by John Harvey
She came to the phone after Carole had all but given him the third degree.
“I’ve just been interviewed for a very exclusive position,” said Resnick, “only I don’t know what it is.”
“Sorry,” Rachel explained, “she’s interceding for me with Chris.”
“What’s up?”
“Oh, he was waiting for me last night when I got back.”
“After I left you?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus!”
“It could have been worse, I suppose. He was upset. At first he was angry and then he was, well, violent, I suppose you’d have to say.”
“He didn’t strike you?”
“No. Nothing like that. Carole got me inside, he hung about getting wet and then disappeared. He’s tried ringing me a few times and I don’t know if it’s to be abusive or to apologize, because so far I’ve managed to avoid him.”
“There’s nothing you want me to do?”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“Except what I called for.”
“Which is?”
“To save myself from another mushroom omelet.”
“Charlie!”
“You said it was my turn to ring you.”
“I didn’t mean less than twenty-four hours later.”
“You weren’t that specific.”
“I know. But, anyway, I’ve eaten.”
“Oh.”
There was a silence and then Resnick said: “What were you going to do?”
“An early bath and then bed.”
Great! thought Resnick. Do it here!
“Did you hear what I said, Charlie?” Rachel asked when there was no reply.
“I was just thinking about it.”
“You’re not turning into a dirty old man on me, are you?”
“Come over,” said Resnick.
“What for?”
“To meet the cats.”
She didn’t say anything for several seconds and then what she did say was, “How can I resist?”
The introductions went as well as could be expected. Dizzy treated her to his rear view within seconds, but that aside the cats were as polite as they usually were when Resnick had guests, which wasn’t often.
“Can I get you a drink?”
“Vodka and tonic?”
“Difficult.”
“Gin?”
“Ah…”
“What have you got?”
They sat on the settee with two glasses of Black Label and Art Pepper on the stereo playing “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” Resnick didn’t tell her the title, he thought that might be going too far, but he did point out the link with Pepper the cat and he was starting to tell her something else when she leaned across him and placed her finger to his lips.
“Charlie…”
“Um?”
“Shut up and let me listen.”
When he refilled their glasses, he found a worn copy of Sinatra’s Songs for Young Lovers. Rachel waited until it got to “Someone to Watch Over Me” before asking, “Charlie, are you trying to seduce me?”
“Am I?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“Are you being honest?”
“Usually.”
“And now?”
“Absolutely.”
“Only if you are, trying to seduce me I mean, I haven’t got my cap in.”
“Oh.”
“And I don’t want you to think I’m the kind of woman who takes it with her wherever she goes.”
“Absolutely not.”
“But I do happen to have it in my bag.”
“Ah.”
He took her whisky glass and she kissed him; when he had set both glasses down, she kissed him again.
They kissed one another.
After some time had elapsed and two of the cats had tried to find some purchase on their shifting laps and given up, Rachel took Resnick’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “Don’t you think it’s time you showed me the bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’d better point me at the bathroom on the way.”
“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”
Rachel waited fully fifteen seconds and when the bathroom mirror didn’t provide her with an answer she flushed the toilet and switched out the light.
“Are you all right?”
“Mmm.”
“No, really?”
“I suppose not.”
Resnick sighed and rolled over on to his side; his eyes were closed and his breathing was loud and too fast. He waited until it had steadied and then opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling.
“Charlie…” Rachel snuggled beneath the crook of his arm, laying her arm across his body, the curve of her hand on his belly. “…it doesn’t matter.”
Resnick didn’t reply.
“Honestly.”
“Um.”
She turned her head in towards him and kissed first his side and then, slowly, his chest, all the way to the hair that gathered thickly at the middle of his rib cage and tasted of salt and sweat.
“Don’t think about it.”
What Resnick was thinking about was Sally Oakes, her scrubbed face and her skinny body and her voice. No. He hurt me. And behind that, like an echo that was off-key but always present, a little girl sitting in a room with dolls: Yes. It hurt me.
Rachel moved until she was lying with her body half covering his and he softly stroked her back from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine.
“Charlie,” she said in a murmur, “don’t stop. That’s lovely.”
And after that she didn’t say anything because she was asleep.
When she woke it was pitch dark, she was alone in the bed and the luminous hands of her watch told her it was close to half-past two. She slipped out from under the covers without disturbing the cat that slept near the foot of the bed, curled in on itself.
She found Charlie in the nursery, with his face up against the window, gazing out into the dark. Rachel pressed her cheek into the middle of his back and her arms wound around him. After a little while he turned to her and when she kissed him, she could feel the tears, not yet dry on his face.
“What are you crying for, Charlie?” she said.
“The children.”
“Which children?”
“All of them.”
Thirty-One
“Charlie.”
“Um?”
“Charlie.”
He turned against her, no more than half awake and startled by her voice, her closeness, the warmth and smoothness of her skin.
“There’s something on my head.”
