Living Proof

Twenty-eight

Back in the Book Dealers' Room at the festival hotel, business was in full swing. Derek Neighbour had spent some time moving from stand to stand and had finally come upon Ed Leimbacher, from Mist erE Books in Seattle, who had assured him that he could he could lay his hands on a first edition of Uneasy Prey in mint condition. Something of a snip at four hundred and sixty pounds. Plus commission. And handling. And packing. And insurance.

"And a bargain at that," Leimbacher had smiled reassuringly.

Neighbour wondered why he wasn't reassured.

There was no getting round the fact, though, that the damage to the copy of Cathy Jordan's book he had taken with him to Waterstone's was even worse than he had feared; as many as fifty pages were stuck together irretrievably with paint, many of the others spotted and splotched. And the dust-jacket. "Look," Neighbour had finally said, fingering his cheque-book nervously inside his jacket pocket,

"I'll have to think about it a little longer. I'm sorry."

"You could be," Ed Leimbacher said.

"Pass it up and by the time you've done another circuit of the room, it could be gone."

"I know, it's just…"

But the book dealer had turned aside and was no longer smiling not until the next potential customer came along moments later. Books may be books, but business, well, that was business.

Dorothy Birdwell was leaning back in the armchair of their hotel suite, a damp cloth lightly across her eyes. Marius had helped her to remove her shoes and stockings and now was slowly massaging her feet, first one and then the other, each held close against his chest as he worked his fingers around the ball and carefully across the instep, knowing exactly when and where to apply pressure, when his touch should be little more than a breath.

"Marius, my dear…"

"Mmm?"

"When you went across to speak to the American, you didn't say anything too, well, distressing, I trust?"

"Oh, no. No." Sliding one of his fingers along the delicate curl of her toes.

"Of course not. Nothing like that."

"I know. I know. Some people, some men, if they were annoyed, they could be a little crude. But not you. I don't think you could ever be crude in the slightest."

Mouth curved into a smile, Marius bent forward and lightly kissed the underside of her foot.

"How'd it go at the signing?" Tyrell asked. It was mid- afternoon and he was snatching the chance for a quick sandwich and a pot of tea at the convention hotel.

"Okay," Mollie said.

"At least as far as Cathy was concerned. It was Dorothy Birdwell I felt sorry for. I doubt if she had more than half a dozen people standing in line. Still, I'm arranging transport for her and Marius to go out to Newstead Abbey. Apparently she's got this big thing about Byron."

Tyrell's eyes brightened.

"Did you know Curds was going to make a film about Byron? Ages ago. Late fifties biopic. Script, locations, everything. Apparently, some of his original drawings are around somewhere. Sounds like a really interesting project. James Mason as the man himself- can't you just see it? Mad, bad and dangerous to know. Patricia Medina. Vincent Price as Shelley. Aside from that Steve Reeves thing he did in Italy, it would have been the only costume piece he made."

"How is Curds?"

Tyrell inclined his head in the direction of the bar. "Keeping himself topped up." He lifted up the pot and gave it a gentle shake, offering it towards Mollie, who shook her head.

"What amazes me," Mollie said, 'he seems able to drink all the time and never get drunk. "

"He explained it to me the other night," Tyrell said. "Claims he attained a state of perfect equilibrium in 1965 and he's been balancing there ever since."

"What crap!" Mollie said.

"All Curtis has done, like a lot of other piss heads is attain a state of being perfectly unemployable."

Tyrell was on the verge of arguing back, but thought better of it; no sense in taking on Mollie when he didn't have to. Easing his slim body back into the comfortable chair, he opted for enjoying his tea instead.

As soon as the signing was over, Cathy Jordan had decided what she wanted most was to walk. She didn't know where and perhaps it didn't matter. She just wanted to walk.

"Want me along?" Frank asked.

Cathy gave a suit-yourself shrug and began to push her way through the crowds entering the Victoria Centre. Crossing the road in dangerous defiance of a black and white cab and a green double-decker bus, she hurried past the Disney shop on the corner and plunged into the Saturday afternoon throng.

Frank knew his alternatives: let her go her own way and head off back to the hotel and watch TV; or do what he actually did, tag along several, yards behind and wait for her to slow down, for whatever was irking her, gradually to become less troublesome.

With no clear idea where she was beading, Cathy found herself on a recently re-cobbled road that led towards the castle; dropping down below the sandstone rock, she turned past the Trip to Jerusalem, local bikers and Japanese tourists sharing an uneasy space outside the proclaimed oldest pub in England. Beyond Castle Boulevard, Cathy crossed the bridge above the canal and walked down towards the lock.

Pigeons roosted in the broken windows of abandoned warehouse buildings. Brickwork blackened and cracked. Iron gates bloomed rust.

Idling past, a freshly painted longboat leaked colours onto the oily surface of the water. Mallards, unconcerned, rocked and resettled in its wake.

"I'm sorry," Cathy said, pausing.

"No problem."

Ruefully, Cathy smiled.

"Why do we say that? No problem, all the time. Waiters in restaurants, cab drivers, clerks. You. Especially when it isn't true."

"Hey, I didn't mean anything."

"Exactly."

"You mean there is a problem? That's what you think?"

"Don't you?"

They were walking slowly now; heels of Cathy's boots clipping the uneven concrete of the canal path.

"It's not that guy, Marius, is it?"

Marius? What about him? "

"I don't know. Just the way he came up to you at the end, there. I thought maybe he had you spooked."

"Jesus! It'd take more than a creep like Marius to Spock me."

They walked on. Between the buildings on the far side of the canal, traffic shunted eastwards in a slow line.

"Is it the letters?" Frank asked.

Cathy sighed.

"I've hardly thought about the damned letters."

"Then it's somebody else."

158 Cathy laughed, short and humourless.

"You mean, a man?"

"Unless you've changed a lot more than I thought."

She shook her head.

"You know you amaze me, Frank. There you are, shaking your dick at anything in sight, telling me it doesn't mean a goddamn thing, where if it's me…"

"There is somebody then."

She stopped, folded her arms across her chest.

"Frank, you have my word, I have not been screwing the home help."

"Maybe not. But that might have been better than banging that plastic surgeon."

Cathy didn't respond. She set off walking again, watching as a pair of ducks, grey-green, floated past along the canal.

"Water under the bridge, Frank. Old water under an old bridge. And, besides, he was interested in offering a little liposuction, that was mostly all."

"I can imagine."

"God, I hope not, baby."

"What?"

"The two of us hacking at it in that hotel room, the size of a domestic freezer. Me struggling with my thermals and Mr Plastic with the kind of all-over body hair that puts King Kong in the shade." She shuddered.

"Not a pretty sight."

Frank strode on ahead, putting some distance between himself and his wife's revelations. He didn't know how much she was joking, if at all. After twenty or thirty yards, Cathy caught up with him, touching the fingers of her left hand to his neck, the ridge of muscle just above the collar. "I'm sorry, I'm a bitch. You don't deserve that."

"I do," Frank said.

"Okay," Cathy agreed, laughing.

"You do."

Thirty minutes later and they were sitting at one of the 159 wooden tables outside the Baltimore Exchange, staring off towards the water with a couple of beers. Away to the east, where the canal disappeared between low, suburban houses on its way to join the River Trent, the sky was suddenly thick with clouds and the near horizon had misted over with slanting rain and violet light.

"How many years," Cathy asked, 'have we been together? "

Seven," Frank said, not looking at her direct

"Eight." "I wonder,"

Cathy said, 'if that isn't long enough? "

Twenty-nine Resnick's friend, Ben Riley, had never been much of a ladies' man.

Back in the late sixties, early seventies, when they had been young constables there in the city, there had been girls, certainly nurses from the old city centre hospital, since rationalised out of existence, workers from the hosiery factories strung out along the roads northeast of the city, long since pulled down for DIY stores and supermarkets. Toys R Us. But the drinking, hobnobbing with the lads, to Ben they had always been more important. Until Sarah.

Sarah Prentiss had been a librarian who worked at the central library when it was on Shakespeare Street, close behind the Central Divisional police station. It was a place Resnick himself had liked to wander through, sit in sometimes, reading through the jazz reviews in back issues of the Gramophone. A solid building, thick stone walls, monumental, long corridors and high ceilings, shelves of books that seemed to stretch on forever, a pervasive silence to Resnick, it was the essence of what a good library was about. Some years back, it had become part of the new university and the main library had moved even closer to the city centre. Now you had to push your way through a conglomeration of sales goods, advertising, magazines, videos and CDs before coming face to face with a good old-fashioned book. As far as marketing went, Resnick was sure it was successful, he was certain the library boasted a greater number of clients than before; he just wasn't one of them.

Neither was Ben Riley, who, to Resnick's continuing regret, had relocated to America some ten years ago. He doubted whether Sarah Prentiss visited the library much either, now that she was Sarah something else, and living in Northamptonshire with a husband, kids, and a couple of cars. He had learned this from Ben, with whom she had, for some years. "exchanged the obligatory Christmas cards.

Why was Resnick thinking of all this?

Betty Carter was singing

"Body and Soul' on the car stereo as he drove, mingling the words and tune with those of a second, similar song, so that the final, climactic chorus seemed forever delayed, but that wasn't it. Not exactly. More confusing still, the words of yet another song were worrying away at some part of Resnick's mind.

"Send in the Clowns."

He had heard Betty Carter live just once. A rare trip to London, a weekend in early spring, and she had been at Ronnie Scott's. A striking black woman, not beautiful, not young; warm and confident, good-humoured, talking to the audience between numbers with that slight show- business bonhomie that set Resnick's teeth painfully on edge. But when she sang. He remembered

"But Beautiful',

"What's New?" the way she would move around the stage with the microphone, her body bending to the shapes of the words with a combination of feeling and control that was unsurpassable.

Scott himself, nose like a hawk and gimlet-eyed, his sixty-odd years showing only where the skin hung thinly at his neck, had been leading his quartet through the support slots on the same evening. Tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums. After several rousing numbers, Scott had played a two-chorus version of Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns', almost straight, bass and drums dropping out, the tone of his saxophone ravishing and hard, one of the best ballad performances Resnick had 162 ever heard, silencing the club and striking him straight to the heart.

Ben Riley's heart.

Resnick had never known his friend fall for any woman the way he had fallen for Sarah.

"Don't know what she sees in me, Charlie, but thank Christ that she does!" And soon after,

"Not going to believe this, Charlie, but I think we're going to do it. You know, yes, tie the knot." During the preparations for the wedding, little by little, Resnick had sensed Sarah withdrawing; the way she would react sometimes when he saw them together, snatches of conversation that were reported back. He tried to say something about it once and it was the first and only time Ben had come close to hitting him. Three weeks before the ceremony, Sarah had told Ben there was somebody else.

When Ben had scraped himself back off the ground days later, he sent her flowers and a telegram / guess they sent in the clowns a line from the song, which was popular at the time. With Sarah, certainly.

She had bought Ben a record of it, Judy Collins.

He didn't know her response, whether she laughed or cried. He wouldn't talk to Resnick about her for months, years, wouldn't hear her name; then, one day, Ben said she had phoned him, from nowhere, out of the blue. Almost, he had failed to recognise the voice and the name; of course, it was no longer the same. Feeling low, lonely the way only marriage can make you feel, she had got to thinking about him. What he was doing. Where he was. They met once on a country road and she held his hand but turned aside from his kiss; there were things she wasn't telling him about the marriage, she made that clear, a tiny hook that bit deep. Then came the Christmas cards: With love from Sarah and family. The last few were returned to sender: Ben Riley had gone to the States.

Why was Resnick thinking of all this now?

She was out in the garden and hadn't heard the bell. Resnick let himself in through the side gate and walked along the gravel path.

Honeysuckle climbed the wall. She was bending over one of the flower-beds, using a tool Resnick recognised but couldn't have named, to lever out weeds. As she straightened, she put her hand, no more than a moment, against the small of her back.

"I didn't think you'd recognised me, Charlie," Sarah Farleigh said.

"I hadn't' She smiled at the ground.

"When did you realise?"

"Today. Oh, no more than an hour ago."

She paused in pulling off her rubber gloves to look at him, asking the question with her eyes.

"I don't know," he said.

"I mean, exactly. It came to me suddenly, I don't know why."

"Why don't we go inside?" Sarah said.

"It's getting cold." This time the smile was fuller, more real, and for the first time he saw her as she had been, the woman with whom Ben Riley had fallen in love.

The interior of the house was not ostentatious, but neat. Comfortable furniture, wallpaper Resnick would have guessed came from Laura Ashley, not an Aga but something similar dominating the broad, flagstoned kitchen where they now stood.

"Do you really want tea?"

"Coffee?"

"All right," she set the kettle to boil, balanced coffee filters over two green Apiico porcelain cups, and reached the sherry bottle down from between glass jars of puy lentils and flageolet beans. Resnick shook his head and she poured a good measure for herself, tilted the glass and poured again.

"You'll think I'm becoming an alcoholic," she smiled.

"No."

Her hair was thick the way it had always been, streaked now with grey. The skin around her eyes was red from too much crying, but the eyes themselves were green, the green of slate that has stood fresh in the rain, and bright. Her wrists were thin, but strong, and her calves and ankles fleshed out and solid. She had aged more heavily, more hastily than Resnick had ever imagined she would.

"Will you come to Peter's funeral, Charlie?"

He took a first sip of his coffee, surprised.

"Isn't that what they always do, Morse and the others? I've watched them on television, standing in the background at their victims' funerals, looking for suspects among the guests."

"I don't think that would be appropriate," Resnick said. "Not in this case." He looked into her eyes.

"But, yes, if that's what you want.

Yes, I'll be pleased to come. "

"Thank you," she said. And then,

"Peter has family, of course, had, but I can't say we ever really got on."

"You have children, though." He had seen their photographs in the hallway and on the mantelpiece in the living room when they had walked past "Yes, three."

All grown up? "

"All grown."

Sarah took her sherry to the window; it was darkening steadily outside and somewhere was getting rain.

"Do you ever hear from him at all?"

Ben? "

" Yes. "

"Not for a while. He's in America, you…"

"Yes, I know. Montana, isn't it? Nebraska? One of those western states."

"Maine, he moved to Maine."

"Married?"

"There's someone, yes."

Children? "

Yes, there's a child. A boy. I. "

"Charlie, I don't want to know." There were tears in her eyes, but she was damned if she was going to cry. There had been crying enough lately and with good reason. What was the point of crying over impossibilities? Spilt milk gone sour.

"Sarah, what happened to your husband, I couldn't be more sorry."

"Thank you. I know." She smiled again, a generous, smile, almost a laugh.

"You always were a sympathetic man." Turning, she rinsed the sherry glass beneath the tap. "Maybe I should have married you."

"I don't think so."

She did laugh then.

"No, neither do I. Why don't we sit for a while in the other room? Have you got time, before you need to be getting back?"

Resnick got to his feet.

"A little, yes."

They sat in armchairs on either side of an open fireplace which had a centre piece of dried flowers in the grate. The curtains, full and dark and with a recurring motif of leaves, were closed. There was one photograph of Peter, arm around one of his daughters, laughing into the camera. The others were of the children, none of Sarah herself.

On the polished coffee table lay copies of Good Housekeeping and "Vanity Fair, several paperback books.

"Did you marry, Charlie?"

"Uh-hum."

"Elaine, is that what she was called?"

Resnick nodded.

"Yes." Christ, he didn't want to talk about this.

"What happened, Charlie?"

"We divorced."

"For better or worse."

"Something like that' " Which was it for you? " Sarah asked.

166 "Oh, worse. I suppose it was worse."

"And now? Have you come to terms with it now?"

"I think so."

"And you're still in touch?"

"Not really, no."

"A shame. But, then, I suppose it's better that way."

He didn't answer immediately.

"It is for me."

Sarah drank more of the gin and tonic that had replaced the sherry.

"You think I treated him badly, don't you? Your friend, Ben. What I did, the way I behaved, you think it was pretty inexcusable."

Resnick shook his head.

"No. I don't think that. I think, at the time, I was sorry he was so hurt. But, you know, my job, it's hard to sit in judgement about what people do."

"You surprise me. Seeing what you see, I should have thought you did that all the time. Pass judgement."

"I know. Only that doesn't seem to be the way it works. What happens, most of the time anyway, whatever it is someone's done, somehow you come to understand. No way you could talk to them, else." Resnick looked across at her.

"At some point in our lives, we're all capable of anything. I suppose that's what you learn most."

Sarah sipped her drink.

"You don't know any more yet," she said, 'about what happened to Peter? I mean, why or. "

"Not really, although…" He stopped, uncertain, and she leaned forward a little, waiting for him to carry on. "There's a chance, just a chance, mind, we might have a lead, something to go on."

Sarah set down her glass.

"It's funny, isn't it? These days, you think, oh, people fooling around. Prostitution. Casual sex. Aids, that's what leaps to mind, isn't it? Aids, that's the danger. Not… not this."

"I think," Resnick said, 'if you're going to be okay, I ought to be moving. "

"Yes, of course, fine. You don't have to worry about me. I'm not about to do anything stupid."

"I didn't imagine you would."

She walked with him to the door.

"The funeral…"

"You'll let me know."

"Of course."

He was almost at the car, when she called him back. "That girl, the one who was here with you the other day."

"DC Kellogg. Lynn."

"She's in love with you, you know."

"Thought you weren't coming," Divine said, as Naylor materialised through the crowd. He had nabbed a seat to the side of the pub, close against the windows that looked out over the trees and sloping shadows of the park. Quiet half-hour with Sharon Gamett, who knew what might develop? But not now.

"Here," he said, trying not to sound too grudging.

"You can just about squeeze in here."

Naylor set down his own pint and the refill he had bought for Divine, and sat next to a youth in a cotton shirt with sleeves rolled back, who grudgingly made space for him.

