“And I’m the inhuman policeman?”
“I hope not. How’s your sandwich?”
“Terrific.” He gestured for her to take a piece, but she declined.
“Too far into my pre-Christmas diet to stop now.”
“What were you doing? While you were walking.”
“Oh, thinking.”
“Lectures and the like?”
“Uh-huh. Among other things.”
Resnick found himself wanting to ask which other things. “While you were passing through the crescent, did you see anyone of Emily Morrison’s description?”
He passed a picture across his desk and she looked at it carefully before answering no.
“And you didn’t see anything unusual going on around the Morrison house?”
“I don’t know which one that is.”
“The woman who was seen, some of the reports suggest she was showing a special interest in the house.”
“But I don’t know …”
“You said.”
“I think,” Vivien Nathanson said, “unless lam very much mistaken, the tone of this conversation has changed.”
“A girl gone missing: it’s a serious matter.”
“And I’m under suspicion?”
“Not exactly.”
“But if I had a specific reason for being in that area at that time, if, for instance, I were calling on a friend at Number, oh, twenty-eight or thirty-two …” She stopped, seeing the reaction on Resnick’s face. “That’s the house, isn’t it? Thirty-two. Where they live? The Morrisons.”
Resnick nodded.
“I didn’t know.”
He didn’t say a thing, but watched her; a hint of alarm undermining her manner, not a seminar any longer.
“But you didn’t see the girl?”
“No.”
“Any girl?”
“Not that I remember.”
“And you would remember?”
“Possibly. Probably.”
“How about a Ford Sierra?”
Vivien shook her head. “I’m afraid the only time I’d notice a car is if it ran over me.”
“Let’s hope not.”
“But I did see a man.”
Jesus, thought Resnick, has she been playing with me all this time?
“He might even be the one you’re looking for. On the radio, it mentioned someone who was running.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I was crossing over, you know, towards the footpath that leads through to the canal. He bumped right into me, almost knocked me down.”
Like downstairs, Resnick thought, though he had been the one falling. “Your mind on other things?” he asked.
“To a degree. But he was most at fault. Just wasn’t looking where he was going.”
“Where had he been looking?”
“Back over his shoulder.”
Resnick could see the curve of the street clearly in his mind, the direction Vivien had been heading, the path the runner had been following. A man running with his head angled back the way he had come, back in the direction of Number 32.
Resnick could feel tiny goose-pimples forming all along his arms, hear the shift of register in his voice when he spoke. “You could give us a description?”
“I think so.”
“Detailed?”
“It was only for a moment.”
“But close.”
“Yes, close.”
Resnick was already reaching for the phone. “What I’d like to do, as well as taking your statement, arrange for an artist to come to the station, make a drawing under your advice. See how close we can get. Okay?”
“In that case,” smiling as she leaned forward, “if I’m going to be here all that time, I will have half of this sandwich.”
Twenty-nine
“I didn’t know you had that.”
Michael shook his head. “Neither did I. Diana must have dropped it in with her things. I doubt she did it on purpose.”
“Perhaps Emily took it.”
“Could be.”
The tag was clear plastic, snapped through at the end where it would have been fastened about the newborn leg or arm: the name written in black felt-tip, Emily, the name and the date.
They had been in her room for almost an hour now, sorting through clothes, some of which, handed on from friends, bought dutifully by Lorraine’s parents, Emily had never worn. In a folder there were Instamatic pictures of the first holiday they had taken, the three of them, after their marriage, the divorce.
“D’you remember that?”
Emily on the back of a bored donkey, clutching Michael’s hand. Although neither of them would put it into words, each was thinking of Emily as though they would never see her again.
“Who was that on the phone earlier?” Michael asked.
“Just my mother.”
Michael nodded, wondering by what twists of logic she would have laid the blame for what had happened squarely at his feet.
“She sent you her love,” Lorraine said, both of them knowing it was a lie.
“I thought it might have been the police.”
“Michael, I would have told you.”
Last night it had been Lorraine who had slept heavily, Michael who had turned and turned, his injured leg throbbing; sat finally in the electric light of the kitchen, drinking tea, glancing now and then towards the unopened whisky bottle on the shelf, the empty one on the floor beside the bin. This morning he’d woken Lorraine with grapefruit juice and toast, kissed her on the lids of both eyes, the first time he had done either of those things for longer than she liked to remember.
“Will it always be like this?” she had asked in the heady days of their courtship-or, as her mother preferred to call it, their sordid little affair.
“Absolutely,” Michael had said, touching the back of his hand to her breast. Kissing her: “Absolutely.”
“Love fades,” says the passer-by in Annie Hall.
“Love hurts,” sing the Everly Brothers on their TV-advertised CD Greatest Hits. “Love dies.”
Their love, Lorraine’s and Michael’s, had slipped into limbo, fallen somewhere between the late nights and the early mornings, Lorraine forever rushing from her job at the bank to the supermarket to collect Emily from school; Michael turning the car into the drive, exhausted by the stubbornness of clients, the miniature of Scotch with which he chased the cans of beer bought on the swaying train.
“I love Emily, Michael, you know I do, but even so, we will, you know, have a baby of our own?”
“Of course we will, of course. We just have to wait until the time is right.”
They had not had that conversation for months, more; as far as Michael was concerned, Lorraine doubted that the time ever would be right. She had even begun to live with it. And after what had happened with Diana, what had happened to his son, to James, Lorraine thought that perhaps she could accept, understand. After all, there was Emily.
“What is it? Lorraine, what?”
Michael reached for her as the tears suddenly sprang, but she twisted away from his hand and off the bed where they had been sitting, out through the partly open door and along the landing to the bathroom, leaving him alone. The clock on the chest read 13.22. Tomorrow, if nothing had happened, he would go back into work: anything was better than being here, breath catching each time a car slowed near the house, waiting for the inevitable walk towards the door, the ringing of the bell.
As Resnick walked along the corridor, yet another conference in the super’s office, the door to one of the interview rooms opened and Vivien Nathanson stepped out followed by Millington, a rare smile, broad as Divine’s shoulders, lighting up the sergeant’s face. Resnick wondered what had passed between them, those moments before leaving the room, and was surprised by jealousy, sudden and sharp, between the ribs, below the heart.
The paintings around the walls were boldly colored, figures all head and little body, trees whose foliage was a mass of leaves, purple and green, suns blazing so fiercely they threatened to send whole landscapes up in flames. In one corner of the room books were collected in plastic bins or stacked, face out, on shelves that were in the middle of reconstruction. Opposite, a Wendy house offered sanctuary, a place to rest, to act out the already half-mastered rituals of family. Small tables and matching chairs stood in clusters, facing inwards. Flowers. Shells. Fossils. Toy cars. Dolls. Hamsters with pouched cheeks asleep in a cocoon of straw.