Cutting Edge

Thirty-two

Lynn Kellogg had drawn the early shift and the logs were on Resnick’s desk and ready for his inspection a full fifteen minutes before he set foot in the station. Amongst the usual spate of break-ins that would require Lynn’s attention was one in which some enterprising soul had squirted WD 40 through the letter-box to stun a pair of angry Rottweilers, picked the lock, and walked away with several thousand pounds’ worth of jewelry and furs and the dogs’ studded collars as souvenirs. The distraught owner had woken to find the front door wide open and the animals wandering around the garden in a dazed state, unusually beatific expressions on their faces. The first phone call had been to the PDSA, the second to the police.

Graham Millington was in next, limping as a result of half the night cramped up in the rear of a hastily converted transit van, watching the lorry park off exit 29 through a hole the size of a new five-pence piece. He was experimentally jumping up and down in an attempt to get the circulation going when Resnick entered with a headache and a Brie and apricot sandwich he’d picked up at the deli across the road.

“Going into training, Graham?”

“Not exactly, sir,” said Millington, embarrassed, casting a sideways glance at Resnick’s feet to see if he was wearing odd socks again.

Resnick went through to his office and nodded for Millington to follow. “Good weekend?” he asked, making a space on the desk for his sandwich.

“Not bad, sir. Pretty good, really. The wife and I …”

Resnick skimmed through the night’s reports, half an ear on his sergeant’s domestic ramblings. What was it that made for a happy and lasting marriage, he caught himself asking? Perhaps it was a lack of imagination.

Lynn Kellogg brought in mugs of tea and cut the catalog of grouting and trips to the garden center mercifully short. After that lot, Resnick was thinking, it might come as a relief to be shut up in a van for six hours.

“These obs, Graham,” Resnick asked. “Any luck?”

Millington shook his head. “We were wasting our time up round Chesterfield, while they were in business outside Ashby-de-la-Zouche.”

Resnick spotted Naylor through the glass of the door and got to his feet, waving to get the DC’s attention and losing a bright sliver of apricot jam to his shirt front in the process.

“Any sign of Divine?”

“Saw him yesterday, sir,” said Naylor. Sitting in Mark Divine’s new studio apartment near the marina, watching a worn video of 9? Weeks while they worked their way through a six-pack of Carling Black Label.

“Coming in today?”

“No, sir. I don’t think so. He’s …”

“Wrong,” said Resnick. “Wrong answer. Injured in the line of duty, one thing. Getting smacked for behaving like a yob with libido problems, that’s another. Ring him now, tell him I expect to see him in thirty minutes. Here. Right?”

“Yes, sir.” Naylor went back into the main office, doing his best to figure out what a libido was; he thought that Divine had only had stitches above the eye.

Millington was midway through making a tortuous request to be relieved of working with the West Midlands Force, at least while there was so much heavy activity on his own patch, when Lynn Kellogg came back to the door. “It’s Ms. Olds, sir. Wants to see you now.”

Wonderful! thought Resnick. “Stall her,” he said. “Try and interest her in the delights of the canteen.”

“I did, sir.”

“And?”

“She laughed in my face.”

Resnick sighed. “All right. Five, no, ten minutes. Tell her it’s the best I can do.”

Lynn nodded and withdrew.

Suzanne Olds tilted back her head and released a film of smoke from between perfectly made-up lips. When Resnick was using the perfumery floor of Jessops as a cut-through, making for the market, that was when he saw women the like of Ms. Olds, perfectly groomed and hard as teak. He guessed one difference might be Suzanne Olds had the brains, too.

“Are you saying this is an official complaint?” Resnick asked.

Unnervingly, the solicitor smiled. “Not yet.”

“Maybe we should wait till it is?”

She swiveled towards him in her seat. “Police Complaints Authority, officers from an outside force, one of your own suspended. To say nothing of the possible accusations: victimization by a ranking officer, harassment, bias.”

“If, if Ian Carew was under surveillance, it was with no knowledge of mine.”

Suzanne Olds was enjoying this. “In that case,” she preened, “perhaps we should add incompetence to the list.”

“Jesus!” sighed Resnick.

“Yes?”

“It’s a game to you, isn’t it? Somewhere between Monopoly and Scruples.”

“There’s nothing funny about a citizen having his civil rights …”

“Oh, come on!” Resnick on his feet now, turning away, turning back. “Don’t give me Carew and civil rights in the same breath. It doesn’t wash.”

“Somehow he’s forfeited them? If that’s what you’re saying, I’d say it was a difficult argument to sustain.”

“Yes? Well, there’s a girl out there who had her civil rights severely curtailed when your client beat her up and raped her.”

“Wait.”

“No.”

“Wait a minute.”

“Why?”

“My client, these alleged offences, has he been charged? Never mind brought to trial, found guilty, sentenced.”

“The only reason he hasn’t, the girl withdrew the charges.”

“Maybe she changed her mind. In the light of day, decided she’d been rash, making accusations in anger. Who knows?”

“How about this? What happened to her was so appalling she couldn’t face being dragged through it again, in front of witnesses, knowing that he would be there watching her.”

“Melodramatic, Inspector.”

“Better than being smug.”

“And rude.”

Resnick made himself stand straight and still and with an effort brought his breathing back under control. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Apology accepted.”

“He was given an official warning,” Resnick said, “as to his future behavior.”

