Last Rites cr-10

by John Harvey

  Resnick held his ground for five long seconds before turning on his heels and walking out into the passageway, past the open living-room door, out through the front, and across to where four skinny kids with pinched faces and short cropped hair were loitering round the unmarked Ford he’d borrowed from the pool.

  “Give us twenty pee, mister.”

  “Give us a fag.”

  When Resnick drove off, they raced after him, making signs mimicking masturbation, shouting abuse.

  Seventeen

  Early evening. Hannah Campbell stood in her small front garden, looking out across the expanse of the recreation ground opposite, its grass no longer the peculiarly vibrant green of midday or even mid-afternoon, but calming now into the softer shade that reminded Hannah of a particular dress her mother used to wear, muted and warm. The shadows of the railings and the trees standing close alongside them were soft and slowly lengthening and, from the middle distance, the cries of children clambering over the playground swings were faint, even musical. Off and on, scenes from Hannah’s own childhood had been picking at the edges of her brain all day, and she knew the reason lay in the letter, French-postmarked, from her father: My dearest Hannah, I hope you will understand …

  She stood a while longer outside the late-Victorian terraced house, with hanging baskets beside its blue door. She had bought the house several years ago, at a figure she could ill afford; but its position, traffic-free, so close to open space, yet near the center of the city, made it worth its price and more. Now she felt settled there, more so than anywhere since she had left her family home to go to university, not quite nineteen. At her next birthday she would be thirty-seven, nearing forty.

  Preoccupied, she was startled to see Resnick, hands in pockets, turn into the path which led toward the front of the house. Was it two weeks since he had called round unannounced, or three?

  They sat in the L-shaped kitchen-dining room at the back of the house, Resnick at the scrubbed pine table, his back toward the old range which Hannah never used, but kept for appearances. Hannah was moving between the table and the narrow strip of kitchen, washing greens for a salad, shaking lemon oil and vinegar together for a dressing, cutting cubes of cheese, spooning hummus into an earthenware bowl, heating ciabatta in the oven.

  “Are you going to stick with beer, Charlie, or d’you fancy some of this wine?”

  Resnick raised his glass. “Beer’s fine.”

  Salad bowl in hand, Hannah paused before the table and smiled. “There’s some work I have to do later, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, why should I mind?”

  “I just didn’t want you to think …” She shrugged. “You know.”

  “That I was going to stay the night?”

  “Yes, I suppose …”

  He had followed her from the table and when she turned it was almost into his arms.

  “That wasn’t why I came, you know.”

  “A bit of sex.”

  “Yes.”

  “Slip back into the old routine.”

  “Is that what it was? Routine?”

  She looked into his face. “Sometimes, yes, I think so. Don’t you?”

  “Maybe that’s what happens.”

  “This soon?”

  Resnick shrugged. His shirt was crumpled and his tie had been pulled off and draped across the same chair back as his jacket. His hair was something of a mess.

  Hannah touched his wrist and felt the veins running under the cuff of his sleeve. “Why did you come round?” she asked.

  “I wanted to see you,” he said, but the pause before speaking was too long.

  “The truth.” Smiling at him all the same.

  “I don’t know. Does there have to be a reason? I don’t know.”

  “Oh, Charlie …”

  “What?”

  Reaching up, she kissed him close to the corner of his mouth. “You had a bad day.”

  “It wasn’t good.”

  “You had a bad day and you didn’t want to sit with the rest of your team in the pub and you didn’t fancy going home to that barn of an empty house with nothing there but the cats, so you came here instead. You wanted company, comfort; someone, maybe, to hold your hand.” She was holding his hand. “Charlie, it’s okay. I understand. I just don’t want to go to bed with you, not tonight. I don’t want to make love. Is that all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  After they’d eaten, Resnick wandered into the front of the house and switched on the light by the shelf where Hannah kept her small stack of CDs. He toyed with the idea of Billie singing “This Year’s Kisses”-the ones which no longer meant the same; or the knowing irony with which she leaned back upon the beat and sang “Getting Some Fun Out of Life”; Lester Young’s tenor saxophone adding its dry commentary to “Foolin’ Myself.”

