Still Waters cr-9

by John Harvey

  “And she was staggering how? Like she was drunk? As if she’d been hurt? Hit?”

  “Crying. Upset. When she heard his brakes, she pulled herself up, you know, gave herself a bit of shake. Driver called out, was she all right? And she said, yes, she was fine, and hurried off.”

  “Which way? Back into the Park?”

  Divine shook his head. “On up Derby Road, toward town.”

  “Do we know what time this was?” Lynn asked.

  “Yes,” Divine said. “He reckons he looked at his watch and the clock on the dash both. Seven thirty on the dot. He got a call right after, pick up somebody at Queens. Turned round and went right back down. It’s in his log. I checked.”

  Resnick’s mind was racing. “All right, here’s Jane. She leaves Spurgeon in Grantham and catches the train, fully intending to have it out with Alex, come clean about the whole business, the whole affair. In the cab from the station, she’s worked up, excited, most likely frightened, there’s a history of violence between them remember, he’s hit her before. But when she gets to the door …”

  “She can’t go through with it,” Lynn said. “She can’t face him.”

  “Right. But are we sure why? Is it because she’s scared of Alex, or because she’s changing her mind?”

  “We don’t know,” Lynn said. “And, any way, does it matter? Now. To us, I mean.”

  “Likely it determines what she does next.”

  “How ’bout she phones him,” Divine suggested.

  “The husband?” said Lynn.

  “No, this bloke in Grantham. No matter what she says, he can tell she’s in a right state. Wait there, he says, I’ll come over and get you.”

  “And there they are,” Resnick said, “arguing it over, back and forth, back and forth.”

  “It’s not just that she’s frightened of her husband,” Lynn said, “it’s more than that. It’s worse. She’s realized she’s making a mistake. That’s what all those tears are about, she’s telling Spurgeon, after keeping him dangling all that time, she’s not about to go through with it after all. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t love him enough. And he spends all night trying to convince her that she’s wrong; that she still does. And it doesn’t do any good.”

  Jealous husband, Resnick was thinking, violent man, love spurned: he hadn’t been listening. Had heard only what he expected to hear.

  “Let’s go,” he said, anxious at the slowness of the automatic doors. “We’ll phone Cambridge on the way.”

  Divine stood beside the car as Lynn slipped behind the wheel. “I don’t suppose, boss,” he said, “there’s anyway I could come along?”

  “Sorry, Mark,” Resnick said, climbing in. “’Fraid not.” He raised a hand and as he closed the door, Lynn pulled away.

  It was dark enough for the blue lights of the emergency vehicles to be seen from some distance, spiraling out across the flat English countryside. A uniformed officer stopped them at the edge of the village and checked their credentials; another waved them over only a little way into Front Street and advised them to park. Colin Presley was standing in the roadway level with the gate of number twenty-seven; the house itself an incongruous blaze of light. When the DS turned toward them, Resnick recognized only too well the look on his face.

  “The children …” he began.

  But mercifully, Presley shook his head. “With a neighbor. Safe.”

  “And the wife?”

  Louise was sitting at the center of the kitchen table, almost the last place Resnick had seen her; what stray color she had once managed had now disappeared.

  “Are you all right?” Resnick asked, as much from the use of saying it as anything else.

  Slowly her head tilted up until she had fixed him with her eyes. “I’m only surprised he had the guts to do it.”

  There was a card torn to small pieces beside her elbow and partly burned, the writing mostly beyond recognition, although Resnick believed he knew who had written it, what it said.

  “Sir,” Lynn said softly. She was standing in the far doorway and he followed her through into the living room and stood a moment beside her, looking down the garden in the direction of the lights.

  They walked out there together, down past the cabbages and the rusted swing and the ambulance men and uniformed officers and finally the police surgeon, who was anxious to have the body lowered carefully to the ground, which it would be once Scene of Crime had finished with their video equipment, their photographs.

  Peter Spurgeon was hanging from the uppermost of the branches, a length of narrow rope knotted close to the trunk and then again around his neck. His legs were splayed out at odd angles, like a man who has been desperately trying to climb something and has failed.

