by John Harvey
He tried the handle and it turned.
“All right,” he called. “I’m coming in.”
“No!” The muffled voice stretched the word into two syllables.
“Stand well back,” Resnick warned.
“Open that door and I’ll use this fucking thing! Don’t think I’m fucking kidding!”
Resnick went in fast. Several piles of books had been strewn across the floor, mostly discarded paperback westerns and old copies of Reader’s Digest donated by well-wishers. More books, dog-eared, sat on shelves to one side: Leon Uris, Wilbur Smith. Of the three people inside the room, however, none was showing the least interest in reading.
One man, his feet bare within open leather sandals, sat on the floor, a soiled gray blanket with red stitching at the hem, covering his head and shoulders. Another, eyes closed and aimed at the ceiling, sat on a straightbacked chair, hand inside his open fly, thoughtfully masturbating.
The third, narrow-cheeked, gray-haired and bespectacled, stood clutching a butcher’s cleaver threateningly above one foot, from which, as if in preparation, he had pulled off both shoe and sock.
For some moments he didn’t look up at Resnick and then he did.
“Just heard a kid who thought he’d rediscovered bebop single-handed,” Resnick said. The man’s eyes flickered. “Bit like hearing somebody fluent in a language they don’t understand.”
The eyes flickered again, but aside from that the man didn’t move.
“Time was,” Resnick said, “you’d have blown him off the stand.”
“Aye, I daresay.”
“How about the cleaver?” Resnick asked, one cautious step closer.
The gray-haired man looked at the blunted blade, then at his foot. “Charlie, I think I’ll fucking do it this time. I think I will.”
Three
“She’s a lovely woman, that.”
“Jane?”
“Lovely.”
They were in a cab skirting the Lace Market, passing Ritzy’s on their right. The purple sign still shone above the door, although by now it was all locked up and the last dancers had made their way home. My place or yours? Resnick had been there on a few early, bachelor Saturday nights when it had been, simply, the Palais, and there were still couples quickstepping their way between the jivers. He remembered the women standing alone and sad-eyed at the end of the evening; men who prowled with something close to desperation, anxious to pull someone on to the floor before the last number faded.
“How old d’you think she is, Charlie? Tell me that.”
“Around thirty.”
“Too young for me, then, d’you think?”
Resnick looked at Ed Silver, leaning half against the window, half against the cab’s worn upholstery. His gray hair straggled thinly across his scalp and bunched in snagged folds around his ears, like the wool of an old sheep; one lens of his glasses was cracked and the frames bent where they had been trodden on and twisted not quite straight. His eyes were hooded and watery and refused to focus.
“No,” Resnick said. “Not a bit of it.”
Ed Silver eased himself further back and smiled.
When Resnick had talked Silver into handing him the butcher’s cleaver and walking peacefully downstairs, Jane Wesley had been grateful and surprised.
“You know him, don’t you?” she asked, spooning instant coffee into chipped mugs.
Resnick nodded.
“But before you went in there? There’s no way you could have known who he was.”
Resnick shook his head, gestured no to milk.
“I don’t know if I can let him stay. I mean, here, tonight.”
“He can come home with me.”
Her eyes widened; they were pale blue and seemed the wrong color for her face. “Are you sure?”
Resnick sighed. “Just for a bit. While he sorts himself out.” It wasn’t as if he didn’t see the dangers.
Jane Wesley sipped at her coffee thoughtfully. “That might take longer than you think.”
“Well,” said Resnick, “maybe he’s worth a little time.” He glanced over to where Silver was sitting in the near dark, fingering the air as if he could turn it into music. “Runner up in the Melody Maker poll three years running. Alto sax.”
Resnick put down his mug of coffee, almost untouched, and turned away.
“When was that?” said Jane Wesley to his back.
The cab pulled over by a stone wall, a black gate that was in need of fresh paint. Lights showed from one of the upstairs rooms and through the stained glass above the front door, an exercise to deter burglars. Resnick leaned down to the cab window and gave the young Asian driver a five-pound note, waiting for the change. The radio was turned low, an almost endless stream of what the Radio Trent DJ would probably call smooth late-night listening for night-owls.
