Rough Treatment (2 page)

Maria Roy was thinking that at any moment the phone would ring and it would be Jerry or Cynthia wanting to know where she was, where they were. Or Harold, maybe, the great Harold himself calling to apologize and say he’d be there to pick her up after all, drive over together.

Except, she remembered, the shorter one, the one rubbing at his knee joint as though he were getting twinges of rheumatism, arthritis, something, had disconnected the phones.

“Finish up the drink,” Grice said to his partner. “It’s time we got down to business.”

Grabianski nodded, sipped a little scotch and water and got to his feet.

“Let’s go,” he said, smiling.

Maria knew he was looking at her.

“No,” said Grice, on his feet also and moving towards the door.

“Let her help out,” said Grabianski. “Save wasting time turning everything upside down.”

“You think she’s going to do that?”

“Sure. Why not? As long as we’re going to take it anyway.”

Not for the first time Maria wondered if they were for real. Maybe it was some elaborate joke set up by one of Harold’s friends: a couple of out-of-work actors offering something a shade more sophisticated than a singing telegram. What would they have called it back in the sixties? A happening. Well it was that right enough. She stood up and for a moment the hem of her robe caught against the inside of her thigh. Grabianski’s mouth fell open and he stared. She hadn’t had that effect on Harold for so long she couldn’t remember.

“This I don’t believe,” said Grice from the doorway. Maria Roy finished her second glass of scotch and put the glass on the seat of the chair. “Maybe I should lead the way?”

She knew Grabianski would be close behind her and she knew how tightly her robe clung to her when she climbed the stairs.

“There’s just one thing more,” Grice said. The jewelry and the cash and the credit cards had been packed into one of the set of matching soft leather cases they had bought on last summer’s trip to the Virgin Islands. Her two fur coats were folded over Grabianski’s left arm.

“What’s that?” Maria asked, but the expression on Grice’s face told her that he knew. They both knew, she could sense it. How did they know about the safe?

She had to push the pillows aside in order to kneel on the bed; she lifted away the Klimt print and handed it to Grice, who leaned it against the bed upside down. She thought she might genuinely forget the combination, but as soon as she touched the dial her fingers made all the right moves.

She swayed backwards as the door swung open.

“Empty it,” Grice told her.

There was another jewelry box, the real one with the real jewels inside, the ones that had come to her in her mother’s will, those that Harold had bought when he still had the need to impress her high on his agenda. There were two sets of bearer bonds, secured with thick rubber bands. Two wills, his and hers. A video a cameraman friend of Harold’s had shot when they’d spent a week on some wretched little Greek island in a foursome. Harold had got an upset stomach from all the olives he’d jammed down his throat, the cameraman had proved to be well hung but had preferred to fiddle with his lens and watch his string-bean girlfriend licking salt out of Maria’s navel, and when she got back to England Maria discovered she’d contracted a mild case of hepatitis.

Grabianski had a hand stretched out towards her, waiting for the cassette to be put into it.

“That everything?” asked Grice.

Maria nodded.

“Don’t worry,” said Grabianski, “you can claim it all back on the insurance.” He grinned down at the videocassette in his hand. “Except this.”

“You’re sure?” said Grice.

“Certain,” said Maria, getting off the bed without showing his friend any more than she had already. Now all she wanted was to get them out of the house as quickly as possible.

“Wait a good half hour before you call the police,” Grabianski was saying, the two of them on their way from the room. “You want to do yourself a favor, think about the descriptions you give them with a lot of care.”

“A couple of blacks,” suggested Grice, right behind them.

“Leather jackets and jeans.”

“Balaclavas”

“Ski masks.”

“They forced you to open the safe.”

“Better,” said Grabianski, “made you tell them the combination.”

“Right,” agreed Grice. “That is better.”

He turned back into the room.

“Where are you going?” Grabianski asked.

“Wipe her prints from the safe,” Grice replied.

Watching him, Maria felt her legs weaken. Grabianski was standing close alongside her, fingers pushing softly in and out of the softness of her best fur coat.

Grice was standing on the bed, leaning towards the safe. Maria watched him as he used his gloves to smear whatever prints she’d left and continued to watch him as he reached into the rear of the safe.

“Uh-oh,” he said, turning back towards the pair of them, looking straight at Maria, “you lied.”

