Still Waters

Forty-five

Eddie Snow unfolded his paper napkin, wiped his fingers, folded the napkin again, and picked up what remained of his quarter pounder, medium rare with bacon and Swiss cheese. They were in Ed’s Diner, not the one in Hampstead, which Grabianski often walked past and sometimes walked into, but this one on Old Compton Street in Soho, maybe the original, Grabianski didn’t know. The style was fifties-early sixties retro, school of American Graffiti, red and chrome, padded stools, rock ’n’ roll on the jukebox, apple pie.

“Exporting rare works of art to the Middle East,” Snow said, “anyone’d think you were trying to sell arms to Saddam in the middle of the Gulf fucking War.”

Grabianski drew on the straw of his banana milkshake; it was a great shake, creamy and thick, but required considerable suction to get it up the straw. “There’s some kind of trouble, Eddie, that’s what you’re saying?”

“This kind of line, there’s always trouble. Otherwise, you think everyone else wouldn’t be doing it?”

Grabianski nodded. “I suppose so.”

“It’s like having sex with the same woman after too many years: no matter how keen you might be, how much you want her, a little more difficult every time.”

Grabianski pushed the milkshake aside. “Bottom line,” he said.

“Bottom line? Applications for transit of goods, pro forma invoices, import-export licenses, cargo shipment, customs and excise. Four more weeks. Possibly six.”

“Six?”

“Outside, eight.”

Grabianski shook his head and stared at his abandoned hot dog.

“What?” Snow said. “You’ve got a problem with storage? I thought you’d solved all that?”

“I have, I have, it’s just …”

“A long time since the original job was done.”

“That’s right.”

“A long time before you see any cash recompense for your labor.”

“Precisely.”

Snow put down an uneaten section of bun, leaned forward toward the white-uniformed server standing the other side of the counter and ordered a Diet Coke.

“Jerry?”

“No, thanks. No, I’m fine.”

“Good, good.” And when the Coke arrived and he’d swallowed enough to make him belch, he said, “That very problem, cash flow, yours, it’s been exercising my mind.”

Grabianski waited. The box was playing Ricky Nelson. “Poor Little Fool.” Who’s to say, Grabianski thought, him or me?

Snow lowered his voice but only a little. “This talent you’ve got for getting in and out of places unannounced. There’s a few things I could do with being deposited, safe and secure, where nobody would ever think of looking for them until they were told.”

“What kind of things?” asked Grabianski.

“Bona fides. Documents. Nothing difficult.”

“And these places you’d be wanting me to gain access to …”

“Museum offices, archives. For the most part, low security.”

Grabianski slid the menu out from between the ketchup and the mustard.

“What d’you say?” Eddie Snow asked.

“You mean aside from how much?” Grabianski thought he might order the pie after all. Why not à la mode?

Resnick found Helen Siddons in the first-floor bar of the Forte Crest, sitting in a gray lounge chair across a low table from Jack Skelton, who was looking chastened even before Resnick appeared, and when he did, assumed the aspect of someone who’s been caught pissing down his own leg.

Resnick raised a hand in greeting and moved on toward the long bar, shifting a stool down to the far end and, when the barman noticed him, ordering a large vodka with lots of ice. He thought he might be in for quite a fight.

Siddons was leaning toward Skelton now, voice low, before suddenly throwing herself backward in the chair and pointing at him with the red-tipped cigarette in her right hand. “Fuck d’you think you are, Jack?” Resnick heard, and “miserable bitch of a wife.” Not so long after, and without a wave or a word in Resnick’s direction, Skelton got up and left.

Resnick wondered whether he should go over to where Helen Siddons was sitting, or if she would come to him; he was still considering when she stubbed out her cigarette and, grim-faced, headed his way.

She lit up again as soon as she sat down. “Scotch,” she said, not bothering to look at the barman. “Large. No water, no ice.”