“Oh.” Reaching up, one of Resnick’s hands inadvertently brushed against her breast. “Dizzy, come down. Come on.”
He prized the cat carefully away, wary that Dizzy’s claws would become entangled with the curls of Rachel’s hair. Setting the cat down on the floor, Resnick waited for him to jump back and when he did, pushed him more energetically away. The fur of his tail fluffed out, Dizzy sulked out of the room.
“Jealous,” Resnick said.
“He’s no need to be.”
“He’ll get used to it.”
Rachel ran a finger down the inside of Resnick’s arm. “He won’t have to.” Looking at her, close enough to see himself reflected in her eyes, Resnick’s fingers closed around hers.
“What time is it, Charlie?”
He brought her arm up in the bed until he could read the hands of her watch. “Ten-past six.”
“I have to leave by seven.”
It was already five-to and Rachel was drinking coffee and putting on her eye shadow; in the bedroom, Resnick was sorting through his shirts.
“You were married, Charlie. Why didn’t you have any kids?”
“The only time we might have was right afterwards, the first year or so. But then it was me, I was the one who wasn’t sure, wanted to wait. I was just getting
into the job, I suppose, maybe I was frightened of the disruption, the responsibility, I don’t know. Later, well, later it was different. There were other things on her agenda.”
She could see him through the mirror, loosening the top of his trousers to tuck in his shirt, watching her.
“How about you?” Resnick said.
Rachel was checking her diary, one arm in her coat: they were standing in the hall.
“Young professionals; it wasn’t an issue.”
“And now?”
“Now, I don’t think about it, not often, and, when I do, I still don’t know if I want any. Sometimes…” She pushed the diary down into her bag and finished fastening her coat…“But then I’ve never been sure enough or I suppose by now I would have done something about it.”
She felt him looking at her and knew what he was thinking. It didn’t make her feel comfortable.
“Bye, Charlie.” She opened the door. Outside it was still quite dark.
“I’ll call you.”
“No.”
Rachel watched as anxiety narrowed his eyes. “It’s my turn to call you.”
Jack Skelton had either found the time to buy a new suit or discovered one in the back of his wardrobe that Resnick didn’t remember. He went through the briefing session even more briskly than usual. The blowups of the bodies were still tacked to the wall; the map enlargements with their annotations in red and blue marker; now two ten by twelve photographs of Leonard Simms, one a right profile, the other frontal. In both he looked startled, his eyes protruding slightly from their sockets, cheeks drawn in as if catching breath.
“What I shall say to the press is this: a man has been helping us with our inquiries into the deaths of Shirley Peters and Mary Sheppard, neither he nor anybody else has been charged, but we do confidently expect an arrest will be made shortly.”
“Shortly,” said Colin Rich. “Why not now?” As usual it was difficult to tell whether he was asking a specific question or thinking aloud.
The superintendent chose to answer. “To present, Simms has been here voluntarily. He asked to see his doctor and that was arranged, but always said he didn’t want a solicitor. Now he seems to be changing his mind on that score and I’m not convinced we have enough evidence on which to charge him. He’s still denying any actual contact with the Peters woman and in no way have we been able to link him with the second murder.”
“That aside,” put in the DCI, “laddie’s very much our best bet.”
“But in the meanwhile,” said Skelton, “we continue to explore other avenues.”
“Or blind alleys, eh, Charlie?” Colin Rich winked.
Resnick knew that, when he talked to Skelton, the superintendent would tell him to put at least two more of his team back on to the main inquiry. Contact magazines, dating agencies, singles clubs: action was continuing to be initiated, paper work still piling up.
Patel had typed his report with the usual painstaking application of Tipp-Ex and an uncertainty, shared by the majority of the population, about the use of the apostrophe. Resnick held the sheets folded back against the counter and spooned the sprinkling of chocolate from the surface of his cappuccino. Names of publications, academic posts held, bits and pieces of biography culled from slender sources, what did it all add up to? Repression, defacement. He wondered if Patel’s page of notes outlining Doria’s lecture on Derrida and Deconstruction meant any more to him than a collection of words, shuffled together. Repression and defacement: provocation and closure.
“Moonlighting, Inspector?”
Suzanne Olds was standing behind him, reading over his shoulder. Resnick refolded the papers and slid them back into their envelope.
“A little heavy for before lunch, isn’t it?” she said, taking the stool next to him.
“Research,” Resnick explained.
“A closet intellectual.” She took a pack of cigarettes from her shoulder bag and then a lighter. “You’re a surprising man.” She lit a cigarette. “Open University, is it? Career move or just a hobby?”
“I didn’t know you came here?” Resnick said.
“I must be honest, I prefer the espresso bar downstairs at Next but there wasn’t a spare seat.”
“Coffee’s better up here.”
“It’s stronger.”
“Exactly.”
Suzanne Olds put a 50p coin on the counter and told the girl to keep the change. “How’s the inquiry coming along?”
“We confidently expect an arrest to be made shortly.”
