Cold Light cr-6 Page 9

  “We’ve heard, Social Services are keeping an eye …”

  “Even so, overstretched the way they are …”

  “And we’re not?” There was more than a touch of anger in Skelton’s voice.

  “But if James is a strong suspect …”

  “Is he? Is that what we’re saying? He’s really a viable suspect here?”

  Lynn didn’t answer; glanced across at Resnick for support. At the back of the room, Kevin Naylor shuffled his feet and looked embarrassed on her behalf.

  “Are you saying it’s possible,” Malcolm Grafton put in, “that James could have been the driver of that car, waiting to whisk Nancy Phelan away?”

  “We don’t know that’s what happened,” Resnick said.

  “Best bet, Charlie. Your call.” Grafton leaned back and recrossed his legs, giving his socks another airing. “Got to be where we’re looking, surely? Not this sorry bugger. Knocking his wife and kids about, throwing chairs at women clerks, that’s his mark.”

  “That doesn’t mean-” Lynn began, color leaping to her cheeks.

  “Lynn …” Resnick was out of his seat, faster this time.

  “You’re not suggesting, sir,” Lynn said, gripping the chair in front of her hard, “that domestic violence …”

  “I think what the DCI means …”

  “Thank you, Charlie, but I don’t need an interpreter,” Grafton said.

  “Just a decent pair of socks,” murmured Reg Cossall.

  “Our concern here is finding Nancy Phelan, what happened to her,” Grafton continued. “Anything else, it gets in the way.”

  Slowly, Lynn sat back down.

  “’Bout chuffing time!” Divine said to no one in particular. “Now we can get bloody on.”

  Grafton allowed himself a quick smirk.

  “Nevertheless,” Resnick said, “man with a record of violence, currently on probation, already subjected the missing woman to an actual assault, we wouldn’t be dropping him from our inquiries entirely. Would we?”

  Grafton stared down at him through narrowed eyes.

  “A watching brief, Charlie, your team.” Skelton was back on his feet, quick to intervene. “Not priority, though; that’s Nancy Phelan’s boyfriends, they’re down to you. Reg …”

  “Here we bloody go!” stage-whispered Cossall

  “… the guests at the hotel, if you please. Malcolm’s arranging for you to have some extra bodies.”

  “Old ones he’s done with, is that, then?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing, sir. You’re all right.”

  As Skelton continued, Cossall leaned towards Resnick, talking behind the back of his hand. “Ever occur to you, Charlie, if any one of us was going home to his little semi of an evening, carving up corpses and stuffing ’em into plastic bags, our Malcolm up there’s your man?”

  There had been fifty-seven guests at the dinner: Andrew Clarke’s assistant had provided the names, almost all of the addresses. Times of departure would be ascertained and, where possible, double-checked; modes of transport, makes and types of car. When was the last time that evening they remembered seeing Nancy Phelan? Where had that been? Who had she been with?

  Once that had been done, answers compared and tabulated, leads and questions followed up, the lists, still slowly being compiled, of the hotel’s other clients would be waiting. Somewhere between three and four hundred in total-without casual callers at the bar.

  Reg Cossall, extra bodies or no, was going to have his work cut out.

  Resnick was in his office with Lynn Kellogg, Naylor, and Divine, looking at the names Dana Matthieson had supplied of the four men Nancy had recently been involved with. Patrick McAllister. Eric Capaldi. James Guillery. Robin Hidden. Divine had already talked to McAllister on the phone and was due to call on him that afternoon. Naylor had made contact with Guillery’s parents, who had informed him their son was on holiday in Italy, skiing, and wasn’t expected back until after the New Year. Eric Capaldi’s answerphone offered some blurry piano music and not a lot else. Robin Hidden had so far remained, well, hidden.

  “It’s not possible,” Kevin Naylor said, “there’s others? I mean, that her flatmate didn’t know about?”

  “As far as I know,” Dana had said. “This’s who she’d been seeing. The only ones she talked about, anyway.”

  “You think there could have been someone else, then? That she never mentioned.”

  “It’s always possible.”

