Off Minor

by John Harvey

  And it was true.

  Not even when he badly overextended his borrowing in ’87 and was obliged to call in a receiver. Before the ink was dry on that particular bankruptcy declaration, Geoffrey was registering another company under his wife’s name. Within a month, he had signed an exclusive contract to supply a northern supermarket company with plastic bags for its new range of serve-yourself fruit and veg. Geoffrey had grinned and bought a new Rover, sent his wife for a fortnight’s rest and restoration at Ragdale Hall and achieved similar effects for himself with a course of vitamin injections and a discreet Asian masseuse moonlighting from the Star Sun Lounge, Stockport.

  For the next year he played one bank off against another, changed his accountant about as often as most men change their boxer shorts and faked a time and motion study at his main factory to persuade his largely immigrant work force to take a cut in pay. Back on top and in danger of becoming too conspicuously solvent, Geoffrey moved house and home some forty miles off the mainland to the Isle of Man. Here, from a six-bedroomed extravaganza on Bradda Head, he could enjoy fresh air, an uninterrupted view across the sea to Ireland and significantly lower tax levels. A private plane, shared with a select group of like-minded businessmen, meant that he could be back among the action inside the hour.

  At forty, Geoffrey Morrison had a half-share in a couple of race horses, a steadily improving golf handicap, an open line of credit at a casino in Douglas and several photographs of himself shaking hands with the stars—Frankie Vaughan, Clinton Ford, Bernie Winters. He wore tailored suits, beneath which he flaunted brightly colored braces, wide silk ties and a relatively flat stomach. Half an hour in the pool three times a week, doing lengths, that and the exercise bike he rode while he was dictating memos.

  When he arrived at his brother’s house, the morning after Michael had returned from the hospital, Geoffrey was wearing a light gray suit with a dark red stripe, midnight blue braces and a tie in which the predominant colors were yellow and orange. The milkman was still delivering further around the crescent and the lights of the hire car that had met Geoffrey at the airport were still shining. Even the media had yet to arrive.

  “Lorraine, sweetheart! You poor darling, what a thing to have happened. It’s too much to hope there’s any news? And Michael. Where’s Michael? My God! What’ve you done to yourself? You’re limping.”

  Oblivious to his brother’s embarrassment, Geoffrey took him in his arms and hugged him tightly; Lorraine, red-eyed, looking on.

  “I don’t understand …” Michael began,

  “Of course you don’t. How could you? A thing like this, your own child, how could you be expected to understand? How could anyone? Lorraine, sweetheart, you don’t mind me saying so, but you look awful.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” Michael said. “I meant you. What are you doing here?”

  Geoffrey’s eyes widened with surprise. “The fact neither of you thought to ring me, I can live with. Put it down to the surprise, shock. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care. I came as soon as I could.”

  “Geoffrey, I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” Michael said. “I just didn’t think. I haven’t been able to think about anything. But, really, there’s nothing you can do.”

  “Do? A time like this.” He caught hold of Lorraine’s hands and squeezed. “I knew I had to be with you, for now at least, express my sympathy, show how I felt. How we both feel, Claire and myself.”

  Lorraine had seen Michael’s brother no more than twice before the wedding, four or five times after. For the wedding, Geoffrey had sent a small truckload of presents from Harrods, worn a white three-piece suit and had the time of his life splashing champagne into the guests’ glasses, dancing with anyone who was fool enough to let him, trying in vain to persuade Michael to join him on the small stage in “All I Have to Do is Dream,” the Morrison Brothers in close harmony, Geoffrey singing lead. “Come on, Michael. We used to sing this all the time at home, remember?” Michael swore to Lorraine later he didn’t recall singing it once.

  They had made one visit over to the island, a week during most of which Geoffrey had been called back to one business meeting or another, leaving Lorraine and Michael in the company of Geoffrey’s wife, Claire, and the seals that splashed off the rocks into the coldness of the sea. Since Claire’s routine seemed to consist of rising in time for lunch and then immersing her nose in Home and Garden or the new Jilly Cooper, the seals proved rather the better company.

