jabbing his finger. “My office. Now.”
Information about Amanda Hooson was being laboriously obtained, systematically annotated, organized. As an exercise it was less than cost-efficient, heavy on personnel, essentiaclass="underline"
“Mandy,” said a student from her social-sciences group. “God! She used to hate it when I called her that. Anyway, yeh, she was just, you know, pretty straight, together. All she wanted to do was get her 2.1 and get back out into the real world. Wasted too much of her life already, that’s what she said. Mandy. God, I still can’t take it in. Amanda.”
The lecturer tapped the bowl of his pipe and began scraping away at the interior with the blunt end of a penknife. “She was rather more serious than a number of our students, that would have to be said. Older, you see, not old, but older. Here from choice, real choice, not like so many of them, arriving on the doorstep straight from school simply because they forgot to get off the bus.” After the dredging came the replenishing, the tamping down. “Great shame, picked up a bit in her final year, might even have got a first.”
“Hot weather, oh yes, sit out on the grass across from PB, hoick her skirt up and sunbathe for hours, ginger-beer shandy and some book about the extended family in Mozambique, homelessness in the inner cities. Not like some of them, stagger about between the Beano and Viz and still end up with a headache. No, she was a serious girl, woman, I suppose you’d have to say. I liked her. Liked her a lot.”
“Amanda! You’re kidding! I mean, I don’t want to put her down, especially after what’s happened, that’s dreadful, it really is. But, I don’t know, the idea of Amanda going out with any bloke, especially a student, well, if you’d have known her … I can’t think of another way of putting it: stuck-up, that’s what she was. No social life. Anything that wasn’t on the syllabus, forget it!”
“Yes, I don’t know who he was, don’t know his name or anything, but yes, she was seeing somebody. I’m sure of it.”
“Amanda came to my seminars, sat there writing it all down, sometimes if I coughed I think she made a little notation in brackets. Good essays, of course. Solid. But discussion-never contributed a word. Not my idea of a good student, I’m afraid, but there you are. I could show you her grades, if you think that might be of any use.”
“Terrible, terrible, terrible. A tragedy. A tragic waste of a young life. Truly, truly terrible. Tragic. Um?”
“We went through this period, last year. Badminton, right? I was beating her time after time, 15-6, 15-7, 15-5. Found out that if I kept it high to her backhand, she just couldn’t cope. Amanda came back after the holiday and wiped the floor with me. She’d found this guy, county player, talked him into teaching her, two hours a day for three weeks. Backhand smash, drive, backhand lob, she could do the lot. Not brilliantly. She was never what you’d call a natural. But she was like that with anything, anything she wanted, really wanted to do. Got down and worked at it, hard as she could. Little things, important things, it didn’t matter. Amanda had these lists in the back of her diary and she’d tick them off one at a time until they were done. After that she’d start a new list. Goal-oriented, I think that’s the term for it. Amanda would have known; if she didn’t she’d have been off to the library to look it up.”
“This diary,” asked Patel, “can you describe it?”
Cheryl pursed her lips and nodded. The shadows beneath her eyes were deep and dark from crying. “Nothing special, not one of those-what-d’you-call-’em-Filofaxes, nothing like that. Sort of slim and black, leather, you know the kind? Student year, I think it was, September to September. Carried it with her all the time.”
“I see.”
“You haven’t found it?”
“I don’t think so. Not yet.” Patel smiled and when he did so, Cheryl thought, not for the first time, what a nice man he probably was; what a shame he was a policeman. “I don’t really know,” Patel said. “I’ll certainly check. Now …” turning a page of his note book, “… perhaps you can tell me something about her friends …”
It was Millington who, having temporarily talked himself out of the hijack detail and finding himself with half an hour in the inquiry room, chanced to glance at a report form waiting to be accessed on to the computer. Amanda Hooson, twenty-six, previous education, West Notts College, previously employed for two years as an ODA at the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary and then back to the main hospital in the city.
“ODA?” Millington asked. “What’s one of them?”
“Search me.”
“Lord knows.”
“Wait up,” called one of the civilian operators, looking away from his screen, “I don’t know what the initials stand for exactly, but what it is, what they do, assist the anesthetist, make sure the gear’s all in working order, operations and the like. That’s what it is. ODA. Yes. Saw one on television once … What’s My Line?”
Thirty-three
Lynn hadn’t been able to work out if the woman was more worried about her floor-length musquash and her sable stole or the stupid dogs. She didn’t know which might raise the woman up higher in her opinion and finally decided it was neither. How could you have respect for someone who drank Perrier out of cut glass and allowed her Rottweilers to crap on the kitchen floor rather than take them for a walk after dark? Nervous of getting mugged, she got burgled instead. “It was stripped down to the original boards in here,” she’d said, pointing at the kitchen floor, “but we had that taken up and new quarry tiles put down. So much easier. Scoop up and swab down, a matter of minutes.” Right, Lynn had thought, that and the money to pay someone to come in every morning, do it for you.
Five hundred yards away, Lynn knew there were families living in flats with rising damp, cockroaches, hot-water systems that broke down again before the repair van had reached the end of the street. “It doesn’t matter, Lynnie,” her mother had used to say, “not where you live, it’s how you live. My great-aunt brought up a family of five in two rooms with a tin bath you set down before the fire and an outside lavvie where the water froze across the bowl November to March. And you could walk into that place anytime, no warning, and not find a cup that wasn’t washed up or a half-inch of dirt on or under anything.” Well, good for Great-aunt Queenie. Knew her place and kept it spotless. Huge bosoms and facial hair; a backside that made horses tremble. Lynn would have loved to see her weighing into the hardship officer at the DSS.