  “Was she secretive, though? Things like that?”

  “Not specially. But, you know … there’s always somebody, isn’t there? Whatever reason, the one you won’t talk about, not even to your best friend.”

  Is there? Resnick had thought.

  And then-yes, of course.

  Now, prompted by Naylor’s question, he thought of Andrew Clarke. Was that the kind of relationship Dana had been hinting at? Older, married, somebody where she worked?

  “The receptionist from the Housing Office,” Resnick said.

  “Penny Langridge,” Lynn read from her notes.

  “Have a word with her, see if there was anything between Nancy Phelan and any of her colleagues, something she might not have wanted broadcast about.”

  “Quick knee-trembler back of the typing pool,” Divine grinned. “That the sort of thing?”

  Lynn shot him a quick angry look. Any other time, Resnick thought, she would have had a sharp remark to go with it. But now part of her mind was on other things.

  The minute Resnick was alone in his office the phone rang: it was Graham Millington calling from his in-laws in Taunton, just this minute heard about the missing girl on the news and wondering if they could use him back at the station.

  Fourteen

  Graham Milllington had met his wife in the Ladies’ lavatory of Creek Road Primary School, a little after eleven in the morning and caught short in the middle of a talk to forty-seven ten-year-olds. Millington, not his wife.

  One thing he hated above all others, worse than charging into the ruck of a Friday night bar-room fight with glass flying, barging into the Trent End on a Saturday afternoon to collar the smart-arse bastard who’s just felled the visiting goalie with a sharpened fifty-pence piece to the head, was standing in front of a class of kids in his best suit and behavior, lecturing them on the dangers of solvent abuse and underage drinking. Knowing sneers on their scrubbed little faces.

  And this particular morning, fielding the usual sporadic questions about airplane glue and which brands set to work fastest, he was overcome by a sharp sudden pain deep behind his scrotum, an urgent message that he needed to pee.

  “I wonder …” he stammered to the deputy headteacher, sitting at the corner table, filling out what suspiciously resembled a job application. “Could you …?”

  The nature of Millington’s discomfort was clear for all to see.

  “First right down the corridor, second left.”

  Millington remembered it wrong, first right, first left instead. He was just easing himself through his fly, looking wildly for the appropriate stall, when, with a swift whoosh of water, Madeleine Johnstone stepped out from the cubicle in her bottle-green Laura Ashley dress, pale green tights, sensible shoes.

  “Sorry, I …”

  “Here,” Madeleine said, pushing open the cubicle door, “you’d better go in here.” And then, as he dived past her, slamming the door shut and fumbling the bolt across, “I’ll keep watch outside.”

  Something wrong, she thought, out there in the corridor surrounded by all that project work on Third World hunger, a man of his age with problems of the prostate.

  He had met her next in the Victoria Centre, Madeleine backing out of the Early Learning Centre, weighed down with plastic bags of presents for her sister with the twins, Millington whistling his way across to Thorntons, mind set on a quarter-pound of peppermint creams, maybe the odd Viennese Whirl.

  “Sorry!” as he cannoned into her and a slew of carefully designed and ed
ucationally approved packages spilled around his feet.

  He knew that she had recognized him by the way her eyes flickered downwards in the direction of his trousers, checking that he wasn’t flashing at her in artificially reproduced daylight.

  Millington picked up a package of brightly colored balls (eighteen months to three years) and set it in her hand. She suggested tea and led him to the coffee bar in Next, where he perched uncomfortably on a black leather stool and ate a tea cake that tasted oddly of lemon.

  “It’s because they use the same board,” Madeleine explained, “for making the salad and buttering those.”

  The girl who served them was black and disdainful and her dark hair was curled like spun glass.

  “She lovely, isn’t she?” Madeleine said, following Millington’s hopeless gaze.

  Even Millington, perhaps not the most sensitive of men, understood this meant what about me? Look at me.

