Cutting Edge

Ten

Debbie Naylor stood looking down at her sleeping husband, alone save for the blue hum of the TV. The first time she had seen him, a friend had pointed him out, standing at the edge of half-a-dozen men at the bar, neither quite one of them nor alone. It hadn’t been until he was driving her home, oh, three weeks later, home where she still lived with her parents, Basford, that he had told her what he did.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Why?”

“You just are.”

She had learned, some of it soon enough, the rest later. After the lunchtime meetings, Sunday afternoons with her family, Kevin embarrassed, wanting to leave; after the jokes from her friends at the office, the wedding with all of Kevin’s friends, tall and short-haired and already three-parts drunk, lining up to kiss her open-mouthed; not above, some of them, trying to cop a feel through the brocade of her wedding dress. Posing for the photographer, one of the bridesmaids had jumped in front of them, slipped a pair of handcuffs over their wrists.

After the honeymoon, the collision of late nights and early mornings; evenings with dinner in the oven and drying out, dreading the phone call that would, almost inevitably, come. Just a quick half. Wind down. With the lads. You know how it is.

She knew.

When Kevin had been accepted for CID it got better and then it got worse. Put your foot down, her mother had said, else he’ll walk all over you.

Better, Debbie had thought, than walking out.

She stood there, gazing down at him, asleep in the chair, looking little different at three and twenty than he had at nineteen. She couldn’t believe that after all that had happened in the past four years, he was still the same. When she was so different.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”

Kevin didn’t hear her. She wanted to go down, carefully, to her knees and feel the side of her face against the warmth of his neck. Instead she left the room, puffing the door to but not closing it, not wanting to disturb him.

Alone, Kevin stirred and, waking, heard the soft thunk of the freezer door; Debbie, he thought, sneaking out for another pigging midnight feast.

The cats heard the phone moments before Resnick himself, jumping down from the bed and scuttling towards the bedroom door. Resnick blinked and groaned, lifting the receiver at only the second attempt.

“Yes?” he said, scarcely recognizing his own voice. “What is it?”

He listened for less than a minute then set down the receiver. He had sat up for too long, hoping that Ed Silver might return, chasing the Budweiser with shots of vodka brought back by a friend from Cracow, the real thing. Setting his feet to the floor gingerly, he pushed himself up and padded to the kitchen. Miles and Bud had beaten him to it and were sniffing at their empty bowls expectantly. Pepper, who had taken to sleeping in an old plastic colander, yawned a greeting and reclosed his eyes, forgetting to put the red tip of his tongue back inside his mouth.

Knowing he was unlikely to get back to sleep, Resnick made coffee, drank half and put the remainder into a flask which he carried out to the car. Overhead lights shone a dull orange along the empty street. He went straight across the lights at the Forest, keeping the cemetery to his right. One last prostitute lingered against the wall near the next junction, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, face pale in the glow of her last cigarette.

When he began driving Resnick hadn’t known for certain where he was going, but now he did.

Large blocks of brick and glass, by day the hospital didn’t have enough character to be ugly. By night, most of its lights extinguished, some of them burning here and there, it was more inviting, mysterious. Resnick went slowly around the one-way system and parked fifty yards short of the medical school entrance.

A few swallows of black coffee and he took a torch from the compartment alongside the dash, locked the car and started to walk towards the bridge. It was a good hour later than the time Fletcher had been attacked, the flow of traffic was sporadic, there was no one else on foot. A short avenue of bushes and trees separated the hospital from the road. He flicked the torch on and shone it up the metal spiral before beginning to climb. Whoever had followed the houseman had either come directly after him from the hospital, or taken this route up from the road. This way, Resnick reasoned, pausing as his head came level with the glass above. Less likely to create suspicion, loitering about; easier to wait for your victim, pick him out.

The door at the top could have been locked, likely would have been if someone had not removed the bolt. Wonder, thought Resnick, exactly when that was done.

He pushed the door open and stepped through, turning left so that the hospital lay behind him, the bridge stretching out ahead. The occasional vehicle now, headlights sliding down the glass panels as they sped along the ring road, north or south. Resnick stood quite still, listening to the muted thrum of engines, concentrating on the double doors at the far end, the bridge spanning six lanes of highway, those doors a long way off.

Do people feel unhappy only during office hours? Black print on white paper, Blu-tacked to the wired glass. Phone NITELINE 7 p.m. to 8 a.m. Resnick tried to imagine being trapped in there, terrified, desperate to escape. He began to walk, slowly, towards the other side, the smell of rubber clearer with every step.

Whoever had seen Fletcher, followed him, what had determined his choice? Being there, now, the middle of the night, Resnick found it difficult to believe in a chance attack. Whoever had stalked the exhausted houseman almost the length of the bridge had done so for a reason. Resnick needed to believe it had been personal. He hesitated for a moment, staring down. He had to believe that, cling to it, knowing that if it were not true, there was somebody still out there, somewhere in the city, who had wreaked terrible havoc on Tim Fletcher’s body for reasons that only a psychologist might ever understand. And who might do the same again.

City Life, read the poster facing Resnick as he went through the double doors. A bicycle had been left chained to the railings on the broad platform, two-thirds of the way down the steps. The air that touched Resnick’s hands and face was surprisingly cold, driving up from the flyover. Something caught his attention, low by the wall of the first building and he brought up the torch.

It was only boxes, crammed with computer printouts: metallurgy, something close. Resnick switched off the torch and stood them, feeling the adrenalin in his body. Seek and you shall find. He crossed back over the ring road, stepping easily over the metal safety barriers at the center.

Sitting in the car, he dribbled the last of the coffee into the plastic cup. There had been no mistaking his ex-wife’s voice on the phone, nor, in those few not-quite-coherent sentences, the mixture of resentment and pleading he had thought forgotten.