Wasted Years

by John Harvey

  Marie Jacob had lived with her aunt, a short, plumpish woman who was struggling to move an easy chair down the stairs and into the middle room when Resnick rang the bell. He took off his jacket and helped, finally forcing the legs past the frame of the final door with a shove that stripped away several layers of paint and the skin from his own forefinger.

  “Here,” Clarise Jacob said, “let me put a plaster on that. You’ll not want it turning all gangrenous on you, sure you won’t.”

  Despite his protestations, Resnick found himself sat firmly down, while the woman fussed and cleaned and smeared his finger with Germolene before wrapping it in Elastoplast with a technique which leaned heavily on the early Egyptians.

  “I never asked her a great deal, you know, about her life. I mean, she’s a grown woman.” Clarise smiled. “More so than me. I’m only four foot eleven, did you know that? Can’t even see over the counter at the bank without I’ve got my high heels.”

  “Marie,” Resnick prompted. “You don’t know who she might have been meeting last night?”

  Clarise Jacob pursed her lips. “Like I say, I was never one to interfere. As long as, you know, she came across at the end of the month with her little bit of rent.” She looked at Resnick directly. “Family or no, bills’ve got to be paid. Either that or we’d all be out on the street.”

  Exactly, Resnick thought, where Marie was earning her money in the first place.

  “You’d know, though, what time she left?”

  “I would. I would. You’re right. It couldn’t have been before ten, on account of I was still watching the box. I made a habit of turning it off, you know, right at the start of the news.” She studied Resnick’s face seriously again. “It’s not good for you, that’s the thing, too much of it, you see.”

  Whether she meant television or news, Resnick wasn’t clear. “I wonder …” he began, getting to his feet.

  “If you can see her room. Oh, sure. Though those two boys earlier, they did the same.” She escorted him up the stairs. “I’ll not speak ill of her behind her back, specially after what happened, but, you’ll see, the tidiest soul on this planet she was not.”

  The walls were covered with posters of rock stars and the previous Pope; almost every available surface was covered with a riot of clothing, garments of all designs and colors.

  “The officers who searched earlier,” Resnick asked, “they weren’t responsible for this?”

  “Oh, no. They did a bit of tidying up.”

  “Did you ever hear her,” Resnick asked, “mention a man by the name of Prior? John Prior?” He was back downstairs now, towering over Clarise Jacob in her tiny hall.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not being a lot of help at all.”

  Resnick slipped the lock on the front door. “Anything you think of later that might be relevant, give me a call. I’ve left my name and number.”

  “All right. And, ooh, when you’re making out your report, it’s Clarise with an S, R-I-S-E. Everyone always gets it wrong. Bye-bye.”

  Eleven minutes past two: if I were a social worker, Resnick thought, I might consider I’d had a pretty good morning. The Fiesta in front of him swerved outwards to avoid an aging pigeon and Resnick braked hard, then swore as the engine stalled. He had vaguely intended to call in at home, but that was enough to change his mind; if he took one of these turnings to the right, that would bring him down onto the Mansfield Road. He was humming one of those Parker tunes with unpronounceable names, beating his fingers against the wheel, when he saw a woman walking out of a house a little off to the right. The house was quite substantial, thirties probably, set back from the road; the woman, wearing a blue suit, smart, turned her head to look back at the man who was now locking the front door and she was smiling. It was Elaine.

  Resnick accelerated clear, took the next road to the left, a narrow street curving back up the hill, swung in between two parked cars, switched off the engine and applied the brake. Suddenly, in the sealed space of the car, he could hear his own breathing, smell his own sweat. He was starting to shake.

  Elaine, leaving the house, low heels clipping the flagged path beside the gravel drive. A suit that had cost a month’s wages and more. Graceful turn of the head and slow. A smile he had seen before. Beside the front garden shrubs, the low stone wall, a sign which read For Sale. The man at the front door, pocketing the keys. Volvo parked at the curb, dark blue. It had been a long time now since Resnick had seen that smile.

