“It’s only just…I mean, we thought, she thought, you know…but for definite, just this last few days.”
“That’s great! I’m really excited for you. Both of you. How’s Debbie? I bet she’s thrilled.”
“Sick.”
“Hmm?”
“She’s sick. Every morning. Half-past four every morning, there she goes, out to the bathroom.”
“But that’ll soon pass.”
“I hope so.”
“Kevin, it’s not you that’s in there throwing up.”
“I sometimes think I might as well be.”
“Oh, Kevin, stop it! You make it sound like a disaster. She hasn’t found out she’s suffering from some fatal disease, you know. It’s a baby!”
“Keep your voice down!”
“I don’t understand this,” Lynn laughed. “You should be dead proud. Walking round telling everyone. Writing it on walls. I know I should be.”
“You haven’t been sitting here trying to balance next year’s budget.”
“No. And I haven’t been worrying myself silly over radiation levels or the next ice age or whether I’m going to be hit by a bus the next time I step out into the street.”
“I suppose you’re right. It’s just that, well, we’d begun to get on our feet, put a bit of money away.”
“Kevin, Kevin!” said Lynn, shaking her head.
“What’s wrong now?”
“Listen to yourself. You sound like my parents when I was a kid: scrimping and saving over every penny, a little in a shoe box under the bed for emergencies, coppers in an old marmalade jar for Christmas-start filling up New Year’s Day and you might have enough for presents and a bottle of brandy.”
He looked at her seriously. “I don’t see what’s so terrible about that.”
Lynn smiled ruefully and pushed back her chair. “I’ve got someone to see out at the university.”
“Better get going myself.”
“Give Debbie congratulations from me.”
“All right. Only, Lynn…”
“Um?”
“Don’t, you know, spread it about. Once Divine gets hold of it-you can imagine what he’ll say.”
Quickly, she leaned back towards him. “What Mark Divine has to say is worth less than a fart in a thunderstorm. He’s got two ideas in his head-and they’re both the same. And if you’re going to let the likes of him run your life for you, you’re less the bloke than I thought you were.”
Patel was around the corner of the CID room, typing up reports on the interviews he’d made that day-a greengrocer seeking solace from seven kids and the irregularities of the rhythm method, a refugee from Colombia who wanted to combine visits to the cinema with language lessons, a chartered accountant who was contemplating suing a dating agency after three successive mismatches by their computer.
Two others sat in a huddle over their notebooks while around them phones sputtered to life at intervals.
Lynn Kellogg came in briskly, went straight to Mark Divine’s desk by the window, lifted the calendar now displaying Miss November from where it was hanging and tore it into half, then half again. With a satisfied slap of the hands she dropped the pieces into the nearest metal wastepaper bin and left.
In her wake even the phones stopped ringing.
The narrow road that wound through the university campus was all hills, right-angle bends, and ramps. After wasting five minutes looking for a parking space, she left the car on the grass above the lake and walked up the broad stone steps to the nearest entrance.
Behind a desk and grille, a porter in a dark blue uniform was speaking into a walkie-talkie.
“Professor Doria,” she said.
Words fell apart against a hail of static and atmospherics. “Useless blasted thing!”
“I’ve an appointment with a Professor Doria.”
“Might as well give us some of them tom-tom drums, stand as much chance of making yourself understood.”
“I’m supposed to be seeing him at a quarter-past three.”
“Interview, is it?”
“Sort of.”
“We get a lot of mature students coming here these days. Can’t say as I can see why. You’d have thought ’em old enough to know better.”
Lynn searched his face for some sign that he was making a joke.
“You want the next building,” the porter said. “Out of here and sharp right, through the car park and through the arch, you want the door to your left. There’s a porter there-ask him.”
She didn’t bother. Along a corridor devoid of students or any other form of life, she found the name-Professor W.J. Doria-in white letters cut into a dark wooden strip and fastened beneath the frosted glass panel of the door.
She knocked, paused and listened, was about to knock again when the door was thrown open and she had a sudden impression of a mass of dark hair, a strong nose, two gesticulating arms ushering her inside.
“Professor Doria?”
Outside, above the building, the clock sounded the single note for the quarter-hour.
Twenty-Four
Rachel didn’t phone again. Days passed. Resnick looked up the number of the Social Services office a couple of times and went no further. The DCI got all hot and bothered about a pork butcher from Gedling with a record of petty theft that had escalated on two occasions to aggravated burglary. When he was brought in for questioning his photograph was in the local newspaper and middle-aged women threw refuse at him when he was bundled across the street. Suzanne Olds had a field day and there were threats of a suit for harassment and unlawful arrest. Pepper’s stomach blew up like a balloon and Resnick hurried him to the vet before he exploded all over the living-room carpet. Debbie stopped being sick. Behind Lynn’s back, Mark Divine swore at her viciously, but whenever she walked into the office he lapsed into an angry, wordless grumbling. Graham Millington stopped by the record shop and talked to Geoff Sloman for an hour and the only thing he came away with was a new Sandie Shaw EP that he played once and promptly forgot. Jack Skelton was now getting up at half-four, so that he could run five miles before getting into work by six, but it didn’t make any difference.
What made Lynn go down to the incident room and get a copy of the computer print-out she could never be certain. It did worry her, days and weeks afterwards, that she had waited so long. All she could put her slackness down to were the images of babies, floating effortlessly and unbidden, around and around inside her head.
That was easier to understand.
The conversation with Kevin Naylor, his reluctance either to accept or celebrate. You should be dead proud. Walking round telling everyone. Writing it on walls. I know I should be. If Naylor was normally taciturn, he was Bamber Gascoigne and Russell Harty rolled into one when set against her Dennis. Dennis who went through life with all the expressiveness and verbal eloquence of the Man in the Iron Mask. She thought they had last made love five weeks ago, after EastEnders and before he nipped down the road for an unofficial meeting of the Osprey Wheelers in the side room of the pub.
Not only a cyclist, but a cyclist whose other hobby was ornithology.
Much as she hated the old joke about the woman officer who was the station bike, Lynn thought the only way she might raise some excitement from Dennis would be to kit herself out with a racing saddle and a pair of drop handlebars.
“Do you ever think about having kids? The two of us. Together.”
He was asleep, dreaming of sighting a ptarmigan while winning the final stage of the Tour de France.
“Sir?”
She knocked and put her head round the door. Resnick was rereading a report he’d already been through twice without taking anything in. There were scores of others, milling around on the desk. It was becoming close to impossible: no way did they have the personnel to keep up with the spread of action the computer was generating.
“Have you got a minute?”
Resnick laughed. “Don’t suppose the kettle’s on, is it?”