‘Muddy, no sugar, thank you.’
‘Muddy?’
‘Strong, with just a tiny dash of milk.’
She went out of the room and he took the opportunity to look at the photographs. One showed a couple outside the front of a church – All Saints, Patcham, he recognized, because it was the same church where he and Ari had been married. The husband, whom he presumed was Jim, wore a narrow-cut suit with a shirt that looked too big for him, bouffant frizzy hair and a quizzical smile. The bride, a much skinnier Janet, had ringlets down to her shoulders and a lace gown with a long train.
Ranged alongside it were several photographs of two children in varying stages of childhood and one of a shy-looking young man in a mortar board and graduation gown.
Graduation, he thought gloomily. Would he ever get to go to either of his kids’ graduations? Or would his bitch wife exclude him?
He pulled out his personal mobile and checked the display. Just in case.
In case what? he thought, pocketing it miserably and wondering again about the man who had answered the phone. The man who was alone with his children.
Was the little turd going to screw Ari when she came home?
He heard wheezing and turned to see an elderly, overweight golden retriever peering at him through the doorway.
‘Hello!’ Glenn said, holding out a beckoning hand.
The dog deposited a slick of slobber on to the carpet, then waddled towards him. He knelt and patted it. Almost immediately the dog rolled over on to its back.
‘Well, you’re a great guard dog, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘And you’re a tart too, showing me your tits!’
He stroked its belly for some moments, then got to his feet again and picked up the greetings card.
On the front, in gold, was printed: ‘TO MY DARLING.’
Inside was written, To Janet, the love of my life. I adore you and miss you every second that we are apart. Thank you for the happiest twenty-five years of my life. All my love. Jim XXXXXXXX
‘Hope it’s the right strength for you!’
Glenn closed the card and replaced it. ‘Nice card,’ he said.
‘He’s a nice man,’ she replied.
‘I can tell from reading it.’
She placed a tray, with two cups of coffee and a plate of chocolate digestive biscuits on the coffee table, then sat on the sofa. The dog pressed its nose against the plate.
‘Goldie! No!’ Janet Towers said sternly.
The dog waddled away reluctantly. Glenn chose the armchair that was furthest away from the fire and looked at the biscuits, suddenly realizing he was feeling hungry. But he felt it might seem rude to start eating at such a sensitive time for this poor woman.
‘I have a few questions for you, further to our telephone conversation yesterday,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind?’
‘I’m desperate,’ she said. ‘Anything, anything at all.’
He turned to the mantelpiece. ‘Are those your children? How old are they?’ Then he watched her eyes very closely.
They swung to the right, then centred as she stared at him, frowning. ‘Jamie, twenty-four and Chloe, twenty-two. Why?’
Without answering, he said, ‘I take it you’ve still heard nothing?’
Roy Grace had taught him, some while back, that you could tell if a person was lying or telling the truth by watching their eye movements. It was an area of neurolinguistic programming. The human brain was divided into left and right parts. Although it was more complicated than Grace taught, essentially with right-handed people, the imagination – or construct – took place in the left-hand side, and the long-term memory and factual stuff took place in the right-hand side. When you asked someone a question, their eyes often moved either to the construct or to the memory side, depending on whether they were lying or telling the truth.
Glenn had already established, by watching her, that she was right-handed. If he now observed her eyes carefully, he should see them move to the left if she was lying or to the right if telling the truth.
Her eyes moved sharply to the right. ‘Not a word,’ she said. ‘Something has happened to him, please believe me.’
He pulled out his notebook and pen. ‘Am I right that you’ve had no word from your husband since Friday night?’
Again her eyes flicked distinctly to the right.
‘Yes.’
‘Has Jim ever been absent for a period like this before?’
‘No, never.’
She still appeared to be telling the truth. He made a note, then sipped his coffee, but it was too hot, so he put it back down.
‘Forgive me if I sound insensitive, Mrs Towers – did you and your husband have any kind of argument before he – disappeared?’
‘No, absolutely not! It was our wedding anniversary – our twenty-fifth. The night before, he told me that he wanted us to renew our wedding vows. We were – are – extremely happy.’
‘OK.’ He looked at the biscuits longingly, but continued to resist. ‘How much did he tell you about his clients?’
‘He told me lots about them, if they were interesting – or odd.’
‘Odd?’
‘He had one guy this summer who hired him to go out deep-sea fishing who turned out to have a penchant for fishing naked.’ She managed a grin.
‘Whatever floats your boat,’ he said, grinning back.
Then, in the awkward silence that followed, he realized that was probably not the best analogy to have used at this moment.
‘So what are the police doing about – about trying to find him?’ she asked.
‘Everything we can, Mrs Towers,’ Glenn replied, his face burning from his faux-pas. ‘The coastguards have launched a full air-sea rescue team, with support from the RAF, out looking for the boat. They’ve stopped tonight but will resume again at first light. All UK and overseas Channel ports have been alerted. All shipping has been alerted to be on the watch for the Scoob-Eee. But so far, I’m afraid, there has been no reported sighting.’
‘We had a table booked for dinner at eight o’clock on Friday night. Jim told me the boat had been chartered for the day by the police diving unit, and that all he had to do was move it back to its mooring, when they returned, and he’d be home by about six.’ She shrugged. ‘Then at nine o’clock his boat was seen going through the Shoreham Harbour lock and heading out to sea. That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Perhaps he got a last-minute charter?’
She shook her head vigorously. ‘Jim’s very romantic – he’s been planning this evening for weeks – months. He wouldn’t have taken a charter that night, absolutely no way.’
Glenn finally succumbed, took a biscuit and bit a chunk. Chewing, he said, ‘I don’t want to sound insensitive, but we know that a lot of smuggling, both of humans and of drugs, goes on in this city. Is it possible that your husband could have been involved in some kind of shipment?’
Again she shook her head vigorously. ‘Not Jim, no.’
Still happy that she was being truthful, he asked, ‘Does Jim have any enemies?’
‘No. None that I’m aware of, anyway.’
‘What do you mean by that, Mrs Towers?’
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asked.
‘Go ahead.’
She pulled a packet of Marlboro Lites from her handbag, took out a cigarette and lit it.
‘Everyone loves Jim,’ she said. ‘He is that kind of man.’
‘So in all his time as a private eye he never made an enemy?’
‘It’s possible. I keep thinking about all his old clients. Yes, he might have upset someone, but he’s been out of that game for a decade.’
‘Could it be someone he put inside who’s just been released?’
‘He didn’t put people in prison. He was more – you know – following unfaithful spouses around, doing a bit of industrial espionage. He just snooped around, followed people, that sort of thing.’