“So what?” Millington said when Divine flourished it with something close to triumph. “I've got a copy of that at home myself.”
Divine redeemed himself by finding the letters, hand written, either copies or unsent.
Dear Patrick
It was good to hear from you and to know that you are well. Things have moved on a little here and it looks as though my plans for setting up on my own should see fruition by this summer, autumn at the latest. I have been looking in the area around King's Lynn, which as you know is where my mother originally comes from, and think I may have found something â¦
Dear Mother
,
I'm so glad the flowers arrived safely, and the card, and that you say they made a nice display. I only wish I could have been with you, but as you know, I'm virtually holding down two jobs what with all the traveling and trying to make sure I don't lose the chance to â¦
Dear Mr. Charteris
I am writing to you with considerable regret concerning your decision not to grant in full the loan we recently discussed. I had hoped that during our meeting I had been able to convince you â¦
Dear Lynn
,
I hope this letter from someone who is as yet a complete stranger â¦
At the bottom drawer, underneath the letters, there was an application form for the Open University Science Foundation course, filled in but never sent. There were OS maps of Norfolk and Lincolnshire, with locations marked in blue-black biro, some of them circled in red; creased and well-used, a Little Chef motorists' map for 1993. In an envelope there were color photographs of a woman taken indoors using flash, bright spots reflecting back from the center of bewildered eyes.
“Any ideas?” Divine said, holding them up.
“Susan Rogel, I wouldn't mind betting,” Millington said. “Let's get Siddons down here to be sure. Meantime, get through to the boss, arrange for copies of these maps to be faxed across. I hope to Christ we find the right place and in time.”
Lynn could hear a dog barking, quite far off; the same note, almost, it seemed, without interruption. She had heard Michael singing earlier, close by, the sound of hammering, ten minutes at most and then it had stopped. Her bladder was starting to burn. What she prayed for was the sound of approaching cars. A key turned in the lock and Michael came in.
He was wearing a white shirt, old corduroy trousers, boots on his feet. “Let me just get these off now. No sense getting mud over everything.” He set down the bucket he was carrying and pulled off first one boot and then the other, placing them outside the door.
“Rain's given over,” Michael said. “Going to be a nice day.” He approached her with the bucket, fished from his pocket a small key. “If I trust you to help yourself with this, you're not going to be doing anything stupid?”
Lynn looked back at him but didn't answer.
Michael moved round behind her and knelt down on one knee. “Don't want me to be doing everything for you, not like a baby.” He unlocked one of the cuffs and it swung against the back of her leg. “Get those jeans off, why don't you, and I'll move this bucket underneath you.”
“Do I have to do this while you watch?”
“Why not? It's only natural.”
Lynn shook her secured hand in sudden anger, rattling the chain. “Natural? Like this? What the hell's natural about this?”
“Temper,” Michael smiled, on his feet above her, “temper. You know what I think about temper.”
“All right,” Lynn said, head down. “All right.” With her free hand she eased her pants down along towards her knees; the instant she sat down, as she'd known it would, the urine streamed from her, splashing back against the underside of her thighs.
“Now then,” he said, moments later, lifting the bucket away, “what have we got here?” Folded in his pocket, several sheets of toilet paper. “Will you or shall I?”
Staring at him all the while, she dabbed herself dry and dropped the damp tissue in the bucket when he held it out.
“I suppose now,” he said, locking the cuff back around her wrist, “you'll be expecting something to drink?”
With her free hand, she took hold of his hand but immediately he pulled away. She waited until he was almost at the door. “I was watching you,” she said, “this morning. The way you were just watching me.”
He stopped in his tracks and she thought he was going to turn around, angry, even strike her, but instead he carried on, out through the door, and soon she heard him again, moving around outside the caravan, alternately whistling and singing a snatch of a song she had only ever heard him sing.