  When his breathing was back to normal and his hands steady, he continued up the sloping road, circling an irregular block.

  The Volvo had gone.

  Slowly, Resnick slid into its place.

  Viewing Strictly by Appointment Only across the bottom of the sign.

  The garden was orderly, just the grass perhaps in need of a trim. The curtains at the upstairs windows had been drawn a uniform third across. Below, the ruched blinds had been set to deny any nosy passerby an easy glance. Resnick sat there for a quarter of an hour and nobody walked past in either direction, there was no sign of movement from inside the house, no sound.

  He got out of the car, locked it, and walked up to the front door. Two locks, a Chubb and a Yale. The gate beside the garage was bolted, but a tall man could reach the bolt end on tiptoe. It took seconds, not minutes, to slip the back door lock with an Access card he rarely, if ever, used. Two glasses had been rinsed and left on the drainer to dry; they were not dry yet. Nothing else in the kitchen suggested recent occupation. The air was flat and smelled faintly of lavender, the central heating had been switched off.

  Faint, he could see the marks their feet had made upon the stairs.

  The toilet had recently been flushed, a fragment of paper flat against the inside of the bowl, a single curl of hair floating dark upon the water. The taps of the hand basin were slightly damp to the touch, bubbles of lather on the purple soap.

  In the second bedroom, at the back of the house, the pillows bulked unevenly against the quilted headboard. Resnick lifted up the floral duvet and eased it down towards the foot of the bed, lowered his face towards the imagined indentations at the center of the sheet. Careful, they had left no marks. What remained, unmistakable, was the sour-sweet smell of sex: another scent, the natural odor of Elaine’s body, clinging to it lovingly.

  Twenty-Eight

  Rains had half of a chicken rogan josh in a plastic container and he was offering it round the CID room when Resnick came in. “How ’bout you, Charlie? Never known you to say no to some free grub.”

  Resnick said no.

  He went over to his desk and sat shuffling through meaningless pieces of paper, applications for courses, arrest forms, incident reports. Back across the room someone got the most from the punchline to an old joke and someone else laughed. Phones rang and were answered. Business as usual.

  Rains dumped the container in the metal bin, wiped his fingers on a pocket handkerchief, lit a cigarette. “That woman, Charlie, Prior’s wife. Knew her, didn’t you? Some time back.” He perched on a corner of Resnick’s desk, leg swinging. “Know her well?”

  Resnick opened one of the drawers and took out a notebook, spiral bound.

  “Anything I saw may be taken down?” Rains grinned.

  Not for the first time, Resnick caught himself wondering how it was that Rains managed to dress the way he did on a DC’s salary. According to gossip from officers who claimed they’d been there, the interior of Rain’s flat looked like something out of an ad for expense-account living. The car he had parked downstairs was a two-year-old Golf GTI.

  “You do know her?” Rains said. “Ruth Prior?”

  “Not really. Not personally. Who she is, that’s all. Who she used to be.”

  “Some singer, right?”

  The last time Resnick had heard her, or maybe the next to last, she had done a version of “I’d Rather Go Blind,” so slow, he thought, listening, time must have stopped.

  “Yes,” he said. “She was a singer. Loc
al, mostly. Blues, soul, stuff like that.”

  “Sort of Tina Turner?”

  “If you like.”

  “Without the tan.”

  Resnick said nothing.

  “And she gave it up to marry him, Prior?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “No kids, though, eh?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  Rains let himself down from the desk. “How long d’you reckon it is, then? Since she jacked it all in for a life of domestic bliss?”

  “Must be five years at least. Six?”

  Rains grinned. “No wonder.”

  Resnick’s expression: what?

  Still grinning, Rains cupped his crotch in one hand. “Ready for a taste of something fresh.”

  “Is she?”

