Off Minor

by John Harvey

  Five

  “Sara, then?”

  “Yes, Sara.”

  “Without an H?”

  “Without.”

  “My cousin, she’s Sarah. Only she’s got an H.”

  “Oh.”

  Raymond couldn’t believe his luck. Waiting for her to finish her lager and black, he’d edged his way across the bar, caught up with her before she reached the door.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi.”

  They had stood several moments before the phone boxes, across from Yates Wine Lodge, from Next. Others jostled round them, heading out for the clubs, Zhivago’s, Madison. Engine running, a police-dog van idled at the curb. Raymond knew she was waiting for him to say something, not knowing what.

  “If you like, we could …”

  “Yes?”

  “Get a pizza?”

  “No.”

  “Something else then. Chips.”

  “No, you’re all right. Not hungry.”

  “Oh.”

  Her face brightened. “Why don’t we just walk? You know, for a bit.”

  They went up Market Street, midway down Queen Street before doubling back up King: on Clumber Street they joined the crowd in McDonald’s, stood in a line twelve or fourteen deep, six lanes working, Raymond couldn’t believe the money they must be taking: finally he came away with a quarter pounder and fries, Coke and apple pie. Sara’s was a chocolate milk shake. Benches all taken, they leaned up against the wall that led down to Littlewoods’s side entrance, Raymond chewing on his burger, watching Sara prise the lid from the container, tip the shake right into her mouth, too thick to suck up with the straw.

  When he told her he worked at a butcher’s, wholesale, she did no more than shrug. But walking on towards Long Row later, she said: “At work, what d’you, d’you, you know, the meat and that, d’you have to chop it up?”

  “Into joints, you mean?”

  “I s’pose.”

  “Carcasses?”

  “Yes.”

  Raymond shook his head. “That’s skilled work I mean, I might. Like to. It’s a lot more money. But, no. Mostly I’m just humping stuff around, loading, packing, jobs like that.”

  Sara worked in a sweet shop down near the Broad Marsh. One of those bright, open-plan places painted out in pink and green, the kind where you’re encouraged to go round and make your own selection, have the assistant weigh it at the end. That was when quite a few people got funny, Sara told him, seeing their paper bag resting on the scale, about to cost them seventy-five pence, a pound. Then they would ask her to tip some out, get it down to something more reasonable, and she would have to explain, being patient, keeping the smile on her face and her voice level the way the manageress had told her to, how difficult it was when they’d chosen from as many as ten different kinds to take them back, put them into their respective containers. Are they sure they wouldn’t like to go ahead and pay for them, just this once? She was sure they wouldn’t regret it, all the sweets were really lovely, she sneaked one or two all the time.

  Raymond’s attention wavered more than a little in the course of this, steering Sara from one side of the pavement to the other, so as to avoid whichever bunch was hollering at the tops of their voices, blocking their way so they would have to step out into the road. That and glancing sideways at her skirt, even now she was walking, still above her knee; the silk flash of her blouse beneath the dark unbuttoned jacket that she wore, swell of her small breasts. Waiting for the lights to change at the bottom end of Hockley, that was when he touched her for the first time, his hand moving against the inside of her upper arm, circling it there.

  Sara smiling: “’S good of you to walk me home.”

  “No problem.”

  She squeezed her arm to her side, Raymond’s fingers trapped warm between.

  The waste land off to one side of the road, Raymond’s uncle had told him once it all belonged to the railway, like as not still did. A murky scattering of buildings, large and small, all manner of stuff that people had junked dumped in between. After dark, flat-bed lorries would back in, vans with names repainted over and over on their sides: next morning others would come with prams and handcarts, picking through the debris, hauling away whatever they could use or sell.

  Sara shivered, her breath blurred on the air, and Raymond took and squeezed her hand; the bones of her fingers tiny, brittle like a child’s.

  “C’mon,” he said, pulling her past a pile of broken masonry towards the hulk of a disused warehouse, bolstered up towards the sky.

