Of course, she couldn’t resist playing the detective game. As time passed, she became assiduous in picking up crumbs that he dropped. Marc was no monk in his earlier days, that was for sure. He’d lost his virginity to an older woman whom he’d met while working in a hotel during his gap year. Maybe from her he’d learned the patience and technique that made him as different from her previous lovers as Mozart from Meatloaf. He’d taken lovers at university, but out of term time he kept going back to a Brackdale girl he’d first courted as a diffident, acned schoolboy. Dale Moffat.
Hannah sat in the living room, rifling her memory for the bits and pieces of information he’d let slip about Dale. After consigning the Erik Satie CD to the bottom of a box of their least-played music, she’d put on Diana Krall and gone in search of comfort food. In a corner of a kitchen cupboard she’d discovered a forgotten box of Belgian chocolates. The legend boasted that the contents represented an exquisite combination of refined taste and time-honoured tradition: how could she resist? She’d worry about her weight in the morning. In the absence of sex, chocolate wasn’t such a bad substitute.
As for sex, every community had at least one Dale. Pretty, vivacious, narcissistic; smart enough not to cheapen herself by spreading her favours too thickly but not quite smart enough to do a Tash Dumelow and hit the jackpot. When Marc was sixteen, she’d dumped him for the star centre forward of the school football team. By the time he came back as a student on his first vacation, the acne was long gone and the soccer player wasn’t scoring any more. Hannah gathered that Marc and Dale liked each other’s company and liked going to bed together even more, but it was never a grand passion. Long before Marc took his degree, Dale caught the eye of a married man and, in time-honoured tradition, finished up pregnant. She’d kept the baby but not the boyfriend.
When the child was a little older, she and Marc had resumed their affair on a sporadic basis. As far as Hannah could figure out, it was a fallback position in more senses than one. If Marc was ever without a girlfriend for the night and Dale wasn’t otherwise engaged, they usually finished up in bed together. In the unlikely event that matrimony had ever been on the cards, Hannah had no doubt that the presence of Dale’s boy Oliver was enough to deter Marc. For a lifelong commitment-phobe, taking on a stepson in addition to a wife was too much to ask. Perhaps that was why he insisted on surrounding himself with books. The dusty tomes never threw up or got toothache, they never made demands.
‘She does know about you and Dale?’ she’d asked when Marc said that he’d invited Leigh Moffat to run the cafe at Amos Books.
‘Of course, those two don’t have secrets.’ The question seemed to amaze him. ‘But it’s not an issue.’
She’d thought about joking that it would be different if the boot was on the other foot, and she was proposing to set up with the brother of an ex, but she let it go. It would never occur to him that she might suffer a pang of jealousy. In a way, she felt flattered that he regarded himself as incapable of betraying her. Only in the darkest moments of self-doubt did she wonder if she was fooling herself. Or if he was fooling himself.
Leigh was less blatantly alluring than her sister, but to Hannah’s mind more attractive. Like Dale, she’d never married; Hannah didn’t have a clue why not. There had been relationships with men, Hannah gathered, but nothing that lasted, and she seemed content to spend a lot of time with Dale and Oliver, upon whom she doted. Apparently she’d been on her own for years, making a modest career in catering while Dale drifted from job to job. Both were intelligent women, but neither seemed to possess any burning ambition. Hannah couldn’t relate to such a lack of drive. To her, it was an article of faith: any woman with talent owes it to herself, and to her gender, to make the most of her potential. From childhood, she’d been determined to make her own way and never to be beholden to a man.
Leigh wasn’t the type to worry without good cause. Whenever Hannah met her, she radiated a calm assurance that verged on the intimidating. Impossible to imagine that in her entire life, she’d ever allowed a souffle to sink or stepped outside her front door without the benefit of a discreet touch of blusher and eye-shadow. If neither she nor Dale was the anonymous caller, why so much angst over what they remembered of the day when Gabrielle Anders had been murdered?
Unless, Hannah supposed, they remembered something about Marc that they didn’t want anyone to know.
The choice was simple. She could imitate Marc and take refuge in booze to stop worrying herself sick. Or she could do something. No contest. She found herself reaching into her case for the personal organiser, and then for the phone.
She was halfway through dialling Daniel Kind’s mobile number when she asked herself what she was doing. Already it was mid-evening; soon it would be dark. He would be busy with his work or doing whatever he did in the company of his partner, the journalist. They weren’t even friends. It was — well, Lauren Self’s phrase would be quite inappropriate. What would he think if she called him out of the blue, without an excuse?
As his phone rang, she cut off the call. Perhaps he was out. Besides, she wasn’t sure what to say if he answered. The impulse to dial his number was inexplicable: why not Nick, or even Les Bryant? It wasn’t as if she fancied him. That morning, she’d taken care not to look straight into his dark eyes, so reminiscent of his father’s. The trouble was, all he had to do was to check who had called in order to discover that she’d called for a couple of seconds, only to think better of it. Embarrassing.
Given the option, it’s always better to do something than nothing.
How many times had she heard Ben Kind say that? As a piece of philosophy, even he’d admitted its limitations, but right now it was apposite. What did she have to lose?
She dialled the mobile number again.
Chapter Seventeen
‘This is Hannah Scarlett.’ A long pause. ‘Have I called at a bad time?’
‘No, no,’ Daniel said hastily. ‘It’s fine, absolutely fine.’
‘I felt guilty about rushing off this morning, after I’d dragged you over to Kendal.’
‘No need.’
‘I really didn’t give you much of an insight into Ben as I knew him. I’m sorry if you thought it was a wasted journey.’
‘Of course not.’ He didn’t want her to hang up without agreeing to talk to him again. ‘If sometime you could spare…’
‘Tell you what. I’m not far away at the moment. Are you busy this evening?’
‘No.’ He groaned inwardly: why keep saying no? ‘I’m just taking a walk in Tarn Fold, that’s all.’
‘Do you know The Slow and Easy?’
‘On the road into Whitmell?’
‘That’s it. If you’d like to drive over, I can meet you in the lounge bar for a chat. Not for more than half an hour, mind. I mustn’t get back home too late.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sorry,’ she said abruptly. ‘You’re breaking up. I’ll see you there in twenty minutes.’
The Slow and Easy was an old coaching inn by the side of the road connecting Brackdale with the neighbouring valley. A blackboard outside bore the legend: I wandered lonely as a cloud and then I thought — sod it, I fancy a pint. The lounge boasted slate tiles and an inglenook with a smoky fire and there wasn’t a jukebox or pinball machine in sight. According to a magnificently bearded old man leaning on the bar, the carved oak bar had been made from a four-poster bed. Hannah wanted a tonic water and he opted for half a pint of Jennings’ Sneck Lifter as a treat to celebrate her unexpected call. On the way here he’d speculated what lay behind it. He wasn’t naive enough to believe that a senior police officer would indulge in spur of the moment socialising with someone she’d only met once. Presumably her sudden enthusiasm for an early second meeting was linked to the interviews that Leigh Moffat had complained about. He was glad to see her, whatever the ulterior motive.