Rough Treatment (3 page)

There was blood on the floor in the reception area, bright enough to be recent. A uniformed constable slid back the reinforced-glass panel as Resnick entered.

“Nosebleed?” Resnick asked, nodding towards the floor.

“Not exactly, sir.”

He pushed open the off-white door and at once he could hear the slow clip of a typewriter, several typewriters, the bright hiccup of telephones breaking into life, the low, persistent swearing of a man who knew four words and used them, without connection, over and over.

Resnick nodded at a WPC who went past with a woman leaning on her arm, a traveler of sorts, a few weeks here begging door-to-door and then, somehow, she would hitch a lift to another city, twenty miles distant, and do the same. Gone and then back. Today there was a dark swelling below her left eye, purple shading into black; the upper corner of the other eye was ridged with scabs that broke to leak a little pus. The policewoman walked her slowly, patting the back of her hand.

Resnick walked along the corridor towards the cells, turning into the first room, where the custody sergeant, crisp white shirt, neat dark tie, was entering an admission in his book.

At first it was difficult to tell whether the young PC or his prisoner was injured. A knife, its blade broken off an inch or so from the point, lay on the custody sergeant’s desk.

“Anything I can do for you, sir?” the sergeant inquired, continuing with his entry.

Resnick shook his head.

He could see now that most of the blood had come from the prisoner, a gash to the side of his head, another wound high beneath the soiled shirt that stuck to him like a bandage.

“He was brandishing a knife and making threats, sir,” the young constable said. He didn’t need to explain himself to Resnick, but he did need to talk. His face was bleached, unnaturally pale. “I told him to calm down, put down the weapon, but he refused. Carried on shouting and swearing. Offering to cut me open.”

The man was swearing still, less loudly, the intervals between each of his four words growing, so that just when it seemed he had stopped, run out of breath altogether, the next one would topple into place.

“Argument over the day’s cider supply,” put in the sergeant.

“It couldn’t have been much after nine o’clock,” Resnick said.

“Early risers, this crew.”

“While the rest of the world is polishing off its Shreddies.”

“I called for assistance,” the PC said, his voice less than level, “but I didn’t know how long I could wait.”

“Chummy’d already marked one of his friends’ cards for the hospital. He’s there now, getting a piece of his nose sewn back on.

With any luck.” The custody sergeant looked round at Resnick. “This young man did well.”

“I took the knife off him, sir, only he got … he injured himself in the process.”

Resnick looked at the man, whose eyes were now closed, though his mouth kept opening at still lengthening intervals. “You don’t think he should be over at casualty, too?”

“Just as soon as the doctor’s had a look at him, Charlie. It’s all in hand.” Resnick turned towards Len Lawrence, the chief inspector, a man who’d once read a novel full of earthy Midlands grit and had believed it.

“Anything special, was it, Charlie?”

Resnick shook his head. “Common or garden interest. Following the trail of blood. You know how it is. Instinct.”

“Thought maybe you were seeing how the other half lives.”

“Pounding the streets, you mean? Out amongst the real folk.”

“Something like that.”

“We get our fair share, you know.”

“CID. Thought it was all white-collar crime for you lot. New technology. Voice prints and visual identification courtesy of the nearest VDU.”

Resnick stepped past the chief inspector, out into the corridor. From one of the cells came a sudden, startled shout, as if someone had woken out of a dream, not knowing where he was.

“My sergeant acquit himself all right this morning?” Resnick asked.

“Loved every minute of it, didn’t he? Had his shoes shining so bright, could’ve trimmed his mustache in them.”

Probably had, Resnick thought on his way up the stairs. Somewhere early in his career, someone influential had told Millington that a smart appearance at all times was the one sure way to the top. In the drawer of his desk he kept, alongside the necessary forms and a copy of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984, a zip-up bag containing shoe-cleaning gear, a needle and thread for sewing back on stray buttons and a pair of nail scissors in a crocodile case. Resnick presumed it was those Millington had been using when he went to the gents and found tiny trimmings of hair trapped against the porcelain of the sink.

It was Graham Millington, too, and not Resnick, who was interested in the uses of computer-based technology. Aside from the superintendent’s, his had been the only name signed up for a weekend seminar at the Home Office Scientific Research and Development Branch down in sunny Hertfordshire.

The door to the CID room was ajar and through the glass panel Resnick could see Mark Divine single-fingering his way through a scene-of-crime report as though the typewriter had only been invented the day before yesterday.

So much for the new technology!

Lynn Kellogg and Kevin Naylor were talking energetically about something urgent, over towards the rear of the room. None of them as much as noticed his arrival.

His own office was a partitioned section, a quarter of the room immediately to the right of the main door. He would have taken bets on Millington being behind his desk and he would have won.

“All right for size, Graham?”

Millington flushed, banged his knee on the edge of the desk trying to get up, juggled with the telephone but clung on to it at the third attempt.

“It’s for you, sir,” he said, handing the receiver towards Resnick.

“Thought it might be.”

“Yes, sir.”

Resnick took the phone, making no attempt to speak into it. Millington hesitated by the door.

“Spare me five minutes, Graham, fill me in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Later.”

