would be so conveniently standing there what other means had been envisaged for its delivery?
After helping Naylor a while at the hotel, Lynn had gone off in search of Vivienne Plant, who, after a few obligatory warnings about harassment, had been only too happy to give the names and addresses of three witnesses who could testify that she had been engaged in a fortnightly badminton game that morning, after which she and her friends had progressed to Russell's bar for a good, unhealthy fry-up brunch.
'Okay,' Resnick said, having listened to their reports.
'Without getting into a lot of lengthy forensics and committing more hours than we can afford, that may be as far as we can go. For now, anyway.'
'That's okay, then,' Naylor said, walking with Lynn across the QD room.
'We can get back to doing something important.'
Lynn stopped in her tracks.
'What?'
'Well, you know. Not as if there was any real harm done,' Naylor said.
'No harm?'
'You know what I mean. It's not as if anything actually happened.'
'Something happened all right,' Lynn said.
'Yes,' Naylor agreed, digging an even deeper hole for himself, 'but not serious. '
'Suppose it had been Debbie, though, Kevin, how would you feel, then?
How would she feel, d'you think? '
'She'd be upset, course she would…'
'Upset?'
'Yes, but she'd get over it.'
'Which means it's not worth our bothering with?'
'Not as much as some other things, no.'
'If she'd been hit, though? Physically attacked, raped even?'
'Then, of course, that'd be different.'
Lynn laughed, more a snort than a laugh.
'Fact you can't see wounds and bruises, Kevin, doesn't mean a person hasn't been damaged. Hurt.
Doesn't have to mean it's less serious. '
Doris Duke didn't look as if she were working. Instead of high heels, she was wearing a pair of scuffed trainers and there was a hole at the back of her black tights big enough to slip a hand through. Aside from what still stuck, haphazardly, to her face from the previous night, she wore no make-up. Her hair had been pulled back from her head and hung raggedly down, secured by a couple of pins and a rubber band. There was a cigarette in her hand.
Sharon eased the car over to intercept her and Doris's head instinctively turned; she wasn't out looking for business, but she wasn't going to shunt it away.
As soon as she recognised Sharon, she knew it was business of a different kind.
'What d'you want now?' she asked, trying to summon up a belligerence that wasn't really there.
Sharon set the hand brake slipped the car into neutral. 'Talk.'
'Oh, yeah? What about now?'
'This and that?'
'Pay for my time, will you?'
Sharon smiled.
'You've been watching too many of those TV movies, Doris. That's the only place girls like you get paid to talk to the likes of me.'
Doris stood uneasily, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, cigarette cupped in her hand.
'From what I've seen, your sort are either looking to bang you up and slap the hell out of you, or they're sniffing round for freebies.'
She gave Sharon a look that was meant to be provocative. 'Which is it with you?'
'Neither. I told you. I just want to talk.'
'And I said, what about?'
'Marlene.'
Doris dropped her cigarette to the pavement, quickly ground it out and began to walk away.
'Doris…'
'No,' she called over her shoulder.
'I already told you everything I know.'
Sharon released the hand brake and let the car coast after her.
'All right,' she said through the window, 'we'll talk about something else. '
'Yeah? Uke what? Swap recipes and tips on chipping away old nail polish?'
'If you Uke, yes. Why not?'
'You know sodding well why not!'
Sharon let the car roll on down the hill, Doris, head down, crossing the road behind her. By the time Sharon had stopped the car and got out, they were level.
'Come on, Doris. A deal.'
Yeah? What's that? '
'I'll buy you a meal and we'll talk and if you don't want to say anything more about Marlene, that's fine.'
'I thought I didn't get paid for my time?'
Sharon was standing next to her now, taller, having to stoop down; Sharon wearing a leather jacket, unzipped, over her souvenir T-shirt from a Prince concert, blue jeans and a pair of ankle-high Kickers, green with a grease mark on one heel.
'This isn't buying your time, it's buying you lunch.'
Lunch? '
'Tea, dinner, whatever. Come on, when did you last eat?'
'That's where I was going now.' 'So fine. Where to?'
Doris grinned, just a little, not giving it too much. 'McDonald's.
Got these vouchers I've been saving from the Post. Two McChicken sandwiches for a couple of quid. '
'Okay,' Sharon said.
'Why don't we go in the car? That way, we could go to the one by the canal, what do you say?'
Sharon told Doris to keep her McChicken vouchers for another occasion and splashed out on two Big Macs, fries, apple pies, cola. They had stopped at the paper shop on Lenton Boulevard so that Doris could buy another twenty Bensons, king size. There was a seat by the window, and although they couldn't actually see the canal from there, they could work out where it was, across the other side of Sainsbury's car park, to the right of Homebase.
Doris picked out most of the middle of her Big Mac, toying with the bun but never really eating it. The fries she dunked in a generous puddle of red sauce. Sharon ate slowly, saying little, trying to make the younger woman feel at ease.
Doris told her about a childhood bounded by Hackney Marshes and Homerton Hospital; Dalston, Clapton, Hackney, Leyton. A familiar enough story, familiar to Sharon certainly, not so very different from her own; the same story many of the working girls had to tell.
When it was told at all. And Doris, not a product of what sociologists and politicians called a broken home; no one-parent family hers. Her father, on the dole, had always been there. Always.
Through the unbroken veil of cigarette smoke, beneath the slow-fading bruise, Sharon looked for the child in Doris's eighteen-year-old face but it had long been driven out. she says: if only I could be three again, struggling with my shoe laces; start all over, go back to the beginning shake my mother abuse my father 'You reckon her for it, don't you?' Doris said suddenly, pushing away the carapace of her apple pie.
'That bloke got himself knifed. You reckon her for that.'
'Do you know where she was, Doris? That evening? Where she was working? Was it the hotels?'
'I already told you, I hadn't seen her since the Tuesday.'
'Tuesday afternoon.'