“Towards the girl?”

Resnick nodded.

“As far as your knowledge goes, has he seen her again?”

“No.”

“Has he made any attempt to?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then how is planting a police car at the end of his street to be construed? Exactly.”

“I’ve explained …”

“You know nothing about it.”

“Exactly.”

Suzanne Olds was smoothly to her feet. “If I were in your shoes, Inspector, I’d be at pains to find out. On this occasion I was able to persuade Mr. Carew an informal approach might be best; if he’s given any further cause for complaint, I suspect he won’t be as charitable. Oh …” pausing at the door, a trace of warmth around the edges of her smile, “… and there’s a smudge of jam, just there …” With one long, painted fingernail she traced a line down the silk of her blouse. “… the corner of your handkerchief and cold water, that should do the trick. Good day, Inspector. I know my way out.”

“Where’s Lynn Kellogg?” Resnick demanded, pushing angrily into the CID room.

“RSPCA,” said Naylor. “PDSA. One of those.”

Divine sat at the furthest end of the room, one-half of his face like a battered pumpkin several days after Halloween.

“You!” Resnick said, jabbing his finger. “My office. Now.”

Information about Amanda Hooson was being laboriously obtained, systematically annotated, organized. As an exercise it was less than cost-efficient, heavy on personnel, essential:

“Mandy,” said a student from her social-sciences group. “God! She used to hate it when I called her that. Anyway, yeh, she was just, you know, pretty straight, together. All she wanted to do was get her 2.1 and get back out into the real world. Wasted too much of her life already, that’s what she said. Mandy. God, I still can’t take it in. Amanda.”

The lecturer tapped the bowl of his pipe and began scraping away at the interior with the blunt end of a penknife. “She was rather more serious than a number of our students, that would have to be said. Older, you see, not old, but older. Here from choice, real choice, not like so many of them, arriving on the doorstep straight from school simply because they forgot to get off the bus.” After the dredging came the replenishing, the tamping down. “Great shame, picked up a bit in her final year, might even have got a first.”

“Hot weather, oh yes, sit out on the grass across from PB, hoick her skirt up and sunbathe for hours, ginger-beer shandy and some book about the extended family in Mozambique, homelessness in the inner cities. Not like some of them, stagger about between the Beano and Viz and still end up with a headache. No, she was a serious girl, woman, I suppose you’d have to say. I liked her. Liked her a lot.”

“Amanda! You’re kidding! I mean, I don’t want to put her down, especially after what’s happened, that’s dreadful, it really is. But, I don’t know, the idea of Amanda going out with any bloke, especially a student, well, if you’d have known her … I can’t think of another way of putting it: stuck-up, that’s what she was. No social life. Anything that wasn’t on the syllabus, forget it!”

“Yes, I don’t know who he was, don’t know his name or anything, but yes, she was seeing somebody. I’m sure of it.”

“Amanda came to my seminars, sat there writing it all down, sometimes if I coughed I think she made a little notation in brackets. Good essays, of course. Solid. But discussion-never contributed a word. Not my idea of a good student, I’m afraid, but there you are. I could show you her grades, if you think that might be of any use.”

“Terrible, terrible, terrible. A tragedy. A tragic waste of a young life. Truly, truly terrible. Tragic. Um?”

“We went through this period, last year. Badminton, right? I was beating her time after time, 15-6, 15-7, 15-5. Found out that if I kept it high to her backhand, she just couldn’t cope. Amanda came back after the holiday and wiped the floor with me. She’d found this guy, county player, talked him into teaching her, two hours a day for three weeks. Backhand smash, drive, backhand lob, she could do the lot. Not brilliantly. She was never what you’d call a natural. But she was like that with anything, anything she wanted, really wanted to do. Got down and worked at it, hard as she could. Little things, important things, it didn’t matter. Amanda had these lists in the back of her diary and she’d tick them off one at a time until they were done. After that she’d start a new list. Goal-oriented, I think that’s the term for it. Amanda would have known; if she didn’t she’d have been off to the library to look it up.”

“This diary,” asked Patel, “can you describe it?”

Cheryl pursed her lips and nodded. The shadows beneath her eyes were deep and dark from crying. “Nothing special, not one of those-what-d’you-call-’em-Filofaxes, nothing like that. Sort of slim and black, leather, you know the kind? Student year, I think it was, September to September. Carried it with her all the time.”

“I see.”

“You haven’t found it?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet.” Patel smiled and when he did so, Cheryl thought, not for the first time, what a nice man he probably was; what a shame he was a policeman. “I don’t really know,” Patel said. “I’ll certainly check. Now …” turning a page of his note book, “… perhaps you can tell me something about her friends …”

It was Millington who, having temporarily talked himself out of the hijack detail and finding himself with half an hour in the inquiry room, chanced to glance at a report form waiting to be accessed on to the computer. Amanda Hooson, twenty-six, previous education, West Notts College, previously employed for two years as an ODA at the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary and then back to the main hospital in the city.

“ODA?” Millington asked. “What’s one of them?”

“Search me.”

“Lord knows.”

“Wait up,” called one of the civilian operators, looking away from his screen, “I don’t know what the initials stand for exactly, but what it is, what they do, assist the anesthetist, make sure the gear’s all in working order, operations and the like. That’s what it is. ODA. Yes. Saw one on television once … What’s My Line?”