by John Harvey
Grabianski willed himself not to look at his watch again, and lost; in any case, there was the clock beyond the square telling him past doubt that she was close to an hour late. Of course, she wasn’t coming, some emergency she had to deal with, one of the unfortunates she’d befriended had taken an overdose, thrown themself from a bridge; maybe one of the others, Sister Bonaventura or Sister Marguerite, had been taken ill. Or it could be simply the train, the train was late, seriously delayed, derailed, rerouted due to engineering works-wasn’t that always happening on a Sunday, engineering works? — he believed it was.
No. She had decided against it, pure and simple: decided, on reflection, it was not a sound idea, not pure and simple at all. Meet at the National Gallery, Sunday, to see the Degas. Innocent enough. He would give it another five minutes and that was all. Go round on his own. Except that would be too depressing. No, a movie; he could go and see a film, dozens of them showing five minutes’ stroll from where he stood. That slow jolt of pleasure, immersion in the dark.
The five minutes up and there he still was, fingers drumming the worn parapet of stone. Below him, buses crept past, red and green, some open at the top, Americans and Japanese craning their cameras toward the this and the that, guides blurred through their microphones; a bunch of dreadlocked, punked-up kids scrambling over one of the stone lions, pulling at each other’s legs and feet; a small boy, no more than four or five, running between the pigeons, clapping his hands so that they rose on grimy wings and resettled on the far side of the square; the slow bass shaking down from the open windows of slick cars as young black men anointed the afternoon with soul. Almost before he had time to register her presence, there she was, Teresa, Sister Teresa, smiling as she stepped over the outstretched legs of youths from Perugia or Milan.
“I’m sorry I’m late, so sorry. One thing after another.”
And Grabianski grinning fit to bust as, just to help her over the last hurdle, he takes her arm. “It doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t matter at all.”
The exhibition was in the Sainsbury Wing and the clock alongside the ticket desk informed them their entry was timed for forty minutes hence. The slightly harassed young woman at the entrance to the brasserie found them a table toward the far corner, almost with a view of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
“Cream tea?” said Grabianski, looking up from the menu.
“Just tea, thank you.”
“You won’t mind if I do?”
Teresa smiled her permission. Unlike some of her calling, it rarely occurred to her to deny others those pleasures she herself abjured.
Order placed, Grabianski was content to sit back and look. Teresa was wearing gray, a color she favored, but today in softer shades which accentuated rather than diminished the slight plumpness of her lower arms, the green that loitered in her eyes.
She was telling him of diversions via Milton Keynes, the thirty or so minutes they had spent, shunted onto a side line north of Willesden Junction due to signal failure; Grabianski half-listening, more than happy just to sit there, watching, watching the tilt of her head, the slow curling and uncurling of her fingers, the movement of her mouth-she knew he was watching her mouth-the stir of other conversations sealing them in.
The tea was served in china pots, Grabianski’s scone a wholemeal disk studded with sultanas, harsh to cut and rich to taste, richer still once he had ladled it with jam and cream; the cream not of the clotted, Devon kind, but fluid enough to suggest it might easily slide off the blade of a knife, his half-moon of scone, his tongue.
“A good choice, then?” Teresa said, eyeing his plate.
“Oh, yes.”
She smiled a private smile and added water to the pot.
“How are the other sisters?” Grabianski asked, wiping his face.
“Well. Sister Marguerite sends her love.”
“Not Sister Bonaventura?”
“I’m afraid Sister Bonaventura regards this entire day as a foolhardy enterprise.”
“Because of me?” Grabianski grinned.
“Oh, no. Because of Degas. What does she call him now? An over-the-hill representative of a dying bourgeois art form, eking out a talent for repetitive misogyny.”
“She knows his work well, then. She’s been down already.”
Teresa laughed. “Not for Sister Bonaventura any of Thomas’ existential doubts. She’d no more need to see a Degas in the flesh than press her hand against Christ’s wounds before believing that he lived and breathed. Religion or politics, faith and dogma for her live side by side.”
“She sounds hard work.”
“Of course; it’s the life we’ve chosen.”
Grabianski finished his scone and washed it down with tea; summoning the waiter he paid the bill, careful to overtip generously.
“Shall we go?” he said, easing back his chair.
“Of course.”
The first room seemed impossible and Grabianski’s heart sank: what he had envisaged as an intimate afternoon, spent in close proximity and expressive silences, was instantly awash with earnest shufflers, shifting from painting to painting as slowly as breath would allow, parents with whimpering offspring dangling from backpack or sling, solitary listeners strapped into headphones listening to recorded commentary, girls from good homes sitting cross-legged, sketching.
Glancing around the walls, he glimpsed ballet dancers, bathers, hats, bouquets, a woman ironing, another standing, stern and staring out as if daring the artist to put a stroke wrong.
“Look,” Teresa said, “the color. There. Isn’t that wonderful?” At the center of a group of hats, the kind that for Grabianski existed only in the royal enclosure at Ascot, a scarf loosely knotted, hung down, lime green, so bright that it threatened to outshine all the other colors in the room.