  That aside, Geoffrey had descended on them occasionally; usually unannounced, staying long enough to drink a cup of tea, make a few phone calls and rebuke Michael for his lack of ambition.

  “Lorraine,” Geoffrey was saying, “what’re the chances of you rustling us all up some breakfast? Times like this, we need to hit the carbohydrates as hard as we can.”

  Touching a hand to Lorraine’s back, he shepherded them towards the kitchen. “And you,” he said, looking sideways at Michael, “what the hell have you managed to do to your leg?”

  Twenty-seven

  Jack Skelton had a freshly jaded look, suffering as he had from his daughter’s latest breakfast sport. The game was easy and there didn’t seem to be too many rules. The way it was played was to come into the kitchen smiling, brush a kiss across your father’s cheek on the way to the Rice Pops, then open the daily paper at the home news, pages two and three. “Oh, look, Dad, I see you’ve snatched all the headlines again. Black man awarded forty thousand after police beat him up in a racist frenzy and then made up a case against him. Another ESDA test shows officers changed their interview notes to secure a conviction. Accusations of perjury after the police’s own video of a demonstration showed evidence of arrest bore little or no relationship to what had actually happened.” All of this delivered in the cheery, upbeat manner of Radio One. “Envy you your job satisfaction, Dad. Knowing how much you’re respected, admired, working for the good of the community.”

  Skelton knew what would happen if he argued, tried to explain. The smiles would disappear and in their place would be the face he recognized from their battles of a year before. Only this time, Kate older, the result would be different. How much it would take to drive her from the comparative comfort of her home to join her boyfriend in some squalid shared house or squat he didn’t know, but he realized it wasn’t much. He knew he was being tested and the importance of not being found wanting. A small-scale domestic equivalent of the taunting his officers suffered at the hands of the pickets in the mining strike of ’84. As Kate delighted in pointing out, the repercussions of that were still being heard, violent retaliation, loss of control.

  Skelton was not about to lose control.

  He cracked his knuckles as he sat behind his desk, rain whipping against the glass outside. Opposite him, Resnick slumped cross-legged, tired, a piece of toilet tissue hanging from the side of his face where he had cut himself shaving.

  Skelton straightened the papers on his desk with the eye of a precision engineer. “This woman up in Yorkshire, the bookseller …

  “Jacqueline Verdon.”

  “… no chance she’s pulling the wool over Patel’s eyes? Mother and daughter stashed away.”

  “Behind the false bookshelf?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Bit Sherlock Holmes, isn’t it?”

  “But possible.”

  Resnick uncrossed his legs and according to some strange symbiosis, his stomach rumbled loudly. “Patel reckons she was genuinely distressed, concerned. She could be faking it, but, on the whole, I’d back the lad’s judgment. All the same, we have had a word with the local station, asked them to keep an eye.”

  “And she’d no idea, this Verdon, where Diana Wills might have shot off to?”

  Resnick shook his head. “What she did bear out, Lorraine Morrison’s tales of Diana getting increasingly disturbed. For a couple of months now she’s been harping on about her kid; not Emily, a boy she had. Apparently, she’d been talking, Diana, about moving u
p there permanently. Hebden. Jacqueline Verdon’d been trying to convince her to give it a go.”

  “Maybe she leaned too hard.”

  “Could be, sir.”

  Skelton went over to the window, stared down into the street and the two lines of vehicles, almost unbroken, in and out of the city. Diana Wills could be anywhere by now and her daughter the same: together or apart. What did it do to a woman, the court taking away one child after the first had already been lost? Knowing she was there but unable to see her other than at the times laid down. All that he put up with from Kate to keep her another year at most.

  “Gut feeling, Charlie?”

  For a moment Resnick closed his eyes. “Mother’s gone off somewhere, feels she can’t cope. I don’t believe she’s got the daughter with her.”

  His eyes open again now, both men looking at one another, aware of what that meant.