  “What d’we have to go in there for?”

  “’S all right.”

  Raymond scooped up a stone and hurled it high: there was the splintering of glass, small and distant, as the last fragments of window fell away: the fast flutter of pigeons taking off, sudden and abrupt.

  Off to the left, Raymond saw a cigarette glowing through the dark. He moved his hand and touched Sara’s blouse at the back, beneath her coat: under the slide of silk, knots of her spine. Inside the building he bent his head to kiss her hair and she turned her face and instead he kissed her mouth, the edge of it first, not quite right, moving till his mouth was over hers, taste of chocolate from the faint hairs on her upper lip.

  “Ray, is that what they call you? Ray?”

  Raymond smiling, feeling for her breast. “Ray-o.”

  “Ray-o?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Like a nickname?”

  “Yes.”

  He took off his coat and then hers, laying them on the ground, concrete and packed earth from which the boards had long been ripped.

  “What’s this?”

  “Where?”

  “Sticking in my back.”

  He eased her up, unzipped his inside pocket and removed the knife.

  “Ray, what is it?”

  “Never mind.”

  In little more than outline, she could see his face; see the metal object in his hand.

  “It’s not a knife, is it? Raymond? Is it?”

  Looking down at her, the sharp, almost pretty features of her face as his eyes grew accustomed to the scarcity of light.

  “Is it? A knife?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Whatever d’you want a knife for?”

  He dropped it from sight into his trouser pocket and reached towards her. “Never mind.”

  Less than five minutes later, the front of his cords unzipped, he had come against her hand. As they lay there, not speaking, he could feel her ribcage rise and fall as she breathed.

  “Ray-o.”

  He rolled over and sat up and she fumbled a tissue from her bag.

  “What’s that?”

  “What now?”

  “That smell.”

  He felt himself blushing and got hurriedly to his feet, embarrassment in his voice. “I can’t smell nothing.”

  “Yes. I’m certain. Back in there.”

  She was staring where the back wall disappeared into the darkness, past piles of rotted cardboard, sodden sacking and old boxes. And though Raymond didn’t want to admit it, he could smell it too, not unlike the tubs where he worked, brimful of all the tubes and offal-ends, the guts, the tripes and lights.

  “Where are you going?” Alarm in Raymond’s voice.

  “I want to see.”

  “What for?”

  “I do. That’s why.”

  One hand clamped across his nose, he followed her, thinking all the time that what he should do was turn round, walk away, leave her.

  “Fuck’s sake, Sara, it could be anything.”

  “No need to swear.”

  “Dog, cat, anything.”

  Sara took the lighter from her bag and held it high above her head, snapping it to life. The stench had already raised tears in her eyes. In the furthest corner a wooden door had been wedged at an angle between floor and wall; behind it, broken planks and cardboard had been stuffed and piled.

  “Sara, let’s get out of here.”


  Her lighter went out and when she clicked it on again, a young rat wriggled from beneath the pile and raced away along the line of the wall, its belly hanging low.

  “I’m going.”

  And as Raymond shuffled back, Sara, unbelievably, took two, then three, then four more paces forward. When at last she stopped it was because she was certain of what she saw: the heel of a child’s blue shoe, what might once have been the fingers of a hand.

  Six

  “What’s the matter, Charlie? You look distracted.”

  Resnick was sitting in one of three chairs across from the superintendent’s desk, one leg crossed above the other, mug of lukewarm coffee in his hand.

  “No, sir. I’m fine.”

  “Fashion statement then, is it?”

  Resnick realized that Skelton was looking towards his feet, one black sock, thin nylon, the other a washed-out gray. Resnick uncrossed his legs, sat forward in the chair. When the phone had rung, wrenching him from sleep, he had been in a hospital ward with Elaine, his ex-wife strapped down in the bed, a mixture of terror and pleading in her eyes, while Resnick, in a white doctor’s coat, had looked down at her and shaken his head, instructed the nurse to expose the arm, prepare the vein, he would administer the injection himself.