  Forty-eight

  Three weeks later, a family out picnicking on the edge of Laughton Forest found a bundle of women’s clothing and a blanket, thickly matted with blood, buried beneath the undergrowth where their labrador had been digging. The last days of Peter Spurgeon’s life were beginning to fall into place.

  Late on the Thursday afternoon, he had booked into a Little Chef motel on the A1, south of Bawtry. The receptionist and the maid confirmed that he had been alone. Jane, presumably, was already dead. Her body had lain in the boot of the estate car, or possibly in the back, covered by its blanket and surrounded by boxes of books thick with learned footnotes and appendices. Analysis of the interior of the Vauxhall yielded samples of Jane’s hair and of her blood. What Spurgeon had done during that day, killing Jane aside, was never clearly established. Resnick imagined them driving somewhere secluded and quiet to continue their argument, he heard the voices winding louder and louder, Jane’s words the more wounding, more final; saw the despair on Spurgeon’s face, the first frantic blow-but with what? Tire jack, iron railing, spade? A weapon had yet to be found.

  On the Friday, incredibly, Spurgeon drove north to Hull and called in on some of his clients, the university bookshop and others, securing a small number of orders. What did he think? That if he behaved as normal, all the rest would go away? That night, he stayed at the same hotel he regularly used and on the Saturday began a long and meandering journey south that would take him through Brigg and Caistor, down through the Lincolnshire Wolds and finally east again-Sleaford, Newark-on-Trent. Jane always behind him, always filling his head, cold, naked, dead.

  Was the decision to lower her body into the still water of the canal a conscious attempt to link her murder with that of others, shift the blame? Or had it finally seemed the only perfect place? Did he think that she would drown and disappear or merely float? How much did he think at all? Resnick saw the legs, stiff, breaking the surface of the water, the torso, trunk and arms; the splash as Spurgeon finally let go.

  “God,” Hannah said, holding Resnick close. “How could he?”

  “I don’t know,” Resnick said.

  But, of course, he did; they both did, deep inside.

  A month to the day after he was first arrested, Aloysius James was released from custody without further charge. He is currently suing for compensation and despite the best efforts of the Serious Crime Squad no further suspect has been identified.

  Faron came round to see Grabianski as a messenger one more time. Eddie Snow wanted to meet him at that new place, you know, Ladbroke Grove, Italian, used to be a pub.

  Didn’t they all, Grabianski thought? “Something to celebrate?” he asked.

  Faron shrugged. “One of Eddie’s deals.”

  “You going to be there?”

  “Maybe.” She looked at him and did that thing with her eyes.

  Grabianski touched his hand to her cheek. “Don’t,” he said. “Find an excuse, anything. Just don’t go.”

  Eddie Snow wore a red silk shirt, black leather waistcoat, tight white trousers, hand-stitched boots. Downstairs in the bar he ordered champagne and slipped an envelope into Grabianski’s pocket, his profit from the sale of two pieces of English Impressionism to Bahrain. Up in the restau
rant, surrounded by dazzling apricot walls, they had stone crab with celery, lamb cutlets with a timbale of aubergine. Snow was in an expansive mood, stories of his record company past and Chablis première cru. While they were waiting for the espresso, he leaned across the table and gave Grabianski a second envelope, sealed.

  “What,” Grabianski said, articulating carefully, “do you expect me to do with that?”

  Eddie grinned back. “How ’bout slipping it into the archives at the Sir John Soane, somewhere dusty where it’d conveniently be turned up next time they’re doing a search.”

  Without the service, the bill must have set Snow back well in excess of a hundred quid. Maybe more. Jackie Ferris and Carl Vincent were waiting in an unmarked car across the street.

  “I’m off this way,” Grabianski said, “31 bus, right?”

  “You and your buses,” Snow laughed. “Bit of a bloody affectation, don’t you think?” He waved goodbye and walked a block before turning his head at what he thought was the sound of a cab. Why walk when you can ride? Except it wasn’t a cab.

  Resnick read in the paper about a British art dealer named Thackray who had been arrested on a warrant from Interpol for attempting to smuggle a painting by the little-known English artist, Herbert Dalzeil, into Japan. More importantly, the Arts and Antiques Squad raided premises in Notting Hill, Hampstead, and Hackney in connection with a worldwide racket in the false authentication and sale of forged paintings. Eddie Snow was among those helping Scotland Yard with their inquiries. A few days later, Resnick also had a message from Sister Teresa to meet him in the city, after she had finished her weekly stint on local radio.

