Killing Me Softly (20 page)

Abigail frowned, worried. ‘It's a bit obvious, keeping a knife by the bedside if you intended to stab your lover with it – though I suppose your lover wouldn't think of it being meant for that!'

‘One person can tell us. What are we doing about finding her?'

‘Barbie gave a Nottingham address when she started at Miller's Wife. I'm sending Carmody and Platt up there tomorrow.'

She shut her notebook. Should she mention Spalding and the part she'd induced him to play? In the end, because of the involvement of Roz with Miller's Wife which had now arisen, she decided she'd better come clean.

‘Spalding, eh?' he asked, after listening to what she had to say.

The non-committal answer didn't reveal whether Nick's return to Lavenstock was news to Mayo. It might have been deliberately kept from him, here at the station, it didn't always do to let it be known upstairs what was known lower down. But in a quiet way, there wasn't much he wasn't wise to, when it came to his own patch. Abigail had always wondered how much Mayo had known, or suspected, of her own affair with Nick. But if he had heard about Nick's return, he was keeping the knowledge to himself, which was also possible.

‘Spalding's genuinely worried about his wife, and I'm beginning to think he might have cause. Two missing women, Roz and now Barbie, I don't like it.'

‘Both apparently missing of their own accord,' he reminded her. ‘As far as we know.'

‘Yes.'

But there was a network surrounding the case, too many lives touching, spinning off one another, with Tim Wishart at the centre of the web. ‘And all of them connected in some way with Miller's Wife,' she added. ‘Or with Tim Wishart, which amounts to the same thing. According to Ellie, he was always in and out, it's that sort of place, free and easy ... people casually dropping in.'

Coincidences happened. Barbie Nelson wouldn't be the first woman to have a secret life. ‘Have they reopened for business yet?'

‘Not yet. This affair has knocked them all for six.'

Still, it seemed to Abigail that Miller's Wife was more than just a means of livelihood to the women who worked there. It was a committed lifestyle, and one through which they received succour and support from each other. And even more than that ...

‘On second thoughts, it probably won't be long before they do open again.' She explained her reasons for thinking so. ‘And whatever it is, there's something definitely needs watching down there.'

Abigail had been right to suspect that Mayo knew about ex-DC Nick Spalding's arrival back in Lavenstock. He'd first spotted him on one of his regular prowls around the town, a habit started when he was new to the area and needed to learn all he could about it, and to see it in all its moods. Continued because a town, like life, is always changing.

Spalding hadn't been aware that he'd been spotted entering a public house, or that, later, he was being studied from one of its quiet corners. If Mayo didn't choose to reveal himself when he was watching someone – especially someone like Nick Spalding, whom he'd always known to be devious, a man who played his own, not always above-board, games – then the one being watched never knew.

More quiet observance and unobtrusive detective work, second nature to him, had revealed to Mayo the source of his disquiet about the man, a worry that was too close to home to be comfortable.

It was almost back to normal, that night. Alex home, and Mayo cooking the supper, ineptly, falling over the cat and cursing the noisy parrot. ‘Like a damn zoo in here,' he grumbled, trying to bring liver, bacon and onions, mashed potato and greens all to fruition at the same time. Perhaps he should teach himself to cook properly. All you had to do was follow a good recipe, if you could read you could cook. He'd just never bothered, having always been catered for by excellent women: his mother, his wife, and then his daughter, whose passion in life was cooking – who, in fact, had made it her career. Alex's meals were not up to their standards. Good, plain food, cooked well but without a trace of imagination, until it came to the pudding stage. She had a sweet tooth and her idea of a gourmet meal was cheesecake and coffee.

Moses, the old grey cat who'd heartlessly abandoned his true owner, Mayo's landlady, and had somehow taken up occasional residence here since Alex had moved in, smelled the liver and twined himself round his legs in an ecstasy of optimism. ‘Move over, Mosh, can't you,' he said irritably, rescuing the bacon before it turned to leather.

