Still Waters cr-9

by John Harvey

  Quite what enticed her into joining the police, she wasn’t sure. Maybe it was the way she’d observed the predominantly white, predominantly male officers operating in East London where she lived, or on the front line in Brixton; maybe she allowed herself to be converted by the agitprop plays she performed in community centers and church halls from Handsworth to Hyson Green. Then again, perhaps she was simply drawn by the adventure. There would be adventure …

  In London, they tried to turn her into some kind of uniformed social worker and made it clear that the pathway to CID was paved with more than hard work and good intentions. Sharon applied for a transfer out and, for reasons best known to the movements of the planets rather than any observable logic, fetched up in Lincoln, which was where she met Resnick, not Lincoln itself exactly, but a pig farm not so many hectares distant, the pair of them up over their ankles in pig shit and murder.

  Soon after, Sharon moved again, this time to the East Midlands, and since there wasn’t a vacancy in Resnick’s squad at the time, joined Vice, where, at least, she got to operate in plain clothes and was allowed a certain degree of autonomy. Sharon had been made up to sergeant three weeks back, and this was the first time she and Lynn, close friends over the past couple of years-about as close as Lynn allowed anyone-had been free to celebrate. One disadvantage of working Vice, like soul singing and community theater both, it did mean working a lot of nights.

  But this particular night there was a double cause for pushing the boat out-Lynn, after all, had just been head-hunted to join Serious Crimes.

  “How many other detective sergeants?” Sharon asked, touching her knife to the last surviving piece of her rack of lamb.

  “Four altogether. Why, you thinking about applying?”

  Sharon grinned and picked up the meat with her fingers. “Give it a little time.”

  “That Asian bloke, Khan, the one who worked the Bill Aston investigation, he’s already in.”

  “DS?”

  Lynn shook her head. “DC.” There was little left to show that the salmon she’d ordered had been served with a cream and dill sauce, sautéed potatoes, a fennel and watercress salad: clean plate, Lynnie, that’s the way her mum had brought her up in the raw comforts of rural Norfolk.

  “Khan,” Sharon said, chewing thoughtfully, “he’s the good-looking one, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot, you don’t notice these things.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Yes? How long is it since you went out with a bloke then, tell me that?”

  Shifting the knife and fork together on her plate, Lynn shrugged.

  “How long since you …” Lamb bone between her lips, Sharon mimed a gesture that made Lynn blush.

  “Is everything finished here?” the waiter inquired, hovering at Sharon’s shoulder.

  “Almost,” Sharon said, deftly tweaking away the last scrap of sweet meat between her teeth.

  “Shall I bring the dessert menu?”

  “Not for me.” Lynn shook her head.

  “Yes,” said Sharon.

  “Any coffees?”

  “Black,” said Lynn.

  “Later,” said Sharon.

  They split the bill down the middle and ordered a cab to take Sharon home; Lynn could walk to her flat in the Lace Market in a matter of minutes.

  “Seriously,” Sharon said, her taxi at the curb. “You haven’t got any doubts?”

  “Not really, only …”

  “Only what?”

  “Helen Siddons.”

  “What about her?”

  “I’m just not sure; working under her, I mean.”

  “She’s keen enough on you.”

  “I know, I know, but …”

  “It’s not because she’s a woman? You’re not one of those who doesn’t like taking orders from other women?”

  “I really don’t know. I don’t think it’s that, no. It’s just … all the time she was talking to me, Siddons, trying to persuade me, buttering me up, I never quite believed what she was saying.”

  The taxi-driver gave a short blast of the horn and Sharon shot him a look that stilled his impatience. “That’s not Siddons,” she said, “that’s you. You’re just not good at taking praise. Anyone tells you how good you are and you think they must be lying.”

  Lynn took a step out onto the pavement. “Anyway, I promised her an answer, first thing tomorrow.”

  “Okay, don’t let me down.” Sharon gave Lynn a hug and left a faint smear of lipstick across her cheek. “Either way, you’ve got to let me know, right?”

  “Right.”

  Lynn waited while Sharon climbed into the back of the cab, gave the driver his instructions, and then settled back, waving through the glass. Then she walked briskly down toward Goose Gate, heading home.

  Lynn recognized Resnick’s car before she saw him, leaning in the half-shadow of the courtyard around which the flats were built. Her first reaction was that it was trouble, an emergency, something serious, work. But seeing his face as he moved toward her, she was less sure: Resnick, hands in pockets, the faint beginnings of a smile, which quickly changed into something more apologetic.

  “Good night?”

  “Fine, yes, why …?”

  “Kevin said something about you going out for a bit of a do, celebration.”

  Lynn’s hand wafted air vaguely. “It was just me and Sharon. Anything more, I’d’ve invited everyone.”

  Resnick nodded. They stood there in the half-light, the evening humming round them, the ground, Lynn thought, tilting beneath her feet.

  “You are taking the job?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Good.”

  “Is that really what you think?”

  “Of course.”

  “Before, when I was trying to get into Family Support …”

  “Not the same.”

  “No.”

