“I hope so, sir. I’d like to…”
She half-turned away, recalling the moment when she’d stepped into the darkness of that small garden, the cold biting at her exposed face and hands, blood drying darkly onto dark, dry earth.
“Let’s get going, then.”
They were only just out of the room when the phone sounded again.
“Forget it,” Resnick said. “You could spend the whole day answering the thing and never get anywhere. Besides,” pushing open the door, “it’s a little difficult to imagine that it’s good news.”
Graham Millington had taken the wrestler for himself, Patel was along the corridor with his friend. A uniformed PC struggled along in the corner, sweating as he tried to keep up with question and answer, flicking his eyes anxiously at the sergeant-slow down, for heaven’s sake, slow down!
Geoff Sloman seemed to be enjoying it. He leaned his considerable weight back in the chair, answering questions with all the enthusiasm of someone whose ambition in life has been to be stopped by one of those women with clipboards who haunt the streets outside Tesco’s or Sainsbury’s.
The first time they’d met the two women, they’d gone to a couple of pubs and then on for a pizza. Shirley had been quite a bit older, but he hadn’t minded that and during a quick chat with Darren in the gents they’d decided that was the way they were going to divvy them up. They’d all shared a cab from the square. Shirley had been the first to get out; he’d thought about getting out with her, the old goodnight on the doorstep routine, all the while trying to get your toe in the front door, but the prospect of having to walk home later had put him off. Besides, by then he’d already arranged to see her again.
Five nights later, the four of them again, a few beers and then into the Astoria. The music, it wasn’t Shirley’s scene at all, soon as she was inside and sitting up on the balcony she got this look on her face, like she’d got toothache in her ear. So, a quick word with Darren, do the decent thing, off out of there, and round the corner for a curry.
Well, she was grateful.
Millington wanted a cigarette. The ends of his mustache were beginning to itch and he eased them back from his upper lip with thumb and forefinger.
“Tell me about it.”
Sloman shrugged his powerful shoulders. “She asked me in for a coffee, gave us a Scotch, large one, laughing, ‘I never did know when to say when.’ Time for Frank Sinatra. No wonder The Exorcists had gone down like a barrel-load of sick.” He looked across at Millington. “That’s it, more or less.”
“Which?”
“Um?”
“More or less?”
“Wrong time of the month.”
“So it was less?”
“Definitely.”
“You’re sure?”
“Bloody certain!”
Millington nodded and stood up. He paced around a little, letting the big feller watch him, much as he would have done in the ring. It had been Sloman who had broken his opponent’s nose in the bout he’d watched: like splintering a match. Except for the scream.
“You must have been pretty pissed off.”
“No,” said Sloman carelessly, one arm hooked over the back of the chair.
“All that hanging about. Evening’s already buggered up because she doesn’t like the music. Curry’s probably given you heartburn. Gets you on the couch and pours whisky down you and then she’s making the excuses. I bet you were really pissed off.”
Sloman unhooked his arm, touched the ends of his fingers together with surprising lightness. “I wasn’t on the couch.”
“Does that matter?”
“You seem to think it does.”
“The couch, the floor…”
“I was sitting on a chair, soft-backed, solid arms, wood. She sat on the couch, when she wasn’t wandering around between the kitchen and the stereo. When she wasn’t sitting on my lap.”
“Sticking her tongue in your ear.”
“My mouth.”
“And you weren’t randy?”
“Maybe.”
“Frustrated?”
Sloman shrugged.
“Come off it, Sloman. You’re expecting me to believe there’s this woman, asks you in, all over you, gives you the old come-on, and then she looks you in the eye and says it’s off the menu-all that malarky and you says thanks very much.”
“Something like that.”
Millington leaned forward across the desk and laughed in Sloman’s face.
Sloman gave a slow smile. “See,” he said. “I’m used to it. All manner of provocation. You. Her. Blokes in the ring. How else d’you reckon I stayed in the game for even three years? You get some nasty bastards, agree to one move and do another just to make themselves look good, walk away, and then it’s the back heel into the groin, smile and spit in your eye. If you haven’t got the self-control, where are you? You can’t afford to let it get to you, can’t afford to get frustrated. If you did and really lost your temper, well…” He winked at Millington and flexed the muscles in his arms, “…whoever it was, they’d be dead. Wouldn’t they?”
Graham Millington looked as if he’d been in the ring-through the wringer, anyway. He was down to his shirtsleeves, which were rolled unevenly back over his wrists. The striped cotton was sticking darkly to his skin. He had a mug of tea in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and he wanted a stiff Scotch.
“Problems?” Resnick asked.
Lynn Kellogg stood close by the door, not certain whether she should be there at that moment or not.
“Clever bastard!” Millington spat out.
Resnick sat on the edge of a scarred table and lifted the unlit cigarette from between his sergeant’s fingers. “Tell me.”
“Sure he went out with her, once with this Darren and a couple of times on their own. Nice woman, he says, but he likes them younger. No hard feelings, no regrets; they sodding shook hands at her front door.”
Resnick smiled: without looking over his shoulder, he knew that Lynn Kellogg would be smiling too. Nothing angered his sergeant more than suspected villains and tearaways behaving like the presenters on Blue Peter. Especially if they happened to be seventeen-stone and bald as a Chinese hippie.
“Think he’s telling the truth?”
“I can’t bloody shake him.”
“Get anything out of his pal?”
“If you ask me, they’re both as bent as last year’s clockwork orange.”
“It wasn’t what I was asking.”
“No. His mate’s given us nothing.”
“Then maybe there’s nothing to give.” Millington put down the mug with a thump, stood up as he pushed his hands deep into his trouser pockets. He glowered at Lynn Kellogg, who averted her eyes but stood her ground. “He’s perfect for it!” Millington said, angry. “He met her through one of those ads, he’s built like a brick shithouse, knows his own strength and what to do with it. If he’d taken a few swings at the back of Mary Sheppard’s head she’d’ve looked like she did-bloody tinned tomatoes!”
“Christ!” Lynn exclaimed below her breath.
“Take it easy, Graham,” said Resnick, standing. “Maybe it’s too perfect. And, what you were just saying, my guess is that tells us he’s not our man.”
“What I said…?”
“According to you, we’ve got a big man who knows what he can use his body for and what he can’t. All in all pretty controlled, wouldn’t you say?”
Millington was looking at a spot on the floor midway between the inspector and himself.
“Graham?” Resnick persisted quietly.
“I suppose so, sir. Only…”
“Whoever did that to Mary Sheppard, sir,” said Lynn Kellogg, coming forward, “whatever control he might have had, he’d lost it.”
Millington glared at her hard.
“She’s right, Graham. Let it go. For now, at least. On your own admission, it doesn’t sound as if we’ve got anything to bold him on.”
The sergeant shook his head, sighed back in his throat.
“I’ll have a quick word with him, since I’m here,” Resnick said, moving towards the door. “With the pair of them. Ring through to the DCI to check, but my guess is, we’ll kick them out with our thanks.”