Rush of Blood (18 page)

‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’

Barry puffed out his cheeks and shook his head. He looked at Ed. ‘I’m done.’

‘We were just talking, that’s all,’ Dave said. He opened his mouth to say something else, but Ed was already turning away
from him, waving towards the waiters and scribbling in the air.

Sue had booked a hair appointment good and early. The best part of two hours to style and get rid of the grey. In the forty-five
minutes reading the magazines and waiting for the colour to take, she had been able to lose herself easily in the mindless
tales of celebrities’ plastic surgery nightmares and reality TV tittle-tattle. Later though, her head back and the assistant
stylist’s fingers working rhythmically at her scalp, she had closed her eyes and suddenly found herself thinking about the
girl: her body bobbing in a cage of mangrove roots, tangled in weed, moving with the current.

‘Is this pressure all right for you?’

Sue had grunted a yes.

She had asked herself how accurate her imaginings were and decided that the pictures in her head were probably too … dreamy.
There would be photographs somewhere and she even wondered if that was the sort of thing that eventually surfaced on the internet.
She’d heard stories about the victims of car crashes and executions. If not, there would be descriptions out there, almost
certainly. Hadn’t the body been discovered by somebody out kayaking or something? He
would have given a statement of course, spoken to the press too, she imagined, and the TV people. If there were, then she
guessed that Angie would have tracked them down online. Would have printed them out most likely and filed them away in a big,
brightly coloured ring-binder with her collection of newspaper reports and duplicates of the holiday snaps she had sent to
the police.

Sue would not have been surprised to see Angie turn up later on with a bottle of wine in one hand and nicely bound copies
for each of them in the other.

‘Water temperature OK for you …?’

Now, walking from the salon to the supermarket, she told herself that her curiosity about how the girl had looked was only
natural, however morbid it might sound if she voiced it. Curiosity about the whole case – the disappearance and the investigation
– was only to be expected and she was certainly not judging Angie Finnegan. It was odd though, she thought, that Marina had
not said too much about it. Despite believing that she was a pretty good judge of character, Sue had yet to get a handle on
that woman at all.

Even when they’d been out together, after a few hours drinking and talking ten to the dozen, Sue couldn’t say what she really
thought of her. Even after a few glasses of wine she had not felt able to tell her about Emma. She wondered if she might feel
ready to tell her tonight, to tell any of them. She would have to wait and see if the opportunity presented itself. She enjoyed
telling people, ached to do it, but obviously she needed to pick her moment.

Ed …

Walking on, she wondered how his tennis match had gone and what kind of mood he would be in later on. She was hopeful, as
he was far more relaxed at weekends. She knew why of course, knew perfectly well what he was up to during the week. She’d
begun to suspect as much anyway, but when the woman two doors up had told her that Ed had been coming home an hour or two
after Sue had left for work, she had quickly figured out what was happening. She didn’t blame him particularly, but she was
certainly not going to let on that she knew.
She would wait for him to confide in her. That was what couples did, wasn’t it.

Up to a point, of course.

She walked past a small parade of shops set back from the main road, trying to decide what to buy for dinner. There had to
be something other than pasta she could manage. Why hadn’t her mother taught her to cook, for God’s sake? Why hadn’t she done
a lot of things, come to that?

Just shy of the supermarket entrance, she caught her reflection in a plate-glass window and stopped. She turned side on to
admire her newly coloured hair. She ran fingers through it and while she stared at the blur of reflected traffic crawling
past behind her, she saw the girl again.

She saw her open face and fat, wet lips.

She saw the snot-smeared face of the boy she had found crying at school a few weeks before.

Eyes filled with tears and relief.

Eyes wide and trusting.

Shaking the images away, she stepped towards the supermarket. She yanked a trolley free of its chain and marched inside. They
would eat spaghetti carbonara and damn well like it.

It was a warm day with no wind, and the club was busy, even for a Saturday morning. Ed sat at the bar finishing a pint of
orange juice and lemonade, thinking through the doubles match he had just lost; reliving the vital rallies, the silly points
that had cost him and his partner the game. He had been over-hitting his ground strokes and been atypically indecisive at
the net. He told himself it was just an off day and that his partner had not played particularly well either, but Ed knew
they had lost because his mind had not really been on the game.

‘Never mind, mate.’

He turned as his doubles partner came out of the shower room and walked towards the clubhouse door. Ed wasn’t going to go
as far as saying sorry, but he managed a shared shrug of resignation and they
hastily agreed to arrange another game early the following week. When he turned back to the bar, the club manager asked him
if he wanted anything else. Ed was no longer thirsty, but said, ‘Sod it,’ and ordered a bottle of beer.

