‘ o ‘
said Hitchcns.
‘Muttering? What do you mean?’
‘Cooper is popular here. A lot of people think he’s been hadly treated, promotion-wise. Another one passed over for a newcomer from outside, they’re saying.’
‘Yes. Well, perhaps they’re right, said Jepson. ‘I’d like to he
sure that now DC! Kessen has arrived he’s made iullv aware of
Cooper’s strengths and potential. It doesn’t do to start off with the wrong impression. And, Paul …’
‘Yes, Chief?’
‘Thai applies more generally.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘I mean starting oH with the right impression. The first
O O I
impression someone has of you can last a long time.’
‘I understand.’
‘So let’s have a hit more of a positive attitude, shall we? Less of the cheap humour.’
‘Certainly, sir,’ said Hitchens. ‘I’ll make sure my humour is more expensive in future.’
Of course, Diane Fry was right. It was the wrong time to expect a hit of luck. Two of the people on his list had hccn far too vague ahout the man they had seen to he any help at all in identifying the Snowman. Predictably, their descriptions had fallen apart and become useless when they were questioned closely. And, even if they AaJ seen the Snowman, they could not say who he was, where he had been going, or where he had come from.
109
The first witness had been an old lady with bifocals arid
>
thinning hair, who had seen a strange man walking down her street, stopping to look at the numbers on houses. She hadn’t seen him call at any particular address. And, unfortunately, she hadn’t noticed a car that might have belonged to him, which would have helped a lot.
The second woman was younger, a divorcee with two young children at primary school. This witness had a more detailed eye, and her encounter had been at closer quarters. She had observed a person very like the Snowman doing his shopping in Boots the Chemists on Clappergatc, where he had bought ra/or blades and a bottle of Grecian 2000 in a dark brown shade. She had noticed that he was well dressed, with nicely polished shoes, and that he had paid for his purchases with a brand new L20 note. She had been standing right behind him in the queue at the till, and she thought his aftershave was Obsession. Afterwards, she had
o
watched him walk off towards the market square, but had lost him when he crossed the road near the High Street junction. That was the way she had put it she had ‘lost him’. Cooper had been impressed. With a bit more training, she might have
I O’ o
made a useful surveillance operative.
As it happened, the third woman had been out. Cooper had put his card through her door with a note asking her to contact him. This witness lived in one of the crescents that clustered on the hillside above Edendale. Most of the addresses here were bungalows dating from the 1960s or 1970s, some of them quite large, with well- established gardens or dormer windows built into their roofs.
That left the address he had saved until last. Cooper consulted the street map in the glove compartment of his car. Woodland Crescent was only two blocks down the hill from the street he was in, a few hundred yards away. He left the Toyota by the kerb and walked downhill towards Edendale, carefully sticking to the middle of the pavement to avoid sinking his shoes into more snow.
He came across a little grocer’s shop and a corner post office that had billboards outside advertising the Derbyshire Times and
o J
Daily Mail. A small flatbed lorry with the name of a local builder
10
on its cab door stood in a driveway next to an outdoor aviary lull of fluttering zebra finches. Two hundred yards away, on the main road, was a Case tractor dealership, directly opposite Queen’s Park, the town’s largest open space.
Woodland Crescent was much like the other streets: more bungalows, and a few newer homes at the top, with open-plan lawns separating their drives. A man of about sixty, dressed in vellow waterproofs like a fisherman, was slowing pushing snow off the pavement with a brush. He stopped as Cooper passed and gave him a nod. He was Hushed and breathing hard. The clouds of his breath reminded Cooper of the early-morning cars standing in exhaust fumes pumped from cold engines.
There was a woman sitting in the window of number B7, the Lukasz home. It was a large bungalow with a built-in garage and a sizeable conservatory, which he could see down the passageway separating it from the bungalow next door. Cooper guessed the woman must be Grace Lukasz. Was she the wife of Piotr?
Cooper walked up the driveway to the bungalow, conscious of the woman’s eyes on him. She was watching him suspiciously, as if he might be somebody undesirable a Jehovah’s Witness or an insurance salesman. Near the front door, he stopped and looked at her. The woman was still staring at him. And her expression was more than suspicion it was fear.
