Arms swinging lightly by his sides, Elder cut through a swathe of tree-lined residential streets on to the main road; for a moment he was distracted by the lights of the pub, orange and warm, but instead walked on, away from the city centre and then left to where the houses were smaller than his own and huddled together, the first part of a circular walk that would take him, an hour or so later, back home.
Behind the curtains of most front rooms, TV sets flickered and glowed; muffled voices rose and fell; the low rumble of a sampled bass line reverberated from the windows of a passing Ford. Haphazardly, dogs barked. A child cried. On the corner, a group of black youths wearing ripped-off Tommy Hilfiger eyed him with suspicion and disdain.
Elder pictured Gerry Saxon leaning up against a darkened tree, his hands trembling a little as he smoked a cigarette. Almost a year now since he had given up himself, Elder fumbled in his pocket for another mint.
He knew the pattern of incidents similar to that at the Atkins house: the man — almost always it was the man — who could find no other way to cope; debt or unrequited love or some religious mania, voices that whispered, unrelenting, inside his head. Unable or unwilling to leave his family behind, feeling it his duty to protect them from whatever loomed, he took their lives and then his own. What differed here was the intensity of the attack upon the wife, that single fierce and slashing blow, delivered after death. Anger at himself for what he had done? At her, for giving cause?
A cat, tortoiseshell, ran two-thirds of the way across the road, froze, then scuttled back.
‘She was seeing someone, wasn’t she?’ Connie Seymour had said, voice parched with her own grief. ‘Lorna. His wife, Lorna. Paul was terrified she was going to leave him, take his kids.’
No matter how many times he and Maureen had asked, Connie had failed to give them a name. ‘He wouldn’t tell me. Just wouldn’t tell. Oh, he knew all right, Paul knew. But he wouldn’t say. As if he was, you know, as if he was ashamed.’
Maureen had got Willie Bell sifting through the house-to-house reports already; tomorrow Matt Dowland and Salim Shukla would start knocking on doors again. For Karen Holbrook the task of contacting Lorna Atkin’s family and friends. Elder would go back to the house and take Maureen with him.
Why? That’s what you clever bastards are going to find out.
Joanne was in the bathroom when he got back, smoothing cream into her skin. When he touched her arm, she jumped.
‘Your hands, they’re like ice.’
‘I’m sorry.’
The moment passed.
In bed, eyes closed, Elder listened to the fall of footsteps on the opposite side of the street, the window shifting uncertainly inside its frame. Joanne read for ten minutes before switching out the light.
They found a diary, letters, nothing of real use. In a box file shelved between two albums of photographs, Maureen turned up a mishmash of guarantees and customer instructions, invoices and bills.
‘Mobile phones,’ she called into the next room. ‘We’ve had those checked.’
‘Yes,’ Elder said, walking through. ‘He had some kind of BT cell phone leased by his work, she was with — who was it? — One to One.’
‘Right.’ Maureen held up a piece of paper. ‘Well, it looks as if she might have had a second phone, separate account.’
‘Think you can charm some details out of them, recent calls especially?’
‘No. But I can impress on them the serious nature of the situation.’
‘You sure you want to do this alone?’ Maureen said.
They were parked in a lay-by on the road north from the city, arable land to their left shading into a small copse of trees. Lapwings rose sharply in the middle distance, black and white like an Escher print.
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘You don’t want…?’
‘No,’ Elder said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
Maureen nodded and got back into her car and he stood there, watching her drive away, rehearsing his first words inside his head.
It was a square brick-built house in a street full of square brick-built houses, the front of this one covered in white pebbledash that had long since taken on several shades of grey. Once council, Elder assumed, now privately owned. A Vauxhall Astra parked outside. Roses in need of pruning. Patchy grass. Close against the kitchen window, a damson tree that looked as if it rarely yielded fruit.
He rattled the knocker and for good measure rang the bell.
No hesitation in the opening of the door, no delay.
‘Hello, Gerry,’ Elder said. ‘Late shift?’
‘You know,’ Saxon said. ‘You’d’ve checked.’ And when Elder made no further remark, added, ‘You’d best come in.’
It was tea or instant coffee and Elder didn’t really want either, but he said tea would be fine, one sugar, and sat, mug cradled in both hands, in the middle of the cluttered living room while Saxon smoked and avoided looking him squarely in the eye.
‘She phoned you, Gerry. Four days ago. The day before she was murdered. Phoned you when you were on duty. Twice.’
‘She was upset, wasn’t she? In a real state. Frightened.’
‘Frightened?’
‘He’d found out about us, seen us. The week before.’
Saxon shook his head. ‘It was stupid, so fucking half-arsed stupid. All the times we… all the times we saw one another, we never took no chances. She’d come here, afternoons, or else we’d meet up miles away, Sheffield or Grantham, and then this one bloody Saturday she said let’s go into Nottingham, look round the shops. He was supposed to be off taking the kids to Clumber Park and there we are coming out of the Broad Marsh Centre on to Lister Gate and they’re smack in front of us, him with the little kid on his shoulders and the other one holding his hand.’
Saxon swallowed down some tea and lit another cigarette.
‘Course, we tried to pass it off, but you could see he wasn’t having any. Ordered her to go home with them there and then and of course when they did there was all merry hell to pay. Ended up with him asking her if she intended leaving him and her saying yes, first chance she got.’ Saxon paused. ‘You’ll take the kids, he said, over my dead body.’
‘She didn’t leave?’
‘No.’
‘Nor try to?’
Saxon shook his head. ‘He seemed to calm down after the first couple of days. Lorna, she thought he might be going to get over it. Thought, you know, if we lay low for a spell, things’d get back to normal, we could start up again.’
‘But that’s not what happened?’ Elder said.
‘What happened was, this idea of her taking the kids, he couldn’t get it out of his head. Stupid, really. I mean, I could’ve told him, a right non-starter.’ Saxon looked around. ‘You imagine what it’d be like, two lads in here. Someone else’s kids. Place is mess enough as it is. Anyway…’ Leaning forward now, elbows on his knees. ‘… you know what it’s like, the kind of life we lead. The hours and all the rest of it. How many couples you know, one or both of them in the force, children, how many d’you know make it work?’
Elder’s tea was lukewarm, tannin thick in his mouth. ‘The last time she phoned you, you said she was frightened. Had he threatened her or what?’
‘No. I don’t think so. Not in as many words. It was more him coming out with all this guff. Next time we’re in the car I’ll drive us all into the back of a lorry. Stuff like that.’
‘And you didn’t think to do anything?’
‘Such as what?’
‘Going round, trying to get him to talk, listen to reason; suggesting she take the boys away for a few days,
