Off Minor

Nineteen

Resnick woke to the sounds of birds outside. Except that these weren’t birds. Clusters of notes, gray, like sparrows at first light: soft insistence of sound. Faint splash of wings in shallow water, dusty cymbal strokes. Fragmentary. Minor chords at angles to the night.

He sat on the side of the bed, listening, wondering at the irregular rhythms of the heart. Someone attacking Gloria Summers with force enough to splinter bone.

There had been a bird: a skeleton he had found inside the house; white and smooth, perfectly proportioned and perfectly matching, translucent, bones that had become dust inside his hands.

I don’t understand how anyone in his right mind …

Resnick knew a man who, in a single uncharacteristic moment, had brought a hammer down smack between his mother’s eyes. Now, after nine years locked away, he reported to his probation officer, changed the flowers on his mother’s grave, lived a productive, blameless life. He knew another who had killed a man with the broken end of a bottle in a pub brawl, an argument over nothing that had ended in a starburst of arterial blood. On the third day of his parole he had quarreled with a taxi driver over a two-pound fare and bludgeoned him to death.

… how anyone …

Resnick stood at the window looking out and all the other windows he could see were curtained across and dark. There was a place in most people’s lives where they were capable of every evil thing.

I wished you dead. Charlie, does that shock you?

Wherever Elaine was now he hoped that she was sleeping and not awake like him, hung on the edge of something he could neither ignore nor fully understand: something that, even when he closed his eyes and ears, still echoed discordantly inside his mind.

“Off Minor.”

Lorraine had been awake since gray dawn, watching the troubled movement of Michael’s sleeping face, the winking eye of the digital clock. When she reached out to smooth the tightening frown around her husband’s eyes, he jerked instinctively away, unwaking, numbed by the enormity of what had happened.

Lorraine continued to lie there, remembering the first occasion she had seen Emily’s face: pressed up against the rear window of her father’s car, dark eyes and startling red hair. Michael had taken her with him to the shops and, on his way home, detoured by the bedsitter where Lorraine lived. She and Michael had been seeing one another for about a month. Stubborn, the little girl had refused to leave the car, say hello to Daddy’s friend. Lorraine thinking, as they drove away, I can’t handle this-a man with his marriage on the point of disintegration, a small child-this is not what I want.

“For pity’s sake!” her father had exclaimed. “Is this what we brought you up for? Educated you for? Somebody else’s leftovers?”

“What he’s doing to his wife,” her mother had said, “who’s to say he won’t do the same to you?”

At the wedding they kept themselves to themselves, stood stiff-backed at the reception, left early because of the long drive home.

Emily had been so excited, so pleased with her new dress which, as the afternoon wore on, became smudged with trifle, ice cream and wedding cake. When the music had begun, Michael had danced the first dance with Lorraine, the second with Emily, swinging her safe and wide and laughing in his arms.

Michael grunted something loudly and rolled over, covering his face with his arm. Softly, Lorraine slid out from beneath the duvet and crept downstairs. When she eased the curtain back a crack, the first camera crew was hurrying across the front lawn.

Raymond lay late in bed that morning, tired and horny, trying to summon up clear images of Sara but others insisting on getting in the way.

“All right,” Skelton began, “wide awake, let’s have your attention.”

The appropriate section of the city map had been enlarged and attached to the wall behind him. Photographs of Gloria Summers and Emily Morrison on either side. Colored pins flagged their homes, the last places they had been seen alive. Ribbon marked the journeys they would have taken to their respective schools, the roads along which they might have been taken to the rec.

“Two girls,” Skelton was saying, “similar ages. Slip a shoehorn between their birthdays if you’re careful. Missing within three months of one another. Homes, schools, no more than three-quarters of a mile apart. Coincidence?”

The superintendent looked at the faces of the officers, grim beneath an early morning haze of cigarette smoke.

“We’re running the Summers case back through the computer, looking for connections. Up to now, the second incident, the mother’s our best bet. We’ve got a lead to West Yorkshire, DC Patel’s on his way there now, liaising with Chief Inspector Dunstan, Halifax C1D. The rest of you, you know the priorities: three vehicles-a red hatchback, Ford Sierra, green transit-and two individuals, the jogger and a woman who might or might not prove to be the girl’s mother.

“Questions?”

There were none.

Chief Inspector Lawrence spelled out the rest. Uniformed officers would back up CID on house-to-house, double-checking, broadening it beyond the immediate vicinity of the Morrison house. Others, along with civilian volunteers, would begin to search the wasteland along the canal and beside the railway tracks; divers were standing by. A watch was being kept at the house in Kimberley in case Diana Wills returned under her own devices.

Skelton was on his feet again. “I don’t need to tell you the urgency here: we want the girl found and as soon as possible.”

He didn’t add while she’s still alive.

He didn’t need to.

“Michael.”

He pushed away Lorraine’s hand and rolled towards the far side of the bed.

“Michael.”

“What?”

“There’s people outside, filming the house. I asked them to go away and they refused.” He was sitting upright now, staring at her; all the while he had been sunk in sleep it had been possible to think that it had not really happened. “They say they want us to talk to them, make a statement.”

A stone clinked against the window.

“Mr. Morrison! Wakey-wakey! Rise and shine!”