Still Waters cr-9

by John Harvey

  “Quick bath, change, mash tea, and settle down to EastEnders,” Naylor grinned.

  “Likely, Kevin,” Resnick said, “she had more pressing things on her mind.”

  The receptionist in Alex Peterson’s surgery was half out of her seat in protest when she recognized Resnick and held her tongue. Lynn was standing close behind him, Naylor at the door.

  “This patient,” Resnick said, “how much longer will he be?” Flustered, she looked from her desk to the clock behind Resnick’s head, then back to her desk again. The telephone sounded and she let it ring. “I don’t know, it should have been over, let me see, at quarter past. But his next appointment’s waiting and there’s somebody else Mr. Peterson’s promised to try and fit in. I’m sorry but I really don’t think he’ll have time to talk to you till the very end of the afternoon.”

  Resnick leaned toward her, close across the desk. “Explain to these people there’s an emergency. Apologize. Don’t make a fuss.”

  “Well, I don’t know, I don’t really see how I can.”

  “Do it. And don’t bother telling Mr. Peterson, we’ll do that for ourselves.”

  “Oh, but you can’t …”

  The Muslim nurse was holding out a metal cup at the end of a tube for the patient to spit into; Peterson was making notes in small, precise writing on the man’s chart. When Resnick appeared in the doorway, the dentist hesitated a little before finishing what he had begun.

  Since his wife’s death, he had used his work more than ever as a way of exerting control; not only over those around him, those he came into regular contact with, but over himself, his emotions. He had accepted condolences from colleagues politely and they had not sought to intrude; the letters from Jane’s family he had acknowledged with a cold, formal hand. Mourning was something to be held at bay for as long as possible, allowed only privately and then in small doses, like a glass of strong Scotch sampled alone and late, just himself and the moon. Grief frightened him: it threatened to undo him.

  “If you’ll give this in at reception, Mr. Perry,” Peterson said. “Make another appointment for, oh, two weeks’ time. We’ll see how that’s settling down.”

  Lynn stepped aside in the doorway to allow him past.

  “Govinda,” Peterson said, “let us have a minute, will you?”

  With a slight uncertainty, the nurse left the room. There was a smell of mint and analgesic; a distinct but faint background hum.

  “Inspector …” Peterson began, offering his hand. When Resnick made no move to accept it, he took a step back, one hand resting on the head of the chair. “Somehow I don’t get the impression you’ve come simply to give me news.”

  “There has been a development,” Resnick said.

  “You’ve made an arrest?”

  “Not yet,” Resnick said. The pause before he spoke alerted Peterson to his meaning.

  “We’d like you to come with us and answer some questions,” Resnick said.

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Methodically, Peterson fastened the cap on his pen and clipped it inside the breast pocket of his jacket. “Is that merely a request or am I the one about to find myself under arrest?”

  “Whichever you want,” Resnick said flatly. “Whichever it needs.”

  Peterson stared at him, then slowly shook his head; taking off his jacket, he slipped on a navy blazer in its place. Outside on the pavement, just before getting into the back of the waiting car, Peterson turned to Resnick and said quietly, “What is it, sheer spite? Or have you simply run out of other ideas?”

  They sat him in the same room as before and made him wait. In search of Helen Siddons, Resnick found her in the squad office, tearing a strip off a group of officers whose background checking she’d found to be less than diligent. The details of Aloysius James’s story were beginning to look particularly frayed, and, emboldened by his solicitor, James was proving a less tractable suspect than they had imagined.

  Resnick waited till the air had cleared a little, then filled her in quickly on the day’s discoveries. “You’ve got him in now?” Siddons asked, frowning.

  Resnick nodded.

  “Fancy him for it, don’t you? Have all along. Topping his wife. That anger getting out of control.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “If you’re right …” She shook her head. “Christ, Charlie, they don’t call you Golden Bollocks for nothing.”

  Almost before Resnick had closed the door, Alex Peterson was out of his seat. If leaving him there dangling had been intended to make him nervous, break down his resistance, it hadn’t worked; what it had done was steady his mind, steady his nerve.

