Cutting Edge

by John Harvey

  Back in Britain, he clung to his short haircut and the habit of wearing colored T-shirts under lightweight suits, at least until the weather beat him down. For months there was a touch of a transatlantic accent to his speech and he wore a watch on either wrist, one of them set to West Coast time. After two years of general surgical work, he was appointed senior staff nurse, with the expectation of being promoted to charge nurse within the next eighteen months.

  Karl Dougherty had been a qualified nurse for nine years; aside from Christmas and his mother’s birthday, he had not visited his parents more than half-a-dozen times in the last four. Soon after returning from the States, he had breezed in wearing an off-white suit, a short-sleeved green T-shirt with a breast pocket and yellow shoes. He had a box of Thornton’s special assortment in one hand, a vast bouquet of flowers in his arms.

  “Oh, no,” his mother had exclaimed. “There’s been a mistake.”

  “Hello, Karl,” one of the patients called. “How was your night off?”

  “About as exciting as yours.”

  “Hi, Karl,” said a nurse, swinging the bedpan she was carrying out of his path.

  “Is that accidental,” said Karl, “or are you just not pleased to see me?”

  Karl liked to get on to the ward a little early, have a sniff round before handover, things he might notice and want to ask questions about that might otherwise go unremarked.

  “Where’s Sister?” he asked.

  A student nurse glanced up from the care plan she was adding to and pointed her Biro towards the closed door. “Hasn’t shown herself for the best part of an hour.”

  Oh, God! thought Karl, moving on, in there wrestling with the menopause again!

  He turned into the side ward and found Sarah Leonard sitting on Tim Fletcher’s bed, holding his hand.

  “This isn’t what you think,” Sarah said.

  “You mean you’re not taking his pulse.”

  “Absolutely not. This is therapy.”

  Karl raised an eyebrow.

  “Comfort and consolation,” Sarah smiled. “Tim’s feeling forlorn today. His girlfriend failed to pay him a visit.”

  “There’s a singularly ugly man with halitosis and very little bowel control, back down the ward; he hasn’t had a visitor in three weeks. Perhaps you’d like to hold his hand as well.”

  Sarah Leonard poked out her tongue and got to her feet. “I’d better go, before Karl here asserts his authority.” She gave Fletcher a smile, Karl a toss of her head and hurried away.

  “Impressive!”

  Tim Fletcher nodded agreement.

  “How are you feeling?” Karl asked. “Apart from horny.”

  “Sore.”

  “No more than that?”

  Fletcher shrugged. “I’m okay.”

  “You don’t want anything for the pain?”

  “Thanks. I’ll be all right.”

  Karl patted his leg. “I’ll check with you later.”

  Helen Minton came out of her office just ahead of Karl as he walked back down the ward, making a slight nod of acknowledgment in his direction and nothing more. Karl didn’t think it was that she felt threatened by him, not that alone. She spent her days on duty as if everything around her might explode or evaporate unless she held it together by sheer force of will.

  Poor woman! Karl thought. He had stumbled across her late one evening, standing with Bernard Salt beside the consultant’s BMW. Whatever they had been talking about, Karl didn’t think it was hospital business.

  “Sister,” he said breezily, catching her up. “Another fifteen minutes and you’ll be finished. A free woman.”

  The look she gave him was not brimming with gratitude.

  Naylor and Patel had found Ian Carew sitting in the small yard at the back of his rented house, drinking pineapple juice and reading about ventricular tumors. For several moments, it seemed as if he might tell the two plain-clothes men to go and play with themselves; he might even have been tempted to take a swing at them, Naylor in particular. But then he grunted something about being left in peace, something else about people who could have been making better use of time and resources, grabbed an Aran sweater and followed them along the narrow alley at the side of the house.

  “I don’t have to put up with this,” Carew said as soon as he was in Resnick’s office. “This is harassment.”

  Resnick was careful to keep his hands down by his sides. “Coming from someone who not so many hours ago beat up a young woman in her own home and …”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “… and forced her to have sex with him …”

  “You’ve got no right …”

  “… that comes over as a bit rich.”

