Living Proof (19 page)

"Since she legged it with fifty quid she owed me."

"And when was that, Doris?"

"Couple of days back."

"And the fifty pounds?"

"Lent it her, didn't I? Slag never give it me back."

"Why did she want the money?" Divine asked.

"I don't know, do I? Never asked."

"Come on, expect us to believe you handed it over, just like that?"

"I don't give a toss whether you believe it or not. So happens it's the truth. One of your mates says they're short, you don't go through some sodding inquisition, right? If you've got it, you hand it over."

Divine wasn't so sure.

"Even if it's fifty pounds?" Naylor asked.

Doris Duke laughed.

"Fifty? What's fifty quid? I can thumb down the next punter comes along here, earn that in twenty minutes."

"Then why," said Sharon, 'are you so steamed up about it? "

"Christ, you don't understand anything, do you? It's the principle of the sodding thing."

They went to sit in Sharon's car to talk, Doris insisting that they drive well clear of the Forest first.

"Certain people see me sitting with you lot, they'd be less than well pleased." Doris had grown up in the same part of east London that Sharon had lived in before striking out for the provinces, and because of that, and the fact that Sharon was clearly different the Vice Squad wasn't exactly overflowing with blacks Doris felt that, underneath it all, Sharon was all right.

But now it wasn't Sharon asking die questions.

"And you last saw Marlene when?" Divine said.

"I told you, Tuesday."

"The day you lent her the money?"

"Yes."

"Lunchtime. In the Queen."

"Jesus, yes."

"All right, Doris," Naylor said, 'we only want to be sure we've got It right' "Oh, yes, I know," sarcasm edging her voice.

"Don't want to put words into your mouth."

Or anything else. Divine thought. Under the car's interior light, Doris's make-up was thick enough to chip and there was the dear residue of a bruise, dark above her left eye.

"And she didn't say anything about her plans? Taking off somewhere for a few days? We know she used to work 172 in Sheffield and Derby. That wasn't why she wanted the money? For the fare?"

"Look," Doris said, her voice taking on the pained expression people reserve for children, the old or the very deaf,

"I don't know where she is. Don't even know where she's been. We were mates, yes, but we never lived out of one another's pockets. Sometimes she'll be off somewhere, weeks at a time; I don't see her around and then I do.

This business, you don't ask too many questions. And the fifty. "

She pulled open the ashtray beside the dashboard and stubbed out her cigarette. "... Most likely she owed someone. Either that or she just fancied going into town, buying herself a new dress."

Why would she do that? " Sharon asked.

"Why would you? Cheer herself up, of course."

"Or make herself look smart."

Doris gave it a moment's thought.

"Maybe."

"So as to work the hotels."

"Maybe." Doris started rummaging for a cigarette in her bag and Sharon offered her one instead.

"Thanks," angling her head towards the' window as she lit it and exhaled.

"If you knew," Sharon said, wishing that the two detectives weren't there, doing her best to exclude them with her voice.

"If you knew that was what Marlene was going to do, try the Victoria, say. The Royal. Maybe the Crest. If Marlene had told you that was what she had in mind and then you read about what happened to that man in his hotel room, well, I wouldn't blame you for keeping quiet."

Doris looked at her, blinking through the veil of cigarette smoke.

"Yes, but I don't know that, do I? If she did that, I don't know nothing about it."

Sharon gave a brief sigh and sat back.

"You're sure you don't know Marlene's new address?"

"Sure."

"Okay," Sharon said, swivelling round and snapping her seat-belt into place.

"Why don't we take Doris back to work?"

They watched her walk away to join the knots of girls on the edge of the Forest

"Wouldn't know the truth," Divine said, 'if it jumped up and bit her in the arse. "

Naylor shook his head.

"I don't think she knows anything," he said.

"I'm not so sure about that I think she does," Sharon said.

"And if I don't push too hard I think she might tell me, but I'd have to be on my own."

"Aside from us, then," Naylor asked, 'why wouldn't she open up now? "

"Partly, it's against her instincts. And I think she's frightened."

"What of?"

