Off Minor

Twenty-three

The name over the door read Jacqueline Verdon, Bookseller. There were books under a canopy outside, paperbacks in crates, dogeared and damp, ten pence each. In the window, more expensive, volumes on astrology, astronomy, motherhood and diet, the lives of the great composers, forgotten women artists. If Patel had ever known the name of a woman artist, he had forgotten it. A bell jingled above the door as he went inside.

The interior smelt of slow-burning incense. From the back of the shop there was music playing, chime-like and repetitive. On a central table several vases of dried flowers were surrounded by a display of maps. Almost the entire wall to Patel’s left was crammed with green-backed books published by Virago.

“How may I help you?” The woman lifted her glasses from her face before she spoke, treating Patel to a welcoming smile. She was in her forties, he thought, neat brown hair, one of those essentially English women whose good manners impelled them towards liberal attitudes on race relations and capital punishment. When Patel had first moved to his present station he had lodged with one, bran flakes for breakfast and the toilet bowl had shone; the day she had caught Patel with a Cape apple in his room, she had reacted as if he had been enjoying sexual congress with her miniature schnauzer.

“There’s a lot more stock upstairs. You’re welcome to just browse. But if you’re in any kind of a hurry, it might be best to let me know what it is you’re interested in.”

Without her glasses she seemed to be staring at him, accentuating the frankness of her gaze. She smiled again and moved her head slightly, so that the circular earrings that she wore brushed against the sides of her face, reflecting such light as there was.

“You are Jacqueline Verdon?” Patel asked.

“Yes.” Less certain now, questioning.

“I thought perhaps you could tell me something about Diana Wills?”

Her hand jerked sharply sideways, sending her fountain pen skittering across the desk where she had been working and leaving a line of tiny blots across her papers, each smaller than the last.

Patel rounded the display table, drawing his identification from his pocket.

“What’s happened?” Jacqueline Verdon asked. “Diana. What’s happened to her?” Alarm clear in the hazel of her eyes, the rising voice.

Resnick got stuck behind a ready-mix concrete lorry going over Bobbers Mill Bridge and was kept fuming in a single line of traffic that stretched from the ring road as far as Basford College. On his radio, the infirm and over-sixties were gamely phoning into Radio Nottingham, reminiscing about real Christmas trees and real holly, mince pies half a dozen for half an old crown, goodness knows how many shopping days to Christmas and they were bitching about it already. I remember the time, croaked one, when there was a Santa Claus in every store in the city: the last Santa Resnick had been in contact with had been up on a charge of molesting small boys in his grotto.

He changed to Gem-AM, sixteen bars of Neil Sedaka and switching off wasn’t very hard to do. A gap appeared in the traffic ahead and he accelerated into it, earning the upthrust middle finger of a peroxide blond delivering auto parts. He arrived in Kimberley in time to find the nineteen-year-old constable sitting on the curb, helmet between his knees, while the woman who had slipped Patel his brandy-laced drink dabbed at his cut forehead with cotton wool and Germolene.

“What the hell happened here?”

“Oh, the poor love …”

The PC blushed.

“He’s old enough to answer for himself,” Resnick said. “Just.”

“Excuse me!”

“He must’ve broke in round the back, sir …”

“Who?”

“Morrison, sir. Least, that’s who I think it is.”

“How did he break in?”

“Window in the door, sir. Key must’ve been inside.”

“You didn’t see him? Hear him?”

“Only after it happened, sir. See …” glancing warily at the woman, who was now fitting a piece of Elastoplast over the treated cotton wool, “… I was taking a break, like.”

“You what?”

“No more than a cup of tea and a cheese cob,” the woman said.

“I wasn’t gone above five minutes, sir.”

“And the rest”

“Don’t be so hard on lad.”

“However long it was,” Resnick said, “time enough for the mother to’ve been in and gone.”

“Sir, I don’t think so, sir. I …”

“Don’t think is just about right. How do we know she’s not in there now, with him? Well?”

The constable looked unhappily at the crown of his helmet. “We don’t, sir.”

“Exactly.”

“There’s been no shouting, sir. Nothing like that.”

“What has there been?”

“Bit of breaking, I think, sir. Things being thrown around.”

