Cutting Edge

by John Harvey

  “When did she leave?”

  “Who?”

  “Karen.”

  “Dunno.”

  Lynn wanted to force his head under the cold tap, wake some life into him. “Think.”

  He struck the underside of the sauce bottle with the flat of his hand and a gout of tomato sauce flopped out, most of it on the plate. “Might have been yesterday. Must’ve been. Supposed to give us notice, four weeks. Now we’ve got to go tarting round for someone else.”

  Lynn’s heart bled for him. “Any idea where she’s gone?”

  He looked up at her disparagingly. “Home to Mummy.”

  “She’s giving up her course?”

  He shrugged and stirred the beans and potato together.

  “Have you got an address for her?” Lynn asked.

  “Somewhere.”

  It was all she could do to stop herself from pushing his face down into his plate. She contented herself by plucking the fork from his hand, waiting till she had his attention firmly on her face, “Get it,” she said. “Wherever it is, the address, get it now.”

  He didn’t like it but he did as he was told.

  During all of this, Resnick had been doing more than his share of window-shopping: anywhere with male assistants wearing suits. In succession, he had feigned a passing interest in bicycles, fourteen-day trips to the Yugoslavian coast, all-in, a new sports jacket, a signet ring, a char-grilled burger with fries and a 90-Day Extra Savings account; he had considered the possibilities of walking boots, cricket bats, Filofaxes, framed posters of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, separately or together; now he was standing between broad rolls of carpet, listening to a disquisition on the virtues (or otherwise) of underlay, when he noticed one of the salesmen leading a couple towards a central table to confirm the details of a sale.

  As the salesman filled in the form, pausing at intervals to ask a question, once to laugh, several times to smile, Resnick watched him. Twenty-five or -six, but already thinning on top, hair combed from either side towards the center of his head in a vain attempt at disguise. He was wearing a double-breasted light gray suit that would have fitted somebody perfectly, but not him. Resnick waited until the final handshakes, the nod of the head, promise of delivery, beginnings of an accompanying walk towards the door. Don’t go all the way, don’t waste time, there is commission to be earned.

  “Excuse me,” Resnick said evenly, approaching from behind,

  The salesman blinked as he turned, moving half a pace back so as to get Resnick properly in focus. Family man, not about to spend a fortune, with any luck a three-bedroom semi in need of recarpeting throughout.

  “Yes, sir.” Cheerily.

  “Peter …” tried Resnick.

  “Paul, as it happens. I …”

  “You know a Karl Dougherty, by any chance?”

  Paul Groves shot a glance towards the door and instinctively Resnick moved across to cover any attempt to escape. But: “Is it still raining?” Groves asked. “Wondered if I’d need a coat.”

  Twenty-one

  Resnick watched Groves all the way back to the station, alongside him in the back of the summoned car, one of his elbows resting against the window, not staring, not making it too obvious. Just the fifteen feet across the pavement from the shop doorway to the curb had been enough to destroy the loose thatch of Groves’s hair, one side falling past his left ear, the other sticking out like a mistake, pale scalp exposed clearly between. Even so, he didn’t look too disturbed, now and again glancing out, interested, as if being driven through a city he only remembered. Sure, his fingers tugged at the slack of his suit trousers once in a while and the collar beneath his blue-and-silver striped tie was getting a touch too tight, but underneath he seemed unconcerned. As if, at base, he knew nothing could really get to him; he was safe. Resnick wondered.

  Outside the CID room he told Groves to hang on and put his head round the door, beckoning Patel from the desk where he was diligently making his way through his paperwork.

  “News from the hospital?” he asked quietly, as they turned into the corridor.

  “Back in intensive care. Apparently stable.”

  Resnick nodded and directed Groves into the nearest interview room, with a view across the sloping car park towards four-story houses where two-bedroom flats were still fetching in excess of a hundred thousand. He pointed to a chair and waited for Groves to sit down, taking the chair opposite for himself, leaving Patel room to make notes at the end of the table.

  “I knew you’d want to talk to me,” Paul Groves said. “After what happened.”

  Resnick didn’t respond, not directly. “You’re here of your own volition to make a statement and can leave at any time. You understand that?”

  Groves nodded.

  “Why don’t you tell us about last night?”

  Groves loosened his tie a little, then tightened it again, holding the knot between the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand while he pulled on the short end with his right. No matter how easily they come to water, Resnick thought, rare that they rush to drink.

  “Karl and I had arranged to meet for a drink,” Groves began. “Half nine and he was late, but then he always was.” Resnick noted the always but let it go. Questions later. “I suppose it was nearly ten by the time he arrived. We stayed there till closing, talking, as much as you can over the music, two or three drinks, that’s all. We’re not what you’d call drinkers, either of us.”

  He paused and looked at Resnick directly, the first time since he’d begun talking.

  “That’s Manhattan’s. That’s where we were. But I suppose you know that?”

  “Go on,” Resnick said.

  “There’s not a lot more, really. Karl left a bit before me, not long. I went home. I assumed he’d done the same. Until this morning when I heard the news. Local. They didn’t give many details at first, not even a name. Went through the back of my mind it might have been Karl, but why should it have been? I mean, really? Why would it?” His arms were resting on the edge of the table, several inches back from the wrist; the more he spoke, the more he gesticulated with his hands. Now they closed into fists and were still. “Then they said who it was.”