Later, after they'd eaten, he threw himself into a chair, watching Alex sort through a portfolio of watercolours, more worn out by his labours in the kitchen than by a hard day's police work. As always, music played in the background. But it was Alex's choice, not his, tonight he was being accommodating and trying not to wince at Lloyd Webber. Music – though she was learning through association – wouldn't ever be important to her, not in the way it was to him. She still needed to sew, or knit, anything to keep her awake during the more esoteric reaches of Britten or Wagner or Michael Tippett. She felt it wasn't polite to fall asleep. He had a new recording of
Orfeo
which he thought she would like, but the Monteverdi might have been too tender, too moving even for him that night.

She was holding up a small, intense watercolour in front of her, judgingly, squinting at it. ‘What do you think?'

‘It's great. Hockney, eat your heart out.'

‘Thanks, but no need to overdo it!'

‘I mean it, I like it.' Painting was something she'd taken up lately, and she had been astonished to find how well she could do it. Only last week she'd come in from her evening class, her face alight with achievement, having been praised for some work she'd done, confirmation that two other paintings which had recently graced the walls at Interiors and almost immediately been sold were not a fluke.

Mayo watched her going minutely through the folder, making one or two pencil notes. After a while, she closed it and sat fiddling with the pencil, staring into the gas flames. He wondered what she was thinking.

‘How about some coffee?' he asked, levering himself up.

‘Relax, I'll make it. It's time Bert went to bed, anyway.'

He forced himself to sit back. He was trying hard not to act over-protective, in a way that she might see as both patronizing and irritating.

She threw the cover over the parrot's cage as she went into the kitchen. Bert was invariably soothed by music almost as much as Mayo was. Apart from the odd squawk, he'd been quiet during the last hour, but now it had finished, he was starting the chuntering and muttering that was a prelude to making his presence really felt, herringboning his feet back and forth along his perch. Now, he fell abruptly silent. His age was uncertain. Julie, Mayo's daughter, when she'd departed for foreign shores and left him in her father's care, hadn't a clue how old he was: he might have been ten, or a hundred, for all either of them knew. But however long he'd lived, Bert had never learned to connect the sudden advent of night with his raucous outbursts.

When Alex came back and sat in her favourite position, curled on the hearthrug near his chair, Mayo told her about Spalding's return, and about his missing wife, cautiously, because Spalding was a delicate subject. ‘I met his wife once, briefly, in connection with the Flowerdew murder. Roz, wasn't it?'

‘I've met her, too,' Alex said. ‘She's bought things at Interiors, nice woman. I'm so sorry about the child.'

Briefly, he cursed himself. But it was she who'd mentioned the child, and they couldn't sidestep for ever, they'd agreed on that, talked it over lovingly and sensibly. He had to learn not to feel he was walking on eggshells all the time.

‘Home so soon?' he had asked the ward sister.

‘Good gracious, yes. We're not an invalid, are we?'

No, and we're not a bloody mental defective, either, he'd silently riposted at the time, not knowing that now he was casting the occasional concerned glance towards the top of Alex's head, until at last, with that amazing empathy she'd always shown, she looked up at him and said, ‘Stop looking so worried, Gil. It happens all the time. Just one of those things.'

A phrase he hated, and a magnificent understatement, he knew. He reached out and touched her hair sadly. Being Alex, she would have to come to terms in her own way.

‘It's only that I feel so damned incompetent,' she said, with a laugh that almost convinced him. ‘Mortified. But I have the rest of my life to live. I'm going in to work tomorrow.'

Work, now, was it? The word was encouraging. Before, it had always been ‘I shall be in the shop' or ‘down at Interiors'. As if what she did at Interiors couldn't be important. Not classed as real work. She saw it as inherently frivolous and, being a basically serious-minded person, unlike her sister who held the controlling interest in the business, it worried her from time to time.

He knew better than to ask her if such an early return was wise, and merely commented, ‘Don't overdo it. Sister said you had to be careful.'

‘Sister can take a running jump,' said Alex forcefully, with the first real smile she'd shown for days.

