Still Waters (20 page)

“I'm sorry if this is rather rushed,” Prentiss said. “It's only that …”

“You have a patient.”

“Yes.”

“Osteopathy, that's what you do?”

Prentiss nodded.

“You manipulate, then, is that right? Bones?”

“Bones, yes. Other parts of the body, too.”

Lynn clicked open her bag and took out her notebook. Left tired by her disturbed night, shadows deep beneath her eyes, her skin, despite makeup, was, for her, oddly pale. She'd intended to wear the new outfit she'd bought that weekend at Jigsaw, break it in before starting the new job, but this morning it would have been, she felt, a waste. Instead, she had pulled a pair of blue jeans back out from the laundry basket, an old pink shirt, badly faded, from a pile of things she scarcely ever wore, and finished off with a baggy cardigan her mum had bought for her in Norwich BHS two years before. She looked a state and she didn't care.

Alan Prentiss thought she looked rather nice. He wished now he'd suggested half past eight, thought to offer coffee, make tea.

“That was how you met Jane Peterson,” Lynn asked, “she came to you for treatment?”

“The first occasion, yes. After that, I think possibly I may have said on the phone, we met socially a few times …”

“You and Jane?”

“Jane and Alex. Dinner, whatever, it was always Jane and Alex and, well, I was seeing somebody then, a friend of Jane's actually, a colleague. Patricia. She'd recommended me.”

“A foursome, then.”

“Yes.”

“And you got on? All of you together.”

“No. Not really, no. I mean Jane and Patricia were okay, they had something in common, at least. Teaching. The school. But Alex and I …” Prentiss shook his head. “When Patricia and I stopped seeing one another, that was it.”

“No more contact.”

“That's right.”

“Not socially.”

“No.”

“How did you feel about that?”

“To be honest, I was relieved. We'd never really hit it off, not all together.”

Lynn began to write something in her book and thought better of it. “But you liked her, Jane?”

“Felt sorry for her might be closer to the mark.”

“Sorry, why was that?”

“You've met Alex Peterson?”

Lynn shook her head.

“You should and then you'd know. Oh, he's charming—I suppose he's charming—good-looking, in the kind of way some women think of as good-looking—undoubtedly intelligent. But arrogant, of course, intellectually. Always spoiling for a fight.”

“A fight? What kind of a fight?”

“One that he can win.”

Footsteps hesitated outside and Lynn hoped it wasn't Prentiss' nine o'clock come early. She noticed him glancing at his watch.

“Why did she consult you in the first place?” Lynn asked.

“She was having pain here …” Stretching, he illustrated the back of the neck at the left side, where it runs into the shoulder. “She'd been to her GP, had pills. No good. She wondered if there was anything I could do to help.”

“And was there?”

“A little. Very little. After one or two sessions, some of the soreness had gone, there was more freedom of movement. If she'd carried on attending regularly, I might have been able to do more.”

“She stopped, then?”

Prentiss checked some calculation behind partly closed eyes. “Offhand I would say she came to me six or seven times; if it's important, I could look it up.”

Lynn raised a hand, gesturing for him to sit back down. “What did you think,” she said, “was the source of the problem?”

Prentiss drew in breath sharply through his nose. “Him.”

“Her husband?”

“I shouldn't say that, I suppose. It's probably unfair, but after meeting them, seeing them together, yes, that's what I think.”

Lynn was leaning forward in her chair, elbows on her knees. “What was it,” she said, “about him?”

“I've said. He was a bully. Always shooting her down. If she sat saying nothing, he'd taunt her, tease her. And when she did open her mouth, in his mocking, superior way, he'd tear her to shreds.”

“And this was causing the problems with her back?”

“Her neck, yes. I think so. Stress. It affects us, you know, the way we are physically. It isn't always a case of overstraining, of bad posture.”

Lynn sat straight, leaning her spine against the back of the hard chair. “Did you say any of this to her?”

Prentiss was slow to reply. There were steps now, approaching the door. “Not quite directly, no. But I think I implied the answer might be, well, elsewhere.”

“How did she respond?”

