“Her?”
“The little girl, the one who went missing, ages back, you know.” Divine held his breath. “What you’re saying, Raymond, right off, it wasn’t simply you knew what was hidden in that corner was a body, you knew whose body it was.”
Raymond stared back at him, not squirming any more, quite calm. “Yes,” he said. “Gloria. I knew her. Used to live near me. See her mornings, on her way, like, into school. Weekends, off down the shops with her nan. Yes. Gloria. I used to watch her.”
Eight
“Here,” the pathologist said, “take one of these.”
Resnick slipped one of Parkinson’s extra-strong mints inside his mouth, pushing it high against his palate with his tongue. It was quiet enough in the small office for Resnick to hear the tick of the old-fashioned fob watch Parkinson always wore, attached by a chain at the front of his waistcoat. Only when he had to don an apron did the pathologist remove the jacket of his three-piece suit; the only occasion he removed his cuff links, rolled his shirt sleeves carefully back up, was when his assistant was holding out a pair of flesh-colored surgical gloves.
“Quite a mess, eh, Charlie?”
Resnick nodded.
“As well we found her when we did.”
Resnick nodded again, trying not to visualize the bite marks on the body; the front of the face, one way or another, laid bare almost to the bone.
“What helped most, of course, either it’s my damned age or this has set to be one of the chilliest winters we’ve had for years. Building like that, no heating, much of the time it would have stayed the right side of forty degrees.”
They had identified Gloria Summers from her dental charts and by comparison of bones from an X-ray that had been taken a year earlier, when she had fallen and broken a bone in her right ankle. Resnick had asked her mother if she wanted to come to the mortuary and see the body and Susan Summers had looked at him with raised eyebrows and said, “Are you kidding?”
“How definite can you be,” Resnick asked now, “as to cause of death?”
Parkinson removed his bifocals and proceeded to give them an unnecessary polish. “One thing’s positive: strangulation. Without doubt the windpipe has been fractured; the other signs you’d anticipate are clearly there. Hemorrhaging in the neck, close by the hyoid bone. Some evidence of swelling in the veins at the back of the head, caused by the increase in pressure when the blood is unable to escape.”
“Then that was what killed her?”
“Not necessarily.” Satisfied, Parkinson set the glasses back upon his nose. “There is also a severe fracture at the rear of the skull, acute extradural and subdural hematoma …”
“Fall or a blow?”
“Almost certainly a blow. The way the hemorrhaging’s below the fracture. While she could have sustained a similar fracture as the result of a fall-she was only a wee girl remember-the force of that kind of accident jolts the brain hard against the skull and I’d be looking to find bleeding further forward, scarcely any underneath the fracture at all.”
Resnick crunched the last fragments of mint between his back teeth. “So, your report, which one will you be opting for, principal cause?”
Parkinson shook his head. “Either, or.” He put his hand into his waistcoat pocket, offered Resnick another mint. “Come the end of the day, I’ll be surprised if it greatly matters.”
Resnick got back to the station to find Graham Millington closeted in his office with Kellogg and Divine. Millington hadn’t quite dared to take Resnick’s chair, but hovered near it instead, as if he might be invited to sit at any moment. Divine, of course, sportsman that he was, had been working his way through Benson and Hedges Silk Cut, giving a pretty fair impression of Sellafield on a cloudy day.
“Sorry,” Millington said, straightening not quite to attention, “like open house out there.”
Resnick shook his head. “I assume you’re not in here to discuss the dinner and dance?”
“No, sir.”
Resnick wafted the door back and forth a few times, settled for leaving it partly open. “Better fill me in,” he said.
Millington looked pointedly at Mark Divine and waited for him to start. Resnick listened, observing carefully: the way Divine leaned forward, shoulders hunched as if locking into a scrum, the eagerness in his voice; Lynn, more centered on her chair, soft skepticism on her face; and Millington-outside of the moral righteousness that went with a well-tended garden and a clean shirt, whatever he might be thinking was a mystery. Aside from the fact that he’d been sergeant for too long now, couldn’t understand why the promotion he surely deserved still seemed so far away.
There was a moment after Divine had finished that they looked, all three of them, directly at Resnick, leaning back behind his desk. Outside, officers answered telephones, identifying themselves, rank and name; a single laugh, harsh and loud, broke into a racking cough; someone whistled the chorus of “Stand By Your Man” and Resnick smiled as he saw Lynn Kellogg bridle.
“He actually said that?” Resnick asked. “‘I used to watch her’?”
“Very words. Look.” He held his notebook towards Resnick’s face. “No two ways about it.”
“No chance you had a tape running?” Millington said.
Divine scowled and shook his head.
“Clearly, you think it means something,” said Resnick.
“Sir, you should have seen him. When he said it, about watching her. He didn’t mean, yes, well, I used to bump into her in the street, knew who she was. He didn’t mean I used to see her, casual-like. What he was on about was something more.”
“You didn’t question him about that? Try to confirm your suspicions.”
“No, sir. I thought if I did, then, I mean, he might, you know, clam up.”
“Where is he now?”
“One of the plods is treating him to a cup of tea.”
“Thinking he knew who it was, lying there underneath all that debris,” Resnick said, “that doesn’t have to be so surprising. He’d have had to be a blind man not to have read about it, seen her face. And if he knew her anyway, by sight at least, there might have been more reason for her to stick in his mind than most.”
“But this other, sir …”
“Yes, I know. We’ll talk to him again, clearly.” Resnick suddenly conscious of the churning of his stomach, just because the morning with the pathologist had turned his mind away from food, that didn’t mean his body had to agree.
“Lynn?”
“Sounds a bit odd, right enough. Then again, if there was anything iffy, would he come right out and say it?”
“Stupid or clever,” suggested Millington.
“The girl,” Resnick said to Lynn, “Sara. Did she say anything about the youth’s reactions when they realized what they’d found?”
“Only that he was frightened. They both were. It took them over an hour, you know, before they made up their minds to come in and report it.”
“Did she say which one of them was hanging back?”
“Says it was the lad, sir.”
“Mark?”
“He never said exactly, just that they spent ages wandering around; he did say as the girl was upset, that’s why they went back to his place, calm her down before walking round here.”
“All right.” Resnick got to his feet and Divine and Kellogg did the same; Graham Millington moved his arm from the filing cabinet on which he had been leaning. “Mark, have another word with him, low key. Lynn, why don’t you sit in with them? See if you can establish just what his relationship with the girl was, supposing it was any more than he’s said. And that warehouse, maybe it was a place he’s used before, somewhere handy for a bit of fun after closing. Let me know how you get on.”