Ed Silver was steadying himself against the wall, while a large black cat arched its back and fixed him with slanted, yellow eyes.
“This yours?” Silver asked.
“The house or the cat?”
“Either.”
“Both.”
“Huh.” Silver stood away from the wall and offered a hand towards the cat, who hissed and spat.
“Dizzy!” said Resnick reproachfully, opening the gate.
“There’s one thing I can’t stomach,” Ed Silver mumbled, following him along the twist of slabbed path, “it’s cats.”
Great! said Resnick to himself, turning the key in the lock.
Dizzy slid between his legs and raced for the kitchen. Miles came down the stairs from where he had doubtless been sleeping on Resnick’s bed and purred hopefully. Bud, skinny and timid, backed away at the sight of a stranger, until only the white smudge beside his nose could be seen in the furthest corner of the hall.
“Christ, Charlie! You’ve got three of the little buggers!”
“Four,” Resnick corrected. Somewhere, paw blissfully blind-folding his eyes, Pepper would be curled inside something, anything, sleeping.
“If I’d known that, I’d never have left the cleaver.”
He made up a bed in the room at the top of the house. It smelt damp, but no worse, Resnick was sure, than his guest had become used to. Even so, he fetched up a small electric fan beater and set it working in one corner. By the time he got back downstairs, Silver had swung his legs up on to the sofa in the living room and seemed sound asleep. Resnick went back and found a blanket, draping it over him, smelling the rancid, sickly-sweet smell of his clothing. Urine and rough red wine. Carefully, Resnick removed Silver’s glasses and set them down on the carpet, where Miles sniffed at them curiously to see if somehow they might be food.
By now it was past two and Resnick was wondering whether he would get any sleep himself at all. In the kitchen he ground coffee beans, shiny and dark, doled out food into the cats’ four colored bowls, examined the contents of the fridge for the makings of a sandwich.
The last time he had seen Ed Silver he had not long been wearing his sergeant’s stripes. Uniform to CID then back to uniform again: forging a career, following a plan. Silver had been guesting at a short-lived club near the top of Carlton Hill, so far out of the city that few people had found it. When Ed Silver had walked in, instrument cases under both arms, he’d looked around and scowled and called the place a morgue.
The first tune he’d tapped in a tempo that had the house drummer and bassist staring at each other, mouths open. Silver had maneuvered his alto through the changes of “I’ve Got Rhythm” at breakneck speed, but when he realized the locals were capable of keeping up, he’d let his shoulders sag a little, relaxed and enjoyed himself.
Chatting to Resnick afterwards, rolling cubes of ice around inside a tall glass of ginger ale, he’d talked of his first recording contract in seven years, a tour, later that year, of Sweden and Norway.
“See,” he’d said, stretching out both hands. “No shakes.” Then he’d laughed and set the glass on the back of one hand and after a few seconds the ice
cubes ceased to chink against the inside.
“See!” he’d boasted. “What’d I tell you?”
Resnick heard nothing more of him for over a year. There was a paragraph in one of the magazines, suggesting that he’d recorded in Oslo with Warne Marsh, but he never saw the album reviewed, or any announcement of its release. What he did read, near the foot of page two on a slow Saturday in the Guardian, was that Ed Silver had fallen face first from the stage at the Nuffield Theater, Southampton, suffering concussion and a nose broken in two places.
Someone had done a good job on the nose, Resnick thought, finishing his sandwich, looking over at Ed Silver, fast out on his sofa. It looked to be the part of his face in the best shape.
He went quietly to the stereo and set Art Pepper on the turn-table. Midway through “Straight Life,” he thought he saw Ed Silver’s sleeping face twist into a smile. As the tune ended, Silver suddenly pushed himself up on to one arm and, eyes still closed tight, said, “Charlie? Didn’t you used to have a wife?” Without waiting for an answer, he lowered himself back down and resumed his sleep.