  Foolishly, Resnick looked at his watch. “I just wanted to be sure. Didn’t want to think there was any reason, anything to do with me, you and me, why you wouldn’t agree.”

  “No. No. I don’t even think … I mean why …?”

  Resnick didn’t know either. What was he doing there? “You’re going to accept, then?” he asked for the second time.

  Lynn blinked. “Yes.”

  Resnick shuffled his weight from one foot to the other, a step he’d forgotten how to make.

  “Do you want to come up?” Lynn asked. “Coffee or something?”

  He was almost too quick to shake his head. “No. No, thanks.”

  Lynn hunched her shoulders, suddenly aware that she was standing there with just a linen coat over her short black dress. “Okay,” she said.

  “Yes,” Resnick said. “Okay.”

  By the time she had climbed the double flight of stairs to her landing, his car was reversing round, red brake lights flaring for an instant, before heading forward beneath the brick archway and away from sight.

  Lynn opened the door and double-locked it fast behind her, sliding home the bolt. Kicking off her shoes and shucking her coat onto the nearest chair, she padded into the bathroom and began to run the shower. Three more days and then she would be reporting for duty at the far end of the Ropewalk, close to where she had been based these past four years. Almost five. Slipping the catch at the back of her dress, she pulled down the zip and let the dress fall to the floor. Moments later, naked, she looked at herself in the mirror, never quite liking what she saw. Breasts too small, hips too large. As if, she thought, it mattered, stepping into the gathering steam. As if it mattered any more.

  Twenty-two

  They started the day with the shower scene. Poor Janet, a good girl really, regular and law-abiding, though not above the occasional sex and tumble with a married man in her lunch hour, succumbing to a momentary temptation and stealing forty thousand dollars. Pursued, suspected, she clings to her la
st vestiges of calm and is almost clean away. Then in the storm she takes a wrong turn and checks into the Bates Motel.

  The day school audience responded the way audiences were programmed to do: the insistent, keening music, stabbing at the ears, the slash and cut of blade, the absurd figure of the attacker, all-powerful, unreal; shot after shot of the woman’s body, naked, falling, cut after cut; blood on the shower curtain, blood on the tiles; her face, unmoving, the open, staring eye; blood merging with the flow of water, running away.

  Poor Janet.

  The lights came up on sixty, seventy people sitting there, the smaller auditorium; some with notebooks opened on their laps, some with cups of coffee cooling in their hands. Mostly women, young to early middle-age, a scattering of men: teachers, media students, specialists from the caring professions, academics, a phalanx of hard-core lesbian feminists, the obligatory few crazies, lost already in their own impenetrable agendas, a shaven-headed young woman exhibiting a fetishistic interest in body piercing and tattoos, a nun.

  “What we’ve just been watching,” the first speaker pronounced, “is the classic scene of ritual punishment, ritual cleansing. The female protagonist has transgressed the laws of her male-dominated world. The camera, while delighting in her sexuality-remember the first shots in the film, almost like a contemporary advertisement for Wonderbra, the way they emphasize her wantonness, the size and shape of her breasts, lying there on the bed while her lover gets dressed-the camera still punishes her for it. And us, as audience. Having pried on her, involved us in her secret activity, aroused us with her sexuality, it becomes her attacker, the movements of the camera becoming those of the knife, taking us, whether we want to or not, deep down into the cut.

  “But Hitchcock being Hitchcock, extreme chauvinist that he was, these extremes of punishment that we witness, and in which we are forced to participate, are not carried out by a man. As the end of the film makes clear, it is only when Norman Bates is taken over by the other half of his divided personality, the mother half, that these murderous impulses come to the surface. Norman didn’t kill the Janet Leigh figure, Norman’s mother did. It is the female, the feminine side of our nature that is the site of evil here, the blood is on our hands.”

  It was some seven minutes short of eleven o’clock. Before the first break at noon, they would see brief extracts from Hellraiser, Dressed to Kill, and Hallowe’en. In the afternoon there were separate seminars, running simultaneously, one on women’s fiction-In the Cut, The End of Alice, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Zombie-the other devoted to sado-masochism and the fetishization of the female body in high fashion. Everyone would come back together at the end of the day for a screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, followed by a final question and answer session and discussion.

  Sister Teresa had brought sandwiches and a thermos of tea and sat on one of the low walls outside the media center, talking to a lecturer from Trent University and an earnest young man with a disturbing look of Anthony Perkins about him, who was in his first year of studying video and film. The person she really wanted to talk to was the bald woman with the wonderful tattoos.

  “Aren’t you the one who does that radio program?” the lecturer asked suddenly, her eyes brightening. “Sister something-or-other, is that you?”

  Teresa smiled apologetically and did her best to deflect the question.

  Why was it, she thought, people were always so fascinated with nuns? Especially today, when there was all that sex and repression up there on the screen? At least they weren’t showing Black Narcissus, that was something to be grateful for. Although in a rash moment a year or so back, Sister Bonaventura had confessed that it was Kathleen Byron’s portrayal of a nun in that film which had persuaded her into holy orders, the messianic look of jubilation in her face before throwing herself to her death.

