Finding Dalziel still in her room when she returned had been a serious disappointment to Gina Wolfe.
She hadn’t expected a senior police officer to drop everything and devote himself totally to her concerns, but the degree of interest shown by the Fat Man over lunch had given her hope that he’d do everything in his power to help. Lying in her bed, sleeping off an excess of booze, did not strike her as a very promising start.
Her mood had not been improved by her afternoon. She’d gone out into the Keldale garden and rung Mick Purdy to give him a progress report. His phone was switched off so she left him a message. She sat for a couple of minutes longer, trying to work out if she was any further forward. Then her phone rang. It was Mick.
He said, ‘Sorry. Still at my desk, tying up loose ends.’
He sounded very tired, not surprising as she guessed he hadn’t had much sleep for the best part of two days. But he listened very carefully to her account of what had happened, constantly interrupting with questions, till in the end she got a strong impression that he had a better understanding of what was going on than she did. Maybe he was able to put himself in Dalziel’s place and create a whole picture out of disconnected fragments.
In the end she got rather annoyed with his insistent questioning and said, ‘Look, Mick, I’m not in one of your interview rooms, OK? I’ve told you what happened and the net result, so far as I can see, is that I’ve got another boozed-up cop snoring in my bed!’
‘You’ve never complained before,’ he said.
‘That’s not funny.’
‘No. Sorry. Listen, I’ll talk to Andy when he wakes up…’
‘To get a truly professional picture, you mean? The things I’ve missed, or maybe the things he’s not telling me?’
‘Hey, don’t be so sensitive. We’re cops, we speak the same language, that’s all. Listen, what are you doing now?’
‘I’m sitting in the hotel garden talking to you on my phone.’
‘That’s fine. Good idea to stay there, don’t go wandering off. Look, I need to finish stuff here, than I’ll get back to you…’
‘No need. I’m perfectly capable of managing myself. And you sound like you could do with getting your head down for a couple of hours at least.’
‘Couple of days would be better. Listen, keep in touch. And remember what I say. Until we’re sure what’s going off here, be careful. Don’t go wandering off by yourself.’
Maybe she should have been touched by his concern, but all it did was irritate her.
What right did he have to start dishing out instructions? So he was worried on her behalf. How much more worried would he have been if she’d told him about her several sightings of Alex, both the obviously fallacious ones this morning, and especially the much more powerful image she’d glimpsed just before Dalziel dropped the water jug.
This was one of the reasons she’d come into the garden, to stare at the space the image had briefly occupied in hope of recreating it.
It didn’t work. She looked at her watch. Two o’clock. The christening party looked as if it was breaking up. Dalziel would soon have had his half-hour, but she suspected he might need a little more. Dissatisfied with herself and also with the tone of her conversation with Mick she rose from the bench she was sitting on and headed for the car park. Aimlessly driving around wasn’t going to advance matters but at least it was doing something in a world where men expected her to do nothing without their imprimatur.
It was of course totally non-productive. This time she didn’t even imagine she’d spotted Alex. So finally at half past three she’d returned to her room, not in the mood to make any allowances whatsoever if she found the fat slob still in her bed, which of course he was.
The shower soothed her bodily and mentally. As she was towelling herself down she heard the phone ringing in the bedroom. Checking first that the Fat Man had definitely gone, she picked up the receiver and said, ‘Hello?’
There was no reply, just a faint sound of breathing.
She said, ‘Room 25, who is this, please?’
Distantly a voice said, ‘Gina?’
She froze.
After a while the voice said, ‘Gina, you there?’
She managed to relax her throat muscles sufficiently to say, ‘Alex, is that you?’
Now it was the caller’s turn to pause. When he finally spoke, he said, ‘Yes, it’s me,’ but hesitantly, like a witness whose certainties begin to crumble in the witness box.
Gina heard the doubt and forced herself to restrain the torrent of questions welling up in her head.
She said, ‘Alex, it’s so good to hear your voice. Where are you? Can we meet?’
Another long silence made her wonder if even that had been a question too far, then the voice said, ‘Why are you here?’
She said, ‘Someone sent me the photo of you in MY Life magazine.’
‘Photo? Which photo?’ He sounded puzzled, with a faint note of alarm.
She said reassuringly, ‘The photo of you in the crowd during the royal visit last week. I thought it might be you who’d sent it. You were right at the front, I knew at once it was you. Like I did when I saw you today, in the garden at the Keldale.’
Silence. Am I losing him? she wondered. Again.
Then he spoke and for the first time the voice was that of the man she’d married: alert, positive, forceful.
‘Gina, what are you driving?’
‘A Nissan 350Z. Red.’
‘Give me your mobile number.’
She obeyed.
‘Now get out of there. Check out and leave. Drive north. Leave your phone switched on. I’ll be in touch. Gina, don’t hang about!’
The phone went dead.
She sat on the bed because her legs had lost all strength. Despite everything she’d done since getting the photo, everything she’d said to Mick and to Dalziel, in her heart she’d refused to believe that Alex could really be alive. Even all those ‘sightings’ of him had been good. The ones she knew for certain were false reinforced the chances that the ones that were doubtful were false too.
And now she’d heard his voice. Could that be a delusion too? She wanted it to be. Over the past seven years she’d built up a barrier against all the pain of that time of loss, she’d buried it as deep, so she thought, as the small white coffin. But now she knew-had known as soon as she saw the photo-that the barrier she’d built wasn’t the sturdy bulwark clad in tempered steel of adamantean proof she’d imagined, but a rice-paper wall a dead child could poke a finger through.
She felt herself on the edge of the state of shock, but she must not succumb, not while there was still doubt. There were questions to ask. Questions were good. They forced the mind to work at seeking answers.
First, was it really Alex?
Every instinct told her it was. The voice was his.
He had offered no proof of identity, but even that was a kind of proof.
Yet he didn’t seem to know anything about the photo.
So that was a maybe.
Second, why had he told her to check out?
She recalled Dalziel’s suggestion that maybe someone else had a reason for getting her up here. She hadn’t taken it all that seriously, but now…
That might explain Alex’s alarm, his desire to get her out of there.
Or could it be that someone else was keen to get her out in the open?
She thought of ringing Mick, but what good would that do? She could formulate his response without bothering with the conversation. Don’t so anything, stay put, contact Andy Dalziel, he’ll know what to do.
Perhaps he would. But she didn’t need external input into her decision. Which in fact wasn’t a decision.
