Living Proof (6 page)

Or maybe it's the Lakes. "

Resnick ran his eyes up and down the page press conference. Radio Nottingham, Radio Trent, Central TV, BBC Radio Four, several book signings, a reading, two panel discussions and her attendance was requested at a civic reception. Also there were the name and address of the hotel where Cathy Jordan would be staying, complete with telephone, fax and room numbers. He would study it all in detail later.

"Covering all of these isn't going to be easy."

"Until we've talked to Cathy Jordan, we just don't know." Only slightly mocking, she treated him to her professional smile.

"One thing we have to remember, she's not just our guest, she's a guest of the city as well."

"And our responsibility."

Mollie was still smiling. Resnick folded the list and slid it into his inside pocket.

Larry turned out to be a ruddy-faced youth of nineteen or twenty, ponytail dangling down beneath the reversed peak of his deep red Washington Redskins cap. The coffee, in white polystyrene cups, was strong and still hot. Mollie took a spoon from one of the used mugs and lifted chocolatey froth towards her mouth with such expectation that, for a moment, Resnick saw more than an efficient young woman whose life was strictly colour-coded.

"The letters," Mollie said, 'what did you think? I mean, ought we to be taking them seriously or not? "

Resnick tasted a little more of his coffee. To a point, I don't see we have any choice. After all, Louella Trabert, Anita Mulholland they may just be characters in books, but that doesn't mean the threats aren't real. "

Mollie smiled, meaning it this time.

"You've got a good memory for names."

Resnick knew that it was true. Names and faces. There were others he could have added. Victims. Fact and not fiction. It went with the job, like so much else: a blessing and a curse.

"You don't like her, do you?"

"Who?" Mollie sitting back a little, on the defensive.

"Cathy Jordan."

"I don't know her."

"You know her books."

That's not the same thing. "

Resnick shrugged.

"Isn't it? I should have thought they must come close."

Mollie was fidgeting with her spoon.

"Anyway, what I think's neither here nor there." She leaned forward again, the beginnings of a gleam across the grey of her eyes. "Unless you think I'm the one who wrote the letters."

Are you? "

Mollie nipped a page in her Filofax.

"If the train's on time, I could ask her to meet you at the hotel. There should be time before the opening reception. Say, a quarter past six?"

Resnick set down his cup.

"All right Always assuming nothing crops up more urgent."

"Good."

He got to his feet.

"Here," Mollie said, handing him a glossy black brochure with the Shots in the Dark logo heavily embossed on its cover. This is the press kit There's a programme 48 inside. And a complimentary ticket. It is a crime festival, after all. I should have thought you'd find quite a lot of interest.

Especially if you like the cinema. "

For all his good memory, Resnick was having trouble remembering anything he'd seen since The Magnificent Seven. He took the brochure and nodded his thanks.

"I don't suppose you've had a chance to look at that book yet?"

Mollie asked when he was at the door.

"No, afraid not."

As he walked out along the narrow entryway and on to the street, Resnick noticed a freshening of the wind and when, back at the corner of Hetcher Gate, he tilted his head upwards, he felt the first drops of a summer shower bright upon his face.

Eleven It wasn't as though Cathy Jordan had never been to England before.

First, as a visiting student, on exchange from her state college in Kansas City, Kansas, she had been catapulted headlong into the heyday of British hippydom. Carnaby Street and the Beatles and the Stones and her first toke, four girls passing it between them, cramped inside one of the cubicles in the ladies' room at the Roundhouse.

Could it really have been the Crazy World of Arthur Brown out on stage, singing Tire'? Or maybe that was later, underground at UFO?

She couldn't remember now. The way her world had spun three hundred and sixty degrees beneath her, it was a wonder she remembered anything at all. Her family ringing nightly, after watching television newscasts of the French students setting fire to the barricades outside the Sorborme; youngsters with long hair battling with police outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square.

"Are you okay? My God, Catherine, are you sure you're okay? What is going on over there? The whole world seems suddenly to have gone mad." One of her dad's Eddie Pisher albums playing steadfastly away in the background - "Oh! My Papa!"

"Wish You Were Here."

