by John Harvey
It lay against her one decent pair of heels, daring her to pick it up.
“You didn’t see Nancy that evening? Later that evening? Christmas Eve?”
“I told you, didn’t I? I never went out.”
Slowly, not wanting to, Michelle bent down towards the knife. Tried to imagine it being raised in anger in a man’s hand.
“’Chelle? Michelle?”
A second before the voice, she heard the board, loose along the landing, squeak. Breath caught hard in her mouth, she pulled the jacket back across the knife, pushed both with her foot further back inside, shut the wardrobe door.
“Here you are.” Smiling that way with his mouth, parted just a little, twisted down. “Wondered where you were.”
She was certain, the way it was pumping, he must hear her heart.
“What’s up?”
Afraid to speak, Michelle shook her head from side to side.
“That cooking,” he nodded back downstairs, “all it is, chop everything up small, meat and that, stick it in a jar of peanut butter.” He winked. “Reckon we could try that.”
Michelle had steadied her breathing enough to move away from the wardrobe door.
“Natalie sleeping is she?”
“I’ll just see …”
Gary caught her arm as she went past. Something had got stuck in the fine straggle of hairs beside his lip.
“Wondered what you’d come up here for.”
“I was just tidying round. Those things …”
“Oh, yeh? Thought you might’ve had other ideas. You know …” His eyes grazed the bed. “… Karl out the way for a change.”
“They’ll be back …” Michelle began.
One hand reaching for the belt to her jeans, Gary laughed. “Oh no, they won’t.”
All the while they lay there, blessed by the squeak and roll of the wire mattress, Michelle thought about the knife. Gary above her, thrusting down, eyes clamped tight, mouth opening only to call her that name she hated, over and over, finally to cry out; through it all she could only see the swelling of the blade, feel its point.
When he had collapsed sideways, pulled away from her, face down into the sheet, she felt gingerly down there, certain amongst all that wetness there would be blood.
“Michelle?”
“Yes?”
“Be a sweetheart, make us a cup of tea.”
She was on her way downstairs, sweater and jeans, hair uncombed, when Josie arrived back with the kids.
“Jesus, girl! Look like you been pulled through a hedge backwards.” And, leaning close enough to whisper in her ear, “Not been knocking you around again, has he?”
Michelle shook her head. “Not the way you mean.”
Josie rolled her eyes. “Oh, that! You know, when I was—what?—seventeen, eighteen, I used to reckon if I didn’t have some bloke poking away at me every night the world was going to come to a sodding end. Now …,” she shook her head and looked at Michelle knowingly, “… most of the time I couldn’t give a toss. ’Fact, far as Brian’s concerned, sometimes that’s all I will give.”
She was laughing so much now she had to grab hold of Michelle so as not to lose her balance. Josie. By Michelle’s reckoning, she was all of twenty-one.
Twenty-six
Lynn woke slippery with sweat and it was too many moments before she realized she had been dreaming. The blanket she had pulled on to the duvet in the night to combat the cold was wound, tight like a rope, between her legs; the duvet itself had been thrown to the floor. T-shirt, knickers, socks, all were drenched. Coils of dark hair clung fast to her head.
In her dream she had been between the henhouses, walking in a nightgown she had never owned, long and stiff and white like something from Rebecca or Jane Eyre, when she had heard the sound.
As she ran, moonlight threw shadows against the packed earth, the worn boards of the henhouse walls. A cry, high and shrill, like the mating of feral cats: except it wasn’t that. At first she thought the high, wooden door was locked, but as she threw her weight against it, she realized it was only jammed fast. Little by little it gave, then sprang suddenly backwards and she stumbled in.
Through the high, meshed windows the moon shone with a muted fall. Her father had climbed to the high conveyor and now he hung there, attached by the neck; his throat had been cut. Spurred by the silence, flies thrummed their wings, blue, and busied themselves in the dark and drying blood.