"Sort out all the under-age drinkers amongst this lot," Naylor said.

"Have the place to ourselves."

"Aye, well. Better things to do, eh?"

"Happen."

"How was Canada's feller-made-good?"

"Prick of the first water."

Divine laughed.

"Maybe should've brought him along. There's women here, not seen a good shagging since Forest last won bloody Cup."

Naylor nodded absent-mindedly and drank.

"Hey up, though. Here we go. There's one I'd not mind putting it to myself."

Dressed in a black roll-neck, leather jacket and blue- black jeans, Sharon Gamett was making her way past the raised platform of the stage, where a tubby retread of Eiton John was fiddling with the wiring of the electric piano and preparing to excite the crowd with a despairing version of "Crocodile Rock*.

"What are you having?" Divine said, out of his seat and reaching for his wallet.

"A headache. I've heard this bloke before. What say we drink up and leave?"

A few minutes later they were walking along Arboretum Street and heading for Balmoral Road, a narrow cut-through that would take them to the Goose Fair site and the Forest Recreation Ground.

"This tart we're looking for," Divine said, 'how well d'you know her? "

"Doris? Like I say, I've not been here long enough to know the girls well, but, yes, I've had words with her once or twice."

And? "

"She's all right. Straightforward enough. Honest."

Honest? "

"Yes. She doesn't make any bones about what she does. Doesn't make a fuss if she's nicked."

"Back on the street the next night, probably carrying a dose of Aids."

Sharon stopped walking. They were on the corner of Forest Road East, the cemetery that took up one corner of the recreation ground, off to their right. Immediately before them, open space dropped to near darkness and, beyond that, the lights of the terraced houses of Forest Fields.

"You don't know that," Sharon said.

"And if she had, who gave it to her, answer me that?"

A needle? " Kevin Naylor said.

I don't reckon Doris does drugs," said Sharon. Divine laughed, the sound carrying on the wind. Makes her the only scrubber round here who doesn't."

Doris Duke was short as Sharon was tall. They finally tracked her down some forty minutes later, climbing out 170 of a Mazda saloon in four-inch heels that still left her well below average in height. She was wearing a pink T-shirt that stopped between belly button and ribs, a waist-length nylon jacket, midnight blue, and a skirt which, when she backed out of the car, left little to the imagination. A small handbag hung from one shoulder by a gold chain.

"Doris."

She almost smiled when she saw it was Sharon; a smile that fast turned sour when she saw the two men in her wake.

"Doris, we'd like to talk."

"Oh, we would, would we?"

Divine wanted to slap the sneer from her face for a start.

"Yes, about your friend."

"Which friend's that, then?"

"Marlene."

No. "

"Marlene Kinoulton. Don't let on you don't know who I mean."

"I know who you mean, all right. Just she in't no friend of mine."

"Since when?"

"Since she legged it with fifty quid she owed me."

"And when was that, Doris?"

"Couple of days back."

"And the fifty pounds?"

"Lent it her, didn't I? Slag never give it me back."

"Why did she want the money?" Divine asked.

"I don't know, do I? Never asked."

"Come on, expect us to believe you handed it over, just like that?"

"I don't give a toss whether you believe it or not. So happens it's the truth. One of your mates says they're short, you don't go through some sodding inquisition, right? If you've got it, you hand it over."

Divine wasn't so sure.

"Even if it's fifty pounds?" Naylor asked.

Doris Duke laughed.

"Fifty? What's fifty quid? I can thumb down the next punter comes along here, earn that in twenty minutes."

"Then why," said Sharon, 'are you so steamed up about it? "

"Christ, you don't understand anything, do you? It's the principle of the sodding thing."

They went to sit in Sharon's car to talk, Doris insisting that they drive well clear of the Forest first.

"Certain people see me sitting with you lot, they'd be less than well pleased." Doris had grown up in the same part of east London that Sharon had lived in before striking out for the provinces, and because of that, and the fact that Sharon was clearly different the Vice Squad wasn't exactly overflowing with blacks Doris felt that, underneath it all, Sharon was all right.

But now it wasn't Sharon asking die questions.

"And you last saw Marlene when?" Divine said.

"I told you, Tuesday."

"The day you lent her the money?"

"Yes."

"Lunchtime. In the Queen."

"Jesus, yes."

"All right, Doris," Naylor said, 'we only want to be sure we've got It right' "Oh, yes, I know," sarcasm edging her voice.

"Don't want to put words into your mouth."

Or anything else. Divine thought. Under the car's interior light, Doris's make-up was thick enough to chip and there was the dear residue of a bruise, dark above her left eye.

"And she didn't say anything about her plans? Taking off somewhere for a few days? We know she used to work 172 in Sheffield and Derby. That wasn't why she wanted the money? For the fare?"

"Look," Doris said, her voice taking on the pained expression people reserve for children, the old or the very deaf,

"I don't know where she is. Don't even know where she's been. We were mates, yes, but we never lived out of one another's pockets. Sometimes she'll be off somewhere, weeks at a time; I don't see her around and then I do.

This business, you don't ask too many questions. And the fifty. "

She pulled open the ashtray beside the dashboard and stubbed out her cigarette. "… Most likely she owed someone. Either that or she just fancied going into town, buying herself a new dress."

Why would she do that? " Sharon asked.

"Why would you? Cheer herself up, of course."

"Or make herself look smart."

Doris gave it a moment's thought.

"Maybe."

"So as to work the hotels."

"Maybe." Doris started rummaging for a cigarette in her bag and Sharon offered her one instead.

"Thanks," angling her head towards the' window as she lit it and exhaled.

"If you knew," Sharon said, wishing that the two detectives weren't there, doing her best to exclude them with her voice.

"If you knew that was what Marlene was going to do, try the Victoria, say. The Royal. Maybe the Crest. If Marlene had told you that was what she had in mind and then you read about what happened to that man in his hotel room, well, I wouldn't blame you for keeping quiet."

Doris looked at her, blinking through the veil of cigarette smoke.

"Yes, but I don't know that, do I? If she did that, I don't know nothing about it."

Sharon gave a brief sigh and sat back.

"You're sure you don't know Marlene's new address?"

"Sure."

"Okay," Sharon said, swivelling round and snapping her seat-belt into place.

"Why don't we take Doris back to work?"

They watched her walk away to join the knots of girls on the edge of the Forest

"Wouldn't know the truth," Divine said, 'if it jumped up and bit her in the arse. "

Naylor shook his head.

"I don't think she knows anything," he said.

"I'm not so sure about that I think she does," Sharon said.

"And if I don't push too hard I think she might tell me, but I'd have to be on my own."

"Aside from us, then," Naylor asked, 'why wouldn't she open up now? "

"Partly, it's against her instincts. And I think she's frightened."

"What of?"

"I don't know. And maybe it's not for herself, maybe it's on account of her friend."

A car slowed as it neared them, the window rolled down on the driver's side.

"Get home to the wife," Divine called.

"Before you get nicked." The window went back up as the driver accelerated away.

"Why don't we call it a night?" Sharon said.

"I'll try Doris again tomorrow, all right? And we'll keep in touch."

You run on. Divine wanted to say to Naylor, just run on ahead and let me give it a try. A drink some time, Sharon, how about that?

Something to eat Clubbing, maybe? Black Orchid's not too bad. But something in Sharon's eyes, the way she held herself, standing there and watching as they walked away, made him realise, no, it wasn't such a good idea after all.

Slowing off the freeway, I can hear the sirens and already I'm thinking, hey. it's okay, how many times do you hear that in this city, night and day? Doesn't have to have anything to do with this case, anything to do with me.

But the closer I get to Fairlawn Avenue, the louder the wailing gets, not just the police, either. As I slow for the light, an ambulance shoots past me, causing traffic travelling on the cross street to swerve and brake. By the time I arrive at the house, my stomach is cramping fit to beat the band and I know what I will find.

Fifty yards away from the gathering furore and the flashing lights, I swing my car into someone's front yard and start to run. Paramedics are scuttling into the house with all their gear and a uniformed cop is standing guard on the sidewalk, while, behind him, two of his colleagues are threading out the famous yellow tape: Crime Scene, Do Not Cross. / show the cop my ID and can tell he isn't about to be impressed, when Lieutenant Daines appears on the square of trimmed lawn at the front of the house, badge clipped to the lapel of the black tux he must have been wearing when the call came through. His black tie is unfastened and hangs loose from the collar of his dress shirt and he has that look that homicide detectives get once in a while, no matter how long they've been in the job. The look that says, no matter how bad you thought it could get, it just got worse. Looking up, he sees me and waves me through.

Resnick turned down the corner to mark his place and set Cathy Jordan's book aside. A little more than two thirds of the way through and the body count was rising. Whoever had killed April Reigler at the end of chapter one, seemed to be working his or her way through April's college friends. Resnick thought it was an elaborate blind, a series of otherwise unnecessary crimes whose only purpose was to confuse the investigation and lead the police and the redoubtable Annie Q. Jones off along the wrong track. For his money, the answer lay closer to home. In his experience, that was usually the case. But he wasn't betting on it.

In the kitchen, he switched the radio on and swiftly off again. What was it about me BBC that the first few hours of Sunday morning were devoted so resolutely to pretending nothing had changed since 1950?

From "Morning has Broken' through to the Appeal for This Week's Good Cause, it was as though God were still benevolently in His heaven and all, in thought, word and deed, were right with the world. Even

"On Your Farm', which was allowed to interrupt the predominantly religious programmes, regularly featured one of its journalists sitting down to a trencherman's breakfast of sausage, bacon and eggs with commonsensical good-hearted country folk of the kind Resnick had long thought existed only in the minds and brochures of the English Tourist Board.

The clock above the dresser showed it was still shy of seven. He had been up since half past five, unable to sleep; had made two pots of coffee and now he was about to make a third.

This time he would have toast and some of 176 that marmalade he had bought at the Women's Institute market in the Y. W. C. A opposite Central police station. Wonderfully sweet and runny, the kind that always slid off the knife blade and on to your hand before you could hope to spread it on bread. Annie Q. Jones, he knew, would have already done her work-out to Cher's fitness video and would be standing with her coloured pens in front of the giant white board on which she noted all the significant incidents in her current case; arrowing connections, circling clues. All Resnick could do, standing there waiting for the water to heat through, was allow the bits and pieces of the investigation to trundle round inside the washing machine of his brain. Turning the toast, he smiled, remembering how it had begun, the loneliness of the middle-aged runner with only one sock. One of the mysteries of the age, which neither he nor Annie Q. Jones would ever solve why was it that whenever you took six pairs of socks to the laundry, nine times out of ten, you only got five and a half pairs back? Lynn? In love with him? What on earth had Sarah Farleigh been talking about?

Millington and his wife had this Sunday morning routine: as soon as the alarm sounded, Millington would push back his side of the duvet (John Lewis Partnership goose down, acquired only after his wife's careful perusal of comfort ratings and tog numbers in Which? magazine) and hurry downstairs, returning some fifteen minutes later with a tray, laden with tea (Waitrose organically grown Assam), slices of fresh granary bread (for which Madeleine had stood in line at Birds the Bakers the previous day), butter (now that the latest dietary reports had suggested a low level of dairy products was actually good for you, they were allowed butter) and Wilkin and Sons' Tiptree' morello cherry conserve. Not jam, conserve. And, for Madeleine, the Mail on Sunday.

Millington placed the tray in the centre of the bed, and prepared to climb back in, knowing full well no matter how circumspectly he did this, his wife would tell him to be more circumspect still.

"Careful, Graham," she said. And, with Millington joining her in harmony,

"You'll spill the tea."

Madeleine detached the sports pages from the paper and passed them across; that done, the drill was this: Graham would butter the bread, which he had already cut into two; Madeleine herself would add the jam. Graham would pour milk into the cups and she would pour the tea, now brewed to a good colour and strength. The only occasions he stirred in a little sugar was at the station, when he could be good and sure Madeleine wasn't looking.

"Ooh look, Graham, that writer, there's something about her in the paper."

"Mmm? Where?"

The photographer had posed Cathy Jordan alongside the statue of Robin Hood beside the Castle wall, Cathy's hand reaching up to touch the bow. The headline: MAKING CRIME PAY.

"You know, Graham, I was thinking of going."

"Where's that, love?"

"She's being interviewed this afternoon, by that woman from the box.

The one I like, with the glasses, you know. From The Late Show. Oh, what is her name? "

"Don't ask me."

"It was on the tip of my tongue just now."

"Thought that were jam." oh, Graham, be serious. "

"So I am. Get your head over here and I'll lick it off."

"Graham, don't! You'll upset the tray."

"Not if we park it on the floor."

"But I've not finished my tea."

178 "Stewed by now. Any road, I can always nip back down later, mash some more."

"Graham!"

What now? "

"I shall have to go to the bathroom first."

"Whatever for?"

"I shall just have to, that's all."

"All right, then. If you must. But for heaven's sake, don't take all day about it."

And Madeleine hurried into her dressing gown, leaving Millington to read about Notts' first innings against Middlesex, nibble another piece of bread and jam and hope the mood didn't desert him before she returned.

"Come on. Mum," Lynn Kellogg was saying down the phone, 'that's just the way Auntie Jane is. You've been telling me that for years. "

And while her mother launched into another familiar family diatribe, Lynn, half-listening, sipped her Nescaf6 and struggled with seven down, four across in yesterday's crossword. At least, she thought, as long as her mother could find the energy to get worked up about her sister's failure, for the third year running, to send a birthday card, it meant there was nothing more urgent to worry about. Meaning Lynn's dad.

Not so long after Christmas, her father had had an operation to remove a small, cancerous growth from the bowel.

"We'll be keeping an eye on him, naturally," the consultant had said, 'but so far, fingers crossed, it looks as though we might have nipped it in the bud. " And her father, slow to recuperate, shaken by everything that had happened the strangeness of the hospital, the discomfort of endoscopy, the myth that no one who was ever admitted to an oncology ward lived more than a twelvemonth after, the persistent threat of the knife was getting better. When last Lynn had driven over to Norfolk to visit, he had been back out again, pottering between hen houses, cigarette hanging from his lips.

"Away with you, girl," he had said, Lynn lecturing him for the umpteenth time about the dangers of cancer.

"There's not a thing wrong with these lungs of mine and you know it. Doctor told me so. So, less you see me pulling down these overalls and smoking out my backside, bugger all for you to get aerated about, is there?"

Lynn hoped he was right. She thought, hearing a bit of the old fire back in his voice, that probably he was.

"Yes, Mum," she said now. And,

"No, Mum. That's okay. He's doing fine, just fine."

A psychological process in which painful truths are forced out of an individual's consciousness six letters. With her mother prattling on like that, Lynn couldn't, for the life of her, think what it was.

"Frank?"

Cathy Jordan rolled off her stomach and reached towards the clock radio, angling it in her direction. Jesus! She hadn't intended to sleep so late.

"Frank? You in the bathroom or what?"

No reply. Most likely he was off swimming, maybe found a gym downtown to press a few weights. Cathy eased herself up on to one elbow and dialled room service, ordered fresh orange juice and coffee, croissants and jam. If she was going to pig out most of the morning, she might as well enjoy it. Give some thought to what she was going to say that afternoon, not that it would be any different from what she'd said half a hundred times before.

The one thing Marius didn't like, the thing he could barely stand, the way she would introduce him as her nephew all the time. As if somehow she were ashamed of him, felt a need to explain. Secretary, that would have been something; personal assistant. She hardly referred to him by either of those titles any more, though, naturally, they explained what most people imagined his function was. And it was true.

Dorothy's correspondence, he saw to that; appointments, meetings with publisher or agent, requests for interviews by the media, any and every little thing. Most people looked at him, accompanying her everywhere, helping her off and on with her coat, pulling out her chair, and they assumed one thing.

About him. Poor Marius, camp as a clockwork sixpence, gay through and through. Well, if only they knew.

He had the oil ready now, a mixture of sweet almond and camellia, scented with dewberry, her favourite. It was just a matter of warming his hands. He knew she was waiting for him, towel spread over the sheet, face down, patient. Undemanding. Most of the world, Marius thought, didn't realise how beautiful old people could be. Their skin. Lightly freckled, the delicacy of fine lines patterned like honeycomb: he thought Dorothy had lovely skin.

FR1; Thirty-two When Resnick's wife had entered into an affair, she had been driven to it; driven by what had disappeared from their own lives, by passion. It had also been a sign: clear, not negotiable. This is over for us; I want out Of course, it had not been clean, nor without pain. It rarely is. But clear, yes, that's what it had been.

Whether passion had driven Jack Skelton beyond the bounds of propriety with the self-possessed DI Helen Siddons during her brief sojourn in the city, Resnick had no way of knowing. He had only seen the looks, the late- night conversations conducted in corners, the lingering glances. What the superintendent would have seen in her, attractiveness and intelligence, both well honed, was easier to judge; aside from the fact that Skelton was her senior officer, what might Siddons have seen in him? She was not, Resnick thought, the kind of person to commit to any action unless it contained an advantage. And if passion was what had been at stake there, would passion for Jolly Jack have been enough? Enough for her to risk losing her footing on the fast track towards the top? Not too many points for engaging with a superior in an extramarital affair; not unless that superior was of the rank of assistant chief constable at the very least.

God, Charlie, Resnick thought, as he approached the Skelton house, you're getting cynical in your old age. It must be Sundays, that's what it is. All that bell-ringing and sanctimonious ill will. All those cars queuing to get into DIY cent res

He was pleased finally to have arrived, to have parked behind the Volvo in Skelton's drive, climbed out and automatically locked the door, walked towards the house in his response to the superintendent's early summons.

"Had breakfast, Charlie?"

Resnick nodded, yes.

"You'll have some coffee, though?"

"Thanks."

