If the vein alongside Beatty’s eye didn’t calm down pretty soon, Divine was thinking, he’d hemorrhage all over the newly sanded wood floor.
“Is that where you did it?” Divine asked, beginning to picture it. “The van?”
Beatty didn’t speak, angled his head aside and nodded.
“Say again?”
“Yes.”
“You did her in the van?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“Say it again.”
“Yes,” Beatty sighed. “In the van.”
“Parked up some back alley somewhere, were you?”
“Jesus! What does it matter?”
“I want to know!”
“All right. We were down behind the Raleigh works, that cut-through that comes out by the pub. If you want any more details, ask her.”
“Ask her?”
“She’s your bloody wife!”
“Is she?”
“And she’s already opened her bloody mouth a sight too much or you wouldn’t be here now.”
“My wife?”
“How else did you get on to me? I don’t advertise that in Yellow Pages.”
“I haven’t got a wife.”
“Chucked her out, have you? Serve her sodding right! I suppose you’ll be after me for the divorce next.”
“I’ve never had a wife.”
“Come off it!”
Divine moved his hand close to Beatty’s face, close enough to make him flinch, enough to get all of his attention.
“What the fuck’s going on, then?” Beatty said.
“You’re telling me exactly that.”
“But if you’re not…”
Mark Divine took his warrant card from his inside pocket and held it out long enough for Beatty to read it. After taking another swallow of tea, he exchanged it for a notebook and ballpoint.
“This woman you’ve been diddling, what’s her name?”
“Melissa.”
“Not Mary?”
“Melissa.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Course.”
Divine grinned with anticipation. “All right, then, let’s see how much else you can remember-and I do mean exactly. Then we’ll get round to your interest in another kind of advertising, also not in Yellow Pages.”
Martin Myers worked as a volunteer for a Church of England charity that provided soup, second-hand clothes, and temporary accommodation for destitute men. Three afternoons a week, two lunchtimes, and one overnight every other weekend. For a spell he had worked mornings in a healthfood shop, but there had been arguments with the full-time members of the collective and he had been asked to leave. While his mother had still been alive, there had been the attendance allowance, but now…well, his needs were small and since they had opened a cafe upstairs in the library he had something there most mornings and that seemed to last him through the day.
“I thought, since Mother passed on, someone to talk to, someone nice and sympathetic. There are so many things that concern us, so much that has to be discussed; Mother and I did, of course, she was wonderful, so alert, right up to, well, almost to the end. And now…”
Patel wrote it all down diligently, scarcely needing to prompt or interrupt, the whole meager litany.
“…I did so want to be able to make contact, in some way to touch her, but, of course, she never wrote back.”
The man in the doorway stank. His clothing was more rags than tatters, bits of cloth wrapped round and round, only here and there a garment that could be recognized as such-trousers with a gaping rent in the upper leg, a cable-knit sweater as matted as the underside of a moorland sheep. He saw Graham Millington and smiled.
“Get on home,” the sergeant said.
“Spare us something for a cup of tea,” the man replied, the look on his face positively benign.
Millington stepped over him and went into the shop. Both knew the man hadn’t had a drop of tea since VE Day: then it had been a mistake, as he liked to explain it, the hysteria of the moment. He didn’t have a home to go to either.
Millington frowned at the insistence of the heavy bass, words walked over like ground glass. If he remembered he’d pick up that Julio Iglesias his wife wanted on CD. Not in this place, though, he wouldn’t.
“Why d’you put up with that?” Millington asked the girl behind the counter. “Enough to put off any customers that survive the sound barrier.”
“What?” the girl said, angling one side of her face towards him.
A tiny curve of stars ran round her ear, each smaller than the last.
“Him in the door, why don’t you have him moved on?”
“Maurice? He’s our unofficial doorman. Autumn till the first day of spring.”
“Goes south for the summer, does he?”
“Eastbourne.”
“He must be a public health hazard.” Millington was having to shout to be heard. “Put in a call to the station, get him disinfected.”
The girl’s face screwed up into a frown. All the while she was talking to Millington, she continued to take records from a cardboard box, check them off against a printed list. “Rather have him in here than the police.”
Millington took out his wallet and showed her his warrant card. “Darren Jilkes,” he said, hard-faced.
“Downstairs,” she said, pointing. “Singles.” Millington was surprised to observe that she was blushing, high red.
The basement had posters on the walls, singles in their sleeves in browsing racks and behind the counter. One of the assistants was wearing a Smiths sweatshirt and drumming along with his hands, using the ring on his little finger for rim shots. He had short brown hair, rather more than his fair share of acne and, even though the lighting was subdued, he was wearing dark glasses. His companion, bending to find something on a shelf near the floor, was almost as fat as he was thin. He was also quite bald save for a wisp of hair that hung down from the folds of his scalp and was graced at its end by a black bow.
“You Darren?”
No reply.
Millington reached over and lifted the arm from the record, more carefully than it deserved.
The second assistant stood up and when he did Millington saw that he wasn’t only fat, he was tall.
“Not keen on The Fall, then?” he said.
“I saw you,” Millington said. “Tag team match at Heanor Town Hall. Winter before last. The Oblivion Brothers. One arm out of joint and a broken nose. When the trainer pushed it back into place I got blood and snot all over my shirt.”
“Front row, was you?”
“Third.”
“Wondered. Usually women in the front. Lapping up all the sweat and grunt and squeezing their handbags further and further down between their legs.”
“You given it up or just resting?”
“Moved on to higher things. Got to be more to life than sex and violence, hasn’t there?”
Graham Millington could feel a familiar nervous squirming in his stomach so clearly he was worried that they might have heard it across the counter.
“That’s how come you’re down here, is it? The search for higher things.”
“It’s in the music. Always has been. Isn’t that so, Darren?”
If it was, Darren wasn’t saying.
“What’s your real name then?” Millington asked. “Always assuming it isn’t Oblivion.”
“Sloman. Geoff.”
Millington nodded. “And you’re Jilkes, Darren?”
“What d’you want?” asked Jilkes.
“Always assuming,” said Sloman, “that it isn’t a record.”
“A colleague of mine was talking to young Darren’s girlfriend last night. She mentioned something about meeting on a double-date.”
“So?” said Sloman, a touch belligerent.