Crane glanced at Patsy, who gave a resigned shrug. Again, it was more or less what she too had said on the first night. ‘What say we drop in on him tomorrow evening, around seven, if you’re free?’
‘I’ll be in the Glass-house after six. I’ll ring you if I can’t make it.’
When he’d gone Patsy made Crane another drink and they sat on the sofa. ‘I do hope you find someone, Frank.’
‘Me too. And Mr Pushy deserves a break, he’s never stopped working on it. I know he’s only thinking in terms of his career, but I suppose that’s what ambitious journalists are like. And it’s Geoff’s ambition that might very well get us there in the end.’
Though Crane was determined that he was going to get there first, aware that he was up against someone with investigative skills almost as sharp as his own, and who took any mistakes as badly as he did. But then he had to remind himself that he and Anderson weren’t opponents, they were supposed to be on the same side.
‘How are things going at work, Patsy?’
She coloured slightly, in the familiar way. ‘Nancy, one of the supervisors, asked me to sit with her during my lunch break. She began telling me what my duties would be if I got promoted.’
‘That means you will be.’
‘She said she was sure I’d do well, because I know all the girls and get on with them.’
‘She’ll know.’
‘Trouble is, the girls have sussed what’s going on. They’re not the same. I mean they’re still friendly, but they seem to be watching what they’re saying, know what I mean?’
‘You’ll never really be one of them again, not if you’re going to be over them. But you’ll make new friends, on the next rung.’
She nodded dejectedly. It was the first time her newfound enthusiasm for getting on seemed to have deserted her. Crane was glad to turn away for a time from the mind-numbing problems surrounding her sister’s death, to help someone with problems of her own.
Carol was sitting in the Glass-house with several of her colleagues. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Touching base with the cave man?’
Crane sat next to her. ‘You know that cliché “the usual suspects”? Well, we’re aiming to talk to them all over again.’
‘That’s more like it,’ she said, grinning, ‘we get such a petted lip when you will keep doing things without him.’
‘So I’m finding out.’
‘Trouble is, he’s always seen it as his story and he gets very agitated about anyone trying to share it. We all tend to get a bit proprietorial in this business. He probably thinks you might want to write a book about it.’
‘He’s the writer, not me. And anyway, he deserves whatever he can make out of the Donna Jackson story. No one could have worked harder on it than him.’
‘Don’t I know it. He’s spent so much time on it I was beginning to wonder if there was a bit on the side involved. These people you keep talking to, I don’t suppose one of them’s female, gorgeous-looking and giving him googoo eyes?’ She giggled to imply she was only joking, but he could tell she was speaking in code and making a serious request. He shook his head.
‘Women didn’t seem to figure much in Donna’s life. So far, it’s been blokes all the way.’
She looked relieved, but Crane knew she was always going to have worries about Anderson and other women, because wherever he was the eyes of other women followed him.
‘What I’ll do when he runs off to London I can’t imagine,’ she said. ‘I’ll be up against girls who have double firsts and work in television and earn a million a year. But will they be able to cook, I ask myself, or change a duvet cover, or programme a DVD-recorder?’ She was giggling again, and Crane felt that what she was saying now was that she could turn a blind eye to Anderson having the occasional affair as long as he always came back to her. He knew from experience that some women could live with this state of affairs around men of looks and charm who showed every sign of having a glowing future.
Then her green eyes softened and he knew Anderson stood behind him before he felt his hand on his shoulder. ‘You need to watch this one, Carol,’ Anderson said breezily. ‘These quiet types with their sympathetic smiles can be inside your knickers while you’re still telling them how you felt when the dog died.’
‘I did try to warn him how insanely jealous you get. Anyway, who said I had any knickers on?’
He squeezed in at the table, giving her the sort of smile that went with a private joke. ‘One drink and then off, Frank?’
‘I’ll get them. Carol?’
‘Can we go in your car? It’s best if we don’t seem to roll up mob-handed. Not with Fletcher.’
‘I’ll drive yours to the flat, Geoff, if you like,’ Carol said. ‘It’ll save Frank having to come back into town. I can leave mine at the office.’
