Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(59)
“Not another lecture?”
“You had a run-in with Malachy.”
“Are you asking, Jack, or telling?”
“He told you what to do and you told him to f*ck off.”
“Something like that, yes.” She held the packet out toward him and when he shook his head, lit up herself. “Afraid she’ll smell it on your breath, Jack?”
“Like she used to smell you?” His voice was easy and insinuating and for a moment, as his hand ran the length of her thigh, she could remember what she had allowed herself to see in him.
“Something about the job, Jack, I think that’s what you said.” She stared at him until he stepped away.
“Malachy, you know he was never your biggest fan from the off. Now he’s wondering aloud if it’s not the best thing to get shot of you before any real damage is done.”
“How exactly is he proposing to do that?”
“Ride you out of town doggy-fashion, I believe that was his suggestion.”
“Pathetic sexist bastard!”
“Possibly. But your immediate superior, none the less.”
Helen rested her cigarette on the edge of the sink and took a good swallow at her scotch. “Don’t worry, Jack. I’ve already figured out how to deal with this. Malachy gets his way and I get mine. And you’ve got two minutes to down that scotch, or you’ll be taking it back to Alice in a paper cup.”
Skelton laughed a sour laugh. “Just about the only way I’d consider it these days.”
Resnick had wandered into the Polish Club midway through the evening, a quiet night, quite a few families with older children, and, after chatting to the secretary for a short while, taken up a position toward the end of the smaller bar. He was there, making his second or third bison grass vodka last and listening with half an ear to Marian Witzcak’s somewhat alarmed recounting of a Glyndebourne production of Berg’s Lulu on Channel Four, when Helen Siddons was ushered in.
“Charlie,” she said, “we’ve got to talk.”
Thirty-two
The entire squad was assembled, two dozen individuals variously standing, sitting, leaning, staring at bitten-down fingernails, recently buffed shoes, casting their eyes back over the canal maps tacked to the walls, before and after photographs of Jane Peterson, Miranda Conway, Irene Wilson, and two still-unidentified women; twenty-four officers, men and women, but mostly men, mostly white, aged between mid-twenties and late thirties, motivated, bright, carefully chosen, keen to do well, succeed, get the bastard who did these sorted and sorted fast.
Helen Siddons, smart and businesslike in a gabardine safari dress, was coming to the end of that morning’s briefing. The team initially working the Worksop murder had passed on details of two potential suspects, one a brewery salesman whose regular run took him through most of the sites where bodies had been found. Details were on their way round.
“That aside, what I want us concentrating on is this period between the first two murders and the last three. If we are looking for the one man, what was he doing during this time? My gut feeling tells me he was locked away, maybe for something dissimilar, but equally it could be for some kind of sexually orientated crime. So, let’s use the technology, chase down what we can.”
She stepped back a moment, taking one deep breath and then another, amidst general coughing and clearing of throats.
“All right, all right, there’s one more thing. The postmortem suggests that Jane Peterson had for some time been the victim of persistent physical abuse. Not the most serious, in terms of what many of us are used to dealing with, but a broken rib, bruising to the body, the kind of injuries that are often sustained within abusive relationships where the person perpetrating them has sufficient control over his or her temper not to strike out at the face or some part of the body where injuries would more easily be noticed.”
Heads were turned in whispered comment and she waited for silence to return.
“I can’t be sure how relevant this is to our primary investigation; but it can’t be ignored. Which is why Detective Inspector Resnick, who most of you already know, is with us today.”
Off to one side of the room, Resnick—clean shirt, second-best suit, clean tie—regarded the floor with interest.
“The inspector had met both Alex and Jane Peterson socially and had begun making inquiries into Jane’s disappearance. So he has good prior knowledge here and it would be foolish to ignore it. And with the blessing of our respective lords and masters, he’s going to be with us on this, concentrating on that particular aspect of the investigation. DS Kellogg and DC Khan will work with him, leaving the rest of us to concentrate on the wider picture.
“Right, questions?”
High-ceilinged, tall-windowed medical wards had once run more or less the length of both floors in the top half of the building. These had now been partitioned off to accommodate the squad’s requirements: an open-plan office and large meeting room, Helen Siddons’ own office leading off it, were on the upper floor; the computer room, communications room, and numerous smaller spaces, largely for the purpose of conducting interviews, were on the lower. Resnick and his small team had been allocated one of these, just large enough to hold three chairs, two desks arranged in an L, one computer screen, two telephones, a small cupboard containing empty files and a notional amount of stationery, and a metal waste-paper basket, color gray. The walls were a suspicious-looking shade of lime green; the suspicion being that it was a mistake. The window, open now by several inches at both top and bottom, afforded a generous view over the Roman Catholic cathedral and the restored Albert Hall and Institute down toward the various buildings of the city’s second university and the bland ugliness of the flats that rose up without majesty above the Victoria Centre.