by John Harvey
“Max,” she said, less than enthusiastically. He hated it when anyone called him Max. “What can I do for you?”
Wrong question.
“Actually, Max,” she said, interrupting, “I’ve had a shit of a day. I’m going to take some paracetamol and crawl into bed.”
Setting down the phone, she lit a cigarette and drew in deeply.
“No, I’m sorry,” she said, receiver back in her hand. “Appealing as it is. Yes, I’ll call you. Bye.”
Carefully divesting herself of her new best suit and blouse and hanging them inside the ghastly flush-fronted fitted wardrobe, Helen kicked off the rest of what she was wearing and went to do battle with the shower.
She was drying her hair when the doorbell sounded and didn’t hear it at first over the noise of the drier. There was a generous glass of scotch close to hand and a Marks amp; Sparks salmon and something-or-other waiting patiently by the microwave.
When she realized there was somebody persisting at the door, she tightened the belt to her pale green robe and padded her way into the hall. Through the security peephole, Jack Skelton’s face looked more intense, more absurd than ever.
“Five minutes, Jack, all right? And don’t let this thing …” she tugged at the lapels of her robe, “give you any ideas.”
“Halfway there already,” Skelton grinned, but he was only going through the motions. “A drop of scotch’d be nice,” he said, spotting Helen’s glass.
“I dare say.” She made no effort to pour him one and Skelton took a freshly washed glass from beside the sink, the bottle of Famous Grouse from between the salt and the Fairy Liquid.
“Not going to be a habit this, is it, Jack? I thought we had all that settled before I agreed to take the job.”
“It’s the job I’ve come to talk to you about.”
“Not another lecture?”
“You had a run-in with Malachy.”
“Are you asking, Jack, or telling?”
“He told you what to do and you told him to fuck off.”
“Something like that, yes.” She held the packet out toward him and when he shook his head, lit up herself. “Afraid she’ll smell it on your breath, Jack?”
“Like she used to smell you?” His voice was easy and insinuating and for a moment, as his hand ran the length of her thigh, she could remember what she had allowed herself to see in him.
“Something about the job, Jack, I think that’s what you said.” She stared at him until he stepped away.
“Malachy, you know he was never your biggest fan from the off. Now he’s wondering aloud if it’s not the best thing to get shot of you before any real damage is done.”
“How exactly is he proposing to do that?”
“Ride you out of town doggy-fashion, I believe that was his suggestion.”
“Pathetic sexist bastard!”
“Possibly. But your immediate superior, none the less.”
Helen rested her cigarette on the edge of the sink and took a good swallow at her scotch. “Don’t worry, Jack. I’ve already figured out how to deal with this. Malachy gets his way and I get mine. And you’ve got two minutes to down that scotch, or you’ll be taking it back to Alice in a paper cup.”
Skelton laughed a sour laugh. “Just about the only way I’d consider it these days.”
Resnick had wandered into the Polish Club midway through the evening, a quiet night, quite a few families with older children, and, after chatting to the secretary for a short while, taken up a position toward the end of the smaller bar. He was there, making his second or third bison grass vodka last and listening with half an ear to Marian Witzcak’s somewhat alarmed recounting of a Glyndebourne production of Berg’s Lulu on Channel Four, when Helen Siddons was ushered in.
“Charlie,” she said, “we’ve got to talk.”
Thirty-two
The entire squad was assembled, two dozen individuals variously standing, sitting, leaning, staring at bitten-down fingernails, recently buffed shoes, casting their eyes back over the canal maps tacked to the walls, before and after photographs of Jane Peterson, Miranda Conway, Irene Wilson, and two still-unidentified women; twenty-four officers, men and women, but mostly men, mostly white, aged between mid-twenties and late thirties, motivated, bright, carefully chosen, keen to do well, succeed, get the bastard who did these sorted and sorted fast.
Helen Siddons, smart and businesslike in a gabardine safari dress, was coming to the end of that morning’s briefing. The team initially working the Worksop murder had passed on details of two potential suspects, one a brewery salesman whose regular run took him through most of the sites where bodies had been found. Details were on their way round.