  “Yeh. See it in her eyes. Just might not know it yet herself, that’s all.” Midway between Resnick’s desk and the door, Rains looked over and winked. “Married women, they’re a cinch.”

  When Elaine got home a shade after six thirty she assumed Resnick had not yet returned. It was only after making herself a pot of tea and opening the tin of lemon creams that, wandering between rooms, she noticed his jacket on the bannister rail.

  “Charlie! Charlie, are you here?”

  It was quite likely that he could have been in and gone out again; certainly, his car hadn’t been outside.

  “Charlie?”

  She sat in the comfort of their new settee—the arguments there had been before she’d felt able to go into Hopewells and put a down payment on that—drank her tea, and leafed through a magazine. Unable to concentrate, she knew that something was troubling her: she didn’t feel that she was alone.

  “Charlie? You’re not in bed, are you?”

  The bedroom was empty, her dressing gown diagonally across the foot of the bed where she had left it. A pair of discarded tights on the floor near the wardrobe and she scooped them up, dropping them in the laundry basket as she walked out of the room towards the last flight of stairs.

  “Charlie, whatever are you doing here?”

  He was sitting in an old easy chair that had come from his parents’ home, the fabric along the arms worn smooth until the original pattern had all but disappeared.

  “What are you doing up here?”

  There was new wallpaper on the walls, an old carpet on the floor, a whitewood chest pushed into one corner of the room. Cartons and boxes that had never been emptied since they had moved. Some of them—God!—Elaine knew were stuffed full of rubbish she had kept since leaving school: reports, magazines, pocket-sized diaries crammed with spidery writing, fevered accounts of first kisses and half-conjured dreams. In there somewhere was a scratched Parlophone single: the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Thinking.”

  “What about?”

  It was too dark in the room for her to be able to clearly see his face. Only the light from the stairs lengthening Elaine’s faint shadow.

  “You don’t normally come up here.”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  It occurred to her that were she not able to see him, she might have had difficulty in recognizing his voice.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Work.”

  “That girl, the one on the golf course?”

  “Yes, that.”

  Elaine took a pace back towards the door. “I’ve not long made some tea.”

  Resnick nodded. “I’ll be down.”

  She hesitated a few moments longer before going back downstairs. When Resnick eventually followed the tea had grown stewed and cold and Elaine was washing salad to go with the grilled chicken breasts they were having for their meal. As Resnick crossed in front of her, taking a beer from the fridge, she didn’t say anything more about the incident and neither did he.

  “Ready in about half an hour, that okay?”

  “Yes,” Resnick said, pouring the beer over near the sink, “that’ll be fine.”

  Prior was channel-hopping, switching between the highlights of the Eurovision Song Contest, a studio discussion about law and order in our cities, and an interview with Spurs’ Argentinian midfield player, Osvaldo Ardiles. “If they win the Cup, it’ll be down to that little bastard,” Prior said over his shoulder. “Lawyer, too, back home.” Prior laughed. “Ever end up in court, reckon I’ll ask for him. Ossie for the defense. Good, eh?”

  “Wonderful.”

  He reached out and caught her by the wrist. “Christ, Ruth! What is it with you lately?”

  “Lately?”

  “Every time I open my mouth all I get’s this great putdown.”

  Ruth pulled away, rubbing at her arm. Sometimes he didn’t know his own strength; sometimes, she thought ruefully, he did, and knew enough to hit her where the bruises didn’t show.

  “Jokes,” she said. “The same old jokes. Maybe I’m fed up with them.”

  “Yeh? What else you fed up with?”

  “Oh, you know. Life. Think I’ll go and stick my head in the oven, end it all.”

  “North Sea gas,” Prior smiled. “Don’t work no more. Better off locking yourself in the garage, leave the car engine on.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Stuck round here all the time, I might as well be.”

  “Get out then?”

  “Oh, yes? And do what?”

  “Get a job.”

  Ruth laughed. “Only place you’d let me do that’d be a convent.”

