Rough Treatment

Twenty-five

Whoever had started to redecorate the room had run out of paint or enthusiasm a third of the way down the end wall. Elsewhere more than one shade of blue had been rolled on to chipboard paper, fading blue fingerprints attached to floor and ceiling. Three sections of unmatched carpet had been interlocked across the floor. One man, overweight by as much as fifteen pounds, leaned back against the end of a moquette settee, watching a program about mathematics for eleven- to fourteen-year-olds. Another, cross-legged on the floor near the window, was reading Leon Uris. Norman Mann was close against the lowered blinds, binoculars in hand.

Resnick nodded briefly towards the two other officers as he came into the room.

“Not too early for you, Charlie?” asked Norman Mann pleasantly.

Resnick shook his head. He’d been awake since 4.25, Dizzy marauding underneath his bedroom window; gone back to bed but known it for a waste of time, finally up around half five, waiting for the sky to clear, the watery sun to rise.

He walked over to the window and Norman Mann obliged him by easing down one of the blinds. Resnick found himself looking out on another low block of flats, similar to the one he was in now. A curving walkway, its once-white wooden sides scattered with graffiti, led down to a paved area rich in dog shit and takeaway cartons from last night’s homeward trawl from the pubs along Alfreton Road.

Mann handled Resnick the glasses and pointed to one particular door. “Not exactly Crack City, but it’s our own little contribution.” Traces of his Edinburgh accent still clung to the back of his voice like shadows on an X-ray.

“Factory?” Resnick asked.

Mann shook his head. “Doubtful. More your out-workers. Cottage industries of old come back to haunt us. Cut the cocaine with baking powder, mix in a little water, bang it in the oven and then leave to dry. Easy as making a pie. Except what you get is a rock of crack that’ll change hands for twenty-five, thirty, forty pounds.”

“You’re not going in?”

“Not till we’ve got a better idea who’s inside. No.” Moving away from the window, he offered the glasses to the officer watching the TV. “You know how it is in this lark, Charlie, awful amount of waiting around, filling in time. Still …” he nodded towards the other officers, “… makes for a more cultured class of chaps.”

The two men laughed; one took his sergeant’s place at the window, the other turning a page of his book, then turning back again, couldn’t remember whether he’d read that page or not.

Norman Mann steered Resnick into the tiny oblong kitchen. The gas cooker looked as if it had been wrenched away from the wall and then left, blocking access to the sink. Something sat moldering in the corner, wrapped in damp newspaper. Better not to ask.

“Someone living here?” Resnick asked.

“Not any more. It was squatters last. Better here than out on the streets. Still, someone flushed them out a week or so back. Uniforms, probably, doing the council a favor. Useful for us though.” He shook out a packet of cigarettes and, when Resnick declined, lit one with the lighter from his back jeans pocket. “So, Charlie, something urgent.”

“Alan Stafford.”

Norman Mann angled his head back slowly, smoke easing from the edges of his mouth. “Bit higher class than this.”

“How high?”

“Connections all over. Newcastle, Southampton, Dover, Liverpool. Middle-man mostly, biggest profit for the lowest risk. By my reckoning he keeps some clients for himself, probably likes to keep the feel of the streets in his feet. Besides, gives him the chance to break and shake with the hoi polloi.”

“Television,” said Resnick, helpfully.

“Those wankers!” snorted Mann. “All they need is a few cans of Red Stripe to be falling arse-over-tip into each other’s Filofaxes. I’m talking money here, Charlie, real money. Power and influence. They don’t call cocaine your champagne drug for nothing.”

“You’ve got a watch on him, then?”

Norman Mann looked at him archly. “Now and again.”

“If he’s so important …”

“He’s as like got himself a bit of protection, all salted away against the inevitable rainy day. Oh, we’d like him, right enough. I’d love the bastard. But this lot here, peddling two-minute highs to schoolkids who hustle for it on the Forest, let’s face it, Charlie, we’re more likely to fetch up with one of them, more likely to get a result.”

“Which doesn’t mean you’re not interested?”

“It does not.”

Resnick nodded, wafted away the smoke that was collecting under the low ceiling in a blue-gray cloud. “He’s hanging round the edges of something pretty strange. A few things that won’t stay still long enough yet to tie down, see how they all fit. But he’s in there somewhere. I’ll bank on that.”

“Boss,” called one of the officers from the other room, “something’s moving.”

Norman Mann made his hand into a fist and set it against Resnick’s upper arm, tapping punches. “Anything we can do, Charlie.”

“Right. I’ll keep you up to the mark.”

Mann was back by the window, peering out. “Do that. Oh, and Charlie … check him out with NDIU, Stafford, they’ll have him pretty up to date.”

Resnick raised an arm. “Thanks.”

