He was wearing a white shirt, old corduroy trousers, boots on his feet. “Let me just get these off now. No sense getting mud over everything.” He set down the bucket he was carrying and pulled off first one boot and then the other, placing them outside the door.
“Rain’s given over,” Michael said. “Going to be a nice day.” He approached her with the bucket, fished from his pocket a small key. “If I trust you to help yourself with this, you’re not going to be doing anything stupid?”
Lynn looked back at him but didn’t answer.
Michael moved round behind her and knelt down on one knee. “Don’t want me to be doing everything for you, not like a baby.” He unlocked one of the cuffs and it swung against the back of her leg. “Get those jeans off, why don’t you, and I’ll move this bucket underneath you.”
“Do I have to do this while you watch?”
“Why not? It’s only natural.”
Lynn shook her secured hand in sudden anger, rattling the chain. “Natural? Like this? What the hell’s natural about this?”
“Temper,” Michael smiled, on his feet above her, “temper. You know what I think about temper.”
“All right,” Lynn said, head down. “All right.” With her free hand she eased her pants down along towards her knees; the instant she sat down, as she’d known it would, the urine streamed from her, splashing back against the underside of her thighs.
“Now then,” he said, moments later, lifting the bucket away, “what have we got here?” Folded in his pocket, several sheets of toilet paper. “Will you or shall I?”
Staring at him all the while, she dabbed herself dry and dropped the damp tissue in the bucket when he held it out.
“I suppose now,” he said, locking the cuff back around her wrist, “you’ll be expecting something to drink?”
With her free hand, she took hold of his hand but immediately he pulled away. She waited until he was almost at the door. “I was watching you,” she said, “this morning. The way you were just watching me.”
He stopped in his tracks and she thought he was going to turn around, angry, even strike her, but instead he carried on, out through the door, and soon she heard him again, moving around outside the caravan, alternately whistling and singing a snatch of a song she had only ever heard him sing.
Fifty-three
By the time Michelle came away from casualty, Natalie grizzling in her arms, it was mid-morning. Karl’s hand had taken nine stitches and was securely bandaged. Lucky, the doctor had said, none of the tendons were touched. The staff nurse, checking Karl’s name against the records, had noted this was his second visit within a short space of time. “I explained all of that when the social worker had me bring him in,” Michelle told her. “He had an accident, ran into the door.” And this time, the nurse thought, he just happened to pick up a knife someone had left lying around. Wrigglesworth, the social worker’s name was on the card; the nurse made a note to call his office as soon as she got a spare moment. The local police would be informed as a matter of course.
LOCAL CLIMBER KILLED IN FALL read the placard outside the corner shop.
“Fish fingers, Karl? Is that what you’d like?”
“Ish fingus,” Karl beamed, jumping up and down, hand forgotten. “Ish fingus.”
When she unlocked the front door and called Gary’s name, she was relieved there was no reply.
“What do you think?” Lynn said.
He had brought her tomato soup from a can, heated up for lunch; sliced bread, buttered, then folded in half. Freed one hand so she could eat. Michael sitting on one of those insubstantial chairs, chattering away quite happily, not eating himself save for what remained of a chocolate bar, all the while watching her. Concerned.
“Is that all right? The soup, I mean. Precious little choice in the village and, besides, I’m never sure which kind is best. Heinz, I think, that’s what they say. I like to buy that Scottish one, but they never have that. The bread was all they had left. I shall have to go earlier tomorrow.”
“Michael, why won’t you answer me?”
“What?” he said. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“I asked, what do you imagine’s going to happen?”
He seemed to give it some thought. “Oh, I suppose we’ll stay here for a while. Quite cozy now since I got this thing, don’t you think? Throws out quite a good heat.”
“Michael …”
“What I’ve got to do this afternoon, though-well, Five years I suppose tomorrow would do-see about hiring some kind of rotavator. That soil out there, I’m not turning it enough by hand.”
“Michael, you’re not listening.”
He blinked. “Aren’t I? I thought …”
“I mean me.”
“What about you?”
“What d’you think’s going to happen about me? About this … situation?”
He looked at her for a long time before answering. “Oh, we’re not getting on too badly now, are we?”
Five years ago, on an application to open an account at the Halifax Building Society, Michael Stuart Best had given his place of birth as Dublin; as a guarantor he had cited his father, Matthew John Best, an address in Germany, serving with the British army overseas. Applying for a small business loan two years later, he had stated that he was born in Greater Manchester and that his father was deceased.
“He talked about it just the once,” the sales manager at Schotness Stationery had told Graham Millington that morning, “the accident which took his parents off, like. Both of ’em. Aye. Lucky to get out himself, strapped in the back, see. On their way to visit relatives, Norfolk way. Terrible. Something you never get over, a thing like that. Good salesman, though, say that for him. When he was in the mood, talk the birds down out of the trees.”
A quiet chap, the general verdict had been, Divine and Naylor going round the neighbors in Ruddington, knocking on doors. Kept himself to himself; friendly enough, though, not standoffish. Nice, the way he used to buy flowers, drive out to take them to his mum in the nursing home every Sunday.
They had made a room available in the local station; Skelton was there now, something of a sparkle back in his eye. “She was right,” just about the first thing he’d said to Resnick when he arrived. “About the Rogel case. Helen. The connection.”
Resnick didn’t give a shit about Helen. The person he cared for here was being held prisoner, her captor a man who had killed one woman already, probably two.
They were steadily narrowing the marked locations down and Resnick continued to pace from desk to wall and wall to desk again, willing the phone to ring.
“Tactical unit’s ready to move, Charlie. Helicopter on stand by if we want it. Two ARVs on their way, one from the city, one from Leeds.”
Resnick’s thoughts had jumped back several years to the unexceptional living room of an unexceptional house save that, cold in the small garden, Lynn Kellogg had just come upon her first dead body, a woman with blood drawn like ribbons dark through her hair. “How are you feeling?” Resnick had asked, and Lynn had fallen, fingers of one hand hooked inside his mouth, face pressed against his chest.
“Charlie?”
Before he could answer, the phone startled to life and Resnick fumbled it into his hand. Listening, his forefinger traced lines along the surface of the map before them. “You’re sure?” he asked. “No room for doubt?”
“No,” Sharon Garnett said. “None at all.”
Before turning to Skelton, Resnick withdrew two of the remaining pins from the map and set them aside, leaving just the one in place. “Got him,” he said, his voice now strangely calm.
“On your way,” Skelton said. “I’ll call up the troops.”
Michelle had been mixing Natalie’s food when Josie came to the door, short of breath from running almost the length of the street on high-heeled shoes.
“The law, they’ve nicked Brian. Gary’s done a runner.”
Michelle stared back at her, open-mouthed. “What’s Gary … Brian … I don’t understand.”