  Even the shower, switched from blistering hot to cold and back again, had failed to lift the sweat from his body. The guilt.

  “Run it by us, Charlie. What’ve we got?”

  The others in the room aside from Resnick and Jack Skelton were Tom Parker, the DCI from Central station, and Lennie Lawrence, chief inspector and Skelton’s deputy. Tom Parker was nine months short of retirement, mind set on a smallholding in Lincolnshire, him and the wife and a few dozen chickens, pigs, possibly a couple of goats. His wife was partial to goats. If this hadn’t cropped up, Sunday morning, he’d have been out at his allotment, not a great deal to do but pull some potatoes, get his fork down into the compost, keep his back in shape for all the digging that was to come. Len Lawrence would be going out on just about the same day, off to help his son-in-law run a pub on the outskirts of Auckland, even this far ahead the tickets booked, deposit paid. The last thing either man wanted, their last winter on the force, was this.

  “Couple came into the station, sir, little after two. Reported finding what they thought was a body in an empty building, that waste ground in Sneinton.”

  “Why report it here?” Lawrence interrupted. “Central’s more obvious, closer.”

  “Seems there was some question about reporting it at all. They must have come across it a couple of hours before, nearer twelve. One of them, the lad, he’s got a room in Lenton, our patch. When finally they decided to come in, that was where they were.”

  “The body, Charlie,” said Parker. “Identification?”

  Resnick shook his head. “Difficult. Apparently been there quite a while. A lot of natural decomposition, though this cold snap’s helped us some. Body seems to have lain largely undisturbed. Whoever put it there had wrapped it inside two large plastic bags …”

  “Bin bags?” asked Lawrence.

  Resnick nodded. “… covered those over with a piece of old tarpaulin and then built a kind of shelter round it, planks of wood, whatever was around.” For a moment the mug of coffee was less than steady in his hand. “Without all of that, the body wouldn’t have stayed as intact as apparently it has; that whole area’s alive with rats.”

  “They never got to it at all?”

  “That’s not what I said.” Resnick got up and walked across to the coffee machine, helped himself to another half a mug. So far, he’d only spoken to Parkinson, the Home Office pathologist, on the phone, but what he had heard had been enough to twist his guts into a knot.

  “I’m not clear what you’re saying,” said Tom Parker. “Are we going to be able to make an identification or not?”

  “We’re not going to be able to look at a photograph and say yes, that’s her, that’s the kiddie, that’s one thing we’re not going to do.” Resnick realized, too late, how high his voice was raised.

  Tom Parker looked at him, only mildly surprised.

  “You think it’s the little girl who went missing,” Skelton said, lining up the paperweight against the picture of his wife and child.

  “Yes.” Resnick nodded and sat down.

  “Gloria.”

  “Summers. Yes.”

  “September, wasn’t it?” Len Lawrence shifted his weight in the chair. Sitting too long in one position gave him cramp: privately, he was dreading the flight to New Zealand.

  “Yes,” said Resnick. “Nine weeks now. A little over.”

  “No leads,” said Lawrence.

  “Till now.”

  “You can’t be certain, Charlie,” Skelton said. “Not yet.”

  “No, sir.”

  But he was.

  Resnick was conscious of the comparative silence outside the room, the virtual absence of traffic on the normally busy road outside; a lull between the usually omnipresent ringing of telephones. Most people were turning over in bed for an extra half-hour, going downstairs in dressing gowns and bare feet to put on the kettle, fetch the paper from the front-door mat, let in or out the dog or cat. They sat there in that first-floor room, four middle-aged men, talking about murder. The next time it was officially discussed there would be maps and photographs, computers, newly opened files and many more personnel. Too many people, Resnick thought, not wanting the silence to break; knowing that when it did he would have to get out on the street, the next step in the investigation.

  “At least,” Kevin Naylor said, pointing his fork in the direction of Mark Divine’s plate, “it hasn’t cost you your appetite.”

