‘You don’t sound sure.’
‘She fancied you. Don’t tell me you did not notice.’
‘Er, no. Can’t say I did.’
‘Well, I noticed.’
‘Really? She is rather attractive, so maybe it’s as well they’re going away tomorrow,’ I said, smiling.
‘She’s not going with him. Not for a couple of weeks. So I don’t want you making any follow-up enquiries.’
‘Oh, er, right.’
At her gate I thanked her for her assistance, and told her I meant it. I wasn’t being patronising. ‘You never told me where you found the pictures,’ I added.
‘They were just inside a book.’
‘The Kama Sutra?’
‘Mechanised Warfare on the Eastern Front.’
‘No wonder we missed them.’
As she opened the car door I said, ‘Am I forgiven, then?’
Annabelle closed the door again. ‘Not completely,’ she answered, looking at me but not smiling. ‘But perhaps in a day or two.’
‘OK. I’ll settle for that.’
She heaved a big sigh and fidgeted with the collar of her jacket. ‘It’s not your fault, Charles,’ she confessed. ‘It’s me. Next Saturday would have been mine and Peter’s wedding anniversary. I’ve been trying to push it out of my mind, but when you said it was Mike and Susie’s…’
She shrugged her shoulders and left the rest of it unsaid.
‘I’m sorry, I never realised,’ I told her.
‘You weren’t to know.’
‘Look,’ I started, not really knowing what I was going to say. ‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. I can either smother you with attention, take your mind off things, or maybe you’d prefer some time to yourself?’
‘I thought you were busy, with this enquiry.’
‘Priorities. I can make time.’
She was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘I think I’d like a few days to myself, if you don’t mind, Charles.’
‘OK,’ I mumbled.
There are two roundabouts, three sets of traffic lights and about eight junctions between Annabelle’s house and mine, but I don’t remember negotiating any of them. It had to happen, but I couldn’t help feeling that something was slipping away. I expect too much from relationships, invest everything I have in them, but it’s me that hurts when they fall through. I’d never felt like this before about anyone, and knew I never would again. There’d been an awful lot of before, but there could never be another again. I yanked the handbrake on outside the place I call home, then realised I was supposed to have gone to the police station. I cursed and restarted the engine.
The office was deserted, which was fine by me. I typed my reports and read some others. Eastwood would be busy assistant-managering at the York and Durham. I’d assume he worked normal office hours and hit him at about six, after he’d eaten but before he started on the Temeraire.
Maggie and Sparky came in with long faces. They’d plenty of misery to report, but no confessions.
Eastwood was leathering his Audi when I arrived, still wearing his suit and tie. Some office types can’t wait to get out of a suit when they go home, but he wasn’t one of them.
At the back of his house I noticed a brand new greenhouse standing on a concrete base. It must have been new because there was nothing in it. Eastwood apologised for the non-existent mess and showed me inside.
‘How can I help you, Inspector?’ he asked.
I didn’t prat about. I just laid the photo of the pirate attack on the table and said, ‘Do you recognise this lady?’
He swallowed and placed two manicured fingers over his lips, as if a great gob of bile had just made a bid for freedom. ‘Y-Yes,’ he stuttered, stifling a burp. ‘It’s m-my ex-wife.’
‘Oh, could you explain?’
‘Well, er, yes. Did you find this at Hartley’s?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Well, er, 1993 I think it was. Joan and I had booked to go on a cruise, and Hartley remarked that he hadn’t had a holiday for years. We saw quite a bit of him in those days — he used to make up a bridge foursome, twice a week. So, Joan and I discussed it between ourselves and suggested he come on the cruise with us. He leapt at the idea.’
I bet he did. ‘So why did you stop seeing so much of him?’ I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Just one of those things. We grew bored with him. All he ever talked about was work, kept trying to involve me in his schemes, pump me for information, that sort of thing.’
‘And you like to leave it all behind you in the office,’ I suggested. ‘Work on your models.’
‘Quite, Inspector.’
‘Pardon my asking, Mr Eastwood, but was your divorce anything to do with Goodrich?’
The bile was still causing him a problem. ‘No,’ he replied, swallowing and grimacing at the same time.
‘Mrs Eastwood wasn’t having an affair with him?’
‘No, certainly not.’
He’d replied just a little too quickly, so I waited for him to enlarge.
‘She…he… She went through a bad patch — nerves, you know. Then decided she wanted a completely fresh start. I think he influenced her, made her feel dissatisfied, but no more than that. We quarrelled a lot. She didn’t appreciate the pressures I was under.’
No, it must be difficult trying to make all those little figures with peg-legs and eye-patches and parrots on their shoulders. ‘So where is she now?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, where did she go?’
‘To a flat in Heckley, but she’s moved since then.’
‘And you don’t know where?’
‘No.’
‘Where would you look if you needed to find her?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘Think, Mr Eastwood. Has she any relatives?’
‘Oh, yes. A sister in Bradford. They were fairly close, she might know where Joan is.’
‘Do you have the sister’s address?’
‘I suppose so, somewhere.’
‘In that case, I’d be very grateful if you could find it for me.’
On the way out I cast a backward glance at the concrete pad under the greenhouse, and wondered how thick it was.
CHAPTER FIVE
I stopped at a corner shop and bought an A to Z. The sister, Dorothy, lived somewhere off the Haworth Road, on the far side of the town, and Eastwood didn’t know her phone number. Some enquiries are like pushing a Tesco’s trolley up the down escalator. Bradford has developed a system of by-passes, but I wanted to go through the city centre. There was gridlock at Forster Square, caused by a broken-down bus. Just after the buses were de- regulated the ones in Bradford carried the message: Privately run for the benefit of the customer, or something similar. Immediately underneath were the words: No change given. I noted that they’d had the decency to remove the benefit of the customer bit. A young girl in a sari and a Nissan let me filter on to the roundabout and I gave her a wave. We were off again.
