Cutting Edge

Thirty-nine

In the bad old days before PACE, Carew might have been questioned through the night; kept awake by interchanging pairs of detectives until he was too tired to know what he was saying, so exhausted that he would say anything if it meant he could get some sleep. In some places Resnick was pretty sure such things still went on. On Jack Skelton’s patch, especially with someone as sharp as Suzanne Olds looking over his shoulder, Carew was assured his hours of undisturbed rest, usually to be taken during the night.

But, Christ, he was a difficult bastard to shake, impossible so far to break down and maybe that was because, beneath it all, there wasn’t anything to break. He’d quizzed men who were belligerent before, and clever, men for whom the interview was a challenge, a situation where you dug in your heels and won at all costs. He still hadn’t been able to disentangle two thoughts in his mind: Carew was guilty of something; but try as they might they were not going to prove that he was guilty of this.

And if he were, what about the others? Fletcher? Dougherty? Motivation? Opportunity? Resnick crossed the street. Inside the entrance to Aloysius House, Jane Wesley was standing up to a stubbly young drunk with odd shoes on his feet and the behind falling out of his trousers.

“Look,” Jane was saying, “I’m sorry, but I’ve already told you. You can’t come in here in that condition.”

“What fucking condition’s that?”

“You’ve been drinking. This is a dry house.”

“Of course I’ve been drinking. What the fuck else should I have been doing?”

“While you’ve got that much alcohol inside you …”

“Are you saying I’m drunk? Is that what you’re fucking saying? ’Cause if it is …”

Resnick tapped him on the shoulder and the man turned faster than he should have been able and aimed a head butt into Resnick’s face. Instinct swung his face away, enough for the man’s forehead to clash with the protective corner of bone at the corner of Resnick’s right eye. The man stumbled back against the doorway, blood beginning to run from a cut above his nose.

“Oh, God!” Jane Wesley said, quietly, a reflex sigh.

“Who in fuck’s name d’you think you are, pal?”

Resnick told him.

Contempt seared the man’s face. “What’s it now then? Assaulting a police officer? Eh? Resisting arrest?”

Resnick said nothing, didn’t move.

“Resisting fucking arrest, eh? That what you fancy?” He turned and smacked his head against the inside of the door jamb, trying for a second time when Jane shouted out and tried to push herself between him and the door and Resnick caught hold of him by the arms and swung him round.

“Hey!” called the man. “Hey!” A light in his eyes. “Don’t you fucking manhandle me! Enough fucking damage already, you! This …” He went unsteadily back across the wide pavement, pointing towards the blood that was now running freely down his face. “Fucking this! You see that? You see that? Fucking police, bastards, they never change. Never change. But I’ll see you done for this, I’ll see you lose your fucking job over this. Bastard!”

“Okay, Charlie. Why don’t you step inside, out the way while I get this sorted?” Ed Silver by Resnick’s side, looking shaved and close to sober in a jacket Resnick was sure he recognized.

The two men looked at one another, a small crowd on the pavement becoming less small every moment, the drunken accusations pouring on and on.

“Go on, Charlie.”

Resnick nodded and went through the small square entrance and into the main room, the same smell of damp clothing and urine and cheap tobacco, the same as it always was.

“Will he be all right?”

“Ed? Yes,” Jane smiled, relieved. “You don’t have to worry about him.”

“What will he do?”

“To calm him down? Oh, I don’t know, give him a lecture, give him a hug, send him off down the road with a couple of quid to get another drink. I don’t know.”

They stopped outside the door to Jane’s office. “You came to see how he was getting on, I suppose? Checking up on him. He said you would.”

“That makes it sound awful. I suppose I just …”

“Feel a sense of responsibility, I understand.”

“Maybe that’s wrong.”

She shook her head, smiling with her eyes. “It’s not wrong. Not at all. If a few more people did …” The sentence remained unfinished, the smile disappeared from her eyes. “It’s not that type of world any more, is it?”

“No,” agreed Resnick. “Though I’m not too sure it ever was.”

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Resnick nodded towards the door. “Has he really stopped drinking?”

Jane shook her head. “No. But he’s cut down. He’s getting it under control.”

“So what’s going to happen here? I mean, is he going to work here, stay here? Are you actually employing him?”

“I think it’s more Ed employing us,” Jane laughed. “I think he’s decided we’re the therapy he needs. Situations such as the one you walked into, they’re not infrequent. I like to think that I can talk to these men, I can, I have done, but Ed, well, let’s say, those that won’t listen to me, they listen to him.”

“I’m glad. I only hope it works out.”

“Oh, you learn not to be too optimistic, but I think there’s a chance.” She smiled again. “As long as he stops trying to get his hand up my skirt whenever I walk upstairs.”

“You could try going up backwards.”

“Not the best logistical advice, Inspector, if you think about it. No, the thing to do, I’ll have to go back to wearing jeans.”

The baby was crying. Jim Davidson was telling jokes about Arthur Scargill and AIDS and Asians, and the baby was crying, Kevin had gone up and picked her up, petted her, patted her, changed her, set her back down. There was a lasagna drying out in the oven, pieces of the foil it had come packed in still sticking to the tomato sauce. Debbie was still wearing the dressing gown she had been wearing when he’d left for work that morning. The baby was crying.

Kevin Naylor slammed shut the oven door and reached for his coat

“You’re not going out again?”

“No,” Kevin said. “I was never here.”

The echo of the front-door slam was still reverberating in his head as he unlocked the car.

