Just shy of the supermarket entrance, she caught her reflection in a plate-glass window and stopped. She turned side on to admire her newly coloured hair. She ran fingers through it and while she stared at the blur of reflected traffic crawling past behind her, she saw the girl again.
She saw her open face and fat, wet lips.
She saw the snot-smeared face of the boy she had found crying at school a few weeks before.
Eyes filled with tears and relief.
Eyes wide and trusting.
Shaking the images away, she stepped towards the supermarket. She yanked a trolley free of its chain and marched inside. They would eat spaghetti carbonara and damn well like it.
It was a warm day with no wind, and the club was busy, even for a Saturday morning. Ed sat at the bar finishing a pint of orange juice and lemonade, thinking through the doubles match he had just lost; reliving the vital rallies, the silly points that had cost him and his partner the game. He had been over-hitting his ground strokes and been atypically indecisive at the net. He told himself it was just an off day and that his partner had not played particularly well either, but Ed knew they had lost because his mind had not really been on the game.
‘Never mind, mate.’
He turned as his doubles partner came out of the shower room and walked towards the clubhouse door. Ed wasn’t going to go as far as saying sorry, but he managed a shared shrug of resignation and they hastily agreed to arrange another game early the following week. When he turned back to the bar, the club manager asked him if he wanted anything else. Ed was no longer thirsty, but said, ‘Sod it,’ and ordered a bottle of beer.
‘More like it,’ the manager said.
It was good to be relaxing without that niggle of guilt he felt during the week when he found himself sitting on his backside. No more than a niggle though. What the hell else was he supposed to do, things being the way they were? Drive for an hour to Slough or Maidenhead so he could try and fail to flog a set of atlases to some sour-faced bookseller? A poxy set of medical textbooks?
‘Here you go.’ The manager set his bottle on the bar. ‘Drown your sorrows.’
Ed blinked, then realised the man was talking about the tennis match.
He hadn’t drunk anything since his night out with Dave Cullen and Barry Finnegan a week before. Since he had reeled in just before midnight, been berated by Sue for waking her up and been called a ‘pisshead’. The truth was, he could not remember the last time he’d drunk so much, and booze was something he had no problem going without, so he didn’t think it did any harm to have a blowout now and again. Sue probably drank more than he did, when you added it all up.
He had never been one of those drinkers blessed with the ability to forget the rubbish they came out with after one too many. Or six. Not that he hadn’t meant everything he’d said that night. In vino veritas, all that. What he really cared about was that they hadn’t thought he was talking rubbish.
That they thought he was a good bloke.
He’d decided, thinking back through their mini pub-crawl, that Dave was actually a pretty good bloke himself; that he wasn’t quite as geeky or superior as Ed had first thought. Barry was another matter, though. What the hell was his problem? Maybe he just wasn’t bright enough to keep up, but Ed didn’t have time for anyone who didn’t laugh at a decent joke, or wasn’t able to take one. Who refused to contribute.
What gets said on a boys’ night out …
Obviously he hadn’t told Sue very much.
It was fine as it turned out, because the next morning all she’d done was make snide comments about needing to keep her voice down and how men never really talked about anything important. How she could get more out of someone she’d just met in ten minutes than Ed could get out of his oldest friend in an entire evening. You’re right, he’d said. It was just football and old TV shows. He certainly hadn’t told her that he’d put his size ten in it about Angie not being invited when Sue went out with Marina. And of course he hadn’t said a dickie-bird about Dave’s conversation with that policewoman. The various ‘ideas’ they had ‘bounced’ around. His tin-pot theories.
He didn’t want to talk about that stuff. Simple as that.
He jumped when a club member he’d played with a couple of times slapped him on the back. A bumptious tosser who brought three rackets on to the court when he couldn’t hit a winner if his life depended on it.
‘So, how’s business, Ed?’
One of those pricks who only asked so he could tell you just how well he was doing, as if the new Mercedes in the car park had not made that obvious enough.
‘Yeah, not bad,’ Ed said.
‘Pleased to hear it.’ For once, Ed was spared a detailed report on the commercial property boom and instead the prick said, ‘What are you and Sue doing later? We thought we might try that new Thai place in Enfield.’
‘Sorry, mate, we’re having people over,’ Ed said.
‘Anyone I know?’
Ed resisted telling the man that they were unlikely to have any friends in common. ‘Just two couples we met on holiday.’
‘Uh-oh.’
‘Yeah, you know how that goes.’
‘Good luck with that,’ the man said, pulling a face. He waited as though expecting to be offered a drink then saw someone else he was keen to impress and drifted to the other end of the bar.
Ed lifted up his beer. That was something else he’d meant when he was out with Barry and Dave. He definitely did not want to spend the whole evening talking about Amber-Marie Wilson. Laughing and joking one minute, murdered girls the next.
He knew it would probably be an uphill battle.
THIRTY-FOUR
Gardner caught a flight just after 8.00 a.m. and was touching down in Atlanta ninety minutes later. He waited with Patti Lee Wilson as the transport casket was carried slowly off the plane. He stood firm when she leaned against him while it was loaded into the back of the white Cadillac Statesman which had been given permission to drive on to the tarmac.
