Rough Treatment

Twenty-eight

Graham Millington was feeling pretty chipper. His wife had agreed to take time off from her evening classes, one of the neighbors had promised to keep an eye on the kids, they had seats for the Royal Center, third row center. Petula Clark. As far as Millington was concerned you could take all your Elaine Paiges and Barbara Dicksons, Shirley Basseys even, lump them all together and they still wouldn’t rival Petula. God, she’d been going since before he could remember and that had to say something for her. And it wasn’t just her voice that was in great shape. She wasn’t page three, of course, never had been and wouldn’t thank you for saying so, but at least what there was was all hers. No nipping and tucking there. None of your hormone transplants either. Fifty whatever she was and looking like that. Incredible!

Millington wandered across the CID room in happy reverie, whistling “Downtown.”

“What is it with you, Graham?” Resnick asked.

“Sorry, sir?”

“Last year it was all I could do to keep you from murdering ‘Moonlight Serenade.’”

Millington looked down at his feet and for one awful moment Resnick thought the sergeant was going to break into a soft-shoe shuffle. “Your mother wasn’t frightened by the Black and White Minstrels when she was carrying you, was she?”

Millington had been inside Resnick’s house once; he’d seen the inspector’s record collection. The sort he listened to, half of them snuffed it from sticking needles in their arms before they were thirty.

“Heard about the super’s kid,” Millington said, changing the subject. “How’s he taking it?”

“How d’you think?” said Resnick sharply. Millington had a clear vision of one of his own, the time he’d found him sitting down behind his bed getting too interested in a tube of Airfix glue.

“Anything new?” Resnick asked. “Fossey, for instance.”

The sergeant recalled the other reason he’d been whistling happily. “Patel, sir. The bloke our man Grice met in the pub, he put the number through Swansea. Car’s licensed to an Andrew John Savage.”

“Fossey’s friend.”

“And helper. Low-grade insurance broker. Lowest quotes, immediate and personal service guaranteed.”

It was Resnick’s turn to smile. “Fossey didn’t get back in touch with his records, I suppose?”

Millington shook his head. “Might be enough now to get a warrant.”

“Let’s wait on that one. Push too hard and he might be tempted to do a runner. They both might. We’ll have a little get-together first thing tomorrow, make sure the strategy’s right. Okay. Graham?”

“Yes, sir,” Millington nodded. But he didn’t move away-and neither did he stop smiling.

“There’s more?” Resnick asked. He hoped it wasn’t going to be “Don’t Sleep in the Subway,” even, heaven forbid, “Winchester Cathedral.” “Sailor!”

“Trevor Grice. We never ran a check on him till now.”

Resnick waited for the punchline.

“Two years for burglary back in ’76.”

“Clean since then?”

“According to the computer.”

“Except we know better, eh, Graham?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well done. Good piece of work. Tell Patel, if you haven’t already. And Graham …”

Millington looked at him expectantly.

“Get yourself an early night. Next couple of days, I’d say we’re liable to be pretty busy.”

Skelton and his daughter sat at either side of the superintendent’s desk, avoiding each other’s eyes, not speaking, When Lynn Kellogg had first shown her into the office, when the door had closed behind her and she had been left alone there with her father, Kate had cried. Tears she had thought used up already. Her father had offered her a handkerchief and she had moved her head away, preferring a handful of tissues, pink and wet and torn.

“Sit down, Kate.”

She had sat, knowing the questions he must want to ask, the answers he was quickly learning to dread. After a while it was almost calm, almost pleasant. The hum of sound from other rooms, steps that moved closer, past and away. Their breathing. Telephones. Traffic changing gear before the traffic lights, the roundabout. Her mother-somewhere her mother was folding a school blouse after ironing, laying it down inside a drawer in Kate’s room. Moving to the kitchen, perhaps, a glance towards the timer on the oven, a casserole to be tasted, salt and black pepper ground in and stirred. “That child,” Kate had overheard one dismal evening, “you give in to her too easily. Things she gets away with. In this house and out. The way you are with youngsters in your job-a pity a little of that hasn’t rubbed off here. She might not be as wild as she is. Might show us both a little more respect.”

“Kate …”

“What?”

“Do you want to …?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go home?”

Right across the road from where Resnick was walking there had once been a mainline railway station. Now the original clock stood on its tower in front of one of the city’s two shopping centers, this one with high-rise fiats rising from inside it like concrete stalagmites. Up here on the left the Moulin Rouge: one and nine it had cost Resnick to see his first foreign film, patchy subtitles and imitations of carnality; barely remembered glimpses of Brigitte Bardot’s breasts, somewhere that might have been St. Tropez. Gone like most of the other fleapits where he had watched Jerry Lewis, Doris Day.

Resnick pushed open the door to the Partridge and walked into the left-hand room. Jeff Harrison was nursing a scotch at the end of the bar and he scarcely looked up when Resnick entered, but clearly knew he was there. Most of the bench seats were taken; at one of the round tables four young men still wearing long overcoats smoked roll-ups and played dominoes. Resnick squeezed in alongside Jeff Harrison and ordered a Guinness and a bag of plain crisps.

“Bit late, Jeff. Sorry.”