Four
Karen Archer found Tim Fletcher at around the time Resnick was beginning his walk down through the Lace Market towards Aloysius House. That is, she found something sprawled across the top of the metal steps which led up from the university grounds to the pedestrian walkway; something dark, wedged half-in, half-out of the first set of doors. An old bundle of discarded clothing, bin-liners stuffed with rubbish and dumped. It wasn’t until she was almost at the head of the steps that she realized what was lying there was a person and at first she took it to be a drunk. What told her otherwise was the tubing of a stethoscope protruding from beneath it.
Karen held herself steady against the railing, staring down at the surface of the ring road, rainbowed lightly with petrol. The chipped metal was cold against the palms of her hands, cold on her forehead when she lowered her face against it. When the worst of her panic had passed, when her breathing had finally steadied, only then did she go back to the body. Get closer. Possibly three minutes, four.
She held the door open with her hip and dragged, then pulled, Fletcher inside. No part of him seemed to be moving, other than what she moved for him. As best she could, Karen turned him on to his back and lowered her face until it was close to his; her fingers fidgeted at his wrists, searching for a pulse. She tried not to look at his wounds, along which dark knots of blood had begun to coagulate.
“Tim!” She shouted his name as if the force of the cry might waken him. “Tim!”
With a soft swoosh an articulated lorry moved beneath the bridge, its lights catching Karen’s face as she stood. Fletcher’s Walkman lay close by the inner door and, irrationally, she stooped to make sure it was in the off position, the battery not wasting.
She hurried through to the hospital, willing her legs to run but getting no response, the squeak, squeak of her trainers on the hard, grooved rubber following her across. She didn’t know whether she was leaving Tim Fletcher alive or dead.
It took several moments for Karen to make clear what had happened, but from there all was quiet speed and efficiency. If the casualty officer who spoke to Karen was surprised, he did nothing to betray it. All she saw of Tim were blankets, a stretcher being wheeled between curtains. All she heard were the same quiet voices. Transfusion. Consciousness. Surgery. They sat her in a corner and gave her, eventually, tea, sweet and not quite warm, in a ribbed and colored plastic cup.
“Is he all right?”
“Try not to worry.”
“Will he be all right?”
Unhurried footsteps, walking away.
“God!” Tim Fletcher had exclaimed, that first time in her room. “God!” Staring at her face, her breasts. “You’re perfect!”
“Miss?”
Karen’s fingers tightened around the cup, glancing up. The police officer had gingery hair and a face that reminded her of her younger brother; he held his helmet against his knee, tapping it lightly, arhythmically, against the blue of his uniform.
“I was wondering,” he said, “if you might answer a few questions?”
Karen’s chest tightened beneath her purple jumper and she began to cry.
The officer glanced around, embarrassed.
“Miss …”
The crying wasn’t going to stop. He squatted down in front of her, took the cup from her hands and rested it on the floor beside his helmet. In the three months he’d been on the force, Paul Houghton had stepped between four youths squaring up with bottles after closing; he had lifted a panicking three-year-old from a second-floor window and out on to a ladder, close to the end of one shift, he’d followed screams and curses to an alley back of a pub and found a middle-aged man on all fours, the dart that his girlfriend had hurled at his face still embedded, an inch below the eye. In each case, he’d acted, never really stopped to think. Now he didn’t know what to do.
“It’s okay,” he said, uncertain, reaching out to pat her hand. She grabbed hold of his fingers and squeezed them hard.
“Maybe you’d like another cup of tea?” he suggested.
When she shook her head, Karen’s breath caught and the tears became sobs. Inconsolable. Bubbles appeared at both nostrils and, with his free hand, Paul Houghton fished into his pocket and found a tissue, already matted with use.
“Here,” he said, dabbing gingerly.
Heads were turned, staring.
“Rotten bugger!” a woman shouted. “Leave the girl alone.”
“Stick ’em in a uniform,” commented another, “and they think they can do as they bloody like!”
“I’m sorry,” breathed Karen, using the soiled tissue to wipe round her eyes, finally to blow her nose.
“S’all right.”
He wasn’t like her brother, Karen thought, looking at him through blurred lashes, he was younger. She felt sorry for him then, beyond the mere platitude, meaning it.
Karen handed him back his scrappy tissue and he stuffed it out of sight, standing. The backs of his legs ached and he wanted to rub them, but didn’t. He took his notebook from his breast pocket.