  Was that what he was doing? What both he and Hannah had been guilty of? The simple truth-Resnick caught himself smiling-the simple truth rarely existed outside of fairy-tales and thirty-two bars of popular song. And even then … his mind went back to Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood. Nothing simple there.

  He slipped the Billie Holiday back into place and pulled out the Cowboy Junkies. Not exactly cheery stuff, but somehow, he knew, Hannah seemed to find consolation in the almost forlorn, floating pessimism of their songs-”Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park”; “This Street, That Man, This Life.”

  Sitting in the armchair, Hannah with her legs up on the settee, Resnick told her about his meeting with Norma Snape. Feeling sympathy for them both, Hannah listened: it was easy to understand why Resnick, acting out of all the best intentions, should feel hurt, rebuffed, misunderstood; but Norma-and she knew, from her work, many women whose situations, while less extreme, were not so far removed from Norma’s-Hannah could feel her helplessness and frustration, a life lived forever at the mercy of circumstance and patronizing authority.

  “What will happen to her, Charlie? The girl.”

  “Sheena? Maybe nothing much, not this time. But in the future …”

  “I remember her, you know. She was in my class at school. Just for a year. And in all that time she barely spoke, other than to her mates. Did as little work as possible, enough to steer clear of trouble. And I don’t think we did anything-I did anything-in the whole three terms that engaged her imagination one scrap.” Leaning sideways, Hannah retrieved her glass of wine. “I didn’t do anything about it, Charlie. I didn’t even try. All my energies, they went on the dozen or so who could be real pains if you gave them half a chance, them and the few who were really good, genuinely interested, off writing poems in their spare time, plays, borrowing the tape-recorder to make a documentary about where they lived. Those were the kids I really bothered about. That’s what was rewarding, that kind of response. As long as Sheena showed up and shut up, I didn’t care.”

  “What’s all this?” Resnick said, setting down his own glass and moving across to the settee to sit beside her. “Taking on my guilt to make me feel better?”

  Hannah smiled and brushed her hair away from her eyes. “Not really. Not consciously.”

  “You’re not to blame for whatever’s going wrong in Sheena’s life.”

  “Aren’t I?”

  “No.” Resnick’s arm was resting on Hannah’s leg, his hand on her knee. “No more than we all are.”

  “And we punish her for our mistakes.”

  Resnick shook his head. “That’s too easy.”

  “Why?”

  “She may not be academically bright, but she’s not stupid. She has to take some responsibility for her own actions.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  There had been a moment, crossing the room, and later, when Resnick had thought he might kiss her, but now it had gone. He was looking at his watch.

  “Busy day tomorrow,” Hannah said.

  “You or me?”

  “Both.”

  At the door, she slipped her hand around his waist enjoying, howeve
r briefly, the solidity of his body, the inward curve of his back. She kissed him on the mouth, but before he could respond she had stepped away again and was wishing him goodnight. “Call me, Charlie.”

  “Of course.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  “Yes. I know.” Resnick walking, crablike, down the path.

  At the railings, he raised a hand and in the failing light she smiled. Inside, she leaned back against the door, his footsteps faint and growing fainter till they disappeared. Some months before, happy, half-drunk, turned on, she had asked him to join in the fantasy that was playing, unbidden, through her mind; the man heavy on top of her as she struggled, pinning her arms to the bed with his knees; a voice she barely recognized as her own, shouting, “Hold me, Charlie! Hold me down!” For Resnick, it had been too close to the realities of his working life: power, force, aggression. Neither of them had talked about it since. But it had been the first wedge between them; nothing afterward had been quite the same.