“Careful on your way out,” Norman Mann warned. “No one’s going to mistake you for your average squatter.” Grinning. “Not at second glance, anyway.”

Back inside his car, Resnick checked with the station, nothing to prevent him from moving on. He’d already had words with the DCI that morning, the request for information from the National Drugs Intelligence Unit would be on its way.

“One other thing,” Tom Parker had said. “Jeff Harrison, I thought the pair of you had some history together?”

“Not too much,” Resnick had replied.

“Only something’s ruffling his feathers and he seems to think you’re back of it.” Resnick had said nothing and waited. “Says he’s tried to talk to you, but you won’t answer his calls. Says you’ve had a couple of your lads over there, leaning on his men, ferreting around behind his back.”

“I came to you first, sir,” Resnick reminded him.

“Maybe it wasn’t clear to me what you were getting up to.”

“Like I said. Trying to fit that burglary in with our other inquiries. Nothing more than that.”

“If it was nothing more than that, d’you really think Harrison would be hopping like a blue-assed fly?”

“Maybe not, sir.”

“Your favorite word, isn’t it, Charlie? Maybe.”

Saying maybe inside his head, Resnick smiled.

“He’s been a bit naughty, that’s what you’re angling for, eh? That’s your suspicion. And don’t, don’t say maybe. Don’t say anything. Not till you’re this side of ready. And then I want it, Charlie. All of it. It’ll be out of your hands then. You know that, don’t you?”

Resnick had nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.

That had been first thing, before his meeting with Norman Mann. Now Resnick was slowing to turn in past the gate at Midlands TV, identify himself to the security guard on duty.

Suzanne Olds was easing her beige Honda out of the visitors’ car park. Seeing Resnick, she stopped.

“Your client,” Resnick said, braking, leaning across towards her. “You did us a favor.”

“Buy me dinner.”

“Anything but Chinese.”

“Polish, then. Isn’t there supposed to be a good Polish restaurant in the city?”

They dressed up in traditional costume and each meal began with a full glass of vodka. “Yes, there is.”

“I’ll hold you to it.”

“What are you doing here?” Resnick asked. “Another client?”

Suzanne Olds removed her glasses for a moment, the kind with lenses that are sensitive to changes in the level of light. “Mackenzie’s an impatient man. He was worried you weren’t taking his alleged assault seriously. Now that you’re here, I can see his fears were groundless.”

“I’m surprised the company are letting him proceed. I’d have thought they’d have preferred the whole thing hushed up.”

Suzanne Olds considered before speaking, tapped one end of the spectacle frame against the dip of her upper lip. “I didn’t say this, but I don’t think a punch on the nose …”

“The mouth.”

“Wherever. I don’t think that’s the concern. I think they’re using it.”

“What for?”

“To lean on Harold Roy. Exert pressure? I’m only guessing.”

“Sounds as if he should be your client, not Mackenzie.”

She slipped her glasses back into place, the car into gear. “Don’t forget,” she said, “Gobtaki, isn’t it?”

“Gotabki,” corrected Resnick, stuffed cabbage in a garlic-and-tomato sauce, but she was already passing the gate and signaling right.

Mr. Mackenzie was in the editing suite with Mr. Freeman Davis and had left a clear message that he was not to be disturbed. As far as the receptionist knew, Mr. Roy was not in the building. Miss Woolf? He could try the canteen.

Diane Woolf didn’t appear to be there, but Resnick recognized somebody who was. Robert Deleval was sitting alone in a corner, staring out through the glass and watching the grass grow.

Perhaps, thought Resnick, he was searching for inspiration. Wasn’t that what writers did?

“Mind if I join you?”

Deleval flapped a hand vaguely in the direction of the empty chairs. He looked like a man who had just written The Great Gatsby and discovered that his only copy of the manuscript had been lost in the post.

“Seen better days?”

Deleval cut one corner from a solid-looking portion of cheesecake; then another, and another. Don’t play with your food, Resnick’s mother had told him. It’s not a toy that you should play with.

“You know what they used to say,” Deleval began, still dismembering the cheesecake, “anything vaguely gynecological, anything below the feminine belt. Women’s problems. What’s wrong with Aunt Sophie? Women’s problems. Okay, so that’s what it is with me.”

Resnick looked at him with new interest. “Women’s problems?”

“Writers’ problems.”

“They’re the same?”

“No, just equally inexplicable to anyone who isn’t suffering from the same things.”

It was going to be, Resnick realized, one of those less than fascinating conversations. Why had he always assumed that writers must be interesting people to talk to?

“So have you come to arrest him?”

“Arrest who?” Resnick said. At the back of his mind, something was nagging at him-shouldn’t that have been arrest whom? What it was, you sat down with a writer for five minutes, miserable bugger or not, and that was enough to have you questioning your own grammar.

Either way, Deleval didn’t seem to have noticed. “Our esteemed director, of course.”

