Gone to Ground (24 page)

As he left, he looked Will directly in the eye, and, without speaking, walked off down the ward. Will watched him go, then stepped into the room. Not wanting to wake Helen, he sat down as quietly as he could.

When she spoke, it was without opening her eyes, and her voice startled him.

"Will?"

"Yes?"

"I don't want him to come here again."

"Who is he?"

"It doesn't matter. I just don't want him here again, that's all."

"I don't see how..."

"Tell him. Please, Will. Tell him not to come."

Will caught up with the man as he was leaving the main entrance, dropped back several paces and followed him to his car. As he was about to get in, Will increased his pace and set a hand on the door, keeping it closed.

"What?" the man said. His face showed little concern, but his hands were clenched into fists.

"She doesn't want to see you again."

"Who says?"

"She does. Helen. Okay? Don't come back. We understood?" Will stepped back from the car.

The man smiled with his eyes; his eyes were blue. "And if I do?"

"Don't," Will said. "Just don't."

The smile flickered and faded and with an almost nonchalant shake of the head, the man got into his car, turned the key in the ignition, and, without a further glance toward Will, reversed out of his space and drove slowly away.

One of the nurses was raising Helen up a little on her pillows when Will got back to the ward.

"Who was that?" he asked.

"I said, it doesn't matter."

"It mattered enough for me to warn him off."

"Just leave it, okay?"

"Okay."

For twenty minutes or so they talked haltingly about the progress the enquiry was making and then, when her parents returned from wherever they'd been, he said goodbye and promised to come back the next day.

Jake was indeed in bed when he arrived home, though Susie was still awake and fretful. Will kissed his wife and daughter and then his son, though he broke his promise about both the puppy and the lion. After supper, he and Lorraine watched an hour of mindless TV, before settling for an early night. This time it was Lorraine who fell asleep first, leaving Will staring at the ceiling, the mocking smile of Helen's anonymous visitor imprinted above him.

NEWS BULLETINS CUED UP AND READY, LESLEY PULLED what the station had on Howard Prince. Surprisingly little. He was a member of the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce and had associations with the East Midlands Development Agency, but, a few passing references to his wilder past aside, there was little, if anything, about his private life. And nothing about his wife.

In the last eighteen months, Prince's name had been linked to a consortium with plans to build on reclaimed railway land out toward the race course, and with a scheme for a new leisure centre and adjacent high-end accommodation, overlooking the Trent.

He had a house out in Cambridgeshire, north of the county, the fens; mention of a second home in the south of France. Frontignan.

Lesley checked the phone book. There was a Prince Holdings listed on Friar Lane.

The receptionist, sounding bored out her skull and not yet mid-morning, asked Lesley to hold. A snatch of the inevitable Vivaldi and then, "Raymond James, here. How can I help?" The voice was cultured, supercilious.

Lesley repeated her request to speak to Howard Prince.

"I'm sorry, who did you say you were?"

"Lesley Scarman, BBC Radio Nottingham."

The man's sniffy tone suggested he was not a regular listener. "And this was in relation to...?"

"A film Mr. Prince is funding."

There was a pause.

"It's due to be made here in the city. Partly, at least."

"Please wait a moment. I'm just going to put you on hold."

Polite, if disdainful. The line went temporarily dead. Lesley tapped at the computer keyboard, accessing her e-mails.

He was swiftly back. "I'm sorry, we have no record of any such project."

"My information is that Mr. Prince is providing substantial financing. The film features his daughter, Natalie."

"As I say, we have no knowledge of this. I'm sorry."

"Is it possible, then, that Mr. Prince could be funding the production personally?"

"I couldn't possibly comment."

"But it is a possibility?"

"I'm sorry, Miss Scarman, but there's nothing I can do to help."

"Perhaps if I could speak to Mr. Prince directly...?"

The line went dead, this time for good.