"I don't know. And maybe it's not for herself, maybe it's on account of her friend."

A car slowed as it neared them, the window rolled down on the driver's side.

"Get home to the wife," Divine called.

"Before you get nicked." The window went back up as the driver accelerated away.

"Why don't we call it a night?" Sharon said.

"I'll try Doris again tomorrow, all right? And we'll keep in touch."

You run on. Divine wanted to say to Naylor, just run on ahead and let me give it a try. A drink some time, Sharon, how about that?

Something to eat Clubbing, maybe? Black Orchid's not too bad. But something in Sharon's eyes, the way she held herself, standing there and watching as they walked away, made him realise, no, it wasn't such a good idea after all.

Slowing off the freeway, I can hear the sirens and already I'm thinking, hey. it's okay, how many times do you hear that in this city, night and day? Doesn't have to have anything to do with this case, anything to do with me.

But the closer I get to Fairlawn Avenue, the louder the wailing gets, not just the police, either. As I slow for the light, an ambulance shoots past me, causing traffic travelling on the cross street to swerve and brake. By the time I arrive at the house, my stomach is cramping fit to beat the band and I know what I will find.

Fifty yards away from the gathering furore and the flashing lights, I swing my car into someone's front yard and start to run. Paramedics are scuttling into the house with all their gear and a uniformed cop is standing guard on the sidewalk, while, behind him, two of his colleagues are threading out the famous yellow tape: Crime Scene, Do Not Cross. / show the cop my ID and can tell he isn't about to be impressed, when Lieutenant Daines appears on the square of trimmed lawn at the front of the house, badge clipped to the lapel of the black tux he must have been wearing when the call came through. His black tie is unfastened and hangs loose from the collar of his dress shirt and he has that look that homicide detectives get once in a while, no matter how long they've been in the job. The look that says, no matter how bad you thought it could get, it just got worse. Looking up, he sees me and waves me through.

Resnick turned down the corner to mark his place and set Cathy Jordan's book aside. A little more than two thirds of the way through and the body count was rising. Whoever had killed April Reigler at the end of chapter one, seemed to be working his or her way through April's college friends. Resnick thought it was an elaborate blind, a series of otherwise unnecessary crimes whose only purpose was to confuse the investigation and lead the police and the redoubtable Annie Q. Jones off along the wrong track. For his money, the answer lay closer to home. In his experience, that was usually the case. But he wasn't betting on it.

In the kitchen, he switched the radio on and swiftly off again. What was it about me BBC that the first few hours of Sunday morning were devoted so resolutely to pretending nothing had changed since 1950?

From

"Morning has Broken' through to the Appeal for This Week's Good Cause, it was as though God were still benevolently in His heaven and all, in thought, word and deed, were right with the world. Even

"On Your Farm', which was allowed to interrupt the predominantly religious programmes, regularly featured one of its journalists sitting down to a trencherman's breakfast of sausage, bacon and eggs with commonsensical good-hearted country folk of the kind Resnick had long thought existed only in the minds and brochures of the English Tourist Board.

The clock above the dresser showed it was still shy of seven. He had been up since half past five, unable to sleep; had made two pots of coffee and now he was about to make a third.

This time he would have toast and some of 176 that marmalade he had bought at the Women's Institute market in the Y. W. C. A opposite Central police station. Wonderfully sweet and runny, the kind that always slid off the knife blade and on to your hand before you could hope to spread it on bread. Annie Q. Jones, he knew, would have already done her work-out to Cher's fitness video and would be standing with her coloured pens in front of the giant white board on which she noted all the significant incidents in her current case; arrowing connections, circling clues. All Resnick could do, standing there waiting for the water to heat through, was allow the bits and pieces of the investigation to trundle round inside the washing machine of his brain. Turning the toast, he smiled, remembering how it had begun, the loneliness of the middle-aged runner with only one sock. One of the mysteries of the age, which neither he nor Annie Q. Jones would ever solve why was it that whenever you took six pairs of socks to the laundry, nine times out of ten, you only got five and a half pairs back? Lynn? In love with him? What on earth had Sarah Farleigh been talking about?

