Off Minor cr-4

by John Harvey

  Patel took a deep breath. “You have no idea, then, where she stays?”

  “Don’t say I said so,” the woman said, rising, “but why don’t you ask at that bookshop back down on the main road? That’s where her friend is, the one she comes to see.”

  “Which shop exactly?” Patel asked. As far as he remembered there were three, possibly four.

  “Up the hill by the Heptonstall turning, past the wholefood place. That’s the one.”

  Patel started to move and she rested a hand on his shoulder. “They’ll likely not pack up and go within the next five minutes. Meantime that tea’ll be stewed and your toast’s curling up and going cold.”

  Against his wife’s and Lynn’s advice, Michael Morrison had left the house, waving off the reporters and threatening to punch a cameraman who positioned himself outside the garage and refused to move. Within twenty minutes he was back: crossing the bridge by the marina he had seen men with sticks, clearing a path slowly through the woods.

  “Investigation!” he yelled at Lynn Kellogg as he slammed back into the house. “You’ve already made up your sodding mind!”

  “That’s not true.”

  “No? Then what’s all that going on out there?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Search parties, that’s what I mean. You don’t carry on like that, looking for anyone you reckon’s still alive.”

  “Michael,” Lorraine said. “Please don’t.”

  “Emily!” Michael shouted full into Lynn’s face. “Everything else is a cover-up. You think she’s bloody dead.”

  “Mr. Morrison, Michael, that isn’t true.”

  “Don’t lie to me. I’m her father, so don’t.” For an instant Lynn thought he was going to lash out at her, but he banged his way out of the room instead.

  Lorraine followed him into the kitchen, where he was opening a fresh bottle of wine. “Do you think you should …?” she began, but the look in his eyes when he rounded on her was enough to choke her words.

  “It’s routine,” Lynn explained when Lorraine came back into the lounge. “Cases like this.”

  Lorraine slowly nodded, never quite believing. “It’s all this stress,” she said, “why Michael’s drinking. Before he lost his job, had to move, he scarcely drank at all.”

  In the kitchen Michael lit a fresh cigarette and poured another glass of wine. Sitting at the breakfast bar, elbows on the speckled surface, in his mind he was hurrying into the hospital and seeing the truth on Diana’s face before either nurse or doctor could intercept him, take him quietly to one side, explain. “We’re desperately sorry, Mr. Morrison. We did everything we possibly could. I’m afraid James slipped away from us.”

  Slipped away.

  For an instant Michael could feel again the earth at his hand’s center, wet and cloying, hear the spatter as it struck the tiny coffin and rolled away.

  “It’s all right, Diana. Diana. Diana, it’ll be all right. Give it time, you see: We have to give it time. We can have another baby, when we’re ready. When you’re ready. You see.”

  But it had never been all right, not really. Not after that. And then Emily had been born and each time she cried to be fed she reminded Diana that James was dead: each and every waking hour a living rebuke.

  Michael splashed wine over his hands slamming the glass down and barked a shin against a stool on his way to the kitchen door. He was in the car and backing out of the drive when Lorraine came running, cameras clicking; Lynn in the doorway watching. Both women knowing where he was going.

  “It’s Morrison, sir,” Lynn said to Resnick on the phone. “Gone off like the start of the Grand Prix. And he’s been drinking pretty heavily. I’d say he’s on his way to his ex-wife’s place.”

  She put back the receiver to find Lorraine looking at her, dark-rimmed eyes primed for more tears. Lynn reached for her hands and when the younger woman tried to shake free she didn’t let her go. “I don’t know about you,” Lynn said, “but I’m famished. I wonder what you’ve got that would be good on toast?”

  And she stood there, holding on to Lorraine’s hands, until Lorraine said, “Baked beans, there’s always loads of baked beans. Marmite. Cheese. Sardines.”