The hesitation was almost imperceptible but it was there. ‘Oh … good idea, Carol. We’ll have a bite to eat when I get back.’
It confirmed what Crane had suspected. Anderson was getting bored with her. Maybe her instincts were sound and there was another woman on the go.
He lived on the old Keighley-Skipton road. The house was large, elegant and Edwardian and at the rear overlooked open country. Ornamental trees dotted a garden that was mainly lawn with well-kept borders. Fletcher was clearly doing well.
Shadows were lengthening in the evening sun as they walked up the drive. Anderson drew the handle of an old-fashioned bell pull. The door was opened very quickly. He gave Crane’s unknown face a wary glance before looking at Anderson. ‘Oh, you again,’ he said, in a low hard tone. ‘Well you can forget it. I’ve already told you everything I knew about her.’
‘There’s been a development, Mr Fletcher,’ Anderson said courteously, with his warm smile. ‘Could you possibly spare us a few minutes?’
‘No.’
‘I’m a private investigator, Mr Fletcher,’ Crane said. ‘Frank Crane, working for Donna’s parents. It would be a great help to me, and them, if we could spend a little time with you.’
‘Who is it, Clive?’ a woman’s voice called.
‘Oh, shit,’ he muttered. ‘You’d better come in.’
They moved into a large square hall. The woman looked from a half-open door and the hall smelt faintly of good cooking. ‘Two gentlemen wanting to arrange a portrait of their board of directors,’ he told her, with well-honed presence of mind. ‘I’ll take them up to the office.’
‘Right you are.’ She gave them a friendly smile. ‘I can hold dinner.’ She was fortyish, plumpish, and had rather coarse, tinted-blonde hair. A slight vagueness seemed to go with the pleasant manner. Crane felt it was a vagueness that would be of great help to Fletcher in living his double life under her nose.
They followed him up a wide staircase. It had dark oak balustrades that also ran along a lengthy landing. Two teenage girls hung over the landing rail and gazed lingeringly at Anderson before going back to their rooms. Anderson glanced at Crane with a small upward jerk of his head. It translated as two pretty young kids whose father made obscene movies of pretty young kids.
Fletcher led them over creaking floorboards and through a door at the end of the landing. This was his office. It had doors to left and right, which Crane guessed were studio and darkroom. It was comfortably furnished and had a large antique pedestal desk and a bow-back Windsor chair. Lavish examples of his highly-skilled work were displayed on the walls: wedding groups in dappled sunlight, winsome babies, family portraits, businessmen looking decisive.
‘Well, get on with it,’ he said tersely.
‘Things have changed, Mr Fletcher,’ Crane told him. ‘It was common knowledge that Bobby Mahon was the leading suspect in Donna’s murder. He’s now been cleared.’
Crane saw a flicker of unease in his eyes, but otherwise he gave little away. He was about five-ten and well-built, with strong features and a head of thick auburn hair. His eyes were dark blue and glinted when they caught the light, and seemed to hint at the faint, louche lassi
tude of a man overdrawing on sizeable energy levels. Crane guessed he overdid everything: work, play, drink, sex. He’d certainly have access to plenty of sex.
‘You’d better sit,’ he said, with an edginess he could only just control. ‘Christ, I never thought it could be anyone else but that shithead.’
‘These things happen, sir,’ Anderson said comfortingly.
‘It means the police have to make a fresh start,’ Crane told him.
‘Does that mean I’ll have to waste time with them too?’
‘If we can get a firm lead on Donna’s killer we should be able to spare you any further dealings with DS Benson.’
‘I spent a lot of time with that kid,’ he said harshly. ‘She had the most photogenic face I’ve ever pointed a lens at. I could have made her a big name. Apart from that I liked her, liked her a lot.’
Enough to shell out seventy-odd pounds a throw to sleep with her? Crane wondered if he really was the C in her diary. But then Fletcher suddenly had a haunted look about him, as if his unfocused eyes saw again the woman he’d photographed so often. He looked forlorn, as if he genuinely grieved.