‘More like it,’ the manager said.

It was good to be relaxing without that niggle of guilt he felt during the week when he found himself sitting on his backside.
No more than a niggle though. What the hell else was he supposed to do, things being the way they were? Drive for an hour
to Slough or Maidenhead so he could try and fail to flog a set of atlases to some sour-faced bookseller? A poxy set of medical
textbooks?

‘Here you go.’ The manager set his bottle on the bar. ‘Drown your sorrows.’

Ed blinked, then realised the man was talking about the tennis match.

He hadn’t drunk anything since his night out with Dave Cullen and Barry Finnegan a week before. Since he had reeled in just
before midnight, been berated by Sue for waking her up and been called a ‘pisshead’. The truth was, he could not remember
the last time he’d drunk so much, and booze was something he had no problem going without, so he didn’t think it did any harm
to have a blowout now and again. Sue probably drank more than he did, when you added it all up.

He had never been one of those drinkers blessed with the ability to forget the rubbish they came out with after one too many.
Or six. Not that he hadn’t meant everything he’d said that night.
In vino veritas
, all that. What he really cared about was that they hadn’t
thought
he was talking rubbish.

That they thought he was a good bloke.

He’d decided, thinking back through their mini pub-crawl, that Dave was actually a pretty good bloke himself; that he wasn’t
quite as geeky or superior as Ed had first thought. Barry was another matter, though. What the hell was his problem? Maybe
he just wasn’t bright enough to keep up, but Ed didn’t have time for anyone who didn’t
laugh at a decent joke, or wasn’t able to take one. Who refused to contribute.

What gets said on a boys’ night out …

Obviously he hadn’t told Sue very much.

It was fine as it turned out, because the next morning all she’d done was make snide comments about needing to keep her voice
down and how men never really talked about anything important. How she could get more out of someone she’d just met in ten
minutes than Ed could get out of his oldest friend in an entire evening. You’re right, he’d said. It was just football and
old TV shows. He certainly hadn’t told her that he’d put his size ten in it about Angie not being invited when Sue went out
with Marina. And of course he hadn’t said a dickie-bird about Dave’s conversation with that policewoman. The various ‘ideas’
they had ‘bounced’ around. His tin-pot theories.

He didn’t want to talk about that stuff. Simple as that.

He jumped when a club member he’d played with a couple of times slapped him on the back. A bumptious tosser who brought three
rackets on to the court when he couldn’t hit a winner if his life depended on it.

‘So, how’s business, Ed?’

One of those pricks who only asked so he could tell you just how well he was doing, as if the new Mercedes in the car park
had not made that obvious enough.

‘Yeah, not bad,’ Ed said.

‘Pleased to hear it.’ For once, Ed was spared a detailed report on the commercial property boom and instead the prick said,
‘What are you and Sue doing later? We thought we might try that new Thai place in Enfield.’

‘Sorry, mate, we’re having people over,’ Ed said.

‘Anyone I know?’

Ed resisted telling the man that they were unlikely to have any friends in common. ‘Just two couples we met on holiday.’

‘Uh-oh.’

‘Yeah, you know how that goes.’

‘Good luck with that,’ the man said, pulling a face. He waited as though expecting to be offered a drink then saw someone
else he was keen to impress and drifted to the other end of the bar.

Ed lifted up his beer. That was something else he’d meant when he was out with Barry and Dave. He definitely did not want
to spend the whole evening talking about Amber-Marie Wilson. Laughing and joking one minute, murdered girls the next.

He knew it would probably be an uphill battle.

Gardner caught a flight just after 8.00 a.m. and was touching down in Atlanta ninety minutes later. He waited with Patti Lee
Wilson as the transport casket was carried slowly off the plane. He stood firm when she leaned against him while it was loaded
into the back of the white Cadillac Statesman which had been given permission to drive on to the tarmac.

White for a child, Gardner guessed.

She did not cry. He figured that she was cried out, for the time being at least. The guy from the funeral home nodded to him
before he shut the car door and drove away. They watched it leave and Gardner waited for the noise of a 747 roaring into the
air from the next runway to die down before he spoke to her.

‘They’ll look after her now,’ he said.

‘Better than I ever did,’ she said.

He laid a hand on her shoulder and shook his head, told her not to talk nonsense. They turned and walked back towards the
terminal together. One of the mechanics working at some steps near the apron took off his cap as they walked past and Gardner
gave him a small nod.

‘You want to get a drink?’ Patti asked. ‘I want to get a drink.’

