Living Proof

Two

Across the city, Resnick was sleeping soundly, cats curled here and there among the humps and hollows of his bed.

He had spent the weekend in Birmingham, at a conference called to address the establishment of a national police force. More silver epaulettes and high-flown phrases than he had encountered in one place since Marian Witczak had dragged him along to a revival of The Merry Widow at the Theatre Royal.

"I feel," one senior officer had said, 'that we are already moving towards the formation of such a force in a very British way. "

Piecemeal, ill-considered and overcautious then, Resnick had thought, somewhere between the reorganisation of the National Health Service and the building of the Channel Tunnel.

"Y' never know, Charlie," Jack Skelton had said, when he pleaded a backed-up schedule and sent Resnick along in his place, 'might not do you any harm, putting yourself about a bit. Letting yourself be seen.

After all, don't want to stick at plain inspector all your life. "

Didn't he?

Watching all the high fliers like Helen Siddons, Home Office approved, race past him in the fast lane, didn't make Resnick feel he had a great deal of choice. Although, truth to tell, if he had wanted promotion badly enough, he would have pushed for it by now himself.

Got it, like as not, for all that he had long ignored the lure of the local Masonic. Lodge and had maintained a steadfast preference for watching County over chipping balls on to the green, getting his handicap down below double figures. * No, the team he had working with him now no one fussing overmuch with how he went about his job thanks very much, Resnick liked it where he was.

The alarm aroused him a few minutes short of six and he padded, barefoot, towards the bathroom, cats, instantly alert, winding between his legs.

The shower head was in need of cleaning again and the water jetted out at him, unevenly, too hot or far too cold.

Before the cats could be fed, the caked residue of the previous day's Whiskas had to be prised from their bowls and Bud, the youngest, seized the opportunity to perfect that pathetic mew of hunger which, allied to the soulful stare of his eyes, would have served well amongst the young men begging beside the mural in the Broad Marsh bus station. What had someone at the conference called it, homelessness? A choice of lifestyle? As if, Resnick had thought, anyone would deliberately choose to sleep rough through the kind of wet winter they had just experienced.

He forked food into the four bowls, allowing the others to get a head start before letting Dizzy in through the back door, from where he had been patrolling the night. Tail angled high, the black cat stalked past him, green eyes narrowing against the extra light.

Resnick dropped a handful of Costa Rican beans into the grinder, sliced rye and caraway, set the kettle on to boil; he removed the outside layer from what remained of the Polish garlic sausage and cut thin slices from a stump of Emmental cheese. Behind him, through the glass at the top of the door, the sky was turning through purple and orange to red.

Resnick carried his breakfast through to the living room, switched the radio on low and sat with yesterday's paper on the arm of his chair, while Miles assiduously cleaned himself on his lap, pink tongue licking deep between extended claws.

It was the time of day Resnick liked best, the quiet before most of the world had got under way. Even back in the days when he had been married before the advent of the cats he would slide from the bed early, careful not to disturb Elaine, and wander contentedly through the empty rooms before settling with a cup of coffee and a new record on the stereo, headphones to his ears.

These days he rarely used the headphones for fear he would fail to hear that first summons, hauling him into the working day bit of an emergency, sir, something's come up.

This morning he got as far the sports round-up just ahead of the half hour another England bowler laid low by a strained groin before the phone rang and he swivelled towards it, Miles jumping to the carpet before he was pushed.

Divine's voice was loud with cynicism and wonder. "Those blokes who were attacked a few months back in the red-light district, looks like we might have another."

"Serious?"

"Serious enough. Lorry driver picked him up by Canning Circus, not far short of running all eight wheels right over him. Stretched out in the middle of the chuffing road he was, absolutely stark bollock naked."

"Twenty minutes," Resnick said.

"I'll be there."

Those blokes.

The first had been your average punter, run of the mill; confectionery salesman with a wife and kids in ffinckley and a four-year-old hatchback stuffed full with Snickers and liquorice chewing gum. Halfway along one of the alleys off Waterloo Road, lured by leopard-skin leggings and red high heels, and two men had suddenly been standing there behind him, quick and still from the darkness.

Three weeks on the critical list, it had taken all the skills of the Senior Registrar and her neurosurgery team to reconstruct his skull, fragment by fragment, piece by broken piece. Every day his wife had come in on the bus to sit at his bedside, reading Woman's Weekly, filling in puzzles, eating his grapes. A couple of months later, one of his credit cards had turned up in Leicester, part of a job lot being offered for sale in a pub near the covered market.

The second victim had been an Italian soccer fan, jubilant after his team's victory in the Anglo-Italian Cup and celebrating on the open spaces of the Forest Recreation Ground with his friends, waving thousand-lire notes and singing Pavarotti's Greatest Hits. A young redhead, newly arrived on a Super Saver from Newcastle, had offered him a quick hand-job in the trees off the road, anything to stop him singing. A couple of early morning dog-walkers found him tied to a sycamore hours' later terrified, stripped of everything save his first-team replica shirt. Seventeen stitches it had taken to mend the gash in his forehead. His plane ticket had been found in a rubbish bin near the Forest park-and-ride and his passport, torn in two and two again, finally surfaced floating on the duck pond by the entrance to the Arboretum.