“She stopped coming. Cancelled one or two appointments at first, always with good reason, but then I realized she wasn't coming back at all.”

“And were you still seeing her and her husband together at this time?”

He shook his head. “No, that was after Patricia and I …” He let the sentence hang.

Even though both of them had been anticipating it, each jumped at the sound of the bell. Standing, Lynn closed her notebook. “I'd just like to be certain. The problems Jane was having, it is your professional opinion that her husband was to blame?”

“Professional, I don't know. Perhaps I should never have said it so strongly. I'm sorry. It was indiscreet.”

A smile edged its way around Lynn's lips. From this one meeting, the look of his house, everything plain and proper and in its proper place, indiscreet wasn't a word she would have readily associated with Alan Prentiss. “Perhaps it was just an honest reaction; you said what you felt. There's nothing wrong in that.”

“Some people wouldn't necessarily agree.”

Lynn hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and thanked him for his time.

At twelve thirty that day, Resnick received a phone call from Suzanne Olds' secretary: Mark Divine had missed his noon appointment, the second time this had happened. Ms. Olds had thought the inspector might like to know.

Resnick caught up on some paperwork, grabbed himself a sandwich from across the street, and finally snagged Millington in a slack moment, the sergeant just back from a lunch-time pint and a pie with the boss of the Support Group, and they drove out to Divine's together.

Ragged and ill-matched, the curtains were drawn across the windows of the first-floor flat, but in Divine's current state of mind, that didn't have to mean a thing. Neither the butcher nor his assistant could remember seeing Divine leave that morning, though for that matter, they couldn't swear to having clapped eyes on him since before the weekend.

On the landing, first Millington, then Resnick tried the door. The sound of the TV could be heard distinctly from inside. That didn't have to mean anything either. One, then another, then both together called Divine's name.

“Maybe sloped off for a few days,” Millington suggested. “Change of scene.”

And maybe, Resnick was thinking, he's inside there now, unconscious, taken an overdose or worse. “Check back downstairs, Graham, see if there's a spare key.”

There was, at least there was in theory; Divine himself had borrowed it, having lost his own, and it had never been returned.

“You thinking what I'm thinking?” Millington asked, eyeing the door.

“Likely, Graham.”

It only took one shoulder charge to soften it up, and then a foot, flat and hard, close to the lock.

The interior stank of rotting food, stale beer and cigarettes, unflushed urine but, thankfully, nothing worse. Of Divine there was no sign.

“Not scarpered, look. Not 'less he's leaving all this stuff of his behind.”

Resnick scribbled a note, asking Divine to get in touch. Once again, he left his own numbers and Hannah's as well. Millington, meantime, used the butcher's phone to call a locksmith he knew and arranged to have the door fixed before the end of the day.

“I'll keep an eye,” the butcher said. “Do me best to make sure no bugger slips up there, fills the place with needles and worse.”

“Right,” Resnick said, “thanks. And if you do spot him coming back himself, you might let us know. Graham here, or myself.”

“'Course. Can't do you a deal on some nice chump chops, can I? Seeing as you're here. Take one of these home,” he said to Millington, “put a smile on your missus's face and no mistake.”

“Thanks,” said Resnick, shaking his head. “Not right now.”

Unwrap one of those within sniffing range of Madeleine, Millington was thinking, she'd get a look on her face, turn milk sour over a five-mile radius.

Twenty-eight

At first sight, he had taken it for a kestrel, but as it came closer, hovering above the shimmer of grass, the reddish underside and rounded wings marked it clearly as a young sparrowhawk.

Up here, from one of a number of wooden benches strategically placed around the area of some ancient burial ground, Grabianski could look down across a swathe of land that had been left to grow like meadow; the drying tops of grass blurred orange to bluish-brown and back again and, as Grabianski watched, alert, the sparrowhawk marked out its territory between an irregular triangle of oaks, firm against the occasional forays of crows.

At Grabianski's back, purple foxgloves twined out of the sparse undergrowth, and two benches to his right a young woman with almost white hair lay on her back, eyes closed, a copy of Emily Dickinson open on her naked chest. The engraving on the bench against which Grabianski himself leaned read:
Ethel Copland Campbell 1897-1987. Vegetarian. Socialist. Pacifist
. It was that kind of a place.

