“I have to ask you again,” Resnick said, “you’ve no inkling where she might have gone?”
“Of course not.”
“No special place, special friend …”
“No.”
“And there was nothing between the two of you, nothing that happened prior to Saturday that might have led to her leaving?”
Peterson was half out of his chair. “That would just suit you, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Making it my fault. Then you could wash your hands of the whole bloody affair.”
“You were the one, wanted me to do more. What I’m looking for is motive.”
“What you’re looking for is to lay blame.”
Peterson was leaning forward across Resnick’s desk, hands gripping the sides. Sweat was blotched across his face and a vein was standing out, blue and strong, to one side of his temple.
“Do you always,” Resnick asked, “lose your temper this easily?
“Only when I lose my fucking wife!”
“Or ask questions that people can’t answer.”
Peterson blinked and blinked again. At first, he didn’t know what Resnick was alluding to.
“It’s not a good idea,” Resnick said, “to lay your hands on anyone. Certainly not in anger. Do I make myself clear?”
Peterson straightened, the color drained out of his face. “I was worked up, anxious. I’d scarcely slept. Waiting round all that time for Jane to call. Maybe I wasn’t quite in control.”
“Exactly.”
Peterson hated having to back down, but he did. Awkwardly, he brushed the sweat away from his eyes, wriggled inside his clothes. “I don’t normally lose my temper, Inspector. It’s not how I am.”
Resnick stared back at him and didn’t say a thing.
Twenty-seven
It was the same dream Lynn had experienced so many times: the same sense of fear mixed with exhilaration, terror mingled with release. Her arms were tied, chained, she was handcuffed behind her back, the man standing over her, now kneeling, face blurring in and out of focus, changing identity. Michael’s soft voice with that faint Irish tinge she had never been certain was real or assumed. Michael Best’s voice and then her father’s; her father’s and then Resnick’s face. Whose mouth? Whose arms? She rolled out from the knotted sheets, the damp pillow halfway down the bed.
What had the therapist called her when she’d gone back to seeing her for the second time? A textbook case. Powerlessness and control; authority, domination; fear of the father, need for the father; passivity and penetration; absolution and guilt.
Lynn switched on the shower, waited for the water temperature to settle, then stepped into the spray. Michael Best was serving life imprisonment for the murder of one woman and the kidnapping of another, herself. It was doubtful that he would ever be released. Her father was even now stalking the runs of his Norfolk chicken farm, smoking the same wafer-thin hand-rolled cigarettes as he had for more than forty years and coughing up golden spitballs of phlegm. The cancer that had hospitalized him two years before was still in abeyance, held there by sticky tape and prayer. And Resnick … Lynn opened her eyes beneath the water and tilted back her head. Just a few more days and then she would be walking into a different office every morning, fresh voices, different faces. Not his. She should have done it a long time before. Either that or something else.
Alan Prentiss began each day with twenty minutes’ meditation, fifteen minutes of simple exercises, a bowl of rolled oats mixed with skimmed milk, nuts, dried apricots, and chopped banana. Alternately, The Times or Telegraph crossword. Four letters, ending in L and beginning with A, the word his wife had scratched into the leather of the raised couch where he treated his patients, the one morning she got up earlier than him and left.
Not before time, his own words, unguarded and instinctive, when he’d understood that policewoman to say Jane Peterson had left her pompous shit of a husband.
Not before time, the tongues loosened behind his back when Cassie had caught the early-bird flight from East Midlands to Edinburgh and the man she had met at an Open University summer school the year before. She was married now, remarried, not to her fellow student from the OU, but to a furniture upholsterer who, like Prentiss-the only way in which he was like Prentiss-lived above his place of work. They all three lived over his place of work, Cassie and the upholsterer and their child.
Prentiss capped his Parker ballpoint, looked at his watch and, automatically, checked it against the clock. She would be here in ten minutes, the woman from the police, always assuming she wasn’t late.
He washed and put away the breakfast things, went up to the bathroom and cleaned his teeth, assiduously rinsed his mouth, watered the house plant on the landing which needed refreshing every other day, and neatly refolded his copy of The Times with the front page uppermost. There was a scene at the end of Damage, a film Prentiss knew a lot of people derided, in which Jeremy Irons, returning from the little shopping expedition he clearly made each morning, took the paper bag in which he’d carried home his loaf of bread, folded it neatly once and then folded it again, before adding it to the precise pile of similar bags on one side of his small kitchen. To Prentiss, there was nothing strange about such behavior, nothing obsessive. It was simply what one did.
Before he could look at his watch again, Lynn Kellogg was walking up the three steps to the front door, finger pointing toward the bell.
They sat in the long downstairs room where Prentiss saw his patients, the room formed from taking out the middle wall and running what had previously been two smaller rooms together. Two certificates authenticating Prentiss’ rights to practice hung framed on one wall; they were the only decoration among the purely functionaclass="underline" desk, treatment couch, lamp, table, chairs, stool. Lace curtains hung inside plain, heavy drapes, guard against the prying eyes of any West Bridgford neighbors.
“I’m sorry if this is rather rushed,” Prentiss said. “It’s only that …”
“You have a patient.”
“Yes.”
“Osteopathy, that’s what you do?”
Prentiss nodded.
“You manipulate, then, is that right? Bones?”
“Bones, yes. Other parts of the body, too.”
Lynn clicked open her bag and took out her notebook. Left tired by her disturbed night, shadows deep beneath her eyes, her skin, despite makeup, was, for her, oddly pale. She’d intended to wear the new outfit she’d bought that weekend at Jigsaw, break it in before starting the new job, but this morning it would have been, she felt, a waste. Instead, she had pulled a pair of blue jeans back out from the laundry basket, an old pink shirt, badly faded, from a pile of things she scarcely ever wore, and finished off with a baggy cardigan her mum had bought for her in Norwich BHS two years before. She looked a state and she didn’t care.
Alan Prentiss thought she looked rather nice. He wished now he’d suggested half past eight, thought to offer coffee, make tea.
“That was how you met Jane Peterson,” Lynn asked, “she came to you for treatment?”
“The first occasion, yes. After that, I think possibly I may have said on the phone, we met socially a few times …”
“You and Jane?”
“Jane and Alex. Dinner, whatever, it was always Jane and Alex and, well, I was seeing somebody then, a friend of Jane’s actually, a colleague. Patricia. She’d recommended me.”
“A foursome, then.”
“Yes.”
“And you got on? All of you together.”
“No. Not really, no. I mean Jane and Patricia were okay, they had something in common, at least. Teaching. The school. But Alex and I …” Prentiss shook his head. “When Patricia and I stopped seeing one another, that was it.”