Cutting Edge

Thirteen

Ever since the problems with his daughter had come to a particularly nasty head, Skelton had abandoned his early morning runs. Now he ran most lunchtimes instead. In the mornings he would try and spend time with Kate, toying with a slice of toast as, absent-mindedly, she spooned her way through a morass of Weetabix and Shreddies, warm milk soaking in until what was left resembled Trent sludge. Skelton asked about her school work, teachers, school friends, anything but what he wanted most to know-where had she been the evening before, who had she been with? He sat and listened to her halting, half-hearted replies, scraping Flora across his toast and wondering how much she drank, if she were back on drugs? Sixteen and a half: what were the chances that she was still a virgin?

Skelton was on his way out of the station as Resnick drew up, opening the door so that Carew could get out. Two men in running gear and Resnick between them with trousers that were too loose above the ankles, too tight at the hips, a jacket on which he could do up one button with ease but rarely two. Moments like this could induce paranoia: the certainty that at some point of each day, at some time within the twenty-four hours, everyone else goes running, jogs, works out, lifts weights. Everyone.

“Charlie.” Skelton beckoned him to one side. “This Carew?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve not charged him?”

“Here of his own volition, sir. Happy to answer any questions that might help us with our inquiries.”

Skelton glanced over at Carew. “Happy?”

Resnick shook his head. “Cocky enough.”

“Don’t blow it, Charlie. Technicalities.”

Resnick changed position, shifting so that more of his back was towards Carew. “Just might be something else, sir. Went to the girl’s place this morning, pushed his way in, could be he raped her.”

Skelton’s face was stone.

“Lynn’s with the girl now, she’s agreed to be examined. Take it from there.”

“Ex-boyfriend, isn’t he?”

Resnick nodded.

“Difficult. Cases like that. Difficult to prove.”

Resnick turned towards Carew, motioned for him to go up the steps to the station.

“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 first 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.