John Harvey - Cold Light

Lynn looked at her watch. “I’ll see.”

When finally she went down the stairs, out past the custody sergeant’s office, the entrance to the police cells, she knew it was Michael she was looking for-exchanging words with the constable at reception, kicking his heels on the street outside. He was nowhere.

Knowing that she’d regret it, promising herself she wouldn’t stay too long, Lynn headed across the street to the pub.

“You ask me,” Divine’s voice rose above the noise, “she’s been dead since a couple of hours after she was lifted.”

Lynn wasn’t about to waste her breath telling him that nobody had.

“What about this ransom business?” Kevin Naylor asked.

“Load of bollocks, isn’t it? Some clever-clogs tossing us a-bloody-round. You know yourself, it’s happened before.”

“Come on, Mark,” Lynn couldn’t keep sitting there saying nothing, “her voice was on the tape.”

“So? What’s to stop him forcing that out of her first?”

“All in two hours?”

Divine raised his eyes towards the smoky ceiling. Why were some women always so literal, jumping on every word you said as if it were gospel? “Okay, maybe it was a bit longer. Two hours, four, six, what’s it matter?”

“To Nancy Phelan or to us?”

Divine emptied his glass and pushed it along the table towards Kevin Naylor, his shout this time. “All that matters, what we should be looking for is a body. Never mind all this undercover crap out there in the sticks.”

“Wasn’t what you said at the time,” Naylor reminded him. “Not with another Early Starter on your plate.”

“You can talk! Here, you should’ve seen our Kev and this Gloria, tongue’d dropped any further from his mouth he’d been hoovering up the floor with it.”

Oh, God, Lynn thought, here we go again. “I’m off,” she said, getting to her feet.

“Not now, look, I’m just getting these in. Pint or a half?”

Lynn thought of what was waiting for her at home, half a frozen pizza, a bundle of ironing, her mother’s call. “All right,” sitting back down, “but make it a half.”

A light rain had started to fall, not enough to persuade Lynn to use her umbrella as she took the cut-through beside Paul Smith’s shop and came out by the Cross Keys, opposite the Fletcher Gate car park. Later the temperature was due to drop and most likely it would freeze. Last night, on the bypass out near Retford, a Fiesta had skidded on black ice and collided with a lorry loaded high with scrap; a family of five, mother, dad, two lads, a baby of sixteen months, all but wiped out. Only the baby had survived. She thought about her own good fortune, the car that had come so close to clipping her when she had swung, blinded, wide from her lane.

As she turned through the archway and began to cross the courtyard, the keys were in her hand.

Midway across, she hesitated, looked around. Muted by curtains or lace, lights showed from windows here and there about the square. Soft, the sounds of television sets, radios overlapping. A cat, ginger and white, padding its way along the balcony to the right.

Michael was on the landing, halfway up the stairs, sitting with his back against the wall, legs outstretched, breath on the air, a newspaper folded open in his hands.

“You know,” he said, drawing in his legs, “I can read this thing from cover to cover, front to back, every word, and if you asked me five minutes later a single thing about it, I wouldn’t have a clue.”

Lynn had still to move.

“Here,” he offered the paper towards her, “test me. Name the prime minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Father of the House of Lords. Define once and for all the obligations of the Treaty of Maastricht. I couldn’t do any of it.”

“How long have you been here?” Lynn asked.

“Oh, you know, I haven’t exactly been counting, but possibly one or two hours.”

She turned away, past the chalked graffiti, to look at the light falling in a spiral at the foot of the stairs. Rain drawn across it like a veil.

“You’re not angry?”

“For what?”

“Me being here.”

Angry? Was that what she should be? Looking at him sitting there, Lynn’s shoulders rose and fell and she tried to avoid the smile sidling into his eyes: how long had it been since anyone had waited for her five or ten minutes? “No, I’m not angry.”

He was on his feet in a trice. “Shall we go, then?”

“Where?”

Disappointment shadowed his face. Doubt. “You didn’t get my message?”

“No. What message?”

“About dinner.”

The iron of the railing was cold against her hand. “There wasn’t any message.”

“I left it where you work.”

“You don’t know where I’m stationed.”

“I phoned personnel.”

“And they told you?”

He had the grace to look a little sheepish. “I told them I was your cousin, from New Zealand.”

“Somebody believed you?”

A laugh, self-deprecating. “I’ve always been quite good at accents, ever since I was a child.”

Lynn nodded, moved one step higher, two. “Where was that? That you were a child?”

“What do you think?” he said. “Is it too late for dinner or what?”

He had booked a table at the San Pietro. Red tablecloths and candles and fishermen’s nets draped from the walls. Crooners murmured through the loudspeakers in Italian, more often than not to the accompaniment of seagulls and a mandolin.

“I’ve no idea what this place is like,” Michael said, pulling out her chair. “I thought we could give it a try.”

The waiter appeared with the wine list and a couple of menus.

“Red or white?” Michael said.

“Nothing for me, I’ve had enough already.”

“Are you sure? You …”

“Michael, I’m positive.”

He ordered a small carafe of house red for himself, a large bottle of mineral water for them both. For a first course, he had prosciutto ham and melon, Lynn a mozzarella and tomato salad. They were well into their main dishes-fusilli with gorgonzola and cream sauce, escalope of veal with spinach and saute potatoes-when Michael asked his first question about her day.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised you were late, this terrible business, it must be driving you mad.”

Lynn set down the fork she had half-raised to her mouth. “Which business is that?”

“That poor missing girl.”

“What makes you think I’m working on that?”

“Are you not? I suppose I thought you all would be, trying to find her, you know, twenty-four hours a day.”

“Well, I’m not, not directly.”

“But you must know all about it. I mean, what’s going on.”

She lifted up her fork again; the veal was tender, sweet to the taste, the breadcrumbs surrounding it not too crisp.

“This latest business, this ransom that was never collected and everything, isn’t that all very weird? Didn’t I read that setting that trap for him cost so many thousand pounds?”

“You seem to know as much about it as I do.”

“Ah, well, it’s only what I read in the papers, you know.”

“I thought,” Lynn said, “you forgot all that the minute you’d taken it in.”

Michael smiled back at her and summoned the waiter, ordered himself another carafe of wine.

“You’re sure you won’t?”

“Quite sure.”

For the remainder of the meal, he asked her about the damage to her car, her father’s health, talked about plans for setting up on his own again once the recession had really started to turn around. Distribution, that’s the thing, wholesale; anything but stationery, deadly stuff, try as you might, never get it to really move. And he’d glanced up at her, grinning, to see if she’d got the joke.