The most recent occurrence had been at the nub end of March" another sales rep, in the city on a roll and booked into the Royal Hotel. He had met a woman in the penthouse bar, nice looking, good clothes, nothing garish but out for business just the same. Back in his room, she had undressed him on the bed, encouraging him, he said, to talk dirty to her all the while. Call her, you know, a slag, a dirty whore, stuff like that When he was down to his Jockey's, she had pulled a knife from her handbag and stabbed him, once in the side, once through the flesh of the upper arm. Frantically, he had pushed her clear away and she had fled, off out of the room and down the hotel corridor, leaving him in no position to chase her. The description he gave of her, detailed as it was, matched no known prostitute on the Vice Squad's books. Just another housewife, most likely, eking out the Family Support.

Three incidents, probably unrelated, and now a fourth.

Resnick crossed the street from the centre of Canning Circus, early traffic already building up on its way along Derby Road towards the city centre. Time was, he would have bumped into Jack Skelton at this hour, the superintendent setting out on his regular three-mile run.

But since early spring, Skelton's exercise had been restricted to pacing the four walls of his office. Whether the superintendent's relationship with DI Helen Siddons had progressed beyond an older man's fantasy or not, Resnick could imagine only too well the tartness with which Alice Skelton would have scolded him for his folly. And Siddons' accelerated promotion to the West Country had done little to ease the situation, leaving Skelton increasingly disgruntled and grey-haired, his girth thickening at a noticeable rate.

The CID office was close to the head of the stairs on the first floor, an L-shaped room with filing cabinets ranked along the far wall, below detailed maps of the city. A succession of desks and tables ran along two of the walls and down the centre of the room.

Graham Millington's desk was on its own, adjacent to the thinly partitioned office which had the words Detective Inspector Charles Resnick on its door.

Behind Millington's desk were the kettle and mugs and the rest of the paraphernalia for tea- and coffee-making. Most of the other surfaces were clogged with official forms in a variety of shades and colours, typewriters and VDUs, here and there foil containers harbouring the remains of the previous night's chicken korma or lamb kebab.

In the usual way of things, only the officer on early shift would have been present when Resnick arrived, busy updating the files that logged the night's activities, after which the primary investigation of the inevitable breakins would be his or her responsibility. This morning, though. Mark Divine had been there from first light, back aching after sharing the interior of a rusting blue Transit with Kevin Naylor, the pair of them peeing into old orange juice cartons and waiting forlornly for the Home- care warehouse on the Abbeyfield Industrial Estate to be raided for a third time.

"What buggers me," as Divine was overfond of saying, 'is who'd go to all that trouble to liberate three gross of sink plungers and a couple of dozen aluminium ladders? "

The fourth night in a row in which they were no nearer to finding an answer.

Naylor had snuck off home to snatch a quick hour snuggled up to his Debbie, while Divine, for whom home offered no such luxury, had opted for a kip behind his desk. He had been snoring nicely when the duty officer rang up from below with details of a man who'd been brought in barely conscious from the end of the Alfreton Road. Soon after which, he had phoned his superior.

"Mark," Resnick said, door swinging to behind him.

"Boss." Divine swung his legs down from his desk and stood to uncertain attention.

"Best fill me in."

Divine told him what little he knew about the man who was presently in a bed at Queen's Medical, barely conscious and temporarily restricted to fluids.

"This stab wound," Resnick asked.

"Life threatening?"

"Seemed so at first, now they reckon he's going to be okay. Missed anything vital, by the sound of it." Divine shrugged.

"Lost a fair bit of blood all the same."

"And the nature of the attack, how much do we know about that?"

"Not a heck of a lot. I mean, when he first come round he was full of it Tart and whore, over and over, blaming her, like, for what had happened."

"It was the woman who stabbed him, that's what he's claiming?"

"No two ways about it. Aside from that, though, started asking him a few questions, clammed up tighter'n a virgin's arse. Wouldn't even tell us his name."

Resnick frowned and shook his head.

"All right. Have a word with Vice, see if they had anyone on patrol last night, late. They might have noticed something that'll tie in. Minute Kevin arrives, pair of you can get up by the Forest, talk to the girls on the early shift.

Meantime, I'll drop by the hospital. Maybe if our mystery man knows he's out of danger, he'll be more ready to talk. "

"Right, boss." Divine was alert now, tiredness fallen away. It wasn't every day Resnick was prepared to trust the younger man's instincts and there was a grin around the corners of Divine's mouth as he sat back behind his desk, reaching for the phone.

Lynn Kellogg was on the stairs as Resnick went down. After the traumas at the start of the year, she had had her hair cut short, making her face seem less rounded, more severe. More often than not now, there was a haunted look, hunched at the back of her eyes.

"Morning, Lynn. Everything okay?"

Fine. "

Neither of them believed it.

Resnick made a mental note to ask if she were still seeing the police psychiatrist, and if she were, whether it was doing any good.