  “You can’t say that.”

  “What?”

  Carew looked at the inspector, standing behind his desk, at Lynn Kellogg, in a white blouse and a mid-length pleated skirt standing off to his right. “I want a solicitor,” Carew said. “Now. Before I say another word.”

  “You don’t have to say anything,” Resnick said. “And you don’t need a solicitor. Just listen.”

  Carew opened his mouth to say something more but thought better of it.

  “In accordance with Home Office instructions,” said Resnick, “I am issuing you with a warning about your future behavior, in so far as it concerns Karen Archer. Although, up to the present, she has declined to press charges, there is little doubt from what she has alleged, backed up by medical examination of her injuries, that you have been guilty of an assault upon her person.”

  “What assault?”

  “Shut it!”

  “What …?”

  “Shut it and listen!”

  Carew retreated the half-step he had taken towards Resnick’s desk.

  “That girl,” said Resnick, “was elbowed in the face, she was punched in the mouth, she was struck in the body. You’re a big man, you’re strong and my guess is you’re used to having your own way.”

  “That’s bullshit!”

  Resnick was around the desk more quickly than either Lynn or Carew would have given him credit. He didn’t stop until his chest was all but touching Carew’s, face almost as close as it could be.

  “We’ve got photographs of her injuries, Polaroids of the bruises and they’re going on file. Your file. I hope for your sake I never have to refer to them again. Stay away from her, that’s my advice. A wide berth. She doesn’t want anything to do with you. That’s over. Leave it.”

  Resnick moved his head aside, rapidly swung it back, so that Carew blinked. “Word you’ve got to learn: no. Doesn’t mean, yes. Doesn’t mean, maybe. Girlfriend, wife, whatever. No means no. Understand it any other way and you’re for it.”

  Resnick stepped back: not far. He stared at Carew for ten seconds more. “Now get out,” he said quietly.

  Carew had to walk around Resnick to get to the door, which he left open behind him, anxious to leave the building as fast as he could. Lynn Kellogg wanted to go over to her inspector and say well done, she wanted to give him a hug; she settled for offering him a cup of tea.

  Before Resnick could accept or decline, his phone rang.

  “Yes?”

  “Someone down here asking for you, sir,” said the officer on duty. And then, before Resnick could ask further, “Think it’s personal, sir. Should I …?”

  “I’ll be down,” said Resnick. “The tea,” he said to Lynn.

  “Some other time.”

  All the way down the stairs, Resnick’s insides danced themselves into a knot. He knew what he would see, when he pushed his way through into reception: Elaine standing there, that distraught expression on her face, impatient, who do you think you are, keeping me waiting—what was it?—ten years?

  “Charlie!”

  Ed Silver was sitting with his back to the wall, meager gray hair resting below a poster asking for information about a thirteen-year-old girl, last seen in Louth three months ago. Something matted and dark clung to the front of h
is jacket.

  “Charlie,” he repeated, rising unsteadily to his feet. “Lost my glasses. Didn’t know where you were.”

  Resnick looked at his watch. “Half an hour,” he said. “Three-quarters at most. I’ll take you home.”

  Fifteen

  “N’cha got no real food, Charlie?”

  “Such as?”

  “You know, bangers, bacon, nice pork chop.”

  Resnick shook his head. “I can fix you a sandwich.”

  Ed Silver made a face and tried the refrigerator again, unable to believe his bad luck.

  “How about an omelet?”

  “All right,” Silver said grudgingly, and Resnick began to chop an onion up small, half a red pepper, a handful of French beans he’d braised a few days before in butter and garlic.

  “Vegetarian now, are you?”

  Another shake of the head. “Just can’t bring myself to buy meat. Not red meat. Not often. I think it’s the smell.”

  “That beer you got in there,” Silver asked, pointing back at the fridge. “You keeping it for something special?”