Two

Resnick had despised estate agents ever since one of them ran off with his wife. Before that he had merely found them distasteful, on a par with the young men who worked in car showrooms, forever eager to hustle forward from their desks, breath smelling of too many cigarettes, hands moist at the center of the palm.

Anxious to get them in place but slow to take them away, three agencies had kept their “For Sale” boards lined up against the dark stone of Resnick’s garden wall for much of the past month. Finally he had fetched a spade from the cupboard beneath the stairs and removed two himself, leaving the third—a small concern, lacking forty-eight offices all over the East Midlands, but having on its staff at least one man Resnick felt he could talk to. It had been this man who had phoned Resnick and urged him to be present when he showed round some prospective buyers, 8.30 that morning.

“Busy people,” the agent had explained, “a couple, looking to start a family, professionals, it’s the only time they can both get there. I think you’ll take to them,” he had added hopefully. As if that really mattered.

The house had been on the market now for twelve weeks and no one had as much as made an offer. It was a difficult size, the right property in the wrong location, the mortgage rate was up, the mortgage rate was down, prices were escalating, stabilizing—Resnick simply wanted to get out of the house. Lock the door and hand over the key. There.

So Resnick had arranged for his sergeant, Graham Millington, to go through the night’s messages with the officer who had drawn the early shift, conduct the morning’s briefing and then, along with the uniformed inspector in charge, report to the station superintendent.

“All right, Graham?” Resnick had said.

Millington had stood there, mustache shining, like a man whose birthday has come as a surprise.

When the couple arrived in their separate cars it was 8.43 precisely. The man got out of a shiny black Ford Sierra that had so many aerodynamic modifications that if he ever strayed in to the runway at Heathrow he would be sure to take off. His wife’s preference was for a simple white Volkswagen GT convertible. They were both wearing light gray suits and both checked their watches as they locked their cars and turned on the pavement.

A minute or so later a green Morris Minor drew into the curb and a woman Resnick had never seen before got out while the engine was still coughing. Her black sweater was loose and large and had the sleeves pushed up to the elbows; a short skirt—dark blue with white polka dots—flared softly above thick ribbed tights and low red boots, which folded back in deep creases over her ankles. She had a clipboard bearing the details of the house in her left hand and she used the other to shake hands with her prospective clients.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lurie … good morning to you. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”

She steered them towards where Resnick was standing, amongst the flat grass and dark unflowering bushes of a winter garden.

“Mr. Resnick, right?”

Her smile was slightly lopsided as she touched his hand; the accent like a brisk but clipped Australian.

“Ought I say Detective Inspector? That’d be more proper.” She stepped ahead of him towards the front door. “Shall we go inside?”

“What happened to Mr. Albertson?” Resnick asked, low-voiced, as they passed through the hallway.

“He’s left to go into the ministry.”

“He rang me only yesterday. About this.”

“I know. But isn’t that the way it always is? Sudden. Look at Saul. Paul.”

Ahead of them Mr. and Mrs. Lurie were discussing the potential expense of ripping out the kitchen units and replacing them with natural oak.

“I’m Claire Millinder,” she said to Resnick, smiling quickly with her eyes. She moved past him into the kitchen. “This is a perfect room in the mornings because of the light. You could easily fit a nice circular table over there and have it as a breakfast bay.”

The Luries looked at their watches.

“Shall we take a look at the reception rooms?” Claire Millinder said breezily.

Resnick didn’t have the heart to follow them. One of his cats, Miles, came out of the living room as the visitors walked in and now rubbed the crown of his head against the side of Resnick’s sensible shoe.

I hope they don’t run into Dizzy, Resnick thought. If Dizzy took a mind to it, he might just bite either Mr. or Mrs. Lurie through the expensive material of their trouser legs.

They came out of the living room and Claire shepherded them in the direction of the stairs.

“You have to look at the master bedroom. It’s really airy and you won’t believe the amount of storage space.”

Resnick continued to stand there, a stranger in his own house.

When they came back down again, Resnick was letting Miles out through the back door. How were his cats going to make the adjustment to somewhere new when after all this time one of them still couldn’t operate the cat flap that had been there for years?

“Inspector?”

He closed the door and moved back towards the hall.

