by John Harvey
“I’ll not be gone long,” said Skelton, moving around on the spot, warming up. “Make it a short one today.”
Oh, good, thought Resnick, following Carew towards the doors, just a quick four miles. Must remember when I get back tonight, fit in a few push-ups while I’m waiting for the omelet to cook.
A youth with gelled green hair and a gold ring through his left nostril was sitting opposite the inquiry window, dribbling blood and snot into his hands. At the window a middle-aged man in a suit, navy blue pinstripe, was explaining to the officer on duty exactly where he had left his car, exactly why he’d been stupid enough to leave his briefcase on the back seat. Inside the next set of doors, a uniformed constable was squatting down beside a girl of nine or ten, trying to get her to spell out her address.
The custody sergeant was in a heated argument with one of the detainees about the exact dimensions of the man’s cell and whether or not they contravened the Geneva Convention. Somebody was crying. Somebody else was singing the Red Flag. Not, Resnick assumed, someone on the Force. “You wouldn’t fucking believe it,” Mark Divine was saying on his way downstairs. “The whole place covered in brown sauce. Not just the kitchen, the living room, everywhere. Before they’d left they’d emptied half-a-dozen tins of baked beans into the bath.” The young DC he was with didn’t know whether to be skeptical or impressed. “Packet soup in one of them things you sit on.”
“The toilet?” suggested the DC.
“No! One of those women things with taps on.”
“A bidet,” said Resnick, going past.
“Probably. Yes, sir. Thanks.”
“Up there,” Resnick said to Carew, pointing ahead.
“What the fuck they want one of those for?” Divine said to the DC as they left. “Not as if they haven’t got a bath.”
“We can talk in here,” said Resnick, showing Carew into his office and offering him a chair. “Tea? Coffee?”
Carew shook his head. “I hope this isn’t going to take long.”
“Shouldn’t think so,” said Resnick. “If you hang on, I’ll organize some tea for myself.”
He closed the door on Carew and moved out of sight, picking up the nearest unused phone and dialing the number of the woman officer detailed to deal with cases of reported rape.
Maureen Madden had passed her sergeant’s exam almost a year to the day before she got her stripes. Twenty-nine and married, wanting to have a baby, not exactly eager for it, but suspecting, half-knowing that the further she turned past thirty, the more pressing that need would become. Let me get my promotion, she’d kept telling her husband, get a year in the job behind me, then we’ll see. They kept offering her things she didn’t want—traffic, community liaison. Then the rape suite. Women’s things. Soft issues. The times she’d arrived at a pub, fight going down, bottles flying, you hang on here, her male colleagues had said, no sense you going in there, you wait outside.
As if she were afraid. As if she couldn’t handle herself. She had gone in on her own once, up on the Alfreton Road, just short of closing, case of having to. Bloke had come out on his hands and knees, most of one ear left behind inside. She’d stepped in between three of these fellers squaring up, two on to one, broken pint glasses in their hands. If she’d been a man they’d have set on her, the lot of them, she was certain. As it was, they’d grinned like great kids, there’d been a lot of backslapping and some language, and they’d helped the injured man look for his ear while Maureen had radioed for an ambulance.
She knew she’d been lucky.
Until the night she’d run across to the Asian shop, been watching a video with her husband and got this sudden craving for custard. Tinned custard. Two youths had grabbed her from behind and had her on the floor in seconds, right there on the pavement. Not yet ten-thirty. She’d struggled and fought, kicked and screamed, still they’d torn her tights, kicked her face, left, one of them, a bruise the size of a fist below her breast. One white, one black, Maureen had been unable to identify them, they had never been caught.
All right, Maureen had said, I’ll run the rape suite. All right.
“Hello,” she said to Karen when Lynn Kellogg brought her in. “I’m Maureen. Maureen Madden. You must be Karen. Come over here and have a seat. The doctor won’t be long.”
“I can leave any time I choose?” Carew asked, seeking confirmation.
“Absolutely,” Resnick said.
“Get up and walk out of your office?”
Resnick nodded.
“Right out of the station and no one will lift a finger to try and stop me?”
“Not a finger.”
“Right,” Carew said, making no attempt to move.
“Now,” said the doctor, adjusting her glasses, “just one more swab and we’re through.”
“I’d have thought,” Resnick said, “that might be a bit of an understatement, pretty pissed off. Dropping you like that.”
Carew shrugged well-rounded shoulders. “Happens, doesn’t it’?”
“Does it?”
“Don’t tell me it’s never happened to you.”
Resnick leaned sideways a little in his chair, made no reply.
“Happily married then, are we?” grinned Carew.
Cocky little shit! thought Resnick. Getting more sure of himself by the minute. “Not any more,” he said. “As it happens.”
“Then you must know what I mean,” Carew said. “Unless it was you that left her.”
What is it about you, Carew, Resnick thought, makes me want to behave the way all those kids selling Socialist Worker outside Marks imagine I behave all the time?
“What did you want to do to him?” Carew asked, reading Resnick’s silence correctly.
Resnick saw him, Elaine’s estate agent, walking away from that empty house where he and Elaine had just made love, the suit, the Volvo and the keys. “Hit him,” Resnick said.