“That aside, what I want us concentrating on is this period between the first two murders and the last three. If we are looking for the one man, what was he doing during this time? My gut feeling tells me he was locked away, maybe for something dissimilar, but equally it could be for some kind of sexually orientated crime. So, let’s use the technology, chase down what we can.”
She stepped back a moment, taking one deep breath and then another, amidst general coughing and clearing of throats.
“All right, all right, there’s one more thing. The postmortem suggests that Jane Peterson had for some time been the victim of persistent physical abuse. Not the most serious, in terms of what many of us are used to dealing with, but a broken rib, bruising to the body, the kind of injuries that are often sustained within abusive relationships where the person perpetrating them has sufficient control over his or her temper not to strike out at the face or some part of the body where injuries would more easily be noticed.”
Heads were turned in whispered comment and she waited for silence to return.
“I can’t be sure how relevant this is to our primary investigation; but it can’t be ignored. Which is why Detective Inspector Resnick, who most of you already know, is with us today.”
Off to one side of the room, Resnick-clean shirt, second-best suit, clean tie-regarded the floor with interest.
“The inspector had met both Alex and Jane Peterson socially and had begun making inquiries into Jane’s disappearance. So he has good prior knowledge here and it would be foolish to ignore it. And with the blessing of our respective lords and masters, he’s going to be with us on this, concentrating on that particular aspect of the investigation. DS Kellogg and DC Khan will work with him, leaving the rest of us to concentrate on the wider picture.
“Right, questions?”
High-ceilinged, tall-windowed medical wards had once run more or less the length of both floors in the top half of the building. These had now been partitioned off to accommodate the squad’s requirements: an open-plan office and large meeting room, Helen Siddons’ own office leading off it, were on the upper floor; the computer room, communications room, and numerous smaller spaces, largely for the purpose of conducting interviews, were on the lower. Resnick and his small team had been allocated one of these, just large enough to hold three chairs, two desks arranged in an L, one computer screen, two telephones, a small cupboard containing empty files and a notional amount of stationery, and a metal waste-paper basket, color gray. The walls were a suspicious-looking shade of lime green; the suspicion being that it was a mistake. The window, open now by several inches at both top and bottom, afforded a generous view over the Roman Catholic cathedral and the restored Albert Hall and Institute down toward the various buildings of the city’s second university and the bland ugliness of the flats that rose up without majesty above the Victoria Centre.
Helen Siddons had telephoned both Anil Khan and Lynn Kellogg earlier that morning to pass on the news; it had not been phrased as a request. Resnick himself had managed a brief word with Lynn, her response matter-of-fact, cool, everything would be fine.
“Okay,” Resnick said, “two things we have to do. Confirm, if possible, Jane Peterson’s injuries were caused by her husband. Find out what might have happened between them to drive him o
ver the edge. So statements from friends, colleagues, relatives, will all need to be double-checked. We need to go through the records at Accident and Emergency, talk to her GP.”
“And Prentiss,” Lynn said, “the osteopath. If he was treating her, you’d’ve thought he must have seen something.”
“He didn’t say anything?” Khan asked.
“Nothing specific. Accused Peterson of bullying her, right enough, obviously didn’t like him, didn’t like him at all, but nothing more than that.”
“Talk to him again,” Resnick said. “Make it priority. And remember, there are seven days during which we’ve no idea where Jane Peterson was. And at some point in that time she met her killer. Could be accident, chance. Or it could be somebody she knew, had planned to see.”
“It could be Peterson himself,” Lynn said.
“Exactly. So the other thing we have to do is go back through that list of people at the day school. Busy building, middle of Saturday afternoon, somebody must have seen her leaving. She could even have been picked up outside. And let’s double-check Peterson’s movements that afternoon while we’re about it.”
