Still Waters (23 page)

“A number of falls.”

“Possibly.”

“Went riding, did she?” Siddons asked. “Climbing? Winter skiing?”

Peterson shook his head.

“Then perhaps,” Helen said, “you could offer some other explanation?”

He held her gaze. “None. I'm sorry, none at all.”

Stubbing out her cigarette, Siddons leaned back. “If you do think of anything,” she said, almost carelessly, “you'll be sure to let us know.”

He continued to sit there, uncertain. “You've finished with me? I can go?”

“Yes, I think so. Anil, perhaps you could show Mr. Peterson out.”

When he was on his feet, she said, “You won't be going anywhere, leaving the country, nothing like that. Not with funeral arrangements to be made.”

Peterson looked back and then walked away. He's good, Helen thought, guilty or not, he's very good. And guilty of what? Hitting his wife to end an argument? Join the club.

The phone was ringing as she walked in the door and she knew it would be either Jack Skelton or Maxwell Bowden, the ACC from Derbyshire, whose idea of sweeping her off her feet had been some decidedly tired-looking roses and a bottle of Drambuie in a paper bag.

“Max,” she said, less than enthusiastically. He hated it when anyone called him Max. “What can I do for you?”

Wrong question.

“Actually, Max,” she said, interrupting, “I've had a shit of a day. I'm going to take some paracetamol and crawl into bed.”

Setting down the phone, she lit a cigarette and drew in deeply.

“No, I'm sorry,” she said, receiver back in her hand. “Appealing as it is. Yes, I'll call you. Bye.”

Carefully divesting herself of her new best suit and blouse and hanging them inside the ghastly flush-fronted fitted wardrobe, Helen kicked off the rest of what she was wearing and went to do battle with the shower.

She was drying her hair when the doorbell sounded and didn't hear it at first over the noise of the drier. There was a generous glass of scotch close to hand and a Marks & Sparks salmon and something-or-other waiting patiently by the microwave.

When she realized there was somebody persisting at the door, she tightened the belt to her pale green robe and padded her way into the hall. Through the security peephole, Jack Skelton's face looked more intense, more absurd than ever.

“Five minutes, Jack, all right? And don't let this thing …” she tugged at the lapels of her robe, “give you any ideas.”

“Halfway there already,” Skelton grinned, but he was only going through the motions. “A drop of scotch'd be nice,” he said, spotting Helen's glass.

“I dare say.” She made no effort to pour him one and Skelton took a freshly washed glass from beside the sink, the bottle of Famous Grouse from between the salt and the Fairy Liquid.

“Not going to be a habit this, is it, Jack? I thought we had all that settled before I agreed to take the job.”

“It's the job I've come to talk to you about.”

“Not another lecture?”

“You had a run-in with Malachy.”

“Are you asking, Jack, or telling?”

“He told you what to do and you told him to fuck off.”

“Something like that, yes.” She held the packet out toward him and when he shook his head, lit up herself. “Afraid she'll smell it on your breath, Jack?”

“Like she used to smell you?” His voice was easy and insinuating and for a moment, as his hand ran the length of her thigh, she could remember what she had allowed herself to see in him.

“Something about the job, Jack, I think that's what you said.” She stared at him until he stepped away.

“Malachy, you know he was never your biggest fan from the off. Now he's wondering aloud if it's not the best thing to get shot of you before any real damage is done.”

“How exactly is he proposing to do that?”

“Ride you out of town doggy-fashion, I believe that was his suggestion.”

“Pathetic sexist bastard!”

“Possibly. But your immediate superior, none the less.”

Helen rested her cigarette on the edge of the sink and took a good swallow at her scotch. “Don't worry, Jack. I've already figured out how to deal with this. Malachy gets his way and I get mine. And you've got two minutes to down that scotch, or you'll be taking it back to Alice in a paper cup.”

Skelton laughed a sour laugh. “Just about the only way I'd consider it these days.”