Skelton's daughter, Kate, was sitting with her feet drawn up under her, in one of the easy chairs in the L- shaped living room. Walkman in place, the usual tinny whispers escaping, she sat reading an A-level textbook, occasionally scribbling a biroed note in the margin. His wife, Alice, with an expression for which the word sour could have been invented, had barely stopped to greet Resnick as he entered; hurrying on past him and up the stairs to the first floor, from whence the whining suck and bump of the vacuum cleaner could now be heard.

All the little nudges, Resnick thought, that make a home, that make a marriage.

He and Skelton sat on stools in the kitchen, alongside what Resnick guessed the brochures called a breakfast bar; the smell of grilled bacon was tantalising on the air and a scrambled egg pan had been left in the sink to soak. Resnick tried to remember the last time he had seen the superintendent unshaven.

"Sure you won't have anything?"

"No, thanks. I'm fine." Resnick accepted the coffee and drank some without tasting.

"You've seen the Sundays?" Skelton asked.

Resnick shook his head.

"Always try hard not to."

"What with this bloody crime festival being here, and now the murder, they're having a field day. Already got us down as the most violent city in the country. Load of bollocks! Give a roomful of monkeys a set of statistics and a computer and they'll prove bloody anything. Anyway, goes without saying, the chief constable's been breathing down my neck for a result. Invited Alice and myself out to his place this afternoon, high tea."

Resnick smiled; the thought of Alice Skelton having to put on her best frock and be polite to people she probably despised, was something he'd rather imagine than actually see.

"Laugh all you want, Charlie, while they're carving into the Yorkshire ham on the lawn, I'm going to be carpeted inside, good and proper. Unless you've got something you've yet to tell me."

Resnick wished he had.

"Marlene Kinoulton, she's still our best shot.

About the only shot we've got. "

"And she's disappeared."

Resnick shrugged.

"May not mean a great deal. Sounds as if she's never in one place for long. You know how it is with these girls, some of them, all over the shop."

"If I could say we had confirmation of her identity, that would be something, but so far not a bloody thing."

Resnick drank some more coffee.

"It's amazing to me, though I suppose by now it shouldn't be, just how unobservant most people are. Close on sixty potential witnesses we've questioned so far. Vast majority of them, couldn't even place Farieigh as being there at all, despite the fact he must have spent a total of over two hours that evening, downstairs in the hotel, either in the restaurant or the bar. Of those that did remember him, half of them have no recollection of his having been with a woman, and those that do… well, it's a lottery if she was fair or dark, Caucasian or Chinese."

Skelton reached up towards one of the fitted cupboards, lifted out a bottle of cooking brandy, tipped a shot into what was left of his coffee and pushed the bottle in Resnick's direction, where it stayed, untouched. Little 184 early in the day for his boss to be hitting the hard stuff, Resnick thought. He said nothing.

Skelton said,

"At least that business with the letters, threats to that woman, Jordan, that seems to have died down."

Muffled but on cue, Resnick's bleeper began to sound.

Cathy Jordan had fallen back to sleep. One of those shimmering dreams that refused to touch ground. Railway carriages, aero planes other people's bathrooms. Silk. Steel. Slivers of skin. She woke with the under sheet wound tight between her legs and her hair plastered to her scalp with sweat.

"Frank?" Frank was still not back. Breakfast? The breakfast didn't seem to have arrived. If room service had knocked, they had got no answer and gone away. Cathy prised herself from the bed and made it, less than steadily, to the shower.

Testing the temperature of the water with her hand, she stepped beneath the shower, letting the water stream over her neck and shoulders and as, eyes closed, she lifted her face towards it, she felt braced, revived.

Ten minutes later, Cathy briskly towelled herself down. Through the curtains, she saw it was another fine day. Not exactly sunny, but fine. Better than she had anticipated. Maybe she'd laze around a little longer, take a look at the Sunday papers. Wasn't that interview she'd done being printed today?

She glanced around. Frank could have taken the newspaper with him when he went out, but that seemed unlikely. Probably, they were still outside in the corridor.

Wrapping a towel around her, Cathy pulled back the door and looked out. There they were, and a full breakfast trolley, too. A glass cafetiere with silver trim, juice, several pots of honey and jam, a bread basket covered with a starched white cloth. Oh, well, the coffee would be cold, but nothing was wrong with orange juice and a couple of cold croissants. Cathy wheeled the trolley back inside and snapped the door closed with her hip. Letting the towel fall to the floor at her feet, she flicked back the cloth from the basket and screamed.

Where she had expected croissants, a baby nesflet snugly, its limbs, where they showed through its bab) clothes, skinned and streaked with blood.

Thirty-three The flesh was rabbit, not the supermarket kind, but bought fresh and skinned, none too expertly at that. The blood, it seemed, had been squeezed from a pound or so of liver, the richness of the smell suggesting pig as the most likely source. Baby clothes, otherwise new, had been purchased at Mothercare. The face, cherubic and brittle, had been detached from a child's doll, the old-fashioned kind.

It was not until later, when the trolley was being carefully checked and searched, that the note was found, a single sheet inside a small envelope which had been slipped between two napkins, folded beneath an empty glass.

"You don't want to see it," Resnick said.

Yes, I do. "

"There's no point, not now. Why don't you wait?"

Till when? " Cathy Jordan had laughed.

"Till I'm feeling better?"

When Resnick had first arrived, she had been standing by the window, dressed in denim shirt and jeans, an absence of colour in her face.

Someone from the hotel had brought her black coffee and brandy and she had drunk the latter, allowed the coffee to get bitter and cold.

The trolley and its contents were where she had left them, towards the centre of the room.

Frank Carlucci had arrived back from the pool a little after Resnick, unaware that anything was wrong. Immediately, Cathy had rounded on him, shouting, where in God's name had he been, why the fuck was he never there when she needed him? Once, hard, she had pounded her fist against the meat of his shoulder and Frank had lowered his head, eyes closed, bracing himself for her to strike him again.

"Can't someone, for Christ's sake, get me some fresh coffee up here?" she had said, turning away, letting her hands fall by her sides.

Since then she had been quiet, almost controlled, patient while Resnick made calls, issued orders, people came and silently went.

Conversations were held in hushed tones beyond the door.

Handling the edges carefully with gloves, Resnick held the note towards Cathy Jordan's face. It had been typed on an ill-fitting ribbon, black shadowing into red: How do you like this? The only misbegotten child you're likely to have.

Cathy read it slowly, again and again, tears filling her eyes until she could no longer see. Blindly, she moved towards the bathroom, banging her shin against the low table laden with magazines. When Frank went to help her, she pushed him angrily away.

The two men looked at one another, Resnick replacing the note inside its envelope.

"What kind of a sick bastard does something like this?" Frank asked.

"I don't know," Resnick said. All the while thinking, this weekend the city is full of them, writers, film makers, people for whom thinking up things like this is meat and drink.

"Frank," Cathy said, coming back, tiredness replacing the shock in her eyes, 'would you be a sweetheart, see what's happened to that coffee? "

Sure. "

As Frank picked up the phone, Mollie Hansen appeared in the doorway and Resnick motioned for her to stay where she was, walking over and leading her into the corridor outside.

"I only just heard," Mollie said. Her face, usually unblemished and even, was beginning to show signs of strain.

"I'm not sure I know everything that happened."

Concisely, Resnick told her all she needed to know.

"How's she taking it?" Mollie asked.

"She's angry, upset, pretty much what you'd expect."

"And those threatening letters she had do you think this is the same person?"

"It's possible. As yet there's no way of knowing. At first sight, the note doesn't seem to have been written on the same machine. But that might not mean a thing."

"And you don't imagine…"

What? "

"Well, that business with the paint. This couldn't be another stunt to get publicity for their cause?"

"Vivienne Plant and her friends? I don't know. I'd have thought she'd have had a photographer on hand, at least. But we'll talk to her, all the same."

"Good." They were standing near the lift doors, opposite a lithograph of trees and a beach, shaded pink.

"Can I talk to her? Cathy?" Mollie asked.

"From my point of view, no reason why you shouldn't. But you might leave it a while longer. Give her some time to settle down."

Mollie sighed, looked at her watch.

"I suppose so. It's just she's got this interview this evening with Sarah Dunant. If she isn't going to be able to go ahead with it, I ought to let Sarah know."

"Why don't you give her half an hour?" Resnick said.

"I can let her know you're around. If she says she wants to talk to you now, I'll let you know."

"Fine," Mollie smiled tiredly.

"Thanks."

Behind her, the lift shushed to a halt and Lynn Kellogg stepped out, Kevin Naylor immediately behind her. "Thought you could use a little help," Lyim said. Resnick nodded his thanks and set them both to work.

Susan Tyrell stood in the centre of the kitchen, door open to the garden, whisking meringue and wondering how long it had been since she and David had made love. Probably it had been Christmas, that squeaky bed in her parents' spare room, several bottles of cheap champagne and some good port enough to stir a little life into David's libido. Even then, he had called out the name of some movie star at the point of climax. His and not hers. Hers had been an altogether quieter, more private affair, later.

Since then it had been a cuddle last thing at night, those long moments before falling into sleep, David's last waking act to turn away from her arms.

"Why do you stay with him?" her friend, Beatrice, had asked.

Susan had sat there like a contestant on Mastermind, stumped for the right answer.

"This damned festival," Tyrell said, coming into the kitchen, cell phone in his hand, 'is getting more like a Quentin Tarantino screenplay every day. "

Terrific, Susan thought, blood and gore and bad seventies pop songs, continuing to stir the meringue as he relayed the events at the hotel.

"You are coming to the show this afternoon?" Tyrell asked.

"Oh, yes, I expect so."

"You should. Aside from one screening at the Electric in 1982, Dark Corridor hasn't been shown in this country since the fifties. And Curtis himself hasn't set eyes on a print of Cry Murder since he was still in the States."

"Really?" Susan said with barely feigned interest. The meringue was just stiff enough now to cover the pie. She could have got into an argument about rarity not always equalling quality if the damn films were any good, why hadn't some enterprising programmer shown them? – but she lacked the energy.

Umpteen eleven- to eighteen-year- olds, nine till four, Monday to Friday, she knew well enough to reserve her strength for what really mattered.

Back at the hotel, Lynn Kellogg and Kevin Naylor were questioning as many of the staff and guests as they could find. Resnick had phoned Skelton and arranged to meet him back at the station to make his report; he had promised to talk with Cathy again later. Frank sat in the chair before a silent television, watching a ball game that, for all its apparent similarities to baseball, he just didn't understand.

Cathy Jordan lay on the bed, fully dressed, staring up at the ceiling with blank, blue eyes.

Thirty-four "I guess when I married Frank, that was more or less my last chance.

Kids, I mean. Oh, we talked about it, back and forth, you know. Frank he would have been keen, keener than me, if you want to know the truth, but, well, the time never did seem right. This book to be finished, that book; another damn tour. In the end, I suppose the idea just ran out of steam. "

Cathy Jordan had wanted to get away, clear her head, and Resnick had brought her to Wollaton Park, green slopes and a golf course, ornamental gardens round an old ancestral pile and down below where deer were grazing, the lake they were walking around.

"You have kids?" Cathy asked.

Resnick shook his head.

"But you're married, right?"

"I was. Not any more."

"I'm sorry." She laughed.

"I say that, sorry, automatically, you know, without thinking. Truth is, half the friends I've got are divorced and most of the others wish they were, so…"

They emerged between brightly coloured rhododendron bushes at the far end of the lake, a middle-aged couple walking amongst other couples who were exercising their dogs, simply enjoying the sunshine. Here and there, men sat transfixed beside fishing rods, immovable as stone.

"Mostly, now, I never think about it. Kids, I mean. Then something happens like today well, never like today, 192 not, thank God, exactly like that and somehow it starts up again…" Her voice trailed away and it was a good few moments before either of them spoke. A pair of Canada geese skidded noisily on to the water, scattering blue.

"I guess it gets easier, right? I mean, the point finally has to come, you accept it: I am not going to be a parent."

Resnick shrugged.

"Maybe," he said, not believing it was so. Even now it would lurch at him, unsuspected, out from the darkest corner of the house or through the glare of a midsummer street the urge to have a child of his own.

"Well, I tell you," Cathy was saying,

"I'm from a big family and whenever we get together, nephews and nieces every which way, I get home after one of those things and I'm glad of the rest." She laughed.

"I've got three sisters, five cousins, seems they pop another one out whenever they stop to take a breath."

Resnick smiled and together they walked on past the lake's edge and up the slow incline towards the Hall. By the time they had turned through the gateway past the stables and the small agricultural museum, it was time to drive the short distance back to the city.

"You going to be okay?" Resnick asked. They were standing beside the car in the hotel forecourt, motor idling.

"Mollie seemed concerned about this interview you have to do."

Cathy gestured dismissively with her hand.

"I'll be fine. And listen, thanks for this afternoon. Most people wouldn't have taken the time.

I'm only sorry I wasn't better company. "

"That isn't true."

She threw back her head and laughed.

"Along with everything else, I'm fucking premenstrual!"

Resnick watched her walk towards the doors.

"Take care," he said, then climbed back in the car and drove to the station.

Millington's wife was spending the afternoon rehearsing The Merry Widow and he had come in to the office in an open-neck shirt and his third-best sports jacket, the one with the leather-patched sleeves, and was threading his way, painstakingly, back through the statements mat pertained to Peter Farleigh's murder. Something whose importance they had failed to grasp, a connection they had missed if it were there, so far it had eluded him.

"Call for you from the wife," Millington said, seeing Resnick walk in.

Resnick's stomach went cold; without reason, his first thought was of Elaine.

"Ex-wife, that is," Millington went on.

"Widow. Farleigh's."

"Sarah," Resnick said.

"Yes, that's it. Wants to know, once the inquest is over, will we be prepared to release the body?"

Resnick's breathing was back to normal.

"I'll talk to her, thanks."

He looked down at the material on the sergeant's desk.

"Anything?"

Millington shook his head.

"About as enlightening as shovelling shit."

Resnick nodded and moved away.

"Boss." He turned again at the sound of Divine's voice; Mark coming into the room with a slice of part-eaten ham and pineapple pizza folding around his hand. Lunch, Resnick thought, I knew there was something.

"Had a bell from Gamett. Says she's going to have another go at Kinoulton's mate later, reckons as how she knows more'n she's letting on."

"You think she's right?"

"Could be. Let's face it some bugger's got to know something."

"Okay," Resnick said.

"Keep on top of it." Sharon Gamett, Divine thought, I shouldn't mind. Tilting back his head as be lifted the pointed end of pizza to his mouth, he wandered over towards his desk.

In the corner near the kettle, Resnick found the remnants of a packet of chocolate digestives and dunked them in lukewarm tea. He was considering phoning Sarah Farleigh, still wondering exactly what he might say, when Kevin Naylor and Lynn Kellogg got back from Cathy Jordan's hotel.

Naylor had talked to the room service staff on duty, the young woman who had prepared Cathy Jordan's breakfast tray, the man who had taken it up to her room, knocked, received no reply and left it on the trolley outside the door. He had talked to the maid who had been changing bed linen and towels on that floor. Everyone had followed procedure; no one had noticed anything amiss. Unless one of the staff were lying, and Naylor didn't think this was the case, the most likely scenario was that the macabre 'baby' had been exchanged for the proper contents of the basket while the trolley was outside the room. Which raised the question since, presumably, the thing had required planning, and since whoever was responsible could hardly have been sure the breakfast trolley would be so conveniently standing there what other means had been envisaged for its delivery?

After helping Naylor a while at the hotel, Lynn had gone off in search of Vivienne Plant, who, after a few obligatory warnings about harassment, had been only too happy to give the names and addresses of three witnesses who could testify that she had been engaged in a fortnightly badminton game that morning, after which she and her friends had progressed to Russell's bar for a good, unhealthy fry-up brunch.

"Okay," Resnick said, having listened to their reports.

"Without getting into a lot of lengthy forensics and committing more hours than we can afford, that may be as far as we can go. For now, anyway."

"That's okay, then," Naylor said, walking with Lynn across the QD room.

"We can get back to doing something important."

Lynn stopped in her tracks.

"What?"

"Well, you know. Not as if there was any real harm done," Naylor said.

"No harm?"

"You know what I mean. It's not as if anything actually happened."

"Something happened all right," Lynn said.

"Yes," Naylor agreed, digging an even deeper hole for himself, 'but not serious. "

"Suppose it had been Debbie, though, Kevin, how would you feel, then?

How would she feel, d'you think? "

"She'd be upset, course she would…"

"Upset?"

"Yes, but she'd get over it."

"Which means it's not worth our bothering with?"

"Not as much as some other things, no."

"If she'd been hit, though? Physically attacked, raped even?"

"Then, of course, that'd be different."

Lynn laughed, more a snort than a laugh.

"Fact you can't see wounds and bruises, Kevin, doesn't mean a person hasn't been damaged. Hurt.

Doesn't have to mean it's less serious. "

Doris Duke didn't look as if she were working. Instead of high heels, she was wearing a pair of scuffed trainers and there was a hole at the back of her black tights big enough to slip a hand through. Aside from what still stuck, haphazardly, to her face from the previous night, she wore no make-up. Her hair had been pulled back from her head and hung raggedly down, secured by a couple of pins and a rubber band. There was a cigarette in her hand.

Sharon eased the car over to intercept her and Doris's head instinctively turned; she wasn't out looking for business, but she wasn't going to shunt it away.

As soon as she recognised Sharon, she knew it was business of a different kind.

"What d'you want now?" she asked, trying to summon up a belligerence that wasn't really there.

Sharon set the hand brake slipped the car into neutral. "Talk."

"Oh, yeah? What about now?"

"This and that?"

"Pay for my time, will you?"

Sharon smiled.

"You've been watching too many of those TV movies, Doris. That's the only place girls like you get paid to talk to the likes of me."

Doris stood uneasily, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, cigarette cupped in her hand.

