“Is there anywhere you can stay?” Resnick asked. “For tonight, at least.”
“You don't think he'll come back?”
“No. No reason to think so, none at all. If you were really worried we could leave a man outside. I just thought you'd feel more comfortable somewhere else, that was all.”
Dana was leaning forward slightly, looking into his eyes. “I couldn't stay with you?”
Resnick glanced around the room to see if anyone had overheard. “In the circumstances, best not.”
“All right,” Dana said. Clearly, it was not.
“Surely there's a friend you could go to?”
“If I did stay here,” Dana persisted, “would you come back? Later?”
Resnick thought about Marian at the Polish Club, counting down the hours till midnight; thought about other things. “I don't know,” he said. “I couldn't promise. Probably not.”
Dana reached for the address book near to the phone. “I'll find someone,” she said. “You don't have to worry.”
“D'you want to let me have the number?” Resnick asked. “Where you'll be.”
“There isn't a lot of point, is there?” Dana said. He touched her arm, just below the sleeve of her sweater, and goosebumps rose to meet his fingers. “I'm sorry,” he said, “it's worked out like this.”
She was just smiling, grudging, wary, as Millington approached.
“Hang on here, Graham,” Resnick said. “Make sure nothing gets missed. And see Miss Matthieson's taken wherever she wants to go. I'm off in to see the old man.”
He paused in the doorway and glanced back inside the flat, but Dana had already moved from sight, back into her room.
Thirty-one
The station was different at night, quieter yet more intense. The blood that had been splashed across the steps and the entrance hall was fresh blood, so bright beneath the overhead lights that it glowed. A sudden shout from the cells aside, voices were muted; footsteps along the corridors, up and down the stairs, were muffled. Only the telephones, sharp and demanding, retained their shrillness.
Skelton surprised Resnick by not being in his own office, but in the CID room, standing over by the far wall in front of the large map of the city. He was wearing a dark blazer and light-gray trousers instead of the normal suit. Unusually, the top button of his shirt had been unfastened above the knot of his tie. He didn't speak as Resnick walked in and when he did, instead of making a remark about what had happened, he said, “Since you and Elaine were divorced, Charlie, d'you ever catch yourself wishing you'd married again?”
Taken aback, uncertain how to respond, Resnick went over to where the kettle stood on a tray, lifted it up to check there was enough water inside, and switched it on at the wall.
Skelton was looking at him still, waiting for an answer.
“Sometimes,” Resnick finally said.
“I'll be honest,” Skelton said. “Living the way you do, on your own, I thought you were a miserable bugger. Night after night, going back to that place alone. Last thing I reckoned I'd want to be, living like that.”
“Tea?” Resnick said.
Skelton shook his head and Resnick dropped a single tea bag into the least stained of the mugs.
“You get used to it, I suppose,” Skelton said. “Accommodate. Learn to appreciate the advantages. After a while, it must be difficult to live any other way.”
There were footsteps in the corridor outside and Resnick turned to watch Helen Siddons push open the door and walk in. Whichever occasion she had been called from had scarcely been informal. Her hair had been pinned up high and she was wearing a dress not unlike the one Resnick remembered from Christmas Eve, except this was blue, so pale it seemed almost all the color had leaked out of it. Somewhere along the way she had changed into flat shoes and the raincoat round her shoulders could have been a man's.
“I asked Helen to join us,” Skelton said. “Her experience might be useful here.”
What experience? Resnick caught himself thinking. “Kettle just this second boiled,” he said. “If you want some tea.”
“When Helen was on secondment to Bristol and Avon she was involved in that Susan Rogel business, you remember?”
Something about a woman whose car was found abandoned on the Mendip Hills, somewhere between Bath and Wells. No signs of a struggle, no note, nothing to explain the disappearance; if there had been foul play, no body had been found to substantiate it, no evidence either.
“I thought the suggestion was she'd taken off of her own accord,” Resnick said. “Wasn't there some kind of affair that had got out of hand?”
