Off Minor (32 page)

If there had been anywhere to walk to, that’s what they would have done, but they sat in Lynn’s car instead. Debbie, Lynn thought, was partly pleased to be out of the house, away from her mother, partly disturbed, as if uncertain how she should act, what she should say.

As it grew colder and darker around them, they talked about the baby, about Debbie’s attempts to get another part-time job, clothes, anything other than what each knew they were there to talk about.

“How’s Kevin?” Lynn said suddenly, right across the middle of something Debbie was saying about teething rings.

“I don’t know,” she faltered.

“You’ve seen him though?”

“Once. Only once, recently. It wasn’t any good. It was hopeless.”

“How d’you mean?”

“We rowed. We just rowed.”

“What did you expect?” said Lynn sharply.

“Well …”

“Well, what?”

“What’s the point, if when we do see one another, after all that time, all we do is fight?”

“Surely, that’s because it has been all that time.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Look,” turning square-on in her seat, an arm close to Debbie’s head, “why you split up, reasons, who left who, none of that’s my business. But given that’s happened, I don’t see what you can expect to do but argue. Least, at first.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point is to try and sort things out. Argue them through. Things went wrong. You’re not about to fall into one another’s arms, lovey-dovey. It’s got to be worked at and that’s not going to be easy, but it’s got to be done.” She waited for Debbie to look at her again. “Unless you really do want it to be over. In which case I think you should be honest and say so, get on with getting a divorce.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Debbie didn’t answer; she looked out of the window instead, at the line of almost identical houses in which lights shone. At a twelve-year-old boy with a red and white wool hat, skateboarding along the pavement, rocking himself up and down over the curb. It was cold enough inside the car for gooseflesh to have formed along the length of her arms; at least, she thought it was the cold.

“He’s the baby’s father,” Lynn said.

“He doesn’t act like it.”

“Then maybe that’s what you should talk about, then give him another chance.”

Debbie looked away again, staring straight through the windscreen now, a pretty face with a small mouth and a tiny scar to the left of her chin.

“He came round to see me the other night,” Lynn said quietly. “Round to my place, it was late.” Debbie was looking at her now, right at her, not missing a look, a word. “Oh, nothing happened. We had coffee, talked. Talked about you. But it could have, and someday soon it will. Not with me, I don’t mean that. But someone. And not because Kevin wants that, but he wants somebody. He wants you and he wants the baby and he can’t find the way to say it.” Lynn smiled. “Debbie, you married him, you know what he’s like. He needs your help, he has to know that you want him back and right now all he can see is that you’re shutting him out.”

Lynn touched Debbie’s forearm lightly. “I think you should phone him. One way or another, that’s what you ought to do. And Debbie, don’t leave it too long.”

Almost out of the building, Resnick turned right around and went back up to his office. He found the university number in the book and Vivien’s home number also, V. Nathanson, nice and neutral. The other night at her flat he had been a grouch and a bore and it wouldn’t hurt him to call her up and tell her so. Apologize and suggest, perhaps, another meeting, another drink.

It took him ten minutes to realize that he was going to do no such thing. Screwing up the piece of paper on which he had written both numbers, Resnick tossed it into his wastebin as he switched out the light.

“Great!” Lynn Kellogg said stepping into her flat and looking round. “Just great!” There were piles of washing on both of the chairs, waiting to be ironed. Bills behind the clock waiting to be paid and the clock itself had stopped around an hour and twenty minutes earlier, battery run down. On the table were the only two letters she’d received in the past week, both from her mother and both waiting to be answered. She knew without looking that there was a can of Diet Pepsi in the fridge, a wrinkled tube of tomato puree and little else. “Such an authority on other people’s lives, it’s a shame you can’t do something about your own!”

Forty-four

Resnick had been lying there for several minutes, awake without fully realizing it, slivers of conversation loose inside his head, loose and unattached.
Kerfuffle.
Dizzy, gracing Resnick’s bed by virtue of the gathering frost outside, pushed a paw into the sheet over Resnick’s arm and began to delve with his claws, purring loudly. Strange word: kerfuffle.
All that kerfuffle.
Carefully, he extricated Dizzy’s claws and got a nip on his fingers for his pains. The Shepperds opposite him in their front room, explaining why they had missed the Identikit on TV.
My drink
, who was it, Stephen or Joan? One of their drinks had been knocked over. That was it. Convenient, Resnick remembered thinking, that or the opposite. Their bedtime drink all over the carpet and there, pointed out to him as proof and, yes, he could remember that too, the stain. His own polite expression of regret, made without thinking, the whole business a distraction from the matter at hand. The stain.

