Warren gave it a moment before shaking his head.
“He used to wrestle. The Oblivion Brothers.”
“He was both of them?”
Resnick smiled. “He’s big enough.”
“No. You don’t get the likes of them down here. Acting class, makeup-that’s more their style. But I’ll ask around if you like. Think he might have been throwing his weight about in the wrong places, do you?”
“Not really. But if you do pick up anything…”
“I’ll give you a bell.”
Advertisers with the local newspaper’s personal columns were still being interviewed and not without embarrassment. Strapping toy boys turned out to be holders of bus passes; the secretary of the Mothers’ Union kept the photographs sent in response to “sexy redhead seeks man hot enough to put out the flame” between the pages of her Bible. Husbands blushed on being confronted before their wives and vice versa. One married couple realized they had both had advertisements for new partners printed on the same day. It was slow, but it was methodical.
Gradually men who had responded to adverts were being tracked down and questioned. Skelton and the rest of the inquiry team felt without knowing why that it was starting to slip away from them. They wanted something more positive, a lead towards somebody they could begin to lean on. Mary Sheppard’s double-date had seemed to be it; the former wrestler, for all too short a time, had been an ideal suspect.
“I’ve been reading through the stuff on Sloman again, Charlie,” Skelton said. “You don’t think we gave up on that too easily?”
“We’ve got half an eye on him, sir.”
“Whereas we did have him in the station. Voluntarily. No question of a charge, no solicitor, simply a chat. We thanked him very much and showed him the door.”
“It was put up or shut up, sir.”
“You don’t think somebody else might have got more out of him?”
“I think if Millington had come out of there and, say, I’d gone in, started asking more questions, putting him back over the same ground, I think then he would have got the wind up.”
“You didn’t want another Macliesh?”
“That’s part of it.”
“The rest?”
Resnick half-shrugged. “Just didn’t feel right.”
“You’ll be fingering seaweed next, Charlie. Reading tea leaves or the I Ching.”
“You want me to pull him in again, sir, then of course…”
“I don’t think so. But your sergeant does.”
“Millington? He’s been to see you about it, sir. I mean, direct?”
Skelton held out his hands in a gesture of pacification. “He’s not been behind your back, Charlie. Nothing like that. A word in the corridor, that’s all it was. In passing. A question from me, a remark from him in return. Anything more and I’d want it through the proper channels.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tendency towards the purblind, Millington, but not a bad copper for all that.”
Resnick nodded.
“I think like the rest of us-everyone except those civilians and their software-I’m hoping against hope we won’t be forced into phase two.”
“Phase two, gentlemen, brings with it a widening out of the inquiry.”
“And enough perforated bloody paper to keep a ward full of gastric cases going,” voiced Colin Rich at the rear of the room.
“On the one hand this means we start to check all of the marriage bureaux and dating agencies. To begin with we’ll restrict this to the city; if necessary we shall extend throughout the county. Nationwide agencies whose files are already computerized will allow us to access them for local names and addresses as soon as we provide them with the necessary warrants.”
Skelton paused to worry something stuck between his teeth with his tongue.
“Those little back hairs,” said Rich, “they get everywhere.”
“With surgery,” Resnick told him, “you could probably have your brain moved back above your waist.”
“The second and murkier avenue,” Skelton was saying, “is contact magazines. There are a number of these readily available in the city. Sometimes an entire magazine devoted to people looking specifically for sexual partners, sometimes a section in one of the girlie mags you can buy at any newsagents.”
“As long as they’re called Patel,” laughed Rich.
“If we broaden out the inquiry along these lines,” said Skelton, “I don’t need to spell out the size of the task. Nor the importance of stressing to your teams the need for careful work, methodical and precise.”
Outside there were streaks of cloud like skid marks across a pale blue sky. The frost that had fringed gardens and roofs that morning had barely disappeared. A couple more hours and the light would begin to go. Lynn Kellogg thought about her father, fussing around the long, jerry-built hen houses, the last half-inch of an extinguished cigarette tight between bloodless lips. Inside the house, her mother’s voice rising and fading over snatches of misremembered Family Favourites: “Oh, Bella Margareta”, “Shrimpboats are a-Coming”, “Buttermilk Sky”. There would be bread rising in the cupboard beneath the boiler; soup beginning to simmer on the stove. The smell of carbolic soap and chickens.
She took a tea and a cheese and onion sandwich and went to join Kevin Naylor, who was sitting with the remnants of double egg and chips, thoughtfully worrying over the entries he was making in a small black diary.
“Join you?”
“Yes, course. There.” He pushed the plate along towards one end of the table, folded the diary closed over his yellow Bic.
Lynn had seen two columns of figures, small writing, sloping backwards, alongside each. “Trying to make ends meet?”
Naylor shook his head. “I was listening to the radio driving in this morning. Some woman from the Royal College of Nursing going on about how badly they were paid compared to the police.”
“What are you saying?”
“I get fed up with hearing it.”
“Not as much as the nurses.”
“I dare say. That’s no reason for us to be passed off as earning a fortune.”
“We earn a sight more than they do. Double nearly, starting anyway.”
“It’s a different issue.” He glanced round the canteen, worried in case he’d made his point too loudly. “Debbie says all that happens is the public end up thinking we’re overpaid, when what’s happening is that the nurses are underpaid.”
“Right,” agreed Lynn. Why did they have to grate the cheese before putting it into the sandwiches? All that happened was that it fell out all over the table.
“It’s those blokes down in the City they want to go after, not…”
“Come on, Kevin, nobody’s going after us.”
“Yuppies making sixty thousand a year…”
“We get a decent wage and others should get the same.”
“A year ago, I never knew what a yuppie was. Well, did you?”
Lynn raised a hand to greet someone across the room. Usually when you sat with Kevin it was a wonder to get more than a dozen words out of him.
“Anyway,” he said, “I don’t see as it is that much. Now we’ve taken on this new house…”
“Between the two of you, though, you must be bringing in a good bit.”
Naylor mumbled something inaudible.
“Skiing in Italy as well as a summer holiday. Or was it Austria?”
“That was Debbie’s idea, not mine.”
“Still, you could afford to go.”
“Good job we did.”
“What’s that mean?”
“When we could, that’s what it means.”
“She hasn’t lost her job? Kevin, they haven’t made her redundant?”
He fiddled with the top of his pen, pushed his diary around the table. “More like I have,” he said, not looking at her.
“What are you on about? You’ve not had a row, I mean you haven’t split up? You…” She reached across the table and took hold of his arm. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
He looked around anxiously, waved his hand at her to keep her voice down. “That’s it, tell everybody.”
“Why ever not? Aren’t you pleased? You must be really chuffed. How long have you known?”