Still Waters cr-9

by John Harvey

  Teresa walked with Resnick along the side passage and out onto the street. Traffic was heavy in both directions, backed up from the lights, and youths with squeegees and tattered ends of chamois leather darted in and out between the cars, prizing back windscreen wipers and furiously polishing at the glass, hands thrust out for small change.

  “Our mutual friend,” she said, “have you seen any more of him?”

  “We paid a visit,” Resnick said.

  “We?”

  “A colleague and myself.”

  “He’s in trouble again, then, is he? He’ll go to prison?”

  “That’s very much up to him.”

  Teresa glanced up at him, narrowing her eyes against the fading sun. “Repent, is that what he has to do? Confess his sins and be cleansed?”

  “I think,” Resnick smiled, “something in the way of restitution might be involved.”

  “A little penance, too?”

  “Rather more than ten Hail Marys, the Stations of the Cross.”

  Sister Teresa took a step back toward the house. “I have it in mind to travel down to London shortly; there’s an exhibition I very much want to see. Degas.”

  “And you were thinking you might ask Jerzy to join you?”

  “It’s so much more pleasurable, looking at paintings with someone who knows more than you do.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “And you’d have no objection?”

  Again Resnick smiled. “You might want to let me know when it is you’re going. Just in case there’s a message it might be advantageous for you to pass along.”

  “Advantageous,” Teresa asked, “to whom?”

  When Resnick got back to the station, Alex Peterson was waiting for him, the expression on his face making it clear he had heard nothing from his wife. “Come on up to my office,” Resnick said, “we can talk there.”

  A message from Hannah lay on his desk: called four thirty-five, ring back. He would as soon as he got the chance.

  “Have a seat,” Resnick said pleasantly enough, but for now Peterson preferred to stand.

  “I’d like to know,” Peterson said, “precisely what it is you’ve been doing.”

  Resnick waited, allowing the anger in the man’s tone to fade out on the air. “Following the usual procedures.”

  “Which are?”

  “Making contact, asking questions, establishing when and where the missing person was last seen.”

  “Christ, we know all that. We’ve known it since Saturday night. Seven o’clock that evening. Six thirty or seven.”

  “Half past two,” Resnick said.

  “What?”

  “As best we can tell, she left the building at half past two. There’s no report of anyone seeing her since then.”

  Alex Peterson sat down. Resnick waited for him to put his face in his hands and he did. When he looked up, it was to say, “There’s got to be something else you could be doing.”

  “Not at this stage.”

  “At this stage? What do you have to do, wait until someone finds her in a bloody ditch?”

  “Is that what you think’s happened?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then there’s little more we can do besides wait for her to get in touch.”

  “Surely you can ask at the station, the airport, wherever? She had to leave somehow. Maybe she hired a car.”

  Resnick leaned forward in his chair. “Mr. Peterson-Alex-I’m afraid in a way you’re right. Unless we have reasonable cause for suspecting foul play, I simply can’t commit more personnel.”

  “Jesus!”

  “What you might consider doing is taking a photograph to one of those quick print places, getting some fliers made. There’s nothing to stop you asking questions of your own accord.”

  “Aside from time.”

  I thought this was important, Resnick thought, more important than a few lost fillings and the odd wisdom tooth. It worried him that he felt this bristling animosity toward the man, made him wonder for a moment if he would do more if he felt otherwise. But, no, at this stage he was doing all that was possible.

  “Look,” Resnick said, “Jane’s a grown woman, an adult person, perfectly responsible for her own decisions. There’s not a single thing, at present, to suggest that wherever she’s gone, wherever she is, she’s not there of her own accord.”

  “I could go to the paper,” Peterson said, “offer a reward.”

  “You could. Though in my experience you might be buying yourself more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “At least it would be doing something.”

  “Yes.” He wanted Peterson to leave so that he could phone Hannah; it wasn’t beyond question that Jane might have contacted her. But there Peterson continued to sit, staring at Resnick through resentful, accusing eyes. Resnick remembered the bruises on Hannah’s wrist.

  “I have to ask you again,” Resnick said, “you’ve no inkling where she might have gone?”

  “Of course not.”

  “No special place, special friend …”

  “No.”

  “And there was nothing between the two of you, nothing that happened prior to Saturday that might have led to her leaving?”

  Peterson was half out of his chair. “That would just suit you, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Making it my fault. Then you could wash your hands of the whole bloody affair.”

  “You were the one, wanted me to do more. What I’m looking for is motive.”

  “What you’re looking for is to lay blame.”

  Peterson was leaning forward across Resnick’s desk, hands gripping the sides. Sweat was blotched across his face and a vein was standing out, blue and strong, to one side of his temple.

  “Do you always,” Resnick asked, “lose your temper this easily?

  “Only when I lose my fucking wife!”

  “Or ask questions that people can’t answer.”

  Peterson blinked and blinked again. At first, he didn’t know what Resnick was alluding to.

  “It’s not a good idea,” Resnick said, “to lay your hands on anyone. Certainly not in anger. Do I make myself clear?”

