Still Waters

Forty-seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What exactly?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Okay, where is she now?”

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

“Right, I’ll get along.”

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

Resnick hesitated. “I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And this was close on five?”

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

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

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

“And the man?”

“Forty, forty-five.”

Lynn took a copy of the Polaroid from her bag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And she was staggering how? Like she was drunk? As if she’d been hurt? Hit?”

“Crying. Upset. When she heard his brakes, she pulled herself up, you know, gave herself a bit of shake. Driver called out, was she all right? And she said, yes, she was fine, and hurried off.”

“Which way? Back into the Park?”

Divine shook his head. “On up Derby Road, toward town.”

“Do we know what time this was?” Lynn asked.

“Yes,” Divine said. “He reckons he looked at his watch and the clock on the dash both. Seven thirty on the dot. He got a call right after, pick up somebody at Queens. Turned round and went right back down. It’s in his log. I checked.”

Resnick’s mind was racing. “All right, here’s Jane. She leaves Spurgeon in Grantham and catches the train, fully intending to have it out with Alex, come clean about the whole business, the whole affair. In the cab from the station, she’s worked up, excited, most likely frightened, there’s a history of violence between them remember, he’s hit her before. But when she gets to the door …”

“She can’t go through with it,” Lynn said. “She can’t face him.”

“Right. But are we sure why? Is it because she’s scared of Alex, or because she’s changing her mind?”

“We don’t know,” Lynn said. “And, any way, does it matter? Now. To us, I mean.”

“Likely it determines what she does next.”

“How ’bout she phones him,” Divine suggested.

“The husband?” said Lynn.

“No, this bloke in Grantham. No matter what she says, he can tell she’s in a right state. Wait there, he says, I’ll come over and get you.”

“And there they are,” Resnick said, “arguing it over, back and forth, back and forth.”

“It’s not just that she’s frightened of her husband,” Lynn said, “it’s more than that. It’s worse. She’s realized she’s making a mistake. That’s what all those tears are about, she’s telling Spurgeon, after keeping him dangling all that time, she’s not about to go through with it after all. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t love him enough. And he spends all night trying to convince her that she’s wrong; that she still does. And it doesn’t do any good.”

Jealous husband, Resnick was thinking, violent man, love spurned: he hadn’t been listening. Had heard only what he expected to hear.

“Let’s go,” he said, anxious at the slowness of the automatic doors. “We’ll phone Cambridge on the way.”

Divine stood beside the car as Lynn slipped behind the wheel. “I don’t suppose, boss,” he said, “there’s anyway I could come along?”

“Sorry, Mark,” Resnick said, climbing in. “’Fraid not.” He raised a hand and as he closed the door, Lynn pulled away.

It was dark enough for the blue lights of the emergency vehicles to be seen from some distance, spiraling out across the flat English countryside. A uniformed officer stopped them at the edge of the village and checked their credentials; another waved them over only a little way into Front Street and advised them to park. Colin Presley was standing in the roadway level with the gate of number twenty-seven; the house itself an incongruous blaze of light. When the DS turned toward them, Resnick recognized only too well the look on his face.

“The children …” he began.

But mercifully, Presley shook his head. “With a neighbor. Safe.”

“And the wife?”

Louise was sitting at the center of the kitchen table, almost the last place Resnick had seen her; what stray color she had once managed had now disappeared.

“Are you all right?” Resnick asked, as much from the use of saying it as anything else.

Slowly her head tilted up until she had fixed him with her eyes. “I’m only surprised he had the guts to do it.”

There was a card torn to small pieces beside her elbow and partly burned, the writing mostly beyond recognition, although Resnick believed he knew who had written it, what it said.

“Sir,” Lynn said softly. She was standing in the far doorway and he followed her through into the living room and stood a moment beside her, looking down the garden in the direction of the lights.

They walked out there together, down past the cabbages and the rusted swing and the ambulance men and uniformed officers and finally the police surgeon, who was anxious to have the body lowered carefully to the ground, which it would be once Scene of Crime had finished with their video equipment, their photographs.

Peter Spurgeon was hanging from the uppermost of the branches, a length of narrow rope knotted close to the trunk and then again around his neck. His legs were splayed out at odd angles, like a man who has been desperately trying to climb something and has failed.