  Hannah carried the glasses through into the kitchen and rinsed them under the tap. Not so far short of eleven; too late, she reasoned, to phone her mother now. Her father’s letter was where she had left it, out of reach if not out of mind. She stood for a while at the upstairs window, gazing out into the dark. Denying the impulse to call Resnick, tell him she’d been stupid, jump in a cab, come on round. Her father’s writing was oddly small, squirrelly. She had needed to read the words twice before their meaning became clear. Robyn and I have decided … never imagined I’d want to get married again … important to both of us … writing to you before I say anything to your mother… easier coming from you … I hope you will understand. He had even tried for a joke: now Robyn’s reached the grand old age of thirty, I think she wants to settle down. And what, Hannah thought? Sell the place in the French countryside Robyn and her father had spent years doing up and buy somewhere larger? Move back to England? Write another best-selling novel? Have children? A child.

  She didn’t realize until it was done that she had torn the letter into smaller and smaller pieces, which went fluttering like confetti down around her feet where she stood.

  Eighteen

  It was early enough still for Resnick to rub his hands together for warmth as he walked. Mist was wreathed faintly around the trees edging the grounds of the university and, off to the east of the city, the sun showed only as an orange smear above the waters of the Trent. He had considered wearing a topcoat, before deciding against it, and the material of his gray suit was feeling not only shiny but thin.

  Parker’s café was facing him now across the boulevard and he waited for a pause in the traffic swishing off the Dunkirk roundabout before hurrying toward it. In younger days, Parker’s had been an informal meeting place for Resnick and a clutch of his fellow officers, and for Norman Mann it seemed it still was.

  There was steam on the insides of the windows and the heat struck Resnick, not unpleasantly, as he entered. Heat and cigarette smoke, the savory smell of bacon frying. For several moments, he wondered why he had stayed away so long.

  Mann was on his feet, leaning over one of the other tables, joking with two men in dark overalls. As usual, there were a number of fire officers from the station next door, uniform jackets unbuttoned, celebrating the beginning or end of a shift with oversized mugs of tea.

  “Charlie.” Breaking off his conversation, Mann greeted him with a strong handshake and slap on the shoulder. “Let’s sit over here. This corner. I’ve already ordered mine. Sort out your poison and we’ll talk.”

  At the counter, old habits quarreled with new-fangled ways, his own leanings toward moderation linked to Hannah’s lectures about healthy eating and coronary failure. In addition to coffee, no sugar, no milk, he settled for a sausage sandwich with brown sauce and grilled tomatoes on the side. Set against Mann’s full breakfast with black pudding and fried bread, it looked positively frugal. But then, Resnick told himself, it wasn’t his stomach that was straining shirt buttons to the last thread, or needing a strongly buckled belt to hold it aloft.

  “Cutting down, Charlie?” Mann asked, pointing across the table with his knife.

  Resnick shrugged.

  “Only live once, Charlie. Enjoy it. That’s my motto. And bollocks to anyone who says different. Present company always excepted.”

  For several minutes, they ate and said nothing, the blur of conversation rising and falling around them. How many wives was it now, Resnick wondered? The third Mrs. Mann or possibly the fourth? Each of them, those Resnick had seen, no taller than Norman’s shoulder, dark-haired, dark-eyed, soft-spoken; submissive, seemingly, until the day those eyes were opened and they packed their bags and walked away. He didn’t change and neither did they.

  Mann balanced his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray and broke off a piece of fried bread with his fingers. “Siddons, Charlie, I know she’s been on to you as well as me. You and Jack. Getting her knickers in a rare old twist about this business with Valentine. Looking to poke her skinny nose in.” He broke the surface of his egg with a corner of the bread, dipping it first in tomato sauce, then mustard, before lifting it to his mouth.

  “Fucking Valentine, we’ve been after that black bastard for fucking months. Run a tap on his phones, stripped that fancy Porsche of his down to the chassis, got more intimate with the inside of his house than a fucking death-watch beetle. Never come up with anything more than a couple of spliffs and a packet of Neurofen.”

