Off Minor

by John Harvey

  “Depends,” Divine said quickly, “on just how much of a pervert he is.”

  “So, Raymond, how was the tea? Okay? Good. This here’s my colleague, Detective Constable Kellogg. Like I say, we won’t keep you long now, just a couple of little things we need to get sorted.”

  Raymond finally left the station at seven minutes after three. His shirt was stuck to his back with sweat and he could smell his armpits and his crotch with every movement, every step. Underneath the tangle of hair, his scalp itched. Pain reverberated, sharp and insistent, beneath his right temple, causing his eye to blink.

  On and on they had gone at him, mostly the man, but the woman chipping in too, all the same questions, again and again. Gloria, Gloria. How well had he known her? When he said that he watched her, what did he mean? Perhaps he used to babysit? Help her grandmother with her shopping? Do odd jobs? Collect Gloria sometimes from school? How well would he say he knew her? The mother? Gloria. Would he, for instance, describe her as a friend? Daft! How could some kid of six be his friend? All right, then, Raymond, what was she? You tell us.

  He wanted to go home and wash. Take a long bath, slow. He wanted something cold to drink. He bought a can of Ribena from the cob shop over the road and walked back across Derby Road to drink it, sitting with his back against the wall of the insurance offices.

  She was a kid he’d noticed first through the shock of fair hair that seemed, more often than not, to spring from her head in all directions. Blue, blue eyes. Like a doll’s. Raymond wondered why he’d thought that? Never had a sister, never had a doll in his life. Handled one: held it. Once he’d spotted her—running along the street towards him, lolly waving in her hand, her nan, her mum he’d thought it was then, calling, “Be careful, be careful! Oh, for goodness’ sake do be careful. Oh, look what you’ve done. Just look at you now.”—he seemed to see her everywhere he looked. In the Chinese chippy, on the rec, waiting at the bus stop with a hand in her nan’s, swinging from it and kicking out this leg and then that, never still. One day he realized that if he angled his head from the window at a certain angle he could see one corner of the school playground. Gloria with all her little friends, laughing and shouting, playing games, skipping, two-ball, kiss chase.

  Nine

  Resnick had opted for the southerly route, leaving the A153 before the potential bottlenecks of Sleaford and Tattershall Bridge. B roads would take him past the furthest outreach of the fens, safely through Ashby de la Launde, Timberland and Martin Dales; after Horncastle the choice lay between Salmonby and Somersby, then it was Swaby, Beesby, Maltby le Marsh and he was there. Returning home, he’d promised himself the high road through the rolling Wolds; Louth and then the cathedral tower at Lincoln, its lights burning for miles through the steadily gathering swathes of mist.

  That would come later. A necessary balm for what he was about to do.

  Right now, there was a flask of coffee on the seat beside him, sandwiches in greaseproof paper he’d picked up from the deli. Emmental and slivers of prosciutto ham, so fine that they would fold back and wrap around a finger like gold leaf; a thick, ridged pickled cucumber, sliced and laid across corned beef, further spiced with a liberal splash of four-grain mustard. Four small cherry tomatoes, ready to burst into his mouth, sweet pulp and tiny seeds. Resnick slowed to allow a Land Rover to swing past on the broad stroke of a bend; another impoverished farmer late for the bank.

  Fumbling the cassette one-handedly from its box, he slotted it into place and swiveled up the volume. The Basie Band in its first prime, 1940, America still to enter the war. A swirl of riffs teased along by the leader’s piano, the soloists stabbing and soaring, the last, Lester, leaning back against the beat.

  Lester Young.

  On the road with the band, he had avoided military call-up until 1944, when a presumed fan turned out to be a draft officer in disguise. Despite an examination which revealed syphilis and an addiction to alcohol, barbiturates and marijuana, Lester was inducted as Private 39729502. Within six months, he would be dishonorably discharged by a military court and imprisoned for almost a year. Prior to sentence, he was diagnosed as being in a constitutionally psychopathetic state: the condition for which ten months in the US Army Detection Barracks, Fort Gorton, Georgia was a guaranteed cure.