Her second visit had been made almost ten years later, when her first husband had been stationed at a US air force base in Lincolnshire and she had opted to join him for six months. In a number of ways, it had not proved such a good idea. From time to time, women old enough to be not 50 just her mother but her grandmother had chained themselves to the base's perimeter fence in protest at the American presence. Sometimes when she was shopping in the nearest town, angelic-faced young men wearing CND badges or brandishing copies of Socialist Worker would spit at her in the street.

Whatever else, her abiding impression of England was not of cobbled streets, spied through the swirl of a quaint Dickensian pea-souper; nor of some fading thatched roof idyll over which the sun barely set and where the squire and village bobby reigned supreme. England, for Cathy Jordan, represented unrest and disruption, change not only for the country, but for herself.

Yet looking out now through the smirched window of the Intercity train as it cleaved through the flat softness of the Midlands landscape, she saw only field on field washed by a perpetual grey drizzle cattle standing morose at hedgerows, a single tractor turning ever-widening circles to no purpose, knots of ugly houses huddled at road ends nothing to stir her heart or energise her mind.

Three days ago it had been Holland, before that Denmark and Sweden, Germany: just another damn book tour, that's what it was. A tour she had begun alone and was ending with her second husband, Frank Cariucci, asleep on the seat alongside her.

Frank, who had got bored minding his own business back in the States and had flown out to mind hers. Except that he had forgotten what it had become like for the pair of them, on the road together the sterile proximity of hotel rooms and polite, translated conversation.

More than three days and Frank was floundering awkwardly in Cathy's wake, bored, and Cathy, unable to stop herself, was sniping at him without let-up or mercy.

This was already the sixth day.

The brittle plastic glass which held her Scotch now had no more than a quarter-inch of once-iced water slopping about at the bottom, and Cathy wondered if she had the energy to walk back through the train to the buffet car and order another.

"Do you think she'll be here on time?"

Mollie Hansen glanced up from her Independent.

"I don't see why not, do you?" There they were, twice on the Listings page, bare details under Events Around the Country and a boxed Daily Ticket offer two pairs of seats for the opening night complete with picture. Good old Independent'. Saturday they'd promised a feature length piece on the Curtis Wooife retrospective, which would fit nicely with the Cathy Jordan profile they were publishing on Sunday. Coverage in the Observer, the Telegraph and The Times, all they needed now was the Mail for a pretty clean sweep.

As Tyrell watched the overhead screen, the arrival time disappeared.

"You see. Trouble."

Moments later, it flashed back up: 5. 18.

"Why are they never on time?"

"David," Mollie shook her head.

"A minute late, I think we can live with that. Don't you?"

The woman who walked along the platform towards them was a good few inches above average in height, even allowing for the cowboy heels on the tan boots she wore below her jeans. Red hair, straight save for a slight curl at the ends, hung shoulder-length. She had taken the time to refresh her lipstick and the greenish shadow above what, even at a distance, were disturbingly blue eyes. A tweed jacket, predominantly green and tailored at the waist, hung open over a red silk shirt. She was carrying a medium-sized carpet bag in her left hand.

Rhonda Reming, Tyrell decided, meets Arlene Dahl: though, close to, there was more than a touch of Lauren Bacall about the mouth.

52 Mollie was looking, not so much at Cathy Jordan, but at the barrel-chested man with cropped grey hair walking alongside her. He was carrying large, matching suitcases in both hands, a third tucked beneath one arm. Shorter than Cathy, what impressed immediately about him was his size. The bags he was carrying could have been toys.

For a moment, Mollie's face settled into a scowl: she didn't like surprises. Nevertheless, she was the first to step forward and hold out her hand.

"Cathy Jordan? Welcome to Shots in the Dark. I'm Mollie Hansen. We've spoken on the phone. And this is David Tyrell, he's the Festival Director."

"Hi!" said Cathy.

"Hello." Shaking hands.

"This is my husband, Frank."

"Frank Carlucci. Good to know you." His voice was pitched low and edged with something that might have been tiredness, but could have been drink.

Tensing instinctively, Mollie was surprised to find his grip so soft, not weak, almost delicate.

