Off Minor (14 page)

Skelton had finished his sentence, put his bookmark in place and gone to the hall telephone, receiver dangling from its cord as Kate had left it.

The first tones of Resnick’s voice and he had known it was serious. “All right, Charlie, I’m coming in.”

Now Skelton stood behind his desk. “Mother’s not turned up yet?”

Resnick shook his head.

“Who’s out there?” Skelton angled the chair away from the desk and sat down, indicating that Resnick should do likewise. The overhead light burned brightly, the clear hundred-watt bulb reflecting off the white inside of the coned shade. The raw facts, such as were known, lay typed inside the folder on Skelton’s blotter, together with the photocopied face, Emily’s age and description, last seen …

Three months ago they had sat in the same room, the same situation. Twenty-four hours. Forty-eight. The autopsy report on Gloria Summers still lay in the top drawer of the superintendent’s desk.

“Patel, sir.”

“Last in contact?”

“Twenty minutes back.”

Skelton opened the folder and slid the papers out, fanning them across the desk like a deck of cards. Resnick leaned forward, for a moment resting his head against a hand, elbow on his knee.

“The mother, anything to go on outside the father’s hunch?”

Resnick straightened. “Some psychiatric history, hospitalization.”

“Recent?”

“Few years back now.”

“Do we know anything more specific?”

“Depression, Morrison says.”

“Jesus, Charlie! We’re all depressed.”

Five percent of the population at any one time, Resnick thought, and that was just those clinically diagnosed. Sit most people down in front of a standard HAD test and get them to check off the answers, how many thousand more would be standing in line for their lithium, their Tryptizol?

“The wife …”

“Which one?”

“The second. Lorraine. She says the girl’s mother’s been acting peculiar for quite a while, phone calls and the like. Recently, she’s taken to hanging round the house.”

“What doing?”

Resnick shrugged. “Not a lot, apparently. Watching.”

“That’s all?”

Nod of the head.

“No approach made to the girl?”

“None.”

“Could be she was building up for it.”

Resnick glanced at his watch. “Neighbor Patel spoke to, reckoned she was always home this side of eight o’clock.”

“And if she’s not?”

Resnick didn’t answer.

“If she’s not,” Skelton said, “we have to assume she’s snatched the kid.”

Of all the variables tripping over themselves inside Resnick’s mind, it was the one to be infinitely preferred. Even though it was less than a minute since he had looked, he checked his wrist again. Twenty minutes short of nine o’clock.

Patel kept the engine running for fifteen minutes at a time, heater turned up high. In between, he would climb out of the car and pace up and down, clapping his hands together, warming them with his breath. Normally, going out on obs in this weather, he would take a large Thermos, a pair of long johns under his gray trousers; this had been so sudden, there had not been time to find even his gloves.

A woman came out from one of the terraced houses with a Snoopy mug. “Coffee, all right?”

Patel smiled thanks and sipped, giving her an immediate questioning look.

“Brandy. We’d got it in for Christmas. Only a drop, duck, don’t you fret. That or a cuddle to keep out the cold, eh?”

Patel had phoned Alison from the call box on the main road. “Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to make it.”

“Oh, well,” Alison had replied, “another evening trying to master macramé. You don’t know anyone who wants half a dozen slightly skew-whiff plant holders, do you?”

Back in the car, Patel contacted the station: nothing to report either way. He switched on the radio and failed to find anything worth listening to. A car turned into the street, headlights wavering and widening in Patel’s wing mirror; hand on the car door, he held his breath, relaxing only when it had turned again, this time out of sight. These weekends that the little girl’s mother went on so regularly, wasn’t the most likely thing that she was off to see someone she knew? He patted his pocket, checking his notebook was in place, time to knock on a few more doors.

House-to-house near the Morrisons’ home had come up with three vehicles parked close by during the afternoon and so far unaccounted for: a transit van, dark green, a black Sierra with a rear stabilizer and fancy trim, and a red hatchback, possibly a Nova.

There were also two reports of strangers. Four different people remarked on a man wearing sports clothes—blue running gear, track-suit trousers and a hooded anorak top—jogging up and down both sides of the crescent. Two said the hood had been up, one said, no, definitely down, the fourth was uncertain; one claimed to have seen a wispy beard. It was not impossible that they had seen more than one person running; increasingly, it was what people did on Sunday afternoons, those who weren’t sleeping in front of the television, taking a nap with their respective husbands or wives.

The other sighting was of a woman, early middle age, nothing remarkable about the way she was dressed, but she had seemed to have been wandering along talking to herself. Yes, out loud. No, not loud enough to hear what she had been saying. Wait a minute, though, now the officer mentioned it, she did seem to have been paying some attention to the Morrison house, looking into the windows as she went past.

The police knocked on more doors, asked the same questions, wrote down the replies. Overtime was all well and good, especially something like this, a kiddie gone missing, but nothing to be gained from hanging about, not with the chance of getting in a pint or two before closing.

Patel’s voice was indistinct, the connection poor, but the gist of what he told Resnick was clear. As far as any of the neighbors knew, Diana spent her weekends away in Yorkshire, though exactly where was more debatable. There were two votes for Hebden Bridge, one for Huddersfield, one Heptonstall and a rather half-hearted suggestion of Halifax. At least the H was consistent. Diana had said something to the woman two doors down, possibly the closest in the street to a friend, that she had been seeing someone in the course of these weekends.