‘And Nick Spalding? You haven't changed your mind?'

‘Him, too. But I told you that ages ago, didn't I?'

He'd accepted her decision easily at the time. Only too relieved that it was Spalding she'd been seeing when he had, basely, suspected the return into her life of the troublesome Liam, her ex-lover. It was only later that he began to have his doubts about whether she'd been absolutely certain of her decision, aware of the animation that lit her when he discussed his cases with her. Police work had once been her life, after all.

‘I'm still of the same mind,' she said, ‘I wouldn't be happy working with someone I couldn't ...'

‘Couldn't what?'

‘Trust, I think I was going to say. What Abigail ever saw in him I don't know.'

‘DI Moon isn't so enamoured of him now. She thinks there's some funny business going on.'

Alex said, ever so casually, ‘Want me to have a word with him and see what I can find out?'

He was right. She'd by no means got police work out of her system. Would she ever? He was beginning to doubt it.

‘Keep out of it,' he answered, more forcibly than he intended. ‘If Spalding is mixed up in anything dodgy, I don't want you involved.'

‘If that's what you want,' she said. ‘Far be it from me.'

Captivity. Birds in cages, lions in zoos, hostages in cells.

Fleeting impressions, the only images that punctuated her seamless days, that floated in and out of her subconscious, whether she was asleep or awake, or in that trance-like state that was neither, since she had nothing else, no past, no sense of self with which to create pictures in her mind. She couldn't envisage the past because there wasn't one, only that terrifying blank.

Until the day she woke from a dream that wasn't filled with the disordered, elusive, nightmare images which usually woke her, sweating and panicky, but with laughter and happiness. It had been a lovely summer's day in the dream and she was a child again, roly-polying with her sister down a grassy slope to the picnic place. Her mother had spread a cloth in a field filled with buttercups and daisies, where they'd had tea. Hardboiled eggs and sardine sandwiches – and Coke to drink, which their mother didn't usually allow because she said it would rot their teeth.

The dream slid away and she fought against wakefulness, not able to bear the ending of happiness, but it was a useless struggle, and she opened her eyes to the same dank and dismal cell – but this time, the despair wasn't total. The dream hadn't slipped away entirely from her.

And something else had changed ... whatever it was, it had loosened the knot of fear and hopelessness. It took her a moment to realize that something real had stepped from out of her memory, at last. A mother, a sister.
Were
they real, or images sent to torment her, part of the continuing nightmare of being here?

Time wore on. And then, not with any sudden revelation but quite quietly, the clouds parted and she knew who she was. She tested it by saying the name out loud and it sounded true and familiar, and her heart leapt to her throat with hope.

Her joy was short-lived. Her own name, and her sister's, were there in the remnants of the dream, solid reassurance, but everything else remained tantalizingly on the edge of consciousness, slipping away when she tried to grasp it. Yet, as the time passed, awareness kept coming back to her in brief flashes, some of it not yet meaning anything to her. She felt frustrated and confused, as though she held all the separate pieces of a broken wireless set and didn't know how to begin putting them together.

Yet it was in one of those small epiphanies that it came to her who her captor was.

The shock was total. At first she thought that lack of food and light was making her hallucinate, that it was another of those terrible, inescapable nightmares. But it was the one solid fact, apart from her identity, that she knew was certain. The sense of betrayal made the fact of her imprisonment even more incredible.

He was sick, of course, he had to be, but that didn't explain why he was doing this to her. To teach you a lesson, he'd said. They were the last words she remembered hearing.

It had been a long, long time since she'd had food or water brought to her, but she didn't seem to be hungry any more, and the stomach cramps which had beset her had gone. There was still water left, since she'd instinctively been careful with it. She tried to master her lethargy and plan what she would say and do when her captor next came.

If.

She found that she was able to let the horror of that ‘if' wash over her: she'd become accustomed to fear and it no longer had the same power to terrorize. She simply thought that it would be the final irony, now that her memory had returned, if he never did come back.