"Tomorrow," Mollie said.
"The early morning flight. Her publisher's meeting her at Heathrow and taking her into London for lunch. She's continuing up here by train. She should arrive about a quarter to five."
Resnick and Skelton exchanged glances. Aside from the recent stabbing, there were other serious crimes outstanding: a sub-post office that had been robbed at gun-point and the postmaster shot through the leg and shoulder when he tried to resist; a domestic incident that had left one partner with burns to the face and neck from scalding water, one of the children with badly bruised ribs and a closed eye; unsolved burglaries were up for the third year in succession, as were thefts from vehicles and taking and driving away without consent. The recruitment of new staff was on hold. Budgets were screwed down tighter than an Arctic winter. This was policing in the age of cost-effectiveness and consumer choice, when those at the top talked of minimal visual policing, counted the paper clips, put a ban on overtime and sat up long into the night massaging the crime figures. If Resnick and Skelton were in the business of selling sentences, less and less people were buying. The last thing they needed was a media celebrity in need of mollycoddling, a body to guard 29 and protect against an unknown possible assailant during a festival at which the attendance might run into the thbusands.
Skelton took a breath.
"Charlie, why don't you liaise with Miss Hansen? Arrange to meet this Cathy Jordan, talk to her, try and get a sense of how serious she thinks these threats really are. Assure her we'll co-operate as fully as we can during her stay. Without making promises we can't keep."
Resnick nodded reluctantly and glanced over at Mollie Hansen who was already drawing a card from the back of her Filofax.
"My number's on there."
"Meantime," Skelton was on his feet now,
"I trust neither of you will say anything about all of this to the press. If there is anything to these letters, the last thing we need is a three-ring circus."
"Of course," said Mollie
"Absolutely," said Tyrell.
Unless, Resnick thought, they reckoned that instead of putting people off, a few good rum ours might do wonders at the box office.
"Here," Mollie said, pulling a paperback book from her bag and pushing it into Resnick's hands.
"You might like to take a look at this. It's meant to be one of her best."
DEAD WEIGHT An Annie Q. Jones Mystery by CATHY JORDAN
"One last thing," Resnick said.
"The Anita MulhoIIand mentioned in the letter, is she another character in one of these books?"
"That's right," Mollie said.
"Another victim?"
"She goes on holiday with her family, to Mexico. She's thirteen. One evening her parents go down to a barbecue by the hotel pool and leave her upstairs in their room. When they get back up, an hour or so later, she's gone. A few days afterwards, someone comes across this thing like a scarecrow in the hills outside the town; it's made from Anita's clothes, up high on a cross of sticks. The police get up a search and dogs find her body in a shallow grave." The tension in Mollie's voice was tight now and undisguised.
"That's it," she said, 'apart from the ways she's tortured before she dies. "
Tyrell was looking at her with concern, possibly anger. Quickly he shook Resnick's hand and then Skelton's.
"We should be going.
Superintendent, Inspector, thanks for your time. "
"I'll expect to hear from you," Mollie said to Resnick from the door.
"Meantime, enjoy the book. Let me know what you think."
After she and Tyrell had left the room, Skelton fussed with a few things on his desk and cleared his throat.
"Quite partial to a bit of Morse, myself," he said.
Resnick didn't answer. He dropped the paperback down into the already sagging side pocket of his coat and headed out along the corridor towards the CID room. Another task he was certain he didn't want.
Sharon Gamett took her time walking back up Forest Road West to where she had parked her car, a four-year- old Peugeot in need of a new clutch. She was wearing black ski-pants that emphasised her height, a red and yellow scarf pulled bandana-like across her hair; in one hand she was carrying a can of Lucozade, a paper bag containing a cheese and ham cob in the other. Relaxed, Sharon moved like someone at ease with herself, strength held in reserve.
The vehicle that slowed alongside her was a Vauxhall, almost certainly a fleet car, a dark blue Cavalier. The driver pressed the electronic switch to lower the window and leaned across.
"Working?" he asked.
She put him at thirty, no more than thirty-five, dark striped suit, white shirt, tie; expensive watch on his wrist, hair brushed down and across to compensate for its early loss. Sharon wondered if she had seen him there before and decided she probably had not.
"How about it?" he tried again.
"You working or not?"
"Sure," Sharon said, without breaking her stride, 'though not the way you mean. Now piss off before I run you in. "
The Cavalier was off up the street and turning left into Southey Street with speed enough to leave tyre marks on the tarmac. Sharon shook her head: why was it some men were content with a jacket potato at lunchtime and for some it was a quick shag?
Back behind the wheel of her car, she popped the top of the Lucozade can and tilted back her head to drink. A pair of girls one in a short skirt and heels, the other in tight red trousers and boots spotted her fifty yards along the opposite pavement, turned in their tracks and began to walk briskly back the other way.
The Lucozade was warm and fizzy and the cob was ten degrees short of stale; fragments of crust splintered over her legs and the seat. The Terry Macmillan she'd been reading lay open, face down, on the passenger side. The dashboard clock told her she had a good two hours to go.
Sharon Gamett had joined the police late, in her mid- thirties, a career move she had tried not to see as a sign of desperation. All her applications to CID in London had been rebuffed and it had taken a move north-east to Lincolnshire – before she was able to join the ranks of detectives. After the best part of a year, she had known she wanted something closer to the cutting edge than investigating poultry fraud and pig rustling in King's Lynn. Moving here to the city had meant a move back into uniform, but almost immediately she had put in for a transfer to Vice, officially uniformed still but working in plain clothes, a step on the ladder towards the real thing.
The Vice Squad in this neck of the woods comprised one inspector, two sergeants and twelve constables, three of whom were women. What they hadn't had, until Sharon joined, was an officer who was black.
Leaning sideways, she wedged the can into the pocket of the passenger door, and what remained of the cob she stuffed back into its bag and placed on the floor. A grey Sierra crawled past for the third time, slowing almost to a stop at every woman it passed. In her notebook, alongside its registration, Sharon wrote the time. As she watched, the car turned right on to Waverley and she knew from there it would make a left on to Arboretum, then left again up Balmoral or Addison, squaring the circle.
This time she was ready. As the Sierra headed back 33 along Forest Road East, Sharon started up the car and drove diagonally across in front of it, headlights on fall beam. The driver had two alternatives: run smack into her or stop. He stopped.
Sharon was out of her car quickly enough, not running, tapping at the near-side window for it to be rolled down.
"Police Constable Gamett," she said, holding up her identification.
"I've observed you on three separate occasions in the past half hour, stopping to speak to known prostitutes."
In the front of the Sierra, the two men exchanged glances and the one nearest to Sharon smiled. Divine drew his wallet from his inside pocket and let it fall open close to Sharon's face.