Rough Treatment

by John Harvey

  “An hour, sir. Personal.”

  “The house?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They’re buggers, Charlie. Never find the one you want and if you do, you can never get shot of it.”

  Thanks! Resnick thought. He said nothing.

  “You remember that little spate of break-ins, a year back, Charlie? Late spring, was it?”

  “March, sir.”

  March the second: Resnick had gone to a club in the city to hear Red Rodney, a jazz trumpeter who had worked with Charlie Parker. In his sixties, three months after having surgery on his mouth, Rodney had played long, elastic lines, spluttering sets of notes that cut across the changes; for the final number he had torn through the high-speed unison passages at the start of Parker’s “Shaw ’Nuff’ with a British alto player, unrehearsed, inch perfect.

  Resnick had gone into the station the following morning, the sounds still replaying inside his head, to be greeted by Patel with a mug of tea and news of another burglary. Five in a row and that had been the last. Big houses, all of them. Alarms. Neighborhood watch. Money and jewelry and traveler’s checks. Credit cards. Heavy with insurance.

  “Out at Edwalton, Charlie. Reported this morning. Same MO. Thought it might be worth your while taking a drive out. Might give us a chance to see if those suspicions of yours were correct.”

  Resnick said he’d get on to it first thing, just as soon as he’d had a briefing from his sergeant.

  Come on, come on, Graham Millington was thinking, half an eye on his superior through the glass. Don’t make a meal out of it. There’s some of us with a day’s work ahead of us. Himself and young Divine had a Chinaman to talk to concerning an overturned five-gallon container of cooking oil and an inadvertently struck match.

  When Resnick opened the door from his office, Millington swung his leg off his desk and stood up.

  Three

  Jerzy Grabianski had been born within sight of the white cliffs of Dover, but that was never quite enough to make him feel truly English. His family—those of them lacking the scruples or sentiment that would have prohibited them from grabbing an overcoat and a length of smoked sausage and leaving everything else behind—had quit Poland in 1939. Variously, they had walked, run, bicycled (his grandmother and his elder sister sharing a crossbar in front of his father’s strong, pumping legs), clung to sides of already overcrowded cattle trucks, hid beneath the tarpaulin of coal barges, again walked, until the leather of their boots wore through to their socks which wore through to their feet, which bled and blistered and finally hardened but never enough.

  They had a strong imperative.

  On 1 September of that year, Hitler invaded Poland on three fronts; on the 17th, Russia came through the fourth. By the 28th Warsaw had fallen and on the following day Germany and Russia sat down to divide the country between them.

  The Grabianskis left Lodz, where most of them had worked in textile factories, and made their trek west. By way of Czechoslovakia, Austria and Switzerland, they crossed the border into France at La Chaux de Fonds, at the bridge over the Doubs River. Most of them. Waking that last morning, they had realized that Krystyna, Jerzy’s sister, was not huddled beneath her grandmother’s greatcoat, ready to rub the sleep from her eyes.

  It took them several hours of circling and retracing their steps before they found her, floating face down near the western shore of Lake Neuchâtel, one arm hooked around the broken oar that someone had thrown adrift. They pulled her on to the land and pressed and pummeled at her thin, breastless chest, but all that happened was that she got colder and stiffer. The broken oar was the shovel with which they dug the shallow grave in which to bury her. She had been eleven years old.

  Her father—Jerzy’s father—unclasped the string of wooden beads from around Krystyna’s neck and kept it close until it was lost one black night when he parachuted out over the English Channel. But that was 1944.

  The remaining family had split up, some to stay in what soon became Vichy France, others to head for England where they lived as close to the Polish government-in-exile of General Sikorski as was possible. Battersea: Clapham Common: Lambeth. Jerry’s father had joined the air force in France, utilizing his skills as a navigator; when France fell he flew bomber campaigns over Germany with the RAF until the war ended. He was not a man easily deflected from a course once he had set his mind to it, and being spilled into the freezing Channel only made him more determined.

