Cutting Edge

Sixteen

There must be some people, Resnick thought, for whom a telephone ringing in the middle of the night doesn’t spell bad news. There he was, ear to the receiver, the clock across the room stranded between three and four. “Yes,” he said, tucking in his shirt. “Yes,” fastening his belt. “Yes,” reaching for his shoes. “I’ll be there.”

Sheets of white paper, smeared with ketchup or curry sauce, littered the pavements; crushed cartons still holding cold gravy, mushy peas. Patel was standing on the street corner, concern on his face clear in the overhead lighting; he took his hands from his raincoat pockets as Resnick approached. One police car was parked outside the entrance to the toilets, another around by the fast-food pasta place, facing up the slope of Trinity Square. A uniformed officer stood at a kind of attention, doing his best not to look tired or bored.

“I wasn’t sure, sir, if I should call you or not.”

Resnick nodded. “Let’s see.”

Patel and a DC from Central had been forming the token CID presence, overnight. The first report had only mentioned a male, white, late twenties to early thirties; it hadn’t been till later that his profession had been referred to. When Resnick walked into the Gents, Patel behind him, DI Cossall was already there, taking a leak at the end urinal. Between them, the scene-of-crime team had finished dusting for prints and were firing off a few more Polaroids for posterity.

Across the floor, the thick chalk mark showed where the body had fallen; rather, the position it had finally crawled into. One chalk toe damp at the foot of the urinal, a hand reaching towards the closet door, it looked less like the outline of a body than abstract art.

“Your young DC, there,” Cossall nodded towards Patel, “could’ve let you get a few more hours’ beauty sleep.”

Resnick was looking at the chalk lines on the floor. “He is from the hospital?”

“So it appears.”

“Attacked with a knife, some kind of blade?”

“Yes.”

“Then Patel here did right. Anything less he’d have got a bollocking.”

Cossall pointed downwards. “Pretty much like this sorry bastard, then. Sounds as if whoever went for him, tried to chop his balls off.”

A quick shudder ran through Resnick and, despite himself, he cupped one hand towards his legs, like a footballer lining up against a free kick. “Let’s get outside,” he said. “The stink in here’s getting up my nose.”

Cossall and Resnick were more or less contemporaries; their movements between uniform and CID ran parallel, the dates of their promotions approximately matched. Cossall had transferred outside the local force at one point, but nine months as a detective sergeant in Norfolk had been more than enough. “The only place,” he’d once confided in Resnick over a drink, “where the stories on the wall in the blokes’ bog are about shagging sheep.”

“Trouble was,” Cossall was saying now, “he lay there so long. Lost so much blood. Looks as if youths were coming in and out, stepping round him to take a piss. Likely thought he’d passed out, drunk.”

“What about the blood?”

“Figured he’d fallen, smacked his head, if they noticed at all. It’s a wonder some bugger didn’t throw up over him into the bargain.”

“Where is he now?” Resnick asked.

Cossall shook his head. “Somewhere between intensive care and the morgue, I should reckon.”

“And family?” Resnick said. “They’ve been informed?”

“Ah,” said Cossall, looking away towards the light flashing intermittently from the roof of the nearest police car, “I knew there was something.”

Resnick turned right alongside the Fletcher Gate car park and came to a halt outside the Lace Market Theater. He switched off his headlights and let the engine idle. The only situation in which he was glad he’d never had children was this: the only part of the job he hated to do alone. Not so long back, he remembered, it had been Rachel he had woken with a phone call in the middle of the night. Come with me. A skilled social worker, she had been the perfect choice. There’s a woman I have to talk to, I need your help. A woman, already crippled with pain, who had to be told her daughter was dead. Of course, he hadn’t only wanted Rachel there for her expertise-when to speak, when to be silent, the right word, the touch at the proper time-however unconsciously he had been drawing her into his life. Sucking her in. So deep that before it was over she had nearly been killed herself.

Rachel.

The scrape of a shoe against the uneven pavement made Resnick turn. A woman stepping forward out of the shadow, collar of her dark raincoat eased up, hair that framed her pale face short and dark. Resnick reached across and unlocked the near side door.

“Sorry to haul you out,” Resnick said.

“S’all right, sir,” said Lynn Kellogg, “I’ve done the same to you before now.”

Resnick switched back to main beam, slid the car into gear. “I’ll fill you in on the way,” he said.