Resnick had wandered into the Polish Club midway through the evening, a quiet night, quite a few families with older children, and, after chatting to the secretary for a short while, taken up a position toward the end of the smaller bar. He was there, making his second or third bison grass vodka last and listening with half an ear to Marian Witzcak's somewhat alarmed recounting of a Glyndebourne production of Berg's
Lulu
on Channel Four, when Helen Siddons was ushered in.

“Charlie,” she said, “we've got to talk.”

Thirty-two

The entire squad was assembled, two dozen individuals variously standing, sitting, leaning, staring at bitten-down fingernails, recently buffed shoes, casting their eyes back over the canal maps tacked to the walls, before and after photographs of Jane Peterson, Miranda Conway, Irene Wilson, and two still-unidentified women; twenty-four officers, men and women, but mostly men, mostly white, aged between mid-twenties and late thirties, motivated, bright, carefully chosen, keen to do well, succeed, get the bastard who did these sorted and sorted fast.

Helen Siddons, smart and businesslike in a gabardine safari dress, was coming to the end of that morning's briefing. The team initially working the Worksop murder had passed on details of two potential suspects, one a brewery salesman whose regular run took him through most of the sites where bodies had been found. Details were on their way round.

“That aside, what I want us concentrating on is this period between the first two murders and the last three. If we are looking for the one man, what was he doing during this time? My gut feeling tells me he was locked away, maybe for something dissimilar, but equally it could be for some kind of sexually orientated crime. So, let's use the technology, chase down what we can.”

She stepped back a moment, taking one deep breath and then another, amidst general coughing and clearing of throats.

“All right, all right, there's one more thing. The postmortem suggests that Jane Peterson had for some time been the victim of persistent physical abuse. Not the most serious, in terms of what many of us are used to dealing with, but a broken rib, bruising to the body, the kind of injuries that are often sustained within abusive relationships where the person perpetrating them has sufficient control over his or her temper not to strike out at the face or some part of the body where injuries would more easily be noticed.”

Heads were turned in whispered comment and she waited for silence to return.

“I can't be sure how relevant this is to our primary investigation; but it can't be ignored. Which is why Detective Inspector Resnick, who most of you already know, is with us today.”

Off to one side of the room, Resnick—clean shirt, second-best suit, clean tie—regarded the floor with interest.

“The inspector had met both Alex and Jane Peterson socially and had begun making inquiries into Jane's disappearance. So he has good prior knowledge here and it would be foolish to ignore it. And with the blessing of our respective lords and masters, he's going to be with us on this, concentrating on that particular aspect of the investigation. DS Kellogg and DC Khan will work with him, leaving the rest of us to concentrate on the wider picture.

“Right, questions?”

High-ceilinged, tall-windowed medical wards had once run more or less the length of both floors in the top half of the building. These had now been partitioned off to accommodate the squad's requirements: an open-plan office and large meeting room, Helen Siddons' own office leading off it, were on the upper floor; the computer room, communications room, and numerous smaller spaces, largely for the purpose of conducting interviews, were on the lower. Resnick and his small team had been allocated one of these, just large enough to hold three chairs, two desks arranged in an L, one computer screen, two telephones, a small cupboard containing empty files and a notional amount of stationery, and a metal waste-paper basket, color gray. The walls were a suspicious-looking shade of lime green; the suspicion being that it was a mistake. The window, open now by several inches at both top and bottom, afforded a generous view over the Roman Catholic cathedral and the restored Albert Hall and Institute down toward the various buildings of the city's second university and the bland ugliness of the flats that rose up without majesty above the Victoria Centre.

Helen Siddons had telephoned both Anil Khan and Lynn Kellogg earlier that morning to pass on the news; it had not been phrased as a request. Resnick himself had managed a brief word with Lynn, her response matter-of-fact, cool, everything would be fine.

“Okay,” Resnick said, “two things we have to do. Confirm, if possible, Jane Peterson's injuries were caused by her husband. Find out what might have happened between them to drive him over the edge. So statements from friends, colleagues, relatives, will all need to be double-checked. We need to go through the records at Accident and Emergency, talk to her GP.”