  Resnick steadied the flask between his legs, unscrewed the cap, took a long swallow and rewound the tape so as to listen again to “I Never Knew.” One of those tunes Gus Khan likely tossed off at his piano between cigars. The trombone takes the first solo, sliding between slur and rasp: then it’s Lester, tenor angled steeply to the mike, paving his way with a stepping stone of single notes before striking for home with thirty-two bars of pride and beauty, making the melody, the moment, his own. Resnick could see him, in his mind’s eye, sitting back in the section with the slightest of nods, a too-thin man with reddish hair and green eyes, wearing a band jacket that is perhaps too large, while behind him the brass rises to its feet for the flag-waving finale.

  What is it that causes us to take a man who, despite disease and self-doubt, can create such glory and throw him into the stockade, denying him everything, a 34-year-old, light-skinned black man in deepest Georgia? Take a girl with china-blue eyes and blonde hair and break her body, bury her in bin bags in the wasted dark?

  “I Never Knew.”

  Resnick lowered his foot on the accelerator, turned up the volume of the tape until the sound trembled on the edge of distortion, closing out all other noise, all thought.

  Mablethorpe, less than twenty miles up the coast from Skeggy, and forever its poor relation, welcomed Resnick like a Dickensian pallbearer wintering away from the poorhouse. Along the length of the single main street, boarded-up shop fronts vainly promised lettered rock and candy floss, jumbo hot dogs and fresh-made doughnuts, five for a pound. A white-haired man in an old RAF greatcoat nodded at him, his wire-haired fox terrier showing a passing interest in Resnick’s ankles. Up ahead, the broad concrete promenade had all the friendliness of the Maginot Line. And beyond that, all but lost in mist, the North Sea rolled coldly in, inexorable, more like sludge than sea.

  Edith Summers had swapped her high-rise flat for a 1930s bungalow with a pebble-dash fascia, three doors down from a corner café advertising fresh caught local cod and chips (tea included, bread and butter extra). She didn’t say anything when she recognized Resnick standing at her front door, shoulders hunched against the drizzle and the wind.

  She had brought her fish tank and gold-rimmed table with her; hired a new TV, bolted on to a black metal trolley, and, in poorly mixed color, Petula Clark was gazing wistfully at Fred Astaire, singing “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” in a failing Irish accent. Edith left Resnick in the low-ceilinged room and returned with a flowered cup and saucer.

  “I’ve not long mashed.”

  When he was sitting, sipping at the lukewarm tea, she said: “I know why you’re here.”

  Resnick nodded.

  “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes, but …”

  “What I said …”

  “Yes.”

  At first, he thought she was going to control it, brave it through until he’d gone, but, sitting in front of him, a distance that could be spanned too easily by an outstretched arm, he watched her face crumple inwards, a balloon from which the air is being slowly released.

  While the first sobs were still raking her, he set down his cup and saucer, knelt beside her, reaching up, until she buried her face in the crook of his neck, cheek fast against the rough collar of his coat.

  “Had he, you know, molested her? Interfered with her, like?” It was later, dark pressed up against the windows; Resnick had made the tea this time and the pot sat before the bars of the electric fire, knitted tea cozy not quite in place.

  “We don’t know. Not for certain. The length of time she’d been left. But, yes, you have to think it’s possible.” A shiver coursed through him, nothing to do with the cold. “I’m sorry.”

 
; Edith shook her head. “I can’t understand it, can you? How anyone in his right mind …?”

  “No,” Resnick said.

  “Then, of course, that’s it. They’re not in their right mind, are they?”

  He said nothing.

  “Sick, sick. They need whipping, locking up.”

  He began to reach a hand towards her.

  “No, no. It’s all right. I shall be all right.”

  Inside the room it seemed airless. The fire was burning Resnick’s right leg, making no impression on the left. Despite himself, he was thinking of the long drive home, the murder incident room the next morning.