  Twenty-three

  The name over the door read Jacqueline Verdon, Bookseller. There were books under a canopy outside, paperbacks in crates, dogeared and damp, ten pence each. In the window, more expensive, volumes on astrology, astronomy, motherhood and diet, the lives of the great composers, forgotten women artists. If Patel had ever known the name of a woman artist, he had forgotten it. A bell jingled above the door as he went inside.

  The interior smelt of slow-burning incense. From the back of the shop there was music playing, chime-like and repetitive. On a central table several vases of dried flowers were surrounded by a display of maps. Almost the entire wall to Patel’s left was crammed with green-backed books published by Virago.

  “How may I help you?” The woman lifted her glasses from her face before she spoke, treating Patel to a welcoming smile. She was in her forties, he thought, neat brown hair, one of those essentially English women whose good manners impelled them towards liberal attitudes on race relations and capital punishment. When Patel had first moved to his present station he had lodged with one, bran flakes for breakfast and the toilet bowl had shone; the day she had caught Patel with a Cape apple in his room, she had reacted as if he had been enjoying sexual congress with her miniature schnauzer.

  “There’s a lot more stock upstairs. You’re welcome to just browse. But if you’re in any kind of a hurry, it might be best to let me know what it is you’re interested in.”

  Without her glasses she seemed to be staring at him, accentuating the frankness of her gaze. She smiled again and moved her head slightly, so that the circular earrings that she wore brushed against the sides of her face, reflecting such light as there was.

  “You are Jacqueline Verdon?” Patel asked.

  “Yes.” Less certain now, questioning.

  “I thought perhaps you could tell me something about Diana Wills?”

  Her hand jerked sharply sideways, sending her fountain pen skittering across the desk where she had been working and leaving a line of tiny blots across her papers, each smaller than the last.

  Patel rounded the display table, drawing his identification from his pocket.

  “What’s happened?” Jacqueline Verdon asked. “Diana. What’s happened to her?” Alarm clear in the hazel of her eyes, the rising voice.

  Resnick got stuck behind a ready-mix concrete lorry going over Bobbers Mill Bridge and was kept fuming in a single line of traffic that stretched from the ring road as far as Basford College. On his radio, the infirm and over-sixties were gamely phoning into Radio Nottingham, reminiscing about real Christmas trees and real holly, mince pies half a dozen for half an old crown, goodness knows how many shopping days to Christmas and they were bitching about it already. I remember the time, croaked one, when there was a Santa Claus in every store in the city: the last Santa Resnick had been in contact with had been up on a charge of molesting small boys in his grotto.

  He changed to Gem-AM, sixteen bars of Neil Sedaka and switching off wasn’t very hard to do. A gap appeared in the traffic ahead and he accelerated into it, earning the upthrust middle finger of a peroxide blond delivering auto parts. He arrived in Kimberley in time to find the nineteen-year-old constable sitting on the curb, helmet between his knees, while the woman who had slipped Patel his brandy-laced drink dabbed at his cut forehead with cotton wool and Germolene.

  “What the hell happened here?”

  “Oh, the poor love …”

  The PC blushed.

  “He’s old enough to answer for himself,” Resnick said. “Just.”

  “Excuse me!”

  “He must’ve broke in round the back, sir …”

  “Who?”

  “Morrison, sir. Least, that’s who I think it is.”

  “How did he break in?”
r />   “Window in the door, sir. Key must’ve been inside.”

  “You didn’t see him? Hear him?”

  “Only after it happened, sir. See …” glancing warily at the woman, who was now fitting a piece of Elastoplast over the treated cotton wool, “… I was taking a break, like.”

  “You what?”

  “No more than a cup of tea and a cheese cob,” the woman said.

  “I wasn’t gone above five minutes, sir.”

  “And the rest”

  “Don’t be so hard on lad.”

  “However long it was,” Resnick said, “time enough for the mother to’ve been in and gone.”

  “Sir, I don’t think so, sir. I …”

  “Don’t think is just about right. How do we know she’s not in there now, with him? Well?”

  The constable looked unhappily at the crown of his helmet. “We don’t, sir.”

  “Exactly.”

  “There’s been no shouting, sir. Nothing like that.”