“Darling, do you realize what a new bathroom suite would cost?” Mrs. Lurie was asking her husband. “To say nothing of the redecoration. And that poky little room at the back, I can’t imagine what it could be used for, apart from storing things in boxes. What else could you get in there?”

“A cot,” Resnick said quietly.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing.”

Claire was looking at him from over the end of the banister rail.

“Darling,” said Mr. Lurie, pushing back the sleeves of his suit and shirt to show the face of his watch.

“Yes, of course. We have to dash.”

“Work, you see.”

“Work.”

They stood in the doorway, arms almost touching. “We’ll be in touch.”

“Of course,” Claire said.

“Thank you for letting us see the house.”

Resnick was on the point of telling them it had been a pleasure, but stopped himself with little difficulty.

The heavy door fitted solidly back against the frame.

“Has he really joined the ministry?” Resnick asked. “Albertson.”

“Anglican, I believe.”

For some moments they stood there, Resnick in the hallway close to the low table bearing a hat he almost never wore and a pile of old newspapers he’d been meaning to throw away, Claire with one hand on the dark brown banister while the other held the clipboard close along her thigh.

“I don’t know what makes people do things like that, do you?” she said.

“No.”

“D’you think they hear, you know, bells, voices?”

“The Sound of Music.”

“Running away.”

“Perhaps.”

She looked at him, considering. “Why do we do anything? Why, for instance, do you want to move from this house?”

“That’s difficult.”

“To explain or understand?”

“To explain.”

“But you do know?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well,” moving down the stairs, past him along the hall, “that’s all right then.”

At the door, she turned.

“They didn’t think much of it, did they?” Resnick said with the beginnings of a smile.

“They hated it.” Grinning.

“You think it’s saleable?”

She fingered the paper close by the door frame where it was coming unstuck from the wall. “Yes, I guess so. You might have to drop the price a little.”

“I already did.”

“I’m sure we can sell it.”

Resnick nodded, pushed his hands down into his trouser pockets and pulled them out again. A skinny cat, dove gray with a white tip beside its nose and another on the end of its tail, wound between the edge of the now open door and Claire’s boots.

“Is that yours too?”

“That’s Bud.”

“There was a tabby with a chewed-up ear asleep in the bowl inside the sink.”

“Pepper.”

“Three cats.”

“Four.”

She glanced down for a moment towards her clipboard, shifted the balance of her weight from one foot to the other. “Got to go.”

“There’s a set of keys at your office.”

“I suppose there is.”

“Anytime …”

“Right.”

“As long as you come with them.”

She looked up at him, almost sharply.

“I mean, I don’t want you just doling out the keys and letting people wander around.”

“No, no. Understood. We wouldn’t do that.”

Resnick nodded to show that he understood also.

Claire opened the door wide and went through on to the first step. “I’ll do what I can, Inspector.”

“Of course.”

“You just might need to be patient, that’s all.” Another step and then she swung her head back with a final grin. It wasn’t only that her smile was off-center, Resnick realized, she had a couple of teeth near the front that overlapped. “But you’re good at that, I’ll bet,” she laughed. “Being patient.”

It would have been easy to have stood in the doorway and watched her walk the length of the slightly meandering path, out through the gate and all the way to the car. Instead, Resnick went back inside, into the kitchen: one more cup of coffee for him to enjoy and Graham Millington to be thankful for.

The station at which Resnick was based was in the inner city, far enough from the center to feel its own identity, not so distant that it was like being in the sticks. North-east, between the fan of arterial roads, were turn-of-the-century terraced houses, infilled here and there with modest new municipal buildings and earlier, less successful, blocks of flats with linked walkways waiting to be demolished. Most of those living there were working-class poor, which meant they were lucky to be working at all: Afro-Caribbean, Asian, whites who had clocked in at the factories producing bicycles or cigarettes or hosiery, before those factories had been torn down to make way for superstores or turned into museums celebrating a lace-and-legend heritage. To the west was an enclave of Victorian mansions and tennis courts, tree-lined hilly streets and grounds big enough to build an architect-designed bungalow below the shrubbery and still have room for badminton. Once a year these people opened up their gardens to one another and served weak lemonade they’d made themselves, a small charge, of course, for charity. The only black face ever glimpsed belonged to someone cutting through or lost.