  “I thought this was urgent; I thought this was something that couldn’t wait. You drag me down here in the middle of the afternoon, prevent me from treating my patients, and for what? So I can sit here for half an hour with a cup of stewed tea and, presumably, somebody outside the door to make sure I don’t run off.”

  “You’re at liberty,” Resnick said, “to leave whenever you wish.” Pulling out a chair, he sat down, Lynn to his left. “You’ve been kind enough to agree to answer our questions, assist with our inquiries. You are not under arrest.”

  From the look in Peterson’s eyes, it was clear he was deliberating what to do: make to go and see what happened, force the issue and become embroiled in a farrago of blundering officialese, solicitors, even handcuffs for all he knew; or stay and see it through, debate, defend. As much as anything, it was the latter which appealed. He sat back down and even smiled. “How can I help?” he said.

  They took him through everything from the moment Jane walked out through the door on that Saturday morning, excited, apprehensive, setting off for Broadway, to the night, a week later, when her body was lifted from the canal. Step by slow step. At no point had Jane been in touch with him, not by letter, not by phone; they had not met, she had not called. The last thing he had said to her, a remark called over his shoulder from the breakfast table where he sat reading the international section of The Times, “Bye. Hope it goes well.”

  “You are certain?” Resnick said.

  “Oh, God. Of what? Can’t we be done with this?” Peterson was bored. This wasn’t a debate, this was a boring litany of the obvious, square pegs into square holes.

  “That you didn’t see your wife at any time between that Saturday and when she died?”

  “Yes. How many more times?” He stared at them and they stared back. “Right, I’m sorry …” Peterson on his feet now, fingers automatically buttoning his blazer, “but this is patently absurd.”

  “How about Wednesday?” Lynn said, speaking for the first time.

  “Wednesday?” He stopped, head angled round, almost at the door.

  “Wednesday evening at around quarter past seven?”

  “What about it?”

  “That was when she came to see you, remember? Your wife. That was when the taxi dropped her off at your door.”

  Peterson laughed, or at least he started to.

  “She caught the six fifty-two from Grantham, then a cab from the station.”

  “Grantham? Whatever would she have been doing in Grantham?”

  “She was there with a man called Peter Spurgeon,” Resnick said. “The man she was leaving you to go and live with.”

  Slowly, mind churning, Peterson moved across and sat back down.

  “You know him?” Resnick asked. There was a fly, fat and lazy, hazing around the upper half of the window, and he tried to clear it from his mind.

  “No, I don’t know him.”

  “You know who he is?”

  “Jane went out with him at Cambridge. That was more than ten years ago. Fifteen.”

  “You didn’t know she’d seen him since?”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “Is it?”

  Peterson started to say something and then stopped. Resnick asked him again.

  “No. No, I didn’t know.”

  “Did she e
ver talk about him?”

  “No, not really. I mean, a few times, possibly, in passing. Maybe once or twice, late at night, you know, those slightly drunken conversations when people start reminiscing. What it was like back then, idyllic summers punting down the Cam.”

  “Idyllic?”

  Peterson shrugged. “She obviously thought so at the time.”

  “She was in love with him.”

  “Apparently. Though heaven knows why. Even when she was trying to paint this heroic portrait of him, learned and romantic, he came over as rather pathetic. Not the kind of person who was ever really going to do anything with his life.”

  “Does that matter?” Lynn asked.

  “Not to me.”

  “But what did you think of him?”

  “I didn’t. Why should I? He was of no possible relevance to me.”

  “So if your wife, if Jane, had wanted to contact him, I don’t know, phone once in a while, see how he was getting on, you wouldn’t have minded?”

  “No,” Peterson practically scoffed. “Why should I?”

  “I wonder why, then,” Lynn said, “when she did get back in touch with him, after his business failed, she didn’t let you know? Unless she was frightened of how you would react.”

  “Jane was never frightened of me. She had no reason.”