Millington and his wife had this Sunday morning routine: as soon as the alarm sounded, Millington would push back his side of the duvet (John Lewis Partnership goose down, acquired only after his wife's careful perusal of comfort ratings and tog numbers in Which?

magazine) and hurry downstairs, returning some fifteen minutes later with a tray, laden with tea (Waitrose organically grown Assam), slices of fresh granary bread (for which Madeleine had stood in line at Birds the Bakers the previous day), butter (now that the latest dietary reports had suggested a low level of dairy products was actually good for you, they were allowed butter) and Wilkin and Sons' Tiptree' morello cherry conserve. Not jam, conserve. And, for Madeleine, the Mail on Sunday.

Millington placed the tray in the centre of the bed, and prepared to climb back in, knowing full well no matter how circumspectly he did this, his wife would tell him to be more circumspect still.

"Careful, Graham," she said. And, with Millington joining her in harmony,

"You'll spill the tea."

Madeleine detached the sports pages from the paper and passed them across; that done, the drill was this: Graham would butter the bread, which he had already cut into two; Madeleine herself would add the jam. Graham would pour milk into the cups and she would pour the tea, now brewed to a good colour and strength. The only occasions he stirred in a little sugar was at the station, when he could be good and sure Madeleine wasn't looking.

"Ooh look, Graham, that writer, there's something about her in the paper."

"Mmm? Where?"

The photographer had posed Cathy Jordan alongside the statue of Robin Hood beside the Castle wall, Cathy's hand reaching up to touch the bow. The headline:

MAKING CRIME PAY.

"You know, Graham, I was thinking of going."

"Where's that, love?"

"She's being interviewed this afternoon, by that woman from the box.

The one I like, with the glasses, you know. From The Late Show. Oh, what is her name? "

"Don't ask me."

"It was on the tip of my tongue just now."

"Thought that were jam."

oh, Graham, be serious. "

"So I am. Get your head over here and I'll lick it off."

"Graham, don't! You'll upset the tray."

"Not if we park it on the floor."

"But I've not finished my tea."

178 "Stewed by now. Any road, I can always nip back down later, mash some more."

"Graham!"

What now? "

"I shall have to go to the bathroom first."

"Whatever for?"

"I shall just have to, that's all."

"All right, then. If you must. But for heaven's sake, don't take all day about it."

And Madeleine hurried into her dressing gown, leaving Millington to read about Notts' first innings against Middlesex, nibble another piece of bread and jam and hope the mood didn't desert him before she returned.

"Come on. Mum," Lynn Kellogg was saying down the phone, 'that's just the way Auntie Jane is. You've been telling me that for years. "

And while her mother launched into another familiar family diatribe, Lynn, half-listening, sipped her Nescaf6 and struggled with seven down, four across in yesterday's crossword. At least, she thought, as long as her mother could find the energy to get worked up about her sister's failure, for the third year running, to send a birthday card, it meant there was nothing more urgent to worry about. Meaning Lynn's dad.

Not so long after Christmas, her father had had an operation to remove a small, cancerous growth from the bowel.

"We'll be keeping an eye on him, naturally," the consultant had said, 'but so far, fingers crossed, it looks as though we might have nipped it in the bud. " And her father, slow to recuperate, shaken by everything that had happened the strangeness of the hospital, the discomfort of endoscopy, the myth that no one who was ever admitted to an oncology ward lived more than a twelvemonth after, the persistent threat of the knife was getting better. When last Lynn had driven over to Norfolk to visit, he had been back out again, pottering between hen houses, cigarette hanging from his lips.

"Away with you, girl," he had said, Lynn lecturing him for the umpteenth time about the dangers of cancer.

"There's not a thing wrong with these lungs of mine and you know it. Doctor told me so. So, less you see me pulling down these overalls and smoking out my backside, bugger all for you to get aerated about, is there?"

Lynn hoped he was right. She thought, hearing a bit of the old fire back in his voice, that probably he was.

"Yes, Mum," she said now. And,