She looked at Resnick curiously before sitting down, as if wondering if she wanted to be there at all.
“Are you his boss?” she asked, nodding in the direction of Naylor.
“Sort of.”
Sally Oakes sniffed.
“Coffee?” Resnick asked.
“Coke.”
“Espresso for me,” Resnick said to Naylor. “Large.”
When Naylor had gone to the counter, Resnick introduced himself.
“You got a cigarette?” she asked.
“Afraid not.”
Sally Oakes swung up from her chair and went to where a couple of young men were sitting at a table, eating baked potatoes. Resnick watched her lean over them, asking first for a cigarette, then for a light. He was certain that she didn’t know them, nor they her.
“So what’s he done, old William James?” she asked, letting the smoke drift up from her nostrils.
“Has he done something?”
“You playing me around or what?” She swallowed some of the Coke, her eyes shifting across to Naylor and back again. “First him and then you.” She sniffed. “Not me you’re interested in, is it?”
Resnick stirred his coffee. “What do you think he might have done? Always assuming that he has.”
“I don’t know, do I?”
“Guess.”
She blinked her eyes rapidly in annoyance. “Computer games for policemen, is it? Dungeons and dragons. Got to make a move or it all grinds to a standstill.”
“Something like that.”
She blinked again through the smoke. She knows, Resnick thought, she knows or at least she suspects, but she’s not saying.
“How come you went out with him?” Resnick asked, switching tack. “On the surface it doesn’t seem made in heaven.”
“I thought it’d be a laugh.”
“And was it?”
Sally drew on the cigarette, angling her head to one side. “No it wasn’t.”
“Still you carried on going out with him. Over a year.”
“He was interesting. I never said he wasn’t interesting.”
“But?”
“But nothing.” She shrugged.
“But you stopped seeing him.”
“I was going steady.”
“You could have carried on meeting him if you’d wanted to, said he was your uncle.”
“That what you get them to say, is it?” Resnick grinned back at her. Naylor, who had been in the act of drinking his cappuccino, spluttered bubbles into it and finished up half-choking and with a cream and chocolate mustache.
“You’d have stopped seeing him anyway, wouldn’t you?” Resnick asked. “After that last time.”
“What d’you mean?”
“After what happened that last time.”
“What do you know?”
“Only what you’ll tell me.”
Sally Oakes showed Resnick her profile and took two, three deep drags on the cigarette. The DJ severed his love affair with himself long enough to play Nina Simone’s “My Baby Just Cares For Me.”
“Can I have another Coke?”
Resnick signaled for Naylor not to hurry back.
“The first time, the first couple of times,” Sally Oakes said, “I thought he wasn’t really interested, in anything happening, you know, sex. Then I realized what he was interested in, what he wanted me to do…well, he wanted to watch me, you know. So I thought, okay, fine, he wants to play with himself. I mean, if it was good enough for Elvis…” She stubbed out the cigarette. “Then, we’d been to this bar, a couple of bands were playing, just local, he’d been doing his usual thing of listening half the time like they were, you know, God’s gift to music and the rest bending my ear about some highfalutin’ theory or other, honest, I used to switch off. So, we got to my room and I thought, okay, a quick run through the usual, but this time it’s different and he’s all over the place, trying to stick it here, there, and everywhere and, Christ, I’m wondering what I’ve got myself into when all of a sudden he jumps up and he’s off in the bathroom-I don’t know what he’s doing in there except I suppose he’s jerking himself off, but when he comes back it’s all those old jokes about cold showers and he just wants to sit there with a mug of Horlicks in one hand, the other inside my knickers, and some German film boring the arse off Channel Four just for a change.”
Sitting with her back towards Naylor, who had turned a lovely shade of puce, she reached round for the glass and drank half of the Coke right down.
“Is that the way it went on?” Resnick asked. “After that.”
“You’re joking! If it had’ve been, that would have been it, then and there. No, he went back to fooling around for half-an-hour at the end of the evening and going through the tapes I’d brought back from this place. Hip-hop, that’s what he seemed keen on.”
I’ll bet, thought Resnick.
“Tell me about the last time, Sally,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”
“It was like before, the one I told you about before. One minute it’s all four-syllable words and the next we’re down to four-letter ones and he’s got me rolling on the floor while he’s…” She stopped and lowered her voice still further, her eyes fixed on Resnick’s face. “There are some things I don’t mind, more than a lot of girls maybe, but I don’t mind telling you…he hurt me.”
“You mean, he hit you?”
“No. He hurt me.”
Resnick wondered what Millington and Mark Divine were laughing about and quickly decided he’d rather not know.
He’d taken Lynn Kellogg out from the University and sent her off to talk with Sally Oakes, see if there wasn’t something else to be learned. The girl would most likely agree to make a statement now, but to what avail he still wasn’t certain.
Graham Millington turned away from Divine, still laughing, intending to answer a telephone, and spotted Resnick.
“Got a minute, sir,” he said, hurrying forward.
Mark Divine picked up the phone instead.
“He’s a hot one,” Millington enthused. “No two ways about it.”
“You thought that about our friendly neighborhood wrestler,” Resnick reminded him.
“Sloman,” scoffed Millington. “Still wouldn’t trust him further than Big Daddy could throw him.”
“But this is different?”
“Inspector Grafton’s pretty set on him, any road.”
“Graham, we all get set on anything that looks more than halfway possible. We all want to see this thing over. Either that or some other woman’s going to finish her evening like Shirley Peters and Mary Sheppard.”
“I know, sir, but…”
“I would have bet a couple of months’ pay away it was Macliesh, domestic violence, open and shut. You went after Sloman because some of the facts seemed to fit, because he looked as if he could have done it. What’s different here?”
What’s the matter with the man, Millington thought? He’s beginning to sound more like counsel for the defense.
“For one thing, sir, there’s his mental history. I mean he’s not only a psycho, he’s a self-confessed sexual maniac into the bargain.”
“Confessed to the thought, not the deed.”
“He says.”
“Do we know any different?”
“There’s a psychiatrist’s report. According to that, if he comes off his drugs then he’s likely to be as randy as a buck rabbit in season.”
“The psychiatrist said that?”
“More or less. I mean, that was the gist of it.”
“Thanks for the translation.” Irony was wasted on Millington.
“Then there’s this business with Shirley Peters. He admits writing to her, owns up to going out to meet her. Now that’s a Monday night just three weeks before she was killed.”
“But he still hasn’t admitted more than that?”
“Of course he hasn’t. He’s not stupid, is he?”
“I thought he was. I thought that was the point.”
“What I’m saying, sir, it doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t fit. All the other women he contacted, he went ahead and met. The only one we know came to any harm, the one who was murdered, oh, no, he walked away, didn’t he?”