Cold Light

Thirty-four

Helen Siddons had chosen her clothes with care. Alienating Nancy Phelan’s parents further was the last thing she could afford. So nothing that might be considered expensive, nothing too stylish, but neither was she going to go marching in with shoulder pads and heels and a suit that shouted authority. She wore a mid-length skirt and jacket in neutral colors, a woolen scarf, and flat shoes. Her hair was neat and orderly, makeup discreet to the point of nonexistence. No perfume.

She sat with Harry and Clarise in the small lounge of their hotel, the three of them leaning awkwardly forward in worn red and gold armchairs. Clarise poured tea from a metal pot and offered round a plate of brittle biscuits. Helen, polite, deflected, as best she could, Harry Phelan’s aggression, his assertion that the police were only going through the motions. The room was heavy with the scent of furniture polish and stale tobacco smoke. Helen declined Harry Phelan’s grudging offer of a cigarette and lit one of her own. “There’s been a development,” she said.

If Resnick had been expecting a great deal from Forensic, he would have been disappointed. “What we want here,” the lab man had said, “is your average sicko. Can’t wait to toss himself off over the lot. Give me that and a little time, I could let you have more than his blood group, I could give you his telephone number. As it is …”

The best he had been able to come up with was a grease mark high on the side of Nancy’s silver top, close to the arm; some kind of oil mixed with human sweat. The sweat, of course, was most likely Nancy’s own, but they didn’t know that yet for a fact. They were doing more tests.

There had been no prints on the doors, none in Nancy’s bedroom, none anywhere. Resnick stalked the corridors of the station, waiting for something to happen.

Dana had woken in the night more times than she cared to remember, alerted by every sound. The slamming of a car door in the street outside, creak of the bed overhead, each had her gripping the edge of the duvet, adrenaline flooding her veins. By the time she climbed into her morning bath, she felt a wreck.

She was drinking herbal tea, trying to concentrate on whatever they were saying on Radio Four, when the phone broke into her already jagged thoughts.

“It’s Andrew,” Yvonne Warden said, “he’s found your little surprise package. I think signing it might have been a mistake.”

With all that had recently happened, Dana had managed to forget the tipsy message she had left for her boss on his office wall, lipsticked graffiti graphically testifying to his failed attempt at seduction.

“Oh, shit!” Dana said.

“Exactly.”

Dana was at a loss for what to say.

“I think you should give him an hour to climb down off the ceiling,” Yvonne said, “then put in an appearance. I imagine he’ll want a word with you by then.”

“I can guess which one it is.”

“Between ourselves,” Yvonne said, “showing him up for what he is, it’s not before time.”

“Christ,” Dana said, “don’t tell me he’s had a go at you, too?”

“What time,” Yvonne said, “shall I say you’ll be in? Ten? Ten-thirty?”

Dana sat for several minutes, staring at the phone. Then she pulled herself together, put on her good black trouser suit with a scarlet silk shirt, paid even more than usual attention to her hair and makeup, drank two strong cups of coffee, the second laced with brandy, and she was on her way.

“You’re looking surprisingly good,” Yvonne Warden said admiringly. “In the circumstances.”

“Don’t,” Dana said, “let the bastards grind you down.”

“He’s expecting you,” Yvonne said.

Dana smiled and breezed on through.

There was a smell of fresh paint which grew appreciably stronger when Dana opened the door. Andrew Clarke was speaking to somebody on the phone, but as soon as Dana entered he lowered the receiver and rose to his feet. Behind him a workman in blue-gray overalls was repainting the rear wall where Dana had lipsticked her graphic version of her Christmas Eve struggle with her employer. The final picture, just visible through the first coat, had a distraught Andrew, sweat flying, running down the street after her, flies agape, penis swaying limply in the wind.

“I suppose you think this is funny?”

“Don’t you?”

Behind them, the painter sniggered.

“Outside!” Clarke snapped.

“But I haven’t …”

“Out. You can finish it later.”

The painter edged past Dana wearing the smuggest of grins and left them together.

“You realize you’ve left me no alternative other than dismissal,” Andrew Clarke said.

“Resignation?”

He coughed into the back of his hand. “Very well, if that’s what you want.”

“I was thinking of yours, not mine.”

“Then you’re deluded.”

Dana smiled. “Dismiss me and I’ll bring charges of harassment and sexual assault. Be patient while I apply for another job, give me a good reference and a bonus, something equivalent to six months’ salary, say, and I won’t even post the letter I’ve got here in my bag addressed to your wife. Think about it, Andrew, think about exactly what Audrey might say and do. When you’ve made up your mind I’ll be in the library. There’s a new batch of slides that want cataloging.”

Outside the door she winked at the workman. “I think you can go back in now.”

The envelope had arrived second delivery, addressed to Superintendent Jack Skelton and marked personal. It had stayed downstairs until mid-afternoon, when the duty officer had sent it up to the superintendent’s office, along with a bundle of papers and other mail. There it remained on the side of his desk until a little before five, when Skelton pulled it out from between two Home Office circulars, and gave it a preliminary shake. The flap had been secured with two staples before being Sellotaped round. Skelton cut the tape at the edges, then pulled the staples free; when he held the envelope over his desk, the cassette slipped down into his hand.

