Still Waters

Fifteen

Divine’s flat was above a butcher’s shop on Bath Street: a couple of ramshackle rooms, one of which also served as a kitchen, and a bathroom back down the hall. Despite protestations in the shop window below that only prime Scottish beef was sold, the odors of something old and inwardly rotting seeped endlessly up through the boards.

It was the third place Divine had lived in as many months; trapped inside his surroundings, self-conscious in the face of others and, despite himself, afraid, he quickly grew to hate whatever walls kept him prisoner and lashed out, defacing and despoiling before he escaped. His previous landlord, an Asian entrepreneur in Sneinton, was pursuing him with a bill for damages that didn’t fall far short of a thousand pounds. It had needed Resnick to stand surety before the owner of this building had agreed to take Divine on; a promise that the young DC had turned a corner, calmed down, and if that were not the case, Resnick himself would make whatever restitution was necessary.

So Divine spent his days with the ill-matched curtains drawn, the television playing in the corner of one room, take-out cartons piled precariously alongside the enamel sink, numerous beer cans, mugs stained orange-brown with the residue of endless tea. Night merged into day. When he ventured out, it was to walk the streets, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, face turned away. Pubs he went into were those in which he could be certain his former colleagues would not be found, old spit and sawdust bars no one had bothered to rejuvenate, forever on the verge of closing down. Here Divine would sit with a slow pint, listlessly turning the pages of the Post, the Mirror, or the Sun.

Up until a month back, he would slide into a phone booth, dial the squad room number, wait for Millington or Naylor or whoever to identify themselves, ear pressed hard against the receiver, listening to the sounds of all that activity, sucking it in.

A few times, he had rung Naylor at home, once getting Kevin himself, otherwise Debbie-the chatter of a small child in the background, the whirr and blurt of an electric mower-Divine had broken the connection without speaking.

At first, the nurse he had been seeing at the hospital had been sympathetic, gone out of her way to be understanding, tried to persuade him to continue with the therapy, spent time with him, trying to get him to talk about what had happened. But somewhere along the line there had been one sullen, half-drunken silent night too many and she had stopped calling, stopped caring. Divine, sitting there hunched in his own morbidity, had scarcely listened to what she said by way of explanation, barely registered the sound of her footsteps, brisk and assured now, relieved, walking away.

He picked up a woman on the curve of Mapperley Road and paid her the usual to undress; when his erection disappeared, she laughed it off and made him a cup of tea instead, showed him photographs of her kids. It was a slow night, and cold: she had no desire to rush back out onto the streets.

A week ago, for the first time, Divine had gone back to the street where it happened. Several hours of aimless wandering had brought him down through a maze of narrow streets on the edge of Radford and there he was. The skin along his arms prickled cold and his legs refused to move. Lights burned, shaded, in the house; normal people living normal lives. Whatever normal meant. Divine’s stomach clenched as he saw again in the corner of his eye a man moving fast toward him, sensed the heavy swish and swing of a baseball bat, the sound, brittle and clear, of splintering bone. And then his legs being kicked out from under him, forced apart. Hands tugging at his belt, his clothes. Didn’t I tell you it’d be me and you? Didn’t I say I’d have you? An arm around his neck, powerful, forcing back his head, fingers probing hard between his legs. Cunt. Whore. This is it, this is what you want. Teeth, as the man climaxed inside him, biting deep into Divine’s shoulder, breaking the skin.

It will take a long time, the therapist had said, before you can expect to assimilate all of this.

The knuckles of Divine’s hands, pressed back against the wall behind him, were grazed raw and yielding blood. What had he expected, coming here like this?

Sooner or later, the therapist had told him, you have to confront what happened to you, accept it even, only then will you be able to see it in some kind of perspective, move on.

Bollocks, Divine said. Accept it, bollocks. What I want to fucking do is forget.

And there were times now, when he’d drunk enough, sometimes when he slept, when forget was what he did. Those times when he didn’t wake red-eyed and slaked in sweat, the sweet stink of blood and butchery sliding between lath and plaster till he could taste it on his tongue.

He was standing at the sink, head bowed beneath the tap when he realized someone was knocking at the downstairs door, likely had been for some time.

Resnick took him to a café on Bath Street and sat him down near the window, the market traders setting up their stalls on the uneven triangle of ground outside. Eggs, bacon, sausage, beans. Resnick liberally applied brown sauce, folded thin slices of bread and butter and dipped them into the yolk, wiped the juices from the edges of the plate.

“Eat,” he ordered Divine. “You don’t look as though you’ve had a decent meal in days.”

Divine was unkempt, unshaven, his clothes had started to hang haphazardly from his rugby player’s frame.

