Cutting Edge

by John Harvey

  “You could try going up backwards.”

  “Not the best logistical advice, Inspector, if you think about it. No, the thing to do, I’ll have to go back to wearing jeans.”

  The baby was crying. Jim Davidson was telling jokes about Arthur Scargill and AIDS and Asians, and the baby was crying, Kevin had gone up and picked her up, petted her, patted her, changed her, set her back down. There was a lasagna drying out in the oven, pieces of the foil it had come packed in still sticking to the tomato sauce. Debbie was still wearing the dressing gown she had been wearing when he’d left for work that morning. The baby was crying.

  Kevin Naylor slammed shut the oven door and reached for his coat

  “You’re not going out again?”

  “No,” Kevin said. “I was never here.”

  The echo of the front-door slam was still reverberating in his head as he unlocked the car.

  What I’ll do, Resnick was thinking, make something to eat, coffee; half of the evening still ahead of him, he could play Lester Young and Basic, with Billie Holiday, Lester with the Kansas City Seven, the Kansas City Six, maybe the Aladdin Sessions, Jazz at the Philharmonic, “This Year’s Kisses” in ’56 with Teddy Wilson, so slow that to listen to it was to feel the loss, the pain.

  “Charlie.”

  He turned sharply, the sound of her voice shuttling him through twenty years and back again, before she stepped from the shadows of the house they had lived in together: Elaine.

  “The other evening,” Elaine said. They were standing stranded in the hall, not knowing where to go or why. “When I was here with that friend of yours …”

  “Ed Silver.”

  “Yes.” The light from the stairs was making her face more gaunt than ever. “Strange. Somehow I never thought I’d stand in this house again.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “You kicked me out, Charlie.”

  “You went. He had the bloody Volvo outside with the engine running and you went.”

  “And if I’d changed my mind? Said I’m sorry, Charlie, please forgive me, let’s start all over again, would that have made any difference?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Don’t forgive easily, do you, Charlie?”

  He was breathing through his mouth, seeing her and not seeing her, under water, through glass. “I suppose not,” he said.

  “All those things I wrote to you …”

  “I didn’t read them.”

  She stared at him.

  “I didn’t read them, tore them up, burned them, whatever.” He was staring at the floor, carpet close to threadbare from use, he could remember the day she’d met him off shift, driven him to Hopewells to look, pay the deposit, arrange delivery.

  “What it took,” Elaine said, “writing to you like that, forcing it all on to paper.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I was in hospital, Charlie.”

  He turned his head aside.

  “The valium wasn’t working, it never did, not really. I went back to the doctor and he made an appointment for me at the hospital and they admitted me the next day. Once a week we’d sit in this room, all of us, and talk, but mostly there wasn’t anyone to talk to, not anyone who was sane enough to listen, and besides there were the drugs and there were, oh, Charlie, there were other kinds of treatment, and because I needed to talk to someone about it I wrote to you.”

  Now he was having trouble breathing at all, even through his mouth, though his mouth was still open and he knew the crying wasn’t going to help either of them, hadn’t then and it wouldn’t now.

  “Charlie,” she said, “go and put the kettle on, for God’s sake make us something to drink.”

  There was a box of PG Tips that Ed Silver must have brought into the house and Resnick dropped three bags into the large pot, poured on water and together they waited in silence. After a while, Elaine left the room and when he found her again she was in the living room, leafing through last night’s paper.

  “It’s you, isn’t it? This girl who was murdered. That’s what you’re working on.”

  He pushed a clearing on the table and put down the tea. “Yes. One of the things.”

  Elaine nodded. “I used to sit here, when we were first married, worried sick over what might be happening to you out there, frightened that something would happen, that you wouldn’t come back.” The mug of tea was in her hand, less than steady. “Then later, when it had all changed, I used to sit here hoping you wouldn’t come back at all.” She looked up at him. “Does that shock you?”

  “No,” sitting down. “No.”