“For taking a swing at Mackenzie?”

“Bang on the button. Bust that mouth of his wide open.” Deleval seemed to have cheered up. “Butterfly stitches, pain killers, the whole works.” His expression soured again. “Only thing, he should have hit him harder. More. What was missing from that little scenario, a couple of good low blows.”

“Last time we spoke,” Resnick reminded him, “you were issuing death threats to Harold Roy, not Mackenzie.”

“That was before Harold became a hero of the unofficial confederation of shafted screenwriters.”

“He was ruining your script.”

Deleval made the final incision into the cheesecake. “Better than stealing it.” He let the knife fall against the edge of the plate. “A couple of years ago I approached Mackenzie with this idea, a series about an ordinary family that wins a lot of money, gambling, lottery, football pools, it didn’t matter. Mackenzie’s interested, excited even. We work our way through the whole gamut of lunches, breakfasts, afternoons in leather armchairs that become the first of several drinks before the taxi home. Ideas are jotted down on serviettes and menus, backs of cigarette packets. Let me have an outline. Mackenzie says, we’ll talk it up. Another month and I’m working on a rough treatment. Channel 4 are interested, Mackenzie and I, we’re forming our own company, the funding’s promised. Do it that way, he says, we get to keep control. You, he says, you develop that treatment the way you see it. Your baby.”

Deleval glanced around, suddenly aware that the level of his voice had risen and that others were beginning to pay attention.

“Almost a year along the line,” he went on, more subdued, “Channel 4 are out the window, the Beeb are interested, really interested. If there was some way I could restructure the treatment so it could be shown to Felicity Kendal, they’d be positively slavering. So, fine. There’s still no money around, nothing up front, but I do it anyway. After all, like the man said, it’s my baby and you don’t let your baby starve for lack of effort, right? At this point the entire series and serials department of the BBC gets sucked down one end of the corporation vacuum-cleaner and blown out the other. Nobody seems to know if they’re on their heads or their heels. That treatment’s out, Felicity Kendal’s out, Mackenzie’s bringing our cherished, now slightly aging infant here into the heartland of independent television drama. Suddenly my idea has become something else, someone else’s idea. Ideas. Now it’s some many-headed hydra, trying to run in half a dozen directions at once, desperate to be all things to all people and almost none of those things that I had in mind in the first place.”

“But,” said Resnick, “it was your idea.”

Robert Deleval threw back his head and laughed. “Signed, sealed and delivered, sold along the dotted line to the highest bidder. Hey, even writers have to eat. Your baby? Here’s the adoption papers. Of course we’ll bring him up right. Oh, we might need to slap him around a little, bring him into line. A little rough treatment, but then, who did that ever hurt?”

Resnick was looking around the canteen for signs of Diane Woolf. What had begun as interesting had degenerated into a mixture of spleen and self-pity.

“You know what a writer needs to succeed in this business?” Deleval demanded.

Resnick shook his head; it was time he made his excuses and left.

“You know?”

Deleval was almost roaring now and the occupants of all the adjacent tables had dropped their indifference and were openly staring.

“What he needs,” Deleval was on his feet, turned towards the interior of the canteen, “aside from the skin of a rhinoceros and a permanently nodding head, is an extra-long tongue that won’t go brown at the edges.”

He seized the plate from his table and held it close to his face. “What any self-respecting writer has to be able to do …” he was pawing his hand into the pieces of cheesecake and pushing them inside his mouth, shouting through the ensuing spray, “… is eat shit and look as though he’s enjoying it.”

After that, Resnick nearly didn’t notice Diane Woolf at all. She tapped him on the shoulder as he backed past her, standing near the head of the queue balancing a plate of salad, a low-fat banana yoghurt and a black coffee.

“Shall we take this somewhere else?”

“Please.”

He followed her out through the doors and along the broad corridor, up a flight of stairs and into a small room that overlooked a section of the car park. There were several pieces of editing equipment, two television monitors and a double stack of VHS cassettes that Resnick eased back along the table so that Diane could set down her lunch. He assumed it was lunch.

“Here,” she said, pushing the coffee towards him. “It’s black. Is that all right?”

“It’s yours.”

She shook her glorious head of red hair. “I drink too much of the stuff. It’s just easier to buy it and pour it away than walk past the coffee point. Besides, if you drink it, I won’t have to go on murdering the house plants the company so thoughtfully provides.”

Resnick was staring at her.

“Well, what they don’t provide are receptacles for unwanted coffee.”

That wasn’t why he was looking at her. She knew it. Delicately between forefinger and thumb, she lifted some alfalfa sprouts towards her mouth. She had one of her long legs crossed over the other, the white dungarees that she was wearing were loose across the hips, less so where the bib was strapped over a satiny blouse, electric blue.

