The other thing was, she did like to be noticed. And by men. It wasn't that she flaunted herself in front of them, but it did please her when they knew she was there. As she'd said to Nancy, if you're never allowed a little sexual repartee, if the flower didn't attract the beeâwell, how was anything ever going to happen? And she had this certain feeling: too much repression was harmful. Tiptoe around each other pretending you've got blinkers on, not a word or a glance out of place, and then, suddenly, there's this guy, can't control it any longer, hurling you down behind the color photocopier, leaving his unrequited passion all over the floor. “Mmm,” Nancy had said, uncertain, “maybe there's something in between.”
Well, Dana had thought, when Andrew Clarke, hand just touching her elbow, had guided her out on to the floor, maybe there was.
Andrew was a senior partner, Victorian house in the Park, all the original architraves, things like that. Family car was a BMW, but Dana had noticed recently this little Toyota MR2 in his slot in the parking lot. Red, something to run around in now the days of public school fees were coming to an end. The most provocative remark he'd ever made to her in the office was about the air-conditioning. No, he was scrupulous, correct; she'd never even caught him looking at her as she walked away, admiring her backside.
“Not very good at this, you know. Even though my daughters try to teach me at family parties.”
There were so many crowded on to the small circle of polished floor, it didn't matter that Andrew Clarke's attempts to boogie resembled the final struggles of a man trapped in quicksand. In fact, there was something about the earnestness with which he went about it which Dana found almost endearing.
So, when the music switched to some old Stevie Wonder and he pulled her into some kind of smoochy waltz, she didn't object. Though she was surprised, after a while, to feel something remarkably close to an erection pushing against her thigh.
She was on the steps outside the cloakroom, after one o'clock, when she saw him again. He had on his Crombie overcoat, a little nicked up at the collar, and his car keys in his hand.
“Going home alone?”
It looked like it; Nancy, despite her earlier protestations, seemed to have found congenial company.
“Still in that place on Newcastle Drive, aren't you? On my way. Why not let me drop you off?”
The inside of the car smelt of leather polish and cologne. She was ready for the invitation to coffee when it came, had determined to say no, the exact tone rehearsed inside her head so as not to offend.
“Yes,” she said. “A quick cup. All right.”
The family, of course, had headed north that morning, getting an early start. “Little place off the Northumbrian coast. Had it for years. Nothing special.” Dana noticed a photograph of Andrew and his sons in front of what looked like a small castle, Andrew and the eldest boy with their shotguns, smiling as they held up dead birds.
“Still ⦔ pressing a large glass of brandy into her hands “⦠their not being here, affords us a bit of privacy. Chance to get to know one another better.”
When Dana limped out forty minutes later, her bra strap was round her neck, unfastened, her tights were torn, she had lost the heel from one of her shoes. Andrew's mood had switched from amorous to angry and back again and when finally she had slapped him hard, pushed him clear, and told him to grow up, he had astonished her by bursting into tears.
Back in her own flat, Christmas Day was already two hours old and no sign of Nancy. Dana only hoped she was having a better time than herself. Quickly, she undressed and showered and made herself some camomile tea. Cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV set, she raised a cup to her reflection in the blank screen. “Happy Christmas to you, too.”
At some point she must have woken cold and found her way into her bed, but when she came round beneath the floral duvet at what felt like half-past six, she couldn't remember it. The digital clock on the floor read 11:07. The telephone was ringing. Dana stumbled towards the bathroom, rubbing the residue of makeup from around her eyes. On the way, she lifted the receiver from the body of the phone and set it down, unanswered. In the mirror she looked fifty years old.
Thirty minutes in the bathroom reduced that by all of five years. Great! Dana thought. Now I look like my mother just back from a fortnight on a health farm. She pulled on a T-shirt, sweater, and old jeans. There were two mandarin orange yogurts in the fridge and she ate them both, washing them down with some stale Evian. Well, Nancy, middayâmust be having a pretty good time.