  “The funeral,” Edith said suddenly. “Whatever’s going to happen about the funeral?”

  “Perhaps Gloria’s mother …” Resnick began and then stopped.

  “It’s my fault, you know.”

  “No.”

  “It is. It is my fault.”

  “No one can be expected to watch over a child all the time. Where you left her …”

  But that wasn’t what Edith Summers meant. She meant her daughter, Susan, born late, virtually ignored by her father for the first nine months of her life, chased and harried by him for the eighteen after that until he left, setting up house in Ilkeston with a woman he’d met on the checkout in Safeway, old enough to indulge him and count the consequences. He scarcely ever came round after that, not all the while Susan was growing towards her teens. Not that Edith encouraged him, better at gritting her teeth and bearing it than she ever was at reconciliation.

  When Susan reached ten, rising eleven, all that seemed to change. Her dad’s relationship had broken up and he was back in the city, sharing a house with a couple of taxi drivers who lived at Top Valley and driving a cab himself. “Edith,” he would say, smiling his way round the door on his increasingly frequent visits, “Edie, lighten up. She’s my daughter, too. Aren’t you, princess?” Offering Susan the comics, the chocolate, the Top-Twenty singles to play on the Taiwanese music center he’d bought her as a Christmas present. “Eh, his dad’s girl.”

  Three years it lasted, lightning visits whenever one of his fares left him over in the right direction, time to call in and sweep his daughter off her feet all over again. Then the Saturday he kissed Susan on the top of the head and said to her mother, “Right, c’mon. Get your coat, we’re off round the pub. Nothing for you to worry about, princess. Back in a couple of shakes.”

  Over a pint of mixed and Edith’s gin and Dubonnet, he told her about America, the woman he had met when she was over here on holiday—“Just picked her up in the cab, short fare from the Lace Hall to Tales of Robin Hood, who’d have thought it?” She was the one who’d invited him over, reckoned she could put in a word, get him fixed up with a job, someone who would vouch for him, see that he settled.

  “And Susan?” Edith had managed.

  “She’ll be able to come over, won’t she? Holidays. You see; I’ll send the fare.”

  What he sent were postcards, once a Mickey Mouse that lost a leg in flight. Susan sulked and cried and claimed she didn’t care: right up to the time she first stayed out all night and when she arrived back home next morning, dropped off by a 25-year-old in a purple and gold Cortina, said to her mother’s face, “It’s my life and I’ll do what I want with it and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” Not so many days short of her fifteenth birthday.

  Edith looked at the tea pot by the fire through blurred eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s anything in there worth drinking?”

  Resnick tried for a smile. “I’ll make some more.”

  “No,” getting to her feet, “let me. It’s my house. Bungalow, anyhow. You’re the visitor, remember?”

  He followed her into the tiny kitchen; whenever she needed to reach for the packet of Tips, the carton of UHT milk, Resnick had to suck in his stomach, hold his breath.

  “Sixteen she was when she fell for Gloria,” Edith said, waiting for the tea to draw. “I was only surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. If ever I asked her, you know, said anything about taking precautions, all that happened was she told me to watch my mouth, mind my own business. I suppose I should have stood my ground, made a scene, dragged her off screaming and kicking to the doctor, family planning, if that’s what it needed.” She sighed and gave the pot a final stir before beginning to pour. “But I didn’t, I let it alone. Look,” handing him the cup and saucer, “you’re sure that’s not too strong?”

  Resnick nodded, fine, and they moved back into the other room.

  “Turned out,” Edith said, sitting down, “she’d got in with this particular gang of lads, old enough to have known better: they’d been passing her round like some blanket you use to take the chill out of the grass when you lie down. Any one of them it could have been and, of course, none of them stood up for it. Susan was too concerned with being sick, being angry to think about pointing fingers, blood tests, any of that.”

  Edith leaned forward from her chair, shaking an inch of ash from her cigarette on to the beige tiles surrounding the fire.

