Still Waters cr-9

by John Harvey

  “Oh, no. Never personally, no.”

  “But the paintings-was he implying, sell them to me or I’ll get my hands on them some other way?”

  Miriam Johnson took her time. “One could place that construction upon what he said, yes.”

  “You let him see the paintings?”

  “Of course. His admiration for them was genuine, of that I am sure.”

  “And you heard from him again?”

  “No.”

  Resnick uncrossed his legs and sat forward. “Did he leave you an address, a card?”

  She had it ready for him, in the side pocket of her Pringle cardigan. Vernon Thackray in a slightly ornate purple font and with only a telephone number underneath. An 01728 code. Suffolk, somewhere, Resnick thought.

  “You didn’t contact him?”

  “Nor he, me, Inspector. Not to my certain knowledge, at least.” She smiled at him, bright eyed.

  “How’d it go with Mark?”

  Millington was at his desk, troughing into what looked suspiciously like an M amp; S chicken and mushroom pie.

  Resnick was still filling him in when the duty officer phoned up to say that Suzanne Olds had arrived.

  “Know more in a minute, Graham.”

  “Happen he should’ve stuck with seeing the shrink more’n the couple of sessions he did.” Pausing, Millington eased a piece of something unchewable to one side of his mouth with his tongue. “Mind you, what with Lynn still trotting off for therapy rain or shine, only needs you to crack up and we can run the whole CID room from the psychiatric unit.”

  Me, Resnick thought. Why me? But then Millington was so much less likely a candidate. Disregard his avowed intention of happily resettling in Skegness and Resnick doubted a more unimaginatively sane man existed.

  Suzanne Olds wrinkled up her nose at the offer of longmashed tea. She and Resnick had been crossing swords for years, Olds capable of raising her well-modulated voice in anger while rarely losing her cool; each respected the other’s integrity, their underlying sense of what was right.

  “They’ll be ready to charge him this evening, push him through court tomorrow. Preliminary hearing. There’s nothing I can say will talk them out of keeping him in the cells overnight.”

  “Charges?”

  “Affray. Causing grievous bodily harm.”

  “And the knife?”

  “If we’re lucky, possession of an offensive weapon, nothing more.”

  “He’ll get bail?”

  “Given his police record, yes, I’d be surprised if he didn’t. There’ll be conditions, of course. It’s difficult to know yet how stringent.”

  “And then Crown Court.”

  “Uh-hum.”

  “One month, two.”

  “Try two.”

  In that time, Resnick thought, who was to say what havoc Divine might wreak upon himself and other people?

  “There’s no way,” Resnick said, “when it comes to trial, of defending him without hauling all that happened back out into the open?”

  “And keep him out of prison? I doubt it.”

  Suzanne Olds shifted her weight from one foot to the other, back perfectly straight. In her teens, Resnick knew, she had been a prize ice-skater, county champion. “Divine’s attitude might well have made him friends in the police canteen, but not many places else. Sexist, racist: just the kind the powers-that-be would love to see being held up as an example. Cleaning the Augean stables before the shit gets too high off the floor.”

  Resnick sighed. “You’ll represent him all the same?”

  “He needed to be taught a lesson, but not like that. I’ll do what I can.”

  The number Vernon Thackray had left with Miriam Johnson was in Aldeburgh and was unobtainable. “Something must be wrong with the line,” the BT official finally told him, having left Resnick to listen to endless repetitions of “Greensleeves.” “We could have it checked.”

  Carl Vincent came back from his tour of the local auction houses empty of information, but carrying a nicely framed watercolor to give to his new boyfriend. Lynn’s face showed every sign of an afternoon spent listening to people shouting abuse to and about their neighbors. Kevin Naylor had discovered two empty petrol cans on a piece of waste ground near the torched lock-up and submitted them for analysis. Only Graham Millington seemed due to end the day with optimism lightening his tread: a meeting with his informant arranged at the Royal Children for half-nine and every hope that names would be produced in exchange for a few pints and a nice little backhander.

  Resnick was about to jack it all in and head home when Sister Teresa made her return call: another card from Grabianski had arrived, still without a return address-although this one did suggest a place in London where, if she ever traveled down, they might easily meet.

  Eight

  “You’ve got all this, all this tightness up here, the upper part of your body. The shoulders and … there, feel that. Can you feel that?”

  Grabianski could feel it right enough, pointy tips of her fingers driving into him like sticks, the heel of her hand.

  “Feel that now?”

  It was all he could do not to call out.

  “It’s all seized up, blocked; all that energy blocked and we have to find a way of letting it out. It’s because of what you do, the way you’re always having to use your imagination, the creative part of you.”

  He had never told her what he did, not a thing.

  “And here, of course. Down here. Feel that, in the chest? This is where it all stems from. See? That tension? Stiffness. That’s where the source of the trouble is, that’s where you’re all clenched up. There, around the heart.”

  She tapped him on the shoulder and he could feel her leaning back from him, sliding away.

  “Turn over now, okay?”