“A shame,” he had said. And Joan Shepperd had replied, “Yes, we’ve not long … we’ve not so long had it down.”

Resnick was as awake now as he had ever been.

From underneath Gloria Summers’s nails, the forensic team had prised tiny pieces of carpet fiber, red and green. Whatever had happened to Gloria, she had struggled against her attacker. Where? On the carpet of that thirties’ living room, safe behind patterned lace? And if he had attacked her there, the first of many blows? The blood. The stain.
We’ve not so long had it down.
Resnick wanted to know when. And once the old carpet had been taken up, what had been done with it, where had it gone?

Twenty minutes later, unshaven, pouches around his eyes, Resnick was standing on Skelton’s front porch, waiting to be let in.

It’s still not light. The two men sit in the small room off the hall that gets called Skelton’s study, when it’s called anything at all. There are, in fact, shelves of books: a carefully alphabetized collection of professional surveys and memoirs, Alderson and Holdaway, McNee and Whitaker; official reports from the Home Office and the Police Foundation; back issues of
Police
and
Police Review
, correctly bound. There are also, to Resnick’s surprise, sections covering motor mechanics, home improvements and Japanese art and culture; less surprisingly, drug abuse and treatment, juvenile offenders, running and diet. The box files in neat order along one side of the floor are labeled Receipts and Insurance, Holidays and Statements. There is a green two-tier filing cabinet: A–N, O–Z. It is into the bottom half of this that Skelton reaches for the bottle, S for Scotch or W for whisky, Resnick isn’t sure. Either way, he nods as the superintendent holds it over his mug of instant coffee, ready to pour.

“Run it past me, Charlie.”

Resnick does so. The suspect had ample opportunity to know both girls, by his own admission did know one of them; his position within the schools, both as someone who did jobs there and through his close association with one of the teachers, made him someone the children would be aware of in some vague official capacity and would be likely to trust. It was an occasional practice to run in the recreation ground where both children were known to have played and from which one of them disappeared. There was a supposition, strong but not definite, that he had been running in the vicinity of the second girl’s house at approximately the time she had gone missing. The suspect had denied this, giving an alibi which didn’t hold water. Furthermore, someone—possibly the suspect’s own wife—had drawn the attention of the police to the fact that he had contact with the first child as well as the second. She had implied that there was evidence she might have against the suspect, although refusing to say what this was. Wasn’t it as though she were saying, look, the answers are here if only you’ll look closely enough to find them out?

Skelton tastes his coffee, strengthens it with a touch more Scotch. Muffled, from above, the sound of a toilet flushing, his daughter or his wife.

“Warrant, then, Charlie, car as well as the house?”

“Yes,” Resnick says, “house and car both.”

Just short of seven the cars entered the road, a cold morning, shrouded in darkness and frost. A milk float further along on the opposite side; a nurse peddling past, on her way to begin the morning shift at Queens. Resnick intercepted the paper-girl with a smile and, with only a questioning look, she passed the Shepperds’
Telegraph
into his outstretched hand. A nod and Graham Millington knocked sharply on the door, pushed his thumb against the bell and left it there. Inside the house, lights went on, footsteps and anxious voices were heard.

“Mrs. Shepperd …”

Joan Shepperd stared out at a half-dozen top-coated men, a single woman, immobile, faint blurs of their breath across the air.

“Mrs. Shepperd,” Resnick said, “we have a warrant to search …”

Holding her dressing gown close at the collar, she took a step back inside the house and turned aside to let them in.

“Joan, what on earth …?” Three rises from the foot of the stairs, Stephen Shepperd, striped pajama jacket loose over regular gray trousers, carpet slippers on his feet.

“I think,” Resnick said, officers moving past him, “it might be a good idea if you and your wife sat down somewhere until we’re through.”

