Marcia began to splutter some kind of outraged reply. Constance did not even bother to listen. She turned on her heel, a now growling Josh close behind her, and walked back into the cottage, vaguely aware that Harley had stopped blushing and was grinning broadly as he followed her carrying another load of bags and boxes.
Safely inside, she allowed herself a peep from the dining-room window and with some satisfaction saw Marcia wheeling her bike up the hill — in retreat, and obviously in high dudgeon, her head nodding up and down as if she were talking to herself. On the grounds that everyone else is sick of listening, thought Constance.
Harley was still grinning. ‘Me mam gave the old bat a right telling off t’other day, too, Mrs Lange,’ he remarked with obvious enjoyment.
‘Did she really, Harley?’ Constance responded with some surprise. Iris was known for her easy-going manner.
‘’Er takes some getting going, my mam,’ continued Harley. ‘But you’d be surprised what ’er can be like. Me dad and me, us knows better than to cross ’er, I can tell ’ee.’ Harley shook his head at the thought.
‘I can’t bleddy stand that old cow Spry either,’ he said later, before taking his leave. ‘If ’er upsets ’ee again, Mrs Lange, you just let me know. All right?’ And Harley drew himself up to his full towering height, throwing back his immensely powerful shoulders.
It was a spontaneous display of support. Constance knew that. Few understood the nuances of village life better than her, after all she had had to work at winning acceptance into it in the first place. Fleetingly she felt cheered.
But once Harley had gone any vestige of cheerfulness and normality left with him. Alone in the silence of Dingwell, except for faithful Josh, Constance could do nothing other than sink again into the nightmare her world had become. She wished she could go back in time, but she was honest enough to realise that she would in any case have to completely reinvent herself.
She told herself no one can be other than their true self, that she could not help being what she was, any more than her son, or any of her family could deny their own selves. But she did not really believe her own message, and certainly it brought her no comfort.
She still did not know where to go from here, but she was beginning to realise at last that doing nothing was no longer an option. If the nightmare was to grow no greater she had to act, she had to do something. She must take control.
There was no one else who could.
Sixteen
Rose continued to build on an already perhaps unwisely close relationship with Charlie. That evening she met him again at the Portway Towers hotel. It was the second evening running. She had given up caring what Simon thought. She told herself that she needed to keep her best hope of any kind of witness in the case sweet. And Charlie was running scared.
‘She’s out there somewhere right now, looking for me, I’m damned sure of it,’ he told Rose over a third Campari and orange.
‘But who is, Charlie?’ asked Rose.
‘Mrs Pattinson, of course.’
Rose sighed. ‘We don’t know that. We don’t even know who she is.’
Charlie had lost much of his bouncy self-confidence and Rose was sorry to see that, although she didn’t understand quite why she should be. He was still staying at his mother’s house in St Paul’s, still afraid to go home to his smart flat overlooking the Floating Harbour, and he confided to Rose that relations with his much loved mother were becoming strained.
‘She knows something’s up, you see,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s pretty obvious innit? It’s been nearly two months now. That’s a hell of a lot of rewiring. I just don’t know what I’ll do if she finds out...’
On occasions Rose thought that Charlie seemed as scared of his mother learning the truth about the son she was so proud of as he was of being killed by the madwoman he remained convinced was hunting him down.
‘Come on, Charlie, I’d better go home,’ she said without a great deal of enthusiasm after another hour spent giving as much solace as she could manage.
Charlie’s car was being serviced, so she dropped him off at his mother’s house — well, just around the corner, actually, as a precaution, although she was of course driving her own car, a seriously unofficial-looking silver Scimitar and even Charlie, obsessed with his own problems as he was, had remarked more than once how little like a police officer she appeared. Which remained all for the best in St Paul’s.
Not for the first time he pecked her on the cheek as he said goodbye. It was a familiarity that had somehow seemed quite natural from the first time he did it and Rose had not pulled him up on it, although she knew she should have done.
She watched him walk away from her down the street. His stride was still quite jaunty in spite of everything. Fleetingly she wondered whether Charlie Collins might have by now attempted something a little more serious than a peck on the cheek were he not staying with his mother. A blush touched her cheeks, even within the privacy of her own car. The boy’s a male hooker and you’re a married woman, she told herself sternly.
But perversely the thought made her smile.
Rose had been lying awake at night for weeks trying to work it all out. There was nothing else to keep her awake nowadays, that was for certain, Simon hadn’t wanted to touch her in ages.
During the day she worked ceaselessly. She had been at her desk by 7.30 a.m., often earlier, ever since the case began. Weekends did not exist. The murder of Wayne Thompson had increased the pressure. On the Sunday after his death she was in her office at Staple Hill as usual, going over and over in her mind everything that had happened and the progress that had been made so far, such as it was.
The DCI wanted desperately to find Mrs Pattinson, although, in a curious way that she couldn’t fully explain to herself, she didn’t actually want Mrs Pattinson to prove to be guilty. She continued to resent the simplistic attitude of most of her colleagues which seemed to be that any woman bizarre enough to pay young men for sex was therefore pretty damn sure to be a serial killer as well.
Rose did believe that she now had a fairly clear impression of Mrs Pattinson. Her conversations with Charlie made her feel that she may not know who Mrs P was, but she did know a little bit about what she was. Certainly there was now a definite visual image — of a strong-looking, well-preserved woman in her forties, tall, good body, slim but shapely, good skin, startling deep-green eyes, blonde hair shaped in a long glossy bob — and, thanks both to Charlie and Janet the receptionist at the Crescent Hotel, a computer picture had even been put together. This had been published in newspapers and shown on television, and an appeal made for anyone who recognised the woman to contact the police. There had been a number of responses. Several had turned out to be little more than mischief-making and none provided a helpful lead. One was from a fourteen-year-old boy who said he was sure it had been Mrs Pattinson who some months previously had kicked a football back into his local playing field from the road alongside. The woman had made quite an impression, apparently. The playing field was in the Clifton area of Bristol not far from the Crescent Hotel and the date and timing of the incident checked out with the little that was known of Mrs Pattinson’s movements. It had added somewhat to Rose’s conception of Mrs Pattinson’s personality; as a self-confident woman, charismatic, physically agile, athletic even, someone who appeared to enjoy life to the full — or at least had done until recently, thought Rose wryly. However the schoolboy footballer had not actually seen the woman park or leave a motor car, and his information in no way assisted the search to find the real Mrs P.