Fifty-three
By the time Michelle came away from casualty, Natalie grizzling in her arms, it was mid-morning. Karl's hand had taken nine stitches and was securely bandaged. Lucky, the doctor had said, none of the tendons were touched. The staff nurse, checking Karl's name against the records, had noted this was his second visit within a short space of time. “I explained all of that when the social worker had me bring him in,” Michelle told her. “He had an accident, ran into the door.” And this time, the nurse thought, he just happened to pick up a knife someone had left lying around. Wrigglesworth, the social worker's name was on the card; the nurse made a note to call his office as soon as she got a spare moment. The local police would be informed as a matter of course.
LOCAL CLIMBER KILLED IN FALL
read the placard outside the corner shop.
“Fish fingers, Karl? Is that what you'd like?”
“Ish fingus,” Karl beamed, jumping up and down, hand forgotten. “Ish fingus.”
When she unlocked the front door and called Gary's name, she was relieved there was no reply.
“What do you think?” Lynn said.
He had brought her tomato soup from a can, heated up for lunch; sliced bread, buttered, then folded in half. Freed one hand so she could eat. Michael sitting on one of those insubstantial chairs, chattering away quite happily, not eating himself save for what remained of a chocolate bar, all the while watching her. Concerned.
“Is that all right? The soup, I mean. Precious little choice in the village and, besides, I'm never sure which kind is best. Heinz, I think, that's what they say. I like to buy that Scottish one, but they never have that. The bread was all they had left. I shall have to go earlier tomorrow.”
“Michael, why won't you answer me?”
“What?” he said. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“I asked, what do you imagine's going to happen?”
He seemed to give it some thought. “Oh, I suppose we'll stay here for a while. Quite cozy now since I got this thing, don't you think? Throws out quite a good heat.”
“Michael ⦔
“What I've got to do this afternoon, thoughâwell, Five years I suppose tomorrow would doâsee about hiring some kind of rotavator. That soil out there, I'm not turning it enough by hand.”
“Michael, you're not listening.”
He blinked. “Aren't I? I thought ⦔
“I mean me.”
“What about you?”
“What d'you think's going to happen about me? About this ⦠situation?”
He looked at her for a long time before answering. “Oh, we're not getting on too badly now, are we?”
Five years ago, on an application to open an account at the Halifax Building Society, Michael Stuart Best had given his place of birth as Dublin; as a guarantor he had cited his father, Matthew John Best, an address in Germany, serving with the British army overseas. Applying for a small business loan two years later, he had stated that he was born in Greater Manchester and that his father was deceased.
“He talked about it just the once,” the sales manager at Schotness Stationery had told Graham Millington that morning, “the accident which took his parents off, like. Both of 'em. Aye. Lucky to get out himself, strapped in the back, see. On their way to visit relatives, Norfolk way. Terrible. Something you never get over, a thing like that. Good salesman, though, say that for him. When he was in the mood, talk the birds down out of the trees.”
A quiet chap, the general verdict had been, Divine and Naylor going round the neighbors in Ruddington, knocking on doors. Kept himself to himself; friendly enough, though, not standoffish. Nice, the way he used to buy flowers, drive out to take them to his mum in the nursing home every Sunday.
They had made a room available in the local station; Skelton was there now, something of a sparkle back in his eye. “She was right,” just about the first thing he'd said to Resnick when he arrived. “About the Rogel case. Helen. The connection.”
Resnick didn't give a shit about Helen. The person he cared for here was being held prisoner, her captor a man who had killed one woman already, probably two.
They were steadily narrowing the marked locations down and Resnick continued to pace from desk to wall and wall to desk again, willing the phone to ring.
“Tactical unit's ready to move, Charlie. Helicopter on stand by if we want it. Two ARVs on their way, one from the city, one from Leeds.”
Resnick's thoughts had jumped back several years to the unexceptional living room of an unexceptional house save that, cold in the small garden, Lynn Kellogg had just come upon her first dead body, a woman with blood drawn like ribbons dark through her hair. “How are you feeling?” Resnick had asked, and Lynn had fallen, fingers of one hand hooked inside his mouth, face pressed against his chest.
