Easy Meat

Four

“You’d think,” Skelton said, “when you get something right, the last thing anyone would want to do is mess about with it and run the risk of losing everything you’d gained.”

From the chair opposite the superintendent’s desk, Resnick grunted something which might be taken for agreement.

“You know and I know, Charlie,” Skelton went on, “most forces in the country would give their eyeteeth for figures like these.”

Nodding, Resnick shifted his weight from left buttock onto right. The idea of a Serious Crimes Unit in the county had been mooted before, but now, with changes in the Police Authority, it looked as though it might actually be going to happen.

Skelton was toying with a pencil, daring to disturb the symmetry of his desk. “You know what it’ll mean, don’t you? Two-tier policing, that’s what it’ll mean. All the highfliers and bright boys stuck in together where they can polish one another’s Ph.Ds and the rest of us left penny-antying about with stolen mountain bikes and traffic offenses.”

Resnick wondered if in a way that wasn’t happening already. Helen Siddons, for instance, the bright young DI who had paused at the station long enough to set a seismograph beneath the crumbling structure of Skelton’s marriage. She had been made up to inspector at an age when Resnick had still been shy of sergeant; now here he was in his mid-forties, inspector still, and where was she? Holding down a chief inspector’s post in Somerset. As Reg Cossall had put it a few nights back in the pub, “If that self-seeking cow’d had the luck to be black as well as female, she’d’ve been superintendent by now, never mind fucking chief inspector!”

“No, Reg,” Graham Millington had laughed. “It were better’n inspector she was fucking, it was our Jolly Jack.”

Looking across at Jack Skelton now, Resnick wondered if that had been true. Oh, Skelton had fancied her, Siddons, clearly enough, and she had turned that to her advantage. But whether it had gone beyond the lingering glances and the barely covert looks, Resnick didn’t know. And besides, it hardly mattered: what mattered was what Alice Skelton thought had happened. Adultery in the mind is as hard to shake as love stains on the sheets. The last time Resnick had been round to the Skelton house, it had been like watching bear baiting between barely consenting adults.

“Still, with any luck, Charlie,” Skelton said, “we’ll both be up and gone, the pair of us, before it happens. Put out to grass with a pension and whatever they give you nowadays in place of a gold watch.”

Resnick didn’t think so. Skelton, maybe, but as far as he himself was concerned, retirement was something lurking in the last gray hours before morning; one of those beasts like cancer of the prostate that stalked you in your sleep.

“Lynn Kellogg, Charlie.” He had waited until Resnick was almost at the door. “Okay, is she?”

Resnick was slow to answer, wondering if there were something he should have noticed, something he’d missed. “Fine. Why d’you ask?”

“Oh, no reason.” Skelton looked at Resnick across the broad arch of his fingers. “She’s started seeing that therapist again, that’s all.”

No reason then, Resnick thought, as he headed back along the corridor towards his own office, was not exactly true. As he well knew, there were reasons enough.

Fifteen or so months ago, Lynn had been kidnapped by a man Resnick and his team were tracking down. The man had killed twice before, women whom he had tantalized with the prospect of freedom, before brutally ending their lives; it was a game that he played, and he had played it with Lynn, alternately being kind to her and then threatening her, keeping her cold and in chains. By day he was capable of speaking to her in the soft tones of romance, and at night, in the cramped blackness of the caravan, he would masturbate over her as she feigned sleep.

After a lengthy trial, at which all this was painfully dragged out for everyone to read about in their newspapers and see replayed each night on their TV, the man’s pleas of diminished responsibility had been disregarded and he had been sentenced to imprisonment for life. A minimum of twenty-five years.

By the time she herself was little more than fifty-younger than her own mother was now-Lynn knew he could be walking the same streets, breathing the same air. At the turn of any corner she might meet him, hear him again, clear across the clamor of a crowded bar, asking could he buy her a drink; his fingers tapping at the window the next time her car broke down, face peering in, drizzled out of focus by the rain, the lilt of his voice, that smile …

And there were other things that had been stirred into consciousness by the experience, things which Lynn was struggling to forget.