“I take it Robert was having another of his little fits.”

“It’s happened before?”

“Like clockwork. Robert’s more pre-menstrual than me and any dozen of my friends put together. He just doesn’t bleed, that’s all.”

“Not like Mackenzie.”

“Ah, so this isn’t merely a social call.”

Wishing that it were, Resnick shook his head. “Did you see what happened? Clearly, I mean.”

“Ringside seat.”

“And was there provocation?”

“When the wind’s in the right direction, Mac could provoke the Buddha into going ten rounds.”

“How was the wind on this occasion?”

“North-north-westerly.”

“Force nine?”

“All cones hoisted.”

“He asked for it, then?”

“Doesn’t he always?”

“You’d make a statement to that effect? If it came to it.”

Diane made a little moue with her mouth. “There’s my salary to think of. And expensive shoe obsession to support.” Today they were white Nikes with a yellow stripe; perhaps she kept the rest under glass, lock and key.

“It probably won’t come to that.”

“You won’t charge him?”

“It’s a little early to say, but …”

“That isn’t the point of it, you know.”

Resnick lifted the coffee mug but didn’t drink any. “What is?”

“Mac wants him out.”

“Of the job?”

“The job, the building, everything.”

“Didn’t he hire him?”

“Hire ’em and fire ’em, that’s the name of the game. Harold’s been at it long enough to know the risks. They’ll pay him what he’s due, slip him a few promises to keep him sweet. His name stays on the credits, he won’t lose his residuals.”

“His what?”

“Oh, repeats, overseas sales. They’ll love this in Australia.”

Resnick, in his mind, was loving her mouth, the lower lip that looked as if it were just slightly swollen.

She ate a piece of celery, taking her time about it. “Do you always ogle your witnesses?”

Resnick almost fell for saying something sticky and smart like, only when they look like you. Thankfully, he didn’t. He had the grace to blush a little instead.

“You want some of this?” she asked, sliding the plate towards him.

Resnick shook his head.

“You should.” She smiled. “You really should think about your carbohydrates.”

Before Resnick could suck in his stomach and straighten his back they were interrupted by a loud shouting from outside.

At the end of the short corridor, Harold Roy had Mackenzie backed up against a door and was threatening to deafen him with accusations. The most frequent amongst those seemed to concern what was going on at the other side of the door.

“If I’ve got it wrong,” screamed Harold, “get the fuck out of my way and let me see what’s going on in there.”

“What’s been done in there is none of your business, Harold.”

“Like hell it isn’t!”

“Harold …”

“Out of the way, you chicken shit …”

“Harold …”

Harold caught Mackenzie by the forearm and managed to swing him far enough aside to make a grab at the door handle possible. It budged, but not by more than an inch.

“It’s locked.”

“Of course it’s locked. With you running amok, what d’you expect? You shouldn’t even be in the building.”

“You shouldn’t be producing the God-slot for five-year-olds.”

“Harold, now you’re being petty and vindictive.”

“When it comes to being vindictive …”

“I know, I know,” said Mackenzie, showing every sign of becoming bored, “I wrote the book.”

“No, Mac,” said Harold Roy, “you stole the book.”

“Up yours, Harold!”

It might have petered out there, just another slagging match between middle-aged prima donnas with nothing better to do on their lunch break, if Freeman Davis hadn’t chosen that moment to unlock the door from the inside and poke his head out to see what all the commotion was about.

Harold barged past the younger man almost as if he weren’t there. Only seconds later he was back in the corridor and bearing down on the producer.

“Couldn’t wait, could you, Mac? Couldn’t wait to let this jumped-up fuck-up start re-editing my footage. Cutting the fucking stuff to bits!”

If Resnick hadn’t stepped in quickly, Harold Roy’s fist might have done more damage this time than last. All those early years directing angry young men were coming home to roost.

“Uh-uh, Harold,” Resnick said, the fingers of his right hand tight around the director’s wrist, his left closed around Harold’s best punch, “not a good idea in the circumstances. This time the provocation might be harder to prove.”

“Let him go,” said Mackenzie, but without a great deal of conviction. “He won’t catch me twice and get away with it.”

Resnick stared into Harold Roy’s face until the latter looked away and the tension had seeped from his arm. “We have to talk, Harold and I,” Resnick said to Mackenzie. “If you could make somewhere available.”

“Sure,” Mackenzie said, backing off. “Of course. You want anything? Anything else?”

Resnick shook his head. Down along the corridor, Diane was leaning against the wall, finishing her salad with her fingers. There was a smile in her eyes, brightening the corners of her mouth. How could she stand there dressed like a house painter, thought Resnick, and be so sexy?

For herself, Diane Woolf was still thinking how quickly for a big man Resnick had moved, how fast. Maybe there was something about him after all; something more than those eyes that didn’t want to let her go.