  “What has there been?”

  “Bit of breaking, I think, sir. Things being thrown around.”

  “One or two in your direction, by the look of it.”

  “Poor lamb …” the woman began, till Resnick’s expression made her think better of it.

  “I stuck my head through the door, sir. Calling for him to come out.”

  Resnick shook his head slowly, more in sorrow than in anger. “You did phone it in?”

  “Yes, sir. They said someone was already on the way.”

  Resnick nodded. “That was me.” He turned towards the house. “Come on. If you’re through being cosseted, let’s see what’s going on.”

  “He’s still inside,” said the cloth-capped man, leaning against his back fence.

  Resnick nodded thanks and carried on into the rear yard. There was no sign of life in back room or kitchen, but the floor of the former was littered with pages torn from scrapbooks and hurled about. Photographs were jumbled together on the table. A shattered vase, presumably the one that had struck the PC, lay on the quarry tiles in the kitchen.

  “Michael Morrison?”

  Aside from a dog barking higher up the street and the thrum of traffic, it was disturbingly quiet.

  “Michael Morrison? It’s Detective Inspector Resnick. We talked yesterday.” A pause. “Why don’t you come and let us in?”

  No response.

  To the young constable, Resnick said quietly, “Round and watch the front.”

  Resnick reached through the broken pane of pebbled glass and tried the handle of the door. The top bolt had been slid into place but he could just reach it with finger and thumb, ease it back. The soles of his feet crunched lightly on china shards. The room smelt slightly musty. Quarry tiles, Resnick reckoned, laid directly on to the packed earth, encouraging the damp.

  “Michael?”

  Bending towards the rough gray scrapbook sheets, he glimpsed pantomime tickets, a sticker from the Wild West Adventure Park a souvenir program from Babes in the Wood. On the torn pages of an album there were small square photographs of a man and a woman with a small child, a baby: Michael and Diana, Emily.

  “Michael Morrison?”

  The front room was snug and dark. It would have been possible to lean in all directions from one of the easy chairs and touch all four walls. The PC’s anxious face, strips of plaster incongruous beneath the peak of his helmet, looked back at Resnick through patterned lace.

  On the stairs, the edges of carpet had all but worn through.

  “Michael, it’s Inspector Resnick. I’m coming up.”

  He was in the bedroom at the front of the house; two beds side by side with enough room for Michael to be sitting between them, back against the wall. The bed closest to the window Resnick guessed to be Diana’s: an alarm dock on the plywood cabinet beside it, two mugs containing an inch or so of long-cold tea, orange now around the edges, a paperback on stress, another, shiny reflective cover, on the subject of assertiveness. On the second bed soft animals crowded round the head. A cushion embroidered with a multi-colored cat lay near the foot. On the adjacent, straight-backed chair there were slim books with vivid covers: Teddybears 1 to 10, Morris’s Disappearing Bag. Scattered over both beds were more pages ripped from the albums and scrapbooks Michael Morrison had found below, his family in pieces all around him. His first family. He sat there not looking up at Resnick, an almost empty half-bottle of whisky tight between his knees.

  “Michael.”

  The eyes flickered towards him, then away. The fingers of Michael’s left hand were curled around a doll, round, flat face and hair like straw. A striped dress, yellow and red.

  “Michael.”

  In his other hand was a knife. Serrated edge, the kind more commonly used for slicing bread.

  Resnick leaned towards him, careful not to startle, not to draw attention to his own hands.

  “It’s my fault,” Michael Morrison said.

  “No,” Resnick said and shook his head.

  “My fault!”

  “No!”

  Resnick saw the tensing in Michael Morrison’s eyes, and grabbed for the knife too late. The point of the blade plunged fast at the doll and missed, driving hard into Morrison’s own thigh.

  There was a vast intake of breath, pitched like a sigh: a shout building to a scream.

  “Christ!” The word no sooner from Resnick’s mouth than Morrison had pulled the knife back out and, fingers buckled open, dropped it to the ground.

