“All right, I was talking about getting somewhere else, and the next we’re not talking at all.”
“We talked the other night when you came round uninvited, have you forgotten that? We didn’t only talk, we got to walk the dog round the block.”
“How can…? You used to love that dog.”
“I still do.”
“You used to say you loved me.”
“What do you want, Chris? I’m already late.”
“Oh, God!”
Rachel opened the car door and threw her bag across on to the passenger seat.
“I thought, well, I haven’t seen you for a bit, I thought we could go out for a meal.”
“We don’t go out for meals.”
“It looks as if we don’t do anything.”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
“Rachel,” he said, standing close against the car. “You said this was a temporary thing, while you thought things through, sorted yourself out.”
“And if I’d wanted to sort them out with you, Chris, I would have done it while we were still together.”
“Come and talk to me, for Christ’s sake!”
“I can’t talk to you.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“Is it?”
“Absolute bloody nonsense!”
Rachel looked at him, her fingers round the door handle.
“You know you can talk to me. You can talk to anybody. It’s not something you have problems with.”
“All right, then. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Wonderful!”
“I don’t want to talk to you, Chris, and that’s why. That’s a great example of why. Because whenever I say anything that goes against what you want to hear, you don’t like it.”
“Do you? Does anyone?”
“There’s a difference between disagreeing and refusing to hear what somebody’s saying.”
“I can hear you all right.”
“Yes, but you don’t acknowledge it.”
“Oh, fine!”
“You don’t accept it and move on. How on earth you manage at work I can’t imagine. Not if that’s the way you act.”
“My work’s perfectly okay, thanks very much. The difference is that I know when I’m there and when I’m not, I can tell where one starts and the other finishes.”
“Meaning that I can’t?”
“Meaning that if I react to you the way I do, it’s because my emotions are involved.”
“And they’re not at work, not with your clients?”
“No! Not in the same way, for Christ’s sake!” Rachel looked at her watch. She pulled the door open wider, got in and closed it firmly behind her. She turned the key in the ignition, gave it some more choke, tried again and put the engine into gear.
“You won’t change your mind?” Chris said, bending towards the window.
Rachel indicated that she was pulling out from the curb.
“Something quick to eat…”
He stood in the middle of the road, watching her car get smaller until it turned right into the main stream of traffic.
“How’s Debbie?” Lynn Kellogg asked.
“Fine,” said Naylor, a little too hastily.
“She’s been seeing the doctor?”
“Honestly, she’s okay. She wasn’t even sick this morning. That is, not really sick. Just…”
Resnick had half a pastrami and mustard on dark rye and a quarter of potato, onion, and chive salad. What he didn’t have was a fork. Lunching on his own he wouldn’t have thought twice about using his fingers, but in front of his subordinates he had to set an example. He’d save the salad for later.
He bit into the sandwich and lifted up a brown A4 envelope with forefinger and thumb of his other hand, shaking it gently until three copies of a photograph slid down on to the desk.
“William James Doria, academic of this parish.”
Lynn Kellogg’s already red cheeks deepened a tone. So he had taken her seriously. Well, good for him.
“I don’t know if this is going to be any more than an irrelevant little side-show,” Resnick was saying. “But I’ve had a word with the superintendent and he says we can take it a little way, see if anything shows. If we haven’t got anything after, say, three days at the most, we’ll chuck him back on the pile with the other also-rans and join the main party. Right?”
Both the detective constables nodded in agreement.
“Questions at this point?”
“How did we get on to him, sir?” asked Naylor.
“Lynn here interviewed him as a matter of routine. Just one more bloke writing off to box numbers. She thought there was something funny about him.”
“That’s it?” Naylor said, surprised.
“He wasn’t what he seemed to be,” said Lynn, emphatically.
“What was he then?”
“He was…creepy.”
“We’re not so overburdened with suspects we can afford to ignore the gut reactions of detectives,” said Resnick, not wanting Naylor to show his lack of enthusiasm any further. “Especially when they’ve been proved right in the past.”
Thank you, Lynn Kellogg thought. Thank you for that.
Maybe Naylor’s spent too long teamed up with Divine, Resnick was thinking. Or perhaps that new mortgage and all that life insurance is weighing him down with care and safety.
“Is he at the poly or the university, sir, this bloke?”
“University. Linguistics and Critical Theory.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Buggered if I know for certain,” said Resnick. “But I know one thing, while you two are out snooping around, Patel is going to be finding out.”
Thinking a moment about Patel, Resnick wondered if the rye bread he was eating was the stuff they sent down by van from Bradford.
“How d’you want us to go about it, sir?” Lynn asked. Part of her wanted to take another shot at Doria, see if in some way she could confirm her initial feelings; against that, spending another twenty minutes alone with him in that office was close to the last thing she wanted to do.
“Kevin,” Resnick said, “Lynn got a list from Doria of all the women he claims to have met through these ads. It goes back two years and there are sixteen names.”
“I’m surprised he’s got the time,” said Naylor.
“No? You should see his timetable. With a workload like that he could manage sixteen women a week.”
Resnick glanced across at Lynn, worried in case he’d just said something sexist, but her expression gave away nothing. He wondered if she had been the one who’d ripped up Divine’s girlie calendar? One of these days he’d have to ask her.
“Anyway,” Resnick said, “I want you, Kevin, to go and talk to them. Just gently. Do they remember him? Where did they go, how did he strike them? Oh, and was it just the one date or more?”
“Yes, sir,” Naylor said, writing quickly in his notebook.
“Two years is a long time,” Resnick continued. “They might be in who knows what relationship by now; they might not want to be reminded. Nurse them along.”
Naylor blinked. “Urn, what, sir, am I looking for exactly?”
Did he try and strangle them with their own scarves or bash them to bits in their own back garden, Resnick said to himself.
“One,” he said aloud, “did any of them come away from this Doria with feelings in some sense similar to Lynn’s? Anything that suggests he might be a little bit odd.”
“Kinky, d’you mean, sir?”
“Not necessarily. But not necessarily not. And, yes, if there’s some way of finding out what went on sexually, if it did, that might be useful, too.”
Resnick leaned across and pointed to one name. “Marian Witczak. I know her. Seen her this morning. I’ll write it up and chuck it in with the rest, but for what it’s worth, she didn’t think he was strange at all. Bright as a button and charming as Fred Astaire.”
“I always thought he was creepy, too,” said Lynn.
“Fred Astaire?” Resnick and Naylor almost chorused.
“Yes. He’s so, oh, smarmy.”
“Tell that to Ginger Rogers,” said Resnick.
“Do you know,” Lynn said, sitting forward, “all those dances they did together, they never as much as kissed, off screen, I mean. I don’t think she even liked him.”
“Torvill and Dean,” said Naylor.
Resnick finished his sandwich and called the meeting back to order. “Lynn, spend some time hanging round the campus, use the bar, the cafeteria. Talk to some students, see if you can find anyone who takes one of his courses; even better, someone doing research, a student he’s likely to spend quite a bit of time with alone.”