"From what I've seen, your sort are either looking to bang you up and slap the hell out of you, or they're sniffing round for freebies."

She gave Sharon a look that was meant to be provocative. "Which is it with you?"

"Neither. I told you. I just want to talk."

"And I said, what about?"

"Marlene."

Doris dropped her cigarette to the pavement, quickly ground it out and began to walk away.

"Doris…"

"No," she called over her shoulder.

"I already told you everything I know."

Sharon released the hand brake and let the car coast after her.

"All right," she said through the window, 'we'll talk about something else. "

"Yeah? Uke what? Swap recipes and tips on chipping away old nail polish?"

"If you Uke, yes. Why not?"

"You know sodding well why not!"

Sharon let the car roll on down the hill, Doris, head down, crossing the road behind her. By the time Sharon had stopped the car and got out, they were level.

"Come on, Doris. A deal."

Yeah? What's that? "

"I'll buy you a meal and we'll talk and if you don't want to say anything more about Marlene, that's fine."

"I thought I didn't get paid for my time?"

Sharon was standing next to her now, taller, having to stoop down; Sharon wearing a leather jacket, unzipped, over her souvenir T-shirt from a Prince concert, blue jeans and a pair of ankle-high Kickers, green with a grease mark on one heel.

"This isn't buying your time, it's buying you lunch."

Lunch? "

"Tea, dinner, whatever. Come on, when did you last eat?"

"That's where I was going now." "So fine. Where to?"

Doris grinned, just a little, not giving it too much. "McDonald's.

Got these vouchers I've been saving from the Post. Two McChicken sandwiches for a couple of quid. "

"Okay," Sharon said.

"Why don't we go in the car? That way, we could go to the one by the canal, what do you say?"

Sharon told Doris to keep her McChicken vouchers for another occasion and splashed out on two Big Macs, fries, apple pies, cola. They had stopped at the paper shop on Lenton Boulevard so that Doris could buy another twenty Bensons, king size. There was a seat by the window, and although they couldn't actually see the canal from there, they could work out where it was, across the other side of Sainsbury's car park, to the right of Homebase.

Doris picked out most of the middle of her Big Mac, toying with the bun but never really eating it. The fries she dunked in a generous puddle of red sauce. Sharon ate slowly, saying little, trying to make the younger woman feel at ease.

Doris told her about a childhood bounded by Hackney Marshes and Homerton Hospital; Dalston, Clapton, Hackney, Leyton. A familiar enough story, familiar to Sharon certainly, not so very different from her own; the same story many of the working girls had to tell.

When it was told at all. And Doris, not a product of what sociologists and politicians called a broken home; no one-parent family hers. Her father, on the dole, had always been there. Always.

Through the unbroken veil of cigarette smoke, beneath the slow-fading bruise, Sharon looked for the child in Doris's eighteen-year-old face but it had long been driven out. she says: if only I could be three again, struggling with my shoe laces; start all over, go back to the beginning shake my mother abuse my father "You reckon her for it, don't you?" Doris said suddenly, pushing away the carapace of her apple pie.

"That bloke got himself knifed. You reckon her for that."

"Do you know where she was, Doris? That evening? Where she was working? Was it the hotels?"

"I already told you, I hadn't seen her since the Tuesday."

"Tuesday afternoon."

"Right."

"When you lent her the money. The fifty pounds you never got back."

Doris mouthed an oath. Sharon reached for her cola and drank a little more. Doris lit another cigarette. Two lads walking past outside shouted something they could neither of them make out and one of the lads went into a swagger, cupping non-existent breasts. His mate laughed so much he nearly got clipped by a passing car.

"She wanted it for drugs, didn't she?" Sharon said.

Doris nodded.

"Crack."

"How bad is she?"

It seemed a long time before Doris answered.

"Look, you know as well as what I do, there's girls out there, they don't keep high, they go crazy and once it gets like that, there's nothing they won't do to score. These dealers, they play 'em along, let 'em get in debt, serious now, hundreds I'm talking, easy. Once it's like that, they can do what they like with them. Sex shows, dyke stuff, animals. This one bloke, charged his mates a tenner each to wank off over this girl while his alsatian licked her out." Doris shuddered and made a face.

"Marlene, though, she wasn't like that. She was bright, dead clever.

Older, too. Been around, but it didn't show. That's how come she could 200 work the hotels. Me, now, I walk in and they've got me walking right out again, regular revolving door. Not Marlene. That's why I was surprised when she started doing crack. Oh, we'd have the odd spliff once in a while, who doesn't? But crack. " Doris shook her head.

"First, it was just weekends, fifteen, twenty quid a rock. You know, when we was busy. Never ends up like that, though, does it? Marlene, she could see what was happening to her. Kept trying to kick. Even went to that place, you know, down by the Square. What's it called?

Crack Awareness, something like that. Got worse anyway. Got so she hated what she was doing, couldn't stand being touched. Being with some bloke, any bloke, but, of course, that's what she had to do.

Keep earning, more and more, trying to stay ahead. "

In another part of the restaurant, twenty or so eight- and nine-year-olds were having a party, flicking Chicken McNuggets across the tables, wearing cardboard cutout hats.

"How much," Sharon asked, 'had she got to hate it? "

"She used to say, next man who touches me, I'm going to kill him."

"And you thought she was serious? You thought she meant it?"

"No, don't be bloody stupid, course I didn't! We say that all the time."

"Then what?" Sharon said.

Doris took a long drag on her cigarette.

"Week or so back, the night that other bloke was done, you know, stabbed. It was in the paper, found him starkers in the road."

Sharon waited, Doris taking her time.

"I ran into Marlene," Doris said, 'she was leaning on this wall off Forest Road, looked like she'd just been throwing up. There was blood all down her front. Up her hand and arm. "

To an almighty roar from the children, one of the McDonalds staff jumped up on to the middle of their table dressed as Mr McChicken, and started napping his wings.

Sharon bided her time.

"Who did she cop from, Doris?"

Doris blinked at her across the smoke from her cigarette.

"Richie. I don't know… I don't know where, but yes, Richie that's the only one I ever heard her mention. That's who she said."

Dorothy Birdwell's fingers fumbled with her water glass, almost sending it tumbling, and for once Marius was not poised to intervene and set everything to rights. Marius, in fact, was nowhere to be seen. It gave her a pinched feeling in the back of the throat, making it difficult to breathe. And as for talking. Dorothy steadied herself and, with almost exaggerated care, brought the glass to her lips. The forty or so people who had gathered to hear her thoughts on Christianity and the crime novel, with special attention to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, watched and waited patiently. After all, she could sense them thinking, at her age you can't expect too much.

Well, expectations were strange things. She reached out towards the small table at her side and lifted her copy of Such a Strange Lady into her lap.

"As we can be only too aware," she began, 'living as we do in these particular times, it is difficult not to see the art of biography and the wish of the individual for privacy as being incompatible. Think then only of a young woman, an only child, born at Christchurch Cathedral Choir School, a Christian scholar whose second book of poems was titled Catholic Tales and Christian Songs, and yet who nevertheless became pregnant out of wedlock and secretly gave birth to an illegimate son. How irreconc'l- able the gulf between the life that is apparent and expected and the life that is actually lived. "

She paused and caught her breath. If only she had not been forced to have words with Marius earlier that afternoon some of them, she would have had to agree, significantly less than Christian. If only Marius had not stalked off in such high dudgeon, no word of where he was going or when he might return.

Dorothy looked out at her audience and continued.

"In her religious play The Devil to Pay, Dorothy Sayers explicitly deals with Faustian themes, the extent to we are all of us prepared to go, the amount we will pay for happiness on this earth even though it might mean we risk damnation in the next…"

"How about a couple of drinks, honey?" Cathy Jordan said in a mock-seductive, mid-Western voice.

"One way or another, I reckon we've earned them." She was leaning against the frame of the bathroom door, a towel wrapped around the middle of her body. A tumbler of tap water, with the aid of which she had just swallowed aspirin, was held lightly in her right hand, wrist resting on the swell of her hip.

"Go to hell, Cathy, why don't you?" Frank said, nipping over the pages of the magazine he was reading a copy of Premiere he'd picked up at the airport, everything you ever wanted to know about Demi Moore except what does she ever see in that asshole actor.

"What does she ever see in that asshole actor?" Frank asked.

"Which particular one did you have in mind?"

"Demi Moore. You know. The one with Demi Moore."

"Oh, him."

"Yes. him."

"He was great in Pulp Fiction."

"Didn't catch it."

"Just terrific."

I still don't see. "

She lifted the magazine from his hand and then dropped it back down.

"They're a partnership, that's what it is. That's why it works." Playful, she nudged him with her bare toes.

"She works. He works. Simple. A partnership." She threw him a face and headed back towards the bathroom door.

"We should try it some time."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"What the fuck was that about?"

He was on his feet now, close behind her, and Cathy turned to face him.

"Work it out for yourself."

"Every cent you earned this last year, I earned as much."

Cathy shrugged.

"I had a bad year."

"Bitch!"

"Sure, Frank. Love you too."

For an instant, she flinched and closed her eyes, thinking he was going to strike her, but what he did was jerk the towel from around her, so that she stood before him, naked.

Her breasts were heavier than when he had first seen her, the skin across her belly less taut, but there was nothing to deflect from the fact that she was still a beautiful woman; more beautiful as she stood there now, unclothed, than in her boots, bright shirts and jeans. Most women Frank knew, the reverse would be true.

"Well?" Cathy gave him a look that said, what now? and he didn't know. She held out the glass towards him and automatically he reached to take it. Swiftly, she stepped back inside the bathroom and shut the door, flicking the bolt across.

Mollie Hansen was sitting in the Broadway Cinema Cafe Bar nibbling at a portion of cabbage stuffed with peppers and drinking Red Raw ginger beer. Slides of scenes from various forties films nows were being projected on to the far wall, and she was idly checking them off as she ate: Mildred Pierce, Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai.

"Hi. Mollie." Susan Tyrell was standing at her shoulder, an empty glass in one hand, a bottle ofCabemet-Shiraz in the other.

"Okay if I join you?"

"Sure."

Susan pulled out a chair and sat down.

"In for a long wait?" Mollie said with a grin, indicating the bottle.

Susan's eyes rolled upwards.

"David's just getting going on Hollywood femmes fatales. Stepping out of the shadows in tight black dresses with guns in their hands." She filled the glass to within a quarter-inch of the rim and brought it to her mouth without spilling a drop.

"Once he gets started on that little fantasy, I might as well be invisible."

Mollie forked up some more stuffed cabbage. Larger than life on the wall, Joan Crawford, in poor lighting and a fur coat, stood over the dead body of Zachary Scott.

"You see what I mean?" Susan asked,

"Who ever paid any attention to her when she was just plain old married Mildred, wearing an apron morning till night and baking pies?"

Mollie waited for the laugh, but it didn't come.

"That's a movie," she said.

"Not real life."

Susan drained her glass and began pouring another. "Try telling that to David."

Mollie looked at her seriously.

"Then maybe it's time to get out of the kitchen?" she said.

Susan looked away.

"Yes, well, I'm afraid that time is long past."

And then she did laugh, but it was loud and forced. 'listen to me, carrying on. Complaining about David to you of all people. "

Mollie leaned closer and covered Susan's hand with her own.

"If you feel this bad, you've got to sit him down and talk to him. Make him listen."

"Really. And when did you last succeed in doing that?"

Marius Gooding had let himself back into the hotel suite he had been sharing with Dorothy En-dwell and locked the door. Pulling the blinds, he stripped down to his under- shorts and vest.

"Bitch!" he said, as he pulled out drawer after drawer of her neatly folded clothes and spilled them across the floor.

"Bitch!" as he jerked her satin and taffeta dress from its padded hanger and tore it neck to hem. Bitch! he scrawled across the photograph in the back of her new book. Bitch! in black felt-tip on the centre of the sheet. Bitch! on the wall above the bed. Bitch! along one arm, the inside of his legs, across his face, and all around his head. Bitch! Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!

Marius curled up on the floor, knees to his chest, head in his arms, and cried.

Thirty-seven Frank didn't recognise the woman sitting up at the bar; no reason that he should. It was early yet, early for serious drinking, and the place, long and narrow with stairs leading to a high balcony at the rear, was quiet. Music which he recognised as Joe Sample, Frank having been a major fan of the Crusaders since seventy-two,

"Street Life* one of his favourite records of all time, the one he always instructed DJs to play when he and Cathy hosted parties of their own – was pumping quietly from large speakers suspended from the ceiling.

The barman, fresh- faced and possibly as young as he seemed, set aside the newspaper he was reading and asked Frank what he wanted. The answer was a whisky sour, large, a little salt on the glass; iced water on the side. And something to pick on. He hadn't eaten since lunch and reasoned this was the start of what might prove a long night.

"Nachos," the barman suggested.

"Chicken wings? Potato skins? Onion rings?"

"Forget the nachos and the onion rings. Let me have the chicken and the potato skins, okay?"

"Sir." The barman passed Frank's order through to the kitchen and began to slice the lemon, fresh, for his whisky sour.

Frank toyed with the drink when it came, checking the temptation to swallow it right down; ever since the talk with Cathy down by the canal, he'd felt like he was walking on the proverbial eggshells. He laughed and the woman four seats along turned her head; never understood 208 what that meant before, eggshells, what it was like. Now he thought if it was going to crack and let him tumble through, why not take a hammer to it, smash it first himself? Do unto others instead of being done to.

He finished his drink and called along the bar for another. The woman, sipping what Frank thought was some kind of rum cocktail, rum collins, cuba libra, one of those, glanced at him again. Not giving it too much. Still light outside, in the bar it was cool and dark.

There were rings on the fingers of both the woman's hands, Frank noticed; dark hair which fell past her face due to the way she was sitting, partly shielding her from his gaze. Thirty- five, Frank thought, forty. Waiting for a friend. Nothing to get worked up about.

"Your whisky sour, sir."

"Sure," Frank said.

"Thanks."

When Cathy arrived outside the main convention room for her interview, she had managed to patch up most of the damage, though the skin around her eyes was darker than usual and her face was pinched as if she were suffering from too little sleep. Which was partly the truth.

"You okay?" Mollie asked, concerned, stepping forward to greet her.

Cathy nodded: fine.

And from anything other than close up, she did look good: a cream linen suit with wide lapels, a green satin shirt and, poking out from beneath slightly flared trousers, the ubiquitous boots.

"Cathy, I think you know Sarah Dunant."

"Sure. We met at the Edgars last year."

The two women smiled and brushed cheeks and set off towards the platform, Mollie leading the way.

"So which part of the States are you from?" the woman was saying.

Ana, "how long are you over for?" And,

"Oh, interesting."

Frank all the while hearing Cathy's voice / wonder if that isn't long enough? Eight years. Close to. Saying it, it didn't seem so long. But living it. He shook his head. Some days he could scarcely remember when there had been anything else.

"Sorry," Frank leaned sideways towards the woman's stool. "I didn't catch what you said."

"I said, do you want another drink here or are you ready to move on somewhere else?"

The music had shifted again, back from some guitar band that reminded Frank of the Byrds, back to the Crusaders, the album they made eighty-one, eighty-two? – with Joe Cocker.

"I'm okay here," Frank said.

"Unless you're getting restless?"

She shook her head and slid her empty glass towards his; all this time they'd been talking and he still hadn't got a good look at her face.

"Two more," Frank called along to the barman.

"Same as before."

The convention room was comfortably full, without being overcrowded.

Mollie had been able to spot a few of the more vocal feminists, identified them from previous events she had helped to organise.

Representations of Women in the Media. Melodrama and the Family. She had talked to quite a few of them at length, respected what they had to say. Liked them.

After a brief introduction in which Sarah Dunant had placed Cathy Jordan's work within the context of post- seventies crime fiction, she led her through a series of questions about her career, its false starts and now its successes. Dunant then summarised the prevailing politically correct readings of crime fiction and asked Cathy for 210 her opinions. There were questions from the floor, searching rather than hostile, and then the interview was over: polite, professional, non-contentious.

Cathy had opted to close the session with a reading and she chose the opening chapter from Dead Weight. Instantly, the caustic, slightly self-deprecating voice of Annie Q. Jones buttonholed the audience and when she finished it was to warm applause.

Mollie came on to the platform to thank both women formally and bring the proceedings to a confident close. Now she could take them to the hotel bar, buy them a drink, make her excuses, take herself home and rest, thankful that the evening had passed without incident.

Still in the bar, Frank was explaining the difference between a latte and a mocha, though he wasn't sure if his companion were still listening and if she were, whether she had understood. Where previously there had been several feet of space behind them, now they were constantly being banged against and jostled by one or other of the young people who stood in groups around them, smoking and drinking and laughing. The volume of the stereo had increased four-fold and whatever was being played now seemed to consist of a thumping bass and very little else.

"You want to try somewhere else?" Frank asked, mouth close against her hair.

"I thought you weren't interested?"

"I'm interested." He wondered how long her hand had been on his knee.

"Then let's go back to your place."

"How d'you mean?"

"You've got a room, haven't you? You're staying at a hotel?"

Frank shook his head. Now that he could see her, he liked what he saw. Liked her breath, slightly sweet, upon his face.

"We can't go there."

"I thought you were here on your own. Have you got a wife or something?"

"That doesn't matter. We just can't go back to my room, that's all."

He let his hand cover hers, where it was still resting, high on his thigh.

"What's wrong with your place?"

"We'll go to another hotel," she said, and smiled.

"As long as your credit card's good for it."

"Hey, don't worry about the money. But d'you think we'll get into somewhere this late? Town strikes me as pretty busy."

"Don't worry about that," she said, getting carefully down from her stool.

"Just trust me."

Thirty-eight The first time Resnick had seen Sharon Gamett; the sun had been showing weakly through winter clouds and the earth beneath their feet had been coarse with frost. All around them. the high stink of pig food and pig shit. Other officers, silent, as they lifted a stretcher across the ruts, the body of a young woman sealed beneath thick plastic that was spotted here and there with mud.