  “I wished you dead, Charlie.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I could escape out of here and live happily ever after.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, he had offices all over the Midlands, a house in Sutton Coldfield, a place in Wales with tennis courts and a swimming pool, and I don’t think he waited more than a couple of months after I’d moved in with him before he started screwing one of his secretaries. At the wedding reception I caught him in the bathroom with one of the bridesmaids. Last little fling, he said, and winked.”

  “You should have left him then.”

  “I’d only just left you. And, I suppose, part of me thought, all right, two can play at that game.” She glanced about her. “I’d been dying here, Charlie, this house. I wanted something else.” She sipped at the strong tea. “We screwed around for years, foursomes a few times, hard to believe, eh, Charlie, all those years with you when I wanted the lights out?”

  Resnick sat there mesmerized by her face, this woman whose features were only half-recognizable, talking about a life he could only imagine.

  “I was careless and I got pregnant. He wasn’t interested, called me a daft cow, a stupid bitch, anyway, he needn’t have worried. I took on all this fluid, problems with my blood pressure. Finally they got me into hospital just in time. The baby died and they told me I was lucky to be alive.”

  “No more babies. That’s what they said: no more babies.”

  “Suddenly, the one thing more important than all the rest, now he knew I couldn’t have one, he wanted a child, a son, an heir. God, Charlie, he turned into you. Except that he hit me. He drank more than usual, more than before, and he started hitting me. Places where it wouldn’t be seen, wouldn’t easily be noticed. Here, the lower back, the kidneys. My breasts. I backed his Volvo into the pool and I left him, sued for divorce. One after another his friends, the friends we’d had together, more ways than one some of them, they went up into the witness box and lied to their hind teeth. His barrister tore me apart and I was lucky to leave the court with the clothes I stood up in.”

  She looked at Resnick and smiled ruefully.

  “That was when I should have come back to you, Charlie. If I was going to do it at all. Instead of waiting till I became like this.”

  “Elaine …”

  “No.”

  “Elaine …”

  She placed her finger firmly on his lips.

  “Don’t, Charlie. Whatever you say now, by the morning you’ll regret it.”

  He would have been able, at that moment, to have taken her in his arms and forgiven her what little there was to forgive, maybe even forgiven himself. He could have foraged amongst the albums he never played and found Otis Blue and set it on the turntable and stood with his arms around her and said, “Let’s dance.”

  Elaine stood up. “If the phone’s still where it used to be, I’m going to call a taxi.”

  Resnick shook his head. “No need. I’ll drop you.”

  “Charlie, you don’t want to know where I’m going.”

  At the front door, he said, “Take care.”

  “I’ll try,” she said. And, “Maybe I’ll drop you a line some time.”

  “Do.”

  Elaine smiled. “You can always tear it up.”

  Forty

  “Helen!”

  Bernard Salt was wearing his white coat over shirt sl
eeves and a pair of tan cavalry twills that he’d bought from Dunn’s more than ten years back and were still going strong. His tie was the one with little pigs on it his elder daughter had given him one Father’s Day as a joke. That morning he’d slid it from the rack and knotted it swiftly, left the house before he realized and now he was stuck with it, no intention of appearing on duty without a tie. Besides, look at it this way, with half the hospital privy to his private life, half of those despising him as a heartless chauvinist, the remainder thinking, himself and Helen Minton, there wasn’t much to choose between them, well, it was a gesture. Let them think he didn’t care. If they were brainless enough to take the word of a neurotic woman, superficial judgments, well and good. He’d pig it out.

  And with this other business, checks in and out, escorts and taxis home, extra security cameras, the staff whose job it was actually watching the screens instead of playing Find the Ball and reading the Sun—there were other things to preoccupy the hospital mind.

  “Helen!”

  This time she half-cocked her head, the slightest acknowledgment, before disappearing into her office and closing the door.

  Salt opened it again and left it open, standing just inside.