“And Prentiss,” Lynn said, “the osteopath. If he was treating her, you'd've thought he must have seen something.”

“He didn't say anything?” Khan asked.

“Nothing specific. Accused Peterson of bullying her, right enough, obviously didn't like him, didn't like him at all, but nothing more than that.”

“Talk to him again,” Resnick said. “Make it priority. And remember, there are seven days during which we've no idea where Jane Peterson was. And at some point in that time she met her killer. Could be accident, chance. Or it could be somebody she knew, had planned to see.”

“It could be Peterson himself,” Lynn said.

“Exactly. So the other thing we have to do is go back through that list of people at the day school. Busy building, middle of Saturday afternoon, somebody must have seen her leaving. She could even have been picked up outside. And let's double-check Peterson's movements that afternoon while we're about it.”

“This whole disappearance business,” Khan said, “he could have been faking it all along. Keeps her out of the way somewhere, secure, while he creates a fuss …”

“Right,” Lynn said, warming to the idea, “plays the distraught husband just long enough, then kills her and dumps the body in the canal, so that we think she's been done by the same bloke as all the others.”

“Which,” Resnick said, “is exactly what we are doing. Most of us, anyway.”

“Well,” Lynn said, “if he did do it—Peterson—we're going to get him.”

“Right,” Resnick said. “And if he did do it, what interests me is why.”

Thirty-three

“You know, dear,” Hannah's mother had said, head half turned from where she was attending to the salad dressing, “I wonder if I shouldn't move after all.”

Surprised, Hannah had looked up from the book section of the
Sunday Times
, her mother bending forward slightly, squinting above her glasses as she measured the required amount of raspberry vinegar into a spoon. “I thought you'd gone over all that, decided it was a bad idea. This house, the garden, you love it here.”

“Yes, I know.” Margaret's voice was flat and without conviction.

Hannah laid the paper aside. “It's not the same, is it?”

“No.”

They were both thinking of Hannah's father, out in France with Robyn, a girl when it had all started, a student, little more than a girl, younger than Hannah by far. Infatuation, intimations of mortality. One of those scarcely explicable affairs that flare up and just as suddenly burn down.

“Have you heard from him?” Hannah asked. “I mean, recently.”

It was the wrong question. Anger fought back the tears in her mother's eyes. “He sent me … how could he have had the nerve? Why on earth he should ever think I was interested, I can't imagine. He sent me a cutting from the paper, or perhaps it was a magazine, something about this wretched book she's supposed to have written. Well, I don't know what he was thinking of. As though somehow that makes it all right, as if she isn't just some silly bit of skirt after all. As if I care what … what she is … the stupid, stupid …”

Hannah folded her arms around her, feeling the tension wound tight inside the brittle wiriness of her mother's body, the hardness of small bones, softness of white, lightly freckled skin.

“I'm not going to cry.”

“No.”

“She isn't worth it. They're neither of them worth it.”

“That's right.” Hannah was thinking of Andrew, her Irish poet lover, the way he had flung his final infidelity in her face like brackish water and expected her to be grateful for his openness, his honesty. How she had cried.

“He didn't think,” Hannah said. “He wasn't thinking.”

“Yes, he was. He was thinking of her. Not of me. Now, we could eat if you're ready. I'm afraid I forgot to buy any cheese. I hope that's all right. I …”

“Mother,” Hannah said, kissing the top of her head, “it's fine. Everything's fine.” Tears bright in her eyes.

He had come back twice after that, Andrew. The first time had been midway through the evening, cold, a fire burning in the open grate. Hannah had been marking folders, grading papers, rereading the Lydgate and Dorothea chapters from
Middlemarch
. The first Mary Chapin Carpenter album had been playing quietly; she had had—what?—two glasses of wine or was it three? At the door, Andrew's breath had seesawed across the air; he had been wearing a thin coat, a scarf wrapped round his head as though he were suffering from toothache, gloves on his hands, a bottle of Bushmills clutched against his chest. Hannah had known from the first moment of seeing him that she should not let him in: known what would happen if she did.