Cutting Edge

Forty

“Helen!”

Bernard Salt was wearing his white coat over shirt sleeves and a pair of tan cavalry twills that he’d bought from Dunn’s more than ten years back and were still going strong. His tie was the one with little pigs on it his elder daughter had given him one Father’s Day as a joke. That morning he’d slid it from the rack and knotted it swiftly, left the house before he realized and now he was stuck with it, no intention of appearing on duty without a tie. Besides, look at it this way, with half the hospital privy to his private life, half of those despising him as a heartless chauvinist, the remainder thinking, himself and Helen Minton, there wasn’t much to choose between them, well, it was a gesture. Let them think he didn’t care. If they were brainless enough to take the word of a neurotic woman, superficial judgments, well and good. He’d pig it out.

And with this other business, checks in and out, escorts and taxis home, extra security cameras, the staff whose job it was actually watching the screens instead of playing Find the Ball and reading the Sun-there were other things to preoccupy the hospital mind.

“Helen!”

This time she half-cocked her head, the slightest acknowledgment, before disappearing into her office and closing the door.

Salt opened it again and left it open, standing just inside.

Witnesses, no more meeting in car parks, fumbling behind closed doors. Fine!

“What do you want, Bernard?” Somehow she’d found time to have her hair re-permed and it was more like wire wool than ever. She stood ramrod straight, staring at him, this woman who had once teased from him a tenderness he had been almost frightened to realize he possessed.

“Very little, except to say how much I welcome what you’ve done. You were right, I have a freedom from personal responsibilities such as I haven’t experienced in thirty years. Now that you have acted as you have, there is no way in which you can threaten that again. I didn’t want you, Helen, I haven’t wanted you for a long time. I don’t love you and if I ever did, the way you have behaved is guaranteed to make me forget it.”

There was a slight tightening of the muscles in Helen’s face, nothing more.

“Thank you,” Bernard Salt said.

Helen said nothing. A nurse came towards the open door, hesitated, went away again.

“I was chatting with the Senior Nursing Officer over coffee; I shouldn’t be surprised if the hospital doesn’t offer you early retirement, obvious stress, neuroses, maybe you could carry on doing a little part-time work … at a more junior level.”

Helen willed herself not to move until he had gone, from her office, from the ward. She willed herself not to cry. Tears enough already and what good had they done her? From the side drawer of her desk, she took the photocopy of the theatre report book and folded it carefully in half and then in half again before placing it in an envelope and sealing the envelope down. Better than crying.

“How long, Inspector, are you intending to detain my client?”

“For as long as it takes?”

Suzanne Olds gave a quick little shake of the head. “You don’t have that long.”

“I’m sure the superintendent will authorize an extension of custody. In the circumstances.”

“The circumstances being that, aside from the girl’s diary, you haven’t been able to come up with a single piece of evidence that places my client in any relationship with the victim.” She used a small gold lighter to light a cigarette. “Getting on for eighteen hours of frantic searching for what? A fingerprint? A sudden reluctant witness?”

“We can apply to the magistrate …”

“An application we would have every chance of successfully contesting.”

Resnick shrugged and wearily smiled. “You’ll do what you have to do.”

“And so will you.” She shifted the balance of the bag slung over her arm. “The trouble is, you want to find him guilty for all the wrong reasons. You don’t like him, do you? Not one little bit.”

Resnick looked back at her. “Do you?”

Calvin didn’t know what had got into his father lately. Dinner last night had been those little beef patties from the butcher down on the High Street, the one he’d sworn never to use again on account of some racist jibe he thought he’d overheard. Patties and tomatoes out of a tin, swimming around in all that pale red juice. Calvin hated that.

Breakfast today had been toast, toast, and toast. The jar of beyond-the-sell-by-date honey had had a fungus growing over it a quarter-inch thick. And just as Calvin had been on the point of sweetening his tea with a couple of spoonfuls of that sugar substitute his father had bought by the twenty-eight-pound bag, he happened to look across at the paper and there the people who made the stuff, NutraSweet, were being accused of falsifying their research and pushing a product that could cause headaches, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, depression, loss of memory, mood swings, and swelling of the bodily extremities. Calvin let go of the spoon and sipped the tea as it was. He knew there wasn’t a granule of real sugar in the house and though he knew some people liked to use honey to sweeten what they were drinking, he wasn’t about to take a risk with that gunk.

Jesus! The tea had tasted terrible.