“Charlie?”
Before he could answer, the phone startled to life and Resnick fumbled it into his hand. Listening, his forefinger traced lines along the surface of the map before them. “You're sure?” he asked. “No room for doubt?”
“No,” Sharon Garnett said. “None at all.”
Before turning to Skelton, Resnick withdrew two of the remaining pins from the map and set them aside, leaving just the one in place. “Got him,” he said, his voice now strangely calm.
“On your way,” Skelton said. “I'll call up the troops.”
Michelle had been mixing Natalie's food when Josie came to the door, short of breath from running almost the length of the street on high-heeled shoes.
“The law, they've nicked Brian. Gary's done a runner.”
Michelle stared back at her, open-mouthed. “What's Gary ⦠Brian ⦠I don't understand.”
“Christ, girl, where the fuck've you been? Brian's been dealing since before Christmas, I thought you knew.”
“But Gary, he'd never ⦔
“Oh, Gary. You know what your Gary's like. Wanted to feel big, go along for the ride. Anyway, look, what it is, I've got to go see Brian's brief. Okay if I bring the kids down, dump 'em with you?”
Michelle nodded, arms tight across her chest. “Josie, what'm I going to do?”
“My advice. Pray they lift Gary before he gets back here. Once he's inside, change the locks, move. Anything. Gary's a loser, always will be. Whatever happens, you'll be better off on your own.”
Michael was sitting at the far end of the caravan, thumbing through a catalog, making notes in the margins, occasionally copying prices down on to a sheet of paper. From time to time he would purse his lips and whistle. “These now,” he remarked from time to time, “they'll look something special, you'll see.” In some part of his mind, Lynn thought, the two of them, Michael and herself, were living together on this piece of land, working happily side by side. The perfect couple. “Your father,” Michael said once, looking up suddenly. “Maybe there's a way you could phone him, find out how he is. Set your mind at rest.” But that had been close to half an hour ago and he'd mentioned no more about it. Lynn wondered if Skelton had asked for a news blackout or whether her mother, pottering in the kitchen, had been startled by her name. Tears pricked her eyes at the thought and for the first time she was close to breaking down.
“Nancy,” she said with a sniff, needing to say something, needing to talk. “Did you know her too? Beforehand?”
Michael seemed surprised, his mind full of calculations, seedlings, yields. “That was nothing,” he said eventually. “Casual. Not like this.”
The main buildings were several hundred yards from the caravan and the ramshackle shed nearby, with its buckling walls and rusting corrugated roof. “It's more than I can ever manage myself,” the farmer said, “since I had this trouble with my leg. When he come along last year looking to rent that parcel out, seemed like a fair blessing.”
Resnick nodded and passed through to the back of the house. Sharon Garnett handed him the binoculars, pointed in the direction of the cream caravan standing on blocks in the corner of the far field.
There were marksmen in place on three sides, the nearest flat on his belly only ninety yards away, elbows braced in the ridged earth. Just moments before, he had had a partial sighting of the target through the caravan window, moving left to right across his vision. He swore softly when he failed to get the order to fire.
“I'm going to try,” Resnick said, “to get to the shed.”
“Michael,” Lynn had said, “why don't you leave all that for now? Come and talk to me.”
In response, he had laughed. “I'm not stupid, you know. You won't catch me falling for some old trick.”
Lynn had rattled her handcuffs against the chain. “What can I do?”
So he came over and sat beside her, wary, as if maybe expecting for the first time that it would all come springing back at him. What had attracted her in his eyes had disappeared and been replaced by the uncertainties of a child.
“You were going to tell me about Nancy,” Lynn said.
Michael moved closer, his leg almost touching hers. “She wasn't like you. Screaming and swearing and kicking out at me every chance she could get. The rest of the time pretending to be nice, nice as could be. Making all those promises, things she would do for me if only I'd let her go.” He laughed.