She was at her desk when Resnick entered the CID office, back towards him, a slight hunch of her shoulders as she made notes on her pad while talking on the phone. Kevin Naylor, like Lynn a detective constable in his twenties, was accessing the computer, checking through incidents of arson in connection with a recent fire in which an Asian boy of four had died. Graham Millington, Resnick’s sergeant, sat with an elderly black woman, coaxing her through the circumstances of a robbery she had witnessed in a local bookmaker’s, three thousand pounds stolen and the manager recovering from serious head injuries in the Queen’s Medical Centre. The other desks were empty, officers out and about in the city, asking questions, knocking on doors.

Inside Resnick’s office, a partitioned corner of the narrow room, the telephone started to ring. By the time he had entered and closed the door behind him, it had stopped. One glance at the jumble of papers on his desk, and he reached into one of the drawers for a half-empty pack of Lavazza caffé espresso and filled the coffee machine his friend Marian Witczak had given him as a present. “For you, Charles, to treat yourself well. I know how much you like good coffee.”

The last drops, black and strong, had not finished percolating through before Resnick, unable to distract himself any longer, pushed open the office door and called Lynn Kellogg’s name.

“Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

She kept her hair cut short now, defiantly, brushed forward at the front just like a boy’s; the only slight curl, as if to spite her, curved in front of her ears and the plain gold studs that she wore. She had never won back the fullness or the color of her face. She wore black cotton trousers, a black, round-necked top. No rings.

“Jack Skelton was asking me how you were.”

She hadn’t forgotten how to smile, at least with her eyes. “And you told him?”

“As far as I knew, you were fine.”

“That’s okay, then.”

Resnick brought the cup towards his mouth, but didn’t drink. “Except, apparently, you’re not.”

Lynn looked at him and saw a sad man with sad eyes. When he had been the first to arrive at the caravan where she was being held captive, she had clung to him and thought that she would never let him go. Now that was proving all too true: through therapy and jagged dreams, the memory of him persisted, the bulk of him hard against her, the tears in his eyes.

“The hospital,” Resnick said.

“Dr. Carey.”

“You’ve started seeing her again.”

Lynn sat forward, hands pressed between her thighs. “So much for confidentiality, then.”

Resnick set the cup back down. “As far as what’s said, whatever passes between you, of course that’s true.”

“But if I’ve gone back into therapy …”

“We have to be concerned.”

“That I might be cracking up?”

“Concerned for you.”

She laughed. “Because I might not be able to do the job?”

“Yes.” He looked away and Lynn laughed again.

“What?” Resnick said. “What?”

“Nothing, it’s just … No, it’s okay, I know you’re only doing your job, too.”

Resnick shifted again, uncomfortable in his chair. “It’s the nightmares, then? They’ve started up again. Is that the problem?”

“Yes,” Lynn said. “Yes, that’s right. Same old thing.”

The lie hung between them, tangible as smoke.

“You feel okay, though,” Resnick asked. “About the job? Carrying on?”

“Yes. Really I’m fine.”

“You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do?”

“Of course.” She was on her feet by the door, avoiding his eyes.

“Your case load,” Resnick asked. For whatever reason, he didn’t want her to go. “What’s most pressing?”

“That lad, I suppose. The one who absconded from the Secure Unit …”

“Hodgson?”

“Martin, yes. He could be anywhere, of course. Manchester, London. But I had a call earlier from Vice, thought they might’ve spotted him, touting for business out on Forest Road.”

Resnick sighed, all too familiar. “Who are you liaising with?”

“Sharon. Sharon Garnett.”

“Give her my best.”

“Right, yes, I will.”

Lynn hesitated just a moment longer before going back through the door. Already her phone was ringing again and Graham Millington, having finished with his witness, was waiting to ask her about overtime. Divine was back at his desk with a copy of the Post and a brace of Jamaica patties from the baker’s on Hartley Road.

In his office, Resnick scanned the response from the Police Authority chairman to claims that the recent Audit Commission survey comparing police forces’ efficiency was scarcely worth the paper it had been printed on. He opened an envelope addressed to him in Marian Witczak’s precise hand. Is it true you are never at home any more, Charles, and, if so, who is feeding all of your beautiful cats? She had enclosed an invitation to a dance at the Polish Club for this coming weekend. Underneath the line, Dress Informal, she had added, But please bring dancing shoes!

Resnick pushed it out of sight beneath a pile of crime reports, dancing the last of several things occupying his mind. For no clear reason he could discern, unless it were the coffee in the cup that he was holding, the words to an old Bessie Smith blues came filtering to the surface, something about waking up cold in hand.