  “She could’ve had an abortion, but I think she was too frightened. All she could talk about was adopt, adopt, adopt. I suppose somewhere inside I hoped that once she’d had the baby, held it, she’d think different. No. The only feelings Susan ever seemed to have were for Susan. Anything that was going to cost her more than opening her mouth, opening her legs, she didn’t want to know.”

  Edith rattled down her cup and looked Resnick in the face. “Whatever made me think, after the mess I made of bringing up one daughter on my own, I could do better with another?”

  Resnick took away the cup and saucer, stubbed out the cigarette and held her hands. “Listen,” he said, “what happened, it wasn’t your fault.”

  She was a long time replying. She said: “No? Then who was it ran off and left her there? Off round the corner for a packet of fags? Who?”

  Only when his arms were numb, the heat from the fire on his leg so strong that he could smell the material of his trousers beginning to singe, did Resnick seek to loosen her grip, let her go.

  Outside the rain had stopped and the wind that cut across the street was keen as a knife. Hesitating for a moment before getting into his car, Resnick could just hear the swish and fall of sea, dull roll of the undertow. And because there was nothing else to do, he turned his key in the lock, the ignition, released the handbrake, adjusted the choke, indicated that he was pulling away.

  Ten

  “D’you see this?”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said, did you see …”

  “Lorraine, it’s no use, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” Lorraine remembered not to sigh or shake her head, pushed the paper a little to one side and sipped at her red mug of Nescafé, Gold Blend decaffeinated. On the ceramic hob, potatoes and carrots were simmering nicely; five minutes’ time, she’d empty some frozen peas from the large family pack into a small pan of boiling water, add a teaspoon of sugar and a shake of salt, the way her mother always did. She would check the oven at the same time; if the fish was ready inside its foil packet, move it down on to the lower shelf and adjust the temperature ready for the Sara Lee Danish Apple Bar, Michael’s favorite, served with double cream and custard both.

  “You’re always doing that, you know,” Michael still toweling his hair as he walked into the room.

  “What?”

  “Talking to me while I’m in the shower, as if you expect me to understand what you’re going on about.”

  “Michael, I wasn’t going on.”

  “All right,” aiming a kiss towards her face and missing, “whatever you were doing, I didn’t hear it.”

  They had bought the house a year ago, five thousand short of the asking price in a declining market and glad to get it, carpets and curtains thrown in. Though, as Lorraine had informed Michael at the time, as soon as they could afford it she was going to throw them out again; not her taste at all. Another thing Lorraine had insisted upon, new
units in the kitchen, proper surfaces, wipe off and keep clean, electricity instead of gas. There was a small room off the kitchen, surely it wouldn’t cost a fortune to have it fitted out with a shower? That way they needn’t be getting under one another’s feet in the mornings.

  And Michael Morrison, just married for the second time, a younger woman this time and with ideas of her own, bound to have, did what he could to ensure they managed. All the mistakes he’d made before, himself and Diana, he wasn’t about to let them happen again.

  Besides, the extra shower was a good idea. Although he left the house quite a bit earlier to catch his train, Lorraine liked to be up too; partly to make sure he had a proper breakfast, but also because she enjoyed sitting over her coffee after Michael had gone, washing already in the machine, dishes stacked away, reading the Mail in her own time. There was always some little tidbit she could slip into her conversation with the other tellers at the bank, the customers even. “Did you read about …?” while she was weighing the bags of change. It made it more personal, as if she were making contact, not one of those machines set into the wall.

  “What’s for dinner?” Michael asked, wandering through into the other room and coming back with the Scotch bottle in his hand. Lorraine wished he wouldn’t do that, knew he would have had one or two already on the train; once she might have said something but now she knew better. What you did, bit your tongue and kept mum.

  “Fish,” she said.

  “I know fish, but what kind?”

  “Salmon.”

  He paused and looked at her, then poured a couple of fingers of Scotch into the solid-bottomed glass.

  “It’s fresh,” Lorraine said. “Sainsbury’s.”

  “Steaks?”

  She shook her head. “A whole fish.”

  “Must’ve cost a quid or two.”