There were boards all around the Old Market Square, behind which a major makeover was in process. Water terraces, trees, and coloured lights were set to transform fifteen acres of concrete wasteland, long a meeting place for Goths, skateboarders, down-at-heel boozers, and raggedy-arsed pigeons, into what some bright spark from the Council's marketing department had called "the beating heart of our vibrant city."

Lesley might not have couched it in such grandiose terms herself.

It was true, though, that the centre of the city was changing. Everywhere you looked whole blocks were being pulled down, new buildings rising in their place. Hotels, apartments, new retail opportunities. Build, build, build.

Someone, Lesley reasoned, was making a bushel of money, square metre by square metre, brick by brick.

As she waited on the edge of Maid Marian Way, an inner-city ring road of almost unsurpassed ugliness, and a testament to the last splurge of urban renewal back in the nineteen seventies, Lesley wondered what weasel words some marketing whiz kid had thought up back then to acclaim its particular beauties. A vital artery pumping lifeblood into the city's burnished heart? A gash of viral reconstruction ripping the guts out of the city centre?

The lights changed and she crossed onto the upper half of Friar Lane.

The sign alongside the door was small and discreet, dark lettering engraved into polished gold. Prince Holdings. Lesley pressed the buzzer and inclined her head toward the intercom.

"Lesley Scarman, BBC Radio Nottingham. I was speaking to someone here earlier."

After several seconds, the buzzer sounded and she pushed back the door. Carpeted hallway, tasteful prints on the walls, stairs at the far end leading temptingly upwards. To her right there was a paneled door marked Reception. Lesley knocked and went in.

More carpet, but with a deeper pile and in a different shade. Paintings and not prints on the walls. An idealized version of the castle; a couple of idyllic views of the River Trent, as seen from the southern bank: rowers, swans, couples gently strolling past an avenue of trees. The site, Lesley wondered, of Prince's prospective chunk of new development?

The woman behind the desk blinked twice, then sighed with the effort.

"I'm here to see Mr. Prince," Lesley said, even as she heard the footsteps behind her.

"Miss Scarman?"

He was in his forties, a lean face that looked to have been chiseled from wood, with rimless glasses shielding his pale blue eyes. Thin lips. His dark suit was almost the same colour as his tie; his shirt could have been ironed five minutes before. Spruce might be the word. One word.

"Raymond James, Miss Scarman, Mr. Prince's assistant. If you're hoping for more information than I was able to give you earlier, I'm afraid you've wasted your time."

"More," Lesley said, "is a bit of an overstatement, don't you think? Mr. James?"

It earned her a small condescending smile.

"Howard Prince," Lesley said, "this is his business? Still, I mean."

"I'm not quite sure I understand."

"He hasn't retired, sold up, taken himself off into the sun?"

"Not at all."

"He takes an active interest, then?"

"Of course."

"Hands on?"

"Very much so."

Lesley glanced round toward the door. "He's here now then, I imagine?"

"I'm afraid I can't say."

"It would only take a moment..."

"Miss Scarman..."

"A minute of his time."

"Miss Scarman, I'm afraid I must ask you to leave."

Lesley assumed the receptionist had summoned up the energy to press a button beneath her desk. In less time than it took her to formulate another question, two young men appeared, slender and smiling, behind James. Hair short but neat, shirt sleeves turned back at the cuff. If they'd turned up on her doorstep, she would have taken them for Mormons, intent on spreading the word.

James favoured her with a superior, you-should-have-listened-to-me look. Any moment, Lesley thought, he's going to say, "Miss Scarman was just leaving."

He did.

One of the young men gently touched her arm below the elbow, and she shrugged him off. She took a business card from her bag and held it out toward James, leaving him little alternative other than to take it.

"Please tell Mr. Prince I was here. Tell him if he'd like to talk to me about his daughter's film, I can be reached on either of these numbers. And thank you for your time."

No smile.

She stepped between the two young men, out along the short stretch of hallway and through the door, which sprang open on her approach. Perhaps, she thought, Natalie Prince's penchant for newsworthy misbehaviour had made her father's firm more than usually cautious about media intrusion—or maybe there were other reasons altogether.