  Divine grunted and cut diagonally across his second sausage, forking up one end and using it to break the yolk of his second egg. He carefully wiped this around the juice of his tinned tomatoes and baked beans before lifting it to his mouth.

  “Something like this,” Divine said, “what it does to you,” wiping his chin with a convenient slice of fried bread, “makes you think about being alive. You know, savoring it.”

  Naylor, who had restricted himself to two rounds of toast and a large tea, nodded understanding. He remembered his father telling him, an unusually unguarded moment, how after his wife’s, Kevin’s mother’s, funeral, all he could think of was hustling his aunt Mary into the spare bedroom and giving her one. Nine months later, the two of them were married and, from what Naylor could make out on his rare visits to Marsden, his dad was still trying.

  “Tell you what,” Divine said through a mouthful of breakfast, “that feller wrote that book about serial murder, you know, the bloke who skins ’em alive and wears them like a shell suit, according to him, what you do, keep the stink from turning your gut, like, it’s carry round this little pot of Vick and rub it round inside your nose. Bollocks! Half a ton of it wouldn’t have kept this from wellying the old nerve ends. Stroll on! Worse than a bevy of bottled farts well past their sell-by date.”

  He speared three miscellaneous pieces of egg white and the last of the sausage. Divine had been one of two CID officers on duty when the report had come in. He had talked briefly to Raymond Cooke and Sara Prine, sending them off with a promise to come back and make a full statement around mid-morning. By the time he got out to Sneinton, the whole area had been roped off, lights were being setup, the scene-of-crime boys eager to move in and shoot a video that would fetch a small fortune if copies ever found their way on to the market. Parkinson had driven down from a dinner party in Lincoln, still wearing his evening dress, rat droppings and worse making a right old mess of the bottoms of his trousers, patent leather shoes. Not that there was much the pathologist could establish there and then. Most of his work would have to take place in more clinical conditions.

  “You know what I think,” Divine said, voice lowered and leaning close. “Next time something like this crops up,” glancing across the canteen now to where Diptak Patel was standing alongside Lynn Kell
ogg in the queue, “we ought to send Sunshine out there, all that oil and incense, stuff he has to eat, like as not he wouldn’t even notice.”

  Finding Gloria Summers’s mother the first time had not been as difficult as the grandmother had suggested. Susan had been living with a girlfriend in a second-story housing association flat in one of those conversions that lined the upper edge of the Forest. This time, mid-morning on the Sunday, the friend was there, but Susan had not returned.

  “Since last night?” Resnick asked.

  “Since a lot of nights.”

  “Any idea where she might be?”

  “Oh, yes.” Resnick had the impression she might have grinned at him, including him in the joke, if she had not been so obviously bored. “A lot of ideas.”

  “Boyfriends?”

  “If you want to call them that.”

  Resnick’s notebook was in his hand. “Where shall I start?”

  “What might be a good idea, get a bigger book.”

  He struck lucky with his third call. A bleary-eyed West Indian opened the door, scratching himself beneath the voluminous arm of a kaftan top. Resnick identified himself and told the man he was looking for Susan Summers.

  The West Indian smiled and ushered him in.

  Susan was propped up against several pillows, not too fussed about the way the sheet was covering her body. The bed was a mattress stretched across the floor, take-away cartons and Red Stripe cans strategically around it. An ashtray the diameter of a dinner plate was close to overflowing.

  “Cup of tea?” the man asked, smiling now at the way Resnick was looking at Susan, trying not to look.

  “Thanks, no.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Remember me?” Resnick said to the young woman in the bed.

  The last time he had spoken to her, asking if she had any idea where her daughter might have gone to, asking if she had seen the girl herself, Susan Summers had replied: “Ask that cow of a mother of mine, why don’t you? She’s the only one good enough even to wipe the shit from her precious little arse.”

  Now, when Resnick told her he didn’t want to upset her, but there was a chance that a body they’d found that night might be that of her daughter, what she said was, “About fucking time!”