When they moved on through the arch, the crowd already seemed to have dispersed a little, and they had an almost unimpeded view of five pictures hanging on the left-hand wall, five women drying themselves from the bath, or rather, the same woman in almost identical poses, the artist working on her again and again: ankle, leg, the deep cleft between the muscles of the back, broad swell of hips, arm raised to towel the now brown, now red hair, the curtains behind changing from orange fleck to fleshy pink, the wicker chair that is there and then not there. Working at it, Grabianski thought, until he got it right.
Except there was no right, he realized, each day a little different, the position, the light never the same: the way it would be if every day you were privileged to watch the same woman, unselfcon-scious, step, first one leg and then, steadying herself, the other, out from the bath and then bend forward to retrieve the towel that has slid to the floor, before drying herself slowly, then briskly, a snatch of song on her lips, a song she has surprised herself by knowing.
As Teresa turned in front of him, Grabianski followed her slowly into the next room toward the famous picture of a woman leaning back in a flame-red dress having the tangles brushed painfully from her flame-red hair.
“I never knew,” Teresa said some minutes later, standing close.
“What’s that?”
“That she was pregnant, look. That’s why she’s so uncomfortable. That’s why it hurts.” And she smiled the secret smile that would forever keep Grabianski excluded, an outsider, more so even than herself, who had forfeited all right to so much that was womanly, to enter into the marriage she craved.
Turning sharply into the fourth room, Grabianski came face to face with the painting he would later believe he liked best; the body submerged in a near-abstract pattern of color and light, blue to the left and orange to the right. As he stood in front of this, Teresa, at his back, hurried past a canvas showing a woman bending forward unclothed, presenting her backside in a way that none of the others had, more frankly sexual, an invitation that lodged a thought in Teresa’s mind and brought a rare blush to her throat.
When Grabianski looked closely at it later, it seemed to him the texture of the model’s flesh was
that of skin seen through wet shower glass, spied on, unannounced.
Teresa, meanwhile, had been relieved to escape from all that flesh into the last room, three gentle landscapes on the far wall threaded through with violet and mauve, so still that you could almost smell the woodsmoke on the evening air.
They hesitated before the exit: they had been there an eternity; they had been there almost no time at all.
Released into the afternoon, they walked without talking, down across the Mall and into St. James’s Park: couples in deck chairs, a couple kissing on the bridge, couples holding hands.
“What did you think?” Grabianski asked.
“The exhibition?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I liked it very much.”
“But?”
“Is there a but?”
“I don’t know. Yes, probably.”
“I suppose I found it a little intimidating,” Teresa said.
“The nakedness?”
“No, oh no, not that. Naked and unadorned. We are used to that. But, no, the warmth, the color, the beauty that he found there. Never tired of. This old man-old for those days-and going blind.”
They sat on a bench near the lake, a group of shovelers and gray-winged teals arguing testily about some torn bread that had been tossed their way.
“I spoke to your friend, Charlie Resnick, not so long ago.”
“Your friend, too.”
“I think so,” Teresa said.
“Did he know you were meeting me?”
“He knew it was a possibility.”
“I see.”
“He says you might be going to help him.”
“I don’t know.”
When she moved, Teresa’s arm brushed the back of Grabianski’s hand, his wrist, certainly it was a mistake. “I think,” she said slowly, “that if you could, you should.”
He smiled, the skin wrinkling around the edges of his mouth, his eyes. “For the greater good?”
“For your good.”
“Penance, is this? Atonement for my sins?”
“Perhaps. If you believe. But maybe something more practical, too. I’m not saying I wouldn’t visit you in Lincoln, or whichever prison it might be, but that wouldn’t be the same as in God’s good air, would it now?” Briefly, she returned his smile. “No more exhibitions then.”
“There’s meant to be a good show in Cornwall,” Grabianski said. “The Tate at St. Ives. Rothko. I don’t know if you …”
“We’ll see,” Teresa said, already on her feet. “Maybe we’ll see.”
Thirty-five
“Someone to see you,” Carl grinned.
Resnick looked up from the interview transcripts he was reading through and there was Mollie, skinny black trousers, a vivid Lycra top, clumpy sandals, two styrofoam cups balanced one on top of the other on the palm of one hand, a plastic bag clutched in the other. “This coffee might not be so hot,” she said. “It’s already been to Canning Circus. They told me you were here.”
“Come on in,” Resnick said.
Carl Vincent closed the door behind her and walked off in search of Lynn. Something she had wanted him to do.
“Black, gay, and a policeman,” Mollie said with a backward nod of the head. “Things are looking up.”
“How do you know?” Resnick asked. “He doesn’t exactly advertize.”
Mollie gave a small, enigmatic smile. “Oh, you can tell,” she said. “You learn.” She perched on a table corner, taking in the bare walls, the lightbulb that still lacked a shade. “Promotion, is it, then?”
“Not exactly.”
“Smaller than the office I used to have and that’s saying something.” She jumped down and retrieved cups and bag. “We could have this outside. Better than being cooped up in here.”