  Witnesses, no more meeting in car parks, fumbling behind closed doors. Fine!

  “What do you want, Bernard?” Somehow she’d found time to have her hair re-permed and it was more like wire wool than ever. She stood ramrod straight, staring at him, this woman who had once teased from him a tenderness he had been almost frightened to realize he possessed.

  “Very little, except to say how much I welcome what you’ve done. You were right, I have a freedom from personal responsibilities such as I haven’t experienced in thirty years. Now that you have acted as you have, there is no way in which you can threaten that again. I didn’t want you, Helen, I haven’t wanted you for a long time. I don’t love you and if I ever did, the way you have behaved is guaranteed to make me forget it.”

  There was a slight tightening of the muscles in Helen’s face, nothing more.

  “Thank you,” Bernard Salt said.

  Helen said nothing. A nurse came towards the open door, hesitated, went away again.

  “I was chatting with the Senior Nursing Officer over coffee; I shouldn’t be surprised if the hospital doesn’t offer you early retirement, obvious stress, neuroses, maybe you could carry on doing a little part-time work … at a more junior level.”

  Helen willed herself not to move until he had gone, from her office, from the ward. She willed herself not to cry. Tears enough already and what good had they done her? From the side drawer of her desk, she took the photocopy of the theatre report book and folded it carefully in half and then in half again before placing it in an envelope and sealing the envelope down. Better than crying.

  “How long, Inspector, are you intending to detain my client?”

  “For as long as it takes?”

  Suzanne Olds gave a quick little shake of the head. “You don’t have that long.”

  “I’m sure the superintendent will authorize an extension of custody. In the circumstances.”

  “The circumstances being that, aside from the girl’s diary, you haven’t been able to come up with a single piece of evidence that places my client in any relationship with the victim.” She used a small gold lighter to light a cigarette. “Getting on for eighteen hours of frantic searching for what? A fingerprint? A sudden reluctant witness?”

  “We can apply to the magistrate …”

  “An application we would have every chance of successfully contesting.”

  Resnick shrugged and wearily smiled. “You’ll do what you have to do.”

  “And so will you.” She shifted the balance of the bag slung over her arm. “The trouble is, you want to find him guilty for all the wrong reasons. You don’t like him, do you? Not one little bit.”

  Resnick looked back at her. “Do you?”

  Calvin didn’t know what had got into his father lately. Dinner last night had been those little beef patties from the butcher down on the High Street, the one he’d sworn never to use again on account of some racist jibe he thought he’d overheard. Patties and tomatoes out of a tin, swimming around in all that pale red juice. Calvin hated that.

  Breakfast today had been toast, toast, and toast. The jar of beyond-the-sell-by-date honey had had a fungus growing over it a quarter-inch thick. And just as Calvin had been on the point of sweetening his tea with a couple of spoonfuls of that sugar substitute his father had bought by the twenty-eight-pound bag, he happened to look across at the paper and there the people who made the stuff, NutraSweet, were being accused of falsifying their research and pushing a product that could cause headaches, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, depression, loss of memory, mood swings, and swelling of the bodily extremities. Calvin let go of the spoon and sipped the tea as it was. He knew there wasn’t a granule of real sugar in the house and though he knew some people liked to use honey to sweeten what they were drinking, he wasn’t about to take a risk with that gunk.

  Jesus! The tea had tasted terrible.

  And Calvin never quite believed what he read in the papers anyway. He spooned in the NutraSweet and started to flip through, looking to see when Guns N’ Roses were appearing in the city, one thing they couldn’t lie about, announcements, and he noticed that one of the pages had been torn away. The front one. He’d found the ad he was looking for and there was Canceled printed all the way across it. Refunds available on receipt of the original tickets. Even when they didn’t lie, newspapers, what they were full of was bad news.

