‘But why?’
Saxon laughed. ‘That’s what you clever bastards are going to find out.’ He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last and as he did Elder noticed Saxon’s hands had a decided shake. Probably the night air was colder than he’d thought.
There was no note that came to hand, but something else instead. Traced with Atkin’s finger on the inside of the misting glass and captured there by Scene of Crime, the first wavering letters of a name — ‘CONN’ and then what might have been an ‘I’ trailing weakly down towards the window’s edge.
Mid-afternoon the following day, Elder was driving with Maureen Prior out towards the small industrial estate where Atkin had worked, head of sales for Pleasure Blinds. Prefabricated units that had still to lose their shine, neat beds of flowering shrubs, no sign of smoke in sight. Sherwood Business Park.
If someone married’s going over the side, chances are it’s with someone from where they work. One of Frank Elder’s rules of thumb, rarely disproved.
Some few years back, close to ten it would be now, his wife Joanne had an affair with her boss. Six months it had gone on, no more, before Elder had found out. The reasons not so very difficult to see. They had just arrived in London, uprooted themselves, and Joanne was high on the speed of it, the noise, the buzz. Since having Katherine, she and Elder had made love less and less; she felt unattractive, oddly sexless, over the hill at thirty-three. And then there had been Martyn Miles, all flash and if not Armani, Hugo Boss; drinks in the penthouse bar of this hotel or that, meals at Bertorelli’s or Quo Vadis.
Elder had his fifteen minutes of crazy, smashed a few things around the house, confronted Miles outside the mews apartment where he lived and restrained himself from punching his smug and sneering face more than just the once.
Together, he and Joanne had talked it through, worked it out; she had carried on at the salon. ‘I need to see him every day and know I don’t want him any more. Not turn my back and never know for sure.’
Elder had told Maureen all of this one day: one night, actually; a long drive down the motorway from Fife, the road surface slick with rain, headlights flicking by. She had listened and said very little, a couple of comments only. Maureen with a core of moral judgement clear and unyielding as the Taliban. Neither of them had ever referred to it again.
Elder slowed the car and turned through the gates of the estate; Pleasure Blinds was the fourth building on the right.
‘Constance Seymour’ read the sign on the door. ‘Personnel’.
As soon as she saw them, her face crumpled inwards like a paper bag. Spectacles slipped, lopsided, down on to the desk. Maureen fished a Kleenex from her bag; Elder fetched water from the cooler in a cone-shaped cup. Connie blew her nose, dabbed at her eyes. She was somewhere in her thirties, Elder thought, what might once have been called homely, plain. Sloped shoulders, buttoned blouse, court shoes. Elder could imagine her with her mother, in town Saturdays shopping arm in arm, the two of them increasingly alike.
The eyes that looked at him now were tinged with violet, palest blue. She would have listened to Atkin like that, intense and sympathetic, pained. Whose hand would have reached out first, who would first have comforted whom?
Maureen came to the end of her expressions of condolence, regret.
‘You were having an affair with him,’ she said. ‘Paul Atkin. A relationship.’
Connie sniffed and said yes.
‘And this relationship, how long…’
‘A year. More. Thirteen months.’
‘It was serious, then?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Her expression slightly puzzled, somewhat hurt. What else could it have been?
‘Mr Atkin, was there… was there any suggestion that he might leave his wife?’
‘Oh, no. No. The children, you see. He loved the children more than anything.’
Maureen glanced across, remembering the faces, the pillow, the bed. Killed with kindness: the proverb eddied up in Elder’s mind.
‘Have you any idea why he might want to harm them?’ Elder asked.
‘No,’ she gasped, moments ahead of the wash of tears. ‘Unless… unless…’
Joanne was in the living room, feet tucked beneath her, watching TV. Katherine was staying overnight at a friend’s. On screen, a bevy of smartly dressed and foul-mouthed young things were dissecting the sex lives of their friends. A laughter track gave hints which Joanne, for the most part, ignored.
‘Any good?’ Elder asked.
‘Crap.’
‘I’m just going out for a stroll.’
‘Okay.’
‘Shan’t be long.’
Glancing towards the door, Joanne smiled and puckered her lips into the shape of a kiss.
Arms swinging lightly by his sides, Elder cut through a swathe of tree-lined residential streets on to the main road; for a moment he was distracted by the lights of the pub, orange and warm, but instead walked on, away from the city centre and then left to where the houses were smaller than his own and huddled together, the first part of a circular walk that would take him, an hour or so later, back home.
Behind the curtains of most front rooms, TV sets flickered and glowed; muffled voices rose and fell; the low rumble of a sampled bass line reverberated from the windows of a passing Ford. Haphazardly, dogs barked. A child cried. On the corner, a group of black youths wearing ripped-off Tommy Hilfiger eyed him with suspicion and disdain.
Elder pictured Gerry Saxon leaning up against a darkened tree, his hands trembling a little as he smoked a cigarette. Almost a year now since he had given up himself, Elder fumbled in his pocket for another mint.
He knew the pattern of incidents similar to that at the Atkins house: the man — almost always it was the man — who could find no other way to cope; debt or unrequited love or some religious mania, voices that whispered, unrelenting, inside his head. Unable or unwilling to leave his family behind, feeling it his duty to protect them from whatever loomed, he took their lives and then his own. What differed here was the intensity of the attack upon the wife, that single fierce and slashing blow, delivered after death. Anger at himself for what he had done? At her, for giving cause?
A cat, tortoiseshell, ran two-thirds of the way across the road, froze, then scuttled back.
‘She was seeing someone, wasn’t she?’ Connie Seymour had said, voice parched with her own grief. ‘Lorna. His wife, Lorna. Paul was terrified she was going to leave him, take his kids.’
No matter how many times he and Maureen had asked, Connie had failed to give them a name. ‘He wouldn’t tell me. Just wouldn’t tell. Oh, he knew all right, Paul knew. But he wouldn’t say. As if he was, you know, as if he was ashamed.’
Maureen had got Willie Bell sifting through the house-to-house reports already; tomorrow Matt Dowland and Salim Shukla would start knocking on doors again. For Karen Holbrook the task of contacting Lorna Atkin’s family and friends. Elder would go back to the house and take Maureen with him.
Why? That’s what you clever bastards are going to find out.
Joanne was in the bathroom when he got back, smoothing cream into her skin. When he touched her arm, she jumped.
‘Your hands, they’re like ice.’
‘I’m sorry.’
The moment passed.
In bed, eyes closed, Elder listened to the fall of footsteps on the opposite side of the street, the window shifting uncertainly inside its frame. Joanne read for ten minutes before switching out the light.
They found a diary, letters, nothing of real use. In a box file shelved between two albums of photographs, Maureen turned up a mishmash of guarantees and customer instructions, invoices and bills.
‘Mobile phones,’ she called into the next room. ‘We’ve had those checked.’
‘Yes,’ Elder said, walking through. ‘He had some kind of BT cell phone leased by his work, she was with — who was it? — One to One.’