Now, as she pushed her way through the bar towards him, Resnick realised that she was both taller than he had remembered and likely older too. The only black face in the Sir John Borlace Warren.

"Your local?"

Resnick grinned.

"Not exactly."

After Sharon had rung him with the information about Marlene Kinoulton's probable drug supplier, he had put through a call to Norman Mann at Central Station and the choice of meeting place had been the Drugs Squad officer's shout.

"Pint?" Sharon asked.

"Guinness, thanks. Half."

By the time she had been served, Norman Mann had joined them, lager in hand, dark hair thick on his head and curling up over the collar of what had clearly been bought from a job lot of black leather jackets.

Resnick shook his hand and did the introductions.

"This Richie," Mann said, once they had elbowed their way into a corner, 'had our eye on him for quite a while. There's a blues he does his drinking some nights. No sense looking for him there too early, but by the time we've supped a couple of these, we could wander down. See what's what' "You think he'll talk?" Sharon asked.

"Give us anything we need to know?"

Norman Mann winked broadly.

"Always a chance. Smoked enough weed, we'll be lucky to shut the bastard up."

The room was small and, in the way of most hotel rooms, anonymously airless. Frank had tried to kiss the woman as she leant back against the door, clicking the lock, but she had swerved her head aside.

Then, as he had reached towards the light switch, she had caught hold of his arm and ducked beneath it, twisting him round till he was hard against her. She had kissed him then, her mouth slippery over his, teeth blocking out his tongue.

"At least now you're going to tell me your name?" he said.

"Why? Isn't it better like this?" in the dark? "

"Yes."

But it was not quite that, the curtains only partly pulled across and light enough from the city shining through; he touched her face and she shuddered, almost before the touch, as if anticipating something else. His skin against hers was surprisingly soft. At first, she squirrel led the tip of her tongue into his palm and then drew her teeth down and around one of his fingers, nipping it a little at the knuckles before drawing her lips back along it so slowly that he moaned. With a laugh, she bit down into the fleshy round beneath his thumb.

"Hey!"

"Hmm?"

Frank fumbled her open at the front and bent his head into her neck, squeezing her breasts. Whatever moment he might have pulled back at had long passed. She touched him and, arching back his head, he closed his eyes.

"Frank?"

"Yeah?"

"Let's go to bed."

Soon she was kneeling over him, kissing him, deft pecks like a bird's, delicate and sharp. His trousers had been pushed and kicked down to his ankles, shirt thrown sideways to the floor; his boxer shorts were tight across his thighs.

Like me, Frank? "

" Sure I like you. "

" I mean me. Really me. "

"Sure."

You're lying, Frank. "

"I'm not."

"Lying."

"Look, I swear to God…"

"Anyone, Frank. I could be any woman in the whole wide fucking world.

Any woman, Frank. Any cunt in a storm. "

He made to roll aside and she leaned her weight against his arms, surprisingly strong.

"What's the matter, Frank? Don't want me any more? Huh? Don't fancy me?"

Head sideways below the pillow, he didn't answer.

"Don't you like it when a cunt talks back, Frank? That the problem?"

"There's no problem," he mumbled, only just audible above the hum of the air conditioning.

"What?" Her face lowered close to him, laughter in her voice, teasing.

"I said there's no fucking problem."

"Temper," she scolded.

"Temper." And rocking back on his hips, she reached a hand behind and between his legs and he could sense rather than see her smile.

"You're right, Frank. No problem at all."

She moved again, her buttocks lower on his thighs, the front of her pale-coloured briefs against his balls. Spreading his hands, straightening his arms, he raised his face towards hers and she kissed him, he kissed her, her fingers tugging at his hair.

Wait," she said, minutes later.

"Wait."

"What for?" His breathing was harsh.

"What do you think?" Swivelling off him.

"I have to go to the bathroom, of course."

He watched her dart away, pale, no longer slender, saw the shimmer of electric light before the bathroom door closed it out. With a slow sigh, he lay back down, rested an arm across his face and once more closed his eyes.

A blues club in Radford or Hyson Green didn't mean laid- back, Mississippi Delta bottleneck, the kind that might grace TV advertisements for beer or jeans; it didn't even mean second- or third-generation bump and grind, juke blues, South Side Chicago, T-Bone Walker or Otis Rush. It meant after-hours drinking. Red Stripe and rum, the sweet scent of marijuana drifting in lazy spirals down the stairs.

They were illegal, of course, and the police knew where they were and who ran them, and those that ran them knew the police knew and, unless something exceptional happened to upset the racial apple cart, that was how it stayed.

This particular club was off the Radford Road, more or less across from where the Hyson Green flats used to be, until they had been bulldozed down and the land leased to house another supermarket.

Perish the thought the Council would build more homes. The fact that the club was above the premises of what had been some kind of outreach office of the Probation Service, only added a little extra piquancy.

Norman Mann paused at the foot of the stairs and drew 216 in a deep, long breath.

"What d'you reckon, Charlie? Worth inhaling, eh?"

Smelled a sight better than a lot of things illegal, Resnick thought, and likely did a lot less harm, but that was as far as he was prepared to go.

The treads on the stairs were cracked in places and bare. As they climbed higher the bass from recorded reggae made the walls vibrate.

Norman Mann motioned for Resnick and Sharon to stay at the end of the landing, went to the door and knocked. There followed a long and fairly tortuous conversation Resnick couldn't hear.

"We'll wait down there," Mann said, when the head he'd been talking to withdrew and the door was sharply closed.

In what had once been the Probation office, a forty-watt bulb hung from a length of fraying flex. Miraculously, it still worked. What it cast light on were an old desk, empty boxes, balls of dust, a stack of forms waiting forever to be filled in and signed those that hadn't been shredded by the mice for their nests. A hungry cat would have thought it had died and gone to heaven. Next time Dizzy nips my trouserieg because he thinks I've put him on short rations, Resnick thought, I'll bring him down here and lock him in.

Richie made them wait. When he finally appeared in the doorway, he was wearing a skinny-ribbed V-neck jumper in bright colours and tight trousers which, even in that dim light, shone when he moved. He was slightly built and about as pale as a black man can be without becoming Michael Jackson. He stood lounging against the door frame with a can of lager in his hand, "Who's these?" he said, indicating Resnick and Sharon with a nod of the head.

Norman Mann made the introductions.

"Marlene Kinoulton," Resnick said.

"We'd like to find her."

"Slag! I'd like to find she first." The syntax was right, but at root the accent was no more Caribbean than if he'd gone down the pit at sixteen which conceivably he might have done, except that by then they were already closing them down.

"She owe you?" Norman Mann asked.

"She owe everybody."

"That why she's keeping her head down? Maybe skipped town?"

"She not even got the sense to do that. I saw her fat white ass only this afternoon."

"You sure?" Resnick asked.

"I not blind."

"Then you would have had a word with her," Norman Mann said.

"Her owing you, and all."

"She getting into this car, in't she?"

"Which car?"

"I don't know. Big white car. She's working, in't she? Doing business. Drive off before I can say a thing."

"No way you could have been mistaken? You're positive it was her?"

"Yeah."

Where? "

"Round near her place."

"You got an address for her then?" Resnick said.

"What's it worth?"

Both men stared at him and Richie stared back for long enough to show no way were they going to intimidate him. Then he gave his can a little chug.

"How about peace of mind?" Norman Mann said. "Goodwill."

"What you want she for?" Richie asked. He was looking at Resnick.

"Something serious," Resnick said.

"Nothing that would affect you, I can promise you that."

"Promise?" Richie drained the can and tossed it into the nearest corner.

"What's that?"

Over their heads, someone had turned up the volume and the ceiling had started to shake.

"That gives way," Norman Mann said, glancing up, 'going to be a lot of people hurt bad. Crying shame. "

"Forest Fields," Richie said.

"She have a room, Harcourt Road."

Number? "

"Top end, corner house."

"Which side?"

Richie grinned.

"Depend which way you looking, don't it?" And then, addressing Sharon directly for the first time, 'stead of hangin' out with these guys, get your black ass down here some night, show it a good time. "

Thirty-nine Frank Carlucci couldn't be certain how long he had lain there before he realised the woman wasn't coming back. However much sexual anticipation he was experiencing, the effect of innumerable whisky sours had meant that the meeting between his head and a pair of the hotel's comfortable pillows had so far resulted in one thing only.

The woman was. he seemed to remember thinking, taking one hell of a long time in the bathroom, but aside from that, he didn't recall very much at all. A sound that, he now realised, might have been that of the room door opening or closing, and that was all.

Sitting up first quickly, and then, as his head informed him speed was ill-advised, cautiously he looked at his watch. Too dark too see. Reaching across, he snapped on the bedside lamp. Blinking, then squinting, he tried again. A quarter past one. He had scarcely been asleep any time at all.

Easing himself off the bed, he checked the bathroom, the door to which was wide open and, of course, it was empty. Only then, with sinking desperation, did he scrabble on the floor for his jacket and fumble his wallet out into the light. He knew what remained of his English cash and all his credit cards would be gone, but, contradicting him, they were there, the money, as far as he could tell, intact.

Back in the bathroom, he splashed cold water in his face and then wondered why he was bothering. Cathy was bound to be asleep in their own room by now, another 220 hotel across the city, and what was to be gained from waking her, he didn't know. Better to face her the next day with a fresh face and a good story.

Frank hung the Do Not Disturb sign outside the door, climbed back into bed and inside five minutes he was snoring, first lightly, then loudly.

They had been parked across the street some ten minutes, Norman Mann smoking two Bensons while he and Resnick listened to one of Sharon's anecdotes about policing deepest Lincolnshire.

"Go into some of those places," Sharon said, 'and I'd know how my relatives felt, getting off the boat at Tilbury in the 1950s. " Or mine, Resnick, thought, in 1938. Except, of course, that they'd been white.

"Well, what d'you think, Charlie? Shall we give it a pull?"

Resnick pushed open the car door and stepped out on to uneven paving stones. Apart from a stereo playing too loud a half-dozen doors down, the street was quiet. The end terrace to the right, facing north, had stone cladding on the front and side walls, window frames and ledges which had been newly painted, yellow, and a small sign attached to the front door to show that the householders were members of the local Neighbourhood Watch. The house opposite had a derelict washing machine upside down outside in the scrubby front garden, one of its upper windows covered in heavy-duty plastic where the glass had been broken and not replaced, and at least a dozen milk bottles beside the front door, each containing a varying amount of mould and algae.

"So, Charlie no call to be much of a detective here, eh?"

"Give me a minute," Sharon said at the space where the front gate should have been.

"I'll get round the back."

Once she had disappeared from sight, the two men slowly walked towards the door. When Resnick rang the bell it failed to work; he knocked and no one answered, but from the sound of the television they knew somebody was at home. Norman Mann leaned past him, turned the handle and pushed and the door swung grudgingly inwards.

"Thanks very much," he said with a wink, 'we'd love to come in. "

They followed the sound of amplified voices into the front room.

Three youths, status unemployed, were watching a video of Naked Gun 2'/^ amongst a plethora of beer cans and empty pizza boxes and the faint scent of dope.

What the fuck? "

Resnick showed them his identification, while Norman Mann walked past them towards the television set and switched it off.

Hey! You can't. "

"You live here?" Mann asked.

Yeah. "

" All of you? "

Yeah. "

"Who else?" Resnick asked.

One of the youths, his head partly shaven, a trio of silver rings close in one ear, got awkwardly to his feet. "Look, you gonna tell us what's going on? What the fuck this is all about?"

"Easy," Mann said.

"We ask questions, you answer them. So, now who else is there, living in the house?"

The youth looked round at his mates before responding. "There's Telly, right, up on the first floor at the front…"

"He's not here now," put in one of the others.

"Off home to see his old man."

"Who else?" Resnick said.

Two of them exchanged quick glances; the man with the 222 shaven head stared at a stain in the carpet, one amongst many.

"You won't let on?" he finally said.

"To who?" Norman Mann asked.

"And about what?"

"The landlord. See, the bloke as was up there moved out and he left it to us to let out the room." A few more shifty looks wove back and forth.

"On his behalf, like."

"And you forgot?"

"No, well, we got someone in, all right…"

Norman Mann laughed.

"Just a bit slow in letting the landlord in on it?"

"Something like that."

"Well, I know how it is, lads," Mann said.

"Busy life like yours.

Going down the video shop, cadging fags, jerking off, signing on.

Understandable, really, you've never quite found the time. " One of the youths sniggered; the others did not.

"This unofficial tenant," Resnick said.

"Got a name?"

"Marlene."

"Kinoulton?"

"Yeah, that's right. Yes."

There were footsteps outside and then Sharon walked into the room.

"Back door was open. Didn't reckon anyone was about to do a runner."

"Here," said the shaven youth.

"How many more of you are there?"

"Hundreds," Norman Mann grinned.

"Thousands. We're taking over the fucking earth!"

The room Marlene Kinoulton had rented was on the first floor at the back. No lights showed under the door and when Resnick knocked there was no response. A hasp had been fitted across the door and a padlock secured.

"Have that off in two ticks," Norman Mann said, flicking it up with his forefinger.

"And have anything we find ruled inadmissible by the court," Resnick said.

"Let's wait for the morning, get a warrant."

"Suit yourself." Norman Mann looked quite disappointed. He was more of a knock-'emdownand-reckontheconsequences-afterwards man himself.

"I'll babysit the place the rest of the night," Sharon offered, once they were back downstairs.

"If she's around, she might come back."

"Good," Resnick said.

"Thanks. I'll send Divine round to relieve you first thing. Meantime, I'll chase up a warrant. See what she's got in there, worth keeping a lock on."

In the front room, Norman Mann took a swallow at the can of lager he'd popped open and set it back down with a grimace.

"What you^ re scrounging off the DSS, ought to be able to afford better than that."

Reaching round, he switched the TV set back on.

"Thanks, lads. Thanks for inviting us into your home."

Cathy Jordan woke early, with the creamy taste of another late-night supper still rich in her mouth. She lay without moving, aware of Frank's absence, accepting it without surprise. They had tried, in the time they had been together, handling her enforced absences, these trips to the conventions and booksellers of the world, in a number of ways. At root, however, there were two alternatives: he went with her or he stayed home. Cathy liked to claim she left the choice to him.

If Frank waved her off at the airport with a hug and a kiss and a see-you-in-six-weeks, within days he would be calling her erratically around the clock, unable to settle; and she would return to smiles and flowers and rum ours of drunken nights and drunken days and always there would be messages from women Cathy had never previously heard of, backing up on the answering machine.

Or he travelled with her, bemoaning the cappuccinos and gymnasia of the free world; frequently bored, listless, quick to take offence and give it. And there were mornings like this, Cathy waking to one side of the bed, the other un slept in and unsullied, and later, around lunchtime, Frank would reappear, without explanation, his expression daring her to ask. Which at first she had, and, of course, he had lied; or she had made assumptions, right or wrong, and he had responded with counter accusation and attack. It was after one of these, she had finally said,

"Frank, I don't give a flying fuck what you do or who you do it to, but if I ever contract as much as the tiniest vaginal wart as a result of your fooling around, I will never -and I mean, never speak to you again."

Sniping aside, not a great many words had been exchanged on the subject since.

Cathy sat up and surprised herself by not wincing when her feet made contact with the hotel carpet. It had been past midnight when Curtis Wooife had insisted on buying several bottles of champagne and then doctoring everyone's glass with four-star brandy. For the umpteenth time he proposed a toast to David Tyrell and thanked him for, as he put it, restoring his life's work to the light of a new day. It didn't seem as if Curds was going to be a recluse any longer. Amongst the other rum ours which abounded was one that he had been asked to film Elmore Leonard's non-crime novel Touch, with Johnny Depp as Juvenal, the beautiful healer, bleeding from five stigmata on prime time television and Winona Ryder as the record promoter who falls in love with him.

Cathy, who to date had fielded approaches, official and unofficial, from Kim Basinger, Sharon Stone, Amanda Donohoe, Melanie Griffith, Phoebe Cates, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh to play Annie Q. Jones, had leaned across and warned Curtis not to hold his breath. In most cases, it was far better to bank the option fee and pray no one ever got around to making the movie.

She was about to get into the shower when the phone rang and she lost her footing to the sudden thought that it was someone calling with the news that something had happened to Frank. Something bad. The skin along her arms pricked cold as she lifted the receiver. Frank, out on the town in a town where men where getting stabbed and worse.

It wasn't Frank, or anything about him; it was Dorothy Birdwell, asking if Cathy would consider joining her for breakfast 226 Cathy drew breath.

"Sure, Dorothy. Why not?" And she returned to the shower, relieved, surprised, wondering if there was a certain British etiquette to these occasions she was supposed to observe.

Skelton and his wife were making brittle conversation over the toast and marmalade. Frank Carlucci had not been the only person to stay out all night unannounced. At a little after seven, Kate had phoned from Newark and said she was sorry, but she'd got stuck, missed the last train, missed the bus, there'd been some confusion and she'd missed her lift; it had been all right, though, she'd been able to stay with friends. She hoped they hadn't been too worried. Why, Skelton had asked, his temper conspicuously under wraps, had she not called to tell them this earlier, before the worrying had begun?

Kate's explanation had been too complicated and devious to believe or follow.

"What on earth was she doing in Newark in the first place?" Alice had demanded, tightening the belt to her dressing gown.

Skelton had shaken his head; aside from a vague idea that they sold antiques, he had never been certain what people did in Newark anyway.

"What time did she say she would be back?" Alice asked.

"She didn't."

He had been pouring another cup of rather tired tea, when the doorbell sounded.

"There she is now," said Alice.

"And she's forgotten her key."

