The phone rang. Fletcher snatched it up, listened. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said slowly, glancing at the two men. ‘Look, I’ll take it in the drawing room, Steph.’ He put down the phone, said to Crane, ‘Give me five, but when I get back we’ll need to wrap this up PDQ. My family want their dinner.’ He went off.
‘What can it be he wants neither us or his missus to hear?’ Anderson said, chuckling. ‘Had the arsehole on the run there, didn’t you, Crane? Bugger, why didn’t I think to ask him how he’d got to the Norfolk?’
He wore his usual wry smile, but Crane now knew the intense irritation it was concealing in a man as aggressively competitive as Anderson. Crane couldn’t help feeling amused to have got ahead of him once again, but simply said, ‘If you were a PI and not a newspaperman you’d have picked up on it.’ It was true. He missed out on very little as it was.
The reporter winked, stood up. ‘Well, the cat’s away. He might not have locked everything up.’ He began to try drawers, without success, then turned to an outsize filing cabinet. ‘Ha ha, he’s overlooked this, but it just seems to be file copies of his prints. Let’s try J for Jackson, shall we?’
‘This might not be a good idea. If he catches you he’ll have us straight through the door.’
‘Oh, come on, Frank. We cut corners, blokes like us. Let’s see what kinds of shots he was really taking of her. Those creaking floorboards on the landing should warn us when he’s on his way back.’
It was this kind of impulsiveness in Anderson that Crane had always been so uneasy about, but he had to admit to being curious. Anyway, he was already leafing through a wad of glossy prints. They all seemed to be totally respectable modelling shots. They showed Donna right profile, left profile, full face. Donna in even light, in shadow, in a key light that gave emphasis to those luminous round eyes with their riveting impression of an innocence that blended with depth, emotion with spirituality. Donna in black and white, in colour, in a sepia tint. Donna standing, sitting, lying down, even twirling, arms extended as gracefully as the wings of a planing bird, gleaming hair flying about her like a fully opened fan.
‘God, what a cracker she was,’ Anderson muttered.
It said it all, that such a pretty and vibrant woman should have had such an appalling fate. Crane felt he could sympathize then with the journalist’s urge to profile her as the guileless creature she’d certainly looked the sad symbolic victim of an upbringing in a sink estate. Even though he’d always known the description wasn’t going to fit.
And then Anderson turned up a print showing Donna naked.
She stood framed by a half-open door, and looking away from the lens, as if unaware of it, her impossibly perfect rounded breasts slightly suspended as she leant forward, apparently to pick up pants and bra, hair now cascading down the sides of her flawless features, her belly flat, her legs smooth and slender, her waist so narrow it looked as if it could easily be encircled by a pair of male hands.
The floorboards didn’t creak. Fletcher, paranoid, must have tipftoed. He was in the room before the folder could even be closed. He took it all in in a nano-second. ‘I’ll speak to your editor in the morning, Anderson,’ he rasped. ‘You’ll be wise to start clearing your desk. And you, Crane, you should know better. Don’t think you’ll get away with it either.’
But Anderson gave him a relaxed smile. ‘You’ll not be doing any of that, Mr Fletcher. You’ll be too worried. You see, this is a print of a naked young woman you were supposed to be grooming for a modelling career. She subsequently ended up in a reservoir. Was that because she’d not agree to go in that cellar of yours with the soft lights on and her fanny in the air? Or maybe she’d got to know too much?’
Fletcher was flushed brick red. ‘Any more on those lines, mister, and you’ll be in a court room before you can spit.’
‘Mr Fletcher,’ Crane said quietly, ‘if the police could find the time and the evidence you’d be in a court room yourself. They certainly know about your cellar and your obscene videos and your use of underage people.’
‘She didn’t know I’d taken it, you dozy sods!’ he suddenly cried. ‘Well, look at them, they’re all standard poses except one. That one. She didn’t know I’d taken it. She was changing into normal gear. She’d left the door open. I couldn’t resist it. She didn’t even know, for Christ’s sake. She didn’t …’ He broke off in a voice that seemed almost choked by a sob.
Crane believed him. It was obvious he was speaking off the cuff. He’d taken a single shot, charming in its artfulness, of a naked beauty dressing herself. Shades of Renoir.
‘But we can’t be sure where it led to, Mr Fletcher, can we?’ Anderson said softly, smile still intact.
‘I’ll have to pass on what we’ve learnt here to the police, sir,’ Crane told him, ‘because I think you went on somewhere after the Norfolk dinner, and I think they’ll want to go into that with you again. I’d try to be very, very cooperative, if I were you.’
‘And we’ll need to keep this print,’ Anderson said calmly, storing it in what seemed to be a specially enlarged inside pocket of his lightweight jacket.
‘Don’t you dare!’ Fletcher screamed, rushing at him. ‘Don’t you bloody dare! It’s my property and it only leaves here under warrant.’
‘And give you the chance to destroy it and the negative? Dear me, you must think I was brought up in Barnsley, Mr Fletcher … sir.’
Fletcher seized him by his jacket lapels. It wasn’t a wise move. Without a word, Anderson pushed him off and gave him a single blow to the chest. It was all it needed. Hunched over, gasping for breath, Fletcher almost crawled to his Windsor chair and flopped into it. He looked tough, and almost certainly was, he’d been simply outclassed. Crane guessed that most people would be around Anderson.
‘So sorry, Mr Fletcher,’ he said, affable as ever. ‘I always try my best to keep things civil. You really mustn’t trouble to show us out.’
EIGHT
Crane drove back to Bradford along the bypass, through peaceful meadowland, with views of a range of hills purpling in setting sunlight.
Anderson said, ‘What do you think?’
‘I’m positive he went on somewhere from the Norfolk.’
‘All right, brains, don’t rub it in.’
The wry smile was there, but he was still brooding and tense about Crane picking up on the oddness of Fletcher driving himself to a booze up. The reporter had to be just about the most competitive man he’d ever known.
‘But I can’t see it being him,’ Crane went on. ‘He’s a shrewd businessman, he’d spent hours on her as an investment. If she took off in the glossies she could be worth a million a year, fifteen, twenty per cent to him, yes? I also think he was levelling about the nude print.’
Crane swung his Megane off the bypass and on to a roundabout that would put them on the Bradford Road. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the reporter nod.
‘I guess you’re right,’ Anderson said, with a sigh. ‘Still, we gave the slimy sod’s feathers a good ruffling, didn’t we?’
‘And if he’s right in the head he’ll close the cellar overnight, so that’s a plus.’
Crane dropped him off at his flat in Frizinghall. It was a good one in one of the many converted wool-baron mansions. He glimpsed curly black hair and an eager smile at a window, but Anderson reacted with an indifference you could only just detect. Crane had to concede that you had special problems if you looked like Anderson, with every woman in sight fluttering her eyes at you. He drove on to Conway House, where he was to pick up Patsy and to drive on to Connie and Malc’s semi.
‘I think we can probably rule out Fletcher,’ he told Patsy, when she was sitting in the car. ‘And he doesn’t know of an Adrian. We’re aiming to see Hellewell tomorrow.’