  At first when he’d met her, Holly, met her on the street, Grabianski had thought she was just another pretty girl-that area he was now living in so full of them, sometimes he had to remind himself to look. But there she’d been, backing away from the window of this place selling second-hand designer clothing, Grabianski with his mind set on how he was going to find a buyer for a brace of nicely engraved solid silver pieces, eighteenth century, and the pair of them had collided, surprise and apologies. Holly wearing royal blue crushed velvet trousers, a cerise top that stopped several inches short of the plain gold ring in her navel. A delicate oval face with brown eyes and browner hair. Not English, not entirely. Eurasian? They were yards away from the wicker chairs and tables set up outside the Bar Rouge.

  “How about some coffee?” Grabianski had said.

  Holly smiling; guarded, but smiling just the same. “I’m picking my daughter up from school.”

  Grabianski put her at late twenties, possibly thirty-one or thirty-two.

  “Some other time,” she said and he forbade himself from watching her walk away, crushed velvet tight over that neat little behind: Grabianski, a natural voyeur, practicing self-control.

  He didn’t see her for weeks and then he did, coming out of the post office across the street. Wearing a white dress today, simple and straight, hair pinned high, bare legs. Let it go, Grabianski had told himself, she won’t remember you anyway.

  She called to him from the pedestrian crossing, raised her hand and waved.

  She ordered herb tea, camomile, and the waiter, recognizing Grabianski, brought him a café au lait. It was then that she told him her name, Holly, and, making conversation, he asked her what she did.

  “Massage.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  The elderly lady from the fruit and vegetable shop alongside where they were sitting was carefully arranging bundles of asparagus and Holly leaned toward her and lifted a plum between forefinger and thumb.

  “Pay you later?”

  “Like usual.”

  Grabianski watched her teeth bite into the yellow flesh. “What kind of massage?”

  “Shiatsu. Shiatsu-do.”
>
  “Oh.”

  He was aware of her looking at him appraisingly, bulky beneath a pale blue shirt open at the neck. “You should come some time, it would do you good.”

  Whenever she saw him after that, every few weeks on average, differing times of the day, she would smile and remind him about the massage. Once she had her daughter with her, a freckle-faced child of no more than five who didn’t look Eurasian at all.

  “Here,” and she gave him her card. “Make an appointment. Phone me.”

  He had already begun to think about lying there naked, just a towel across him, how his body would behave when she touched him. Visions of unguents and oils.

  “Make sure you’re wearing something loose,” she told him when finally he phoned.

  The address was close to where he himself was living, above a shop selling candles and hand-printed fabrics. “Take off your shoes and leave them there,” Holly pointing to where several other pairs were lined up, her daughter’s and her own.

  In the low-ceilinged living room a white sheet was stretched out across the center of the rug; beyond it a cloth lay draped across a wooden chest, turning it into a kind of altar with fruit and pieces of dried wood arranged in metal bowls. Incense in the air.

  “Lie down,” Holly said, indicating the sheet. “On your tummy first. That’s it, head to one side, so you can breathe.”

  But it had taken his breath away, the force with which she could press into him with her slight body, slim wrists and hands.

  “Breathe in … and slowly out. All right, why don’t you turn over onto your back.”

  After the first time, he had not gone again for almost a month and on their next meeting she had chided him gently on the street; since then, it had fallen into a pattern, he would visit her once every couple of weeks. She would work on him for nearly an hour, advise him on diet, assign him exercises which he forgot. Sometimes, squatting over his body, she would simply chat: something her daughter, Melanie, had done or said; once, mention of Melanie’s father, who lived in Copenhagen, where he worked as an artist, computer graphics and videotape.

  Now she eased herself back onto the balls of her feet and from there, in one smooth movement, rose to her feet.

  “Have you been doing those exercises I showed you?” she asked.

  Grabianski was afraid he might blush. “Maybe not as often as I should.”

  “You were really bad today.”

  “I was?”

  “Across your shoulders again, your neck. I couldn’t move it at all.” Holly smiled. “It’s stress, of course. You’re worried about something, that’s what it is.”

  What was worrying Grabianski, worrying him specifically, was that since he had acquired two rare Impressionist paintings on Vernon Thackray’s behalf, of Thackray neither hide nor hair had been seen. That was without this business with the nun. Why, Grabianski was already asking himself, why had he succumbed to temptation, sent her another card?

  He had first met Thackray some, oh, four or five years before, when he and Grice had been working a circuit that took them from Manchester in the West to Norwich in the East, Leeds in the North to Leicester in the South. It had been worth getting a yearly season ticket with British Rail.

  His old partner, Grice, was still detained at Her Majesty’s displeasure, and no substantial loss where Grabianski was concerned; a great third-floor entry man, one of the best, but unable to see beyond the newsagent’s top shelf when it came to culture.

  And Thackray-Thackray had been living in Stamford then: a mid-Victorian brick house with columns at the front and high arched windows looking out over a sunken pond and three-quarters of an acre of shrubbery and graveled paths. A gallery on the second floor, in which he could show off his select collection of British art. A small oil by Mabel Pryde aside-a self-portrait, dark, the shadow of her husband barely visible in the background-there was nothing that couldn’t leave the premises for the right price, courtesy of Federal Express.