“Staying with him?”

“Oh, I don’t know, duck. She didn’t offer and I say it’s none of my business to ask, but you know what they do say, nature will have her way.”

“You never saw this man? He didn’t come and see her down here?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“And his name? She didn’t mention his name?”

“No, lovey, sorry.”

“Get yourself home,” Resnick said. “Catch a few hours’ sleep. Be back out there first thing. If she doesn’t show, we’ll call Yorkshire, see if we can’t track her down.”

Patel disappeared beneath a crackle of static and Resnick went off in search of a road map, an atlas. When he had been a DS and Skelton a DI, he’d allowed himself to be talked into a couple of days walking on the Pennine Way. Aside from blisters, he seemed to remember that Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall were close together. Wasn’t one down in the valley, the other up on a hill? If he had to go up there again, he’d make sure it was by car, not an anorak, not a rucksack in sight.

The crime reporter from the city paper knocked on the Morrisons’ door a little shy of ten o’clock. A decent man wearing a sombre expression and a brown suit, it didn’t take him long to persuade Michael that the kind of coverage his paper would give to Emily’s disappearance would do nothing but good.

He sat and drank tea, made bluff sympathetic noises, made notes. Lorraine—“red-eyed and stricken with grief”—said very little, but Michael—“clearly distressed, but determined to be hopeful”—talked willingly about his lovely daughter as he showed the reporter photos from the family album—“a happy child with beautiful red hair.”

Making sure he got permission to come back the next morning with a photographer, the reporter hurried off to get his story ready for the first edition. On his way he used the car phone to contact a colleague from the local radio newsroom, a favor returned like money in the bank.

So it was that the first broadcast of Emily Morrison’s disappearance went out as second lead on the eleven o’clock news, sandwiched between rumors of a half percent cut in bank lending rate and a near fatality on a local golf course during a thunderstorm.

Resnick heard the item driving home and wondered if the Morrisons were in any way prepared for the media attention their daughter’s disappearance would inevitably bring. More especially since the body of another girl of similar age had so recently been found. Another girl who had lived in the same part of the city, their homes less than a mile apart.

Nineteen

Resnick woke to the sounds of birds outside. Except that these weren’t birds. Clusters of notes, gray, like sparrows at first light: soft insistence of sound. Faint splash of wings in shallow water, dusty cymbal strokes. Fragmentary. Minor chords at angles to the night.

He sat on the side of the bed, listening, wondering at the irregular rhythms of the heart. Someone attacking Gloria Summers with force enough to splinter bone.

There had been a bird: a skeleton he had found inside the house; white and smooth, perfectly proportioned and perfectly matching, translucent, bones that had become dust inside his hands.

I don’t understand how anyone in his right mind …

Resnick knew a man who, in a single uncharacteristic moment, had brought a hammer down smack between his mother’s eyes. Now, after nine years locked away, he reported to his probation officer, changed the flowers on his mother’s grave, lived a productive, blameless life. He knew another who had killed a man with the broken end of a bottle in a pub brawl, an argument over nothing that had ended in a starburst of arterial blood. On the third day of his parole he had quarreled with a taxi driver over a two-pound fare and bludgeoned him to death.

… how anyone …

Resnick stood at the window looking out and all the other windows he could see were curtained across and dark. There was a place in most people’s lives where they were capable of every evil thing.

I wished you dead. Charlie, does that shock you?

Wherever Elaine was now he hoped that she was sleeping and not awake like him, hung on the edge of something he could neither ignore nor fully understand: something that, even when he closed his eyes and ears, still echoed discordantly inside his mind.

“Off Minor.”

Lorraine had been awake since gray dawn, watching the troubled movement of Michael’s sleeping face, the winking eye of the digital clock. When she reached out to smooth the tightening frown around her husband’s eyes, he jerked instinctively away, unwaking, numbed by the enormity of what had happened.

Lorraine continued to lie there, remembering the first occasion she had seen Emily’s face: pressed up against the rear window of her father’s car, dark eyes and startling red hair. Michael had taken her with him to the shops and, on his way home, detoured by the bedsitter where Lorraine lived. She and Michael had been seeing one another for about a month. Stubborn, the little girl had refused to leave the car, say hello to Daddy’s friend. Lorraine thinking, as they drove away, I can’t handle this—a man with his marriage on the point of disintegration, a small child—this is not what I want.

“For pity’s sake!” her father had exclaimed. “Is this what we brought you up for? Educated you for? Somebody else’s leftovers?”

“What he’s doing to his wife,” her mother had said, “who’s to say he won’t do the same to you?”

At the wedding they kept themselves to themselves, stood stiff-backed at the reception, left early because of the long drive home.

Emily had been so excited, so pleased with her new dress which, as the afternoon wore on, became smudged with trifle, ice cream and wedding cake. When the music had begun, Michael had danced the first dance with Lorraine, the second with Emily, swinging her safe and wide and laughing in his arms.

Michael grunted something loudly and rolled over, covering his face with his arm. Softly, Lorraine slid out from beneath the duvet and crept downstairs. When she eased the curtain back a crack, the first camera crew was hurrying across the front lawn.

Raymond lay late in bed that morning, tired and horny, trying to summon up clear images of Sara but others insisting on getting in the way.