What I’ll do, Resnick was thinking, make something to eat, coffee; half of the evening still ahead of him, he could play Lester Young and Basic, with Billie Holiday, Lester with the Kansas City Seven, the Kansas City Six, maybe the Aladdin Sessions, Jazz at the Philharmonic, “This Year’s Kisses” in ’56 with Teddy Wilson, so slow that to listen to it was to feel the loss, the pain.

“Charlie.”

He turned sharply, the sound of her voice shuttling him through twenty years and back again, before she stepped from the shadows of the house they had lived in together: Elaine.

“The other evening,” Elaine said. They were standing stranded in the hall, not knowing where to go or why. “When I was here with that friend of yours …”

“Ed Silver.”

“Yes.” The light from the stairs was making her face more gaunt than ever. “Strange. Somehow I never thought I’d stand in this house again.”

“Neither did I.”

“You kicked me out, Charlie.”

“You went. He had the bloody Volvo outside with the engine running and you went.”

“And if I’d changed my mind? Said I’m sorry, Charlie, please forgive me, let’s start all over again, would that have made any difference?”

“Probably not.”

“Don’t forgive easily, do you, Charlie?”

He was breathing through his mouth, seeing her and not seeing her, under water, through glass. “I suppose not,” he said.

“All those things I wrote to you …”

“I didn’t read them.”

She stared at him.

“I didn’t read them, tore them up, burned them, whatever.” He was staring at the floor, carpet close to threadbare from use, he could remember the day she’d met him off shift, driven him to Hopewells to look, pay the deposit, arrange delivery.

“What it took,” Elaine said, “writing to you like that, forcing it all on to paper.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was in hospital, Charlie.”

He turned his head aside.

“The valium wasn’t working, it never did, not really. I went back to the doctor and he made an appointment for me at the hospital and they admitted me the next day. Once a week we’d sit in this room, all of us, and talk, but mostly there wasn’t anyone to talk to, not anyone who was sane enough to listen, and besides there were the drugs and there were, oh, Charlie, there were other kinds of treatment, and because I needed to talk to someone about it I wrote to you.”

Now he was having trouble breathing at all, even through his mouth, though his mouth was still open and he knew the crying wasn’t going to help either of them, hadn’t then and it wouldn’t now.

“Charlie,” she said, “go and put the kettle on, for God’s sake make us something to drink.”

There was a box of PG Tips that Ed Silver must have brought into the house and Resnick dropped three bags into the large pot, poured on water and together they waited in silence. After a while, Elaine left the room and when he found her again she was in the living room, leafing through last night’s paper.

“It’s you, isn’t it? This girl who was murdered. That’s what you’re working on.”

He pushed a clearing on the table and put down the tea. “Yes. One of the things.”

Elaine nodded. “I used to sit here, when we were first married, worried sick over what might be happening to you out there, frightened that something would happen, that you wouldn’t come back.” The mug of tea was in her hand, less than steady. “Then later, when it had all changed, I used to sit here hoping you wouldn’t come back at all.” She looked up at him. “Does that shock you?”

“No,” sitting down. “No.”

“I wished you dead, Charlie.”

“Yes.”

“So I could escape out of here and live happily ever after.”

“Yes.”

“You know, he had offices all over the Midlands, a house in Sutton Coldfield, a place in Wales with tennis courts and a swimming pool, and I don’t think he waited more than a couple of months after I’d moved in with him before he started screwing one of his secretaries. At the wedding reception I caught him in the bathroom with one of the bridesmaids. Last little fling, he said, and winked.”

“You should have left him then.”

“I’d only just left you. And, I suppose, part of me thought, all right, two can play at that game.” She glanced about her. “I’d been dying here, Charlie, this house. I wanted something else.” She sipped at the strong tea. “We screwed around for years, foursomes a few times, hard to believe, eh, Charlie, all those years with you when I wanted the lights out?”

Resnick sat there mesmerized by her face, this woman whose features were only half-recognizable, talking about a life he could only imagine.

“I was careless and I got pregnant. He wasn’t interested, called me a daft cow, a stupid bitch, anyway, he needn’t have worried. I took on all this fluid, problems with my blood pressure. Finally they got me into hospital just in time. The baby died and they told me I was lucky to be alive.”

“No more babies. That’s what they said: no more babies.”

“Suddenly, the one thing more important than all the rest, now he knew I couldn’t have one, he wanted a child, a son, an heir. God, Charlie, he turned into you. Except that he hit me. He drank more than usual, more than before, and he started hitting me. Places where it wouldn’t be seen, wouldn’t easily be noticed. Here, the lower back, the kidneys. My breasts. I backed his Volvo into the pool and I left him, sued for divorce. One after another his friends, the friends we’d had together, more ways than one some of them, they went up into the witness box and lied to their hind teeth. His barrister tore me apart and I was lucky to leave the court with the clothes I stood up in.”

She looked at Resnick and smiled ruefully.

“That was when I should have come back to you, Charlie. If I was going to do it at all. Instead of waiting till I became like this.”

“Elaine …”

“No.”

“Elaine …”

She placed her finger firmly on his lips.

“Don’t, Charlie. Whatever you say now, by the morning you’ll regret it.”

He would have been able, at that moment, to have taken her in his arms and forgiven her what little there was to forgive, maybe even forgiven himself. He could have foraged amongst the albums he never played and found Otis Blue and set it on the turntable and stood with his arms around her and said, “Let’s dance.”

Elaine stood up. “If the phone’s still where it used to be, I’m going to call a taxi.”

Resnick shook his head. “No need. I’ll drop you.”

“Charlie, you don’t want to know where I’m going.”

At the front door, he said, “Take care.”

“I’ll try,” she said. And, “Maybe I’ll drop you a line some time.”

“Do.”

Elaine smiled. “You can always tear it up.”