  It crossed Resnick’s mind that Groves had been practicing this, rehearsing the shifts in tone, the moves.

  “I called the hospital,” Groves said, “wouldn’t say a lot over the phone, but they did tell me how he was.” A quick glance up. “I was going into see him, tonight, after work. I mean, I would have taken time off, only with Karl being like he is …”

  “Like he is?”

  “Not conscious, not really conscious and in intensive care. They said they might have to operate again …”

  “They did.”

  Now the response was real, concern jumping across his eyes.

  “Whatever they did,” Resnick said, “seems to have been successful. The last we heard he was resting. Not out of the wood, but …” Resnick spread his hands, suggesting, with luck, everything would turn out all right.

  “Is this going to take much longer?” Groves asked.

  “There’s just a couple of things …”

  “Yes?”

  “You say Karl left first?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was that?”

  Groves looked at him sharply.

  “You met for a drink, spend—what?—an hour together, more, normal thing, I would have thought, you’d have left at the same time.”

  “Karl was worried about getting home.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was on an early. Next day, today.”

  “Arrived late, left early.”

  “Yes.”

  “One of the penalties, going out with a nurse.”

  “Sorry?” Just a touch sharper, arms away from the desk, but not still, stretching away from his sides.

  “Same with the police. Shift work. Plays havoc with your social life. Police and nurses. Earlies and lates.” Resnick leaned his
chair back on to its rear legs, relaxed. “That’s all there was to it, then? His leaving before you?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Yes,” Resnick nodded. “So you did.”

  He smiled at Groves helpfully, waiting for more. Revisions of revisions. Groves fidgeted, the tie, the table, creases in his trousers, the tie again. “I can’t think of any other reason.”

  Resnick could: several. “It’s not true there was an argument, then? No truth in that?”

  “What argument?”

  “I don’t know, it’s only a suggestion.”

  “Whose suggestion?”

  “Probably nothing to it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “There’s nothing to it?”

  “No.”

  “Karl and yourself, you didn’t argue?”

  “No.”

  “No raised voices?”

  “No.”

  Resnick lowered the front legs of his chair carefully to the floor. He leaned forward across the table and, instinctively, Paul Groves leaned back. Of the two, Resnick was by far the bigger man. “Like I said, it was pretty noisy, the music. Quite a few dancing. Almost had to shout to make ourselves heard.”

  “I expect that’s what it was, then.”

  Groves shrugged.

  “Not a row at all.”

  Groves looked at him. “What would we have to row about?”

  Resnick gave him another encouraging smile. “You tell me.”

  Three shots out of four, Divine could get the paper into the waste bin without it touching the sides. Mind you, that was after twenty minutes of concerted practice. The boss was in the interview room, safely out of the way, everyone else God knows where, and he was writing up another report. A couple of hours of sitting in taxis down round the square, all very well for them to have those NO SMOKING stickers in the front, came out of the cabs smelling like an Indian restaurant. Anyway, there’s this bloke comes prancing by in that purple sports gear they all seem to fancy just now, brand-new ghetto-blaster in one hand and an Adidas sports bag in the other. All Divine had done was go across and talk to him, by the numbers, warrant card, name and rank, station. “I have reason to believe …” Now the guy was threatening official complaint, witnesses, racial harassment. In the court just the other week, some clever-bollocks of a barrister trying to make him look like a lifelong supporter of the National Front. “Why did you stop the accused, constable? Had my client been white, would you have acted in the same way?” If the bastard had been white, he’d have been a sight less likely to be walking home at two in the morning with half an ounce of crack and his wallet thick with dirty tenners he’d just ponced off the girls he pimped for on Waverley Street.

  Racial harassment, it choked him up. If they didn’t want to get harassed, why didn’t they clean up their act? Go straight, get a job. Instead it’s sponging off the State one minute and calling it for every evil, repressive pigging thing the next. If harassing the buggers didn’t make for an improvement in the crime statistics, it would stop soon enough. Not his fault if it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Asking for it and when they got it crying foul.

  He cursed and screwed up another piece of paper, lobbing it through a high arc, into the bin in one.

  Same with the bollocking IRA, they were another bunch of two-faced bastards. Over here, over in Europe, up to their armpits in Semtex and sub-machine-guns, blowing women and kids to kingdom-bloody-come, someone from the SAS sticks a gun up against their heads and pulls the trigger. Smack through the brain pan, that’ll do nicely, thank you, they start squawking about illegal acts, overstepping the mark, operating outside the rule of law. What the fuck were they doing, if it wasn’t operating outside the rule of law?

  No.

  Either they fuck off back to their own country, the lot of them, go back to growing potatoes or whatever it was they did over there, else give up running behind the skirts of some Human Rights Commission and accept the consequences.

  Over here, looking for trouble, IRA or any other bloody terrorist, whap! Have them up against the wall fast and let the rest see what they’re up against. That’d soon put a stop to it, no mistake.

