Cutting Edge

Four

Karen Archer found Tim Fletcher at around the time Resnick was beginning his walk down through the Lace Market towards Aloysius House. That is, she found something sprawled across the top of the metal steps which led up from the university grounds to the pedestrian walkway; something dark, wedged half-in, half-out of the first set of doors. An old bundle of discarded clothing, bin-liners stuffed with rubbish and dumped. It wasn’t until she was almost at the head of the steps that she realized what was lying there was a person and at first she took it to be a drunk. What told her otherwise was the tubing of a stethoscope protruding from beneath it.

Karen held herself steady against the railing, staring down at the surface of the ring road, rainbowed lightly with petrol. The chipped metal was cold against the palms of her hands, cold on her forehead when she lowered her face against it. When the worst of her panic had passed, when her breathing had finally steadied, only then did she go back to the body. Get closer. Possibly three minutes, four.

She held the door open with her hip and dragged, then pulled, Fletcher inside. No part of him seemed to be moving, other than what she moved for him. As best she could, Karen turned him on to his back and lowered her face until it was close to his; her fingers fidgeted at his wrists, searching for a pulse. She tried not to look at his wounds, along which dark knots of blood had begun to coagulate.

“Tim!” She shouted his name as if the force of the cry might waken him. “Tim!”

With a soft swoosh an articulated lorry moved beneath the bridge, its lights catching Karen’s face as she stood. Fletcher’s Walkman lay close by the inner door and, irrationally, she stooped to make sure it was in the off position, the battery not wasting.

She hurried through to the hospital, willing her legs to run but getting no response, the squeak, squeak of her trainers on the hard, grooved rubber following her across. She didn’t know whether she was leaving Tim Fletcher alive or dead.

It took several moments for Karen to make clear what had happened, but from there all was quiet speed and efficiency. If the casualty officer who spoke to Karen was surprised, he did nothing to betray it. All she saw of Tim were blankets, a stretcher being wheeled between curtains. All she heard were the same quiet voices. Transfusion. Consciousness. Surgery. They sat her in a corner and gave her, eventually, tea, sweet and not quite warm, in a ribbed and colored plastic cup.

“Is he all right?”

“Try not to worry.”

“Will he be all right?”

Unhurried footsteps, walking away.

“God!” Tim Fletcher had exclaimed, that first time in her room. “God!” Staring at her face, her breasts. “You’re perfect!”

“Miss?”

Karen’s fingers tightened around the cup, glancing up. The police officer had gingery hair and a face that reminded her of her younger brother; he held his helmet against his knee, tapping it lightly, arhythmically, against the blue of his uniform.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you might answer a few questions?”

Karen’s chest tightened beneath her purple jumper and she began to cry.

The officer glanced around, embarrassed.

“Miss …”

The crying wasn’t going to stop. He squatted down in front of her, took the cup from her hands and rested it on the floor beside his helmet. In the three months he’d been on the force, Paul Houghton had stepped between four youths squaring up with bottles after closing; he had lifted a panicking three-year-old from a second-floor window and out on to a ladder, close to the end of one shift, he’d followed screams and curses to an alley back of a pub and found a middle-aged man on all fours, the dart that his girlfriend had hurled at his face still embedded, an inch below the eye. In each case, he’d acted, never really stopped to think. Now he didn’t know what to do.

“It’s okay,” he said, uncertain, reaching out to pat her hand. She grabbed hold of his fingers and squeezed them hard.

“Maybe you’d like another cup of tea?” he suggested.

When she shook her head, Karen’s breath caught and the tears became sobs. Inconsolable. Bubbles appeared at both nostrils and, with his free hand, Paul Houghton fished into his pocket and found a tissue, already matted with use.

“Here,” he said, dabbing gingerly.

Heads were turned, staring.

“Rotten bugger!” a woman shouted. “Leave the girl alone.”

“Stick ’em in a uniform,” commented another, “and they think they can do as they bloody like!”

“I’m sorry,” breathed Karen, using the soiled tissue to wipe round her eyes, finally to blow her nose.

“S’all right.”

He wasn’t like her brother, Karen thought, looking at him through blurred lashes, he was younger. She felt sorry for him then, beyond the mere platitude, meaning it.

Karen handed him back his scrappy tissue and he stuffed it out of sight, standing. The backs of his legs ached and he wanted to rub them, but didn’t. He took his notebook from his breast pocket.

“I shall have to ask you some questions,” he said, blushing.

Resnick had finally got to bed at four and found himself unable to sleep. Miles and Bud were a weight at the bottom of the covers and Ed Silver’s broken snoring filtered up from the floor below, nudging him where he didn’t want to go.

Didn’t you used to have a wife, Charlie?

No cats then and every penny counted. DC’s pay. Elaine had kept the house well, having been the one to see it first, boxed advert in the paper, must be viewed to be appreciated. Walking him round from room to room, hand in his or beneath the arm, guiding. That fireplace, Charlie. Look. Isn’t it wonderful?The mortgage had stretched them fine, his salary and hers; evenings of repapering and painting; front and back garden some nights till dark. Just as well I’m working, Charlie. Without that, I don’t know where we’d be.

Back in Lenton, Resnick’s answer, unspoken, St Anne’s or Sneinton, a two-bedroom terraced with a bricked-in yard and a front lawn you could clip in fifteen minutes with a pair of shears.

Time a-plenty for moving, he might have said. When we need the room.

All that early interest in real estate, it prepared Elaine for the man she was to go off with, eventually, when the tacky weeks of subterfuge were at an end. That Tuesday afternoon when Resnick had driven through Woodthorpe, not his usual route at all, cutting down from Mapperley Plains, he had seen the dark blue Volvo first, parked with its near-side wheels on the curb, close to the For Sale sign at the gate. A man in a three-piece suit, not tall, keys in hand, walking towards it. And a pace behind him, buttoning up the tailored jacket that she wore for work, Elaine. Still smiling.

How many other empty properties she had visited with her lover, how many evenings she had passed in his Volvo, discreetly parked, Resnick had not wanted to know. Later, all out in the open, in court, nothing left to lose, Elaine had made sure that he did.

Knowing hadn’t meant that he understood. Not exactly, not quite. The mystery of living with someone for so long and never really knowing them, little more than how they like their tea, the wrist on which they wore a watch, which angle they prefer to lie in bed.

Not long ago there had been three letters: the first two close together, the third after a gap of several months. There had been no mistaking the writing and by the time the last arrived, curiosity had got the better of him. He had read the first sentences quickly, the first communication from Elaine in almost ten years; glanced at the end, where she had written, Love. After tearing it, he had taken it into the kitchen and burned it.

Ed Silver had stopped snoring; the cats were curled into each other and still. Without meaning to, Resnick slept.

“How’d it go at the hospital, Ginge? Waste of time?”

Paul Houghton fidgeted with a collar that was always too tight. “Not exactly, Sarge.”

“Let’s be having it, then.”

Only a brief way into Houghton’s verbal report, the sergeant interrupted him, picked up the phone and dialed the uniformed inspector on night duty.

“If you’ve a minute, sir, you might care to come through … Right, sir. Yes.”

He set the receiver down and looked across at Paul Houghton with a half-grin. “Making a bit of a habit of this, aren’t you? Darts, sharp implements.”

Houghton shrugged. “Suppose so, Sarge.”

“Girl as found him, all right, was she?”

“Upset, Sarge, naturally, but …”

“No, I mean was she all right?”

He could feel the red rising up his neck. “I didn’t really …”

“Held her hand, did you? You know, make her feel better.”

Paul Houghton was blushing so strongly that the backs of his eyes had begun to water.