Cutting Edge

Thirty-six

Otis Redding, that’s who the DJ was playing when Resnick went down the curved steps into Manhattan’s. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now).” It hadn’t been altogether true, what Elaine had accused him of that evening at the Polish Club. About having to drag him on to the floor, one dance before fumbling for the cloakroom ticket, fetching the coats. When they’d first been going out, going steady-only Elaine’s grandmother had used the term “courting” and then with the slyest of grins-there was a spell they’d be dancing-what? — every Friday night without fail. Once, at the second-string Palais that was now the MGM, the corner of Collin Street and Greyfriar Gate, they’d walked in on some kind of Otis Redding tribute, some anniversary, and just about every number that was played or sung had some association with him. “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” “Mr. Pitiful.” “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song).” If they heard “My Girl” once that night, they must have heard it a dozen times. Resnick scarcely moving, pushed up against Elaine and her arms round his neck, saying, “See, just because it isn’t jazz, doesn’t mean it isn’t any good.” Right there and then, Resnick would have listened to Alma Cogan, Clodagh Rodgers, Des O’Connor, thought they were wonderful.

Maura was collecting glasses from the tables, her hair like orange whip. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “What’re you doing here?”

“It’s okay,” Resnick said, “I’m not wearing a cap.”

“How about cheesecake?”

“I’m not wearing that either.”

Maura picked up another couple of glasses with her left hand and transferred them to the column she was balancing from the palm of her other hand all the way up to her shoulder. “That bloke,” she said, nodding behind where Resnick was standing, “he’s over there.”

“Good,” said Resnick. “Thanks.”

Paul Groves was sitting with a young Asian who was wearing a light-green polo shirt, bottle-green trousers, and ankle-high trainers with the tongue out and the laces mostly undone. Groves was wearing the same suit, tie slacked down to half-mast.

Resnick pulled over a stool and sat opposite them and Groves introduced him to his friend, who had an accent that was Hands-worth via Hyson Green.

“I was in to see Karl,” Resnick said.

Maura leaned between them and placed a bottle of Czech Budweiser and a frosted glass on the table.

“Thanks,” Resnick said.

“I’ll put it on the manager’s tab.” Winking, moving away.

“How was he?” Groves asked. “Karl?”

“Seemed a lot better. Amazing, when you consider.”

Groves glanced at his friend, flicked ash towards the ashtray and missed. “Did you see him?” he asked. “When he was in there, after it had happened? Before they took him off in the ambulance.”

“No.”

Groves blinked away the smoke that was drifting up past his eyes. Two girls, couldn’t have been more than sixteen, pushed past the back of his stool on their way to the ladies. “Bleedin’ cheek!” one said. “All right, though, isn’t he?” said the other. “Well, wouldn’t kick him out.” Giggling, they pushed into the crowd standing around in front of the DJ.

“I keep thinking about it,” Groves said. “Trying to picture it. What he must have looked like.”

“Don’t.”

“Lying there in all that …”

“Don’t.”

“No. No, suppose it’s stupid. Daft.”

“Want another?” his friend said, making the nail of his index finger ring against the rim of Groves’s glass.

“Yeh, thanks.”

“You?” he asked, standing, looking over at Resnick. Resnick laid a hand flat across the top of his glass. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

There was an instrumental coming through the speakers, organ and sax, a churning, rolling blues and a few couples had started moving around the small dance floor.

“Firm I work for,” Groves said, looking not at Resnick but at his almost empty glass, “got a vacancy. Northampton. I was thinking, you know, time I had a bit of a change. Might, like, take it.”

Resnick nodded.

“What d’you think? I mean …” Groves shrugged.

“New place,” Resnick said. “Fresh start. Sometimes it’s a good idea.”

“But as far as you’re concerned?”

“Personally?”

“The police.”

“Oh. No. Let us know where you are if you like, but no, far as we’re concerned, feel free.”

Groves relaxed on his stool, unfastened another button of his shirt. His friend was on his way back from the bar, carrying the drinks. “Pursuing a new line of inquiries, then?” Groves half-smiled.

Resnick said he supposed that was true.

“I know.” Groves pulled out the newspaper from beneath his stool and folded it back at the front page. “I was reading it in here.”

UNDER THE KNIFE

Hospital staff in the city are now working in fear of their lives after police confirmed today they are investigating a connection between the murder of attractive student Amanda Hooson and the earlier violent attacks on two young men employed at the hospital. Security precautions have been stepped up and there is a strong possibility that visitors will be routinely questioned and searched.

Detective Chief Inspector Tom Parker said that connections between the three victims were being pursued as a matter of urgency. “The one thing we don’t want the general public to do,” the Chief Inspector told our reporter, “is panic.” He would neither confirm nor deny that until the present danger has passed, both plain-clothes and uniformed officers would be on duty in and around the hospital buildings and grounds.

Resnick passed back the paper and stood up to go. “What if he wants to go to Madisons?” asked one of the girls, coming back. “Yeh, well,” said her friend, “what if he doesn’t?”

Resnick offered Groves his hand. “If you go through with it, the move, I hope it works out for you.”

“Thanks.”

Resnick looked for Maura on his way out, wanting to wave goodbye, but she was intently talking at the bar, uncorking a bottle of Bulgarian red without taking her eyes off a man in a blue mohair blazer, short fair hair and a stud in one ear, more muscle across his shoulders than Resnick had in the whole of his body and roughly half Resnick’s age.

There was nothing for it but to head home.