  Peterson straightened, the color drained out of his face. “I was worked up, anxious. I’d scarcely slept. Waiting round all that time for Jane to call. Maybe I wasn’t quite in control.”

  “Exactly.”

  Peterson hated having to back down, but he did. Awkwardly, he brushed the sweat away from his eyes, wriggled inside his clothes. “I don’t normally lose my temper, Inspector. It’s not how I am.”

  Resnick stared back at him and didn’t say a thing.

  Twenty-seven

  It was the same dream Lynn had experienced so many times: the same sense of fear mixed with exhilaration, terror mingled with release. Her arms were tied, chained, she was handcuffed behind her back, the man standing over her, now kneeling, face blurring in and out of focus, changing identity. Michael’s soft voice with that faint Irish tinge she had never been certain was real or assumed. Michael Best’s voice and then her father’s; her father’s and then Resnick’s face. Whose mouth? Whose arms? She rolled out from the knotted sheets, the damp pillow halfway down the bed.

  What had the therapist called her when she’d gone back to seeing her for the second time? A textbook case. Powerlessness and control; authority, domination; fear of the father, need for the father; passivity and penetration; absolution and guilt.

  Lynn switched on the shower, waited for the water temperature to settle, then stepped into the spray. Michael Best was serving life imprisonment for the murder of one woman and the kidnapping of another, herself. It was doubtful that he would ever be released. Her father was even now stalking the runs of his Norfolk chicken farm, smoking the same wafer-thin hand-rolled cigarettes as he had for more than forty years and coughing up golden spitballs of phlegm. The cancer that had hospitalized him two years before was still in abeyance, held there by sticky tape a
nd prayer. And Resnick … Lynn opened her eyes beneath the water and tilted back her head. Just a few more days and then she would be walking into a different office every morning, fresh voices, different faces. Not his. She should have done it a long time before. Either that or something else.

  Alan Prentiss began each day with twenty minutes’ meditation, fifteen minutes of simple exercises, a bowl of rolled oats mixed with skimmed milk, nuts, dried apricots, and chopped banana. Alternately, The Times or Telegraph crossword. Four letters, ending in L and beginning with A, the word his wife had scratched into the leather of the raised couch where he treated his patients, the one morning she got up earlier than him and left.

  Not before time, his own words, unguarded and instinctive, when he’d understood that policewoman to say Jane Peterson had left her pompous shit of a husband.

  Not before time, the tongues loosened behind his back when Cassie had caught the early-bird flight from East Midlands to Edinburgh and the man she had met at an Open University summer school the year before. She was married now, remarried, not to her fellow student from the OU, but to a furniture upholsterer who, like Prentiss-the only way in which he was like Prentiss-lived above his place of work. They all three lived over his place of work, Cassie and the upholsterer and their child.

  Prentiss capped his Parker ballpoint, looked at his watch and, automatically, checked it against the clock. She would be here in ten minutes, the woman from the police, always assuming she wasn’t late.

  He washed and put away the breakfast things, went up to the bathroom and cleaned his teeth, assiduously rinsed his mouth, watered the house plant on the landing which needed refreshing every other day, and neatly refolded his copy of The Times with the front page uppermost. There was a scene at the end of Damage, a film Prentiss knew a lot of people derided, in which Jeremy Irons, returning from the little shopping expedition he clearly made each morning, took the paper bag in which he’d carried home his loaf of bread, folded it neatly once and then folded it again, before adding it to the precise pile of similar bags on one side of his small kitchen. To Prentiss, there was nothing strange about such behavior, nothing obsessive. It was simply what one did.

  Before he could look at his watch again, Lynn Kellogg was walking up the three steps to the front door, finger pointing toward the bell.

  They sat in the long downstairs room where Prentiss saw his patients, the room formed from taking out the middle wall and running what had previously been two smaller rooms together. Two certificates authenticating Prentiss’ rights to practice hung framed on one wall; they were the only decoration among the purely functional: desk, treatment couch, lamp, table, chairs, stool. Lace curtains hung inside plain, heavy drapes, guard against the prying eyes of any West Bridgford neighbors.

  “I’m sorry if this is rather rushed,” Prentiss said. “It’s only that …”

  “You have a patient.”

  “Yes.”

  “Osteopathy, that’s what you do?”

  Prentiss nodded.

  “You manipulate, then, is that right? Bones?”

  “Bones, yes. Other parts of the body, too.”

  Lynn clicked open her bag and took out her notebook. Left tired by her disturbed night, shadows deep beneath her eyes, her skin, despite makeup, was, for her, oddly pale. She’d intended to wear the new outfit she’d bought that weekend at Jigsaw, break it in before starting the new job, but this morning it would have been, she felt, a waste. Instead, she had pulled a pair of blue jeans back out from the laundry basket, an old pink shirt, badly faded, from a pile of things she scarcely ever wore, and finished off with a baggy cardigan her mum had bought for her in Norwich BHS two years before. She looked a state and she didn’t care.

  Alan Prentiss thought she looked rather nice. He wished now he’d suggested half past eight, thought to offer coffee, make tea.

  “That was how you met Jane Peterson,” Lynn asked, “she came to you for treatment?”