“Thanks,” she said, averting her head to release a film of gray smoke, “I read the first edition.”
“Then you know.”
“From what I hear you’ve got some half-witted flasher doing his best to talk himself into the High Court.”
“You’re not representing him?”
“I didn’t think anybody was.”
“Besides,” said Resnick, “if you read the rest of the piece, you’ll know we let him walk away.”
“How far and for how long?”
Resnick gave his coffee a stir and drank it down in three swallows.
“You don’t think he did it, do you?” She was leaning her head towards him and he still didn’t like her perfume. There was, though, something about the way her skin stretched tight over high cheekbones…
“Don’t I?”
“Inspector, I’ve seen you when you’re convinced a man’s guilty. That interrogation of Macliesh…”
“I regret that.”
“Why?” Her hand was resting on his sleeve. “I thought you were very impressive.”
“I’ve got to go,” Resnick said, putting the envelope into his inside pocket, getting down from the stool.
“You know,” Suzanne Olds said, “you could be an attractive man if ever you decided to take the trouble.”
Resnick had no trouble in not looking back.
For Christmas they had pork: slices of it a quarter-inch thick that her father would slice away from the bone, golden-yellow crackling, roast parsnips and potatoes, applesauce to which her mother had added a thimbleful of brandy at the last moment. Her mother had been on to her about it since her last letter, this Sunday’s eleven-thirty phone call.
“You will be home? You will be here? Christmas Eve, your dad says. He could do with some help on the last delivery. Can’t trust that lad to come in. Oh, and the bird for that inspector of yours…”
Lynn wondered how difficult it would be to arrange for a spell of duty that would carry her across into the New Year.
“Problem?”
She hadn’t noticed Resnick coming into the office.
“No, sir,” shaking her head.
“You look guilty about something.”
“Christmas, sir.”
Resnick grinned. “Didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”
Across the room two phones rang almost simultaneously and Mark Divine picked up one with each hand and said into the pair of them, “CID.”
One caller he asked to hold a moment, cupped his hand over the mouthpiece of the second and gestured towards Resnick, who shook his head.
“He’s busy at the moment. Can you call back later?”
Divine shrugged and set the receiver back on the cradle. “Hung up, sir.”
Resnick turned back to Lynn Kellogg. “You went to see the girl?”
“Sally Oakes. Yes, sir.”
“What did you make of her?”
“Weird. I mean, really strange. Brittle as a stick and that look of hers…I’m ten years older than her and she made me feel like I was back at school.”
It was interesting, thought Resnick, the way that her Norfolk accent came back more strongly whenever she’d been thinking about home.
“And all that carrying-on with Doria, I don’t understand how she could…I don’t see how she could bring herself to tell me about it, never mind mess around like that with a man…” She sensed the way her line of thought was taking her and veered away with
as much grace as she could. Noticing, Resnick gave her room, impressed.
“I’ll say this for her, though, she sent him packing and she meant it. That’s not easy at the best of times.” Look at me, she thought, sharing a flat and a bed with a man I no longer have any feelings for, simply because it’s less of a problem than finding a way of telling him to pick up his bike and walk. “She gave him his marching orders and according to her he’s accepted it; she doesn’t seem to have been intimidated by him at all.”
“Whereas you were, a little, on your own admission.”
“More than a little. He overwhelmed me, I think.”
“With words.”
“That and the whole setup, the cozy little room, all those books I’d never read and never will, the sherry. It’s a long way from Norfolk.”
“So are most places,” Resnick smiled.
“Sally Oakes, though,” Lynn continued after a moment, “none of that seemed to bother her at all.”
“She switched off.”
“I suppose so.”
“Until he came out from behind all the talk, the language.”
Inwardly, Lynn Kellogg shivered and, as if sensing it, Resnick reminded her of what she had said about Doria after their meeting, what she’d said about his eyes.
“Yes, sir. Like he was looking at me from behind a mask.”
“If that’s right, he doesn’t let it slip often. From your report, there doesn’t seem to be any gossip about him at the university at all.”
“Nothing sexual, sir. No rumors about affairs with students, though from what I heard he must be about the only lecturer who isn’t having one.”
“It’s all that reading,” said Resnick. “Gives them a taste for it.”
“Really, sir? I don’t see how.” A boyfriend had given her a well-thumbed copy of The Story of O once; she’d hit him with it.
“Just a theory. Talking of which, no sign of Patel, I suppose?”
“I think he’s at the Never-Too-Late Club for the Widowed and Divorced, sir. They’re having a tea dance.”
“If he comes in, tell him I’d appreciate a quick tutorial, will you?”
By the end of Resnick’s shift there was still no Patel; perhaps he’d fallen for a matron with a holiday home in France and a winning way with a foxtrot.
He slipped across the road to buy a paper and the headline informed him: DOUBLE MURDER—ARREST NEAR. Divine was going down the stairs three at a time and had to push out his hand against the wall to stop himself.