  And in the meantime, don’t let anyone waste their breath telling him he was prejudiced. Not anyone. He swiveled in the chair, arm raised, going for something more fancy, in-off, side of the desk on to the wall, down into the bin, when the door opened and Patel came into the office.

  “Bollocks!”

  The ball of paper rebounded from the wall and skittered across the floor.

  “Paul Groves,” Patel said, handing Divine a page from his notebook with the address, “the boss says can you check him through records?”

  “When I’ve got time.”

  “I rather think he meant now.”

  Divine waited until Patel had left the room. “What’s wrong with doing it yourself, Diptak? Too busy rimming the old man’s arse to find the time?”

  “You haven’t any ideas yet then,” Paul Groves was saying, “who might have done it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Resnick said. “We’ve always got ideas.” He stood up and held out his hand. After only the slightest of hesitations, Grove shook it, looking Resnick in the eye, but likely, Resnick thought, having to force himself to do so. Knowing it was the right thing to do.

  “There’s nothing else, then?” Groves asked.

  Resnick smiled. “Not for the present.”

  Patel opened the door.

  “DC Patel will show you out.”

  Divine didn’t know what Resnick had expected him to come up with, maybe nothing, but the way Groves was shaping up he was ripe for something. Two and a bit years back, he’d been charged with gross indecency; that had been lowered to behavior likely to harass, alarm, or distress, before being dropped altogether. Nine months after that he had received a warning for remaining in a public lavatory longer than was reasonable for the purpose.

  Not for his purpose, Divine said to himself, little bugger spends his lunch hours out cottaging.

  Resnick was standing just outside the CID room, chatting to one of the other DCs about soccer.

  “If I were you, sir,” the DC was saying, “I’d give County the elbow. Better off going up to Chesterfield and watching John Chedozie.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  Divine came across and handed Resnick the details. “Won’t pay to turn your back on this one, sir,” said Divine. “He’s a bloody poof!”

  Twenty-two

  Calvin heard his father’s footsteps overhead and leaned on to his left side, wondering if he was about to come downstairs. But the steps carried on towards the kitchen and Calvin relaxed and made himself comfortable again on the bed, drawing down hard on the spindly roll-up to keep it alight. Trouble with dope, especially stuff as good as that, the lingering sweetness of the smell; one move of his father’s towards the stairs and Calvin would have been across to the door that opened out into the garden, wafting in air, spraying aftershave around like it was going out of style. “One thing,” his father had said, “and one thing only. You bring home girls, I don’t want you bringing them down to your room. And I won’t have you smoking dope. Not in this house.” Calvin had nodded, agreed, not pointing out to him that was two things. What did it matter? It was like school, you said yes and carried on doing what you liked. Calvin had reasons to remember school: endless afternoons of woodwork and skiving cross-country runs, and kids who’d yell at him across the playground: “What’s the matter with you, Calvin? Not got the balls to be a real nigger!” Real niggers were black. Calvin, son of a Bermudan father and a Nottinghamshire mother, was a shade of light coffee. “Hey!” the black kids would shout. “You ain’t one of us!”

  They were right. Calvin wasn’t one of anybody.

  Closing his eyes, resting his head back, he could see his room as clearly as if his eyes were still open. Three of the four walls were painted matt black, the fourth, the one with the window, deep purple; the ceiling w
as dark blue, the color of the night; when all of the lights were extinguished he could lie on his back and stare up at the formations of stars and planets he had stuck there, iridescent and sparkling. The cupboard and the chest he had painted in white-and-black diagonal stripes; a black metal trolley held his stereo tape deck, record deck, amp and tuner. The cover draped over the bed was shiny black, fake silk. He had bought it in the market with the money his father had given him the day he was accepted for City College. He hadn’t given him anything the day he’d quit. Not even a good shouting. When that had happened there had been other things on his father’s mind.

  There were no pictures on the walls, no posters. Only, in white letters he’d cut out himself, high above his bed, the name: Calvin Ridgemount.

  The tape came to an end and clicked off. Calvin stubbed the last quarter inch out into a tobacco tin and slid it beneath the bed. Any minute his father would call down, asking him if he wanted anything to eat. He slid off the bed and straightened the cover; one thing you couldn’t say about his room, you couldn’t say it wasn’t neat.

  One of the differences Calvin had noticed in his father since it had happened, his father had taken to cooking. All the while they’d been together, a family, the only times he’d as much as entered the kitchen had been to fetch a cold can of Red Stripe from the fridge. He hadn’t even carried out the plates after eating, not since Calvin had been big enough to do the job for him, Calvin or Marjorie. Marjorie was Calvin’s sister, four years younger. It had seemed a long time before she had been able to manage more than the water glasses, Calvin having to take the remainder on his own.

  Now, twice a day, three times on a Sunday, his father would fetch proper meals to the table. Nothing fancy, experimental, but none of that ready-to-serve, chill-cooked, out of a packet, out of a carton, out of the tin. Today, from the smell of it, it was onions, fried almost to a crisp till the sweetness came and all but went; sausages, too, fat ones, speckled with herbs, Lincolnshire. Though Calvin had a friend worked nights in a factory in the city, swore they were made right there.