Thirty-five

A low hiss lasting several seconds, broken by two clicks, evenly spaced. A quarter-second’s silence, almost imperceptible, before the voice.

Hello, this is me. Nancy. I have to tell you that I’m all right. I’m well and nothing … nothing bad has happened to me, so I don’t want you to worry …

There is a slight fade as the voice disappears, the briefest of pauses during which the familiar background hiss can just be heard. The voice itself is pitched low but quite strong, perhaps surprisingly so; there is only a faint tremor at the end of certain words.

I am a prisoner, though, I’m not staying away because I want to but I don’t … because I don’t have any choice …

Most of the time I’m kept tied up, tied up and chained and I have … I have to squat down or lean against the wall or lie on the floor and I wish I could have more …

I am given water to wash with and a bucket to use as a toilet and I’m not hungry, there’s food and water to drink and once a day I get a cup of tea and …

What I want to say to you is this-Mum, Dad, whoever hears this- the person who’s keeping me here; making me do this, you should believe what he says, do what he says. He’s clever, yes, clever, and please, please, if you want to see me again, do whatever he says.

The click of the machine being switched off. Several seconds of constant hiss. The experts who listen to copies of the tape will disagree in their interpretation of the speaker’s state of mind here, one placing her near to the end of her tether, another suggesting a resilience that goes unimpaired. What they agree upon is that Nancy is speaking under duress, that although she does not seem to be reading from something previously prepared, nonetheless she has been fairly carefully rehearsed. Considerable significance is found in the detailed description of her routine as a prisoner, her subservience to her captor, her enforced regression to an almost fully dependent childlike state.

The break in the sound is followed by another double click, similar to before. The man’s voice is slightly distorted, slowed somehow in the process of recording, slurred. And the accent is regional, without being strongly so; enough, just, to blur the edges of received pronunciation. First attempts to place it centered on the northwest, not Manchester exactly but close, a touch softer and less well-defined. Somewhere, perhaps, to the south, towards the Welsh border. There seemed a strong possibility of one naturally absorbed mode of speech merging with another.

I do hope you will pay attention to that advice and listen to me carefully. Of course, I’m sure you will; I’m sure you are, right now, listening to me with such special care, playing my voice backwards and forwards and backwards again, shaking it upside down and inside out to see if you can shake me out.

But you can’t.

Nancy, you see; she’s right. About me, I mean. Oh, not that I’m clever, really clever, that’s not me. I’m not one of those geniuses who go to Oxford at twelve and thirteen to get a degree in Mathematics, no, I wasn’t even especially clever at school, but that’s only because I was never given the right chance. Because no one, you see, ever listened to me, really listened to what I had to say.

And now you will.

Close to the microphone, a laugh, low and generous, drawing the listener in.

I’m sorry, it’s just that I can see you now, excited, thinking, ah, he’s given himself away, told us more than we should know. But, no. It isn’t true and if it were it wouldn’t really matter. I could tell you my date of birth, size of shoe, the color of my eyes. Even Nancy could tell you the color of my eyes. She could tell you that much. But it wouldn’t matter. There still wouldn’t be time.

So listen very carefully. Don’t make any mistakes. Do as I say to the letter and Nancy can return, free and unharmed, to where she came from.

The day after you receive this tape you are to take two identical bags, each containing twenty-five thousand pounds, to two locations. The bags must be duffel bags, plain black, no markings, and the money must be in used notes, fifties and twenties only. The first location is the Little Chef at the intersection of the A15 and the A631 at Normanby. The second is the Little Chef on the A17 south of Boston. The bags are to be driven to the restaurants in unmarked cars, one driver and one passenger only, neither in uniform. The cars must both arrive at their destinations at a quarter to five in the evening. Park outside and leave the engine running while the passenger takes the bag into the Gents’ toilet and leaves it on the floor beneath the hand dryer. As soon as that has been done, that person must get straight back into the car and the car must drive off. There’s no reason this should take any more than two minutes and if it does the deal is off. If there are any other police cars in the area, marked or unmarked, the deal is off. If the locations are visited earlier in the day for the purpose of setting up microphones or hidden cameras, the deal’s off. Anything, any attempt to detain me, and the agreement is null and void.

So, remember, nothing bad has to happen here and if it does it will be at your door, your fault-and I’m sure you don’t want to live with that. Especially if it means somebody else is not.

The same low laugh, and then a click, louder than before. Silence. How he loves this, the experts will say, the psychologists, the precision of his orders, the control, like someone moving counters around a board. A man seizing the chance to laugh at others where previously others have laughed at him. About his apparent self-confidence there is a division; to one it is assumed, a delusion to be easily shattered, to another it is real-the confidence of someone in the process of constructing a world in which he is master, believing this more and more.

But this will come later.

Now, in the room where they have been listening-Skelton, Resnick, Helen Siddons, Millington-no one moves, speaks, swivels in their chair, cares, for several moments, to look anywhere other than at the floor. Nothing bad has to happen here and if it does it will be at your door, your fault. Finally, it is Millington who clears his throat, crosses and recrosses his legs; Helen Siddons who reaches inside her bag for cigarettes. Skelton and Resnick look one another in the eye: a quarter to five tomorrow. Give or take a few minutes, it is a quarter to five today.