‘Can we have one back at your place?’ Gardner said. He reached past to open the door for her. ‘There’s something I need to
talk to you about.’

‘Fine by me,’ she said. ‘Liquor’s cheaper at my place.’

She lived in a brown and white, two-bedroom condo in Decautur. The place was neat and clean; neater and cleaner than Gardner
had expected and it shamed him a little to admit this to himself.

They sat sweating in the living room, a plastic fan creaking and clicking as it spun overhead. Each of them had a beer and
Patti had poured chips into a large bowl, which sat between them on the vinyl couch.

‘Air-con’s playing up,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a service contract, but I’m a bit behind with it. Things got away from me these
last few weeks, you know?’

‘It’s fine,’ Gardner said. ‘Beer’s cold.’

She held the bottle to her forehead. ‘Right.’

‘A witness told us you were talking to some guy,’ he said. ‘A few days before Amber-Marie went missing. You remember that?’

She thought about it.

‘You were outside one of the bars in the village. She was inside talking to the three British couples?’

That appeared to jog her memory. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Yeah, some guy.’

‘Dark hair, pumped up, tattoos on his arms?’

‘That’s him.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Just some guy hitting on me,’ she said. ‘We were both having a cigarette and we got talking, that was all.’ She drank. ‘You
know, tell you the truth, I might actually have been hitting on
him
.’

‘Did you see him again?’

‘No, more’s the pity.’

‘Did you tell him where you were staying?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I mean I might have done.’

‘OK, so do you think he might have seen Amber-Marie?’

She shrugged. ‘I guess it’s possible. I can’t remember if she was still with me when we got talking. I can’t say for definite.’
She looked at him. ‘You think he might have been the one?’

‘I’m not saying that.’

‘But he might have been, right?’

‘We have to look at every possibility,’ Gardner said. He could see from her pained expression that she was already thinking
the man with tattoos
was
the one. That her attempt to pick up a good-looking stranger on the street had led directly to her daughter’s abduction and
murder. Confirming what she already believed; that it was all her fault.

Gardner’s cell buzzed in his jacket pocket and he took it out. There was no number displayed.

He flipped it open and gave his name.

When the caller had identified herself, Gardner said, ‘How’d you get this number?’

‘Your office gave it to me,’ Jenny Quinlan said.

Silently cursing Whitlow or whoever else had passed on his cellphone number, Gardner pressed the handset to his chest and
told Patti that he needed to take the call. He told her a second time. Her face still creased with unpleasant thoughts, she
waved a hand and told him to go ahead. He stepped outside the door into a front yard that was irregularly divided into patches
of dried mud and crabgrass. There was a rusty swing in the far corner. On the sidewalk opposite, a boy on a bike was being
pulled along by a toffee-coloured retriever.

‘I’m a little busy,’ he told Quinlan.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘So you’ll need to be quick.’

‘Well I sent you the interview reports a week ago and I hadn’t heard anything back, so …’

‘This is not the only case I’m working, you know.’

‘You didn’t get back to me, that’s all.’

‘I would have done so if I’d needed to,’ Gardner said. He heard the
intake of breath and immediately felt bad for snapping. ‘The department budget doesn’t stretch to too many transatlantic phone
calls.’

She laughed rather more than was necessary. ‘I know what that’s like,’ she said. ‘We haven’t even got a kettle that works
properly in the Incident Room. The computers are steam-powered!’

Gardner breathed in. Hot asphalt and a whiff of dog-shit. ‘So …’

‘So, have you had a chance to follow up on anything I told you about?’

‘As it happens, I’m doing that right now.’

‘Oh, how’s it going?’ Her voice was a little higher suddenly. ‘Anything useful? Any … breaks?’

‘Not as yet, I’m afraid.’ He pressed on quickly, before the woman could ask any more pointless questions. ‘But we will follow
up on anything we think worth following up, OK?’

‘Well, you know where I am,’ she said.

‘I know where you are.’ Gardner snapped the phone shut and slipped it back into his pocket. Cute accent or not, the woman
was fast becoming a royal pain in the ass, and on reflection he wished he had been a little tougher on her.

When he came back inside, Patti was sitting on the couch with a fresh beer. She reached down to the side of the couch for
another bottle and held it towards him. He could feel a headache kicking in and did not want another, but he took it anyway.

‘You stopping for the funeral?’ she asked.

Gardner picked at the label on his bottle.

‘You’re welcome to stay over here.’

‘I’d like to,’ he lied. ‘I really have to get back.’

She raised her arms and barked out a dry laugh. Gardner could see that she wasn’t cried out at all. ‘Suddenly, I’ve got a
spare room.’