  Thackray, meanwhile, had relocated to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, drawn there by migrating poets and the annual music festival in honor of Benjamin Britten. Grabianski considered this a retrograde step. Thanks to a brief, early relationship with a middle-aged psychotherapist, he had once endured Peter Pears singing Britten’s settings of English folk-songs-an experience so graphically engraved on his memory as to provide him with an instant definition of Purgatory. It also meant that Thackray was no longer calling distance away. Save by telephone, that is, and both of his lines-the one displayed in the directory and the other only available to select business acquaintances-were permanently out of order.

  The last occasion on which Grabianski had seen him, it had been embarrassingly necessary to explain how it was that having broken into the house where the Dalzeils were kept, he had walked out again empty-handed.

  They had been sitting in a hotel bar in Market Harborough, shaded through the long afternoon, dust prancing in the low shafts of steeply angled light. Thackray had been less than pleased: this left a good customer to be pacified, a matter of principle, of re-establishing trust.

  “Tell him to be patient,” Grabianski had said. “Tell him you always keep your word.”

  Which, in so far as his word to Grabianski was concerned, had since proved untrue. The paintings freshly acquired, he returned to the same bar and sat there for two hours, sipping wine, waiting in vain for Thackray to arrive. It made Grabianski uncomfortable: whatever else he was, Vernon Thackray was not a man to miss an appointment. Promptness, reliability, these were Thackray’s cardinal virtues. But perseverance, patience-save for the occasional rush of blood, those were two of Grabianski’s own. If one buyer could no longer be found, well, he would find another. Simple as that.

  Even so, as Grabianski approached the southern edge of Hampstead Heath, it continued to nag at him, and he had walked beyond Parliament Hill itself and down into the first thickening of trees before the splendor of his surroundings eased it from his mind.

  Nine

  “Whatever sort of time do you call this?”

  “Um?”

  “I said, whatever sort of time …”

  “Alex, please, don’t start. Not the minute I get home.”

  “I’m not starting anything. I was merely worried …”

  “You weren’t worried, Alex, don’t pretend. You just can’t stand the thought that I might have been doing something on my own. Enjoying myself without you.”

  “Jane, why so hostile?”

  “I really can’t imagine. I must be premenstrual, that’s what it usually is. Or else it’s school. That’s it, the stress of my job.”

  “I do sometimes wonder …”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, you know, whether you wouldn’t be better off moving to part-time …”

  “We’re not going to start this again, are we?”

  “I’m only thinking of you.”

  “Of course.”

  “If you did mornings, afternoons, maybe just three days a week …”

  “Alex, we’ve been through all this; it just isn’t practical.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Because it isn’t, that’s why. Because if I went part-time, always supposing that were possible, which as things are going it might not be-then I wouldn’t be doing the same job.”

  “I would have thought it would be the same, essentially anyway. More time to yourself.”

  “Alex, I don’t want more time, that kind of time. Time to get the shopping, do the washing.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “You know very well, I enjoy what I do and I certainly don’t want to risk losing the little bit of responsibility I’ve got.”

  “I should hardly have thought getting kids to watch EastEnders in school time constituted responsibility. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m not being funny.”


  “No, you’re not.”

  “All right, why don’t we stop all this?”

  “A good idea.”

  “Come here.”

  “No, Alex, I …”

  “Come here.”

  “Alex.”

  “Sweetheart, I shouldn’t have shouted at you, I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t shout.”

  “Nag you, then. Get on at you, whatever.”

  “It’s all right, just let me …”

  “Stay here for a minute, come on.”

  “Alex, the dinner.”

  “Bugger the dinner!”

  “No, Alex, really. Besides, I’ve got to go out again afterwards.”

  “What d’you mean, go out?”

  “A meeting. Finalizing the arrangements for the day school. It shouldn’t take long. But I do have to leave at seven.”

  “Seven! It’s a wonder you bother to come home at all.”

  “Oh, fuck off, Alex!”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, just fuck off. I can’t do a bloody thing without you interfering, trying to make me feel guilty.”

  “All I did was make a remark. Is that so terrible?”

  “Yes. It feels like I can’t breathe without you standing over me, waiting to make some kind of comment.”

  “Some wives would be pleased …”

  “Would they?”

  “At least I show an interest.”

  “In criticizing, yes, making me feel inadequate. Why didn’t you do this, why don’t you do that?”

  “Oh, don’t be so pathetic!”

  “You see?”

  “What?”

  “You see what I mean. If ever I stand up to you, argue back, try to get you to see things my way, I’m being pathetic.”

  “Right.”

  “Poor, pathetic Jane, running around in circles, all the while fooling herself that what she’s doing is so important when anyone with a modicum of intelligence can see it doesn’t count for shit.”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “Good.”

  “You’re right, Alex, it was a mistake. I should have stayed at work, gone round to Hannah’s, gone for a drink. Anything but this.”