‘Oh, well,’ Anderson said gently, ‘at least you’ve got plenty of other attractive young women to console yourself with.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he snapped, back in the present, eyes glinting, face hard.
‘Your glamour photography. Your remarkable ability to make young women look their sexy best. You very kindly lent us a picture of Donna to put in the paper when the poor kid’s body was found, remember?’
The other watched him. He couldn’t quite decide if he was being needled by this amiable young man, but Crane was quite certain he was. It was Mahon and pointing the bone all over again.
‘Just to get things straight in my own mind, sir,’ Crane said. ‘Would you mind telling me when you last saw Donna?’
‘Two days before she went missing,’ he said mechanically. ‘We’d had another long photo shoot. Pros, we need dozens of shots to get the right one.’
‘And they were all … routine modelling shots?’ Anderson asked, with subtly pointed emphasis.
‘Of course they bloody were!’ he said, stung. ‘That’s the only kind of glamour work I do.’
Crane and Anderson both knew the value of a dubious silence and they let it roll for a few seconds. Crane said, ‘Did Donna ever mention an Adrian, sir? It’s very important. No surname, I’m afraid.’
He seemed genuinely to be searching his memory. He finally shook his head. ‘Means nothing. She talked about Mahon now and then, and the guy who owns Leaf and Petal – Joe Hellewell – but that’s about it.’
Crane nodded. ‘I know the police have gone into all this, but would you mind telling me where you were the night Donna went missing?’
‘The Photographic Society dinner at the Norfolk Gardens.’
‘About what time did it end?’
‘Elevenish.’
‘And you came directly home?’
‘Yes. My wife can vouch …’ He’d said it all before.
‘In your own motor?’
He gave the slightest pause. ‘… Yes.’
‘Wasn’t that rather unusual?’
‘Why should it be? I’d only had a couple.’
‘Oh …’ Crane shrugged. ‘I suppose if I’d gone to a boozy do I’d have wanted to get a few down and join in the fun. I’d have taken a taxi.’
Crane heard Anderson’s soft intake of breath as a second flicker of anxiety showed in Fletcher’s glinting eyes. He wasn’t ready for this, it had caught him off his guard. It had to have been a question neither the police nor Anderson had thought to put.
‘Taxis, they’re … expensive from this distance,’ he said uneasily.
Crane glanced pointedly at his Rolex, his handmade cotton shirt and silk tie. Fletcher didn’t like it, that he’d looked to need to raid the petty cash tin.
‘Ten miles,’ Crane said musingly. ‘£25 return?’
‘I went in my own car, what’s the big deal?’
He was flushing with irritation, because though sharp he’d not seen this coming. Anderson had though. The big deal was that Crane couldn’t believe a wealthy man who liked a drink would spend four hours nursing two. Unless he needed to stay sober to drive on from the dinner to see a girlfriend. A girlfriend who’d possibly been eased into a reservoir.
‘Were your daughters at home that night, sir?’
‘His colour deepened slightly. ‘I … can’t remember. What’s that got to do with anything? Christ, it’s twelve months ago.’
In other words they’d been away. Crane wondered if he might be on to something, felt a familiar frisson. It meant his wife would be home alone. What if Fletcher had given her a doctored drink before he’d set off to his dinner, which had meant she’d slept so soundly she’d had no real idea when he’d crept under the duvet?
The phone rang. Fletcher snatched it up, listened. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said slowly, glancing at the two men. ‘Look, I’ll take it in the drawing room, Steph.’ He put down the phone, said to Crane, ‘Give me five, but when I get back we’ll need to wrap this up PDQ. My family want their dinner.’ He went off.
‘What can it be he wants neither us or his missus to hear?’ Anderson said, chuckling. ‘Had the arsehole on the run there, didn’t you, Crane? Bugger, why didn’t I think to ask him how he’d got to the Norfolk?’
He wore his usual wry smile, but Crane now knew the intense irritation it was concealing in a man as aggressively competitive as Anderson. Crane couldn’t help feeling amused to have got ahead of him once again, but simply said, ‘If you were a PI and not a newspaperman you’d have picked up on it.’ It was true. He missed out on very little as it was.
