“A nice woman,” Resnick said. “Straightforward, sensible.”
“Kids?”
“Two, I think. No, three. Grown up and left home. One somewhere like Canada, Australia.” He seemed to recall that one of them had married, but couldn’t remember which. “You know, I didn’t really know him that well. The family. We’d not had a lot of contact these past few years.”
Lynn made a slight nod with her head, concentrating on the driver in front, who couldn’t seem to make up his mind which lane he was supposed to be in. Trent Bridge was only a few hundred yards ahead. You could see the spot where Aston’s body had been found, still staked out, cordoned off.
“We haven’t come up with any kind of weapon?”
“Not as yet.”
There was a lot of water down there, flowing quite fast beneath the bridge.
The young man who came to the door looked enough like his father for Resnick not to wonder who he was. Terry Aston had inherited Bill’s facial expression, the color of his eyes, already the same peaking of the hair; he had enough of his mother’s genes to be shorter, stockier, set four-square on the ground. He had traveled up with his wife and eighteen-month-old son from where they lived outside Bedford: Terry, a computer programmer with sidelines in home brewing and ornithology; his wife, Moira, a legal secretary who still temped at ten pounds an hour, those mornings when Steven was with the nanny.
Terry Aston shook hands with Resnick, accepting his condolences, nodded a shade awkwardly at Lynn Kellogg, and led the two officers through the house into the living room.
“I’ll tell Mum you’re here.”
Resnick had thought Margaret Aston might have been in bed, resting, somewhere out of the light, alone with her thoughts. But through the French windows, he could see her bending to deadhead one of the early roses, her grandson behind her, running and falling, arms akimbo, onto the graveled path. Stifling his squawl of tears, Margaret scooped him into her arms and held him tight against her, ssh-sshhing into his blond hair, until his mother came hurrying and took him from her, hoisting him high into the air and turning tears to laughter. Crushed against Margaret’s chest, the white petals of the rose fell aimless to the ground.
“Inspector Resnick?”
The girl who came towards him from the doorway had to be nineteen, possibly twenty, but looked younger, fair hair pulled loosely back, wearing a cream shirt under faded dungarees; the eyes with which she regarded Resnick were alert and half-amused; the hand she offered was smooth and small-boned inside his.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
Resnick looked at her again. “You’re Stephanie?”
“Not a bad try. Actually it’s Stella. But I still don’t think you really remember.”
Resnick shook his head.
“You came here with Dad. I think I was eleven, something like that. Maybe twelve. I remember pestering you about how you got to be a policewoman. On and on. It’s all I wanted to be at the time, all I could think of, and Dad, well, he wouldn’t talk about it. Said it was the last thing in the world I should do. No job for a girl, that’s what I remember him saying, it’s not a job for a girl.” She looked across at Lynn. “Do you think he was right?”
“It depends.”
“What on?”
Lynn realized she wasn’t certain. If there was an easy answer, she couldn’t call it to mind. “I suppose it depends what kind of a woman you are. But then we all have different ideas, don’t we? About what work should be.”
“And women,” Stella said.
Lynn looked back at her, saying nothing. There was a clear smile at the sides of Stella’s mouth, the corners of her eyes.
“But you do like it?” Stella asked. “You enjoy what you do?”
“Most of the time, yes.”
“Good. It must be terrible, stuck in some job you can’t stand. Boring, nine to five.”
“Well,” Lynn smiled. “This certainly isn’t that.”
“Is it something you’re still considering?” Resnick asked. “Coming on the Job?”
Stella laughed. “I think all my dad’s propaganda must have worked.” Almost apologetically, she looked at Lynn. “He thought it was man’s work, I’m afraid. Men of six foot and over.” She smiled a little wistfully. “Bit of a traditionalist, Dad, where gender roles are concerned.”
Resnick looked into her face for a sign of what she was feeling, talking about her father as she was; she was forcing herself to do so, he thought, making herself talk that way in order to keep him alive.
“What are you doing?” Lynn asked.
“I’m at agricultural college.”
“You’re going to be a farmer?”
Stella shook her head. “Trees. That’s what I’d like to do eventually. Get into forestry. Grow trees. Hundreds of them. Thousands.”
Lynn was grinning broadly.
“What?” Stella asked. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I was just wondering where that came on the list of traditional women’s jobs. Not very high, I don’t suppose.”
“Dad said I’d grow out of it.” Stella laughed again. “A phase I was going through. Bless him, he didn’t really understand. Not that or a lot of other things.”
She was smiling at Lynn as her mother walked into the room. “All that jollity,” Margaret Aston said, “I wondered what on earth was going on.”
Stella stepped back, guiltily silent; the smile disappeared. As Resnick moved forward to greet her, Margaret’s good intentions evaporated and her brave front collapsed in tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said, again and again, as Resnick hovered, uncertain, awkward, offering her a handkerchief which she refused. “I kept telling myself I wouldn’t do this, create a scene.”
“Mum,” Stella said, “it’s okay to cry.”
Her mother dabbed at her eyes with a wad of damp tissue, blew her nose, pushed automatically at the ends of her hair. “Time enough for that later. It’s not what Charlie’s here for, is it, Charlie?” She sniffed. “I’m sure there are questions to be asked, isn’t that right. Work to be done.”
“Mum …” Stella started.
“No. It’s what your father would have wanted. Eh, Charlie? It’s what Bill would have wanted done.”
They had gone out into the garden, the house too cramped for Margaret, too confining, too full of her husband’s memory, her grandson’s shrill laughter and sudden tears. She had told them all that she could remember, most of what they wanted to know. Bill’s early-morning swim, the journeys they had made together to the supermarket and then to the garden center, later in the day. The letter from Nuneaton, inviting Bill to preach on Sunday fortnight; the phone calls from Stella and from their middle child, the son out in Australia, and the call that Bill had taken in the hall, somebody who’d rung him and he’d phoned them back, talked for quite a while, something else to do with his Church work, she supposed, Bill hadn’t said.
Standing now near the bottom hedge, the three of them, Margaret, Resnick, and Lynn, they were for that moment a silent tableau, while around them, the electric hum of an unseen lawn-mower rose up and merged with the dulled roar of a passing plane.
“He was angry, Charlie, you can understand that. These last few years. He felt he’d been passed over; he’d given them everything he had and they didn’t want any more, so they hid him away in that wretched place. Offices with closed doors.” She smiled. “You knew him, Charlie, better than most. He wanted to be out there, doing things. Real things. Work that mattered. That’s what he believed in. He thought that it mattered, what he did. That it made a difference.” She half-turned away, shaking her head. “That doesn’t mean anything though, does it? Not any more. Not now. What you feel. That’s old-fashioned. Belief. Values. He was a dinosaur, Bill. That’s what he was; he embarrassed them.”
“Margaret, no …”