White for a child, Gardner guessed.
She did not cry. He figured that she was cried out, for the time being at least. The guy from the funeral home nodded to him before he shut the car door and drove away. They watched it leave and Gardner waited for the noise of a 747 roaring into the air from the next runway to die down before he spoke to her.
‘They’ll look after her now,’ he said.
‘Better than I ever did,’ she said.
He laid a hand on her shoulder and shook his head, told her not to talk nonsense. They turned and walked back towards the terminal together. One of the mechanics working at some steps near the apron took off his cap as they walked past and Gardner gave him a small nod.
‘You want to get a drink?’ Patti asked. ‘I want to get a drink.’
‘Can we have one back at your place?’ Gardner said. He reached past to open the door for her. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about.’
‘Fine by me,’ she said. ‘Liquor’s cheaper at my place.’
She lived in a brown and white, two-bedroom condo in Decautur. The place was neat and clean; neater and cleaner than Gardner had expected and it shamed him a little to admit this to himself.
They sat sweating in the living room, a plastic fan creaking and clicking as it spun overhead. Each of them had a beer and Patti had poured chips into a large bowl, which sat between them on the vinyl couch.
‘Air-con’s playing up,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a service contract, but I’m a bit behind with it. Things got away from me these last few weeks, you know?’
‘It’s fine,’ Gardner said. ‘Beer’s cold.’
She held the bottle to her forehead. ‘Right.’
‘A witness told us you were talking to some guy,’ he said. ‘A few days before Amber-Marie went missing. You remember that?’
She thought about it.
‘You were outside one of the bars in the village. She was inside talking to the three British couple
s?’
That appeared to jog her memory. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Yeah, some guy.’
‘Dark hair, pumped up, tattoos on his arms?’
‘That’s him.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Just some guy hitting on me,’ she said. ‘We were both having a cigarette and we got talking, that was all.’ She drank. ‘You know, tell you the truth, I might actually have been hitting on him.’
‘Did you see him again?’
‘No, more’s the pity.’
‘Did you tell him where you were staying?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I mean I might have done.’
‘OK, so do you think he might have seen Amber-Marie?’
She shrugged. ‘I guess it’s possible. I can’t remember if she was still with me when we got talking. I can’t say for definite.’ She looked at him. ‘You think he might have been the one?’
‘I’m not saying that.’
‘But he might have been, right?’
‘We have to look at every possibility,’ Gardner said. He could see from her pained expression that she was already thinking the man with tattoos was the one. That her attempt to pick up a good-looking stranger on the street had led directly to her daughter’s abduction and murder. Confirming what she already believed; that it was all her fault.
Gardner’s cell buzzed in his jacket pocket and he took it out. There was no number displayed.
He flipped it open and gave his name.
When the caller had identified herself, Gardner said, ‘How’d you get this number?’
‘Your office gave it to me,’ Jenny Quinlan said.
Silently cursing Whitlow or whoever else had passed on his cellphone number, Gardner pressed the handset to his chest and told Patti that he needed to take the call. He told her a second time. Her face still creased with unpleasant thoughts, she waved a hand and told him to go ahead. He stepped outside the door into a front yard that was irregularly divided into patches of dried mud and crabgrass. There was a rusty swing in the far corner. On the sidewalk opposite, a boy on a bike was being pulled along by a toffee-coloured retriever.
‘I’m a little busy,’ he told Quinlan.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘So you’ll need to be quick.’
‘Well I sent you the interview reports a week ago and I hadn’t heard anything back, so …’
‘This is not the only case I’m working, you know.’
‘You didn’t get back to me, that’s all.’
‘I would have done so if I’d needed to,’ Gardner said. He heard the intake of breath and immediately felt bad for snapping. ‘The department budget doesn’t stretch to too many transatlantic phone calls.’
She laughed rather more than was necessary. ‘I know what that’s like,’ she said. ‘We haven’t even got a kettle that works properly in the Incident Room. The computers are steam-powered!’
Gardner breathed in. Hot asphalt and a whiff of dog-shit. ‘So …’
‘So, have you had a chance to follow up on anything I told you about?’
‘As it happens, I’m doing that right now.’
‘Oh, how’s it going?’ Her voice was a little higher suddenly. ‘Anything useful? Any … breaks?’
‘Not as yet, I’m afraid.’ He pressed on quickly, before the woman could ask any more pointless questions. ‘But we will follow up on anything we think worth following up, OK?’
‘Well, you know where I am,’ she said.
‘I know where you are.’ Gardner snapped the phone shut and slipped it back into his pocket. Cute accent or not, the woman was fast becoming a royal pain in the ass, and on reflection he wished he had been a little tougher on her.
When he came back inside, Patti was sitting on the couch with a fresh beer. She reached down to the side of the couch for another bottle and held it towards him. He could feel a headache kicking in and did not want another, but he took it anyway.
‘You stopping for the funeral?’ she asked.