  Resnick opened his last two bottles of Czech Budweiser and lifted glasses down from the shelf. “No,” Silver said, reaching across. “Have mine as it comes. Won’t do to get too used to creature comforts; never know when you might pitch me out on me arse.”

  He wandered off into the living room and several minutes later, as the butter was beginning to bubble up round the edges of the pan, Resnick heard a few bars of off-center piano and then, instantly recognizable, the sound of a trumpet, burnished, like brown paper crackling; the soloist stepping into the tune with short, soft steps, deceptive. Clifford Brown. The notes lengthening, sharp blue smoke, rising. The Memorial album. Resnick doubted if he had pulled the record from the shelf in eighteen months, yet he could picture its cover.

  a photograph of a playground, a trumpet

  lying on a swing, over there

  the slides, the splintery line

  of benches, chaotic segments of

  chain link fence, hazy

  apartment buildings beyond.

  Perfect.

  He continued to listen, tilting the pan so that the egg mixture rolled round the curved sides and down, forking in the onion, seconds later the pepper and the beans. He left it on the flame long enough to cut slices of bread, dark rye, gave the pan a shake and folded the omelet in two. Before Brownie had finished “Lover Come Back to Me,” it would be ready.

  “They’re all dying, Charlie.”

  “Who?”

  “Every bugger!”

  Resnick handed him a plate, set his own down on a copy of Police Review, went back for forks and black pepper, started the LP again at the first track.

  “Know how old he was when he copped it?” Ed asked.

  “Twenty-six?”

  “Five. Twenty-five.”

  Less than half your age, Ed, Resnick thought, and you’re still going—in a manner of speaking.

  “Nineteen,” Silver said, “he was in a car crash nearly finished him. Almost a year in hospital. Enough to kill you in itself, way some of those butchers wade in when they’ve got you strapped down. Anyway …” He pushed a piece of omelet on to a corner of the bread and lifted it to his mouth. “… got over that, started playing again, made it big and wham! Another sodding road accident. Dead.”

  “Mm,” said Resnick.

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor bastard!”

  “Amen.”

  “Stockholm Sweetnin’” became “’Scuse These Blues.” Resnick took the plates into the kitchen and dumped them in the sink. He thought the last thing he should do was let Ed Silver catch sight of his bottle of Lemon Grass vodka, but the last stray gleams of light were striking the room at just the right angle and, whatever the risks, it seemed the proper thing to do.

  “Cheers,” said Resnick.

  “To Brownie,” said Ed Silver.

  “God bless.”

  They drank a little and then they drank a little more. There was a moment when Ed Silver’s wispy gray hair and scarred scalp were outlined against deep orange light. Resnick looked at Silver’s knuckles, cracked and swollen, and wondered when those hands had last held a saxophone; he wanted to ask him if he thought he might ever play again. Of course, he didn’t. They drank a little more. Dizzy sneaked out of the half-dark and lay across Silver’s lap, sniffing from time to time at whatever was matted thick on his jacket.

  “They’re all dead, Charlie.”

  “Who?”

  “Clifford, Sandy, Pete, Lawrence, Vernon, Marshall, Tom. All the fucking Browns. Gone.”

  Muted, but jaunty, Clifford Brown was playing “Theme of No Repeat.”

  There had to be better places to spend the evening, Millington was thinking, than a lay-by close to Burton-on-Trent. Heavy lorries yammering cross-country between Derby and West Bromwich, bits of lads in tuned-up Fiestas driving as if they were on Donnington race track. Three nights before, a truck loaded with cartons of Embassy, packets of twenty, had pulled in here so that the driver could rest. He had been hoping for a cup of tea, something warm to eat, but the man who ran the stall had closed early and gone home. The driver had stood by the field edge to take a leak and someone had hit him from behind with a wrench and taken his keys. When he came to, surprise, surprise, the truck was gone.

  It had been found early the following morning, abandoned and empty, close to the motorway. The police also discovered the driver to have two previous convictions for theft and one, when he was a youngster, for TDA. Which didn’t mean that he had whacked himself round the head, nor agreed beforehand that somebody else should do it, but it did mean officers were keeping a keen eye on who he contacted and watching for tell-tale signs of unsuspected wealth, anything from a spanking new fifty-one-centimeter flat-screen TV with a Nicam stereo decoder to a holiday for two in Tenerife.