“So, Charlie,” she said, “how’s it all going?” And before he could answer, “What is it, Charlie? What is it with just about every man in the fucking world? The minute you lose interest is the minute they become convinced you’ve got a cunt of gold.”

She drank the first half of the scotch fast, the rest at even speed, and called for another. Resnick wondered how long she had been there, whether this particular session had started at lunchtime and simply flowed.

“This woman of yours, Charlie, what’s she called?”

“Hannah.”

“Hmm, well, promise me this; promise me this about you and darling Hannah …”

Resnick waited while she dragged deep on her cigarette.

“Promise me if ever she wants to leave, if ever the day comes when she wants to walk away and call it quits, promise you’ll let her go. God’s blessings, Charlie. Godspeed and goodbye. None of this sniveling and whining, you’re-the-most-important-thing-in-my-life crap. Right?”

“Right.”

“I’m serious, Charlie.”

“I know.”

Her hand was on his knee. “You and me, Charlie, you never fancied that?”

“No.”

She threw back her head and laughed. “Christ, Charlie! The last honest man.”

Resnick wondered what it was about her that made that sound almost like an insult. “I was going to ask you …” he began.

“What I’m doing here half-pissed? Triumph or adversity?” She ducked her head forward till he couldn’t avoid the nicotine and whisky on her breath. “That little sniveling little shortshanks the computer spewed up for us, David Winston Aloysius James, five years for attempted rape, except of course he’s out after serving not much more than three, not only has he got two other priors for assault, one more charge of indecent exposure which got thrown out of court, guess what he had tucked snug underneath the mattress of his bed, along with more porn than the average newsagent’s top shelf and a score of semen-stinking handkerchiefs?”

Resnick couldn’t guess.

“Miranda Conway’s Euro Railcard, complete with photograph attached.”

“You’ve brought him in?”

“What do you think?”

“Charged?”

“Not yet.”

“What does he say about the card?”

“Says he found it, what do you think?”

“Is there anything else linking him with the girl?”

“Come on, Charlie, what do you want? Love letters? A length of rope?”

Resnick shrugged. “Someone who saw them together earlier that evening. She’d not been in Worksop that long, but she hadn’t exactly kept her head down. There’s folk knew who she was.”

Siddons lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last, tipped back her head, and released smoke into the air. “Charlie, he fits the profile, he’s got the photo ID, and we can put him here in the city four nights before that one you claimed who was fished out of the canal.”

Instead of responding directly, Resnick told her what they had discovered about Jane Peterson and Peter Spurgeon. She listened with interest, went thoughtful, and asked for a large coffee, black, two sugars.

“Fronted him with it yet? The husband?”

Resnick shook his head. “Up to now, he’s always denied seeing her or hearing from her after that Saturday she disappeared. I’d like something else to hit him with aside from Spurgeon’s accusation, which as things stand we’ve no way of proving. We’ve only his word for it, she went to see Peterson from Grantham.”

“She went somewhere.”

“Agreed. We’d already canvassed the neighbors, in case they’d seen anything of her during the week, but came up short. Now, though, we’ve got a good idea, if she did come here, which train it would have been. I’d like everyone on duty at the station that afternoon and evening talked to, shown photographs, taxi-drivers the same. Regular passengers, too.”

“That’s a major operation, Charlie.”

“I thought this was a major case.”

“And we’ve got someone a few hours from being charged.”

“All right,” Resnick conceded, “but even if he’s responsible for the others, all or some, he doesn’t have to have done this.”

Helen Siddons gave him a look pitched somewhere between contempt and disgust. “I didn’t think this was you, pedaling your own corner no matter what.”

“What evidence is there says Jane Peterson was killed by the same person as the others?”

“Aside from an identical MO?”

“Naked, not molested, dumped in water, what else?”

“What else?” Incredulous.

“Helen, that’s all circumstantial, flimsy at best. Unless there’s something you haven’t told me, you’ve got nothing links Jane Peterson directly to your suspect, no physical evidence, no DNA.”