The reporter winked, stood up. ‘Well, the cat’s away. He might not have locked everything up.’ He began to try drawers, without success, then turned to an outsize filing cabinet. ‘Ha ha, he’s overlooked this, but it just seems to be file copies of his prints. Let’s try J for Jackson, shall we?’
‘This might not be a good idea. If he catches you he’ll have us straight through the door.’
‘Oh, come on, Frank. We cut corners, blokes like us. Let’s see what kinds of shots he was really taking of her. Those creaking floorboards on the landing should warn us when he’s on his way back.’
It was this kind of impulsiveness in Anderson that Crane had always been so uneasy about, but he had to admit to being curious. Anyway, he was already leafing through a wad of glossy prints. They all seemed to be totally respectable modelling shots. They showed Donna right profile, left profile, full face. Donna in even light, in shadow, in a key light that gave emphasis to those luminous round eyes with their riveting impression of an innocence that blended with depth, emotion with spirituality. Donna in black and white, in colour, in a sepia tint. Donna standing, sitting, lying down, even twirling, arms extended as gracefully as the wings of a planing bird, gleaming hair flying about her like a fully opened fan.
‘God, what a cracker she was,’ Anderson muttered.
It said it all, that such a pretty and vibrant woman should have had such an appalling fate. Crane felt he could sympathize then with the journalist’s urge to profile her as the guileless creature she’d certainly looked the sad symbolic victim of an upbringing in a sink estate. Even though he’d always known the description wasn’t going to fit.
And then Anderson turned up a print showing Donna naked.
She stood framed by a half-open door, and looking away from the lens, as if unaware of it, her impossibly perfect rounded breasts slightly suspended as she leant forward, apparently to pick up pants and bra, hair now cascading down the sides of her flawless features, her belly flat, her legs smooth and slender, her waist so narrow it looked as if it could easily be encircled by a pair of male hands.
The floorboards didn’t creak. Fletcher, paranoid, must have tipftoed. He was in the room before the folder could even be closed. He took it all in in a nano-second.
‘I’ll speak to your editor in the morning, Anderson,’ he rasped. ‘You’ll be wise to start clearing your desk. And you, Crane, you should know better. Don’t think you’ll get away with it either.’
But Anderson gave him a relaxed smile. ‘You’ll not be doing any of that, Mr Fletcher. You’ll be too worried. You see, this is a print of a naked young woman you were supposed to be grooming for a modelling career. She subsequently ended up in a reservoir. Was that because she’d not agree to go in that cellar of yours with the soft lights on and her fanny in the air? Or maybe she’d got to know too much?’
Fletcher was flushed brick red. ‘Any more on those lines, mister, and you’ll be in a court room before you can spit.’
‘Mr Fletcher,’ Crane said quietly, ‘if the police could find the time and the evidence you’d be in a court room yourself. They certainly know about your cellar and your obscene videos and your use of underage people.’
‘She didn’t know I’d taken it, you dozy sods!’ he suddenly cried. ‘Well, look at them, they’re all standard poses except one. That one. She didn’t know I’d taken it. She was changing into normal gear. She’d left the door open. I couldn’t resist it. She didn’t even know, for Christ’s sake. She didn’t …’ He broke off in a voice that seemed almost choked by a sob.
Crane believed him. It was obvious he was speaking off the cuff. He’d taken a single shot, charming in its artfulness, of a naked beauty dressing herself. Shades of Renoir.
‘But we can’t be sure where it led to, Mr Fletcher, can we?’ Anderson said softly, smile still intact.
‘I’ll have to pass on what we’ve learnt here to the police, sir,’ Crane told him, ‘because I think you went on somewhere after the Norfolk dinner, and I think they’ll want to go into that with you again. I’d try to be very, very cooperative, if I were you.’
‘And we’ll need to keep this print,’ Anderson said calmly, storing it in what seemed to be a specially enlarged inside pocket of his lightweight jacket.
‘Don’t you dare!’ Fletcher screamed, rushing at him. ‘Don’t you bloody dare! It’s my property and it only leaves here under warrant.’
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