“How about Jane,” Resnick said. “How was she with the kids? Did they get on okay? Did she like them?”
“She loved them. And they loved her. I remember once, it couldn’t have been so long after this one was born, Alex must have been off at some conference or something, anyway, Jane got to come over on her own for the whole day. It was wonderful. We just fooled around on the beach in the morning; made up a picnic and drove up onto the moors.” For a moment, Diane’s voice was breaking up. It must have been the last time she saw her sister; Resnick didn’t need to ask, and she didn’t need to say.
“It wasn’t her decision then, as far as you know, not to have children?”
Diane squeezed her hands around the metal of the rail. “Decision? In that relationship, there wasn’t much question of Jane making decisions. Oh, I dare say mustard or cranberry sauce with the turkey, two pints of milk or three, but that was about as far as it went.”
“Why did she put up with it?”
Diane shrugged, turned around, and leaned the small of her back against the railing. Her daughter was tugging at the uneven hem of her cut-offs, eager for ice cream. “Why does anyone put up with anything? Because we’re too lazy to do anything different? Too frightened.”
“You think she was frightened of Alex?”
Diane looked at him. “Probably. But that wasn’t what I meant. Frightened of the alternatives, that’s what I meant, all that great unknown.” She cuddled the smaller child to her, and nuzzled her chin down into his hair. “Frightened of being alone.”
“You don’t think,” Resnick said-they were walking now, back along the way they had come-“you don’t think she could have been having an affair?”
“God!” Diane said. “I wish she had. I wish she’d had the gumption, never mind anything else.”
“But you don’t think she was?”
Emphatically, Diane shook her head.
“Would she have said?”
“To me, you mean? I’m not certain. Once I might have said, yes. And maybe that day she was here, if anything had been going on …” A smile brightened Diane’s face. “The only time I can remember her going on about something like that, you know, boys, men, love, she was home from university and we went off into town, shopping for clothes. There was this lad she’d met and she just couldn’t stop talking about him. On and on and on. ‘I’ll never want anyone else,’ she said, ‘not as long as I live.’” They stopped at the curb and waited for a car to ease past. “Well, you say things like that, don’t you? Young and in love. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Back in the house, radio playing, children stalking the cat, Diane blew the top layer of dust away from a cardboard box she had pulled out from under the bed. Inside were photographs, old Christmas cards, torn concert tickets, letters, badges. Diane shuffled and sorted while Resnick watched.
“Here,” she said, finally, separating one small colored photograph from a batch of a dozen or so others. “Jane and Peter. Love’s young dream.”
Resnick looked down at two nineteen-year-olds, arms wound about each other on a white bridge, smiling not at the camera but at each other.
“Where’s this taken?” Resnick asked.
“Cambridge. It’s where they went to university.”
Resnick looked at the young man with a wide face and a shock of dark hair, unable to see anything other than the young woman beside him. Even in that small, slightly battered photograph, it was impossible not to respond to the adoration he was feeling, not to see her beauty through his eyes.
“You’ve no idea where he might be now?” Resnick asked.
“Peter?” She shook her head. “I haven’t a clue.”
“And Jane never mentioned him? More recently, I mean.”
“Never, no.”
Careful to avoid cat and child, Resnick got to his feet. “If I could just borrow this, a few days? I’ll make sure it gets back to you in one piece.”
“I suppose so,” Diane said, a little surprised. “Can’t do any harm.”
Forty-one
“Peter Spurgeon,” Resnick said, holding out the blow-up reproduction of the photograph. “I don’t have to tell you it was taken a while ago.”
“Childhood sweethearts,” said Lynn, not quite able to keep the dismissiveness out of her tone.
“College, anyway,” said Khan.
“And we’re assuming they’ve kept in touch?” Lynn asked.
Resnick lowered the photograph onto the desk. “We’re assuming nothing. What we’re doing is checking as thoroughly as we can. Let’s see if we can track him down through vehicle registration; otherwise, it’s voting registers, directories, you know the kind of thing. And let’s check his college while we’re about it; there’s bound to be some kind of organization for former students and he just might belong.”
When the phone went some little while later, Khan identified himself, listened for a moment, then passed the receiver across to Resnick. “For you, sir. Something about a nun.”
Sister Teresa was waiting for Resnick outside the main doors, a dark gray shawl draped over a light gray dress, gray tights, and black laced ankle boots.
“You’re busy,” she said, reading some concern in Resnick’s face.
“No more than usual. Time for a cup of coffee, at least.”
“Ah, I’d best not. There’s two people to call on still, and then another of those meetings Sister Bonaventura’s forever hauling me off to. Christian Interface and the Diocese, something along those lines.”
Still smiling, she drew an envelope from her bag and from that lifted out a postcard. “It arrived yesterday. I thought you might want to see.”
Resnick glanced quickly at a picture of a young woman sitting among a lot of hats, before turning it over to read the reverse:
Your favorite, I think. Almost mine too. Entrance to exit it was a perfect afternoon. Thank you.
I thought you’d like to know, after your lecture, I’ve decided to be active in the cause of righteousness.
Till St. Ives,
Jerzy
“St. Ives?” Resnick said.
“Oh, that’s nothing. Just some foolishness.” She was, Resnick thought, perilously close to blushing.
“The rest of it, then …”
“I did as you asked, tried to show him that in helping you, he could only be helping himself.” She waited until she had Resnick’s eye. “That is right, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes,” Resnick said. “I think so.”
Teresa reached her hand toward the card. “You’ll not be needing this?” As he relinquished his grip of it, she replaced the card inside the envelope, the envelope safely inside her bag.
“Thanks for making the time,” Resnick said.
She slipped her hand for a moment into his and smiled.
Helen Siddons was shouting instructions down the corridor, a plethora of younger officers stumbling in her wake. Midway down the stairs, she paused to light another cigarette and that was when she spotted Resnick, on his way back into the building. “Charlie, how’s it going?”
As they walked, he filled her in on the progress of his end of the inquiry, letting her know just enough to see they hadn’t been wasting their time.
“Well,” Siddons had stopped outside the main computer room, hand to the door, “not that I want to knock you off your stride, but it looks like we’ve got a live one just crawled out of the woodwork. Went down for attempted rape six months after the Irene Wilson murder; released three weeks before that girl turned up in the Beeston Canal. Oh, and Charlie, we may have got a line on her, too. Dental records. Should have confirmation in a day or two.”