  Resnick plucked the knife clear and slid it back over the thin carpet, out of reach. Blood was beginning to well, surprisingly bright, through the tear in Michael Morrison’s trousers, the puncture in his leg.

  Resnick wrenched back the clasp, threw open the window. “Ambulance,” he yelled. “Fast.” And then he was hurling off the blankets, looking for a sheet to make a tourniquet.

  Twenty-four

  “Thank you,” Lorraine said in scarcely more than a whisper.

  There in the hospital corridor, porters and nurses hurrying round her, she looked more like someone’s daughter than anyone’s wife. Whatever make-up she had been wearing had long been cried from her face. Hands like moths around her body, never still.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Resnick said.

  “The doctor, he said that without you Michael would have lost a lot more blood.”

  Resnick nodded. The wound had been less than two inches deep and surprisingly clean. There seemed little reason for them keeping him in overnight.

  “Come on,” Resnick said. “I’m taking you home.”

  “I can’t.” A blur of hands. “Not without Michael.”

  “Michael’s sleeping. When he wakes they’ll check him over, phone you.”

  “Even so.”

  “You can’t do anything here. And if you don’t rest yourself you’re not going to be much good to him when he gets home.”

  He could tell she wanted to argue, but she no longer had the strength. Within two days she had suffered a stepdaughter abducted, now a husband hospitalized at his own hand. If she stood there much longer, she would keel over and Resnick was going to have to move smartly to catch her. He put his arm across her shoulders instead. “I’ll drive you back.”

  Between car and house she faltered, only one cameraman hanging on, ready to get a picture of Lorraine fainting on her own front lawn. But she rallied herself, depriving the nation of a front-page splash. Resnick waited, patient, while she found the door keys. My fault, Michael Morrison had said; he wondered what he had meant by that.

  “You look as if you could sleep for a week,” Resnick said, inside the hall.

  “I only wish I could,” she smiled wanly. “As it is, I doubt if I’d sleep a wink.”

  Resnick followed her through the house. “How long is it since you had anything to eat?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Okay. Sit down somewhere. I’ll see what I can find.”

  Again, she was about to argue and, again,
the necessary energy deserted her. Resnick left her in the living room, legs tucked up beneath her. The kitchen looked like something from an advertisement for modern living. The kind, Resnick thought ruefully, that Elaine would have aspired to for the pair of them: except she had fostered other ambitions, altogether more affluent. Why else fall for a high-flying estate agent with a holiday home in Wales and a Volvo big enough to allow easy adultery on the rear seat? Jesus, Charlie! Resnick thought, cracking eggs into a bowl, you can be a self-righteous son-of-a-bitch at times!

  When he went back into the living room, omelets and coffee on a tray, Lorraine was fast asleep. Smiling, he put his own plate and mug down on the floor and turned quietly towards the door. He was turning the handle when Lorraine spoke.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Put this in the oven to keep warm.”

  “Were you looking at me? Just now, I mean.”

  “Only for a second.”

  “That’s funny. I thought someone was standing over me. Staring. It woke me up.”

  “Come on,” Resnick said, “you might as well eat this while it’s hot.”

  Lorraine regarded the omelet with suspicion, pushed at it with her fork listlessly. After a few mouthfuls her appetite revived.

  “What’s in this?” she said, surprised.

  “Oh, nothing much. Tomato, onion, a small turnip I found to grate. Garlic. I sliced up your last rasher of bacon, I’m afraid. Oh, and I finished the cream.”

  “But what’s this on top?”

  “Parmesan. I sprinkled a little on after adding the cream. If you cook it the last couple of minutes under the grill, it gets that sort of crust.”

  Lorraine was looking at him as if she couldn’t believe him, quite. “Where did you learn all that?”

  “Nowhere special,” Resnick shrugged. “Picked it up, I suppose.”

  “I learned from my mother.”

  “If I’d learned from mine, it would have been dill and barley with everything, so many dumplings I would’ve been twice the size I am now. If that’s possible.”