  “Not even when you were angry?”

  “No.”

  “Those times you hit her, then,” Lynn said, “you were just hitting her for fun?”

  Peterson clenched his fist and then, aware of what he was doing, allowed his fingers slowly to relax.

  “If you had known Jane was carrying on some kind of relationship with Peter Spurgeon,” Resnick said, “it’s fair enough to say you wouldn’t exactly have approved?”

  “Approved? Of course not, Spurgeon or anyone. She was my wife, you can understand that.”

  “Yes,” Resnick said, leaning a little toward him, lowering his voice. “Absolutely. Of course I can. Just as I can understand when she finally got around to telling you, not simply that she’d been seeing him all this time, but that she was going away with him, well, it would be enough to test anyone’s temper. Any man’s. I can see that.”

  Peterson laughed and shook his head. “Is that how you do it?” he asked. “Charlie Resnick, Detective Inspector, catcher of thieves and murderers, is that how it works? Push me around enough and then when you’ve got my back up sufficiently, uncork the compassion. Oh, yes, yes, of course I understand. And they sit here, poor innocent bastards, feeding out of your hand. Well, I’m sorry, because even if I wanted to help out, confess, unburden my sins, I’m afraid I can’t. If Jane was running off with her childhood sweetheart or whatever she thought of him, I knew absolutely nothing about it until a few moments ago when you told me. And if she came to the house that Wednesday, if that’s what really happened, well I can assure you she didn’t knock on the door, didn’t ring the bell, didn’t use her key. I was in all evening from a little before six, just as I was every evening that week, sick with worry about what had happened to her, where she might be.

  “And if you seriously think, had she come to me and told me this fairy story about herself and Peter Spurgeon, that my response would have been so uncontrolled that I would have taken her life in a fit of jealousy, then, Inspector, you are about as far from understanding me as you will ever be.”

  Resnick and Lynn were silent, waiting.

  “If you intend to charge me with my wife’s murder, then go ahead, but let me warn you I will pursue you with the biggest wrongful arrest suit this constabulary has ever faced. And whichever course of action you intend, I believe I am within my rights to telephone my solicitor and that is what I wish to do now.”

  Peterson gripped the table hard and sat back down; as soon as he reasonably could, he slid his hands from sight, hoping no one would see how they were beginning to shake.

  Forty-seven

  One simple question and answer, repeated, with slight variations, again and again.

  Naylor: After you’d dropped her off, did you actually see her go inside the house?

  Driver: I saw her go up to the door, yeah, there’s these steps, you know, leading up. And like I say, she’d been in a bit of a state. But then, when I saw her on the step, I thought, like, she’s gonna be fine and I drove away. I never actually, what you’d say, saw her go inside, no. No way.

  Peterson’s solicitor, Maxwell Clifford of Clifford, Taylor, and Brown, didn’t even bother talking to Resnick direct; his first call was to the chief constable designate, who referred him to Malachy, who took great delight in chewing out his DCI, getting in a passing shot to the effect that she wasn’t having much luck with her other suspect either and maybe she should consider tossing everything up in the air and starting again. His tone made it clear that tea lady was the kind of thing he had in mind.

  Alex Peterson stepped back out onto the pavement of the Ropewalk less than three hours after he had been marched in, turning down the polite offer of a ride home in a police vehicle in favor of a brisk stroll along Park Terrace and Newcastle Drive and then home.

  “Now then,” Helen Siddons smiled maliciously, cupping a hand in the direction of Resnick’s balls. “Not so golden after all.”

  Resnick was pleasant with Hannah when she called, and although he felt himself sounding cold, pleasant was the best he could do. He felt as flat as water trapped in a rusted sink, flat and stale. Jealous husband, violent man, love spurned: it had been so simple. Perhaps it still was.