He was trying not to think about paintings, forged or otherwise, not to think about his dealings with Vernon Thackray, Eddie Snow. And Resnick, a man whose word he trusted, who, on certain levels, he admired—someone whom, had their lives but shaken down differently, Grabianski might have been pleased to call a friend—how seriously did he have to take the threat of being fitted into a frame and locked in tight?

He watched as the hawk rode the air with the smallest movement of wings and then dropped, almost faster than he could follow, down into the grass and away, a vole or some such fast in its grasp.

Marvellous, Grabianski thought, as the bird was lost to sight between the branches of the farthest tree, how life did that, offered up those little scraps, parables for you to snack on, inwardly digest.

The lower reaches of Portobello were lined by barrows selling fruit and vegetables at knockdown prices, stripy watermelons sliced open, lemons tumbling yellow inside blue tissue. The same black guy, wearing a wide white shirt with a gathered yoke, winked at Grabianski from the doorway of the Market Bar and stepped aside to let him through.

Moving slowly toward the bar, letting his eyes become adjusted to the filtered light, Grabianski saw Eddie Snow seated in the far corner, talking earnestly to a youngish man with shoulder-length hair. The woman Grabianski had seen him with before, the model, was perched on a stool close by, flawless, bored.

Grabianski ordered his pint of beer and waited, certain Snow would have seen him; now it was a matter of form, of etiquette, waiting to see when and how that recognition would be acknowledged.

What happened was that the young woman leaned forward at a sign from Snow's beckoning finger and after a brief discussion, got down from her stool and came to where Grabianski was standing, one arm against the surface of the bar.

“I'm Faron,” she said, and Grabianski nodded pleasantly, wondering if some of the things he'd read about her were true. He hadn't recognized her before, not really, a face, thin and feral, like so many that stared out at him, big-eyed, from the fronts of glossy magazines. She was wearing shiny silver tights, clumpy thick-heeled shoes, and either a dress that was really a petticoat or a petticoat that was really a dress.

“Eddie says he's busy.”

“I can see.”

“It's important he says, like business. Is it okay for you to wait?”

Grabianski assured her that was fine; she made no move to walk away and when he offered her a drink she asked for an Absolut with ice and tonic and a slice of lemon not lime. According to her press releases she had been born and brought up in Hoxton, East London, one of five children, none of them named Faron nor anything like; the fashion editor for British
Vogue
had noticed her behind the till at a garage in Lea Bridge Road when she called in for petrol on her way back from a photo shoot in Epping Forest. Wearing one of those awful pink overalls, of course, oil and the Lord knows what underneath her fingernails, but those eyes, those tremendous waiflike eyes.

Not so many months later, after numerous makeovers, a spot of minor surgery, and a name change, there she was in grainy black and white and bleached-out color, wearing price-on-application designer clothing in some industrial wasteland, staring empty eyes and legs akimbo. Since when, affairs with movie stars of both sexes, private clinics, smoked-glass limousines; rumor was she'd turned down a cameo part in the new Mike Leigh—or was that Spike?—and recorded a song for which Tricky did the final mix, but which had yet to be released. Rumor, juiced with money, will say almost anything.

Grabianski wondered if she were yet nineteen.

“What d'you do, then?” she asked.

“I'm a burglar,” Grabianski said.

“Go on, you're winding me up.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Yeah? What you burgle then?”

“Houses, apartments, the usual thing.”

She laughed, a giggle, brittle and fast. “You burgle Eddie, then?”

“Not yet.”

She leaned a little away from him, uncertain. “Great security, Eddie, alarms and that, all over. Well, he has to. Paintings and that. Worth a fortune. It's what he's interested in, art.” For a moment, she glanced round. “That bloke with him, Sloane, he's an artist. Painter. You know him? He's good. Galleries and that. I've never been, museums, they're boring. Well, I'm a liar, not since I was a kid. School trip, down the Horniman. Lost my knickers, coming back.”