  Madeleine was broad at the shoulders, narrow to the hips, good strong calves that suggested lots of schoolgirl hockey or netball or both. She had brown hair a few shades short of chestnut, a healthy down on her upper lip, eyes that were disconcertingly blue. A complexion like that, Millington wagered a week’s wages she came from somewhere south, Sussex or Kent or farther southwest, soft winds and cream.

  Some detective, it had taken him till now to check the third finger of her left hand.

  “They’re not for me, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Madeleine glanced at the bags by her feet “My sister. Twins. It runs in the family.”

  Something inside Millington shuddered.

  “It’s considered old-fashioned, nowadays, isn’t it?” Madeleine said. “For men to wear wedding rings.”

  They hadn’t been able to have children. Not so far. Not for want of trying. Whatever was in the family, the genes, the almost careless fecundity of her several sisters, it wasn’t there for them. They had had therapy, tests, everything short of acupuncture, the thought of which had reduced Millington’s eyes to tears. “Graham, they don’t put the needle there.” It hadn’t mattered; acupuncture was out.

  Madeleine applied for promotion and was rewarded; she embarked upon a never-ending series of self-improvement classes, everything from Chinese cuisine through European languages to British Visionary art and beyond. On the kitchen wall she kept a chart, color-coded, on which she annotated the ages and birthdays of her nieces and nephews so that none would go uncelebrated, unremarked.

  Christmas, in her parents’ vast house in Taunton, had been a maelstrom of unrestrained young middle-class voices, each intent on clamoring its instant needs above the rest. Madeleine and her sisters had sat around the oak table that had once graced the refectory of a nearby abbey and laughed about old photographs, old jokes. And all around them, in and out and up and down, the children ran and ran, with only the occasional, “Oh, Jeremy!” “Oh, Tabetha! Now see what you’ve done!” to acknowledge they were there at all.

  Millington had listened to her father’s ideas on law and order and the breakdown of family, the lack of respect for authority and the failure of religion, the seemingly equivalent evils of the single-parent family and the admission of women priests into the Church. Even grace on Christmas Day had been accompanied by a sideswipe at leniency towards young offenders, before sinking the knife deep inside the bird.

  “Are you all right?” Madeleine asked from time to time, passing him by chance.

  “Me? Yes, of course. Fine.”

  And then she had been off again, attention tugged away by some tousled three-year-old pulling at her sleeve. “Oh, yes, Miranda, that’s lovely! Let’s go and show it to Granny, shall we?”

  He had been seeking refuge in the bathroom when he had heard the news, trimming the ends of his moustache for want of something better to do. The small Roberts portable, dusted with talcum powder on the shelf, had been left on low. Hearing the city’s name, he had turned the volume up. A young woman who had gone missing on Christmas Eve; the parents’ concern; police investigations proceeding.

  Millington had used the drawing-room phone. “Graham, sir. Wondering if I could be any use.”

  “How soon can you get here?” Resnick had said. Millington grinning as he weaved his way between small children, opening doors, looking for his wife so he could tell her sorry, but there was no alternative, he was leaving.

  Fifteen

  “Made a real fool of myself, didn’t I?” Lynn was sharing a cemetery bench with Resnick, one of the few places near the police station it was possible to find sanctuary. In front of them, the ground dipped away steeply, paths winding between Victorian tombstones raised in loving memory of Herbert or Edith or Mary Ellen, aged two years and three months, gone to a better place. In the middle distance, beyond Waverley Street, the green of the Arboretum shone dully in midwinter sun.

  Resnick finished chewing a mouthful of chicken salad sandwich. “You said what you thought needed saying.”

  “It wasn’t the time,” Lynn said. “And standing up to Grafton like that, it was stupid.”

  “What he said wasn’t over-bright.”

  “But tactically …” Lynn shook her head. “If I stopped to challenge every statement by a senior officer that was sexist or insensitive, how long d’you think I’d last in CID? Never mind promotion.”

  Resnick crunched down into a pickled cucumber, head dipping forward in a vain attempt to prevent vinegar splashing across his shirt.

  “What would really worry me,” Lynn went on, “would be if it meant Gary James didn’t get taken seriously. You know, just Lynn again, riding another of her hobby horses.”