  When he arrived home, there was no Dizzy to greet him, preening himself on the side wall. Inside the house, there was the unmistakable reek of cat piss; someone was telling him something and he’d better listen quick. Coffee he ground fine and made strong, the first thing he did after feeding Pepper and Bud, pausing to give the smaller one a touch of the cosseting he seemed to need. Of Miles and Dizzy, so far, there was nothing to be seen.

  In the living room with his coffee, having found only a few sad slices of salami at the back of an almost empty fridge, he pulled down his old album of Monk playing solo piano-fractured, dissonant, ends refusing to be tied. “Monk’s Mood.” It suited him perfectly.

  Slumped in the armchair, he almost failed to register the phone when it rang.

  It was Lynn, plain and matter of fact. “There’s a woman, says she spoke to you this morning? At the railway station.” Gill Manners, Resnick thought. “Anyway, she says she’s remembered.”

  “What exactly?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Okay, where is she now?”

  “Still at the station. Till half past eight, she said.”

  “Right, I’ll get along.”

  “Is this likely to be important?” Lynn asked.

  Resnick hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  The moment he set the phone back down, hand still on the receiver, it rang again.

  “I forgot,” Lynn said, “Mark called. He may have something but he’s not sure. He said he’d be in the Market Arms; till closing I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “All right,” Resnick said. “Pick him up, bring him to the station. I’ll meet you there. Soon as you can.”

  He went out leaving his coffee unfinished, the record still playing.

  Gill Manners’ husband was a bristling, fit-looking man with strong wrists and small, almost delicate hands. Gill looked womanly beside him, motherly, a bright yellow apron sailing across capacious breasts.

  “Harry reminded me, Mr. Resnick, when he got back after lunch. Where I saw that woman you was asking about. Jane, is it? Yes, Jane. Anyway, it wasn’t here at the station. No, not at all. The market, that’s where it was. The wholesale market, you know. Well, we’re down there every morning come five, Harry and me.”

  Just when Resnick was expecting more, she stopped. “And that’s where you saw her?” he asked.

  “Like I said. The morning after you was asking about, the Thursday.”

  “And this was close on five?
”

  “I was just parking up. So, yes, ten minutes either way. She was standing by this car, estate, dark blue, black. Wasn’t no farther off than, oh, here to them doors.”

  Twenty yards, Resnick thought, no more than twenty-five. When he looked across, there was Lynn heading their way, Divine hanging back by the entrance. “She was on her own?” Resnick asked.

  “No. With this bloke. Bald. Tall. ’Course I don’t know what’d been going on, not exactly, but they’d been having some kind of row, you could tell. Tears an’ all, the pair of them. Got themselves worked up into a right state. Soon as they saw me get out the van, he said something to her and they got back in the car. Looked at me though, she did, before she done so. Dreadful, she looked. Dead miserable. But it was her, the one in the picture, I’d swear.”

  “And the man?”

  “Forty, forty-five.”

  Lynn took a copy of the Polaroid from her bag.

  “Yes,” Gill exclaimed. “That’s him. That’s the bloke there.”

  “And the car was a Vauxhall estate?” Resnick asked.

  “Estate, yes. As for Vauxhall, Harry’ll tell you I don’t know one make from another. Shapes I can do, it’s names I’m bad at.”

  “What they used to say about me,” Harry said, “before you got your hands on me.”

  His wife laughed and aimed a mock blow at his head, Harry bobbing and weaving out of the way like the bantamweight he once was.

  Resnick thanked them both and hurried across with Lynn to where Divine was waiting.

  “What Mark’s got,” she said, “it could fit in.”

  Divine gave Resnick a nervous half-smile. “Mini-cab drivers, I carried on asking questions, even after Kev’d found that bloke as picked her up at the station. No real reason, just felt good, I suppose. Like I was back doin’ the job again. Doing something. Anyhow, this guy I spoke to, Castle Cars, he reckons he saw a woman, could have been her, Peterson, right by where them gates are, top of North Road, you know, entrance to the Park off Derby Road. Staggering, he says, almost out into the road. Thought she might’ve been coming right out in front of him so he slammed on his brakes. That was how he saw her face.”