Gardner picked at the label on his bottle.
‘You’re welcome to stay over here.’
‘I’d like to,’ he lied. ‘I really have to get back.’
She raised her arms and barked out a dry laugh. Gardner could see that she wasn’t cried out at all. ‘Suddenly, I’ve got a spare room.’
THIRTY-FIVE
It wasn’t as though she never worked on Saturdays. Still, Jenny had decided it would not be a good idea to let on that today she was actually calling from home, on her own time. On her own dime, as he might have said.
She lay back on her bed, thinking things through.
That crack about transatlantic phone calls. Laughing and joking with her like any other colleague. Maybe a bit flirty too, if that wasn’t her imagination running riot with her.
‘He looks sod all like Denzel Washington,’ Steph had said, when Jenny had shown her Gardner’s picture. ‘Well, maybe if Denzel Washington had spent a fortnight eating nothing but doughnuts.’
‘He’s got this amazing voice.’
‘You can’t shag a voice …’
It was incredible timing, Jenny thought, to have called just when he was running down one of the leads she had given him. He clearly hadn’t wanted to say too much about it though, so maybe he’d been unable to speak freely. Perhaps he’d been talking to someone he didn’t want listening in on their conversation.
Cop talk.
She flicked the television on, then flopped back on to the bed, trying to decide what to do with the rest of her Saturday. Steph was busy, but that didn’t matter. She might go and see a film, she thought, or there were two or three novels she’d picked up and put down again. She might even just stay in and watch whatever the hell she wanted on TV, which was after all one of the advantages of being single. Everyone was always banging on about being with somebody, but that didn’t always turn out for the best, did it, even when you stayed together? Thinking about the likes of the Finnegans and the Dunnings and that other weird pair, Jenny decided that being in a couple was not all it was cracked up to be.
You could have way more fun on your own.
THIRTY-SIX
Behind the counter, Devon or Deron poured out hot milk and said, ‘You’re usually in a bit earlier than this.’
Dave said, ‘Yeah, my girlfriend normally does the morning class at the theatre.’ He pointed back towards the Brixton Road. ‘She’s doing something a bit different today, that’s all.’
‘She an actress or something?’
‘Trying to be.’
‘Have I seen her in anything?’
‘She’s just starting out,’ Dave said. ‘It’s a tough business to get into.’
The barista nodded. ‘I’m really a guitarist …’
Dave took his coffee across to a table in the window and spread out his Guardian. Having admitted defeat with the espresso, he had decided to persevere a little longer with broadsheet newspapers.
He turned the pages slowly.
He should probably have just said, ‘Yes,’ to the bloke behind the counter and not ‘Trying to be,’ but still, asking if he’d seen her in anything after that was pretty stupid. The truth was, he was never very comfortable talking about Marina to anyone. He’d shown Kevin a picture at work, of course, because he’d wanted him to know how gorgeous she was, but he tried to avoid any further discussion. He wanted to keep his private life private.
He wanted to keep her to himself.
He took a sip of coffee and felt his chest tighten as he remembered some of the things he’d said when he was out with Ed and Barry. Things about him and Marina, personal stuff. He was not a drinker. He was only grateful that he hadn’t blurted out anything else, that he hadn’t said too much. When Marina had asked how the evening had been, Dave had told her that Ed had been showing off as usual, that Barry had been a bit surly. She had nodded as though expecting nothing else, still she knew how much he’d been drinking so she had been wearing the expression that clouded
her face if there was even a fraction of doubt. Wanting to make sure there was ground he had not been stupid enough to cover. Up close, looking him in the eye and checking for a reaction.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he had told her. ‘They’re idiots. I just listened to them talk rubbish all night.’
In spite of himself, he was still wondering what Ed had meant in the Indian restaurant. Calling him a weirdo, saying ‘exactly’ the way he had. Dave had struggled to keep his anger in check, to control his breathing, but he desperately wanted to know what Ed Dunning thought of him; what all of them said about him and Marina behind their backs. Obviously nobody ever really knew what anyone else was thinking and, on balance, that was probably a good thing. Like that film where the hero tells everyone exactly what’s on his mind and his life falls apart very bloody quickly. But when it came to what people said and what they actually thought, Dave considered himself more finely attuned to that everyday deceit than other people. More of an expert. He told himself that he could see the yawning gap between the public and the private face; the breadth and the blackness of it.
He drank his coffee, remembering a line from some book or film he’d seen somewhere.
Who knows what evil lurks in men’s hearts?
He smiled, thinking that in Ed Dunning’s case there was probably nothing lurking apart from the next shit joke and something about the size of a woman’s tits.
Devon – yes he was sure it was Devon – wandered across and put a plate down in front of him. ‘Cheesecake,’ he said. ‘On the house because you’re a good customer. My sister makes it …’
Dave said thanks and helped himself to a forkful. Sweet as it was, a sour taste came up in his throat as he thought about dinner at the Dunnings’ place that evening.
Smiling and trying to keep that gap nice and wide. Then Ed making some crack about what he and Marina got up to in bed.
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