“I wasn’t expecting you back so soon, that’s all,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t mean that. I…”
“I can sit in the kitchen if you’re working.”
Phillips released a breath, close to a sigh. “I thought you were meeting someone.” He lifted the box and folders away and turned round. “I thought you were going for a drink.”
“I was,” Rachel’s voice came back from the kitchen.
“And?”
“And I had a drink and now I’m back here.”
He leaned forward and retrieved the card he’d been writing on, quickly finished making his annotation, slotted the card back into place. He knew how he should react to Rachel when she was like this, knew that what he had to do was leave her alone, let her sort her own way out of it.
“I was just about to have a Scotch,” he said, leaning against the kitchen doorway.
She swung her head towards him as if to say, good for you.
“Want to join me?”
“No.”
“Might make you feel better.”
“No.”
Somehow he’d managed to close out the sound of the rain so completely that when he went out into the garden the fierceness of it took him by surprise. The dog had run out after him and now hunched back near some roses that were waiting to be cut back, looking at him hopefully through the gloom. You want to play ball, don’t you? You want to go for another walk?
Through the blurred square of the window he could make out the dark twist of Rachel’s hair as she moved back and forth between the cooker and the sink.
The Labrador’s coat was soaked already, his nose slick and his eyes bright.
All right, he knew she was having a tough time at work, this placement breaking down on top of everything else, a kid she’d really struggled for. But why did she have to hold so much into herself, why try so hard to keep him out, as if admitting any kind of weakness was showing a crack through which he could slide his hand and hang on? And besides, his day hadn’t exactly been a cake-walk. A couple of kids with so much solvent up their noses that breathing was more or less impossible; a woman who’d barricaded herself into her flat on the thirteenth floor and threatened to chop off her fingers if she weren’t left alone; an old man all but dead from hypothermia, who’d fallen over and lain for two days with the carpet wrapped around him until Meals on Wheels raised the alarm. She wasn’t the only one with things to feel bad about.
When he walked back into the house, water running down his face, Rachel had left the kitchen and the kettle was coming up to the boil, beginning its shrill whistle.
In the bathroom Rachel stood quite still, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Where her cheekbones touched her skin, she was still flushed from the rain and the cold. After some moments she began to pull the comb down through her hair and then stopped. Why was she behaving like this? Because she’d allowed herself to get annoyed by a man she scarcely knew? A stupid policeman. It was ridiculous.
“I’m sorry,” she started to say.
“It’s okay. Nothing.” Phillips closed the living-room door with one foot, a mug in each hand.
Rachel tried for a smile. “What is it? Coffee?”
“Tea.”
The smile became real. “Just because your wife told you it was what women needed when they were premenstrual.”
“Oh, so that’s what it is.”
“Part of it.”
“I should have known.”
“I told you those little red dots should be in your diary.”
He waited until she had sat on the settee, handed her the tea and sat beside her, careful not to crowd her too close. “How did it go, the meeting?”
“It went.”
“No way of holding it together?”
Rachel sat with the mug cradled between both hands. “No,” she said. “No way.”
Resnick had driven home from the Peach Tree and fed the cats. The post comprised a letter from his bank urging him to apply for the one credit card he already had, several pieces of disposable junk mail, and a reminder that his dues to the local Polish Association had not been paid. He was tearing everything but the last in half when he noticed a leaflet offering three free trial sessions at a new health club.
You never could tell.
Resnick folded the leaflet neatly and slid it between the Tabasco and the Worcester sauce. Bud was sulking because Dizzy had stolen her food again, so Resnick picked the cat up and set her down near the draining board, tipping a handful of chicken Brekkies quietly out of the palm of his hand in front of her.
A few minutes later he was back in his car and heading for the station.
Graham Millington had a small hand mirror propped up on his desk and was using a pair of nail scissors to trim his mustache.
“Graham. The house-to-house?”
Millington nearly cut a generous slice out of his lip when he jumped. “Reports are on your desk,” he said, scrambling to his feet, his voice a shade muffled.
Resnick leafed through the forms, summaries of the calls Kellogg and Patel had made that day. “Give me the gist of it,” he said, not looking up.
“Lot more stuff about threats from Macliesh, hammering on the door at all hours, calling her all the names under the sun, at least two claim he’d wait down the end of the street for her of an evening…”
“Recent?”
“Most of them before he went down, but not all.”
“This one here,” Resnick said, lifting one sheet away from the rest. “Man at 42-that’s across the street, isn’t it? — says he saw Shirley Peters leaving the house the evening she was killed. Eight o’clock.”
“Says he knew the time because of the television.”
“Saw a taxi pulled up and she went off in that.”
“Thinks there was only the driver in the cab but he couldn’t swear to it.”
Resnick glanced down at the report. “Didn’t know which taxi firm either.”
“No particular reason for him to notice, sounds as if she was always off out, this one.”
Resnick looked up sharply at the censorious tone in his sergeant’s voice. “Not about to voice the opinion that she was asking for it, Graham?” he said softly.
“No, sir.”
“And we’re following up the taxi?”
“DC Kellogg, she’s been phoning round. Nothing definite yet, but they’re usually pretty good, things like this.”
Resnick pushed the reports back together, glanced at his watch. “Off duty, aren’t you?”
Millington shrugged. “Wife’s night for her Russian class. She’s dropped the boys off at her mother’s. I’ll probably just have a quick pint and then get back.”
Resnick nodded and the sergeant turned to leave. “Graham?”
“Yes?”
“Peach Tree, that’s your pub, isn’t it?”
Millington nodded.
“Shouldn’t go in there looking like that. You’ve got blood down the front of your shirt.”
Resnick checked through the reports again, making notes here and there. A call had been logged from Aberdeen informing him that Tony Macliesh had been taken into custody off the train. The DS on the second shift had been called out to clear up a couple of assaults at a private family party. The owner of a second-hand shop on the Alfreton Road had called in to say that a couple of youths had been round offering him three VCRs; they were coming back tomorrow and an officer would be there to greet them. If the owner hadn’t already been sentenced twice for receiving stolen goods, it would have been altruistic.
When Resnick realized he had been thinking about Rachel Chaplin for some minutes, he called down to the desk and asked the sergeant to send one of the uniforms past Reno’s to pick him up a pizza-pepperoni, anchovies, extra olives.
He’d hardly put the phone down when Patel came in with the woman.
Grace Kelley sniffed the room for the smell of Brut and was disappointed. She’d been inside police stations before but never into CID and somehow it wasn’t living up to her expectations. She’d anticipated a mixture of shower gel and Benson king-size, men with jock straps snug beneath the polyester weave of their off-the-peg blue suits, but all she got were some uncovered typewriters, a couple of dying pot plants, and, on the desk nearest to her, a photograph of a wife and two kids with a mirror resting against it. She might as well, she thought, have been back in the typing pool.