  A sliver of reddish yellow slid, unimpeded, round the side of Mann’s chin.

  “He is dealing?” Resnick said.

  Mann laughed and wiped a paper napkin across his face. “’Course he’s bloody dealing. Even he can’t live that way on social bloody security. But, try as we may, we’ve never been able to lay a hand on him. Not one that counts.”

  Resnick sipped his coffee. “So what? Lucky? Clever? What?”

  “Fuck knows, Charlie. I don’t.” Mann speared a circle of black pudding. “Best thing could’ve happened, that youth’d been a bit more on target with his knife, lopped Valentine’s tackle off and slung it out to the dogs. As it is, he’ll get patched up good as new and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “He shot somebody in the head.”

  “According to who? You’ve got witnesses, reliable? A couple of tarts with less brains between them than the average cockroach. And how about the weapon? Even if it does turn up, which I tend to doubt, you reckon it’s going to have our man’s prints all over it, nice and sharp? No, Charlie, it’s a waste of time. My way of thinking, let Siddons flap around like she’s running the show, keep her sweet. Comes up empty-handed, it’s her bloody fault and not yours or mine.”

  Resnick cut the remaining half of his sausage sandwich into quarters and chewed thoughtfully.

  “Moved, Charlie, don’t know if I ever told you. Place out the other side of Arnold. New. You must come out some time. Bring that woman of yours. Teacher, isn’t she? Gloria’d like that. Someone new to show it off to, rabbit with. You know what they’re like.”

  Resnick nodded and not so many minutes later Mann looked at his watch. “Time I wasn’t here.” He scraped back his chair, slurped down a last mouthful of tea, and started toward the door. “Drop you anywhere?”

  Resnick shook his head. “I’ll walk.”

  “Got you under the thumb, has she? This woman of yours. Lose weight. Exercise. Have you down the gym next. One of them standing bicycles. Treadmill. Waste of energy, Charlie. All that effort and it never gets you anywhere.”

  Diane Johnson was having problems bringing the cigarette to her mouth. Her hands were shaking so much that after the fourth attempt Sharon Garnett reached across the table and steadied them with her own. For a moment, Diane looked Sharon in the eye before blinking away.

  There were four of them in the interview room: Sharon and Carl Vincent, Diane and her solicitor. A wooden table, a metal ashtray, stackable chairs. Attached to the wall was a tape machine with a twin deck and, above that, a cl
ock. The duty solicitor, dandruff, spectacles, bored, angled away from his client, legs crossed, crosshatching doodles on his pad. Sharon sat up to the table, facing Diane, Vincent alongside her, his chair pushed back, taking the secondary role.

  The only window was the small square of frosted glass reinforced with wire that was set into the door. Above their heads, the single strip of neon gave off a low, off-key hum. The air was stale and second-hand.

  There were lines around Diane’s eyes, small scab marks close to her mouth, dark on her dark skin. Her hair was a tangle of tight curls. It had been a long time since she had slept, slept well; a night on the skimpy mattress of the police cell hadn’t helped.

  Sharon handed Diane a box of matches and she snapped the first two, finally managed to light her cigarette from the third. She drew down hard and, eyes closed, let the smoke drift from her nose. After several more drags, her hands were still shaking, but not quite as much.

  “I need my medicine,” she said, a crack in her voice.

  “You mean your drugs,” Sharon said.

  “My medicine.”

  “For which you’ve got a prescription.”

  “’Course I’ve got a fuckin’ prescription.”

  Sharon’s eyebrow rose.

  “Temazepam, i’n’it? For my fuckin’ nerves.”

  “One hundred and five capsules,” Vincent said, speaking for the first time.

  “What?”

  “Jellies, Diane,” Sharon said. “Over a hundred of them stuffed into a plastic bag under the front seat of the car. That’s to say nothing of the hash in the glove compartment.”