And Calvin never quite believed what he read in the papers anyway. He spooned in the NutraSweet and started to flip through, looking to see when Guns N’ Roses were appearing in the city, one thing they couldn’t lie about, announcements, and he noticed that one of the pages had been torn away. The front one. He’d found the ad he was looking for and there was Canceled printed all the way across it. Refunds available on receipt of the original tickets. Even when they didn’t lie, newspapers, what they were full of was bad news.

His father had come back in from doing something to his bike, the chain slipping, something like that, and Calvin had asked him when they were going to get some decent jam again, out-of-date Oxford marmalade there was never anything wrong with that, what was he going to do with twenty-eight pounds of poisonous artificial sweetener, where was the rest of the paper?

His dad had mumbled something and rinsed his hands under the tap, wiped them on a tea towel and gone back outside to get them all oily again.

Calvin had found the missing front page in the bin under the sink, tea leaves and what hadn’t been eaten of the tinned tomatoes wrapped inside it. Stained with a sort of dark orange, he’d read the headline: NEW HOSPITAL ALERT, the first few lines about somebody being arrested in the grounds, helping the police with their inquiries.

One of Calvin’s friends had helped the police with their inquiries. He’d been off work for six weeks and lost his job, bruises consistent with falling down a flight of steps his parents had been told. Bruises consistent with being called a black bastard and out on his own with a holdall at one in the morning, that was more like it.

Calvin had pushed the paper back down into the bin and headed off to his room. He was fast running out of dope and just a quick hit listening to some music, that would set him up for the day, get out on the streets and score some more.

Skelton and Resnick were in the corridor, trying to ignore the phones that were ringing everywhere, footsteps, the rise and fall of voices. Graham Millington passed between them with a murmured excuse me, a man in a sense of dazed elation: twelve dozen cartons of cigarettes traceable to two different robberies and at that moment the magistrate was issuing a warrant to search a lock-up in Bulwell.

“Forensic have checked every print in the girl’s room,” Skelton was saying. “Nothing that doesn’t come from the girl herself.”

“Still hoping for something from the university, sir. Someone must have seen them together.”

“If they were.”

“Apart, then. Carew admits he was there; the girl’s diary suggests she was. We’ve got two officers sitting there in the bar interviewing people and so far no definite sighting of either of them. Might have been her, might have been him, all of that.”

“Ms. Olds has been wearing out the carpet to my door, Charlie.”

“Mine, too, sir.”

“We need a break on this and soon.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was Lynn Kellogg who remembered something the nurse, Sarah Leonard, had said while being interviewed. The first time he spoke to me, Sarah had said, meaning Carew, I was walking home and he pulled over in his car, asked if I wanted a lift. One of those sports jobs, I can’t tell one from another. Lynn could see the car clearly in her mind’s eye, parked higher up the street and on the opposite side of the road from the house where Carew lived. She had thought nothing of it.

She needed written authorization and with Resnick back in the interview room she went straight to Skelton and got it within minutes, neat and precise and with his blessing. Her heart seemed to be alternately pumping faster and hardly functioning at all when she drew up alongside Carew’s car and got out. There were a couple of medical textbooks on the back seat, a towel and an empty Diet Lilt can on the floor; as far as she could see only maps and some old Mars Bar wrappings at the front. The boot was locked and it took her an age to find a key that would fit. Squash racquet, tennis racquet, a pair of sports shoes, a can of Duckhams Multigrade, a sweatband, a Ruccanor sports bag with a white sports shirt stuffed down through the top. Lynn gingerly removed the shirt and slid the zip back.

Beneath a jock strap and a single white sock with blue and red bands at the top, a slim metal rod, silvered, five to six inches long.

“Tea?”

Ian Carew nodded and reached up for the styrofoam cup that Divine was offering him. Instead of letting go immediately, Divine held on and their fingers briefly overlapped, their eyes locked.

“What’s this?” Resnick slapped the implement against the table hard, not waiting for Divine to return to his seat.

Despite herself, Suzanne Olds jumped in her seat.

Hot tea splashed over Carew’s fingers.

“What-oh, Jesus!”

“Hardly an answer.”

“Where did you find that?”

“You tell us.”

Carew shook his head, did his little trick of pretending to get up, settling back down. Trick or nervous habit, Resnick couldn’t be sure. “I don’t believe this,” Carew said to Suzanne Olds.

Suzanne Olds was the only person in the room who, at that moment, didn’t know what the object lying on the table was.