"We didn't know you'd be coming."

Carlucci shrugged strong shoulders.

"Last-minute thing. Joined up with Cathy in Copenhagen. Nice little town. You know it at all?"

Mollie shook her head and they began walking towards the end of the platform, Carlucci falling in step beside her, while, immediately behind them, Tyrell was talking to Cathy Jordan.

"This hotel where we were just staying," Frank Carlucci was saying, 'the Plaza. Oak panelling you'd kill for, leather books all round the bar, huh! They got this pillar in the lobby, names of all the celebrities ever stayed there engraved in gold. Well, maybe it was brass. But everyone, you know. Liza Minnelli, Paul McCartney, Jack fucking Nicholson. Michael Jackson. Well, maybe they'll be taking that one down. But Cathy, next time we go back, hers'll be up there along of the rest Alongside of Jack Nicholson, ain't that something? "

Mollie made a sound that was strictly noncommittal; Nicholson had been all right in Chinatown, but after that what was he? An overpaid actor with a paunch and falling hair.

Climbing the steps from the platform, Carlucci was still talking and Mollie realised he was the kind of man whose idea of a conversation was one-sided he talked and you listened. She moved ahead on to Cathy Jordan's free side, Tyrell on the other telling her how excited he was she could be there, how much he liked her work.

Glancing across, Mollie put Cathy's age as late forties, certainly not a day under forty-five. Her bio sheet was surprisingly coy when it came to details like age. But whatever she was, Mollie thought, she was looking good, Outside, on the station forecourt, waiting for a taxi, Tyrell assured Cathy that the civic reception would be no big deal, nothing exhausting. So far, neither he nor Mollie had said anything to her about the hand-delivered letter or its threat.

You do realise I am serious? Poor little Anita Mulholland, Cathy, remember what happened to her.

"Graham, you didn't get anywhere with that book, I suppos 7' Millington looked across the CID room hopefully, unable to pick out most of what Resnick had said. Two desks away, the world's noisiest printer was chuntering its way through a listing of the last six months' unsolved burglaries, broken down by the Local Intelligence Officer into location, time and MO.

Lynfl set down the receiver, pushed herself up from her desk afld stretched her shoulders and back. The last of her trawl around the city's hotels and she was no nearer to finding the identity of the mystery man who'd done a runner from the hospital. As one of the clerks had pointed out, with so many accounts prepaid by employers' credit cards, all some clients had to do was turn in their keys and wave goodbye.

"Sorry," Millington said, having made his way to where Resnick was standing.

"Couldn't hear a bloody word."

"That woman's book, the one I gave you..."

"How about it?"

"Thought perhaps you could give me some idea what it's about. Got to see her later."

"Ah. Can't say I really got that far. All right, though. Not rubbish, you know what I mean. One thing pretty clear- she's not Agatha Christie, you'd have to say that."

Resnick guessed that to be a compliment, but with Millington you could never be sure. This was, after all, the person who swore Petula dark did a better version of "Lover Man* than Billie Holiday.

"Not got it with you, I suppose, Graham?"

"Have, as a matter of fact. Reckoned I might give it twenty minutes in the canteen, but, of course, it never happened."

"Best let's have it back, then. Take a look on the way down."

"Suit yourself." Millington shrugged and turned away to fetch him the book.

Minutes later, Resnick was on his way down the stairs, a copy of Dead Weight in his hand.

Cathy Jordan poured herself another shot from the one of the pair of king size bottles of J & B Rare they had bought on the plane. She and Frank buying silence with the usual share of booze in the usual bland hotel room, though here the walls were closer together than usual.

Which meant that they were too. In a way.

Right now they were getting ready for the reception. Frank was wandering about morosely in a pair of striped boxers and a white shirt, the creases from where it had lain folded in the case pulled flat across the muscles of his arms and back; Cathy was wearing a couple of towels and a cream half slip, which she hated, but the problem with the dress she had chosen was the minute you stood in front of the light, it was the next thing to being featured in an x-ray.

For once it was Frank who broke the unspoken truce. "So what d'you think?" he said.