by John Harvey
Resnick had washed the dinner things, Hannah had dried and put away. They had sat ten minutes longer in the front room, enjoying the silence, the virtual dark. Now Hannah was on her side, knees pulled up under the hem of the oversize T-shirt she wore in bed, and Resnick lay close in behind her, one arm running along the pillow between Hannah’s shoulder and chin.
“So?”
“So what?”
“Was it as awful as you thought?”
“Who said I thought it would be awful?”
“Oh, Charlie, come on! Your face, your voice, everything about you. You were mooching around downstairs before they came like someone waiting for-I don’t know-something dreadful.”
“Like waiting for the dentist, you mean.”
“Funny!”
Resnick edged forward a touch more and angled his arm downward so his hand could cup one of Hannah’s breasts.
“Seriously,” she said, “what did you think of them?”
“They were okay. I liked her. Quiet, but she seemed nice enough. She’s fond of you. Alex, I’m not so sure. Small doses, maybe.”
“And together, as a couple?”
“I don’t know … they seemed to get on well enough, I suppose.”
Hannah turned over to face him, dislodging his hand from her breast. “He’s a bully, Charlie. He bullies her. It upsets me to see it, it really does.”
Slowly, she rolled away from him and when Resnick reached out for her he felt her tense against his hand.
Three
At a quarter to six that morning, the air was raw; mist silvered across the flat expanse of the park and the Asian taxi-driver waiting for Resnick at the corner of Gloucester Avenue sat rubbing gloved hands.
“Why don’t you leave some of your things here?” Hannah had suggested once. “There’s plenty of room. Then you could go straight to work without having to get us both up at the crack of dawn. You could walk it in ten minutes.”
But there had been the cats-there were always, for the foreseeable future, the cats. So whenever Resnick stayed over the alarm was set for five thirty and, one of his older jackets he’d forgotten aside, Hannah’s wardrobe remained her own. Despite his assurances that she didn’t need to get up with him, she persisted in doing so, making coffee for him and tea for herself; once Resnick left, taking a second cup back to bed and reading and dozing her way through the next hour.
Resnick’s return was always greeted with preening disdain by the largest of his four cats, Dizzy presenting him with a proud backside and running ahead of him along the length of stone wall that skirted the drive, jumping down and waiting with studied impatience by the front door.
By the time Resnick had showered, changed, fed the cats, made toast and more coffee for himself, and driven the short distance across town to the Canning Circus station, it was close to half past eight. Carl Vincent had more or less finished getting the night’s files ready for Resnick’s inspection and was wolfing down a bacon and egg sandwich he’d fetched from the canteen. In the corner of the CID room, on the cabinets alongside Resnick’s partitioned office, the kettle was simmering, ready to make tea for the assembling officers.
“Much activity?” Resnick asked.
Vincent swallowed too hastily and came close to choking. “Not really,” he finally managed. “Quiet. One thing, though. Those paintings we thought someone was trying to lift a few months back. One of those big houses in the Park. April, was it? May?” He opened the file and pointed. “Here. Someone broke into the place last night. Had them both away.”
Resnick recalled the occasion clearly; he even remembered the paintings. Landscapes, both of them, quite small. Around the turn of the century? Somebody called … Dalzeil? Dalzeil. He didn’t think it was pronounced the way it looked.
He remembered waiting outside the house for the intruder to leave, others keeping watch over the side fire escape and the rear. Except that when Jerzy Grabianski let himself out of the house it was by the front door and the holdall he was carrying proved to contain nothing but a Polaroid camera, a torch, and a pair of gloves.
“Knew him, didn’t you?” Vincent asked. “Some connection?”
Aside from the fact we’re both Polish, Resnick thought, ancestry anyway? And, he might have added, that we both top six foot and are heavy with it. The first time he had seen Grabianski, it had been a little like walking into a room and coming face to face with your double. Save that he was a copper and Jerzy Grabianski was a professional criminal, a thief.
“We pulled him in a few years back,” Resnick said, “along with a nasty piece of work called Grice. Stolen jewelry, other valuables, cash, half a kilo of cocaine …”
Vincent whistled. “They weren’t dealing?”
Resnick shook his head. “Came on it more or less by chance and tried to get rid.”
“Still, must’ve drawn some heavy time.”
“Grice, certainly. Still away somewhere for all I know. Lincoln. The Scrubs.”
“Not Grabianski?”
“He helped us nail somebody we’d been after a long time. Big supplier. We did a deal.”
“And he got off? Nothing?”
“A few months. By the time it came to trial …” Resnick shrugged. “Get yourself out to the house first call. If nothing else has been disturbed, clean entry, place looking more like it’s had a visit from an overnight cleaner than a burglar, Grabianski might be in the frame.”
“Right, boss.”
From the shrill version of “This is My Song” that came whistling up the stairs, Resnick knew DS Graham Millington was about to make an appearance.
Hannah had said little more about Alex and Jane Peterson. She and Resnick had soon fallen asleep-the consequence of good food and good wine-and their morning had been too rushed and sleepy for much in the way of conversation.
