Karen made a note of the name; if it came to it, he shouldn't be all that difficult to find.
Less than ten minutes later Ramsden rang her back. 'Name's Patrick. Terence Patrick. I've got an address in Prestatyn: 15 Sea View Terrace.'
'Current?'
'I'm not sure.'
'Shouldn't be too hard to check. Listen, Mike, if I don't get back to you inside the hour, I want you to meet me there tomorrow morning. Prestatyn. Eight. Eight thirty. I'll catch an early flight to Liverpool or Manchester and drive over.'
'And how am I supposed to get there from the wilds of fucking Lincolnshire?'
'Leave early.'
Karen pressed 'disconnect' and looked at her watch. She needed to get back to the office, make some calls. She thought they'd got as much out of Vanessa Taylor as they were going to get for now. They could always talk to her again. She was thinking about Terry Patrick, how he might have heard the news of his ex-wife's death. If and when and what he'd felt. If he hadn't known already.
Thinking about Maddy's mother, trying to imagine how you began to come to terms with what had happened. If you ever did. Children were supposed to outlive their parents, wasn't that the way it was supposed to be?
11
Whoever had named Sea View Terrace was either possessed of an ironic sense of humour or a very tall ladder. It wasn't even a terrace any more, but a street of seventies semi-detacheds, each with its own garage, right or left. The pebble-dash frontage of number 15, once white, was now a sour, yellowing cream. Wooden planks and sundry pieces of scaffolding littered the front yard. The garage door was partly open.
Karen drove slowly past in the hire car she'd picked up at the airport, reversed into a three-point turn and stopped several doors down. Mike Ramsden's Ford Sierra, showing every sign of having battered along a succession of minor roads in heavy rain, was parked further along on the opposite side, Ramsden catnapping behind the wheel.
Karen got out of the car, wearing a sort of faded green today, almost certainly a mistake, popped a mint into her mouth and turned up the collar of her coat; the rain had dwindled to a steady drizzle, grey out of a grey sky.
She rapped the keys against the Sierra's window and Ramsden was instantly awake. Several lidded coffee cups and an empty Burger King box were on the passenger seat alongside him, an orange juice carton on the floor.
'I thought you said eight?' he said, winding down the window. 'Eight thirty?'
'I did.'
Ramsden looked at his watch and grunted. It was coming round to twenty past the hour.
'What time did you get here?' Karen asked.
''Round seven.'
Karen nodded in the direction of the house. 'Anything happening?'
'Patrick's been in and out the garage a couple of times, fiddling with stuff in his van. Had on his white overalls second time, off to work soon I don't doubt.'
'Anyone else around?'
'Face at the window. Wife, girlfriend, someone.'
'Well,' Karen said, 'let's go and introduce ourselves.'
The woman who came to the door was plumpish, shortish, a smoker's mouth and mid-length straw-coloured hair, breasts that, underneath a pale cotton top, seemed to have a life of their own.
'Mrs Patrick…?'
Her glance moved from one face to the other and back again. 'Sorry, I'm afraid I don't have time…'
But Karen was holding up her warrant card. 'We're police officers,' she said.
The woman looked past them to the empty street outside. 'Terry,' she called over her shoulder. Then, stepping back into the hallway, 'You'd best come in.'
The central heating was turned up high. A radio was playing in another room, the cajoling voice of some near-desperate DJ. Terry Patrick appeared at the end of the hall. His fair, almost sandy hair was in need of a comb, dried patches of plaster and specks of old paint clung to his overalls and the work boots on his feet. Fifty, Karen thought, if he was a day. Around the same height as herself. One of those men who become more wiry with age, rather than gaining weight.
'What's all this then?'
But from his eyes he already knew.
'It's about Maddy, isn't it?'
'Just a few things,' Karen said. 'Routine, really.'
'Come on through,' he said. And then, 'Tina, get kettle on, will you?'
The sigh was practised, automatic. 'Tea?'
'If there's any chance of coffee?' Karen said.
'It'll be instant.'
'That's fine,' Karen said.
'That'll be for the both of you, then?'
Ramsden nodded.
'Suit yourselves.'
The living room was overburdened by furniture and dark. Wherever the radio was playing it wasn't here. The kitchen, probably. Karen could just recognise the Delfonics' 'Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time?' Going back.
'Sit yourselves down,' Patrick said.
Karen sat at one end of a settee that had seen better days, Ramsden on a high-backed chair near the window. Patrick settled himself into what was obviously his chair, creased leather opposite a large-screen TV.
'It must have come as a shock,' Karen said, 'what happened.'
'Course it bloody did. All over the news, like. Couldn't believe it at first.' He made a small derisive sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh. 'What they say, isn't it? When something happens. Couldn't believe it. But it's true. Someone gets, you know, killed – accident, whatever – you never expect it to be someone you know.'
Leaning back, he lifted his feet on to a low wooden table that seemed to have been put there for the purpose. Keeping his boots off the shag carpet.
'Poor silly cow,' he said. 'Out jogging, that's what they said.' He shook his head. 'London. Late at night, some park or other. You'd've thought she'd have known better.'
Coffee and tea were carried in on a metal tray, sugar still in its packet, a solitary spoon.
'Thanks, Tina, love.'
Patrick's hands, Karen thought, watching him stir two sugars into his tea, were broad across the knuckles, lightly etched with paint.
'Maddy,' Karen said. 'When did you last see her?'
Patrick smiled a quick, lopsided smile and, for the first time, Karen caught a sense of how he might have been an attractive man, fifteen or more years before.
'Been thinking about that, haven't I? Tina asked me same thing. Eighty-six, it must have been. The divorce. Year after it all, you know, went pear-shaped.' He picked a small circle of paint from the leg of his overalls and flicked it towards the empty fireplace. 'Seventeen years.'
His wife was still standing in the doorway, watching him, her face impossible to read.
'You've not seen her in all that time?' Karen said.
'Not the once.'
'But you'd kept in touch?'
'Not really, no. Her folks, they were always pretty decent, sent a card at Christmas, that kind of thing. Leastways, till her father died. Four or five years back now, that'd be. Maybe more.'