The air outside was cold and fresh, and Lesley thought she might take a stroll round the Castle grounds before returning to work.

She bought a coffee in the cafeteria and sat thinking, none too coherently, random ideas and images shuffling through her brain without ever really connecting. When she'd finished her coffee, she went outside onto the terrace and leaned on the stone balustrade, looking out over the new office buildings at the far side of the canal to the bright green roofs of the county council offices alongside the Trent. Beyond those, she could see the darker green of the fields either side of Sharphill Wood. Fields and trees that would soon, if the council's decision was upheld, be bulldozed by developers with plans to build a thousand new homes.

The last time she'd stood on that spot, Lesley remembered, it had been with Stephen, who had told her it was where Albert Finney had stood with Rachel Roberts in the film of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
the smoky landscape of the city etched in behind them in hazy black and white.

At the memory of Stephen, she pressed her hands harder against the pitted surface of the stone.

After her visit to Prince Holdings and the Castle, Lesley was busy for the remainder of the day, headphones in place, fingers to the keyboard, eyes on the screen. By the time she finished, there was an ache across her shoulders, a dull pain in the small of her back, and she'd put in at least forty-five minutes overtime she'd never see.

She thought Alan Pike had already left, but as she was putting on her coat, he stepped out of his office.

"Howard Prince, Lesley, there's nothing to interest us there."

Lesley flushed. "I thought I might do a follow-up on that stuff about Natalie, you know, the movie."

"I don't think so."

"Come on, Alan. As long as I can do it on my own time..."

"Lesley, you're not listening. Leave it alone. Okay?" He was a little disheveled, tie at half-mast, but his voice was firm and unwavering.

"Okay."

"It's not just me," Pike said.

"Roger?"

Pike nodded.

Why, Lesley thought, was the station manager getting involved? "Someone's been leaning on him," she said.

"It's possible. I don't know."

"Prince."

"Lesley, go home. It's late." Pike turned back toward his office.

No other option open, Lesley picked up her bag and left.

The reception desk had closed down for the evening. One of the cleaning staff was maneuvering a rotund vacuum cleaner around the stands in the far corner, and Lesley called out good night and let herself out onto the street.

London Road was busy as usual, the traffic not exactly stalled, but slow, barely moving. Drizzle was falling and the pavements were slick with rain.

She was almost at the top of the steps leading up toward Commerce Square, her usual cut through, when she heard a sound behind her, a footfall other than her own, but when she turned there was no one there. Just the rough bare brick walls to either side and the worn steps themselves funneling down into the dark.

WILL DROVE OVER TO NOTTINGHAM UNDER LOWERING skies, the car radio releasing a stream of background conversation and anodyne music, neither of which connected with what was going on inside his head. The news about Helen was good: if things continued to progress as expected, she could be discharged within days.

The theology student, however, having rallied, had slipped backward during the night and was now unconscious and breathing with the help of a respirator, his condition giving grave cause for concern.

No sign of the knife with which Helen had been stabbed, nor of any other weapon that had been used; bins and back alleys and bits of wasteland close to the attack were still being searched; divers were going down into the river again, Will guessed, even now.

When he arrived in Nottingham, he found that, thanks to demolition and rebuilding in the city centre, there were diversions on the roads leading to the Central Police Station, and it took him several attempts before finding his way into the parking area at the rear.

Nick Moyles had driven over separately and was waiting for him in the foyer, well turned out as usual. Moyles's clothes, he had once told Will, were from White Stuff, or, occasionally, Diesel, and tended toward the casually fashionable, without ever overstepping some recognized but invisible mark.

Chris Parsons was waiting for them in a room on the second floor with views out toward several acres of rubble and a large crane.

Parsons himself was around the same height as Will, five or six years older. He was clean-shaven, sandy hair trimmed fairly short, wearing dark trousers and a pale green shirt, the sleeves rolled back above the wrist. His jacket hung neatly from the back of his chair.