Sara nodded again and took the bag from her next customer, setting it on the scale. Lynn popped a bull’s-eye into her mouth and left.
“And the weapon?” Patel was saying.
“The gun.”
“Yes. You. say he took it from his pocket?”
“His inside pocket, yes. A blue … donkey jacket, I suppose that’s what you’d call it.”
“Like a work jacket, similar to that?”
“Smarter. I mean, he didn’t look as if he’d nipped in from a building site. Besides, there was none of that reinforcement they have, real working ones, across the shoulders.”
Patel nodded, wrote something in his book. The assistant manager had turned out to be an assistant manageress. He had waited at the corner of the inquiry desk until the buzzer sounded and he was waved through, escorted into a narrow, windowless room, barely large enough to hold a desk and two chairs, the chairs on which they now sat, Patel and Alison Morley. When he had asked her name, she had simply pointed to the badge pinned at an angle over her breast.
“You don’t know, I mean, what kind of gun?”
“No. Except that it was …”
“Yes?”
“Black. It was black.”
“Long?”
She shook her head. “Not very.” A pause. “I mean, I suppose it depends what you’re comparing it to.”
Patel set down his pen and held out both hands, sideways on, approximately eight inches apart.
“Is that long?” she said.
“It depends.”
“I mean, I’ve seen that film, on television. More than once. Clint Eastwood. He can’t get to finish his hamburger on account of this robbery taking place on the other side of the street. Anyway, there’s all this shooting and cars crashing, and then he’s standing there with this gun …”
“A Magnum,” Patel said.
“Is that what it is? Anyway, he’s pointing it down at this gangster, bank robber, whatever he is, pretending he doesn’t know if there are any bullets left or not. Which I think, well, it’s funny, but also it’s stupid, because if he’s a policeman, I mean a professional, he must know how many bullets he’s got left in his gun. Don’t you think so?”
Patel nodded. “I suppose …”
“I mean, if you were on duty and armed, you’d know how many bullets you had left, wouldn’t you?”
Patel, who had never been armed on duty and earnestly hoped that he never would, told her that, yes, he hoped that he would.
“Anyway,” Alison Morley said, “that gun was big.”
“‘A.45 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world,’” Patel said, quoting from the film as accurately as he could remember. “And the weapon the man pointed at you through the glass, it wasn’t that size?”
“Nothing like. But frightening enough all the same.”
“You were scared?”
She looked back at Patel, smiling at the corners of her mouth. “I thought I was going to wet myself,” she said.
Lynn Kellogg and Sara Prine were sitting on a bench not far from where Sara worked; they were dipping into Lynn’s diminishing bag of sweets as they talked. Lynn chatting to her about her job at first, trying to get her to relax a little, some chance.
“There isn’t anything else I can tell you,” Sara said, selecting a strawberry fizz. “About finding that poor girl’s body. I’ve been over it again and again in my mind.”
“I wanted to ask you about your boyfriend,” Lynn said.
“Boyfriend?”
“Yes, Raymond.”
“Raymond isn’t my boyfriend.”
“I’m sorry, I thought …”
“That was the first time I’d ever seen him. That evening.”
“Oh,” said Lynn, looking at her half-profile, Sara less than keen on eye contact, “I thought …”
“I’d known him longer?”
“Yes, I suppose …”
“Because I went with him?”
“I suppose so.”
Sara looked at Lynn then, a dart of the head, round and away.
“We didn’t do anything, you know.”
“Look, Sara …”
“I mean, nothing happened.”
“Sara …”
“Nothing serious.”
Just for a moment, lightly, Lynn touched the girl’s arm. “Sara, it’s none of my business.”
Sara Prine got to her feet, brushing puffs of pink sherbet away from the front of her uniform. Higher up the street, outside C amp; A, a busker wearing a comic hat and a red nose was singing “There’s a Blue Ridge Round my Heart, Virginia,” accompanying himself on banjo. It wasn’t the version Lynn had heard in the station canteen.
“Sara,” she said, trying for the intonation of a friend, an older sister.
Sara sat back down.
“Where you and Raymond went, the sidings, did you get the impression he’d been there before?”
She thought it over, nibbling at a hangnail on her little finger. “I hadn’t really thought about it, but, yes, I suppose … He knew where he was taking me, yes. I mean, he wasn’t stumbling around in the dark.”
“And the building itself?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He could’ve. Yes. Though we didn’t really go far in, you know, not at first.”
“When you were …” Lynn paused “… kissing?”
“Yes.”
“So up until the time you suspected there might be something very nasty in there as well, what would you say was Raymond’s mood?”
Sara chewed at the flesh inside her lower lip. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, was he, for instance, was he excited, was he nervous?”
“He wasn’t nervous, no. Only after.”
“After you found Gloria’s body?” Sara nodded.
“Up to that point, then, he wasn’t apprehensive at all?”
Sara frowned, not certain she understood.
“Raymond, he wasn’t frightened?”
“No. He had no need to be, did he? Specially not when he had the knife.”
Lynn was aware of the skin at the back of her neck beginning to prickle. “Knife, Sara? What knife was this?”
“So,” Alison Morley said, hands on the table, fingers spread, “shall I be talking to you again?”
“I don’t know,” Patel said. “If we find somebody, make an arrest, then yes, it is possible.”
“An identification parade?”
“Possibly.”
Alison Morley nodded once; getting to her feet, she gave the sides of her skirt a discreet downward pull.
“Thank you for your time,” Patel said, suddenly self-conscious that she was watching him stow away his notebook and pen, push back his chair.
“You’re not from here, are you?” she said.
Patel shook his head. “Bradford. My family, they come from Bradford.”
Alison nodded. “I thought it was more a Yorkshire accent.”
“Well, yes.”
“I’ve a cousin, comes from somewhere outside Leeds.”
“Yes.” He glanced round at the door, began to back away. “Well, thanks for being so helpful.”
“Wait a minute.”
She took a small handkerchief from her pocket and nodded at the lapel of his jacket. “You’ve got something down you.”
Patel watched as, carefully, she dabbed it away. The badge engraved with her name was so close to touching his other lapel. She had, he noticed, a tiny mole immediately below one corner of her mouth and level with the cleft of her chin.
“There,” she said, satisfied, stepping back.
“Look,” Patel said, blurting out the words too quickly, “you wouldn’t like to come out with me some time?”
“Why not?” said Alison Morley, stepping back. “We could always talk about your mortgage. See if it isn’t time for you to think about an extension.”
Twelve
Resnick had emerged from Jack Skelton’s office inspired. Back from a brisk two-mile run, the superintendent had unfolded from its neat foil wrapping two pieces of dry plaster board which turned out to be Swedish crispbread, three sticks of green celery and an apple.
“Hear that report on the radio this morning, Charlie?” Skelton had asked, slicing the apple scrupulously into four and then four again. “Two-thirds of the country setting their health at serious risk through sloppy eating habits. Cancer of the colon, cancer of the bowel.”