“And did you?”
“No.”
“Not ever?”
“Never.”
Carew smiled. “I bet you wish you had.”
Resnick smiled back. “Satisfying, is it?”
Ian Carew’s smile faltered.
Resnick leaned his weight in the opposite direction. His stomach made a low, groaning noise and he remembered he had had nothing for lunch.
“And Karen?”
“What about her?”
“You must have felt like hitting her. Lying. Seeing this man behind your back.”
Carew shook his head. “I don’t think you understand, Inspector.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t hit women.”
Maureen Madden was sitting to one side of Karen, Lynn Kellogg to the other. Both women were looking at her and Karen was looking at the pattern in the carpet, noticing a scattering of small burn marks. Cigarettes, she thought. She had that minute stubbed one out herself in the ashtray; now she lit another, waited till the first swathes of light gray smoke were rising to the ceiling. “I’m not going to press charges,” she said.
Lynn and Maureen Madden exchanged glances over her head.
“We’ll help you,” Maureen said gently. “Every step of the way.”
“I’m sure,” Karen said.
“What’s worrying you?” Maureen asked. “Is it the court, giving evidence?”
Karen shook her head.
“Ian,” suggested Lynn, “are you frightened he might come after you?”
“I’m not frightened.”
“Then what is it?”
Smoke veiled the brightness of her eyes. “It’s over. It’s happened. That’s an end to it.”
“No,” Lynn said too sharply, a warning look from Maureen.
“You agreed to come in,” Maureen reminded her.
“I was upset. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Look at your face,” said Lynn.
“It’s not only your face,” said Maureen. “Remember what he did.”
“Oh,” said Karen, turning for the fi
rst time towards her, “you don’t have to worry about that. I was the one it happened to.”
“Then stop it happening again.”
“How do I do that?”
“Help us put him away.”
Karen lowered her eyes, shook her head.
“If he gets away with this …” Lynn began.
“Then don’t let him.”
“Without you, without your evidence,” said Maureen, “we wouldn’t stand a chance. It probably wouldn’t even come to court.”
“He’ll get off scot-free,” Lynn said. “He can do it again.”
“Think of other women,” said Maureen.
Karen squashed her cigarette into the ashtray as she got to her feet. “You! You think of other bloody women. It’s your job, not mine.” She reached past the two police officers for her coat. The corners of her eyes were red and blurred with tears.
Lynn moved towards the door, as if to prevent Karen leaving, but Maureen Madden shook her head. “If you’ll wait a few minutes,” Maureen said, “I’ll arrange for you to be driven back.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll take you back,” said Lynn.
“I’ll walk.”
Thanks, Lynn thought. Thanks for that. Thanks a whole lot! She opened the door and stood aside.
Resnick had the phone in his hand at the first ring. He listened and set the receiver back down, standing up. “Excuse me a minute,” he said to Carew. “Something’s come up.”
“I’ll go,” Carew said, beginning to stand himself.
“No,” said Resnick. “Wait. Five minutes, that’s all I’ll be. At most.”
Ian Carew waited until Resnick had left the office before sitting back down. Patel was sitting near one of the windows in the CID room, typing up his report. “If he tries to leave,” Resnick said, nodding his head back towards his office door, “stall him.”
“I’ll try, sir.”
“Do better than that.” He glanced down at what Patel was typing, trying to read it upside down. “Anywhere with the clothing thing?”
“No, sir.”
Resnick hurried from the room. Lynn Kellogg and Maureen Madden were already in the superintendent’s office and the expressions on all of their faces told Resnick what he didn’t want to know.
“No chance she’ll change her mind?” asked Resnick.
“She might,” said Lynn. “A couple of hours later she’ll have changed it back again.”
“How about the other business?” asked Skelton. “It is the more serious charge.” He carried on, intercepting Maureen Madden’s fierce look and ignoring it. “GBH at least, attempted murder.”
“More serious than rape, sir?” said Maureen regardless.
“No time to ride the hobby horse,” said Skelton sharply. “I treat rape every bit as seriously as you do.”
“Really, sir?”
“Well, Charlie?” Skelton said.
“Possible motivation, sir. Dodgy alibi. Now we know he’s capable of violence. But, no, nothing to link him in directly. Not as yet.”
“So we let him go.”
“Sir,” said Lynn, cheeks flushed, “he beat up that girl and raped her.”
“Who says? I mean, according to which account?”
“The medical evidence …” Maureen Madden began.
“Intercourse had taken place, cuts and bruising to the face and body—without the girl’s sworn word, what does that prove? No worse than what goes on between couples all over the city every Saturday night. Consenting adults. What’s to prevent him getting up and saying, well, it was how she liked it? Hard and rough.”
“Jesus!” Maureen Madden breathed quietly.
Lynn Kellogg stared at the floor.
“We can warn him,” Skelton continued. “Even though she won’t press charges, we can officially warn him, let him know that warning will be registered, documented. On that matter, that’s all we can do and it will be done. For the rest—watch and wait.”