  He had vowed to get his family out of Poland and, for the most part, he’d succeeded. He had sworn to help defeat the Nazis and so he had. Somewhere inside himself he had made an agreement to make up for Krystyna’s death with another child but the strain of the last five years had rendered his wife an old woman. She died at thirty-seven, looking fifty-seven, lay on her front in the upstairs back bedroom of a terraced house between Clapham and Balham and simply stopped breathing. When they found her she had one arm curled out from the bed and was clinging to the bedside table as her daughter had clung to that broken oar. And she was almost as cold.

  She was buried on a day of slant rain and keen wind, in a walled cemetery within sight of St. George’s Hospital. Walking home afterwards, temporarily lost in the maze of streets, Jerzy’s father bumped—literally bumped—into a nurse on her way home from duty. She took one look at his father’s face and thought that he might be in shock, insisted that he came along the street to her rented room and sit down a while. Probably because of her uniform, Jerzy’s father did as he was told; sat in a small room that smelt of camphor and accepted cup after cup of strong sweet tea.

  The nurse was to become Jerzy’s mother.

  Jerzy.

  It had been years since anyone had called him anything other than Jerry.

  Many years.

  He walked to the window and looked down on the hotel car park, out over the college and the other small hotels, over the bowling green, the tennis courts, the stretch of worn grass and the edge of the cemetery on the hill—the first cluster of marble and sculpted stone, graves, one of them his father’s. He would have to take a walk there later, when the light was beginning to fade and the bell soon to be rung to announce closing. Long enough to read the inscription but not too long. He wondered, maybe, should he take flowers?

  He knew that kids climbed over the wall and stole them, went from house to house and sold them, wrapped in discarded newspaper.

  There was a bottle of Bass and a can of Diet Pepsi in the courtesy fridge, tea bags and a small jar of instant coffee alongside the electric kettle, containers of UHT milk. From the wall behind the television set a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers stubbornly refused to bloom. He lifted his watch from the dressing table and strapped it to his wrist: Grice was already twenty minutes late.

  Resnick had two clear memories of Jeff Harrison. One was a league match at the County ground, Notts against Manchester City, and City needed three points to win the division. The normal crowd, three to five thousand, was swollen by at least as many Manchester supporters. Not only a special train, but coaches, convoys of them, had come across the Pennines and down the Ml. Notts had little enough to play for, save pride, and the Manchester celebrations were under way before the match began. Banners, flags, most striking of all, faces painted sky blue and gray; so many raucous clowns shrieking their team towards promotion.

  Police presence had been increased: never by enough.

  Resnick had been there as a spectator, his usual place midway along the terraces flooded for the occasion with unfamiliar bodies. All that good humor was bound to bring a negative response, spill over into ugliness. When it happened, half time, Jeff Harrison, in uniform, waded into a dozen youths who had climbed the barrier on to the pitch. He was in the midst of them when the bottle struck his face. Resnick had tried to push a way through to him, but there hadn’t been the time, and in the end there wasn’t the need. Harrison had hurled two of the supporters back against the wire, caught hold of a third and thrust his arm up behind his
back; the rest had scattered, except for a big lad with a shaved head daubed the same colors as his face. The lad had a Stanley knife in his hand. Likely he’d been drinking since early that morning; he’d pulled the knife from his pocket without thinking and now that he was fast against a uniformed officer with the crowd roaring at his back, the worst possibility was that he would panic.

  Jeff Harrison, blood streaming from the bridge of his nose, blocking out one eye, had stared him down with the other. Half a minute, more or less, and the weapon had been laid on the turf, its blade retracted. There were four youths waiting between the touchline and the barrier when reinforcements arrived.

  The second occasion was later, after Harrison had transferred into CID. He and Resnick had been involved in a raid on a warehouse on the canal that was suspected of housing stolen goods. They picked up a known thief running clear, a villain, real dyed-in-the-wool, regional crime squad had had him targeted for months. Try as they might, nothing would tie him in, nothing that would stand up as evidence.

