Still Waters

Nineteen

“Listen,” Resnick had said, Hannah beginning to make yawning noises behind her book and shift position at the other end of the settee, “you won’t take this the wrong way …”

“But you don’t want to stay.”

Resnick shrugged and smiled.

“Well,” Hannah said, setting the book on the floor and getting to her feet, “the cats will be pleased.”

“You don’t mind?”

Hannah shook her head. “Of course not.” She nudged the book with her foot. “I can go to bed with this.”

“Another cheery tale?”

“A fifty-year-old man in prison for attacking little girls and a young woman who likes sex with eleven-year-old boys.” She saw the frown darken his face. “It’s life, Charlie, you know that better than most.”

“All the more reason I’d not want to read about it.” He was looking down at the book on the floor. The End of Alice by A. M. Homes. On the cover an old monochrome picture of little girls in ballet clothes had been artfully dismembered so that their bodies skipped and cavorted above the title, and their faces, shiny and alive, appeared below the author’s name.

“Come on, Charlie,” Hannah said, “I’ll walk you to the car.”

Take-away menus for Indian restaurants and pizza parlors were gathering dust behind the front door; any burglar who left a fingerprint on the hall table or the bannister of the stairs would fill Scene of Crime with delight. From a perch on the third shelf in the kitchen, Pepper stared down at him as at a stranger, a distant, faintly remembered relative at best. He was surprised Dizzy didn’t take a bite out of his leg.

Something, Resnick thought, was going to have to change; it was difficult with his job to spend time enough in one home, never mind two.

He made supper for himself and the cats and carried the last few issues of the Post through into the front room. After the color, the coziness of Hannah’s, the room was overlarge, heavy, almost unwelcoming. When he sat, his eyes were drawn to the Herman Leonard photograph of Lester Young framed on the wall; Lester looking tired, older than his forty-something years, either he had grown out of his suit, or his suit had grown out of him.

When, not so very much later, Resnick went up to bed, he left the stereo playing, Lester in his youth and glory, the sound of his saxophone, light and sinuously rhythmic, tracing him up the stairs: “I Never Knew,” “If Dreams Came True,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” “The World Is Mad” parts one and two.

So much for good intentions. Adrift in his own bed with only one of the cats for company, Resnick turned and wallowed the entire night, so that when the phone rang a little after seven, he was already up and showered, breakfasted, and feeling as if he’d scarcely slept at all.

Comforting at that bleary-eyed time of the morning to be greeted by Reg Cossall’s cheery tones. “No need asking who she shagged to get the bloody job, Charlie, more a case of who she agreed to let alone.”

Resnick hadn’t the faintest idea who or what he was talking about.

“Siddons, Charlie. That bloody Siddons woman. More postings already’n pricks in a second-hand dartboard, an’ now she’s got this fucker.”

“Helen Siddons?”

“Less you know any others.”

“DCI, Serious Crimes?”

“Another stepping stone, most likely. Six month at most. Superintendent next. Bit of a leg up, all it is for her-or leg over. Any road, Charlie, thought you’d like to know. See you for that jar some time, right?”

“Right.”

Resnick was left staring at the silent telephone. Helen Siddons had been attached to the local force a while back, already marked out for higher things; she had been enthusiastic, tenacious, nakedly ambitious; on the inquiry she and Resnick had worked together, she had proved disturbingly guilty of tunnel vision. And possibly more.

For all that Cossall’s old-fashioned chauvinism could be taken with a pinch of salt, it was Resnick’s experience that Siddons was not above making use of her obvious charms to cultivate friends in higher places. The clearest memory Resnick had of her was from a Christmas function almost two years before: Helen Siddons wearing an ankle-length dress in pale green and standing off to one side with Jack Skelton, the pair of them carelessly oblivious to the innuendo spreading about them as they leaned against the wall and talked, heads bowed, talked and smoked and smiled and talked some more. He remembered Skelton’s wife, Alice, ignored and drunk and pawing at his knee. What you have to see, she’s not just fucking him, Charlie, she’s fucking you too.