The smell of charred meat was strong, as though someone had decided to hold a barbecue there in the middle of the house. Smoke lingered close to the coving in the hallway and Ed Silver stood in front of Resnick’s stove like the man who’s discovered the wheel but can’t immediately think what to do with it. “Bastard thing!” Silver said, grudging admiration in his voice. He was wearing one of Resnick’s light-blue shirts as an apron, sleeves knotted behind his back. Small darts of flame were sparking out from beneath the grill. “Not be long, Charlie. Have it on the table in two shakes of a monkey’s tit.” If the kitchen didn’t burn down first.

Pepper’s head lolled from the tin hat of the colander, half-asphyxiated, a cat in need of a gas mask.

Resnick went to take hold of the grill pan, but Silver stuck a bony elbow into his side. “Relax, Charlie. S’under control.” Catching Resnick’s breath, he turned to him disapprovingly. “Bit early in the day to have been at the bottle?”

Whatever was simmering away in the various pans Silver had going on top of the stove was going to give new meaning to the words, well done. “Right,” Resnick said through gritted teeth, “I’ll leave you to it. Everything you want’s over there-salt, tomato sauce, fire extinguisher.”

He went upstairs to sluice his face, change his socks, work whatever had got lodged there out from his upper back teeth.

“What you’ve been missing, Charlie, someone to do this sort of thing for you. Make sure you’ve got a proper meal waiting for you when you get home. Never mind this sandwich, sandwich, sandwich. You must have a digestion like the M26 at rush hour.” It was always rush hour on the M26. Perhaps that was his point. “Grazing, that’s what it’s called. Eating like that. Heard it on the wireless.” He gave Resnick a sharp, pecking look over his forkful of mashed potato. “When I was with Jane.”

Let that one sink in.

“Jane?”

“You know. Wesley.”

“Wesley.”

“Yeh, that’s her. I was helping her out.”

“At Aloysius House?”

“Yeh. Nothing, like-how would you say? — too specialized. Bit of cleaning, few things she wanted humping out the way …”

“No cooking?” Resnick had given up trying to cut what, in a former life, had been a lamb chop and was holding it between his fingers.

“Not yet, eh?” Silver winked. “Got to ease into these things. Never does to go at it too hard. Full frontal, know how I mean?”

Resnick thought it was probably better that he didn’t. He wondered if mushy peas had been Silver’s original intention, or whether they’d simply happened along the way.

“Good, eh?” Silver said, pointing towards Resnick’s plate with his knife.

“Distinctive.”

Silver beamed. “S’what I said, Charlie. How it should be all the time. Job like you’ve got, can’t be expected to cook for yourself. You need someone to do it for you.”

Was this how Ed Silver saw his future? Mornings doing good works for homeless alcoholics like himself; afternoons as Resnick’s resident cook and butler.

No.

“She was here, Charlie. You know that?”

“Jane Wesley?”

“Elaine.”

Air clogged at the back of Resnick’s throat.

“Earlier. Came to the door, didn’t see as I could turn her away.”

“She came into the house?”

“Well, it did used to be half hers, Charlie. ’Sides, she looked terrible.”

“Ill?”

“Face like a bleached nappy. I had her sit down and made a pot of tea; slipped a drop of gin into it.” Whose had been the gin, Resnick wondered, Ed Silver’s or Elaine’s? “We had quite a little chat.”

I’ll bet you did!

“She’s had a hell of a life, Charlie. Since she left you. One hell of a life.”

Resnick set down his knife and fork and pushed the plate aside.

“You’ve never finished! There’s another chop waiting to be eaten. Apple pie in the oven, Mr. Kipling, can’t beat them. Winner every time. Charlie …”

“Let’s be straight on this,” Resnick on his feet, back of his chair, staring down, “it’s fine for you to stay here, for a while, till either you get a room somewhere or decide to move on. But I don’t want a nanny, I don’t want a housekeeper, I don’t want a cook and if I did, with the best will in the world, I don’t think you’d get the job.” Silver sat there absolutely still, looking up at him. “And I don’t want a wife: especially the same one I had before.”

“Some people,” Ed Silver said a few minutes later, trying to coax Bud on to his lap with a piece of fat, “don’t know the meaning of the word gratitude.”

When the cat only sniffed the meat but wouldn’t come any closer, Silver popped it into his own mouth, got up, and carried the plates towards the sink to do the washing up.

Ben Franks had been in the Buttery, taking his mind off an overdue essay with several bottles of Newcastle Brown, a couple of games of pool and the last half hour bopping around to a retro post-punk band with reggae leanings called Scrape the Barrel. He saw a bunch of students he knew ahead of him and called after them, running in a shambling sort of fashion past the library to catch up.

Four of them, three lads and a girl, they’d been across to the Showcase to see a film about a legless Vietnam vet who dies in a traffic accident and is reincarnated as a kung-fu Buddhist priest who’s vowed to eliminate the Colombian drug lords. Chuck Norris, the girl said, was better than you’d have given him credit for. Especially playing the entire ninety-four minutes on his knees.

Somehow, heading down the grassed slope towards the hall of residence, all five became involved in a re-enactment of the plot, with the result that Franks finished up twisting his ankle and having to be supported the rest of the way home. Down on the level, they decided he could manage to hobble by himself and after a few steps his ankle went again under him, he pantomimed a dying fall and came down with a clatter amongst the dustbins. Groaning theatrically and allowing himself to be hauled to his feet, Ben Franks’s hand brushed against something and he called for them to stop.

He picked it up and turned in the direction of the overhead light; he blew on it a couple of times, brushed away a persistent beetle, and opened it up. There in his hand, Amanda Hooson’s diary.