  “Bend the rules a little, Charlie,” Harrison had said. It was one in the morning, in a drinking club off Bridlesmith Gate. “In a good cause. That confession I heard him make, you heard it too.”

  “No, Jeff,” Resnick had said, “I did not.”

  Two memories, clear as daylight.

  “Good to see you, Charlie.”

  “Jeff.”

  They shook hands and Harrison offered Resnick a seat, a cup of tea, a cigarette. Resnick sat down, shook his head to the rest.

  “Course, you don’t, do you?” Harrison emptied the ashtray into the metal waste bin and lit up again. He was still in CID, like Resnick now an inspector.

  “Tom Parker says you’re interested in this break-in.”

  Resnick sat forward, shrugged. “Might fit, might not.”

  “I’ve had a copy of the report done for you. Young DC went out there, Featherstone. He’s not in as of now, or you could have talked to him yourself.”

  Resnick pushed the manila envelope into his side pocket. “You didn’t go out there?”

  “Couldn’t see any point. Pretty straightforward. Run of the mill.”

  “You’ll not mind if I do?”

  Harrison tapped ash from his cigarette and leaned his chair back on to its hind legs. “Help yourself.”

  Resnick got to his feet. “Thanks, Jeff.”

  “Any time. Charlie,” the chair came down on all fours, “we must have a drink or two. Been a while.”

  “Yes.” Resnick was heading for the door.

  “You do come up with anything,” Harrison said, “you’ll keep me posted.”

  “Depend on it.”

  After Resnick had gone, Jeff Harrison sat where he was until he’d smoked down that cigarette and then another. What was it about Charlie Resnick that made him so special? With his shirt still crumpled from the wash and his tie knotted arse-about-face.

  Grabianski tried to imagine how Grice spent his afternoons. He pictured him sitting in the auditoriums of mostly empty cinemas, eating popcorn and doing his best to ignore the snores and shuffles from the semi-darkness around him. The last film Grabianski had seen had been Catch 22, and he had barely lasted the opening sequence: the promise of blood and bowels spilled across the airplane fuselage had brought back memories of his father’s wartime stories, too keen for Grabianski’s own stomach. He had thrown up, quietly, into a toilet bowl in the gents, fluttered his half-ticket down into the flushing water and left.

  “Jerry!”

  Grice was standing near the hotel entrance beneath a sign that promised TVs and en-suite showers in every room. His fists were stuffed into the pockets of a sheepskin car-coat and his thinning hair had been combed sideways over the broad curve of his head. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Grabianski climbed into the front of a nearly new cherry-red Vauxhall that was parked at the curb.

  “You changed your car,” he said as Grice pulled out into the slow stream of traffic.

  “Observant today,” Grice said sharply. He jabbed the palm of his hand at the horn and found the indicator, swore, tried again and swerved around one vehicle and cut across another to make the roundabout.

  “What’s pissing you off?” Grabianski asked.

  Grice depressed the accelerator and laughed. “This is pissed off?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Eleven thirty this morning, that was pissed off.”

  “Your day got better?”

  “Better beyond belief.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Grice measured the distance between a milk truck and the central bollard almost to perfection.

  “Whatever it is,” said Grabianski, both hands tight against the dash, arms tensed, “do you have to celebrate this enthusiastically?”

  “’S’he doing delivering milk this time of day, anyway? Gone three in the afternoon. He early or late or what?” He glanced over at Grabianski, who was just easing back in his seat and starting to breathe more freely. “You know what’s the best way to break your arms, don’t you? We hit anything, seat belt’s not going to do your arms one bit of good, you got them braced like that. Snap!”

  Grice lifted his hands from the steering wheel long enough to clap them together loudly in front of his face.

  “How far are we going?” Grabianski asked. Unless he sat well down in the seat, the upholstery of the roof touched against his head.

  “Relax,” Grice said, “we’re almost there.”