  Geoffrey Morrison had arranged a surprise call on a couple of factories where he had work subcontracted. Catch them with their trousers down; keep them up to the mark. While Lorraine was still clearing away the breakfast things, he got Michael to one side and, not for the first time, offered him a place in the business. A year, eighteen months, you could be running the UK distribution, double your present salary, you’d be responsible only to me. As usual, Michael promised he would think about it. All he was thinking about was Emily: where she might be, what had happened to her. All the while he was trying to suppress the pictures of that other unfortunate girl that kept imprinting themselves, like sun spots, behind his eyes.

  Resnick walked into the Gents to find Millington adjusting his fly and whistling the theme from the Elgar Cello Concerto. Well, it made a change from Oklahoma.

  “Wife doing classical music this term, Graham?”

  “English art, sir. Plays all that stuff to get herself in the mood. Real catchy, some of it.”

  “In the Mood,” Resnick was thinking, Joe Loss’s signature tune. One of the first times he and Elaine went dancing, stumbling over one another’s feet to a pumped up version of “The March of the Mods” at the old Palais.

  “You all right, sir?”

  Resnick nodded.

  “Looked as if you were in a bit of pain. Not prostate problems, I hope?” Millington left, smiling maliciously, Resnick scarcely noticing, certain now that he knew where they would find Diana Wills.

  “Who was it you wished to see?” asked the duty officer at the desk.

  “For the second and I hope the last time,” sneered Geoffrey Morrison, “the senior officer in charge of investigating the disappearance of my niece.”

  “That would be Emily Morrison, would it, sir?”

  “Wonderful, officer. One of the new graduate entrants, I’m delighted to see.”

  “There’s Inspector Resnick or Superintendent Skelton, sir. Which would you be wanting?”

  Geoffrey Morrison counted to fifty in tens. “Which do you think?”

  With what bravery Elaine had finally come to see him, to the house where they had lived as man and wife, Resnick could no more than guess at. Her face gaunt in the stairs’ light, she had handed him her years of pain. Once a week we’d sit in this room, all of us and talk but mostly there wasn’t anyone to talk to. Least of all you, Charlie; least of all, you.

  “Lynn! Kevin! In here.”

  Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

  “Lynn, go and see Michael Morrison. See if he knows the name of his ex-wife’s doctor; if not the present one, the last. Trace it forward from there. One of the reasons he got custody at the divorce was Diana had been having psychiatric treatment. I doubt that he visited her, but he might remember the hospital. Find out when they last treated her; if they’re treating her now.

  “Kevin, contact all the other hospitals in the area, special care units, whatever. Right? Let’s not waste any more time.”

  The two detectives had only just left his office when the phone rang and it was Skelton, asking him to step along the corridor.

  “Charlie,” Skelton said, “this is Geoffrey Morrison, Michael Morrison’s brother. Detective Inspector Resnick.”

  The two men shook hands and stepped back. Fitter looking than his brother, but older, Resnick was thinking, that aside, you’d know they were family and close. And that Geoffrey spent more on what he was wearing than Michael likely earned in a month.

  “Mr. Morrison, quite reasonably, wanted to be sure that we were doing everything to find his niece and I think I’ve put him at ease on most points.” Skelton paused, eyes on Resnick’s face. “There is one thing, however … Mr. Morrison thinks we would get quicker results if we were to offer a reward.”

  “Ten thousand for information resulting in Emily’s recovery. Safely, of course.”

  Resnick was shaking his head.

  “I assure you it’s no idle offer.”

  “I’m sure it’s not.”

  “I can afford it and if it helps to bring my niece back …”

  “On the first front,” Resnick said, “I don’t doubt it. On the second …”

  “I’ve explained some of the difficulties as I see them,” Skelton said.