Helen Siddons drew a chair out from one of the desks and Skelton moved to help with her coat. “She'd become involved with her husband's business partner,” Helen said. “They ran an antiques business, branches all over the south west.” She took a cigarette from a case in her bag and Resnick half expected Skelton to lean over and offer her a light but he allowed her to do it for herself. “Seems that the husband knew what was going on, had done for some while, but hadn't said anything as the business was in a pretty shaky state and he didn't want to rock the boat any more than it was already.” She arched back her long neck and released smoke towards the ceiling. Skelton was staring at her like a man transfixed. “When it became clear they were going to go bust anyway, he gave his wife an ultimatum. Stop seeing him or I want a divorce. The wife, Susan, she would have been happy to jump the other way but faced with the possibility her lover backed off. Preferred to carry on sneaking around, didn't want to get married and make it all respectable, settle down.” It was the slightest of glances towards Skelton, probably no more than coincidental. “All this had made Susan ill, she'd seen a doctor, was taking all kinds of pills for stress, depression, whatever. There's a suggestion, unproven, that she made at least one attempt on her own life. We do know that on more than one occasion she told a girl friend that she couldn't be doing with either man any more. She just wanted to get out.”
“So she staged this business with the car as a red herring and headed for Spain or wherever?” Resnick asked. “That's the assumption?”
Helen tapped ash into the metal waste-bin near her feet. “A lot of the evidence pointed that way. There was a suitcase and clothes missing from home and her passport wasn't found. But I never believed it.”
“Why not?”
Behind blue-gray smoke, Helen Siddons smiled. “Because of the ransom demand.”
If she hadn't had all of Resnick's interest before, she had it now. “I don't remember anything about a ransom,” he said.
“We asked for a media blackout and got it.”
“And you think that's what's happening here?” Resnick asked. “With Nancy Phelan? Ransom?”
Helen Siddons took her time. “Of course,” she said. “Don't you?”
Half an hour had passed. More. From somewhere Jack Skelton had magicked a half-bottle of Teacher's and they were drinking it from thick china mugs. Somehow the clock slipped past midnight without any of them noticing and no toasts were offered up. Ash sprinkled here and there down the pale blue of Helen Siddons' dress as she talked.
Painstakingly, she took them through the Rogel case, stage by stage. When the first ransom note had been delivered, pushed through the door of the missing woman's parents' house in the early hours of the morning, it had gone unnoticed for the best part of a day, the envelope pushed between a pile of old newspapers and unsolicited catalogs. When a follow-up phone call was made, at four o'clock that afternoon, Susan Rogel's mother had had no idea what it was referring to, took it as some kind of sick joke and hung up. By the time the second call came through, though, they'd found the note. It was asking for twenty thousand pounds in used notes.
Rogel's father was a retired army colonel, not someone to be toyed with. He made it clear they wouldn't as much as think of handing over a penny without proof. He also immediately contacted the police.
Nothing happened for three days.
On the fourth, the Rogels drove to the nearest supermarket to do their weekly shopping and when they returned, someone had jimmied open one of the small windows at the rear of the house. Naturally, they thought they'd been burgled, looked anxiously round but found nothing obviously missing. What they did find, folded neatly inside tissue paper in one of the drawers in the spare bedroom, the room that had been Susan's when she had lived at home, was one of her blouses, the one she had been wearing when she was last seen, filling her car with petrol at a garage on the Wells road.
The family wanted to pay the ransom, asked for time to find the money; they were given another three days. Instructions were given about leaving it in the courtyard of a pub high on the Mendips. All of this information was passed immediately to the police. On the morning the drop was to be made, the location was carefully staked out, it would have been difficult to be more discreet.
“What happened?” Resnick asked.
“Nothing. The money was left in a duffel bag by the outside toilet of the pub. No one came near it. Not many vehicles came over the tops that day and all that did were checked. Nobody suspicious.”
“He got scared then? What?”