As Lynn fell fast against his legs, the body tore and tipped and spilled against her. His feet and hands were bony and cold and hard and when his eyes met hers they smiled.
She screamed herself awake. The sheet and pillow were soaked. Lynn stripped them from the bed and dropped them to the floor beside the blanket and her clothes. For several moments she stood with her head bent towards her knees, steadying her breath. It was twenty-five past three. Against all her judgment, what she wanted most of all was to phone home, make sure her father was all right. She pulled on her dressing gown and tied it tight, filled the kettle and switched it on, brought a towel from the bathroom and vigorously rubbed at her hair.
If anything had happened, her mother would have rung her. And she had worries enough already, without picking up the pieces of Lynn’s dreams.
Lynn could remember her, inevitable apron smudged with flour, sitting on the side of the narrow bed Lynn had shared with a family of somewhat disabled dolls and a ragged panda, patting her hand and shushing, “Just a dream, my petal. All it was, a silly old dream.”
Lynn had forgotten to buy any milk on the way home and so she drank half a cup of tea, black, before going back into the bathroom and standing under the shower. It was only then, hot water cascading from her head and shoulders, that she began to cry.
Worried about the lack of progress over Nancy Phelan, worried by the unfamiliar drawn expression he had noted on Lynn Kellogg’s face, the dark shadows beneath her eyes, worried by his seemingly unresolvable predicament over New Year’s Eve, Resnick had gone to bed convinced that he would never be able to sleep and had slept like the proverbial log. It had taken Dizzy’s insistence to spin him awake, the cat’s paws working rhythmically into his pillow with something close to desperation. It was a few minutes short of six o’clock, but Resnick felt as if he had overslept, head coddled in cotton wool.
Dizzy waited outside the bathroom while Resnick showered, sharpening his claws against the frame of the door. The other cats were in the kitchen, waiting to greet him, Pepper purring with anticipation from inside an old colander he had commandeered as his favored sleeping quarters.
Coffee brewing, cat food distributed into colored bowls, Resnick concentrated on layering alternate slices of smoked ham and Jarlsberg on to half-toasted rye bread. He was adding a touch of Dijon mustard when Lynn phoned, saying she needed to talk.
“Something about Gary James?” Resnick asked.
“No, it’s personal,” she said.
“All right,” Resnick said, “give me half an hour.”
He pressed the pieces of toast together into a sandwich and cut them in two, poured the coffee, took both back upstairs to finish getting dressed. Before leaving the house, he called Millington at home.
“Graham, wasn’t sure if I’d catch you.”
“Only just.” Millington had been sitting at the circular table in the kitchen, chewing his way through an assortment of bran and wheat-germ that was about as appealing as the floor of his old nan’s budgie’s cage.
“At your age, Graham,” his wife insisted, “it doesn’t pay to take chances. You have to keep your arteries open.” She’d been browsing through those leaflets she brought back from the well-woman clinic again, Millington had thought.
“Looks like I shall be a few minutes late,” Resnick said. “Hold the fort for me, will you?”
Millington, of course, was only too pleased. Much of his sergeant’s life, Resnick suspected, was spent waiting for some unforeseen and appalling accident to befall his superiors. At which time,
only he, Graham Millington, mind alert, shoes buffed, and hair gleaming, would be ready to step into the breech. His moment of glory. What was it the dance director said to little Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street? “You’re coming out of that dressing room a nobody, but you’re coming back a star.”
The postman was at the end of the drive when Resnick left, sorting through a vast bundle of mail.
“Not all for me, I hope?” Resnick said, scarcely breaking his stride.
The postman shook his head. “Just the usual. Readers’ Digest, Halifax, the AA, and free garlic bread if you order one large or two medium pizzas.”
Resnick raised a hand in thanks. Exactly the kind of postal worker there should be more of, sifted through the junk mail for you so all you had to do was transfer it directly to the bin.