There was a bench, battered and heavily graffitied, but a bench nonetheless, by the top of the broad crumbling steps that led down to Park Valley. Mollie handed Resnick his cup and delved inside the plastic bag, lifting out a package wrapped in aluminum foil, which she placed between them cautiously.
“Is this getting to be a habit?” Resnick asked.
“Maybe.”
Mollie carefully folded back the foil and there inside, squashed but not beyond recognition, lay two pieces of dark chocolate cake, a layer of what might be jam through the middle and coffee and vanilla icing across the top.
“It’s my birthday,” Mollie explained.
“Today?”
She shook her head. “Yesterday. But if I hadn’t brought in some of the cake, the people at work would have killed me. And so I thought … well, you brought something when you came to see me.”
“Thanks,” Resnick said. “And happy birthday.”
He wondered which it was, thirty-four or thirty-five? Mollie prized the cake apart and set a slice, precariously, in his palm.
“I should have brought napkins.”
“That’s okay, don’t worry.” He took a bite and managed to catch the piece that fell away in his other hand. If he didn’t drink some of the coffee soon, it would be colder still. “When I came to see you,” he said, “there was a reason.”
“Sheer delight at seeing me aside.”
“Of course.”
“Well,” Mollie said, “I’m afraid it’s true for me, too.” Freeing herself to reach into her hip pocket, she pulled out a photocopy of the Broadway office telephone bill, two lines-number, date, time, and duration-highlighted in green. The numbers were prefixed 01223. “Here.”
Resnick’s hands full, she placed it on his knee.
He hooked at her inquiringly.
“The last quarter’s telephone accounts just came through. As our esteemed finance director’s wont to do, he pointed these out to me. You know, numbers he doesn’t recognize. Exceptionally lengthy calls. The first was made on my mobile, oh, six weeks ago. That was short enough. A couple of minutes. But the second was from my office phone on the morning of the day school. Twenty-one minutes, forty-three seconds. You can bet he noticed that. And then, checking back, he spotted the first. The same number.”
“And you don’t know whose it is?”
Mollie shook her head.
“You didn’t make the calls?”
“No.”
Resnick’s stomach tensed, waiting for what she was going to say next.
“I hadn’t remembered, didn’t think anything of it at the time, but as we were coming out of one of the early planning meetings, Jane asked if she could use my mobile, just a quick call. I said, sure. I presumed she was making arrangements, meeting someone, somebody picking her up. As I say, I didn’t give it another thought.”
“But this second call, the longer one, you didn’t know anything about that?”
“Uh-uh.” Mollie was getting in her share of the cake now, licking her fingers.
“Could Jane have had access to your office while the day school was going on?”
“The downstairs door should have been locked, but with people popping in and out all day, yes, it could have been left on the catch. She could have used it without anyone knowing.”
“Isn’t it possible she could have asked someone else if she could use your phone?”
“It’s possible, yes, but as far as I know it’s not what happened. I asked around. The staff who were there.” Mollie sat forward. “You really think this might be important?” she asked. “You think it might help?”
“It might. At least it’s something. We’ve precious little as it is.” Resnick smiled and when he did Mollie couldn’t help but notice the smudge of coffee icing just above the corner of his mouth. “Thanks,” he said, “for letting me know so promptly. And,” smile broadening, “for the birthday cake.”
Mollie’s face darkened. “I just hope it helps. Poor Jane. No more birthdays for her.”
Resnick put a trace on the Cambridge number as soon as he got back to the office. It belonged to a pub on the outskirts of the city, the Dray Horse out on the old Newmarket road; a
pay phone in the corridor outside the lounge bar.
Alan Prentiss smiled as he opened his front door to Lynn Kellogg, a smile which tapered off when he saw Carl Vincent standing behind her. Lynn introduced Carl and thanked Prentiss for agreeing to see them at short notice.
“I had a cancellation,” he said, stepping aside to let them in.
Carl nodded, taking the man’s measure as they walked through. With Khan busy, Lynn had wanted a second opinion, hadn’t wanted to talk to Prentiss alone.
“You said you had one or two more questions about Jane Peterson,” Prentiss said, when they were all sitting down. “It’s terrible, of course, what happened to her. Such a waste.”
“When you were treating her,” Lynn asked, “I wonder whether you noticed any marks on her body?”
Prentiss blinked. “Marks?”
“Bruises,” Carl said.
Prentiss shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“Did you ever see any bruises on Jane’s body, Mr. Prentiss?” Lynn asked.
Another little fidget, something irritating along his thigh. “I might have once … There were, there was bruising once, yes. Around the hip and along this, this side.”
“Severe?”
“No, no, I wouldn’t necessarily say severe.”
“And you asked her about it?”
“Yes. She said she’d been in a fall. Coming down the stairs from the living room. Carrying a tray. Cups and so on. She fell. I don’t know, as many as a dozen steps. Halfway.”
“Had she been to her doctor?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And the hospital? Accident and Emergency?”
“It’s possible. I don’t know.”