“There was one final call to the Rogels the following day. Angry with them for trying to trick him, get him caught, going to the police. There was no attempt at contact after that.”
“And Susan Rogel?”
Helen Siddons was standing against the window, outlined against the white strips of blind. “No sign. No word. If she did simply run off, if the ransom note was somebody's bluff, she's never resurfaced, never been back in touch with anyone in her previous life. Husband, lover, parents, not anyone.”
“And if it was real?”
Helen smoothed one hand down the leg of her dress. “This was almost two years ago. If someone kidnapped her, it's difficult to believe she's alive now.”
“You double-checked everyone in the area of the pub that day?” Skelton asked.
“Double, triple.” Helen shook her head. “No way we could connect any of them with Susan Rogel or the way she disappeared.”
“How easy would it have been for this person to find out you and her parents were hand in glove?”
Helen Siddons lit another cigarette. “I was the liaison officer. Any meetings we had were well out of the way, never the same location. Phone calls call box to call box, never to their house or the station. No mobile phones used because they're more susceptible to being tapped. If he found out, rather than guessed, that wasn't the weak link.”
“Have you any idea what was?”
She gave a quick shake of the head. “No.”
“Near enough two years back,” Skelton said, looking at Resnick. “Time to lay low, move maybe, try again.”
“Blouse aside,” Resnick said, “there's not much says this case is the same.”
“Not yet, Charlie.”
“Wait till Nancy Phelan's parents get the morning post,” Helen said. “Special delivery.”
“And if they don't?”
Helen blinked and looked away.
Skelton tipped the last of the bottle into the three mugs. “So, Charlie, what d'you think? If this is a runner, where does that leave young Hidden in the scheme of things?”
“Between Dana Matthieson leaving the flat and our bringing Robin Hidden in for questioning, he had time and plenty to get round there and leave those clothes. And he knew the layout of the flat well, remember, in and out in no time.”
“I thought you had your doubts about Hidden for this,” Skelton said. “That was the feeling you gave. Now you want to keep him tied in.”
“One way or another, he already is.”
Skelton looked thoughtful, sipped his scotch. “Helen?” Skelton said.
“I think we should make good and sure,” she said, “the minute anyone contacts the Phelans, we know about it. And by the time they do, we know how we're going to respond.”
“Charlie?” Skelton said.
“That only makes sense,” Resnick said. He was uncomfortable with the knowledge that he was bridling inside every time Helen Siddons said we, at the way she seemed to be edging herself more and more into the heart of things.
“I'll give you a lift then, Helen,” Skelton said, hopefully holding her coat.
Resnick knocked back the last half-inch of whisky, rinsed out the mug from which he had been drinking, and wished them both goodnight; whatever was going on there, as long as it didn't get in the way of the task in hand, it didn't have to concern him.
“Night, sir. Happy New Year, sir,” said the young constable at the desk.
Resnick nodded in reply and stepped out on to the street; it wasn't clear if someone had wiped the blood away or whether it had been trodden clean by a succession of passing feet. Above, the sky had cleared and there were stars, clustering close to the moon.
In little more than minutes he was standing at the far end of Newcastle Drive, hands in pockets, looking up at the blank windows to Dana's flat. If she had decided to stay, he hoped by now she would be safely asleep. For several long moments he allowed himself to recall the warmth of her body, generous beside him in her bed.
“
If I did stay here, would you come back? Later?
”
By the time he had crossed town, avoiding the raucous celebrations continuing in and around the fountains of the Old Market Square, and arrived at the Polish Club, almost the last of the cars was turning out of the car park, exhaust fumes heavy in the air. Those that remained belonged to the staff. There was a taxi idling at the far side of the street, but Resnick didn't linger to see who it was waiting for. He would call Marian tomorrow, make his apologies with a clear head.
Dizzy was sitting on the stone wall at the front of the house when Resnick arrived, stretching his legs and trotting along the top of the wall beside him, tail arched high in greeting.