“This whole disappearance business,” Khan said, “he could have been faking it all along. Keeps her out of the way somewhere, secure, while he creates a fuss …”
“Right,” Lynn said, warming to the idea, “plays the distraught husband just long enough, then kills her and dumps the body in the canal, so that we think she’s been done by the same bloke as all the others.”
“Which,” Resnick said, “is exactly what we are doing. Most of us, anyway.”
“Well,” Lynn said, “if he did do it-Peterson-we’re going to get him.”
“Right,” Resnick said. “And if he did do it, what interests me is why.”
Thirty-three
“You know, dear,” Hannah’s mother had said, head half turned from where she was attending to the salad dressing, “I wonder if I shouldn’t move after all.”
Surprised, Hannah had looked up from the book section of the Sunday Times, her mother bending forward slightly, squinting above her glasses as she measured the required amount of raspberry vinegar into a spoon. “I thought you’d gone over all that, decided it was a bad idea. This house, the garden, you love it here.”
“Yes, I know.” Margaret’s voice was flat and without conviction.
Hannah laid the paper aside. “It’s not the same, is it?”
“No.”
They were both thinking of Hannah’s father, out in France with Robyn, a girl when it had all started, a student, little more than a girl, younger than Hannah by far. Infatuation, intimations of mortality. One of those scarcely explicable affairs that flare up and just as suddenly burn down.
“Have you heard from him?” Hannah asked. “I mean, recently.”
It was the wrong question. Anger fought back the tears in her mother’s eyes. “He sent me … how could he have had the nerve? Why on earth he should ever think I was interested, I can’t imagine. He sent me a cutting from the paper, or perhaps it was a magazine, something about this wretched book she’s supposed to have written. Well, I don’t know what he was thinking of. As though somehow that makes it all right, as if she isn’t just some silly bit of skirt after all. As if I care what … what she is … the stupid, stupid …”
Hannah folded her arms around her, feeling the tension wound tight inside the brittle wiriness of her mother’s body, the hardness of small bones, softness of white, lightly freckled skin.
“I’m not going to cry.”
“No.”
“She isn’t worth it. They’re neither of them worth it.”
“That’s right.” Hannah was thinking of Andrew, her Irish poet lover, the way he had flung his final infidelity in her face like brackish water and expected her to be grateful for his openness, his honesty. How she had cried.
“He didn’t think,” Hannah said. “He wasn’t thinking.”
“Yes, he was. He was thinking of her. Not of me. Now, we could eat if you’re ready. I’m afraid I forgot to buy any cheese. I hope that’s all right. I …”
“Mother,” Hannah said, kissing the top of her head, “it’s fine. Everything’s fine.” Tears bright in her eyes.
He had come back twice after that, Andrew. The first time had been midway through the evening, cold, a fire burning in the open grate. Hannah had been marking folders, grading papers, rereading the Lydgate and Dorothea chapters from Middlemarch. The first Mary Chapin Carpenter album had been playing quietly; she had had-what? — two glasses of wine or was it three? At the door, Andrew’s breath had seesawed across the air; he had been wearing a thin coat, a scarf wrapped round his head as though he were suffering from toothache, gloves on his hands, a bottle of Bushmills clutched against his chest. Hannah had known from the first moment of seeing him that she should not let him in: known what would happen if she did.
She took his scarf and hung it in the hall, the coat he kept on, the gloves had somehow disappeared. “Have you glasses?” he said. And then, when they were sitting drinking, the smell of smoke faint from the fire, the shaded light dancing in his eyes, “So, Hannah, how’ve you been?”
He took her on the floor, the curtains only partly drawn across, touching her first with his tongue and then no time for niceties, Hannah’s skirt pushed up and knickers pulled aside, Andrew having her there, wedged somehow between floor and chair, his long coat trailing round them as she moaned and he bit her breast and thrust deeper inside, stopping only to turn her round and push her down again face first onto the chair, hands clutching her, himself, not gentle, never that, the quick deep strokes and his fingers, damp, so far inside her mouth Hannah thought, if think she did, that she must surely choke.