“I shall have to ask you some questions,” he said, blushing.
Resnick had finally got to bed at four and found himself unable to sleep. Miles and Bud were a weight at the bottom of the covers and Ed Silver’s broken snoring filtered up from the floor below, nudging him where he didn’t want to go.
Didn’t you used to have a wife, Charlie?
No cats then and every penny counted. DC’s pay. Elaine had kept the house well, having been the one to see it first, boxed advert in the paper, must be viewed to be appreciated. Walking him round from room to room, hand in his or beneath the arm, guiding. That fireplace, Charlie. Look. Isn’t it wonderful?The mortgage had stretched them fine, his salary and hers; evenings of repapering and painting; front and back garden some nights till dark. Just as well I’m working, Charlie. Without that, I don’t know where we’d be.
Back in Lenton, Resnick’s answer, unspoken, St Anne’s or Sneinton, a two-bedroom terraced with a bricked-in yard and a front lawn you could clip in fifteen minutes with a pair of shears.
Time a-plenty for moving, he might have said. When we need the room.
All that early interest in real estate, it prepared Elaine for the man she was to go off with, eventually, when the tacky weeks of subterfuge were at an end. That Tuesday afternoon when Resnick had driven through Woodthorpe, not his usual route at all, cutting down from Mapperley Plains, he had seen the dark blue Volvo first, parked with its near-side wheels on the curb, close to the For Sale sign at the gate. A man in a three-piece suit, not tall, keys in hand, walking towards it. And a pace behind him, buttoning up the tailored jacket that she wore for work, Elaine. Still smiling.
How many other empty properties she had visited with her lover, how many evenings she had passed in his Volvo, discreetly parked, Resnick had not wanted to know. Later, all out in the open, in court, nothing left to lose,
Elaine had made sure that he did.
Knowing hadn’t meant that he understood. Not exactly, not quite. The mystery of living with someone for so long and never really knowing them, little more than how they like their tea, the wrist on which they wore a watch, which angle they prefer to lie in bed.
Not long ago there had been three letters: the first two close together, the third after a gap of several months. There had been no mistaking the writing and by the time the last arrived, curiosity had got the better of him. He had read the first sentences quickly, the first communication from Elaine in almost ten years; glanced at the end, where she had written, Love. After tearing it, he had taken it into the kitchen and burned it.
Ed Silver had stopped snoring; the cats were curled into each other and still. Without meaning to, Resnick slept.
“How’d it go at the hospital, Ginge? Waste of time?”
Paul Houghton fidgeted with a collar that was always too tight. “Not exactly, Sarge.”
“Let’s be having it, then.”
Only a brief way into Houghton’s verbal report, the sergeant interrupted him, picked up the phone and dialed the uniformed inspector on night duty.
“If you’ve a minute, sir, you might care to come through … Right, sir. Yes.”
He set the receiver down and looked across at Paul Houghton with a half-grin. “Making a bit of a habit of this, aren’t you? Darts, sharp implements.”
Houghton shrugged. “Suppose so, Sarge.”
“Girl as found him, all right, was she?”
“Upset, Sarge, naturally, but …”
“No, I mean was she all right?”
He could feel the red rising up his neck. “I didn’t really …”
“Held her hand, did you? You know, make her feel better.”
Paul Houghton was blushing so strongly that the backs of his eyes had begun to water.
Five
Season of mists and bollocking fruitfulness! Okay, it meant, with any luck, he’d be back in the First XV, a few jugs after the match, but that apart, what was it? Gray mornings when your car wouldn’t start on account of the tossing damp and alternate Saturdays when, instead of playing a proper game, you were on overtime babysitting a bunch of pissed-up morons with shit for brains and arseholes where their mouths were supposed to be. Christ! Mark Divine thought, if there was one thing that summed autumn up for him, that was it. Hanging around the railway station waiting for some excursion special so you could crocodile a mob from Manchester or Liverpool or Chelsea (they were the worst, Chelsea, the ones for whom he saved his real loathing, no doubt about it) across the river to trade insults and worse with the Forest fans massed at the Trent End.