“Eat.”

“Not hungry,” Divine said, but little by little, grudgingly, eat was what he did. Ten minutes later, Resnick’s own plate comprehensively cleared, Divine hurried through to the small toilet at the back and threw up. By the time he returned, wiping tissue across his pallid face, Resnick had a fresh mug of tea waiting, sweet and hot.

Divine lit a cigarette and almost as quickly stubbed it out.

“These conditions of bail,” Resnick started.

Fidgeting back his chair, Divine looked away.

“There’s not going to be a problem? Mark, there’s not going to be a problem?”

“Why should there be?”

“Suzanne Olds came to see me …”

“Stuck-up cow.”

“Good at her job.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“She came to see me because she was worried …”

“Well, now she can stop worrying, can’t she, ’cause you can see. Look. Look, what’m I going to do? Nip off down the South of France? Costa del Sol?”

“You went to Derby,” said Resnick, almost smiling.

“Fucking Derby!”

“You had a knife.”

“Yeah, well I haven’t got it any more.”

“Nor anything like it?”

Divine hung his head; his skin was itching and the inside of his throat felt like a length of tubing someone had been attacking with industrial cleaner. He brought the mug to his mouth and the tea burned. More than most things in the world, he wanted to pull off his clothes and lower himself into a hot bath, close his eyes.

“Tell her she doesn’t have to worry. I’ll keep clean.”

“Good.” Resnick reached into his pocket for money to pay the bill. “You okay for cash?”

Divine nodded: fine.

“Okay, I’d best be getting back. And Mark …”

“Yes?”

“If ever you need, call me, work or home, it doesn’t matter, understood?”

“Yeah. Yes, thanks.”

Hesitating just for a moment, Resnick fished out one of his cards, bent from his top pocket, and wrote his own number and then Hannah’s in biro on the back.

“Any time, right?”

“Right.”

A quick handshake and Resnick left him sitting there, cradling the mug of tea.

Jack Skelton was loitering with intent in the vicinity of Resnick’s office. Skelton, while not exactly back to the peak of fitness which once saw him running four miles each morning, had nonetheless lost the excess ten pounds the past year had seen him put on, and was looking spruce this morning in a light wool check jacket and tan slacks, hair brushed to within an inch of its life.

Following Resnick through into his partitioned room, Skelton closed the door firmly at his back.

“Announcement’s being made any day now, apparently.”

“Announcement?”

“Serious Crimes. Who’s going to be in charge, here in the city.”

“I thought Kilmartin.”

“Kilmartin’s dropped out. Rallied round up in Paisley, offered him something he couldn’t refuse.”

“Season ticket to Rangers, was it?”

“Could be.”

“And you’ve no idea?”

Skelton shook his head. “Rumors, you know how it is.”

Resnick knew.

“Should’ve put yourself up, Charlie, then we wouldn’t have all this …” The superintendent broke off, seeing Resnick smiling widely. “What? What’s so bloody funny?”

“Marlon Brando. It was on the box the other night. Where he’s a boxer, working down on the docks. I could’ve been a contender, Charlie. Sitting there with his brother in the back of a car.”

Skelton was shaking his head. “Must’ve missed it.”

Resnick, too, if Hannah hadn’t nagged on at him. Charlie, you’ll like it. Honestly. Just give it a chance.

“What about the other business?” Resnick asked. “This deal with the Yard.”

Skelton patted his pockets for his cigarettes, remembering yet again that he’d given up. “Passed it by the powers that be. Fretting about possible expenses, overtime, you know the kind of thing, but basically, yes, just so long as you don’t think they’ll give us the run-around, take all the credit, you can move ahead.”

Resnick nodded. “I thought I’d get Carl Vincent on board. He’s been following up the original theft. Even knows something about art.”

“Tend to, don’t they, Charlie. His sort. That way inclined, if you catch my drift.”

“Jackie Ferris,” Resnick said. “I’ll put her in the picture. Give her a call.”

He finally got through to her at four thirty in the afternoon, Jackie busy following up several leads that had come her way earlier in the day.

“Good,” she said briskly, when Resnick told her they could go ahead. “That’s grand.” And then, “Your pal Grabianski, my best information, he’s been cozying up to a character named Eddie Snow. Could be using him to get shot of the Dalzeils.”

“And Snow, you think he could be implicated in this forgery business?”

“It’s a strong possibility, yes.”

Resnick told her a little about Carl Vincent, his reasons for wanting to get the DC involved.

“Fine. Why don’t I come up to you this time? We can go over the ground.”

“You’re sure?”

“Why not? You can show me round the castle. Introduce me to Robin Hood.”