Still Waters

Twenty-seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have a patient.”

“Yes.”

“Osteopathy, that’s what you do?”

Prentiss nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You and Jane?”

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

“A foursome, then.”

“Yes.”

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

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

“No more contact.”

“That’s right.”

“Not socially.”

“No.”

“How did you feel about that?”

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

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

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

“Sorry, why was that?”

“You’ve met Alex Peterson?”

Lynn shook her head.

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

“A fight? What kind of a fight?”

“One that he can win.”

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

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

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

“And was there?”

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

“She stopped, then?”

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

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

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

“Her husband?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How did she respond?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Some people wouldn’t necessarily agree.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was, at least there was in theory; Divine himself had borrowed it, having lost his own, and it had never been returned.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Millington asked, eyeing the door.

“Likely, Graham.”

It only took one shoulder charge to soften it up, and then a foot, flat and hard, close to the lock.

The interior stank of rotting food, stale beer and cigarettes, unflushed urine but, thankfully, nothing worse. Of Divine there was no sign.

“Not scarpered, look. Not ’less he’s leaving all this stuff of his behind.”

Resnick scribbled a note, asking Divine to get in touch. Once again, he left his own numbers and Hannah’s as well. Millington, meantime, used the butcher’s phone to call a locksmith he knew and arranged to have the door fixed before the end of the day.

“I’ll keep an eye,” the butcher said. “Do me best to make sure no bugger slips up there, fills the place with needles and worse.”

“Right,” Resnick said, “thanks. And if you do spot him coming back himself, you might let us know. Graham here, or myself.”

“’Course. Can’t do you a deal on some nice chump chops, can I? Seeing as you’re here. Take one of these home,” he said to Millington, “put a smile on your missus’s face and no mistake.”

“Thanks,” said Resnick, shaking his head. “Not right now.”

Unwrap one of those within sniffing range of Madeleine, Millington was thinking, she’d get a look on her face, turn milk sour over a five-mile radius.