“What d’you reckon?” Millington asked. They were sitting in an otherwise unoccupied interview room, Resnick’s office, as he had suspected, resembling a YTS convention of young plumbers.
“No trace on the other print, the one on the door?”
Millington shook his head. “Not so far.”
What they did have was an artist’s impression, a narrow-faced young man with a mass of tightly curled hair: it would be in the evening editions of the Post, screened on both Central News and East Midlands Today. Not exactly Crimewatch, but it might yield results.
“Nothing on file about this Rylands’s known associates?” Resnick asked.
“Doesn’t sound as if he had any. Pathetic little bugger.”
“Okay,” Resnick said, pushing back his chair, “I’ll get Lynn to drive me out there. See what’s what. Sooner that than hanging around here without a place to call my own. Mooching about the corridors. Starting to feel like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“Okay, okay,” Darren called. “Stop the car, stop the car. That’s it. Here, right here.”
Keith had driven the Cavalier into the NCP car park near the Rutland Square Hotel and swopped it for a silver-gray Honda Accord with a rusted rear offside wing and two pairs of walking boots wrapped in old newspaper down by the back seat.
Keith wriggled himself up to his full height. “Hey, this is …”
“I know where it is.”
“You’re not going to try knocking it over again?”
Darren gave him a look that warned Keith there was such a thing as having too much to say-what he ought to do, stick to the driving and leave the thinking to him.
“Then why are we …?” Keith persisted.
“Shut it!” Darren hissed and pointed at the clock on the car’s dashboard. “That working? That right?”
“Far as I know.”
Twenty-eight minutes past five.
“Right, then.” Darren said, opening the car door. “Wait here.”
The office was due to close at five thirty-ten, fifteen minutes for sorting stuff out, finishing up, they ought to be coming out. Darren remembered the slight hesitation when he’d spoken her name, but nothing more, real cool-“How may I help you?” Looking back at him through those big glasses, blue-framed. He’d liked that. “This gentleman has a query. Perhaps you should deal with it yourself.” Took nerve, that. Not a sign of wobble in her voice. Different situation, Darren thought, she and him would get along. Him and Lorna. He’d wondered sometimes what it’d be like, going with a tart as stood up for herself, not just someone to be poked and pushed around.
Resnick was pleased to sit back, let Lynn Kellogg get on with the driving. When he’d been younger, not long joined the force, he’d evinced an interest in cars because it had seemed the thing to do. What you talked about in the canteen when it wasn’t how many pints you’d swilled down the night before, how many times you’d got your leg over. As he’d got older, got promoted, he’d gradually felt able to let it drop. It was a while now since he’d talked about all three.
“Called round to see Rebecca Astley this afternoon,” Lynn was saying. They were heading down Canton Hill, about to pass St Paul’s school.
“Bit of a wasted visit, I hear,” Resnick said.
Lynn smiled. “Don’t know what they think they’re doing, giving her branch office to manage. Couldn’t even manage to get out to the kitchen, fetch a glass of water to take these pills. Expected me to do it for her.”
Resnick laughed, imagining the expression that would have been on Lynn’s face when she’d walked back into the room, handed her the water.
“On and on about this migraine. That was the way she said it-mee-graine. As though it was some rare disease. Instead of a posh name for a headache.”
Lynn slowed behind a self-drive van, signaled to turn left into Gedling Road.
“All she was interested in talking about was what a shock it had been. That and the bunch of flowers been sent to her from head office. ‘I don’t want to brag,’ she said, lying there on the sofa, ‘but it does show what a lot they think of me.’”
“Didn’t tell her what you thought of her?” Resnick asked.
“Tempted,” Lynn grinned. “Wouldn’t have been worth wasting my breath.”
Twenty-nine Albert Avenue had a newly fitted wooden door with a circle of bottle glass at normal head height. The windows poked out from the front of the roof; a satellite dish was attached to the wall. Stuart Bird, read the sign to the side of the small front garden, Painter amp; Decorator-Estimates Given Without Obligation.
“You must want my husband,” Christine Bird said. “He’ll not be back while seven, maybe later. He’s got a job on over Newark way.”
Resnick assured her she was the one they wanted to see and she showed them into a front room that smelled of furniture polish and Windolene. A small boy lay on his stomach in front of the TV, watching a cartoon video, pausing it every time the black cat went flying into an old-fashioned kitchen dresser, swallowing plates and bowls and cups before crashing to the ground with them inside him.
“This is Jason,” Christine Bird said.
Jason rolled on to his side, stuck out his tongue, then rewound the tape and played the section through again. Christine went over and turned down the sound, turned up the flame behind the fake log fire, and took a cigarette from the packet of Players Extra Mild which lay on the marble shelf above the stone surround.
“It’s your other son we’re interested in,” Resnick said.
It took her five attempts to light her cigarette. “He’s not here,” she said.
“Do you know where Keith is?” Lynn Kellogg asked.
“I haven’t seen him, not for a couple of days.”
“And you don’t know where he might be?”
“I didn’t say that,” tapping away ash nervously with her finger.
“We have reason to believe …” Resnick began.
“Don’t,” Christine Bird interrupted him. “I don’t want to know what it is he’s done. Not this time. Not any more.”
“You don’t happen to know where Keith was yesterday afternoon?” Lynn asked.
Christine Bird got to her feet and crossed the room. Reaching down she switched off first the television set, then the video, and when her five-year-old started to whine and complain she gave him a look that said, not this time, and he read it well. “Why don’t you go out into the garden?” she said. “Or upstairs to your room?”
“If I do, can I …?”
“One,” she pronounced emphatically. “One only. Go on. You know where they are.”
“Twix,” she explained, as Jason left the room.
Neither Resnick nor Lynn Kellogg said a thing.
Christine Bird fidgeted with the blinds, the kind that have scalloped edges. She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately took another from the packet, sliding it back before she could light it.
“My husband …” she started.
“Stuart, he’s been very good …” she tried.
“Keith …” she began.
This time she lit the cigarette, pushed a hand up through her hair. There were lines tracking away from the corners of her eyes, slender pouches of skin below them; the eyes themselves were gray, narrowed against the plume of smoke that coiled upwards past her face.
“When we started going together, Stuart and me … you see, he’d been married himself, still was, legally. I mean, their divorce, it hadn’t come through. One of the things he felt bad about was the thought of leaving his kids. That was the way he saw it, though I don’t think it really was like that. Not as if, anyway, she’d have agreed to let him take them with him and even if she had, well, it’s difficult to see how he would have managed. Three of them, you see. The youngest just eighteen months, much younger than his other two.” She drew on the cigarette deeply; stared at her hands. “They had her as a way of trying to sort things out, keep them together.”