Well, maybe …

Graham Millington was waiting to waylay him inside the CID room. “Another triumph for fair play and the powers of positive discrimination.”

“Something like that, Graham.”

Resnick closed his door firmly behind him, the kind of firmness that makes good and clear casual interruptions are unwelcome. Until that morning he hadn’t realized how much he had wanted the job for himself and now … well, who did he have to blame but himself for not even trying, not applying? Helen Siddons would be a skip and a jump down the Ropewalk away, striding from room to room through the upper floor of the old hospital building that had been converted into the Serious Crime Squad’s city office; likely as not, some civilian in overalls was carefully at work even now, adding her name and rank to the outside of her office door.

There was a note on Resnick’s desk already: Jack Skelton’s office at eleven-thirty, an informal get-together to welcome the new DCI into her post.

In Skelton’s office, Helen Siddons was wearing a charcoal suit with a box jacket and a skirt that finished quite decorously a few inches below the knee. Her hair was attractively done in a French pleat, practical but not too severe, suggesting she could still let it down if the occasion demanded. Cigarette in hand, she was talking to an inspector from the Fraud Squad when Resnick came in. No more than a dozen people there so far, and among them Resnick noted Harry Payne from the Support Department, and Jane Prescott, newly promoted to inspector in Force Intelligence. Spotting Resnick, Siddons excused herself and came directly toward him, offering her hand.

“Charlie …”

“Helen, congratulations.”

“Thanks.” And then, adding a wry smile, “Bet you didn’t think you’d see me again so soon.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Lot of things we wouldn’t say, Charlie, doesn’t mean they don’t get thought. How many dicks did it take her to get where she is today, you know the kind of thing. Not that I’d assume that of you. I think I know you better than that.”

Switching smiles, she turned as Skelton approached, the superintendent wearing his best suit too, and very smart, though his hand seemed to have slipped when he was shaving and he might have been too prodigal with the aftershave.

“Good to see you here, Charlie. There’s coffee on the side. Sherry, if you’d like.”

“Coffee will be fine.” He didn’t move.

“That spell Helen had with us a bit ago,” Skelton said. “Just passing through, that’s what we thought, eh? Good to welcome her back like this.”

“You’ll be going round all the stations, I dare say,” Resnick said. “Letting them see your face.”

“I dare say. Sooner or later. Coming here was different. You and Jack, people I know. Worked with.”

“And will again, it’s hoped,” Skelton said, his hand barely brushing her sleeve.

“I wonder, Jack,” she said, “that sherry you mentioned. Since this is something of an occasion …”

“Of course, right away.”

“Charlie,” she moved closer, filling the space Skelton had left, “I’ve a confession to make.”

“Go ahead.”

“This early visit, it’s not purely social.”

“I see.” Resnick’s mind was starting to race.

“Bit of a fishing expedition really. Poaching.”

“Yes.”

“Lynn Kellogg, she passed her sergeant’s board a while back now, unless I’m mistaken.”

Resnick tensed. “All set to join Family Support; she’s got an interview lined up the end of this week.”

Helen Siddons’ face expressed clear distaste. “Come on, Charlie, she doesn’t want that.”

“Not what she says.”

“A detective, Charlie, that’s what she is, and a bloody good one. You know that better than anyone. What does she want with domestics and missing kids? Wiping noses and passing round the Kleenex.”

“Ask her.”

“I will. But with your permission, Charlie. Your blessing.”

Resnick shifted balance. “Far as I know, nothing to prevent you approaching whoever you’ve a mind to.”

“Charlie …” Now it was his arm, her fingers light on the back of his hand. “You’ve got to let her go some time. Fly the nest.”

He pulled back, smarting. “She’s not a kid, you know. I’m not her bloody father.”

“No, Charlie. Not exactly that.”