  Sister Teresa’s other colleague from their order, Sister Marguerite, would be attending that afternoon, specifically to go to the seminar on fetishism and fashion; after prayers that morning, she had threatened to break with protocol and go along wearing her traditional habit. See what they have to say about that!

  Hannah and Jane were sitting just inside the Café Bar, sharing a crowded table with Mollie Hansen and several other members of the Broadway staff.

  “So what do you think?” Mollie asked, spooning chocolatey froth from her cappuccino toward her mouth. “The turnout. You pleased?”

  “Why, yes,” Jane said, excited. “Aren’t you? I mean, I never thought … I suppose fifty, you know, that would have been terrific. Saturday, people away. But this, well, there must be getting on for eighty, don’t you think?”

  “Sixty-nine.” Mollie matter-of-fact, chocolate or no chocolate.

  “Are you sure? I would have thought … But, well, it’s still good; it is, isn’t it? Okay? I mean, you are pleased?

  “Oh, yes. Yes, it’s fine.”

  “I thought it got us off to a good start,” Hannah said. “The first session. She had some really interesting things to say. Don’t you think that’s right?”

  “I thought she was great,” enthused Jane. “Really, really good.”

  “She was all right,” said Mollie, who had heard it all before and was wondering if she would bother going back after the break.

  Jane had decided to go to the session on fashion, and since Hannah had done all of the reading for the fiction seminar, she would go there. Arriving slightly late, Hannah found herself sitting next to Sister Teresa, who had positioned herself midway along the back row, and immediately behind the young woman with the shaven head.

  The group leader, a journalist and published writer herself, kicked things off with some observations about writer and reader, killer and victim, male and female, the weapon and the wound. She referred to an article on slasher movies which talked about the Final Girl, the one woman strong and resourceful enough to defeat the serial attacker, rather than becoming his victim. “The same,” she said, “in books. Books by men. Think about The Silence of the Lambs. But here, in these books we’ve been reading by women, this doesn’t happen. There is no escape.”

  She paused and looked out at her audience.

  “Now is this because these women writers are more bloodthirsty than their male counterparts, want to scare us, chill us more? Or are they simply being more realistic, more serious, more concerned with the truth? If we become, as some of the female characters in these novels do, fascinated by violence, especially by a combination of violence and sexuality, then there is a price to pay. If you stick us-as someone, as far as we know not a woman, once famously said-do we not bleed?”

  She sat down to the sound of coughing, furious scribbling, and some generous applause.

  The questions were not all as productive as they might have been; as was often the case, too many people were concerned to state their given positions instead of opening out the discussion. But Sister Teresa asked a quiet, well-formed question about the absence of any wider spiritual morality within which to contain a more individual, sexual one, to which the shaven-haired young woman, who turned out to have a soft, Southern Irish accent, responded by comparing the sexual wounds received by women, the often ritual nature of their bleeding, with the Christian tradition of the piercing of the body of Christ.

  At the end of the hour, Hannah’s own question, about women asserting their right to explore the nature of their own fascination with violence and domination, remained unasked.

  Time for tea, a quick cigarette or two for some, a degree of female bonding, and then back in for the main feature. Teresa barely had time to catch up with Sister Marguerite, her face aglow from good strong argument; for Hannah, a few moments in which to observe Jane’s continuing elation that the project on which she had worked so hard was proving such a success.

  As she was slipping back in through the front doors, Hannah passed Mollie Hansen, slipping out.

  “Not staying for the film, then?”

  Mollie shook her head. “I’ve seen it alrea
dy.”

  “And?”

  Mollie smiled her oddly invigorating smile. “It’s bollocks. If you want an informed opinion.” And, sports bag slung over her shoulder, hurried off to her workout in the gym.

  Some hundred and thirty-nine minutes later, stumbling somewhat numbed out into daylight, Hannah wondered if Mollie might not have been right. For all those around her who spoke with admiration of the director’s control of the big action sequences, or Ralph Fiennes’ beauty, there were others who were appalled by the inclusion of a lengthy rape sequence, shot almost entirely from the point of view of the male aggressor.

  “Talk about ending the day where you started off,” said one of the group, hollering her exasperation. “You expect that kind of thing from someone like Hitchcock, but this is a woman, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” said another. “But I loved it. Every minute.”

  Sister Teresa had remained in the cinema some sixty seconds into the scene in question before leaving.

  Hannah looked around for Jane, to give her a final hug of congratulation, but failed to pick her out in the crowd that was milling around the service area in the Café Bar. Tired, stimulated, Hannah headed along Goose Gate in the opposite direction to that taken by Lynn Kellogg the night before. She would phone Jane later.

  When she rang Jane’s number at twenty-five past seven, Alex answered abruptly that she hadn’t yet arrived home; at half past nine, there was no answer, and Hannah left a brief message on the machine. It was past one in the morning, Hannah alone in her bed and not quite able to sleep, when Alex phoned her: Jane had still not returned, nor been in touch; he had seen nothing of her, neither hide nor hair.