But it was Resnick, braving another episode of happy families in order to persuade Skelton to apply for a search warrant for the end terrace in Harcourt Road.

"The whole house?" Skelton asked, when he had listened to Resnick's explanations.

"Might as well. While we're about it' While Cathy Jordan's breakfast was heavy on the grains and fruit, heavy on the coffee, Dorothy Birdweu's order, carefully enunciated, was for one poached egg " And that's poached, mind, properly poached, not steamed' – on dry whole meal toast and a pot of Assam tea.

"Cathy," Dorothy Birdwell said, once her egg had been delivered (a poor, shrivelled thing, in Cathy's opinion) to the table.

"I may call you Cathy, may I?"

"Sure, Dottie. That's fine." She could tell Dorothy didn't like that, but the older woman took it in her stride.

"You know, dear, I am not the greatest fan of the kind of thing that you write."

"Dorothy, I know."

"In fact, I would go so far as to say, in a way I find it quite pernicious. I mean, this may be old-fashioned of me, I'm sure that it is, but I do think there are certain standards we have a moral obligation to maintain."

"Standards?" Great, Cathy thought she's invited me down to receive a lecture, a grande-dame rap across the knuckles.

"Yes, dear. A certain morality."

Cathy speared a prune.

"Let me get this straight. Are we talking sex here?"

"My dear, you mustn't think me a prude. Sex is fine, in its place, I'm sure we would both agree to that." (We would? Cathy thought, surprised.) "But its most intimate details, well, I don't think we need to have those spelled out for us, you see. Not in all their personal intricacies, at least And the violence we most certainly inflict upon one another, if I wish to learn of that, I can always read the newspaper though, of course, I prefer not to1 do not wish to find myself confronting it inside an otherwise charming work of entertainment You do see my point dear?" in polite company, Cathy wondered, what did you do with a pmne stone?

Spit it out into your hand, or push it under your tongue and risk being accused of speaking with your mouth full. Either way, it didn't matter. Dorothy's question had been rhetorical.

"But I do want to say that I think the way those ghastly women have been ganging up on you is perfectly dreadful. And in no way could I ever bring myself to support their actions." She fluttered her hands above the remains of her poached egg.

"That silly business with the paint."

Cathy nodded.

"To say nothing of the rabbit."

Dorothy inclined her head forward.

"Yes, dear. It was about that I most particularly wanted to talk."

"You did?" The antennae in Cathy's brain were beginning to stand up and point, but she couldn't yet tell in which direction. She set down her spoon and fork and waited.

"Marius," Dorothy said earnestly, 'has always been such a sweet boy, so single-minded in his attentions. I really couldn't begin to tell you all the things he has done for me. " For a moment, Dorothy paused and dabbed at her mouth with a napkin.

"But, I now realise, there are times when he has allowed his1 suppose the only word I can use is devotion his devotion for me to, well, blind his judgement." She sipped her tea, grimaced in a ladylike way and added just a touch more milk.

"I am sorry, dear."

Cathy didn't say anything: she couldn't immediately think of anything aside from the scatological and the profane to say. She stared across the table at the older writer instead and, in return, Dorothy Birdwell smiled one of her perfunctory smiles and tipped some more hot water from the metal jug into the teapot.

"Are you telling me," Cathy finally got out, whispering because she was afraid anything else would be a shout, 'that it was Marius pulled that gross stunt with the rabbit dolled up as a fucking baby? "

It was do good, the whispering hadn't worked; she was shouting now, not quite at the top of her voice, but loud enough to have half the dining room turning round and an assistant manager heading towards them at a fast trot "Yes," Dorothy said, head bowed, 'and I'm afraid that is not all. "

"Not all? Not all? Jesus, what's the little creep done now?"

"My dear, I can only assure you, you have my deepest sympathy and apologies."

"Sympathy? Apologies?" Cathy was on her feet now, stepping back.

"With all due respect, Dorothy, your apologies, my ass!"

"Really, dear, I don't think this kind of a scene…"

"No? Well, I don't give a fuck what you think. What I do give a fuck for is where in sweet hell is your little lap dog Marius?"

"I dismissed him, of course. I'm afraid there was quite a little scene. He was very upset. Very. But in the circumstances, there was no way in which I could change my mind." Again, she paused.

"I am sorry, dear, believe me."

"Where," Cathy said, 'is Marius now? "

"I can only imagine he's gone to the station…"

Train station? He's heading for where? London? Where? "

"Is everything all right?" the assistant manager asked. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Keep out of my face," Cathy snapped.

"Manchester," Dorothy Birdwell said.

"He has a friend, I think, in Manchester."

"Thanks," Cathy said, 'for the breakfast. Thanks," over her shoulder, as she hurried off towards the nearest phone, 'for everything."

Resnick had just got back to his office, warrant signed and 230 delivered into his hand, when Millington beckoned him towards the phone he was holding.

"Cathy Jordan, for you. Likely wants to know if you've finished her book."

"Hello," Resnick said, and then listened. After not too many moments, he asked Cathy to stop, take several deep breaths and start again.

Slowly.

"Right," he said when she had finished.

"Right. Yes." And, "Right." He passed the receiver back into Millingtbn's hand.

"Graham," Resnick said, 'get on to the station. Manchester train, I think it's the one comes across from Norwich. Have it stopped. " He swivelled round to see who was available in the office. " Lynn, pick up this bloke at the railway station, I'll arrange back-up. Marius Gooding. Late thirties, five seven or eight, shortish hair, dark.

Smart in an old-fashioned kind of way. Maybe a blue blazer. Keep it low key, just ask him in for questioning, that's all. "

"What if he refuses?"

"Arrest him."

What charge? "

"Threatening behaviour, that'll do. Okay?"

"Right."

Millington was still talking to the stationmaster; any immediate developments he could handle here. Divine and Naylor had already gone out to relieve Sharon at the house where Marlene Kinoulton had her room. As he left to follow them, Resnick patted his inside pocket, making sure the search warrant was in place.

Forty-one They found: one three-quarter-length coat, navy blue; one leather jacket, hip-length, black, badly scuffed along one sleeve; five skirts, three short, one calf-length, one long; two sweaters; one white, ruffle-front shirt; one black- beaded fishnet top with fringing; eight other assorted tops, including two T-shirts and a blue silk blouse with what looked like blood on one sleeve; one black velvet suit; two pairs of jeans, Levi red tab and Gap denim; three pairs of ski pants, one badly torn, possibly cut; five pairs of ribbed woollen tights; seven pairs of regular tights, one red, one blue, mostly laddered or holed; three pairs of stockings, all black, two with seams; two pairs of cotton socks, off- white; eleven pairs of briefs, two of them crotchless; one black suspender belt; three brassieres; one bus tier one nurse's uniform, badly stained; one school gym slip bottle green.

Two pairs of ankle boots, a brown and a bright red; one pair of black leather lace-up boots, knee-length; two pairs of trainers, Reebok and Adidas; seven pairs of shoes.

Condoms: Durex Featherlite and Elite and Mates liquorice ribbed.

K-Y lubricating jelly, three tubes.

Vaseline.

Body Shop body massage oil.

Cotton buds. Smoker's toothpaste. Safeway frequency wash shampoo. A diaphragm. A pregnancy testing kit, unused. Soap. Boots face cream.

Nail polish, seven different shades. Nail polish remover. One Philips electric 232 razor, lady's model. One set of make-up brushes. Navy eyeliner. Green mascara. Dejoria hand and body lotion. Aloe hair gel. Max Factor Brush-On Satin Blush. Princess Marcella Borghese Pink Marabu Blusher, hot pink. Three kohl pencils. Three bottles of aspirin. One packet of Nurofen. Lipsticks, seven ranging from Coral Reef to Vermilion. Panty liners. One box of tampons, extra absorbency, five remaining.

Perfume. One plastic bottle of Tesco antiseptic mouthwash, peppermint flavour, family size.

Paperback books: Dark Angel by Sally Beauman; The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris; Rosemary Conley's Hip and Thigh Diet, Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin; Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.

Assorted copies of Elle, Vanity Fair, She, Cosmopolitan, Fiesta and Men Only.

One video tape of Sex Kittens Go Hawaii.

Kleenex.

An Aiwa radio-cassette player, with a copy of the Eurythmics' Greatest Hits inside. Assorted cassettes by Phil Collins, Chris Rea, Chris de Burgh and Tina Turner.

One medium-size suitcase, a tan handbag, two imitation leather shoulder bags. Inside one of the bags, a purse containing forty-seven pence in change, several used tissues, a torn half-ticket for the Showcase cinema and a strip of four coloured head-and-shoulder photographs of an unsmiling Marlene Kinoulton.

In a drawer, one Coke can, a hole punched through approximately one inch from the end, around which there were signs of burning. Two boxes of matches. A container of aluminium foil.

In a buckled metal dustbin in the back yard, and partly covered by grey-black ashes, several fragments of dark material synthetic mixed with cotton singed, but not burnt.

In the kitchen on the ground floor, somehow stuffed down behind the piece of narrow, laminated board that separated the washing machine from the swing-top rubbish bin, one dark blue, Ralph Lauren, wool and cotton mix sock with a red polo player logo.

On its way to Liverpool, via Manchester, the twin- carriage train stopped at Langley Mill, Alfreton and Mansfield Parkway, Bolsover, Sheffield, Edale and Stock- port. At that moment, it had stopped within sight of the station, small knots of would-be passengers staring along the track towards it, checking their watches, the overhead clock, the monitor screens on which the slightly nickering green lettering announced no delay and clearly lied.

Lynn almost approached the wrong man, before she spotted Marius, standing close to the window of the buffet, glancing distractedly at the copy of the Telegraph folded in his hand. He was wearing a blue blazer, grey trousers with a deep crease, black brogue shoes that shone. There was a smart, double-strapped, leather suitcase at his side.

"Marius?" Lynn said softly, so softly that he only just heard.

"Hmm? I'm sorry?" He looked at a youngish woman, with brown hair cut, he thought, rather savagely short. A round face that seemed, somehow, to have sunk, like early-punctured fruit.

"Is your name Marius?"

"Marius Gooding. Yes, why? Have we met? You'll have to forgive me, I don't remember."

What she was taking from her pocket was her warrant card.

"I'm a police officer. Detective Constable Kellogg. I…"

He was still smiling his well-mannered, tentative smile when he struck out, the arm that held the newspaper jerking towards her face. For an instant, Lynn was lost in tall pages of newsprint, crisp and self-righteous editorials, as Marius followed up his blow with a push and took to his heels. Twenty yards along the platform, heading for the stairs, he collided with an elderly couple, loaded down with walking boots, binoculars and rucksacks, off for a day in the Peaks. Spinning around, close to losing his footing, Marius started off again in the opposite direction, aiming for the far side of the buffet, the steps that would take him up to the bridge and the open car park, the streets beyond.

Lynn positioned herself well, feet firmly set; she made a grab for his upper arm, ducking beneath his. open hand as he made to fend her off. Her fingers grasped the sleeve of his coat and held fast Marius's impetus rocked Lynn back, but not totally off-balance.

Buttons sprang free as threads snapped.

Most of the people waiting on the platform had ceased worrying about their train. Fingers pointed; cries of "There!"

"There!" and "Look!"

A black porter, white- haired, too small for his blue-black uniform, hovered anxiously, wanting to do something but unsure what.

Lynn ducked again under a nailing arm and tightened her grip on Marius's opposite wrist, forcing it high towards the middle of his back.

Marius gasped with sudden pain.

"Go on, duck," someone called admiringly.

"You show 'im right and proper."

Releasing one of her hands, but not the pressure, Lynn caught hold of Marius's hair, just long enough at the back to give her leverage.

Marius cried out as first one knee, then the other struck the concrete platform.

"Nesh bugger!" a voice came dismissively.

"Be scraightin' next, you see if he ain't."

And, in truth, there were tears in the corners of Marius's eyes.

"Marius Gooding," Lynn said, a little short of breath, "I'm arresting you on suspicion of threatening behaviour…"

"That's ridiculous! When did I ever threaten…?"

"For assaulting a police officer and resisting araest."

The socks matched: a perfect fit. The youth with the earrings and the shaved head had remembered finding the second sock, the one that Naylor had triumphantly discovered in the kitchen, but not exactly where. Somewhere on the stairs, he thought? Out in the yard? Anyway, he had assumed it belonged to one of the other lads (knowing it not to be his, his came from a stall in the market or at Christmas and birthdays from Marks and Spencer, via his parents) and had stuffed it in the washing machine along with an accumulated load. How it had ended up wedged where Naylor had found it, he had no idea, except, socks, well, almost as if they had a mind of their own.

The Coke can still contained minute traces of what Resnick was certain would prove to be crack cocaine.

And the blood on the silk blouse? If blood indeed were what it was?

Forensic tests would be carried out with as much haste as urgent calls from Resnick himself and Jack Skelton could engender. If the blood proved to match that of the late Peter Farleigh, they were as good as there, home free. If not. "So, Charlie," Skelton said, turning away from the window behind his desk, clear blue sky beyond the edge of the building outside.

"Are we there, do you think, or what?"

"Nudging close. Got to be. Business with the sock, could be coincidence, but that's asking a lot. Circumstantial, though, at best."

"This, er, friend of hers Doris Duke. She'd give evidence about seeing the blood on Kinoulton's clothing, as well as her deteriorating mental state?"

Resnick shifted his weight in the chair. Close and yet still far.

"Maybe, though what credence the jury give to her, I don't know.

Something concrete, that's what we need. Positively linking Kinoulton with the attacks, any one of them. That's what we still don't have.

IfFarieigh's hotel room had given up a clearer print that'd be a start, but no. Smudge and fudge. I can lean on McKimber again, but he's got his own reasons for not wanting to get dragged in too far.

Desperate to get back with his wife and kids, poor bugger. "

Skelton coughed, a sudden, sharp attack and Resnick waited while it subsided.

"Course, if we could lay our hands on Kinoulton herself, ask her some questions direct, it might be a different picture."

Skelton nodded neat agreement and nicked out the sides of his suit jacket before sitting back down.

"Not to fret, Charlie; something'!! turn up. "

Once his panic and anger had subsided, Marius Gooding had apologised so abjectly, his tongue must have tasted of the interview room floor.

Over and over. You have to believe, I've never done such a thing in my life. Never struck anybody at all, never mind a member of the opposite sex, a woman. No, Lyim, had observed, but you have done other things.

"What? What other things?"

One by one, she showed him the Polaroids that had been taken inside Dorothy Birdwell's hotel suite. Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!

Without further hesitation, Marius had demanded a phone call and a solicitor. The call was to Dorothy Birdwell, who listened patiently to his pleading and then hung up without answering.

The solicitor who arrived was actually a solicitor's clerk. Heather Jardine; a forty-three-year-old Scot, divorced with two teenage children, who had abandoned a stuttering career as a playwright and enrolled in evening classes in law. She knew Lyiin Kellogg fairly well they had been through this and similar procedures before and the two women treated one another with more than grudging respect.

Jardine made sure her client was aware of his rights, had been fairly treated and asked if he might not have a cup of tea.

Lynn waited for Kevin Naylor to join her and set the tape rolling, identifying those present in the room and the time.

"All right, Marius, why don't we talk about the incident with the rabbit first off?"

After a less than ten minutes of prevarication, Marius asked if he could speak to Heather Jardine alone. This allowed, he admitted the incident with the breakfast trolley, said that he had got it ready the previous day and had intended to leave it outside Cathy Jordan's door; seeing the trolley there, waiting to be taken into the room, he had elaborated his plans accordingly.

"And what was the point?" Lynn asked.

"I mean, why go through all of this rigamorole?"

Marius didn't reply immediately. Instead, he swivelled his head and asked Heather Jardine if he had to answer, and she said, no, he did not. Another few moments and he answered anyway.

"It was a symbol," he said.

"Of what I think of her work."

"A symbol?" Lynn repeated carefully.

"Yes."

"Perhaps you'd best explain."

"Oh, if you'd read any, you'd know."

"In fact, I have," Lynn said.

"A little."

"Then you'll know the awful things she does; little children tortured, abused, defiled." His face was a mask of disgust.

"Do you have children, Mr Gooding? Yourself?" Lynn asked.

"I don't see what on earth…"

"I was interested, that's all."

Well, no, then. No, I don't. "

"But it's something you feel strongly about?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. I mean, it's only natural. At least, that's what you would think. And the fact that she's a woman. That it's a woman, perpetrating these things…"

"Not exactly, Mr Gooding."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, Ms Jordan isn't actually doing any of these things. She isn't doing anything. Other than writing books. Isn't that so?"

"Yes, but…"

"Let me be clear here," Naylorsaid, leaning forward for the first time.

"The business with the rabbit, that was to teach Miss Jordan a lesson, frighten her into stopping writing, what?"

"Huh, she's never going to stop, is she? Not with a formula like that. Raking it in. God knows what she must have earned, the last few years. Though, of course, she hasn't got the respect. Not from the critics, nor the affection of her readers. True affection, like Dorothy."

"That was what you had for Ms Birdwell? Yourself, I mean. Affection and respect?"

"Of course, yes. Why I…"

"Then why this?" Lynn's finger hovered over the first of the photographs.

"Or this? Or this?"

Marius closed his eyes.

"I was upset. I…"

"You seem to get upset a lot," Lynn observed quietly.

"I thought… I know it was stupid and foolish and very, very wrong… but I thought she didn't… Dorothy didn't… after everything that had happened between us, all the 240 time we had spent together…" His body was racked by a sudden sob.

"I thought she didn't love me any more. And I am deeply, deeply ashamed."

The faint whir of the tape machinery aside, the clipped clicking of the clock, the only sounds were the contortions of Marius's ragged breathing as he struggled to recover himself, regain some element of control. Heather Jardine looked at the notepad on her lap and wished she could light up a cigarette; Kevin Naylor simply looked embarrassed. It was Lynn whose eyes never wavered. If ever anyone was in need of therapy, she was thinking, it's this poor, pathetic bastard and not me.