There was only the flat click of the wall clock, the sounds of four people breathing. Outside, along the corridor, officers and clerical staff walking, talking, getting about their business. The greedy persistence of telephones, like starlings.
“All right, Lynn?” Skelton said. “Maureen?”
“Yes, sir.” Overlapping, subdued. “All right, Charlie?”
“Yes, sir.”
Resnick’s office was empty. Anxiety hovered around Patel’s dark eyes. “He walked out, sir. Insisted upon leaving. He said he had the right. I didn’t think I could try and prevent him.”
“Don’t worry,” Resnick said. “Dig out Naylor and go and pick him up again. No charge, no caution, get him back here just the same.”
“Yes, sir.”
Resnick’s stomach gave another empty lurch. Time enough to cross to the island at the middle of the circus, have them make up a couple of sandwiches, smoked ham and Emmental, breast of turkey with wholegrain mustard, pickled cucumber and mayonnaise. He would have a quiet word with Lynn on his way out, perhaps she’d like to be present while he was giving Carew a good bollocking.
Fourteen
When Karl Dougherty had told his mother he was going to be a nurse, she had pointed through the kitchen window at the way the chrysanthemums were leaning over and blamed the rain. When he had told his father, the look in the older man’s eyes had made it clear he thought his son was telling him he was gay. Not that Dougherty would have called it that: nancy boy, shirt-lifter, plain old-fashioned poof—those were the expressions that would have come to mind.
“You can’t,” his mother had said after the third time of telling.
“Why ever not?”
Karl watched as she placed six pounds of oranges on the Formica work top and began to slice them with a knife. The copper jam-pot she had bought at auction was waiting on the stove. Soon the kitchen would be studded with glass jars, scrubbed and recycled, labeled in her almost indecipherable hand. Quite frequently at breakfast one of the family had spooned gooseberry chutney onto their toast by mistake.
“Why can’t I?”
“Because you’ve got a degree.” His mother had looked at him as if that were the most obvious reason in the world and she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it for himself.
He had shown her the letter, accepting him for a place at the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary as a student nurse.
“There you are,” she said. “You’re not a student. You’re a BA, a good upper second. They’ve got it wrong.” She smiled up from the last of the oranges. “There’s been a mistake.”
Karl had found his father in the cellar, planing a length of beech. “We can’t support you,” his father said. “Not again. We’ve been through all that.”
“I shall be paid,” Karl explained. “Not very much, but a wage.”
“And living? Where will you live?”
Karl looked at the woodworking tools, arranged on and around the shelves in neat order, each wiped and cleaned after use. “There’s a place in the nurses’ home. If I want it.”
“Good.”
When Karl was at the steps, his father said, “I never wanted you to go to that bloody university in the first place, you know.”
“I know.”
“Waste of bloody time and money.”
“Maybe.”
“And you know one thing—this’ll do for your mother. She’ll not begin to understand.”
A few nights later, Karl had been in his room to the rear of the upstairs, writing a letter. His father had come in with a half-bottle of Scotch and two glasses, tumblers that had been given away with so many gallons of petrol.
“Here,” sitting on the bottom of Karl’s bed and handing him one of the glasses, pouring a generous measure into them both. He had seen his father drink bottled beer on Sunday afternoons, port and the occasional sherry at Christmas; he had never known him to drink whisky.
They sat there for close on three-quarters of an hour, drinking, never speakin
g. Finally, his father tipped what remained into Karl’s glass and stood up to leave.
“Was there something you wanted to say to me?” his father asked.
Karl shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“I thought there might have been something you wanted to tell me.”
“No.”
The incident was never referred to again by either of them, but for some time, whenever they met, Karl’s father would avoid looking him in the eye.
There was scarcely a week went by during Karl’s training, he didn’t consider throwing it in. Neither was there a week when something took place—usually an interchange with one of the patients—which didn’t confirm for him the Tightness of his decision. For the first time since he could remember, his life had a purpose: he felt he was of use.
“This is my son, Karl,” his mother said, introducing him to friends when he made an unannounced visit home. “He’s training to be a doctor.”
“A nurse,” Karl corrected her.
She smiled at her guests. “There’s been a mistake.”
The evening after Karl received notification that he had qualified, he called his father and arranged to meet him for a drink. They went to a pub on the old road from Eastwood to Nottingham and sat with halves of bitter while youths in leather jackets played darts and Elvis on the juke box. “You think I’m gay, don’t you?” Karl asked. “Homosexual.”
His father sucked in air and closed his eyes as if a heavy foot had been pressed down on his chest.
“Well, I’m not. I just don’t like women very much. I mean, only as friends. Okay?”
When his father opened his eyes, Karl reached out a hand towards him and his father pulled his own hand, sharply, away.
After his registration, Karl did a couple of years of general nursing before specializing; he worked on a genito-urinary ward for three years, not bothering to tell either of his parents the day-to-day focus for his skills. He spent two years nursing in the States, Boston and San Francisco, well paid and, he felt, under-used. Patients paying for their private rooms thought it was okay to summon him to fetch their newspaper from across the room, reposition the TV set away from the sun. Before he could do as much as issue an aspirin or clip a toenail, he had to call a doctor and obtain permission.