“Oh, and what have you got, Charlie, aside from a selection of lovers’ lies?”

“Then lend me some bodies, authorize the overtime.”

“I can’t.”

“Helen …”

Her mobile phone jumped to life and she fumbled it from her bag. “Right,” she said, after listening. “Right, I’ll be there.” She had a grin that would have challenged a Cheshire Cat. “He’s owned up to talking to her, Miranda, buying her a drink, taking her for a walk along the canal. We’ve got him, Charlie. He’ll have his hands up for it this side of supper-time.”

Resnick followed her across the room. “If you’re right, you’ll have officers, time on their hands. Twenty-four hours, that’s all I’m asking.”

She stopped at the head of the stairs. “Talk with Support Department. If they can spare a few bodies, fair enough. But like you said, twenty-four hours and that’s your lot.”

Resnick was on his way back to where his drink sat unfinished on the bar when he changed his mind.

Jackie Ferris was wearing an unbuttoned denim shirt with a snug white T-shirt underneath, blue jeans; in the comparative heat of the car, she had kicked off her shoes. Carl Vincent, beside her, was smart and cool in a fashionable stone-colored suit and a collarless white shirt.

“You always dress this way?” she asked. “It doesn’t bring you any grief?”

“How d’you mean?”

“Get you noticed? Draw the wrong kind of attention?”

“Aside from being black and queer?”

Jackie Ferris leaned back along the seat. “Down here in the sophisticated South, we call it gay.”

“Uh-huh, that’s what I’d heard.”

She hesitated only a moment before asking, “Are you out?”

“Yes.”

“Long?”

Carl shook his head. “Year, more or less.”

“How’s it been?”

He looked out through the car window at the slow stream of people taking the exit from the underground station, automatically checking every face. “You know, like a lot of stuff, worse before it gets better.”

Jackie nodded and wondered again about a cigarette.

“How about you?” Carl said, keeping it light, not quite looking at her direct. She was a detective inspector, whatever else.

She took out and lit the cigarette, winding the window low. “There was this woman I was living with, well, more or less. She was a singer, one of those little indie bands. Did session work once in a while. But that was the kind of life she led.”

“She must have been young.”

“She was. She said she couldn’t keep seeing me if I was living this secret life. That’s what she called it, this secret life. So the next time I went for a drink with the lads from the squad, I took her along.”

“How did they react?”

“You mean, aside from the ones that wanted to fuck her? Oh, they were fine. People confuse you sometimes, straight people, by being a lot less prejudiced than you expect. Mostly they were fine. Six weeks later, she dumped me anyway. I think she came home early and caught me listening to Doris Day.”

“I’m sorry.”

Jackie Ferris shrugged. “What did Oscar Wilde say, never give your heart to a child or a fairy? I’d done both.”

But Carl was no longer really listening. He was watching Grabi-anski approaching along the opposite side of the street, starting to cross toward them now. Jackie pushed her feet back into her shoes and turned the key in the ignition.

As soon as Grabianski was in the rear seat, she pulled away, careful through the traffic turning west into Victoria Street.

“How did we do?” she asked over her shoulder.

“As long as you don’t mind a little indigestion, and rather too much of Ricky Nelson, I think it went fine.” And, taking the cassette from his pocket, he passed it forward into Carl Vincent’s waiting hand.

Resnick had thrown four or five stones up at Divine’s flat, before the window was pushed awkwardly open and Divine’s head leaned out. He was about to give whoever it was a piece of his mind but then grinned when he realized who it was.

“Hey up, boss! What’s up?”

“Come to see you.”

“Hang about, I’ll be down.”

“You sober?”

“Yes, I was just having a kip.”

“Eaten?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.”

“Good. I’ll treat you to a curry. There’s a bit of work, unofficial, I might be able to put your way.”

Divine beamed like someone had brought back the sun.