"These feelings you had about Cathy Jordan," Lynn asked, 'about her work. Would you say that Ms Birdwell shared those? "

"Most strongly, yes."

"But she didn't approve of the methods you used to express what you felt?"

"Grand guignol was the term she used. Over-theatrical. Too close for Dorothy's liking to the kind of thing you can imagine Jordan doing herself. Though, of course, that was the point."

"She was happier with the letters, then, was she?" Lynn asked, making a leap of faith.

Marius's face was a picture.

Reaching down for the folder that was leaning against one leg of the table, Lynn extracted copies of the threatening letters Cathy Jordan had received and set them carefully down along the length of the table.

"The letters," Lynn said.

"Have a good look. Remind yourself."

Marius wobbled a little in his seat.

"I think," Heather Jardine said, rising to her feet, 'my client is in need of a break. "

"This interview," Lynn said, face angled towards the tape recorder, 'suspended at seventeen minutes past twelve. "

At four minutes to two, Alison and Shane Charlton rang the buzzer at the Enquiries desk below and asked if they could speak to somebody about the Peter Farleigh murder.

FR1; Forty-three "We had a message," Alison Charlton said, 'you wanted us to get in touch. We've been away, you see. The weekend. " She smiled at her husband, who smiled, a touch self- consciously, back.

"We came in as soon as we heard." The wedding rings, Resnick noticed, were shiny and new on their hands.

"The man who died," Shane Charlton said,

"Alison's mother had saved his picture from the paper. She knew we'd been staying there that night. The same hotel."

"It was Shane's firm's do," Alison explained.

"I recognised him, we recognised him right off," Shane said.

"Didn't we, All?"

"Oh, yes." Her face, bright already, brightened still further.

"We were right facing him, him and her. Going up in the lift. Must have been1 was saying to Shane, wasn't I, Shane? – after that that it happened."

"What time was this?" Resnick asked.

"Can you remember?"

"It would have been round eleven thirty," Shane said.

"Nearer quarter past," Alison said.

"You said, him and her," Resnick reminded her.

"The woman…"

"The woman he was with…"

"Nice looking, she was. Well, quite…"

"Considering."

"Like you say, considering. And I think she'd been drinking, don't you, Shane?"

"Didn't act drunk, though, did she? Not exactly."

"No, it was what she said."

Shane nodded, remembering.

"Come right out with it, didn't she? We might as well not've been there, might we? For all she cared. Well, I'd never've had the guts to have said it. Not the way she did. One hundred and fifty pounds, she said, just like she was talking about, oh, you know, the weather.

A hundred and fifty pounds, to spend the night. I said to Shane after, when we was in our room, would he, like, if he was off on business and on his own, without us being married, of course, would he ever spend that amount of money. And you said you might, d'you remember, but only if she looked like me. I thought that was really sweet. "

She giggled and Shane, embarrassed, fidgeted in his seat.

"Could you describe her?" Resnick asked.

"The woman."

They looked at one another before Alison answered. "She was, well, she wasn't young."

"She was never old," Shane said.

"Thirty-five, should you say, Shane?"

Shane shrugged.

"Something like that."

"And she was dressed, you know, not tarty. Smart, I suppose you'd say. She had this black, button-through dress. Satiny, sort of.

Sleeveless. A blouse underneath. "

"Colour?"

"Blue. It was, wasn't it, Shane? Quite a dark shade of blue."

"I don't know. I don't think I ever noticed."

"I'm sure it was. Midnight blue, I think that's what you'd call it.

Midnight blue. "

"How about her hair?" Resnick asked.

"What do you remember about that?"

"Well, it was dark. Definitely dark. And she wore it up like this…"

Alison demonstrated as best she could with her own hair, even though it was too short to give the proper effect.

'. pinned, at the back. "

"She had one of those things," Shane said.

What things? "

"I don't know, those things you put in your hair."

"A ribbon? She didn't have a ribbon."

"No, not that. One of those plastic thingununies…"

"A comb?" suggested Alison.

"She wasn't just standing there with a comb in her hair, don't be daft."

"That's what they're called, though. Combs."

"Don't you remember?" Shane said.

Alison shook her head.

"It was on the right-hand side," Shane said.

"Well, that was over towards you. Where you were standing."

"That's right."

"What colour was it?" Resnick asked, hanging on to his patience.

"This comb."

"White. Off-white." And, as though plucking the name from the air, smile on his face as if his answer had just won a prize.

"Ivory."

Alison smiled for him.

"I'd like you to look at some photographs," Resnick said.

"Down at Central Station. The Intelligence Bureau. I'll get someone to drive you down."

"Oh, great," Alison exclaimed.

"We'd like that, wouldn't we, Shane?"

The officer set out the photograph of Marlene Kinoulton along with eleven others of similar colouring and general age and appearance.

Neither Alison nor Shane picked her out immediately, but when they did, there was little or no uncertainty.

"It was the hair that threw me, wasn't it you, Shane?"

Alison said.

"She didn't have it down when we saw her. Like I told the other policeman…"

"Inspector Resnick," Shane said.

"Inspector Resnick, yes. Like I told him, her hair was up then. Made her look quite a bit different. Bit older, of course, but smarter.

I'd wear it like that all the time, if I were her. "

Heather Jardine and Lynn Kellogg were standing out at the rear of the station building, the ground around them dark and slick from the quick summer shower. Heather Jardine was having her second cigarette in succession, all the more necessary having given up smoking from New Year's Eve until a week ago last Friday. Now, it was as if she couldn't get the nicotine back into her bloodstream fast enough.

"So how's it been?" she asked and they both knew what she was referring to, Lynn standing there with a polystyrene cup of lukewarm coffee in her hand, not wanting to talk about the kidnapping and its aftermath, not at all, but understanding the other woman's need to ask, the concern.

"Not so bad," Lynn said.

"You know…" Letting it bang.

"I don't suppose," Heather said, 'it's the kind of thing you ever really forget. "

Lynn swallowed a mouthful more coffee; though the sun had come back out, the recent rain had left a nip in the air and she caught herself wishing she had worn a cardigan, some kind of a sweater.

"He's not come up for trial yet, either, has he?"

Lynn shook her head.

Heather drew smoke in heavily and held it in her mouth before exhaling.

"These letters, they're pretty nasty, I know. Threatening, it's true. But even if you could prove in court he actually did send them, there's never any real sense he was intending to carry any of those threats out' Lynn let her continue.

"I suppose if you took some of it literally, there might be a charge of threat to kill, but well… I don't think the GPS would be over the moon about that, do you? Without that, unless the woman wants to press charges herself, take out a civil action, where are you?"

Lynn smiled wearily.

"Public Order Act, section five."

"Ah, you'd not bother. Most your boss is likely to press for, bung him up before the magistrate and have him bound over."

Lynn had a mouthful more coffee and tipped the remainder out on to the wet ground.

"And what about all the rest?"

"Resisting arrest?"

"Assault."

Heather stubbed out the butt of her cigarette on the sole of her shoe.

"First offence, no record, previous good behaviour. I'd be surprised if it got anywhere near court, and if it did, any barrister worth half his fee would argue a hole through the prosecution a mile wide."

"Maybe."

"If I'm wrong," Heather laughed,

"I'll buy you a bottle of twenty-year Macallan."

Not really a drinker, Lynn took this to be an impressive offer.

"Shall we go back in? At least, we can make him wriggle and squirm a bit longer." She shuddered, not from the cold.

"It's not just his public-school accent or that pathetic little moustache, don't know what it is, but there's something about him, makes my skin crawl."

Involuntarily, Heather had begun scratching her thigh. "Mine, too."

Skelton was standing behind his desk, about as close to being at ease as he ever seemed to get.

"Pulled in all the extra bodes I can, Charlie. Go through the city tonight like a fine-tooth comb. If she's still here, we'll find her."

"If not?" Resnick asked.

"Then we'll release her picture in the morning."

'. Police today took the unusual step of releasing a photograph of a woman they wish to interview in connection with a number of attacks on men, including the murder of Peter Farleigh, whose body was found with fatal stab wounds. "

Susan Tyrell reached over and pushed one of several preset buttons, switching the radio to Classic-FM.

"Did you see the picture, David?"

"Mm? Sorry, which picture?" He was standing by the microwave, concentrating on the controls; one second too many and the croissants would be reduced to slime. Close by stood the matt black espresso machine he had talked Susan into buying him the Christmas before last and which he had never learned to use.

"In the paper," Susan said.

"The woman they mink's been stabbing all those men."

"On the game, isn't she?"

"So it says."

The microwave pinged and David slid the warm croissants on to plates.

It was warm enough again for them to sit out in the garden, make use of the deck chairs Susan had picked up on sale at Homebase. He picked up the paper from where Susan had left it and carried it back to his chair. Centre columns, page three.

"Marlene Kinoul- ton, doesn't have much of a ring to it, does it? Not exactly stunning, either. Can't quite imagine who'd want to shell out for her."

"Really?" Susan said, pouring the coffee.

"I should have thought she was just your type."

David laughed.

"What on earth's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh, you know, one of those raddled creatures you fantasise about, short on morals and long on hearts of gold. I can remember you dragging me off to see Cutter's Way..: " Jeff Bridges. "

'. just for the scene where Lisa Eichhom looks so pained and awful after he's walked out on her. What did you say? You'd never seen a woman looking so bereft. "

"Or beautiful. 1 " Right. " Susan broke into the croissant with her fingers. " And then she gets killed. "

David raised an eyebrow and passed her the jam.

"Goes with the territory."

"Prostitutes and whores, you mean? Victims."

"I suppose."

Susan looked at him hard.

"I wonder why they're always the ones you fancy so much?"

A butterfly landed for an instant on David's sleeve, then fluttered off towards the cotoneaster.

"I liked Julie Andrews once."

"You were seven. And you're avoiding the issue."

"Is it an issue?"

Susan brushed crumbs from the front of her blouse.

"It might be."

David wriggled his lean body against the striped canvas. Just when he was having a nice, relaxing morning for a change.

"Then I suppose it's to do with oh, you know what it's to do with fallen angels, forbidden fruit."

"Like her?" Susan said, nodding in the direction of Marlene Kinoulton's picture in the newspaper.

"But you don't fancy her,"

"That's different."

"Why? Because she's not pretty, screen-star pretty?"

"For God's sake, Susan, because she's real. And because what goes with her is real."

"Such as?"

"How long a list do you want? Herpes, gonorrhoea, Aids."

"Oh," Susan said, 'for a moment I thought you were talking about commitment. "

"Commitment? To a whore?"

"Yes. Why not? That's what it is, after all. You start off fancying her, you decide to pay for her, you end up sticking a condom on your cock and sticking it inside her. I'd say that called for quite a lot of commitment, wouldn't you?"

David had jerked to his feet, spilling coffee down one leg of his trousers and across the seat of the deck chair "Christ, Susan, what's this all about?" He couldn't remember her so animated, so angry.

Susan put down her cup and plate, folded her hands across her lap.

"The night before last, I went out and picked up a man."

David stared at her, mouth slightly open. Just stared. As if hearing it for the first time, he heard the harsh, bright call of the magpie on the overhanging branch of their neighbour's pear tree.

"I picked him up in a bar and we went to a hotel."

David turned towards the bottom of the garden, walked five paces, turned back around.

"Look, Susan, I'm sorry, I can't deal with this now. I have to go."

All she could do was shake her head from side to side and laugh.

Hurrying past her into the house, David froze at the entrance to the hall. Where was his briefcase? Where were his keys? What was going on with his life?

"David," Susan touched his arm and he flinched.

"David, look at me." And she leaned back against the front door the way she thought Claire Trevor might have done, Barbara Stanwyck or Jane Greer.

"I didn't tell you so that you could deal with it. It's done. Over. I just wanted you to know."

As he tried to push past her, reaching for the handle to the door, she added, close to his ear,

"I thought you might look at me differently, that's all."

He hesitated for a second before tugging at the door and Susan stepped to one side, letting him go.

She was still standing in the hallway when she heard the car start, tyres spinning a little as it sped away. She hadn't told him exactly how drunk she had needed to be, the way excitement and revulsion had tasted in her mouth; nor about the way her face had looked in the bathroom mirror before she had decided to cut and run.

Susan looked at her watch: nine seventeen. They would have realised at school by now she wasn't coming in. She was surprised they hadn't phoned. In the living room, she poured herself a generous glass of gin, lit a cigarette: isn't that the kind of thing Lisa Eichhom would do? Claire Trevor. Barbara Stanwyck. Jane Greer. All those women who rarely made it in one piece, through to the final reel?

Resnick sat at the coffee stall, taking his time through his second espresso of the morning. A sudden shower had surprised him as he was walking his way down from the Woodborough Road and he had ducked into the market by the rear entrance.

Marlene Kinoulton's photograph was prominently displayed on the front page of the local paper. All of the previous night's searching had brought them nothing but sore feet and abuse. Urgent messages had gone out to Leicester, Sheffield, Derby, the other cities where it was known she had worked. It was too early to gauge the extent and accuracy of public response, though early signs were far from promising; what had come through via the information room so far had been patchy and poor. Nowadays, it seemed, unless you went on television, Crimewatch UK or one of those, chances of lighting a fire under the public were poor. And he supposed, in time, if Kinoulton weren't traced, that was what would happen. Actors and a film crew and a researcher asking to interview him so that they could get it just right.

"Later tonight, on Crimewatch UK, the intriguing story of the missing prostitute and the hotel-room murder…"

A woman with a child of under two clinging to her skirt, climbed on to the vacant stool next to him, lifted the child into her lap and stuck a dummy in its mouth. Directly across from where he was sitting, a man he had put away for two stretches for burglary, joked with one of the Asian stall holders over a cup of tea. He did not acknowledge Resnick, nor Resnick him. When the festival was over and all the visitors and writers and film makers had returned to wherever they had come from, this was what it would come back to. People who lived here; who did what and to whom?

"Another espresso, inspector?"

"Thanks. Better not." Lifting the small cup to his mouth, he swallowed down what was left. Dark and bitter, why was it so good?

Cathy Jordan and Frank Cariucci had tiptoed around each other, exchanging no more words than were necessary. Neither of them wished to begin a conversation that could reopen old wounds and, in all probability, inflict new ones. Mollie Hansen had phoned earlier to enquire whether Cathy were happy to be interviewed on Kaleidoscope that evening, she had to ring John Goudie back and let him know.

Now Mollie was there at the hotel, making sure that the travel arrangements to London were clear; after the radio programme, there was a book signing in the Charing Cross Road at Murder One, at which point the publicist working for Cathy's UK publisher would take over and Mollie was in the clear. That is, she could get on with attending to the rest of the festival.

She was leaning against the counter at reception, just through speaking to Cathy on the internal phone, when Resnick came in.

"Not more trouble?" she asked, intercepting him with a guarded smile.

"No." He realised he was staring at her and looked away.

Mollie laughed.

"My God! You don't like it, do you?"

"What?"

"And now you're embarrassed to have noticed." She 254 had had a small stone filled in the right side of her nostril, bright blue.

"Not at all," Resnick blushed.

"You don't approve, body adornment?"

He shook his head.

"I don't suppose I've ever thought about it. I was surprised, that's all."

Mollie smiled.

"Do you like it, though? Be honest. I'd like to know what you think."

"I think you looked fine before."

It was Mollie's turn, almost, to flush.

"You're here to see Cathy?"

He nodded.

"Just quickly. I shall't be long."

"If I hang on," Mollie said,

"I don't suppose I could scrounge a lift?"

"If I had the car with me you could."

"Never mind. Some other time maybe?"

"Maybe."

"Well," backing away, 'see you around, I guess. Come to a movie, why don't you? "

"I'll try."

Mollie raised a hand, fingers spread, and turned towards the doors.

By the time she had walked from sight, Resnick was standing by the lifts, watching the numbers descend.

When Resnick got out of the lift on Cathy Jordan's floor, Frank Carlucci was waiting to get in. The two men exchanged cursory nods before Frank, hands in pockets and ample shoulders hunched, stepped inside and the doors closed behind him.

Cathy opened the door on Resnick's first knock and was surprised to see him standing there and not Frank.

"Sorry. Figured you for the penitent husband, back to crave forgiveness."

"Does he have something to be forgiven for?"

Cathy's mouth turned upwards into a smile.

"Don't we all? And wouldn't life be a deadly bore if we did not?" She moved aside to let Resnick enter.

"But in Frank's case, this particular case, I have no idea." She shrugged.

"Going on his track record, I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt."

"Innocent as charged."

Cathy grinned.

"Guilty."

"Marius likewise."

"He owned up?"

Resnick nodded.

"The letters as well?"

"Yes."

Cathy's fist punched the air.

"The bastard! The snivelling lousy bastard!"

"He got a friend in the States to send the letters for him; everything that happened over here was down to him. He swears he never had any intention of carrying any of it through. Just wanted to frighten you. shake you up; make you think about what you were doing."

"Frighten me?"

"Yes."

"The little shit!"

"As far as it's possible to tell, my guess is he's telling the truth.

It's difficult to see him as actually dangerous, more of a nuisance. "

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were building up to telling me you're about to let him go."

Resnick stood there looking at her.

"Jesus! You are! You're going to give him a friendly pat on the head and a warning. Be a good slime bag and don't do it again." She turned, shaking her head.

"I can't believe it. I can't lucking believe it!"

"Dorothy Birdwell insists she won't press charges. Also, she's paid to have the room set back to rights and the hotel's keen to avoid any adverse publicity."

Cathy's face was white with anger.

"Which just leaves 256 me, right? And who the fuck am I, that you should give a good goddamn?"

Resnick took a pace towards her, then a pace back. "Cathy," he said.

"What?"