Lynn was waiting for him at the door, had heard his footsteps, heavy across the courtyard and turned up the flame under the Italian coffee pot she had recently bought. The coffee you put, ground, into a small perforated container which stood over cold water in the bottom section; light the gas and not so many minutes later the water had somehow pumped up and there was your coffee, strong and black and ready to pour. In truth, she doubted she’d used it more than a few times since buying it in the autumn. She hoped the coffee was strong enough; she hoped it didn’t taste stewed.
“Good smell,” Resnick said as soon as he was inside.
“You want some toast? I’m going to have toast.”
“No, thanks,” looking for somewhere to put his coat, “I’ve eaten already.” And then, “All right, why not? Just one.”
“Here, give me that,” Lynn said, and hung his raincoat from one of the hooks just inside the door.
The radio was playing quietly in a corner of the room, not quite tuned. Trent-FM. “Let me turn that off.”
“No, it’s okay.”
She switched it off anyway and Resnick mooched around the room while she was in the small kitchen, reading the titles of the books on the shelf, glancing at an old copy of the Mail, the back page with the headline, FOREST FOR THE DROP? Among the photographs above the fireplace was one of a happy Lynn, chubby and smiling, in her father’s arms. Five years old? The pictures of her former boyfriend, the cyclist, seemed to have pedaled off into the dustbin.
“Butter or marge?”
“Sorry?”
“On the toast, butter or …”
“Oh, butter.”
Resnick settled himself in the center of the two-seater settee, Lynn at an angle on a chair.
“How’s the coffee?”
“Fine.”
“Sure it’s strong enough?”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s worrying you, what’s happened?”
She told him about her dream. Neither spoke for a little while.
“You’re bound to be frightened,” he eventually said. “For yourself as well as for him. It’s a difficult time.”
Lynn pulled her legs towards her chest, wrapped her arms around her knees. “If it is cancer,” Resnick said, “what are his chances?”
“They won’t really say.”
“And treatment? Chemotherapy?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She was focusing on a spot on the side wall, anything rather than look at him directly. “They cut it out. As much as they can. He’ll probably have to have a colostomy. That’s a …”
“I know what it is.”
“I can’t imagine … he’ll never cope with that, he never will. He …”
“Better that than the other thing.”
“I don’t even know if that’s true.” Her knee banged against the chair as she got up. She wasn’t going to cry in front of him, she wasn’t. Fingers digging into the flesh of her hands, she stood by the small window, staring out.
“I remember,” Resnick went on, “when my father went into hospital. Trouble with his breathing, his lungs. Half a dozen stairs and he sounded like one of those old engines, winding down. He went into the City for tests, treatment, a rest. They gave him, I don’t know, some kind of antibiotics. Physiotherapy. I’d go in sometimes to visit, I might just have been over that way, you know, passing, and this woman would be there, white tunic and trousers, pleasant but serious, deadly serious. ‘Come on now, Mr. Resnick, we have to teach you to breathe.’ ‘What does she think I’ve been doing, Charlie, these past sixty years if it’s not breathing?’ he used to say as soon as she’d gone.” He sighed. “I suppose they did what they could, but he hadn’t made anything easy. Even as a kid, I can scarcely picture him without a cigarette in his hand.” Resnick looked across at her. “But they did what they could. Got him so he was able to come out of hospital, come home for another few months.”
Lynn turned sharply. “And you think it was worth it?”
“Yes, on balance I do.”
“Did he?”
Resnick hesitated. “I think so. But truly, no, I don’t know.”
“He didn’t say.”
“Oh, he moaned. Complained. I won’t lie to you, there were days when he said he wished they’d let him die; he wished he were dead.”
“And yet you can still say it was right? For him to go through all that discomfort, the pain, the … loss of dignity, all for what? A few extra months?”
Resnick drank some more coffee, giving himself time. “There were things he was able to say, we were able to say to one another, I think they were important.”
“To you, yes?”