  Either of which Millington would have been pleased to receive. He stopped trying to figure out exactly what the couple in the car behind were up to by careful use of his rear-view mirror and got out to stretch his legs. The tea stall was actually an old caravan now devoid of wheels and painted all over in a bizarre tartan. Its proprietor was a Glaswegian with one glass eye and a five-inch scar down his cheek along which you could clearly see the stitch marks. Millington reckoned he’d been sewn up on a back-parlor table with a domestic needle and thread and a bottle of Glenlivet for anesthetic.

  “Tea, is it?”

  Millington fished in his trouser pocket for the money.

  “How about a steak and kidney pie? Keep away the cold. If you don’t fancy eating it, you can always set it under your feet, like one of they old stone jobbies your grannie used to have.”

  “That the best you can offer?” Millington asked.

  “I’ve a hot dog or two in here somewhere,” the man said, lifting the lid from a metal pan and swishing away with a pair of tongs. “Maybe a burger?”

  “Yes.”

  “A burger?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Great salesman, aren’t you?”

  “Onions or without?”

  “Onions,” Millington said. “With.”

  He tipped sugar into his tea and stirred it with a spoon that was attached to the counter by a length of chain. Three motor bikes throttled down and swung in off the road, stopping between the caravan and Millington’s car. One of the riders was skinny and tall, totally bald beneath his helmet when he took it off; his companions were overweight and stocky, one of them sporting a belly that hung over his studded belt like a pregnancy about to come to term. All three wore boots and leathers and were old enough to have seen Easy Rider and The Wild One when they were first released. The girls riding with them were none of them more than seventeen, pale, pretty faces, sharp features drawn sharper by hours staring into the wind.

  They ignored Millington and joked with the Scot behind the counter, old friends. Mil
lington took his burger, added some watered-down ketchup and walked back towards his car to eat it. The couple parked behind him had forsaken the front seat for the back. The burger was gray and greasy, pitted with white gristle; two bites and Millington tossed it into the surrounding dark. He thought about his wife, sitting on the settee with her legs curled beneath her skirt, chuckling over Mary Wesley. “I don’t know how she can even think about sex at her age,” she’d said, “never mind write about it.” Millington had grunted non-committally and waited for her to change the subject: he knew that thinking about it was never the problem.

  “Debbie?”

  Kevin Naylor lay facing his wife’s back, early night for once, both of them hoping against hope the baby would sleep right through.

  “Deb?”

  He touched the nape of her neck, above the collar of her night-dress, and felt her flinch.

  “Debbie.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t carry on like this.”

  Not for the first time, Karl Dougherty was wondering why there were only fifteen minutes in which to hand over to the night staff; never enough, especially when they’d had two unexpected admissions, which had been the case tonight. The administrators who closed wards for financial reasons didn’t seem to understand there were others who failed to respond to budgetary shortfalls: the sick and the dying.

  “Now then,” Karl said to one of the nurses as she stood waiting for the lift, “off home to a cold bed and an improving book, I hope.”

  “Oh, yes!” she grinned. “And the rest!”

  As Karl walked towards the main road and the buses, he caught sight of Sarah Leonard in her beige coat ahead of him. Hurrying, he drew level with her at the entrance to the subway.

  “Catching the bus?”

  Sarah smiled and shook her head. “Walking clears my head. Besides, by the time you’ve waited, you could be indoors with your feet up.”

  “Well, I’d walk with you, only I promised to meet a friend in town for a drink.”

  They came up from the subway at the far side of the street, side by side. “Think of me,” Sarah said, “settling down to a good-night bowl of cornflakes.”

  Karl laughed. “I’ll be having mine later, don’t you worry. Only with me it’s Shredded Wheat. I keep thinking if I eat three at a time, it’ll make a man of me.”