“Overtime?”

Resnick shook his head. “Feeding the cats.”

“Give them all the tit, do you, Charlie?”

Another shake of the head. “Whiskas, as a rule.”

Harrison looked towards a couple of empty seats in the back corner. “Want to sit down?”

“Suit yourself.”

Apparently it suited Harrison to stay as he was. They chatted sporadically, Resnick pacing himself down his glass, wondering how long it would take Harrison to get to the point.

“Anyone had asked me, Charlie, I might have said we were mates.”

Resnick looked at him along his shoulder. “Not that exactly.”

“But not enemies.”

“No, not enemies.”

“Then why all this?”

“Come on, Jeff, there’s no all about it.”

“Vendetta, that’s what I’d call it.”

Resnick didn’t answer. He’d known this was going to be difficult, one of the reasons he’d been putting it off as long as he had. Maybe he should have left it another forty-eight hours, or did he owe Harrison more than that, mate or no?

“You’ve had men going behind my back …”

“No.”

“I’m not stupid. Not a fool.”

“No one’s been doing anything behind your back.”

“Like buggery!”

“Jeff, you know …”

“Yes?”

“There were reasons for pushing on the Roy investigations. You were told what they were.”

“This has gone further than that.”

“All through the DCI.”

“Pals, together, that it, Charlie? Scratch my balls, I’ll scratch yours. Or is it the trouser leg rolled up the knee, the funny handshake?”

“Pursuing an inquiry, that’s what it is.”

“Yes?” Harrison stared at him. “Into that burglary or into me?”

The woman behind the bar was trying so hard to listen she’d developed a serious list to one side.

“Not here, Jeff.”

“No? Why the hell not here? Or would you rather wait till the interview room, back at the station?”

Resnick’s Guinness tasted sharper than usual. “Is that where this is all leading?”

“Right. You’re asking me. As if I know what’s going on. I’m the last to know what’s going on. Just ignore that fucker, waltz around him, make him dizzy. Don’t tell him a thing.”

“Jeff…”

“You’ve had that Paki nudging away at my lads behind my back, seeing if they won’t cough for some misdemeanor or other, own up to how far I tied their hands behind their backs. Questioning my evidence, my procedures. Going back to my witnesses …”

“I asked …”

“Once, once you came to me, face to face, and asked. This is something more, this is different.” He grabbed hold of Resnick’s forearm and pressed it hard against the edge of the bar. “Charlie, there’s blokes in the force get a hard-on doing that kind of shit. Shafting their own. That’s not you. Not without you’ve got a special reason.”

Resnick looked at Harrison, glanced down at the grip he had on his arm. Harrison released him and turned abruptly away. He might have been leaving and Resnick would have been glad to see him go, but all that happened was he went to the gents and came back.

“Promotion, Charlie-is that it?” Harrison signaled for another scotch and Resnick placed his hand down over the top of his own glass, not wanting more. “Fed up with plain inspector?”

Resnick didn’t answer. He could think of a great many places he would sooner be; not one that, right then, might be worse.

“You’ll be all right there, Charlie. Oh, you might be an odd sort of a sod, not exactly by the book, but, I’ll give you this, you get results. More than your fair share, I shouldn’t be surprised. But then, you’re still in the action. Nobody shunted you out to one side because your face didn’t fit; you hadn’t made the mistake to go mouthing off a few home truths to the wrong suits, the wrong faces.” Harrison downed his scotch in one, wiped the back of a hand thoughtfully across his mouth. “There’s more to life out there than this, sitting back behind a desk and waiting for a pension. Open a little shop somewhere, move out to Mablethorpe and start up in a bed and breakfast. You know the way things are going, Charlie. Law enforcement. Private security. There’s housing estates down in London pay for their own patrols, round the clock. Some bloke in a uniform, a guard dog and a flashlight. They don’t care who it is, just so long as they can look out of their window of an evening and see somebody there. The less we do it, the more they want it; the more they’ll pay. I don’t want to wait until it’s too late, until I retire.”

“You’ve got connections, then?” Resnick asked.

“Never you mind what I’ve got, just get off my back. That understood?”

Resnick lifted the glass to his mouth and Harrison grabbed him again, the elbow this time, the rim forced against the underside of his lip.

“Understood, Charlie?”

The pub noise went on around them. They both knew that Resnick was unlikely to do anything there and then.

“You don’t know anything, Charlie,” Harrison said, turning back to the bar. “If you did, you’d not be here now.”

“’Night, Jeff. Finish the crisps, if you want.”

Resnick shouldered his way between customers and stood for several moments outside on the street. A city bus went slowly past, one woman sitting alone on the top deck, staring out. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to go himself, what he wanted to do, except that, rare for him, he didn’t want it to be alone.

Of course, the directory was missing from the phone booth and the young man fielding inquiries informed him that no Diane Woolf was listed. Resnick put the receiver back in place, lifted it back almost immediately and redialed. A different voice, a woman this time, gave him Claire Millinder’s number. Resnick looked at it, written in Biro on the back of his hand.

Charlie, we’re not talking major commitment here.

He left the booth and headed back to where his car was parked, erasing her number with even movements of his thumb.