Wollaton was the place that time forgot. An inner-city suburb of bungalows and crescents and neat detached houses with crazy paving and front gardens fit for gnomes. A light shone in the porch of the Dougherty house, dull orange. Resnick pressed the bell a second time and stepped back. Another light appeared, filtered through the curtains of the upstairs front. Cautious footsteps on the stairs.

“Who is it?”

“Detective Inspector Resnick. CID.”

Through the square of frosted glass set into the door, Resnick could see a figure, shoulders hunched, hesitating.

“It’s the police, Mr. Dougherty,” Resnick said, not wanting to raise his voice too loud and wake the neighbors. Wanting it to be over: done.

The figure came forward; there was a slow sliding back of bolts, top and bottom, a latch pushed up, a key being turned: finally, the door was inched back on a chain.

Resnick identified himself, holding his warrant card towards the edge of the door and stepping to one side so that Dougherty could see him.

“This is Detective Constable Kellogg,” Resnick said, pointing behind him. “If we could come in.”

“Can’t it wait? What’s so important that it can’t wait?”

“Your son,” Resnick said. “It’s about your son.”

“Karl?”

“Yes, Karl.”

The door was pushed closed, but only to free the chain. Dougherty stood in tartan slippers on a mat that said Welcome in dark tufts of bristle. His ankles were bony beneath the hem of striped pajama trousers, the skin marbled with broken blue veins. The belt of his dark green dressing gown had been tied in a tight bow. His hair tufted up at angles from the sides of his head.

“What about Karl?” he asked. “What’s happened to him?”

But the expression in his eyes showed that he already knew.

Not exactly, of course. That came a little later, in the small living room, the only light from a standard lamp in one corner, the three of them sitting on furniture that had been built to last and had done exactly that.

All the while Resnick had been speaking, Dougherty’s eyes had flickered from the cocktail cabinet to the light oak table, from the empty vase they had brought back from Holland fifteen years ago to the small framed photographs on the mantelpiece above the variflame gas fire.

In the silence that followed, Dougherty’s eyes were still. His fingers plucked at the ends of his green wool belt. Resnick wondered how much, how clearly he’d understood.

“Would you like us to take you to the hospital?” Resnick asked. “You and your wife?”

“My wife …” Dougherty began, alarmed.

“We could take you,” Resnick repeated. “To see Karl.”

“My wife can’t go,” Dougherty said.

“She is here?” Resnick asked.

“I told you, upstairs. She can’t go, she mustn’t know, she can’t…”

“She’ll have to be told, Mr. Dougherty,” Resnick said.

“No.”

“Would you like me to speak to her?” Lynn offered.

“She can’t know.”

“What?” said Pauline Dougherty from the doorway. “What is it, William? Who are these people? I woke up and you weren’t there. That was when I heard voices. Your voice, William. I thought it was Karl. You know, one of his little visits. To surprise us.”

“What visits?” said Dougherty, staring at her.

“You know, his little …”

“He doesn’t make visits,” getting to his feet. “One year’s end to the next, he scarcely comes near us.”

“He does, William. Oh, he does. You forget.”

William Dougherty closed his eyes and his wife stood close in front of him, recently permed hair held tight in a net, a dressing gown of quilted pink and fluffy pink slippers without heels.

“William,” she said and he opened his eyes.

“Karl’s dead,” Dougherty said.

“No,” Resnick said quickly, half out of his chair.

“He’s dead,” Dougherty repeated.

“No,” said Resnick quietly. “Mr. Dougherty, that isn’t what I said.”

“There you are,” Pauline Dougherty turned her head towards the inspector and then back towards her husband, reaching for his hand. “There you are,” almost beaming. “You see, there’s been a mistake.”

The sky was lightening and the milk-float was only two streets away. Lynn Kellogg had spoken to Pauline Dougherty’s sister in Harrogate, who would catch the first train down via York. One of the neighbors would be across to sit with her within the half hour, and meanwhile Lynn herself sat in the kitchen holding Mrs. Dougherty’s hands, watching the birds land for a moment on the cotoneaster bush and then fly off again. Going to the hospital meant acknowledging the truth of what had happened and Pauline Dougherty was not ready for that yet; Lynn wondered if she ever would be.

Meanwhile Resnick phoned the hospital, the station, the hospital once more. A uniformed officer came to take William Dougherty to see his son. Karl was in surgery and fighting for his life, struggling, unknowingly, to prove his father wrong.

Resnick and Lynn Kellogg went to the cafe near the Dunkirk flyover and ate sausage baps with HP sauce and drank strong, sweet tea. Looking out through the steamed-over window at the blur of early morning traffic, neither of them said a word.