“That was all?”
“That was all.”
“But you thought …?”
“I suppose I thought, well, she’s been thinking about it, at least.”
“Cappuccino or espresso?” Lynn asked.
“Straight, please. Straight black.”
“All right,” Resnick said, “correct me if I’m wrong.” They were in their room on the Ropewalk, Resnick, Khan, and Lynn, the window open several inches top and bottom, the air heavy and promising rain. To the northwest, the sky was darkening like an overripe plum. “What we’re supposing is this. One, despite any previous evidence to the contrary, Jane Peterson was carrying on an affair. How far this had got or how long it had been going on, we’ve no way as yet of knowing, but some kind of affair.
“Two, both of the calls she made from Broadway, were made to the other person involved, which places him in the Cambridgeshire-Newmarket area, if not permanently, then at those times.
“And three, after the second of those calls, somewhere, somehow, Jane ran out on her husband and joined her lover. We don’t know what happened then, where they went, anything. All we do know is that a week later she was dead.” He looked from Lynn to Khan and back again. “Now why, as a story, do I not find that convincing?”
“There are too many gaps,” Khan said. “Too much conjecture. We don’t know she was having an affair at all.”
“We know she phoned someone before she disappeared.”
“Okay, but if she’s on the point of meeting him, why talk for almost half an hour?”
“Maybe there were a lot of arrangements to be made.”
“Or,” Resnick said, “maybe one or other of them was getting cold feet.”
“Probably Jane,” Lynn said.
“We don’t know that,” said Khan.
“She was the one who’d stayed in an abusive relationship for years,” Lynn said. “If she was all that keen to run off, surely she’d have done it sooner. No, it makes perfect sense to me she’d have doubts.”
“Right at the last minute?”
“Especially then.”
“Okay,” Resnick said, “here’s what we do. Lynn, we should check back through all of Jane’s known friends and relations; if she let that one remark slip to Patricia Falk, she just may have said something to somebody else. Something that until we jog their memory they might have honestly forgotten. And push the Cambridgeshire connection, see if you can get them to come up with anyone Jane knew there.”
Lynn nodded.
“Anil, I want you back out at that pub, asking around. If this bloke we’re looking for calls in regular, daytimes, it might mean it’s on his route from here to there. But equally well, it might be his local. How close is the nearest village? Couple of miles? Happen he’s got good reasons for not wanting to take calls at home. Some calls. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right.” As Resnick pushed up to his feet, the first rumblings of thunder were heard, rolling across the middle distance. By the time he was down at the main entrance, spots of rain the size of ten pence pieces were darkening the street.
Thirty-nine
Standing in the kitchen, Resnick seated at the table in front of her, Hannah vigorously toweled his hair dry. “Why is it,” she asked, “I feel like I’m in a short story by D. H. Lawrence? Seeing to my man after a hard day at the pit face. All it needs is the coal in the bath to be perfect.”
“Or me in the bath,” Resnick suggested.
Hannah dipped her head to kiss the back of his neck. “We’ll get to that later.”
After dinner, they sat in the front room with the lights out and watched a video of Woody Allen’s September. Brittle, rich people with money enough to indulge their own small hurts. And in its midst a writer whom half the women seem unfathomably to be in love with. He was, Resnick thought, as manipulative and self-obsessed as he supposed writers might be.
“Switch it off, Charlie, for heaven’s sake!” Hannah exclaimed as, yet again, Resnick let out a groan at the behavior of one or other character on the screen. “Or else stop complaining.”
But there was one thing that kept him watching-or listening: the album Art Tatum once made with Ben Webster was forever on the record player. People danced to it, listened in the dark to it, kissed and quarreled to it, exclaimed how wonderful it was.
Which was true. Almost the only truth Resnick could divine from the whole charade.
“You know what it reminded me of?” Hannah said, once the end titles had come up, switching the remote to rewind. “You remember the first time we went to Broadway, that film we saw based on the Chekhov play?”
Resnick could recall the occasion very well; about the film he was less certain. He reached up to switch on the light. It was still not eleven o’clock. “The thing that got me,” he said, pausing on his way to the kitchen, “wanting us to believe that twerp of a writer with the morals of an alley cat would have the nous to choose Tatum and Webster as his favorite record.”
Hannah looked at him, smiling. “Morality, Charlie, is that what it’s about?”
And Resnick looked right back at her, as if not believing what she had just said.
Candlelight flickering across walls and ceiling, and only a light rain now falling, they lay and stared up through the skylight at the midnight sky.
“After things went wrong between you and Jim,” Resnick said suddenly, “how long did it take you to come to terms? Yourself, I mean. You know, feel okay again.”
Hannah turned lightly onto her side, facing him. “What made you ask that?”
“Do you mind?”
“No. It’s just that you’ve never asked before. About that or anything much else.” She was stroking her fingers down along the inside of his arm.
“I suppose I always figured it’s your life.”
“Not wanting to interrogate me, eh, Charlie?”
“Something like that.”
“And now?” She raised one knee so that he could slide his leg between hers.
“It was watching the film, I suppose. Mia what’s-her-name, taking two years off in the country to get over some bloke who’s dumped her.”
“She could afford to, that’s all.”
“And you?”
“All I could afford was a week in France, visiting my dad and his doxy.”
“Doxy?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
Her breasts were pressed against his chest and when she moved only slightly along his thigh, he could feel that she was already wet.
“So how long did it take?” Resnick asked, his mouth close to her ear.
“Getting over Jim?”
“Uh-huh.” Difficult to speak when she was kissing him.
“About two years,” Hannah said some moments later. “If, that is, you ever really do.”
She slid herself over him and, though he wasn’t quite ready, deftly took him inside her. Leaning forward, she teased his nipples with her tongue and then, knees fast against his side, arched back, arms wide, and hung there, her voice arousing, enthusing, attacking, and imploring.
Resnick raised a hand toward her face and, broadly smiling, she took his fingers in her mouth and languorously started licking them, but that was not what he had meant. He moved his hand again till it was behind her neck and gently brought her down and round until once again she lay facing him.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I don’t know …”
“Charlie, Charlie, shush. It doesn’t matter. The earth doesn’t have to move every time.” And then she threw back her head and laughed. “Sleep with an English teacher, Charlie, and that’s what you get. Literary references the whole evening.” And continued to laugh, rocking on her hip until she spilled him out.
Forty
As soon as the car crested the hill across the moor and he saw the rose window of the abbey outlined against the stubborn blue of the sea, Resnick remembered when he had been here before. Whitby. The summer of ’76. Himself and Elaine young enough and still in love enough not to care if the cups they drank tea from in the café on the West Cliff were cracked, if the wind laced chip papers around their feet each time they crossed the harbor bridge, or if the seagulls woke them at dawn in the B amp;B where they stayed. Especially that.