“It’s a scalpel holder,” Resnick said. “If I’m correct.”

Carew shifted his weight on the chair and folded his arms. He’d been offered the chance to shave after several broken hours trying to sleep in the cell, while somebody through the wall alternated between throwing up and blaspheming. He pushed his fingers into the corners of his eyes, then pushed up on the skin around the eyebrows, he was buggered if they were going to get him to say something he didn’t want to say. Couple of smart-arse policemen, think they’re so bloody clever!

“Carew?”

“It’s a scalpel holder, so what?”

“You recognize it? I mean, this one in particular?”

“No, Inspector, I do not. A bit like the police, see one, you’ve seen the lot.”

“Ian,” said Suzanne Olds, warning tone, warning look.

Oh, please, Divine was thinking, please give me just one chance. “And you’ve no idea where we found it?” Resnick persevered. “This particular one.”

“Well,” Carew leaning forward now, a little adrenalin jolting through him, take the high ground, “the only point of asking me is if one of your minions found it somewhere in the house. Maybe even in my clothes. So, yes, all right. It was in the house.”

Resnick shook his head. “The car.”

For a moment, Carew seemed genuinely bemused. “The car? My car? What on earth was it doing in the car?”

“You tell us,” Divine said, easy on the menace.

“Oh,” Carew said. “Right. The car.”

Resnick and Divine exchanged glances. Suzanne Olds uncrossed her legs, turned the page of her notebook; after holding out all this time, there wasn’t a confession coming?

“I nicked it,” Carew said.

“Say again?”

“The scalpel holder. Saw it lying around. At the hospital. I thought, right, that might come in handy, slipped it in my pocket. I think then, yes, that’s what it was, I was driving up to Cripps for a game of squash. Dumped it in the bottom of my sports bag.”

“When was this?”

Carew shrugged. “Oh, whenever we were in theaters, couple of weeks back now, must have been.”

“It’s been in your possession all that time?”

Again a shrug. “I suppose so, yes.”

“Thieve stuff from the hospital often, do you?” Divine asked.

“No.”

“Just scalpels?”

“Scalpel holders.”

“Easy to get the blades though, is it?”

Carew actually smiled. “Easy enough.”

“You haven’t told us why you bothered to take this implement,” Resnick said, “and then, according to your version, leave it at the bottom of your sports bag for two weeks. That is what you’re claiming?”

“Look, I saw it lying around. No use to anyone else. I thought it might come in handy. Then forgot about it.” He looked over at Suzanne Olds for support. “Nothing sinister about that, surely?”

“Come in handy for what?” Resnick asked.

Carew shook his head and made a sound of mock exasperation. “Oh, come on! I wouldn’t have thought that was too difficult to work out, even for you. What am I?”

A jumped-up little prick, Divine thought.

“A medical student,” Carew continued. “One day I might decide to specialize in surgery. In fact, I think I shall.” He held Resnick’s gaze. “I suppose I thought it would come in handy for practicing.”

“On what?”

Carew laughed in his face. “What’s the matter, Inspector? On whom, isn’t that what you mean? Although it would probably be on who if you actually said it. No, I could fit some blades and try it out on all kinds of things. Rabbit from the lab. Frog. Carve the Sunday bloody chicken with it, if you like.”

“Carve a body,” said Resnick.

“What about the anatomical skeleton you must have found in my room?” Carew asked. “Maybe that was the one. Carved her up, boiled down the flesh and tied it up in neat little parcels, swilled away the blood, painted the ribs and spine that funny sort of flesh color when I’d finished scraping away any last fragments of tissue. I expect this was what I used for that, too. Slice them up one minute, clean them up the next. All in a studious medic’s work.”

“Ian,” Suzanne Olds was standing close to the door, about to pull it open. “A break. A break, Inspector.”

“Fuck breaks,” said Carew. “I’ve had it with this. Old bloody scalpels, it’s pathetic. The same name as mine in some girl’s book. If that’s all there is, all the so-called evidence there is, I’m walking out and not coming back.”

“You can’t do that,” Suzanne Olds told him. “You’re still under arrest.”

“How much longer for?” Carew asked her.

Suzanne Olds looked at her watch. “Between four and five hours, unless the inspector approaches a magistrate and requests an extension.”

“He needs evidence for that, does he? The magistrate has to hear the evidence and be convinced by it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then,” Carew said, “in that case we’re laughing.”