unusual restraint, confined himself to his second large espresso.
'See that?' With her spoon, she made a dismissive flicking gesture across the table.
'Lothario in action.'
Oblivious, Frank Cariucci was engaging Mollie Hansen in intense conversation; if he got any closer he would be eating his creme caramel out of her lap.
'Doesn't bother you?' Resnick asked.
Cathy glanced across at them and then away.
'Not any more.' The look in her eyes suggested she might almost mean it.
'Besides, that young woman can handle herself.'
Resnick drew breath slowly and nodded. About that, he thought she was right. Along the table, Dorothy By- dwell, back upright, head tilted forward, sat quite asleep.
'That was all it took,' Frank Cariucci was saying to Mollie, 'a little investment here, little advertising there. One minute I'm the guy who won silver snatching the big one at the Games, face all over the sports pages for weeks. The Olympics, right? A big deal. '
Mollie yawned.
'A while after that,' Frank said, 'things got kinda slow. That's till I met Cathy there. Married her. Wake up and what am I? Mr Cathy Jordan, that's what. '
Oh, God, thought Mollie, here we go. Another everyday story of emasculation. Tennessee Williams without the style.
'I could only take that for so long,' Frank was saying.
'I knew I had to do something for myself. Something big. So I look around, talk a little here, a little there, a favour to be called in, you know what I mean? Now here I am, heading up the fastest-growing catering franchise on the West Coast. Shops everywhere, those little carts, signs Cariucci's cappuccino, the coffee with muscle. Truckers pull over and drink my stuff without there's guys looking at 'em strange for drinking something with a fancy name, bunch of froth on top. You understand what I'm saying?'
'I understand,' Mollie said quietly, 'if you don't take your fucking hand off my leg, I'm going to stick this fork right through it' There was a scar on one of her breasts, curving beneath it, a thin ridged line, small and white. Peter Farleigh lay on his back and Michelle knelt above him, straddling his thighs. She was still wearing skimpy bikini pants. They had fooled around for a while earlier, Michelle finding some baby oil in her bag, and now a small pool of it floated in one of the folds of his stomach, glistening a little in the light from the window, the only light in the room.
'Are you ready?' she said.
She could see he was ready.
'All right,' she said, 'just a minute. ' And leaned sideways, reaching down again to where her bag lay beside the bed.
Bloody condoms, Farleigh thought, shifting his position to accommodate her move. Still, better safe than sorry.
But then he saw what was in her hand, the look in her eyes, and he knew that wasn't true.
Twenty-one
Resnick had just walked into the CID room when the call came in, Millington picking up and listening only long enough to beckon him over, pass the phone across.
'Right,' Resnick said, a minute later.
'We've got a body. Graham, you come with me. Mark…'
'Boss?'
'I shall need you and Kevin knocking on a few doors.'
Divine didn't need telling twice.
'How about Lynn?' Millington asked. They were in the corridor, heading for the stairs.
'Seeing the shrink, isn't she? Could always get her to cancel. Reschedule.'
'For the sake of fifty minutes? No, I don't think so.'
Millington pushed open the rear door to the car park. 'How long till all this psycho babble business is over and done with, that's what I'd like to know?'
'Graham,' Resnick said, with a slow shake of the head, 'I doubt it ever is.'
To say the body was in the bath was not quite accurate. The left arm and leg and most of the trunk were hanging inside, the right leg outside, trailing at an awkward angle to the floor. The right arm stretched along the bath's rim, the head resting, open-mouthed, against the crook of the elbow. From the position alone, it was unclear whether the dead man had been trying to climb into the bath or crawl out.
A patchy trail of blood contoured its way across the carpet, leading from the bed into the bathroom; blood had dried in tapering lines down the plastic-coated side of the bath beneath the body and more had collected around the plug hole like a pressed rose.
'Dragged there, d'you reckon?' Millington asked.
Resnick's mouth tightened.
'Possible. Dragged himself, could be.'
Why the bath, then? Not the door? '
'Might not have known. Just getting away. Disorientated. Then again, maybe it was deliberate. Wanted to wash it off.'
There was a uniformed officer outside the door, another further along the corridor, shepherding curious staff and guests on their way. From the hotel register, it had been established that the occupant of the room was a Peter Farleigh, with an address Resnick recognised as one of those villages in the Wolds, north of Loughborough.
The clean towels which the maid had been carrying were in a heap near the door where she had dropped them; the maid herself was lying down in one of the vacant rooms, according to the manager, in a right old state.
'We don't know, of course,' Millington said, 'if this is Farleigh or not. Not for a fact. '
Resnick nodded, stepping back into the main room. Both he and Millington were wearing plastic coats over their street clothes, white cotton gloves on their hands.
A wallet lay on the table beside the bed, nudged up against the base of the lamp. Cautiously, Resnick fingered it open. Whatever money it might have held was gone. Surprisingly, though, the credit cards seemed to be in place. Behind a kidney donor card was a membership card for a squash club in Melton Mowbray which bore a small, coloured photograph above an address and the name, Peter John Farleigh. The man poised over the bath looked different, in the way that dead people do, but Resnick had no doubt that he was one and the same as the person pictured in the photo.
Resnick stood where he was, focusing on the bed, the ruck of clothes, darkly stained; under the almost silent hum of the air conditioning, the scent of sweat and blood were unmistakable. He tried to imagine what had happened in that room, tried to magic words, expressions out from the walls. If that address were still correct, then Farleigh lived no more than an hour's drive away, so why opt for the hotel in preference to going home?
Sex, Resnick thought.
A lover.
A liaison, bought and paid for, bought and sold.
Sometimes this was what it cost.
The door opened from the corridor and Parkinson, the pathologist, came in: tall, bony, thinning hair, neat in a mossy tweed suit.
Automatically, he fingered an extra- strong mint from the roll in his side pocket and slid his glasses from their case.
'Now then, Charlie, what have we got here?'
Lynn thought, this room always smells of flowers. Roses, though there were none that she could see. She sat in the same chair, wooden arms and a curved back, comfortable, but not so comfortable that you would drift off to