When she remembered the phone, a woman's recorded voice was instructing her to replace the hand set and redial. The moment she put the receiver back in place, it rang again.
“Hello?”
It was Nancy's mother, calling from Merseyside to wish her daughter a merry Christmas. From the background noises, the rest of the family were waiting to do the same.
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Phelan, she's not here now.”
“But we thought she was spending Christmas Day with you. She said ⦔
“She is, she is. It's just ⦔ It's just that she's not back yet from getting laid. “She's popped out. A walk. You know, clear her head.”
“She's not ill?”
“Oh, no. No. Just last night, we went to this dinner-dance ⦔
There was a silence and then, indistinctly, the sound of Mrs. Phelan reporting back to the family. “Be sure to tell Nancy I called,” she said when her voice came back on the line. “I'll try again in a little while.”
Which she did several times over the next few hours. And on each occasion the questions were increasingly anxious, Dana's responses increasingly vague. When she was fast running out of excuses, Mr. Phelan spoke to her himself. “Enough of this pissing about, right? I want to know what's going on.”
Best as she could, Dana told him.
“Why on earth didn't you say that before?”
“I didn't want her mother to be upset.”
“The minute she drags herself back in,” Mr. Phelan said, “you tell her she's to call us, right?”
Right. At the far end of the line there was a sharp swerve of breath before the connection was broken.
Dana looked at the turkey taking up most of the refrigerator, the black plastic vegetable rack overloaded with several weeks' supply. She pulled a frozen broccoli lasagna, only two days past its use-by date, from the freezer and put it in the microwave. In the time it took to cook, she had looked at her watch, at the clock on the kitchen-diner wall half a dozen times. When Nancy's father next phoned, she had the directory open on her lap and was about to try the casualty department at Queen's.
“Is it like her?” Mr. Phelan asked, no attempt to disguise the anxiety he was feeling. “Not to let you know where she is?”
“I don't know.”
“You're living with her, girl.”
“Yes, but I mean ⦠Well, it's not as if there've been a lot of occasions ⦔
“So being down there hasn't turned her into a tart, her mother will be pleased. Now have I to get in the car and drive down there or what? Because it seems to me you're not treating this as seriously as you should.”
“I really don't think we have to worry, I'm sure she's fine.”
“Yes? That's what you'd want our Nancy thinking if you were the one not come home, is it?”
A pause. “I was about to phone the hospital when you called,” Dana said.
“Good. And the police, I dare say.”
Ten
Christmas morning or no Christmas morning, Jack Skelton had been for his normal four-mile run, setting off while his wife was still apparently sleeping, returning, lightly bathed in sweat, to find her staring at him accusingly in the dressing-room mirror.
“Have fun last night, you two?” Kate asked disarmingly at breakfast.
Skelton pushed the back of the spoon down against his Shredded Wheat, breaking it into the bottom of his bowl; carefully, Alice poured tea into her cup.
“Like to have seen it,” Kate went on into the silence, “the pair of you, dancing the light fantastic. Bet you were a regular Roy Rogers and Fred Astaire.”
“It's Ginger ⦔ began Alice, sounding her exasperation.
“She knows,” Skelton said quietly.
“Then why doesn't she â¦?”
“Can't you tell when you're being wound up? It was a joke.”
“Funny sort of a joke.”
“Isn't that the usual kind?” Kate said, no disguising the malicious glint in her eye.
“Katie, that's enough,” Skelton said.
“Your trouble, young lady,” Alice said, “you're altogether too smart behind the ears.”
“It's what comes of having such clever parents,” Kate replied.
Half out of her chair, Alice leaned sharply forwards, about to wipe the smile from her daughter's face with the back of her hand. Kate stared back at her, daring her to do exactly that. Alice picked up her cup and saucer and left the room.
With a slow shake of his head, Skelton sighed.
“Did you have a good time last night?” Kate asked, this time as though she might have cared.
“It was all right, I suppose.”
“But not great?”
Skelton almost smiled. “Not great.”