“Lynn, listen, you’ve got to realize, hard as it might be, this isn’t just about him. About your dad. It’s about you too. Your life. If he … if he dies, whenever he dies, one way or another you’ve got to find a way of living with that. And you will.”
She let herself cry now and he stood close to her, a hand on her shoulder and for a short while she rested her head sideways against his arm, so that her face lay on his wrist and hand.
“Thanks,” she said then and got to her feet and blew her nose and wiped her eyes and carried the empty cups and the plates back into the kitchen and rinsed them under the sink. “We’d better be going,” she said. “It’s not as if there’s nothing to do.”
Cossall was pacing the corridor, drawing heavily on his fifth or sixth cigarette of the morning. “Charlie, in here. You’ve got to hear this.”
Resnick checked with Millington that everything was proceeding smoothly, then followed Cossall to the interview room, getting the details on the way.
Miriam Richards had been employed at the hotel on Christmas Eve, casual work as a waitress with which she augmented her student grant. On this particular evening she had been assigned to one of the larger banqueting rooms, shared for the occasion by the senior management of one of the larger department stores and an ad-hoc group of dentists, dental nurses, and technicians. At a little after half past eleven, Miriam had been clearing away the last of the coffee cups when a man had slid his hand between her legs, pushing the black skirt she was forced to wear hard between her thighs. No way it was any kind of an accident. Miriam had swung round, told him to keep his hands to himself, and slapped her right hand across his face. There was a cup and saucer in it at the time. The man screamed and landed with a jarring thump on his knees; amidst a lot of blood were the fragments of not one, but two broken teeth. Miriam thought there was poetic justice in this, until she found out the man worked not with fillings but furniture.
Of course, at first he denied as much as touching Miriam, never mind goosing her; all he would eventually admit as a possibility was that, being a little the worse for wear for drink, he had lost his footing getting up and reached out to steady himself.
“Bullshit!” Miriam declared resolutely, the term sounding somewhat at odds with her Cheshire accent. But she was doing American Studies and took the aculturation seriously.
When the member of the hotel’s management team instructed her to apologize, she told him in no uncertain terms where to put his skirt and apron. She was on her way out of the hotel, irritable and pr
epared to walk back to her digs in Lenton, when she saw a car pull up beside a woman just in front of her. The driver shouted a name out of the window, jumped out when the woman didn’t stop, ran after her, and grabbed her arm.
Miriam had held back for a while, worried in case what had just happened to her was about to happen to someone else. But after a few minutes of raised voices, mostly his, a little arm tugging, the woman shrugged her shoulders and seemed to change her mind. Anyway, she walked around to the passenger side of the car and got in, the driver followed suit, and they drove off, turning left down the hill.
“Descriptions?” Resnick asked.
Cossall grinned. “Talk to her yourself.”
Miriam was wearing a blue denim jacket with a button reading Spinsters on the Rampage on one lapel, a larger one, Hillary for President, on the other. She wore a faded denim shirt and a yellow roll-neck under the jacket, black wool leggings, and Doc Martens. She greeted Resnick with a wary half-grin.
“I’m sorry to ask you all this again …”
“S’okay.”
“But this woman, the one you saw get into the car, how old would you say she was?”
Miriam rolled her tongue and Resnick realized she was chewing gum. “Could have been a couple of years older than me, not a lot more.”
“Early twenties, then?”
“Yes.”
“And she was wearing?”
Miriam glanced over at Cossall before she answered. “Like I said, silvery top, matching tights, short black skirt; she had this red coat across her shoulders. Bit posey, I thought. Still …” She looked from Resnick to Cossall and back again. “It’s her, isn’t it? The one who’s missing. Jesus Christ, I could have done something, stopped it.”
“I doubt you could have done anything,” Resnick said. “You waited to see what was going to happen, that’s more than most people would have done. But she got into the car of her own accord. There was no reason for you to interfere.”
“But when I heard about it, on the news, back home, you know, over the holiday—I’m so stupid!—I never as much as thought.”