"Whatever you decide to do, it's unlikely, given all the circumstances, that the GPS will recommend prosecution."

"Shit!" Cathy crossed the room to the whisky bottle, poured a stiff shot and carried it back with her to the set tee

"So what will happen to him? Exactly."

"Most likely, he'll be bound over not to repeat this or any other behaviour."

"And then he'll walk?"

Resnick nodded.

"Yes."

Cathy took one sip at her Scotch and then another. "Where is he now?

You've still got him in custody? "

"Yes, why?"

All energy, Cathy jumped to her feet.

"Fine. I want to see him."

"I don't know…"

"Come on, just see him, right? One final time. Tell him goodbye."

Resnick looked a long way short of convinced.

"Inspector… Charlie… Surely it's the least you can do? After all, I'm not exactly about to stick a knife in him, pull out a gun."

"I still don't know…"

"Please."

"All right. But just five minutes. No more. And I shall have to be there all the time."

Cathy smiled at him with sweetness dropped in acid. "But of course."

The police cells were full so Naylor had stuck Marius Gooding in one of the interview rooms and turned the key. ic'" " Half an hour," he had said.

"Forty-five minutes. Tops."

Marius had been there for not far short of three hours. Silent, a uniformed officer had brought him a cup of tea and a copy of a three-day-old Daily Mail, which Marius had read through several times, cover to cover.

When Resnick entered, he was quickly on his feet, a protest forming on his lips; then, when he saw who was with him, he remained silent.

"Hello, Marius," Cathy Jordan said, not halting until she was an arm's length away.

"Been treating you okay, have they?"

Marius looked at her, eyes refusing to focus; Resnick had remained near the door and was picking at something that seemed to have lodged on the cuff of his shirt.

"I just wanted to see what you looked like, remember you, in case there was any chance I might have the misfortune of running into you again. And to thank you. No, really, I mean it. Thank you for showing me how low a piece of phlegm like you can go. Exciting, though, was it, Marius? Give you a little hard-on? Thinking up all that stuff in those letters you sent me. Writing about it. What had happened to those women. Those kids." A fleck of spittle had landed on Cathy's chin and with the back of a hand she wiped it away.

"Must have known those books of mine pretty well, Marius, to quote them so well. So accurately."

Marius didn't want to look at her, but he wasn't able to look away.

"Might make a point of asking your therapist about that, your fascination with all those nasty incidents you profess to hate. That is, after you talk to him about your mother, your relationship with her."

He flinched as if he had been struck and clenched both hands fast by his sides.

"Got to be something there, right? Explain this thing you've got for old women."

"Cathy," Resnick said, moving forward.

"I think that's enough."

"No," shaking her head.

"No, it's not nearly enough."

Lightly, he placed a hand on her shoulder.

"It'll have to do."

She tilted her head towards him and smiled.

"Okay. Okay, Marius. No hard feelings, maybe. Well, not too many. And I do hope, whoever the shrink is you go to see, he can help you sort yourself out."

She looked at him and the first vestiges of a grateful smile appeared at the edges of Marius's eyes.

"Here," Cathy said softly.

"Have this to remember me by." And, with a fast swing of the arm, she hit him hard across the face and he rocked backwards, the ring on her finger opening a cut deep below his eye.

Resnick grabbed her but she was already stepping away.

"Well," she said, 'let's see if your DPP or whatever it is, reckons it's worth prosecuting me for that. "

Releasing her, Resnick pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to Marius to hold against his face. Then he opened the door and called along the corridor for someone to administer first aid.

Cathy paused in the doorway.

"Then there's a tooth for a tooth, Marius. You remember that one, don't you?"

They stood on the steps outside the police station, watching the traffic playing ducks and drakes with the traffic lights around Canning Circus.

"I tricked you," Cathy saaid.

"For that, I'm sorry."

"You had that in your mind all the time?"

"Pretty much."

"I should have known."

Quickly, she glanced at him.

"Maybe you did."

Resnick didn't reply.

A pair of uniformed officers exited behind them and walked around the corner to the official car park.

Cathy offered Resnick her hand and he took it in a firm grip.

"That book of mine," Cathy said, 'if you ever finish it, you could always drop me a line, let me know what you think. "

"Of course."

They both knew, whatever his intentions, he most probably would not.

Cathy gave him her card regardless and he slipped it down into the top pocket of his coat.

"See you then."

"Yes, see you."

For some minutes he stood and watched her go, a tall woman with cropped red hair, wearing a red silk shirt, blue jeans and heeled boots, walking away.

At a little short of nine the next morning, Sarah Farleigh was sitting in Resnick's office, black leather handbag resting in her lap. She was wearing a black suit that looked new, hemline stretched across her knees.

"Asked to see you, sir," Naylor explained outside.

"In the circumstances, I thought you'd not mind."

"Okay, Kevin. That's fine."

There was a moment to look at her, through the glass, before she turned. One of her hands moving distractedly from her side to the brooch on the lapel of her coat, from the corner of her mouth to a stray twist of hair.

"Sarah." As he entered she rose and came towards him and, although he held out his hand, she moved inside it and gave him a brief hug.

Where her face had rested on his sleeve, it had left a smudge of make-up and, stepping back, she brushed it away.

"Is there any news?"

"News?"

"The woman have you caught her?"

"Not yet." Resnick went round behind his desk and sat down.

"I don't suppose you've any idea why she did it?"

"Not really. Not till we talk to her."

"And if you don't?"

"We will."

"You sound sure."

"Murders," Resnick said, 'one area where our clear-up rate is good. "

"I thought that was usually the what do you call it? family ones?"

"Domestics. Yes, I suppose it is. More often than not' Sarah had resumed her seat and retrieved her bag from the floor. Now she opened it and took out a photograph, square and a little creased, bent at the edges.

"I don't know what I was doing, looking through stuff of Peter's, I suppose, and I found this." She leaned forward and placed it on the desk, for Resnick to swivel round.

It showed Sarah and Ben Riley in a rowing boat, Sarah leaning back, her face, sharper-featured than now, smiling out from beneath the brim of a large, white sun-hat. Ben had the oars in his hands, a cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth. He looked the phrase leapt immediately to Resnick's mind, somewhat archaic, but appropriate – as pleased as Punch.

"You know where that was taken, don't you?"

Resnick looked again. There was a small, curved bridge in the background, flowering shrubs.

"It's up by the university, isn't it?

The lake? "

"That's right. And you know who's behind the camera."

No, I don't think so. "

"It's you."

He looked at it once more, trying to cast back.

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't remember." He made to give the photograph back to her, but she held up her hand and shook her head.

"Keep it."

"Well, I…"

"I thought you might like it. You never know, you might see Ben some time. Or write…"

"Okay. Thanks." Resnick glanced at it again before sliding it into the drawer to the right of his desk.

"If you don't find her, this woman, I mean, suppose it takes a long time it could now, couldn't it? – what happens about the body?"

"As I told you when I phoned, it remains the property of the coroner."

"But not forever. What if you never find her?"

"Sarah, I don't think that'll be the case. Believe me."

"So I can't bury him?"

"Not yet. I'm sorry."

For several moments, she closed her eyes; body held taut.

"A memorial service, then. That's what I'll do. There'll have to be something."

Resnick was on his feet.

"As long as you think you're up to it, that sounds a good idea."

"Thanks." This time, she was the one offering her hand and he took it.

"You will come?" she said.

"Of course."

Sarah smiled her thanks.

"I'll see you out."

"Nice car," Resnick said, as Sarah unlocked the Volvo. He said it as much to make conversation as anything else; since leaving his office, she had fallen quiet. Not that that surprised him; he was glad to see her coping as well as she seemed to be.

"It was Peter's. I've got an old Flat, just for nipping about, locally. Longer distances, I use this if I can. It's a lot more reliable."

"Well, take care, Sarah. Drive safely. And you will let me know about the memorial service?"

Millington met him on the stairs.

"Call from Sheffield, possible sighting of the Kinoulton woman; sounds promising. Local CID're running it down."

"Good."

"Oh, and the report's in on that blouse found at the house. It was blood. And it is the same group as Farleigh's."

Sheffield, not for the first time, was a wash-out. As were Birmingham, Bradford, the Chapeltown district of Leeds. There was a twice-confirmed rumour that Marlene Kinoulton had been working the streets of Butetown, down near the Cardiff docks. A Vice Squad officer had warned her off, only recognising her from the circulated description when it was too late; a bevy of the local girls had backed her into a corner and given her a tonguelashing, warned her to piss off out of their territory or they'd get one of the pimps to see to her face and legs.

Millington and Divine drove down to Cardiff; Mark Divine pleased at the chance to make a rugby player's pilgrimage to Cardiff Arms Park.

It was about the only part of the trip that worked out well. The cooperation which the local force had promised was dissipated in a miasma of broken promises and missed appointments. They did persuade one of the runners working for a high- flown dealer to talk to them over a late-night biriani and chips. Marlene Kinoulton he swore he'd seen just two nights before, sold her the last two rocks he'd had.

Millington and Divine stayed another couple of days | and, as far as they were able, turned the underbelly of the city upside down.

Afterwards, only one thing seemed certain: Marlene Kinoulton had been there and now she had gone.

Resnick allowed Marian Witczak to talk him into accompanying her to a midsummer dance at the Polish Club and, 265 after several generous glasses of bison grass vodka, remembered how to polka. A card from Cathy Jordan, a street scene in Dublin, reminded him that he had still to finish Dead Weight and, between other things, he got not quite to the end, but almost.

Debbie Naylor waylaid Kevin one night with a bottle of wine and something racy she'd bought from an advertisement in the back of the Sunday paper and now she woke in the mornings with carry-cots and Babygros dancing before her eyes.

Kate Skelton, who not so long before had driven her parents close to despair, shoplifting to pay for her drug problem, astonished them by getting three good A levels and applying to university.

Sharon Gamett applied to be transferred from the Vice Squad into CID and her application was turned down.

Lyim Kellogg came into Resnick's office one morning at the end of July and told him she was seriously thinking about moving back to Bast Anglia and had been sounding out an old friend about a vacancy in a Norwich force. "

"Can we talk about this?" Resnick said. He felt as if something solid was being pulled out from beneath his feet. He felt something he didn't understand.

"Of course," Lynn said, and waited.

"I meant, I suppose I meant, not here."

"You're busy." His desk was the usual clutter of reports and forms, empty sandwich bags.

"Yes. No. It's not that. I suppose… well, to be honest, you've taken me by surprise."

"Yes, well, it's nothing definite yet, although…" She stopped, reminded of the look that had come into her father's eyes, the first time she had told him she was applying to join the police.

"How about a drink then?" she said.

"If you want to talk it through."

"It's a long time since you were at the coffee stall,"

266 Resnick said.

"They've just about given up asking where you've got to."

Lynn smiled; just a little, not too much; just with the eyes.

"All right."

Amongst the other things on Resnick's desk, unopened, the invitation to the service at Wymeswold Church dedicated to the memory of Peter Farieigh.

He thought she'd changed her mind. Several of the stall holders had taken in the goods that hung around the outside of their sections and pulled down the metal sides. Resnick had read the cricket report in the local paper twice.

"Sorry," Lynn said, a little out of breath, her cheeks flushed with colour for the first time in weeks.

"Something cropped up."

"Important?"

"No, just fiddly."

"Here," the assistant said, setting down a cappuccino, 'for you the first one free. "

"Thanks," Lynn said, 'but best not. " She pushed a pound coin across the counter and grinned.

"Probably consitutes a bribe."

Now they were there, there was no rush to talk. Resnick sipped his espresso as Lynn tasted the chocolatey froth from a cheap metal spoon. With a thump and clatter, another stall was locked away for the night.

"Your dad," Resnick finally said.

"Is that the problem?"

"How d'you mean?"

"The reason you're thinking of moving back."

"Oh, partly, yes. In a way."

"I thought he was better. Doing okay. Stable, at least."

"He is. But cancer, you know, so hard not to think, whatever the doctors say, it's not going to come back. Somewhere else."

"There's no sign, though?"

"No, not yet No. Touch wood." She glanced around. The couple who ran the corner vegetable stall were laughing together, lighting up, just for a moment holding hands.

"It's my mum, more."

She's not ill? "

Lynn shook her head.

"Just works herself up into such a state."

Resnick finished his coffee; wondered if there were time for one more.

"That's the reason, then? To be near your mother, close?"

Lynn drank some of her cappuccino.

"Not really, no."

Something had begun pressing against the inside of Resnick's left temple, urgent, hard.

Lynn tried to choose her words with care.

"Ever since what happened.

When I was. taken prisoner. I can't stop, haven't been able to stop myself, well, thinking. "

"That's only natural…"

"I know. Yes, I know. And Petra says… That's my doctor. Petra Carey. She says I have to take time, open myself to it; she says there's a lot I have to talk myself through."

'like what? "

"Like you."

Resnick's left eye blinked. If the assistant turned around, he would order another espresso, but, of course, the man continued stubbornly washing down the counter at the other side.

Lynn was speaking again, her voice measured, trying to talk the way she would to Petra Carey if Petra Carey were there.

"Tied up there at night, in the caravan, never knowing when he might come in. Knowing what had happened to that other girl, knowing what he'd done, what he might do. I was scared, of course I was scared. Terrified. Though I knew the last thing I could afford to do was show it. To him. And underneath it all, somehow I'm not sure, I was dreaming a lot of the time, I think I must have been; trying not to let myself fall asleep, but not being able to stop myself-but somehow there was always this idea that it would be all right, that someone no, you – that you would come and God, it sounds pathetic now, doesn't it, hearing myself say this but that you would come and save me." For a moment, Lynn pressed her face into her hands and closed her eyes.

"Except," she went on, 'it wasn't always you. It wasn't as straightforward as that. Sometimes, I would think it was you but then when I saw your face, it was my dad.

You were. my dad. " She shook her head, low towards her hands, which were folded over one another now, beside her cup.

"It isn't even that simple. There are things, other things, I can't, I don't want to say."

Resnick put one hand over hers, ready to retract it if she pulled away.

"I haven't been able to talk to you," Lynn said, not looking at him, looking away.

"Not really talk, not since it happened."

"I know."

"I just haven't felt comfortable, being with you."

"No."

"And it's difficult. So bloody difficult!" With surprise, the assistant looked round at her raised voice.

"And I hate it."

"Yes," Resnick said, taking away his hand. And then, "So this is why you want to go; this rather than your mother, anything at home."

"Oh, they want me back there, of course. My dad doesn't say so, but my mum, she'd love it. But if it wasn't for this other business, no, I don't think I'd go."

"And you don't think we could work it out. Somehow, between us, I mean. Maybe, now you've started talking about it?"

"That's what Petra says."

"That you, we, should talk it over?"

Lynn nodded, still not looking at him.

"Yes." And when Resnick was silent, she asked him what he was thinking.

"I was wondering why you hadn't felt able to come to me before?"

"You're hurt, aren't you?"

"By that? Yes, I suppose I am."

"She said you would be. But, I don't know, I just couldn't' " You were afraid of what I'd say? "

"No. What I would."

Resnick's intention, that evening, had been to go along to the refurbished Old Vie and listen to the new Stan Tracey Duo. But by the time he'd fed the cats, fiddled around with a smoked ham and stilton sandwich, he didn't seem to feel like going out. Sitting on the back step with a bottle of Czech Budweiser, he found out how Annie Q. Jones was getting on, embroiled in plot and counter-plot in the last fifty pages of Dead Weight. Poor Annie, sapped on the head from behind, going down a narrow side street in pitch darkness at least she had her lover to provide a little comfort in the small hours.

His neighbours, also enjoying the light, pleasantly warm evening, had thrown open their windows and were treating him to muffled television laughter and the smell of chicken frying. Resnick finished his beer, took the book back inside, page at the start of the final chapter folded down, and set off to walk down into the city.

He arrived at the pub in time for the last two numbers. Stan Tracey, bunched over the keyboard, angularly maneuvering his way through "Sophisticated Lady', taking-the tune into seemingly impossible blind alleys and then escaping through a mixture of finesse and sheer power. Finally, Tracey and an absurdly young-looking Gerard Presencer on trumpet had elided their way along a John Coltrane blues, the audacity ofPresencer's imagination more than matched by his technique.

Just once, in the middle of the trumpeter's solo, eyes closed, Resnick had seen a perfect vision of Lynn, her face, round and open and close to his. And then it had gone. While the applause was still trickling away, he lifted his empty glass and set it down by the end of the bar, nodded towards the landlord, and made his way towards the door.

Back home again. Bud nestled in beside his feet, Resnick finished the book: / know that Reigler has suffered another stroke, but still I'm not prepared for what I find. One side of his body seems totally paralysed, the same side of his face sunken and lined, one dark eye staring out. His speech is slurred, but I get thejist. As confessions go this one's pretty simple and to the point. He nods when he's finished and I switch off the tape that's been resting on one arm of his wheelchair.

Seems he's got one more request.

I don't know why I should raise a finger for him and then I find out what it is.

The gun is in the drawer and I'm careful only to handle it with the gloves I conveniently have in the pocket of my coat. There's a wind got up from the ocean and the temperature has plummeted. There's one shell in the chamber and just a moment of doubt when I think it might be intended for me, but one more look at his wrecked body and I know that's not the case.

The trigger mechanism seems light, though even so, I'm not convinced, the state that he's in, he's going to be able to find enough pressure, but I figure that's his problem, not mine.

I hear the gunshot as I'm climbing into my car, and I guess it's worked out all right. I don't go back. There'll be a call box on my way home and I can pull over and perform my anonymous civic duty. I risk the last ten miles way above the limit. I know Diane's going to have something ready, maybe even something we can eat in bed. and I don't want to keep her waiting.

Well, no longer than she finds enjoyable.

So that was how it ended, he thought, clear-cut and happy, no loose ends. With a wry smile, Resnick closed the book and reached across to switch off the light.