“He embarrassed them and that’s why they shut him away and waited for him to die.”
“Margaret …”
“And now this …”
“Of course, we …”
“All this …” She was facing him again, eyes raw not with loss but anger. “All this performance, this great paraphernalia, all of you like headless chickens running around. Who did this? Who did this? Isn’t it tragic? Terrible? Of course, it’s terrible. He was my husband. But it’s what you wanted all along.”
“Margaret, you know that’s not true.”
“Isn’t it? Not you, maybe. You personally. But the rest of them, all those smart young men-and women-with their smart young attitudes and sociology degrees. They don’t care about him, none of them. Not a one.”
“Mrs. Aston,” Lynn said, “we’ll catch whoever did this, we will.” Margaret Aston looked at her long and hard, this young woman who could almost have been her daughter, so earnest, believing what she said. “And if you do,” Margaret said, “what difference will that make? What difference will that make now?”
Resnick waited till they were back in the car. “That call, the one unaccounted for. Have it checked out, the number. Just in case.”
Twenty-six
It turned out that John Anthony Lawrence St. John had walked away from a place on the second year of an undergraduate course in applied mathematics at Bristol University-outside of Oxford and Cambridge, one of the most difficult to get into. His tutor had been convinced John Anthony Lawrence was on his way to a first; one year for his masters and then the Ph.D. A research fellowship for the asking. Before that, he had left his secondary school in Buckinghamshire-a grammar school, that county being just about the only one in which they still had a right to exist-with four high-grade A levels and ten Os. Glory, glory all the way.
“What buggers me,” Divine said, “he’s got all that going for him, all those brains, what’s he doing, chucking it all away?”
Divine was in the canteen with Graham Millington, tucking into bacon, double egg and chips, and beans, his earlier purloined sausage having sharpened his appetite more than a touch. Opposite him, Millington was slowly forking his way through a meat-and-potato pie that had spent too long in the microwave and whose contents now bore a startling affinity to slurry.
“Fancy it yourself, then, do you?” Millington asked. “Groves of Academe?”
“Bollocks.”
“Well,” Millington said. “I suppose that’s a point of view.”
Divine dashed a large mouthful of egg and beans down with a quick swill of tea. “The way I see it, he’s so much sodding cleverer than me, he should be out there using it, making a whole lot more money, right? Sight more’n you or me. Instead of which, here am I, bringing in little enough as it is, all those deductions, national insurance, tax, some of which is going to keep him on the dole ‘cause he’s too fucking lazy to work.”
“His choice,” Millington said.
“Live off you and me? Yeh, thanks a lot!”
Millington pushed his plate aside and reached for a cigarette; one of life’s little miracles, he was thinking, no matter how much radiation or whatever you zap those pies with in the microwave, there were always those few bits of gristle left intact, like pearls. “Only thing need interest us,” he said, “what he told us about finding Aston, it all holds up. Thank him for his help and kick him free.”
“Aye.” Divine nodded his head. “More’s the sodding pity.”
The river police had two divers working off their launch, searching the Trent either side of the bridge for a possible weapon or weapons. So far they had come up with two stools of the type frequently used by fishermen, several discarded rods, the rusted frame of a Raleigh bicycle, one picnic hamper, four nasty-looking knives, one of which had several triangular sections chipped out of the blade, a child’s tricycle, roller skates, assorted pots and pans, a filing cabinet still containing fifty or so manila files, most likely rolled down the slope from County Hall by a disgruntled clerk, and a sawn-off double-barreled shotgun, which was proving of great interest to the detectives investigating a three-month-old robbery at a bank on Gregory Boulevard. Nothing that might have been used in the attack on Bill Aston.
Forensic had recovered sufficient splintered fragments from the dead man’s skull and face to be certain that the weapon involved had been a varnished implement, most likely a baseball bat of some kind. Even in this country where the game was comparatively rarely played, that was more and more the norm.
And blood: quite minute, difficult at first to detect, there were small samples of a second type, mixed in with Aston’s. As soon as it was properly isolated, it could be checked against the recently established, steadily growing national DNA bank for comparisons.
Support Department had gone over the ground with a fine-tooth comb. Dog turds, cigarette ends and discarded cigarette packets, fast-food containers, used condoms and the like notwithstanding, they had come up with only two items which held potential interest: a D90 TDK audio cassette tape, unlabeled, which seemed to hold a fairly arbitrary selection of home-taped heavy metal, and a large-sized left-hand leather glove, well-worn, scuffed around the fingers’ ends and smooth in the palm. Both of these items were undergoing further tests.
Scene of Crime had presented Naylor with evidence, mostly partial, of twenty-seven sets of footprints within the immediate vicinity of the attack. A chart showing the positioning of these was still in the later stages of completion, but seemed to suggest that of this twenty-seven, nine were strongly present close to where the body had fallen; of that nine, five seemed to have partly circled around it. The impressions of three of these had been made by some kind of running shoe; one by a heavy work boot, the last, most likely, came from a regular, rubber-soled walking shoe.
After being successfully stalled by Phyllis Parmenter’s secretary for the best part of a day, Khan had installed himself in the outer offices of the local authority inspectorate, and settled himself down with a copy of Vikram Seth’s one-thousand-and-five-hundred-odd-page novel, intent upon a long wait.
The WPC walking away from Cossall had an arse on her like a pregnant duck. Cossall’s words, though he kept them to himself and supped his pint; all this questioning-publicans and bar staff-it gave a man a thirst. And besides, where women on the force were concerned, nowadays it paid to keep your mouth closed.
He knew a sergeant at one of the out stations, not so much above a month back, who had chanced to make some innocuous remark about a female officer within her hearing and, within an hour of her lodging an official complaint, the poor sod had been suspended from duty, pending an investigation. A sure sign of the way it was going, Cossall thought, the writing on the menstrual bloody calendar.
Only that morning, he had read in the paper, the first ever woman chief constable had been appointed in Lancashire. A few years shy of fifty and, wouldn’t you know it, a graduate from the Open University. And what was her degree in? Psychology. Cossall had read she’d be bringing in over seventy thousand a year salary. Seventy thousand. And a budget of close to a hundred and fifty million to dispose of. How much of that was going to go on setting up crèches, that’s what he’d like to know? Counseling sessions? Hiring some poncey interior designer to put in soft furnishings and curtains in the interview rooms, create a more trusting atmosphere.
Still, what had she been quoted as saying? It’s never been a man’s world, they only think it is. Yes, well, that’s where she was wrong: Cossall didn’t think, he knew. At least until he chucked it all in, threw in his hand with one of them home security firms, it was his world still.
And if that WPC ever made it to the top they’d have to buy her a specially reinforced chair. Not that, he reflected, he’d say no to charvering it from behind. Nice tits, too, sort of stretch Dunlopillo, wouldn’t mind spreading himself over those. He’d thought that when she had first walked in looking for him ten minutes before, Cossall lubricating his tonsils between visiting the pubs along London Road, spaced out between Trent Bridge and the city. Football pubs, most of them; big trade of a Saturday whichever side was at home, Forest or County.