  “Not likely. Let them nuns get a look at you.”

  “Stop it! Just stop it!”

  “What? Ruthie, what?”

  “Going on. This joke, this fantasy. As if I was some kind of sex queen.”

  “You still get blokes turning their heads after you in the pub, in the street.”

  “Yes?” She moved close against him, her hip brushing him as she sat on the arm of the chair. “If I’m so sexy, how come I’d need to be on Mastermind to remember the last time we made love?”

  From the sudden change of expression on his face, she thought he was going to take a swing at her, but the phone rang and she jumped to her feet. “I’ll get it,” she said.

  She recognized his voice straight off and it was like him grabbing her hand again and pulling it against him, although she pretended that she didn’t.

  “Come on,” he said. “You know who it is?”

  “You want to speak to John?” she asked.

  Rains laughed. “I wondered if you fancied meeting for a drink?”

  For some time after she had broken the connection, Ruth stood in the still quiet of the hall, staring at the way her fingers curved around the sharp red of the receiver, the tarnished gleam of the ring biting tight below the knuckle. From the living room came the sound of Prior’s mocking laughter, the oompah bass and fractured vocal of the Icelandic entry.

  Resnick had watched the discussion, the Police Commissioner’s assertions that he would never countenance No-Go areas in the capital; the search for an appropriate police response which veered between a return to community policing, ordinary coppers on the beat, to the advanced technology of CS gas and the riot shield.

  “What do you think?” Elaine asked as the program came to an end.

  “I don’t know,” Resnick said, “but Ben reckons we’ll soon get the chance to find out firsthand.”

  “Want anything before bed?” Elaine asked. “Tea or anything?”

  Resnick shook his head. “Think I’ll sit up for a while. Listen to some music.”

  Elaine thought about offering to sit with him, till she saw which record he was pulling from the shelf. That bloke who played piano like a man with no arms.

  “Don’t sit too late then.”

  “I’ll be all right. You get some sleep.”

  Resnick poured a vodka and took i
t over to his chair; found the track he’d been hearing, off and on all day, inside his head. Ten, eleven single notes, seemingly unconnected, fingers jabbed down against the keys, till suddenly, the steady rhythm of the bass, swish of brushes against the snare, and the vibraphone takes over, finding a line, a melody where none had existed before. July second, nineteen forty-eight, New York. “Evidence.”

  Twenty-Nine

  The main office of Hilton, Lockett was on Trinity Square, where the fumes from the waiting buses and the cars waiting for spaces in the National Car Park were enough to lessen life expectancy a good five years. Resnick walked into the square past the Post building, pausing to look at the special offers on art paper in the stationer’s window and buy a packet of mints from the newsagent’s. He hoped he wasn’t developing a sweet tooth.

  There was no mistaking the man he’d seen leaving the house with Elaine. Leaning now over one of the young women at her desk, smiling as he made some remark. He was several inches shorter than Resnick himself, slim; the suit, dark blue with a narrow stripe, was the same as he’d been wearing then. The same or similar. The young woman laughed and the man moved across the office to his own desk near the rear.

  There were several people inside, couples, browsing the property details: houses under £40,000, houses under £65,000, houses under £85,000; £85,000 and above. There was a photograph of the detached house on Richmond Drive in the window; save for the two figures who had been outside, it was exactly as Resnick remembered. And well above the £85,000 mark. Good: he was pleased Elaine wasn’t selling herself cheap.

  Resnick pushed open the door and stepped inside. Three faces looked up at him expectantly. Ignoring them, Resnick went to the appropriate section and lifted a sheet detailing the Richmond Drive property from the rack.

  “A very fine house, sir.” He was blocking Resnick’s path, professional smile in place, scent of violets faint on his breath. “Excellent value.”

  Resnick nodded and took a step to the side.

  “Was it that particular property you were interested in, that particular area? We have a number of others …”