Shepperd hesitated, eyes wild, settling finally in his wife’s implacable stare.

“Mr. Shepperd.”

He came the rest of the way into the hall, moving towards the front room.

“Perhaps not in there,” Resnick said. “I expect we’ll be rather busy in there. Here …” pushing the newspaper towards him “… why not take this through to the kitchen?”

Unspeaking, the couple did as they were told, sitting self-consciously at the small table, Mark Divine, arms folded in the doorway, smirk on his face.

Patel and Lynn were going through the upstairs, room at a time, drawers and cupboards first, the obvious places. In the front, Millington and Naylor were moving pieces of furniture towards the center, all the easier to prise the carpet from the boards. “I wonder,” Resnick said past Divine’s shoulder, “if you’d be good enough to let us have the keys to your car?”

DC Hansen, borrowed for the occasion for his skills with things mechanical, caught the keys with a grin and turned his attentions to the E registration Metro at the curb.

Thirty minutes later, neither of the Shepperds had moved, the paper rested, folded and unread, between them; Stephen’s eyes were either closed or focused on his hands, thick ridges of hard skin at the corners of the palms, the ends of the fingers. All that Joan did was stare at him.

Divine sighed from time to time; shifted his weight from one foot to another, amused himself with scenarios of what would happen to a man like Shepperd if he ended up in prison.

“The carpet in the front room,” Resnick said, “when was it laid?”

“Some time last summer,” Stephen said.

“September,” said his wife.

“And the old one?”

“What about it?”

“What happened to it?”

“Do you mean, to make us replace it?”

“If you like.”

Stephen coughed and fidgeted on his chair, three people watching him and he didn’t want to look any of them in the face.

“I was working on the brakes,” he said. “The Metro.”

“In the living room?”

“I didn’t want all the fuss of carrying things down stairs.”

“He didn’t want to get filthy oil over his precious tools,” said Joan. “He got it all over the carpet instead.”

“It was unfortunate,” Stephen said.

“It was a horrible mess. Ruined the carpet, the rug, everything.”

“We’d been talking about getting a new carpet for ages,” said Stephen.

“What was that about a rug?” Resnick asked. “There was a rug as well as a carpet?

Joan nodded. “Stephen’s right, the old carpet was worn and thin; we bought the rug a year or so ago to help cover it up, make it look more respectable.”

“What color was the carpet?” Resnick asked.

“Oh. blue. But it had faded, you know. A sort of grayish blue.”

“And the rug?”

“Tartan. I wouldn’t know which one, it may not have been a real tartan at all, of course, but that kind of a pattern.” Resnick was on the point of asking her which colors predominated, when she added: “Not dark at all, green and red.”

“What did you do with them?” Resnick asked. “The carpet and the rug?”

“Took them to the tip,” Stephen said.

“Which one?”

“The nearest, Dunkirk.”

“Not easy, moving a carpet for a room that size.”

“Tied on top of the car,” Stephen explained.

“After you’d refitted the brakes, I hope,” Resnick smiled, causing Divine to snigger into the back of his hand.

“And the rug?” Resnick asked. “Did you fasten that to the roof as well?”

Stephen shook his head. “I put that in the boot.”

The clothes that Stephen Shepperd wore for running were in the linen basket in the bathroom, waiting to be washed, a dark blue track suit with red and white piping round the collar, St. Michael label inside. A white singlet, white socks with reinforced soles. A pair of Reebok running shoes, earth and ash in the grooves, rested alongside his other shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe. All were bagged and labeled carefully.

Diptak found the camera at the front of Shepperd’s shirt drawer, a small single lens reflex, Olympus AF-10, the kind that can easily be carried in the pocket, held in the palm of a hand.

In the cupboard on Joan Shepperd’s side of the bed, Lynn found a bottle with printed label, a child-proof top, Diazepam, 10 mg. Inside, there seemed to be twenty or so remaining. On the opposite side, she found the photograph of Joan Shepperd’s class, the last afternoon of the summer term, thirty-plus children gathered around her in the playground, Joan looking round and maternal, smiling at the camera; sitting at the front, crosslegged and squinting a little into the sun, unmistakably, Gloria Summers.