"What about the American?" Skelton said.
"Is she keen to press charges?"
"We don't know yet…"
"Then it's about time we bloody did!"
Right, Resnick thought, getting to his feet, and it's about time you went back to running before you have some self-induced heart attack.
Whatever was going on behind closed doors in Skelton's executive home, it wasn't happy families.
Lynn was waiting outside Resnick's office.
"Graham and I had another go at her. Still won't budge. Didn't know the other woman from Adam.
I mean Eve.
" She's lying?"
"Not just that. She knows we know she is, but at the moment there's not a lot we can do to prove it. Loving that, isn't she? Clever cow!"
"Not your favourite person, then?" Resnick smiled.
"Women like that," Lynn scowled, 'whatever their intentions, just end up making women like me feel inferior. "
"Well, looks like you can have the pleasure of kicking her free. Last thing the old man wants to do is contribute to her publicity campaign."
"What about Cathy Jordan? Suppose she wants…"
To lay charges? I doubt it. Wouldn't exactly help her, would it? But if she does. " Resnick shrugged.
"I don't suppose Ms Plant's about to do a runner, do you? Suddenly turn into a shrinking violet?"
Lynn looked back at Resnick, concerned; unless she was very much mistaken, he had made a joke.
"Catherine, dear. How awful for you. How perfectly awful."
How Cathy Jordan hated being called Catherine; especially by Dorothy Birdwell, watt led hands flustering all around her, smelling her old maid's smell of face powder and malice.
"Yes, well, you know, Dotde, it really wasn't so bad."
"Perhaps you should consider following my example, dear, and have a nice young man to look after you."
Marius Gooding was standing a short way off, blazer buttons glistening. For the first time, Cathy noticed his manicured hands, long fingers flexing slightly at his sides. Catching Cathy's gaze he made a quick dipping gesture with his head, somewhere between a nod and a bow, a token smile of sympathy passing across his face. Without her understanding exactly why, something deep inside Cathy shuddered.
"I don't need a nice young man, Dottie," she said,
"I have a husband."
"So you have, dear, sometimes I forget."
"What in hell's name happened to you?" – Frank's first words when Cathy had appeared back at. the hotel in borrowed clothes, face oddly aglow, hair clotted red. "Something go wrong at the beauty shop?"
"Screw," she'd said, pushing past him on her way to the bathroom, 'you! "
"Nice idea, Cath, if you could remember how. Wait for you to screw me, might as well hand my dick to Lorena Bobbitt for surgery."
The only answer was the sound of water bouncing back from the shower.
Frank poured himself a drink and took it across to the window, looking out There was a plane rising slow between the small, off-white clouds and for a moment, wherever it was heading, he wished he were on it. Then he laughed. The thing that had most fascinated him about the whole Bobbitt affair, the way the guy had made a living later in a Californian nightclub, women handing over good bucks to dance with him in the hope of scooping ten grand by giving him a boner.
For Prank, whose childhood had been spent in castoffs and hand-me-downs and who had stolen his first quarter at age five, it was eloquent testimony to what made his country great. The ordinary American's ability to make entrepreneurial capital in the face of any adversity.
Tyrell had insisted on living as close to the centre of the city as his and his wife's combined salaries would allow. After all, he had reasoned, the one thing we don't want to add to my already antisocial hours is a lot of unnecessary travelling time, right? And Susan Tyrell had nodded agreement and said nothing about the fact that buying a house where her husband was suggesting would give her a forty-five-minute drive each way to the comprehensive where she taught.
Besides, she had liked the house: substantial, large without being sprawling, one of those late-Victorian family homes near the Arboretum which she and David had redecorated and were steadily filling with books and videos instead of children.
Another of those decisions that Tyrell had talked her into with his usual mixture of enthusiasm and dodgy rationalisation. She had, Susan knew, allowed it to happen too often, agreed to far too much for too long and in 96 favour of what? A quiet life, contentment? When most of their friends were already into their second divorce or separation, what was she trying to prove? That she was a survivor? That, despite all the odds, she and David still loved one another, that they had found a way of making it work?
The first time she had spoken to him, really spoken, had been after a seminar at the University of Warwick, where they were both doing Media Studies. The only one of the group not majoring in Film, Susan had sat there for eight weeks, listening, contributing very little.
Finally, she had plucked up her courage and launched into a mild attack on the film they had been watching, a fifties musical called It's Always Fair Weather. Pretty enough, she had said, but pretty vacant. Fun, but why all the fuss? David had told her in no uncertain terms and after twenty minutes she had bowed her head and agreed with him and a pattern had been set.
On the way out of the seminar, he had invited her for coffee; in the coffee bar he had invited her to a movie. The movie turned out to be two, an Elvis Presley double bill, and David had made them sit on the front row. King Creole was okay, he pronounced, but the really interesting one was Change of Habit, Presley's last feature, 1969.
And Susan had kept her thoughts to her popcorn, watching Dr Elvis falling sanctimoniously in love with a speech therapist she had only later identified as Mary Tyler Moore.
"Didn't you think it was great," Tyrell had enthused later, 'the way our sense of Presley as star bifurcates the diegesis of the narrative? "
"Um," Susan had said.
"Yes. Absolutely."
She looked up now from the pile of books she was marking, hearing the front door open and Tyrell's voice calling her name from the hall.
"Susan, you there?"
She would, he thought, be in the long kitchen which doubled as dining room, marking another thirty-three pastiches of EastEnders, ever ready to pop another frozen pizza into the microwave.
"My God! You won't believe what happened, in the middle of the day, broad daylight. Must have been like that scene in Carrie, the one with the pig's blood, you know."
Susan was on her feet, filling the kettle.
"I heard about it on the car radio."
National? "
"No, Radio Nottingham."
"Oh," Tyrell sounded disappointed, ferreting in the cupboard for what was left of the packet of custard creams.
"I thought at least we might've got some good publicity out of it."
"I wonder if she felt the same? The woman what's her name?"
"Come on, Susan. Cathy Jordan, how many more times? You'll meet her tonight at Sonny's."
"I'm not sure if I'm going."
"What? Don't be ridiculous, of course you're going."
"I don't know, I think I'm getting a headache. I've got all this work to do."
Tyrell swore as the last biscuit crumbled between his fingers and fell to the floor.
"Susan, it's all booked. Arranged. Besides, you want to meet everybody, don't you?"
"Do I?"
"Of course you do. You'll have a great time once you're there, you always do."
Susan reached for the tea bags.
"Earl Grey or ordinary?"
"Ordinary."
What Susan could remember was sitting at one end of the table, drinking glass after glass of Perrier while the conversation spun around her.