“Neither was mine.”
“Your party?”
“All so boring and predictable. People getting drunk as fast as they were able, chucking up all over someone else's floor.”
“Tom there?”
Tom was Kate's latest, a student from the university, a bit of a highflier; in Skelton's eyes a welcome change from the last love of her life, an unemployed goth who wore black from head to toe and claimed to be on quite good terms with the Devil.
“He was there for a bit.”
“You didn't have a row?”
Kate shook her head. “He hates parties like that, says they're all a bunch of immature wankers.”
Skelton managed to stop himself reacting to her choice of word; besides, it sounded as if Tom had got it pretty right. “Why on earth stay? Why not leave when he did?”
“Because he didn't ask me. And besides, they're my friends.”
The same friends, Skelton was thinking, you used to take E with at all-night raves.
“I hope you're not expecting,” Kate said, “me to hang round here all day. I mean, just 'cause it's Christmas.”
The day wore on in silent attrition. The turkey was dry on the outside, overcooked, pink, and tinged with blood close to the bone. Alice accomplished the moves from sherry to champagne to cherry brandy without breaking stride. Kate spent an hour in the bath, as long again on the phone, and then announced she was going out, not to wait up. As it was beginning to get dark Skelton appeared at the living-room door in his navy-blue track suit, new Asics running shoes.
“In training for something, Jack?” Alice asked, glancing up. “Running away?”
Before the front door had closed, she was back with her Barbara Vine.
When Skelton returned almost an hour later, Alice was sitting with the lights out, feet up, settee pulled close to the fire. She was smoking a cigarette, a liqueur glass nearby on the floor.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” Skelton asked.
“There was a call for you,” Alice said. “From the station.” And as he crossed the room. “Don't hurry. It wasn't from her.”
The pavement outside the police station was littered with broken glass. Crepe paper and tinsel hung, disconsolate, from nearby railings. In the waiting area, a young woman with half her ginger hair shaved to stubble and the remainder tightly plaited, was nursing a black mongrel dog bleeding from a badly cut ear.
“What's this, the Humane Society all of a sudden?” Skelton said to the officer on desk duty.
“Every day except Christmas, sir.”
When Skelton went close to the dog it barked and showed its teeth.
Upstairs in his office, door to the CID room open, Resnick was talking to a well-built woman Skelton took to be in her early to mid-thirties. Friend of the girl who'd gone missing, he assumed. Not a bad looker in a blousy sort of a way. At opposite sides of the room, Lynn Kellogg and Kevin Naylor were on the phones.
“When you've a minute, Charlie,” Skelton called from the doorway, “all right?”
He was tipping ready-ground decaf into the gold filter of his new coffee machine when Resnick knocked and walked in.
“So, Charlie, where are we? Not throwing up panic signals too soon?”
Resnick waited until the superintendent had added the water, flipped the switch to on. New machine or no, he was thinking, it'll still be too weak to stand. When Skelton was back behind his desk, Resnick took a seat himself and relayed Dana Matthieson's concern over her flatmate, Nancy Phelan.
“That's not the same woman involved in that incident yesterday? Phelan?”
“At the Housing Office, yes.”
“Threatened, wasn't she?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“The man responsible ⦔
“Gary James, sir.”
“We released him.”
“Last night, yes.”
“No suggestion he might have been involved?”
Resnick shook his head. “Not as far as we know.”
“What happened at the Housing place, was it personal between them?”
“Not as far as we know.”
“We know damn all.”
“Very little, so far.”
Skelton crossed to the side of the room; the coffee had all but finished dripping through.
“Black, Charlie?”
“Thanks.” When the superintendent held up the glass pot of coffee, Resnick was alarmed: you could see right through it.
“You've got someone out having a word with him, James, all the same?”
“Not yet, sir.”
Skelton sat back down. “Boyfriend?” he asked.
“No one special, not at the moment. Not according to her flatmate. She gave us some names, though. We've started checking them out.”