  Grabianski nodded and looked through the side window. Super-save Furnishings were offering a 40 percent discount on all beds, settees and three-piece suites, free delivery: green and blue plaid moquette or dimpled red plastic with a fur trim seemed to be the popular styles.

  They found a parking space between a Porsche and a gleaming red Ferrari with personalized number plates. The house was four stories, broad and glowering Victorian gothic. High above the arched front doorway, panes of stained glass caught at what was already late-afternoon light.

  “I didn’t know we were working,” Grabianski said, looking up towards a pair of circular turrets at either end of the roof.

  “We’re not.”

  Grice slipped off his glove, took a ring of keys from his pocket and used one to open the front door.

  The entrance hall was harlequin-tiled and marble-edged; the stairs broad and thickly carpeted, and there were dying pot plants on each landing. Outside one of the doors two bottles of milk were turning to a creamy green. Grice fingered a second key into the lock of flat number seven, top floor.

  “We’ll have to get that changed,” he said, pushing the door open over a collection of free newspapers and amazing offers from Reader’s Digest. “Anyone who fancied it could get through there easy as breathing.”

  He walked along a short corridor and into a long room with high windows on one side and a slanting roof on the other.

  “Servants’ quarters,” he said, pointing towards the windows. “Never wanted them to see the light of day, did they?”

  Grabianski poked at a dark ridge in the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “What are we doing?” he said.

  “Moving in.”

  Resnick had tried the number three times without getting a response. He had driven out to the house and knocked on the door, rung the bell. For twenty minutes he had parked on the opposite side of the road, leaning back with a copy of the local paper spread across the wheel. A woman with a shopping basket on wheels walked past him, slowly, twice; up along the opposite pavement, back down this one. Finally, a man in his sixties, wearing a blue track suit and leading a small Yorkshire terrier, tapped on the window.

  Resnick folded his paper, wound the window midway down and smiled.

  “I don’t like to bother you, but …”

  “Mrs. Roy,” said Resnick, nodding in the direction of the detached house across the road.

  “Yes, I believe she’s …”

  “She’s out.”

  “Yes.”

&nb
sp; The man stood there, gazing in. The dog was probably cocking its leg at the wheels of Resnick’s car.

  “I think she left at lunchtime,” the man offered. “When I took Alice for her midday walk the car was there in the drive—the Mini, that’s hers—but then as we came back I couldn’t help noticing that it was gone.” He paused, gave a short tug on the lead. “I’ve no idea when she might be back.”

  Resnick took his warrant card from his pocket and opened it under the man’s nose.

  “Oh. Oh. Of course, there was a burglary. Just the other day.” He shook his head. “It still happens, doesn’t seem to matter how vigilant you are, they still get away with it. I mean, I know you do your best, but, then, there’s only so much you can do. I suppose that’s it, isn’t it? More of them than there are of you. A measure of the way things have changed. That and other things.” He leaned a little closer. “Do you know they were three weeks after the last bank holiday before they came and emptied our dustbins and only then after I’d telephoned each morning at eight sharp; four mornings on the trot, that’s what it took. And, of course, when they did finally come, it was the usual torrent of bad language and litter and such left scattered the length of the drive.”

  Resnick rewound the window, switched on the ignition and put the car in gear; if he waited until the good neighbor got to his conclusion about the way the country was going to rack and ruin, he might have felt obliged to ask him which way he’d voted at the last couple of elections.

  He would call in at Jeff Harrison’s station on the way back and see if the PC who’d spoken to Maria Roy had returned. If not, there was plenty to attend to back on his own patch, and little about this to suggest it was urgent.

  As he turned the car around and headed back the way he had come, he was wondering why the alarm system at the Roy house had apparently failed to function.

  “Took me till twelve o’clock to screw an extra hundred out of this imbecile in the showroom and even then, God is my witness, I had to walk almost to the door twice. So, by a little after 12.30 I’ve had a couple of halves and a scotch and without really knowing why, I’m inside this estate agent’s, pretending to look at properties between forty and sixty thousand, when what I’m really doing is looking round the edge of the desk at this woman in red boots.”