He sat across the fire from her afterwards, uncovered, his lissome cock folding slowly back against his balls, savoring the whiskey, the cigarette he’d lit from the fire.
“I’ve missed you,” he said.
Hannah hunched there, legs drawn up, arms raised across her chest, feeling him slowly dribble out of her, for those moments immune to tears.
There was another woman, of course; well, there were two, one in Belfast, one here. He wondered if he might not marry one of them this time, put an end to all this wandering, settle down. He’d written a poem about it, this yearning after hearth and home, but then he would.
When next he came round unannounced she bolted the door against him and immediately broke out laughing, unable to think of anything save the wonderfully melodramatic scene at the end of The Heiress, a film she remembered watching with her mother one long Saturday afternoon, Olivia de Havilland locking Montgomery Clift outside her door. Who said art didn’t prepare you for life? She hoped Andrew could hear her laughter as he trudged away.
He had married, she heard, soon after; married and divorced and married again. His new book of poetry much acclaimed, he had given a reading at the university but she had not gone. She had glanced through the book once, displayed on the table in Water-stone’s, smiling quietly at a poem she thought most probably about her. She missed the way he would read to her at night, his work and others-Heaney, Longley, Yeats-but Andrew being Andrew, mostly his own. She surprised herself by missing sometimes the way he would arrive unexpectedly home after a lecture that had gone spectacularly well or badly, and reach for her no matter what she was doing, taking her, hungry and fast, pinned up against the sink or stretched along the stairs.
Jim, the peripatetic music teacher who eventually took Andrew’s place, had been far too sensitive and thoughtful to suggest anything so aggressive and uncaring. And Charlie … well, Charlie, bless him, was still a little hesitant and cautious at the best of times. A little lacking in that kind of fervor or imagination. Poets and policemen. Hannah smiled: at least she felt safe.
He was there when she finally arrived home, worn out after battling with the Sunday evening traffic on the motorway. A casserole of chicken and cured French sausage was in the oven, the kettle was simmering, r
eady to make coffee or tea. “You’d be So Nice to Come Home to.” Billie Holiday was playing on the stereo in the front room.
“Why don’t you let me run you a bath?” Resnick said. “Relax you. Then we can eat.” Arms around her, he had no idea why she was crying.
“Charlie, why is it?”
“What?”
“You’re forever trying to get me clean.”
Less than fifteen minutes hater, he carried mugs of tea upstairs and sat on the edge of the bath, telling her about what was happening with the investigation, the fact that he was now fully involved.
“Poor Jane,” Hannah said, “putting up with that for as long as she did. That bastard. That sanctimonious, know-it-all bastard. If he … if he …”
“If he did,” Resnick said, “we’ll catch him for it.”
She rested her head sideways against his leg and he soaped her back, rinsing it with warm water and then, when she climbed out of the bath, helping to towel her dry. When he kissed her, she felt him starting to harden against her.
“Charlie,” she said, “the casserole …”
“Isn’t that the thing about casseroles? They just sit there and wait till you’re ready.”
Bubbles of water speckled the small of her back and the length of her thigh as she lay on the bed. “Is that all right?” he asked. “Is this?”
She curled beside him, her legs around his, feeling his heart beating through his ribs.
“Why are you so good to me, Charlie?” she asked.
Later still, they sat propped up by pillows, dipping bread into Portuguese blue bowls and soaking up the juice.
Thirty-four
Grabianski remembered the first time he had seen her, striding out between the traffic on Gregory Boulevard, her topcoat belted but unbuttoned, a tall, well-made woman of a certain age. Now, as he stood on the steps outside the National Gallery, scanning the crowds that moved without pattern across Trafalgar Square, he felt the anticipation of her like ice beneath his skin. All below where he was standing, students lounged and laughed and smoked across the steps, Italians, German, French. More of them sprawled on the grass that ran wide along the front of the gallery, sharing it with the homeless and their cardboard havens, cans of cider and ratty wet-nosed dogs tied up with string-as much a part of the tourist sights as the Horse Guards on parade.