  “The first occasion, yes. After that, I think possibly I may have said on the phone, we met socially a few times …”

  “You and Jane?”

  “Jane and Alex. Dinner, whatever, it was always Jane and Alex and, well, I was seeing somebody then, a friend of Jane’s actually, a colleague. Patricia. She’d recommended me.”

  “A foursome, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you got on? All of you together.”

  “No. Not really, no. I mean Jane and Patricia were okay, they had something in common, at least. Teaching. The school. But Alex and I …” Prentiss shook his head. “When Patricia and I stopped seeing one another, that was it.”

  “No more contact.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not socially.”

  “No.”

  “How did you feel about that?”

  “To be honest, I was relieved. We’d never really hit it off, not all together.”

  Lynn began to write something in her book and thought better of it. “But you liked her, Jane?”

  “Felt sorry for her might be closer to the mark.”

  “Sorry, why was that?”

  “You’ve met Alex Peterson?”

  Lynn shook her head.

  “You should and then you’d know. Oh, he’s charming-I suppose he’s charming-good-looking, in the kind of way some women think of as good-looking-undoubtedly intelligent. But arrogant, of course, intellectually. Always spoiling for a fight.”

  “A fight? What kind of a fight?”

  “One that he can win.”

  Footsteps hesitated outside and Lynn hoped it wasn’t Prentiss’ nine o’clock come early. She noticed him glancing at his watch.

  “Why did she consult you in the first place?” Lynn asked.

  “She was having pain here …” Stretching, he illustrated the back of the neck at the left side, where it runs into the shoulder. “She’d been to her GP, had pills. No good. She wondered if there was anything I could do to help.”

  “And was there?”

  “A little. Very little. After one or two sessions, some of the soreness had gone, there was more freedom of movement. If she’d carried on attending regularly, I might have been able to do more.”

  “She stopped, then?”

  Prentiss checked some calculation behind partly closed eyes. “Offhand I would say she came to me six or seven times; if it’s important, I could look it up.”

  Lynn raised a hand, gesturing for him to sit back down. “What did you think,” she said, “was the source of the problem?”

  Prentiss drew in breath sharply through his nose. “Him.”

  “Her husband?”

  “I shouldn’t say that, I suppose. It’s probably unfair, but after meeting them, seeing them together, yes, that’s what I think.”

  Lynn was leaning forward in her chair, elbows on her knees. “What was it,” she said, “about him?”

  “I’ve said. He was a bully. Always shooting her down. If she sat saying nothing, he’d taunt her, tease her. And when she did open her mouth, in his mocking, superior way, he’d tear her to shreds.”

  “And this was causing the problems with her back?”

  “Her neck, yes. I think so. Stress. It affects us, you know, the way we are physically. It isn’t always a case of overstraining, of bad posture.”

  Lynn sat straight, leaning her spine against the back of the hard chair. “Did you say any of this to her?”

  Prentiss was slow to reply. There were steps now, approaching the door. “Not quite directly, no. But I think I implied the answer might be, well, elsewhere.”

  “How did she respond?”

  “She stopped coming. Cancelled one or two appointments at first, always with good reason, but then I realized she wasn’t coming back at all.”

  “And were you still seeing her and her husband together at this time?”

  He shook his head. “No, that was after Patricia and I …” He let the sentence hang.

  Even though both of
them had been anticipating it, each jumped at the sound of the bell. Standing, Lynn closed her notebook. “I’d just like to be certain. The problems Jane was having, it is your professional opinion that her husband was to blame?”

  “Professional, I don’t know. Perhaps I should never have said it so strongly. I’m sorry. It was indiscreet.”

  A smile edged its way around Lynn’s lips. From this one meeting, the look of his house, everything plain and proper and in its proper place, indiscreet wasn’t a word she would have readily associated with Alan Prentiss. “Perhaps it was just an honest reaction; you said what you felt. There’s nothing wrong in that.”

  “Some people wouldn’t necessarily agree.”

  Lynn hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and thanked him for his time.

  At twelve thirty that day, Resnick received a phone call from Suzanne Olds’ secretary: Mark Divine had missed his noon appointment, the second time this had happened. Ms. Olds had thought the inspector might like to know.

  Resnick caught up on some paperwork, grabbed himself a sandwich from across the street, and finally snagged Millington in a slack moment, the sergeant just back from a lunch-time pint and a pie with the boss of the Support Group, and they drove out to Divine’s together.

  Ragged and ill-matched, the curtains were drawn across the windows of the first-floor flat, but in Divine’s current state of mind, that didn’t have to mean a thing. Neither the butcher nor his assistant could remember seeing Divine leave that morning, though for that matter, they couldn’t swear to having clapped eyes on him since before the weekend.

  On the landing, first Millington, then Resnick tried the door. The sound of the TV could be heard distinctly from inside. That didn’t have to mean anything either. One, then another, then both together called Divine’s name.

  “Maybe sloped off for a few days,” Millington suggested. “Change of scene.”

  And maybe, Resnick was thinking, he’s inside there now, unconscious, taken an overdose or worse. “Check back downstairs, Graham, see if there’s a spare key.”