  “Any interesting calls?” Resnick asked. They were sitting in the Food Court, drinking coffee out of paper cups.

  “A seventy-two-year-old woman looking after her ninety-three-year-old mother, wondering isn’t she entitled to a little help? Another pensioner, wanting me to pray for his cat, that it might have a merciful release. Two women, neither of them more than twenty by the sound of them, both of them in relationships with men that beat them. He loves me, sister, what should I do?”

  Only two, Resnick thought?

  Teresa opened her bag and gave him a postcard and a package. The card was from Lisbon, white buildings leading down toward a true blue sea. So these are the paths of righteousness, Grabianski had written. I always thought they went to St. Ives.

  “The package,” Teresa said, “it’s for you.”

  It was a CD of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, recorded in 1968 and containing “The Degas Suite.”

  “Possibly,” Teresa said, “I could come and listen to it some time. I’m afraid the order doesn’t see the need for our having anything more than a little Roberts radio.”

  “It would be a pleasure,” Resnick said. And it was.

  It didn’t seem that Grabianski stayed in Lisbon long. One morning, making her way a trifle gingerly into the drawing room, Miriam Johnson stopped in her slow tracks and stared: the two Dalzeils which had been stolen were back in place on the wall.

  It would only be after her death, thankfully some little time into the future, that the question of whether these were forgeries came to be discussed. Meanwhile, once the delighted Miriam Johnson had informed Resnick of their miraculous return and Resnick had passed on the news to Sister Teresa, Teresa was left thinking, not for the first time, that the Lord did indeed move in mysterious ways.

  Resnick and Hannah talked about the cats. As a result, he began to stay over at her place rather less in the week, rather more at weekends and when he did, paid the thirteen-year-old son of a near neighbor to go in and administer to the animals’ needs. “Pick them up,” Resnick told him. “Stroke them, make a bit of a fuss. Not the big black one, though. He’ll have your fingers if you don’t watch out.”

  Over Hannah’s half term, they took the Eurostar train to Paris and Resnick realized, from looking at a poster outside Gare du Nord, he’d missed Milt Jackson by two days. They went to see the singer Dee Dee Bridgwater instead, joyously swinging through her versions of Horace Silver tunes.

  More than six months now; if they weren’t careful, it would be a year. Hannah occasionally thought of her former Irish lover, mused from time to time about other lovers she had never had, but most of the time seemed content.

  And Resnick …?

  One night, more than a little drunk after dinner with some friends, aroused, he and Hannah started making love upon the stairs, continued on the sanded floor and then half on, half off the bed. Hannah with her head thrown back, eyes wide, fingers clutching tight into his back, breaking skin. “Hold me, Charlie! Hold me down!”

  He didn’t hear, at least not the final word; not till, his face sweating next to hers, she screamed it in his ear.

  He was sitting down below, shirt unbuttoned, boxer shorts, feet bare. Hannah came and sat opposite him, feet pulled up beneath her on the chair.

  “Charlie …”

  “Every day,” he said, “most days, so much of what I have to deal with, it comes from that.”

  “That?”

  “People having power over one another, using them. Submission. Hurt.” He looked at her, the beauty in her eyes. “It’s not a game.”

  She moved across to him, sat on the floor with her arms around his legs, resting her head against his thigh. “Charlie,” she said after a while, “the fact that I can say that to you, that I can ask you … That fantasy-that’s all it is, a fantasy-I could never show that, expose myself in that way if I didn’t trust you. Absolutely. It shows how safe I feel with you, how close we are, don’t you see?”

  Resnick reached down and stroked her hair and touched his fingers to the fine line of her back, but still, no, he didn’t see.

  “I’m going back up,” Hannah said, getting to her feet. “You’ll be up in a little while, yes?”

  Resnick nodded but he didn’t move; he didn’t move until much later, when, stiff-legged, he went to the window to pull back the curtains and by then the first light of day was stretching out across the park.

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