  “Without doubt,” said Resnick, “there would be a huge response. We’d be inundated with calls from all over the country, sightings from the Hebrides to Plymouth Hoe, and the net result would be to tie up personnel and computer time to little actual effect. We’d get hoaxers trying to talk their way into some easy money, psychics with a reputation to prove, worst of all, within hours your brother and his wife would receive their first ransom call. If it can be avoided, I don’t think they should be put through that.”

  Skelton moved around his desk. “Trust us, Mr. Morrison. We’re doing everything that can be done.”

  Geoffrey Morrison looked from one officer to the other. The superintendent had a sense of how an executive should dress, even seemed to keep himself in good trim, but this other one … he wouldn’t let him within a hundred meters of the board room looking like that.

  “You know that if I choose,” Morrison said, “I can go straight from here to the office of a national newspaper and it’ll be all over their front page by the next edition?”

  Both Skelton and Resnick realized that was probably true; neither of them said a word, watching their visitor all his way to the door.

  “All right, for the time being, I’m prepared to wait. But you have to know, in case Emily isn’t found soon, I’m retaining the reward as an option.”

  “Thanks, Charlie,” Skelton said once Morrison had gone. “Thought I needed a little moral support.”

  Resnick nodded okay and his stomach lurched loudly.

  “Sounds,” said Skelton, “as if you could do with something more substantial.”

  Twenty-eight

  Resnick was on his way back into the building with a chicken breast and Brie on rye, a sardine and radicchio with crumbled blue cheese, when he almost collided with a woman standing at the inquiry desk. She was backing away from the square of window, set so low down that you risked slipping a disc bending towards it.

  “Oh, sorry!”

  “Sorry!”

  Resnick lost one of the sandwiches from his grasp, made a lunge towards it and missed. One of his feet slid out from underneath him so that, off balance, he slipped almost to the floor. Clutching the other sandwich to his chest, he steadied himself against the woman, one hand gripping her not insubstantial thigh. If both noticed this, neither saw fit to mention it.

  Apologizing again, Resnick pushed himself to his feet. Meanwhile, the woman retrieved his straying sandwich, all save for some curls of lettuce which had sprung clear.

  “You wouldn’t be Inspector Resnick?” she asked.

  Do you mean, Resnick wondered, that I have a choice? “The man at the desk said you’d be back at any minute.”

  “Here I am,” said Resnick. “Not before time. What was it about?”

  “The little girl. Emily—is it?—Morrison.”

  Resnick dumped the br
own paper bags on his desk and turned to look at his visitor. She was a little over medium height; dark, almost black hair pierced with gray and cut against the nape of her neck. She was wearing a loose skirt, dark blue, a paler blue sweater under a maroon jacket with deep pockets and padded shoulders. Resnick couldn’t be certain, but he thought she might be wearing contact lenses. He put her in her late thirties, early forties and he was underestimating by a good five years.

  “I’m Vivien Nathanson,” she said.

  All these years and Resnick was still uncertain about shaking hands: did it matter that ten minutes later the person had become a suspect in some heinous crime or was confessing to acts which made the imagination reel? He offered coffee instead.

  “I don’t suppose I could have tea?”

  “Of course.”

  “Black?”

  “Given the usual state of the milk, safest choice.” Resnick called into the CID room and Divine stirred himself from the shadow of Miss December to oblige.

  “I heard an appeal on the radio as I was driving to work. At the university. I teach.”

  She didn’t look as if she cleaned the floors.

  “Canadian Studies.”

  Resnick was mystified. He hadn’t realized there was such a thing as Canadian Studies. What was there to study, after all? Great Canadian inventors? The life cycle of the beaver? Trees? He knew an ambitious detective sergeant from Chesterfield who had arranged a sabbatical for himself, working with the Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta. Reckoned to have spent most of his time watching snow melt.

  “You’re interested in the identity of a woman seen near where the girl disappeared. I think it might have been me.”

  Divine knocked on the door and brought in the tea.

  “Where’s mine?” Resnick added.

  “Sorry, sir. Never said.”

  “I was in the crescent on Sunday afternoon, some time between three and four. I’m afraid I can’t be more specific.”