"I can think of one reason," Diane said quietly from behind Pete. "That it's all true, and he's seen what she can do."
Nothing moved for a while. There was no sound, other than that of the death dance of the craneflies in the hall behind them.
But finally, Aldridge lowered the shotgun.
"I think we need to trade some information, here," he said.
When the sun came over the Step the next morning, it found the three of them still talking. In all that time Alina didn't come home, as Pete had guessed that she wouldn't.
Aldridge told them about what he'd seen up at the ski lodge, and what had happened to him there. He said nothing about anything else. Diane showed her cuttings and repeated Pavel's story, and Pete finally found a release in pouring out everything that had been troubling him about Alina since those first days when he'd brought her to the valley. He'd been afraid that some of it might sound stupid and trivial. But nobody seemed to think so. Their accounts all meshed together with a kind of quiet perfection… and it all traced a line back to that one moment in the motorway services, when he'd looked up into those grey eyes and made a choice instead of an excuse.
She'd even warned him, in her way.
But he hadn't listened.
Aldridge was the one that he couldn't quite make out. He'd no car, and apparently he'd scrambled all the way up to the house the previous night, stalking its windows like a raider until he'd realised that there was no one around. Then he'd broken in.
"Any ideas on where she might have gone?" Aldridge said, standing at the window and watching the dawn light as it filled out the sky beyond the ridge.
"I don't know," Pete said. "But I don't think she'll have left the area completely." This made the most sense to him. He'd watched Alina's growing love affair with the valley, one that had become deeper and darker with every midnight tryst, and he didn't think that she'd ever be able to tear herself away.
And what was a Rusalka, after all, without a lake to call its home?
"Did she make any friends?" Aldridge said. "I mean, anyone she might run to who'd hide her?"
"I can think of someone," Diane said.
Aldridge said that he wanted to pick up some equipment before they went up to the Hall, and so they stopped off in the village. He didn't seem to want them to go with him into the house; seemed to make a point of it, in fact. So they waited with the vehicles at the end of the close. Pete was frowning as he watched Aldridge walk away. "What's wrong?" Diane said, but he made as if to brush the worry aside.
"Nothing," he said. "Unless you count the obvious."
"Well, the obvious ought to be enough."
"I know. But I'm not so sure about him, Diane."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that we spent all last night hammering out what we knew about Alina, and what's he doing now? He's planning for the three of us to go looking for her. That's not my idea of a police response. He ought to be calling someone."
"He could be calling someone now."
Pete said, "Come on. This is hardly going by the book. He broke into my place with a shotgun. You know what he said to me last night, one time when you weren't around? He said he'd looked into her eyes and he didn't think she was human."
Diane looked toward the house. Pete had noted that even though it was daylight, the upper-storey curtains were still drawn. Apart from that, Aldridge's world seemed like a pretty regular one.
"Just a way of putting it," she said uncertainly.
"That's what I thought at the time. Now I'm not so certain."
Aldridge was coming out again with an armload of stuff. He turned and carefully locked the door behind him.
And then it seemed to Pete that he stopped for a moment, and for no obvious reason; he stood with his free hand gripping the door handle and his head bowed slightly, like a programmed thing that had hit some momentary gap in the instructions that it was receiving.
For a moment, it was as if the birds didn't sing.
And then Aldridge straightened, and started back toward them.
Dizzy's black limousine was on the forecourt when Diane arrived, and she parked alongside it. She glanced around as she got out, remembering Aldridge's warnings. But this was daylight and familiar ground, and she sensed no danger.
On her way around to the side entrance she came across Bob Ivie, stretched as before out on his sunlounger. This time he wasn't even pretending to be interested in a magazine; he was simply staring off into space and looking about as forlorn as it was possible to get.
Diane couldn't help feeling sorry for him; and for Tony Marinello, whom she'd overheard in his room singing along with Rainbow one afternoon the previous week. Dizzy's minders were almost useless when lifted out of their city environment; but they'd have to stand it, because both of them knew that they were otherwise unemployable. They were probably yearning for the end of summer and their return to town, for the late nights and the bad debts and the fights quietly defused before they'd started, and for the legwork involved when Dizzy got tied up with some of the bizarre business ventures of his friends and which would sometimes actually make them all a spot of money. Life out here had been standing still too long for them, and like anything else in the same situation it was beginning to go sour.
"Bob?" she said, and he looked up, startled. "Sorry, Bob. Were you napping?"
"No," he said, "just thinking. It's getting to be a bad habit."
"Has Dizzy got anyone with him, do you know?"
Ivie slowly started to get to his feet, moving as if he'd gone soft from lying too long. "I don't think so," he said. "Was there anyone in particular you had in mind?" But she sensed more of an evasion than an answer, and Ivie shot a dark glance toward the parapet and Dizzy's apartments above. At that moment, loud rock music suddenly fell onto them like an airburst.
The level dropped straight away, but it stayed fairly loud; it was the effect of someone having switched on a sound system without realising quite how high they'd set the volume, and it was coming from the suite upstairs. For it to be so loud, Dizzy's verandah windows had to be open.
Diane looked at Bob Ivie, and saw that he was as tense as a wire.
She said, "Is something wrong?"
Ivie forced his attention back down to her. "No," he said, and then he seemed to make a conscious effort to relax. As they went in through the old kitchen, he said, "Spoken to Jed, yet?"
"I'll ring him tonight," she said, glancing around the kitchen for any hint of a visitor. "Thanks again from the transport."
"Anytime. Although I was relieved when I found out you meant Richmond, Yorkshire and not Richmond, Surrey. We had a good drive, stopped a couple of times."
"Did the old folks feed you?"
"Like a pig. I couldn't get away."
By now they were through into the hall, Ivie stepping aside to let Diane precede him through the doorway. The music wasn't as loud in here, blocked by interior walls and closed doors.
It certainly wasn't loud enough to cover one shrill, terrified scream.
"You carry on," Ivie said sharply to Diane as he started to move. "I'll handle this."
He ran for the stairs, with Diane no more than a couple of paces behind him. His previous unease and his present speed of reaction seemed to suggest that he'd been half expecting something of the kind.
Diane said, "Is it her? Is it the waitress?" But Ivie didn't answer. He took the stairs in twos and threes, all of his apparent softness gone as he raced to deal with something that he could at last understand.
The door to Liston's suite was locked, but Ivie fumbled out a passkey. "Diane," he said. "Do me a favour. Just go. I'll take care of everything."
He managed to get the door unlocked. It gave half an inch, and then stuck solid against something that appeared to have been jammed up under the handles on the other side.