“Right, questions?”
High-ceilinged, tall-windowed medical wards had once run more or less the length of both floors in the top half of the building. These had now been partitioned off to accommodate the squad’s requirements: an open-plan office and large meeting room, Helen Siddons’ own office leading off it, were on the upper floor; the computer room, communications room, and numerous smaller spaces, largely for the purpose of conducting interviews, were on the lower. Resnick and his small team had been allocated one of these, just large enough to hold three chairs, two desks arranged in an L, one computer screen, two telephones, a small cupboard containing empty files and a notional amount of stationery, and a metal waste-paper basket, color gray. The walls were a suspicious-looking shade of lime green; the suspicion being that it was a mistake. The window, open now by several inches at both top and bottom, afforded a generous view over the Roman Catholic cathedral and the restored Albert Hall and Institute down toward the various buildings of the city’s second university and the bland ugliness of the flats that rose up without majesty above the Victoria Centre.
Helen Siddons had telephoned both Anil Khan and Lynn Kellogg earlier that morning to pass on the news; it had not been phrased as a request. Resnick himself had managed a brief word with Lynn, her response matter-of-fact, cool, everything would be fine.
“Okay,” Resnick said, “two things we have to do. Confirm, if possible, Jane Peterson’s injuries were caused by her husband. Find out what might have happened between them to drive him over the edge. So statements from friends, colleagues, relatives, will all need to be double-checked. We need to go through the records at Accident and Emergency, talk to her GP.”
“And Prentiss,” Lynn said, “the osteopath. If he was treating her, you’d’ve thought he must have seen something.”
“He didn’t say anything?” Khan asked.
“Nothing specific. Accused Peterson of bullying her, right enough, obviously didn’t like him, didn’t like him at all, but nothing more than that.”
“Talk to him again,” Resnick said. “Make it priority. And remember, there are seven days during which we’ve no idea where Jane Peterson was. And at some point in that time she met her killer. Could be accident, chance. Or it could be somebody she knew, had planned to see.”
“It could be Peterson himself,” Lynn said.
“Exactly. So the other thing we have to do is go back through that list of people at the day school. Busy building, middle of Saturday afternoon, somebody must have seen her leaving. She could even have been picked up outside. And let’s double-check Peterson’s movements that afternoon while we’re about it.”
“This whole disappearance business,” Khan said, “he could have been faking it all along. Keeps her out of the way somewhere, secure, while he creates a fuss …”
“Right,” Lynn said, warming to the idea, “plays the distraught husband just long enough, then kills her and dumps the body in the canal, so that we think she’s been done by the same bloke as all the others.”
“Which,” Resnick said, “is exactly what we are doing. Most of us, anyway.”
“Well,” Lynn said, “if he did do it-Peterson-we’re going to get him.”
“Right,” Resnick said. “And if he did do it, what interests me is why.”
Thirty-three
“You know, dear,” Hannah’s mother had said, head half turned from where she was attending to the salad dressing, “I wonder if I shouldn’t move after all.”
Surprised, Hannah had looked up from the book section of the Sunday Times, her mother bending forward slightly, squinting above her glasses as she measured the required amount of raspberry vinegar into a spoon. “I thought you’d gone over all that, decided it was a bad idea. This house, the garden, you love it here.”
“Yes, I know.” Margaret’s voice was flat and without conviction.
Hannah laid the paper aside. “It’s not the same, is it?”
“No.”
They were both thinking of Hannah’s father, out in France with Robyn, a girl when it had all started, a student, little more than a girl, younger than Hannah by far. Infatuation, intimations of mortality. One of those scarcely explicable affairs that flare up and just as suddenly burn down.
“Have you heard from him?” Hannah asked. “I mean, recently.”
It was the wrong question. Anger fought back the tears in her mother’s eyes. “He sent me … how could he have had the nerve? Why on earth he should ever think I was interested, I can’t imagine. He sent me a cutting from the paper, or perhaps it was a magazine, something about this wretched book she’s supposed to have written. Well, I don’t know what he was thinking of. As though somehow that makes it all right, as if she isn’t just some silly bit of skirt after all. As if I care what … what she is … the stupid, stupid …”
Hannah folded her arms around her, feeling the tension wound tight inside the brittle wiriness of her mother’s body, the hardness of small bones, softness of white, lightly freckled skin.
“I’m not going to cry.”
“No.”
“She isn’t worth it. They’re neither of them worth it.”
“That’s right.” Hannah was thinking of Andrew, her Irish poet lover, the way he had flung his final infidelity in her face like brackish water and expected her to be grateful for his openness, his honesty. How she had cried.
“He didn’t think,” Hannah said. “He wasn’t thinking.”
“Yes, he was. He was thinking of her. Not of me. Now, we could eat if you’re ready. I’m afraid I forgot to buy any cheese. I hope that’s all right. I …”
“Mother,” Hannah said, kissing the top of her head, “it’s fine. Everything’s fine.” Tears bright in her eyes.
He had come back twice after that, Andrew. The first time had been midway through the evening, cold, a fire burning in the open grate. Hannah had been marking folders, grading papers, rereading the Lydgate and Dorothea chapters from Middlemarch. The first Mary Chapin Carpenter album had been playing quietly; she had had-what? — two glasses of wine or was it three? At the door, Andrew’s breath had seesawed across the air; he had been wearing a thin coat, a scarf wrapped round his head as though he were suffering from toothache, gloves on his hands, a bottle of Bushmills clutched against his chest. Hannah had known from the first moment of seeing him that she should not let him in: known what would happen if she did.
She took his scarf and hung it in the hall, the coat he kept on, the gloves had somehow disappeared. “Have you glasses?” he said. And then, when they were sitting drinking, the smell of smoke faint from the fire, the shaded light dancing in his eyes, “So, Hannah, how’ve you been?”
He took her on the floor, the curtains only partly drawn across, touching her first with his tongue and then no time for niceties, Hannah’s skirt pushed up and knickers pulled aside, Andrew having her there, wedged somehow between floor and chair, his long coat trailing round them as she moaned and he bit her breast and thrust deeper inside, stopping only to turn her round and push her down again face first onto the chair, hands clutching her, himself, not gentle, never that, the quick deep strokes and his fingers, damp, so far inside her mouth Hannah thought, if think she did, that she must surely choke.
He sat across the fire from her afterwards, uncovered, his lissome cock folding slowly back against his balls, savoring the whiskey, the cigarette he’d lit from the fire.
“I’ve missed you,” he said.
Hannah hunched there, legs drawn up, arms raised across her chest, feeling him slowly dribble out of her, for those moments immune to tears.
There was another woman, of course; well, there were two, one in Belfast, one here. He wondered if he might not marry one of them this time, put an end to all this wandering, settle down. He’d written a poem about it, this yearning after hearth and home, but then he would.
When next he came round unannounced she bolted the door against him and immediately broke out laughing, unable to think of anything save the wonderfully melodramatic scene at the end of The Heiress, a film she remembered watching with her mother one long Saturday afternoon, Olivia de Havilland locking Montgomery Clift outside her door. Who said art didn’t prepare you for life? She hoped Andrew could hear her laughter as he trudged away.