Sitting in his office now, shuffling papers, Resnick thought back to the previous night’s dinner, trying to recall any signs that would support Hannah’s accusation. Alex had been the more dominant, it was true; domineering even. He clearly felt his opinions counted for a great deal and was not used to having them contradicted: a consequence perhaps, Resnick thought, of talking to people whose mouths were usually stretched wide and crammed with metal implements.
But while Jane had been quiet, she had scarcely seemed cowed. And when she had stood up to him about the Broadway event she was organizing, he seemed to take it well enough. Hadn’t he kissed her as if to say he didn’t mind, well done? While Resnick was aware that Hannah would probably regard that as patronizing, he wasn’t sure he altogether agreed.
How long, Resnick wondered, had they been married, Alex and Jane? And whatever patterns their relationship had formed or fallen into, who was to say they were necessarily wrong? What best suited some, Resnick thought, sent others scurrying for solace elsewhere-his own ex-wife, Elaine, for one.
He was mulling over this and wondering if it wasn’t time to wander across to the deli for a little something to see him through till lunchtime, when Millington knocked on his door.
“Our Carl, called in from that place in the Park you were talking about earlier. Wondered if you might spare the time to go down there. Reckons how it’d be worth your while.”
The photographs showed the paintings clearly. One was a perfectly ordinary landscape, nothing especially interesting about it that Resnick could see: sheep, fields, trees, a boy of fourteen or fifteen, a shepherd with white shirt and tousled hair. The other was different. Was it the photograph or the painting that had slipped out of focus? As Resnick continued to look, he realized it was the latter. A large yellow sun hung low over a plowed field patched with stubble; undefined, purplish shadows bunched on the horizon. And everything within the painting blurred with the tremor of evening light.
“What do you think of them, Inspector?” Miriam Johnson asked. “Are they worth stealing, do you think?”
Resnick looked down at her, a small keen-faced woman with almost white hair and an arthritic
stoop, voice and mind still sharp and clear in her eighty-first year.
“It seems somebody thought so.”
“You don’t like them, then? Not to your taste?”
When it came to art, Resnick wasn’t sure what his taste was. Which probably meant he didn’t have any at all. Though there were reproductions here and there in Hannah’s house that he liked: a large postcard showing a scene in a busy restaurant, a man talking earnestly to a woman at a center table and leaning slightly toward her, hand raised to make a point, the woman in a fur-trimmed collar and reddish flowerpot hat; and another, smaller, which was tucked into the frame of the bathroom mirror, a woman painted again from behind, seated, but looking out across reddish-brown rooftops from one side of a large bay window-Resnick remembered the white vase at the center holding flowers, a sharp yellow rectangle of light.
“I think I like this one,” Resnick said, pointing at the second photograph. “It’s more interesting. Unusual.”
Miriam Johnson smiled. “It’s a study for Departing Day, you know. His most famous painting, in so far as poor Herbert was famous at all. He made the mistake of being British, you see. Had he had the foresight to have been born French …” She tilted her head into an oddly girlish laugh. “French and Impressionist, it’s almost as if they were brought together from birth, don’t you think? Whereas if you were to stop some person in the street and ask them what they knew of our British Impressionists all you’d get would be so many blank looks.
“Even among the knowledgeable few,” she continued, “it is Sargent who is remembered, Whistler of course; but not Herbert Dalzeil.” She pronounced it De-el.
“Excuse me if this is a daft question,” Vincent said, “but if he’s not famous, why would anyone go out of their way to steal his work? Especially if it’s not like, you know, the one that’s reckoned his best?”
Miriam Johnson smiled; such a nice boy, that soft dark skin, not black at all, but polished, almost metallic brown. And he wasn’t brash, like some young men. Polite. “He painted so little, you see. Especially toward the end of his life. He would have been, oh, sixty I suppose when he did his best work, but then he lived on another thirty years.” She laid a finger on Vincent’s sleeve. “It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? He was born right in the middle of the last century and yet he lived to see the first years of the Second World War.” Again she laughed, girlishly. “He was even older than I am now. But he lost his health, you see. His eyesight, too. Can you imagine, for a painter, what a loss that must be?”
She smiled a little sadly and Vincent smiled back.
“It’s their rarity, then, that would make these worth stealing?” Resnick asked.
“And not their beauty?” Miriam Johnson countered.
“I don’t know. To a collector, I dare say both. Though I doubt anyone would try to sell them on the open market; any reputable dealer would know they were stolen.”
“Japan,” Vincent said, “isn’t that where most of them go? There or Texas.”
“I should have given them to a museum,” Miriam Johnson said, “I realize that. That’s what was intended to happen to them, of course, when I died. It was all arranged in my will. The Castle would gladly have added them to their collection, they don’t have a single Dalzeil. I know it was wrong to cling onto them, especially once I couldn’t afford the insurance premiums. But I was so used to having them, you see. And I would look at them every day, not simply pass them by but really sit with them and look. Of course, I had the time. And each year I thought it can wait, it can wait, there can’t be long to go, just let me keep them for now.” Her eyes as she looked up at Resnick were bright and clear. “I was a foolish old woman, that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Not at all.”
“Well, Inspector, you should be.”