  His father had come back in from doing something to his bike, the chain slipping, something like that, and Calvin had asked him when they were going to get some decent jam again, out-of-date Oxford marmalade there was never anything wrong with that, what was he going to do with twenty-eight pounds of poisonous artificial sweetener, where was the rest of the paper?

  His dad had mumbled something and rinsed his hands under the tap, wiped them on a tea towel and gone back outside to get them all oily again.

  Calvin had found the missing front page in the bin under the sink, tea leaves and what hadn’t been eaten of the tinned tomatoes wrapped inside it. Stained with a sort of dark orange, he’d read the headline: NEW HOSPITAL ALERT, the first few lines about somebody being arrested in the grounds, helping the police with their inquiries.

  One of Calvin’s friends had helped the police with their inquiries. He’d been off work for six weeks and lost his job, bruises consistent with falling down a flight of steps his parents had been told. Bruises consistent with being called a black bastard and out on his own with a holdall at one in the morning, that was more like it.

  Calvin had pushed the paper back down into the bin and headed off to his room. He was fast running out of dope and just a quick hit listening to some music, that would set him up for the day, get out on the streets and score some more.

  Skelton and Resnick were in the corridor, trying to ignore the phones that were ringing everywhere, footsteps, the rise and fall of voices. Graham Millington passed between them with a murmured excuse me, a man in a sense of dazed elation: twelve dozen cartons of cigarettes traceable to two different robberies and at that moment the magistrate was issuing a warrant to search a lock-up in Bulwell.

  “Forensic have checked every print in the girl’s room,” Skelton was saying. “Nothing that doesn’t come from the girl herself.”

  “Still hoping for something from the university, sir. Someone must have seen them together.”

  “If they were.”

  “Apart, then. Carew admits he was there; the girl’s diary suggests she was. We’ve got two officers sitting there in the bar interviewing people and so far no definite sighting of either of them. Might have been her, might have been him, all of that.”

  “Ms. Olds has been wearing out the carpet to my door, Charlie.”

  “Mine, too, sir.”

  “We need a break on this a
nd soon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was Lynn Kellogg who remembered something the nurse, Sarah Leonard, had said while being interviewed. The first time he spoke to me, Sarah had said, meaning Carew, I was walking home and he pulled over in his car, asked if I wanted a lift. One of those sports jobs, I can’t tell one from another. Lynn could see the car clearly in her mind’s eye, parked higher up the street and on the opposite side of the road from the house where Carew lived. She had thought nothing of it.

  She needed written authorization and with Resnick back in the interview room she went straight to Skelton and got it within minutes, neat and precise and with his blessing. Her heart seemed to be alternately pumping faster and hardly functioning at all when she drew up alongside Carew’s car and got out. There were a couple of medical textbooks on the back seat, a towel and an empty Diet Lilt can on the floor; as far as she could see only maps and some old Mars Bar wrappings at the front. The boot was locked and it took her an age to find a key that would fit. Squash racquet, tennis racquet, a pair of sports shoes, a can of Duckhams Multigrade, a sweatband, a Ruccanor sports bag with a white sports shirt stuffed down through the top. Lynn gingerly removed the shirt and slid the zip back.

  Beneath a jock strap and a single white sock with blue and red bands at the top, a slim metal rod, silvered, five to six inches long.

  “Tea?”

  Ian Carew nodded and reached up for the styrofoam cup that Divine was offering him. Instead of letting go immediately, Divine held on and their fingers briefly overlapped, their eyes locked.

  “What’s this?” Resnick slapped the implement against the table hard, not waiting for Divine to return to his seat.

  Despite herself, Suzanne Olds jumped in her seat.

  Hot tea splashed over Carew’s fingers.

  “What—oh, Jesus!”

  “Hardly an answer.”

  “Where did you find that?”

  “You tell us.”

  Carew shook his head, did his little trick of pretending to get up, settling back down. Trick or nervous habit, Resnick couldn’t be sure. “I don’t believe this,” Carew said to Suzanne Olds.