  Resnick grinned ruefully. “People have been saying that about me for years.”

  Lynn looked back at him. She didn’t say and where’s that got you, because she didn’t have to. They both knew a younger, less experienced man had been promoted over him.

  “You really fancy him for this, James? Nancy Phelan?”

  “If not for that, then for something.”

  “The kiddie.”

  “Maybe.”

  Resnick’s stomach stirred uneasily. “You’ve been back to Social Services?”

  “Martin Wrigglesworth, yes. Well, I’ve tried. Left messages, but so far he’s not come back to me. Off duty, bound to be.”

  Getting to his feet, Resnick screwed the paper bag that had held his lunch into a ball, brushed crumbs from the front of his coat. “Let’s hope you don’t have to wait till after the New Year.”

  As they were walking back through the archway towards the broad sweep of road, Lynn prompted him about Gary James’ probation officer. “Pam Van Allen, I do think she’d be more likely to talk to you than me. You never know, she might throw some light.”

  Without any great enthusiasm, Resnick nodded. “I’ve got Nancy Phelan’s parents in half an hour. After that, I’ll see what I can do.”

  The holiday traffic was light enough to allow them across all four lanes and on to the central island without breaking stride. A dusty Ford Prefect with its offside door painted a different color was just turning into the car park alongside the police station: Mr. and Mrs. Phelan had arrived early.

  Harry Phelan’s father and grandfather had worked on the Albert Dock before it became a home for shopping boutiques and an art gallery; Harry had grown up with every intention of following in their footsteps. But by the time he was ripe to leave school, the writing had been scrawled all too clearly on the wall and he had got himself apprenticed at Raleigh making cycles and moved to the East Midlands. Now that trade, too, was virtually dead and the family had moved back to its roots.

  Harry was a tall man, strongly built, with failing sandy hair, a fair moustache, and broad hands which sprouted reddish hair between the knuckles. His tie was knotted too tight and he tugged at it constantly, this way and that. His wife, Clarise, no more than a couple of inches above five foot, wide at the hip and big at the bust, was forever fidgeting with the black handbag that she held in her lap, always close to
tears.

  Resnick saw them with Jack Skelton, four seats pulled round in the superintendent’s office, one of the uniformed PCs bringing a pot of tea from the canteen, Rich Tea biscuits overlapping on a small plate.

  Increasingly agitated, Harry Phelan listened to the explanations of what steps had been taken, which directions the investigation was following. What he wanted to hear about were arrests, appeals, rewards, not computerized cross-checks, methodical questioning, the gradual elimination of people from the inquiry.

  “Looks like,” he said finally, “you’re treating this about as serious as someone lost their second-best sodding coat!”

  “Harry, don’t,” said Clarise, fumbling a small square handkerchief from her bag.

  “One of your lot, we’d see something different, no two ways about that.”

  “Mr. Phelan, I can only assure you …” Skelton began.

  But Phelan was on his feet now, chair pushed back against the wall. “And I can assure you …” jabbing a hand in the superintendent’s direction, “… if someone doesn’t pull his finger out here, I’ll raise such a bloody stink, you’ll be back on the beat and lucky for it.”

  “Harry,” begged Clarise, “you’ll not do any good.”

  “No? What bloody will, then?” He pointed at Skelton again, swinging his arm wide to include Resnick also. “Forty-eight hours, that’s what they reckon, isn’t it? Forty-eight hours. If you don’t find them in that, likely they’re sodding dead!”

  “Oh, Harry!” Clarise Phelan covered her face with her hands and began, loudly, to cry.

  Resnick was out of his chair, moving automatically to comfort her, when Harry Phelan set himself in his way. There was no avoiding the anger, bright in Phelan’s eyes. For a moment Resnick held his stare; then slowly he backed away, sat back down.

  “Come on,” Phelan said, taking hold of his wife’s arm. “We’re only wasting our time here.”

  “When are you going back?” Skelton asked, as they walked away.

  “We’re not going bloody anywhere. We’re staying here till this is sorted.” He didn’t add, one way or another.