Like many in the Park, the house had been built in the latter half of the last century, testimony to the wealth which coal and lace had brought to the city. Not converted into apartments like so many of the others, it lingered on in drab high-ceilinged splendor, slowly declining into terminal disrepair. The burglar-and they were assuming it was one person acting alone-had risked the rusting fire escape and forced entry into an unoccupied second-floor bedroom. The window frame had been so rotten the catch had been easy to prize away whole. In the drawing room, pale rectangular patches on the heavy wallpaper showed clearly where the paintings had hung, one above the other. Nothing had disturbed the owner, asleep at the rear of the ground floor.
“Careful,” Vincent remarked. “Professional.”
“Yes.”
“Professional enough for your friend Grabianski?”
Resnick remembered the smile that had settled on Jerzy Grabianski’s face, the hint of smugness in his voice. “Half an hour with one of the unsung masters, worth any amount of risk. Besides, you’ll not bother charging me, not worth the paperwork. Nothing taken. Not as much as a speck of dust disturbed.”
All right, Resnick thought: that was then and this was now. “Maybe, Carl, maybe. But there are ways of finding out.”
Four
The Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help lived in an undistinguished three-story house midway between the car park for the Asda supermarket and the road alongside the Forest recreation ground, where the local prostitutes regularly plied their trade.
There but for the grace of God, as Sister Bonaventura used to remark, bustling past. Whether she was referring to whoring or working at the checkout, Sister Teresa and Sister Marguerite were never sure.
All three of them were attached to the order’s outreach program, living in one of the poorer areas of the city and administering as best they could to the unfortunate and the needy, daily going about the Lord’s business without the off-putting and inconvenient trappings of liturgical habits but wearing instead civilian clothes donated by members of the local parish. Plain fare for the most part, but ameliorated by small personal indulgences.
Sister Marguerite, who came out in a painful rash if she wore anything other than silk closest to her skin, purchased her underwear by mail order from a catalog. Sister Bonaventura stuck pretty much to black, which she relieved with scarlet AIDS ribbons and a neat metallic badge denoting Labour Party membership. “Who do you think He would vote for, if He came back down to reclaim His Kingdom on earth?” she would ask when challenged about this. “The Conservatives?”
And Sister Teresa, whose mother had stopped measuring her against the kitchen wall at fourteen when she had reached five foot seven, was forced to make her own arrangements as the kind supply of cast-offs rarely matched her size. Regularly, she would bundle up a pile of pleated skirts and crimplene trouser suits and take them to the Oxfam shop, where she would exchange them for something more fitting.
Today, when Resnick met the sister by the entrance to the radio station where she broadcast charity appeals and dispensed advice, she was wearing a calf-length navy skirt and a plain white blouse with a high collar and broad sleeves. She wore no discernible makeup and her dark hair was pulled back from her face by a length of ribbon.
Recognizing Resnick, she smiled.
“Good program?” he asked.
“Oh, you know. Sometimes when the same people phone in week after week demanding the same answers, you get to wonder. But, no, once in a while I think it may genuinely help and, at least, it makes people aware that we’re here. I’m grateful for the opportunity to do that.” When she smiled again, Resnick noticed, not for the first time, the tiny lines that creased next to the green of her eyes. “It increases our visibility, that’s what Sister Bonaventura says. And she’s the one with the diploma in media studies.”
“You don’t think it makes you a little too visible at times?” After one helpline session during which Sister Teresa had advised a battered wife to go into a refuge, the woman’s husband had been waiting for Teresa and had attacked her in the station’s car park-which had been where Grabianski, unlikely knight errant, had leaped to her rescue.
; “It is only radio, Inspector,” Sister Teresa said. “It’s not as if I were making a spectacle of myself on television. People don’t point at me in the street.”
“You’ll not mind being seen with me, then,” Resnick said. “I thought if you had time for a cup of coffee …”
“Were you thinking of going into the market?”
“Why not?”
“Then I’ll have a strawberry milkshake. And pray for forgiveness afterwards.”
The market stalls, selling fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy produce, meat and fish, had once done battle with the elements in the Old Market Square; for years after that they had jostled comfortably together in a covered hall near the now defunct bus station. When one of the city’s railway stations was demolished to make way for a vast new shopping center, the food market moved again, finding space on the upper floor above the ubiquitous Dorothy Perkins, Mothercare, and Gap.
Resnick came here frequently to buy salami and rich cheesecake at the Polish delicatessen, ham off the bone, Jarlsberg and blue Stilton, and to perch on one of the stools around the Italian coffee stall, drinking small cups of strong dark espresso, which the proprietor dispensed with an extravagant flourish.
This particular afternoon Aldo’s appraising eye traveled its politically incorrect way the length and breadth of Sister Teresa’s body, resting finally on the ring which she wore, third finger, left hand.
“Si bella, signora. If you were not married already, I would fall to my knees this moment and propose.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the nuns,” Teresa said.
Rapidly crossing himself, Aldo withdrew behind the Gaggia machine.
“Jerzy Grabianski,” Resnick began.
“What about him?”
“I wondered if you’d seen anything of him recently.”