“One or two in your direction, by the look of it.”

“Poor lamb …” the woman began, till Resnick’s expression made her think better of it.

“I stuck my head through the door, sir. Calling for him to come out.”

Resnick shook his head slowly, more in sorrow than in anger. “You did phone it in?”

“Yes, sir. They said someone was already on the way.”

Resnick nodded. “That was me.” He turned towards the house. “Come on. If you’re through being cosseted, let’s see what’s going on.”

“He’s still inside,” said the cloth-capped man, leaning against his back fence.

Resnick nodded thanks and carried on into the rear yard. There was no sign of life in back room or kitchen, but the floor of the former was littered with pages torn from scrapbooks and hurled about. Photographs were jumbled together on the table. A shattered vase, presumably the one that had struck the PC, lay on the quarry tiles in the kitchen.

“Michael Morrison?”

Aside from a dog barking higher up the street and the thrum of traffic, it was disturbingly quiet.

“Michael Morrison? It’s Detective Inspector Resnick. We talked yesterday.” A pause. “Why don’t you come and let us in?”

No response.

To the young constable, Resnick said quietly, “Round and watch the front.”

Resnick reached through the broken pane of pebbled glass and tried the handle of the door. The top bolt had been slid into place but he could just reach it with finger and thumb, ease it back. The soles of his feet crunched lightly on china shards. The room smelt slightly musty. Quarry tiles, Resnick reckoned, laid directly on to the packed earth, encouraging the damp.

“Michael?”

Bending towards the rough gray scrapbook sheets, he glimpsed pantomime tickets, a sticker from the Wild West Adventure Park a souvenir program from Babes in the Wood. On the torn pages of an album there were small square photographs of a man and a woman with a small child, a baby: Michael and Diana, Emily.

“Michael Morrison?”

The front room was snug and dark. It would have been possible to lean in all directions from one of the easy chairs and touch all four walls. The PC’s anxious face, strips of plaster incongruous beneath the peak of his helmet, looked back at Resnick through patterned lace.

On the stairs, the edges of carpet had all but worn through.

“Michael, it’s Inspector Resnick. I’m coming up.”

He was in the bedroom at the front of the house; two beds side by side with enough room for Michael to be sitting between them, back against the wall. The bed closest to the window Resnick guessed to be Diana’s: an alarm dock on the plywood cabinet beside it, two mugs containing an inch or so of long-cold tea, orange now around the edges, a paperback on stress, another, shiny reflective cover, on the subject of assertiveness. On the second bed soft animals crowded round the head. A cushion embroidered with a multi-colored cat lay near the foot. On the adjacent, straight-backed chair there were slim books with vivid covers: Teddybears 1 to 10, Morris’s Disappearing Bag. Scattered over both beds were more pages ripped from the albums and scrapbooks Michael Morrison had found below, his family in pieces all around him. His first family. He sat there not looking up at Resnick, an almost empty half-bottle of whisky tight between his knees.

“Michael.”

The eyes flickered towards him, then away. The fingers of Michael’s left hand were curled around a doll, round, flat face and hair like straw. A striped dress, yellow and red.

“Michael.”

In his other hand was a knife. Serrated edge, the kind more commonly used for slicing bread.

Resnick leaned towards him, careful not to startle, not to draw attention to his own hands.

“It’s my fault,” Michael Morrison said.

“No,” Resnick said and shook his head.

“My fault!”

“No!”

Resnick saw the tensing in Michael Morrison’s eyes, and grabbed for the knife too late. The point of the blade plunged fast at the doll and missed, driving hard into Morrison’s own thigh.

There was a vast intake of breath, pitched like a sigh: a shout building to a scream.

“Christ!” The word no sooner from Resnick’s mouth than Morrison had pulled the knife back out and, fingers buckled open, dropped it to the ground.

Resnick plucked the knife clear and slid it back over the thin carpet, out of reach. Blood was beginning to well, surprisingly bright, through the tear in Michael Morrison’s trousers, the puncture in his leg.

Resnick wrenched back the clasp, threw open the window. “Ambulance,” he yelled. “Fast.” And then he was hurling off the blankets, looking for a sheet to make a tourniquet.