Millington drew in air, nodded, closed the office door behind him.

“Hallo,” Resnick said into the phone, moving aside some papers so that he could sit on the corner of his desk. “DI Resnick.”

“Tom Parker, Charlie.”

“Morning, sir.” Tom Parker was the detective chief inspector based at the central station and each morning that Resnick was on duty he would call through and discuss what was happening on his patch.

“Thought you were taking time off?”

“An hour, sir. Personal.”

“The house?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re buggers, Charlie. Never find the one you want and if you do, you can never get shot of it.”

Thanks! Resnick thought. He said nothing.

“You remember that little spate of break-ins, a year back, Charlie? Late spring, was it?”

“March, sir.”

March the second: Resnick had gone to a club in the city to hear Red Rodney, a jazz trumpeter who had worked with Charlie Parker. In his sixties, three months after having surgery on his mouth, Rodney had played long, elastic lines, spluttering sets of notes that cut across the changes; for the final number he had torn through the high-speed unison passages at the start of Parker’s “Shaw ’Nuff’ with a British alto player, unrehearsed, inch perfect.

Resnick had gone into the station the following morning, the sounds still replaying inside his head, to be greeted by Patel with a mug of tea and news of another burglary. Five in a row and that had been the last. Big houses, all of them. Alarms. Neighborhood watch. Money and jewelry and traveler’s checks. Credit cards. Heavy with insurance.

“Out at Edwalton, Charlie. Reported this morning. Same MO. Thought it might be worth your while taking a drive out. Might give us a chance to see if those suspicions of yours were correct.”

Resnick said he’d get on to it first thing, just as soon as he’d had a briefing from his sergeant.

Come on, come on, Graham Millington was thinking, half an eye on his superior through the glass. Don’t make a meal out of it. There’s some of us with a day’s work ahead of us. Himself and young Divine had a Chinaman to talk to concerning an overturned five-gallon container of cooking oil and an inadvertently struck match.

When Resnick opened the door from his office, Millington swung his leg off his desk and stood up.

Three

Jerzy Grabianski had been born within sight of the white cliffs of Dover, but that was never quite enough to make him feel truly English. His family—those of them lacking the scruples or sentiment that would have prohibited them from grabbing an overcoat and a length of smoked sausage and leaving everything else behind—had quit Poland in 1939. Variously, they had walked, run, bicycled (his grandmother and his elder sister sharing a crossbar in front of his father’s strong, pumping legs), clung to sides of already overcrowded cattle trucks, hid beneath the tarpaulin of coal barges, again walked, until the leather of their boots wore through to their socks which wore through to their feet, which bled and blistered and finally hardened but never enough.

They had a strong imperative.

On 1 September of that year, Hitler invaded Poland on three fronts; on the 17th, Russia came through the fourth. By the 28th Warsaw had fallen and on the following day Germany and Russia sat down to divide the country between them.

The Grabianskis left Lodz, where most of them had worked in textile factories, and made their trek west. By way of Czechoslovakia, Austria and Switzerland, they crossed the border into France at La Chaux de Fonds, at the bridge over the Doubs River. Most of them. Waking that last morning, they had realized that Krystyna, Jerzy’s sister, was not huddled beneath her grandmother’s greatcoat, ready to rub the sleep from her eyes.

It took them several hours of circling and retracing their steps before they found her, floating face down near the western shore of Lake Neuchâtel, one arm hooked around the broken oar that someone had thrown adrift. They pulled her on to the land and pressed and pummeled at her thin, breastless chest, but all that happened was that she got colder and stiffer. The broken oar was the shovel with which they dug the shallow grave in which to bury her. She had been eleven years old.

Her father—Jerzy’s father—unclasped the string of wooden beads from around Krystyna’s neck and kept it close until it was lost one black night when he parachuted out over the English Channel. But that was 1944.

The remaining family had split up, some to stay in what soon became Vichy France, others to head for England where they lived as close to the Polish government-in-exile of General Sikorski as was possible. Battersea: Clapham Common: Lambeth. Jerry’s father had joined the air force in France, utilizing his skills as a navigator; when France fell he flew bomber campaigns over Germany with the RAF until the war ended. He was not a man easily deflected from a course once he had set his mind to it, and being spilled into the freezing Channel only made him more determined.

He had vowed to get his family out of Poland and, for the most part, he’d succeeded. He had sworn to help defeat the Nazis and so he had. Somewhere inside himself he had made an agreement to make up for Krystyna’s death with another child but the strain of the last five years had rendered his wife an old woman. She died at thirty-seven, looking fifty-seven, lay on her front in the upstairs back bedroom of a terraced house between Clapham and Balham and simply stopped breathing. When they found her she had one arm curled out from the bed and was clinging to the bedside table as her daughter had clung to that broken oar. And she was almost as cold.

She was buried on a day of slant rain and keen wind, in a walled cemetery within sight of St. George’s Hospital. Walking home afterwards, temporarily lost in the maze of streets, Jerzy’s father bumped—literally bumped—into a nurse on her way home from duty. She took one look at his father’s face and thought that he might be in shock, insisted that he came along the street to her rented room and sit down a while. Probably because of her uniform, Jerzy’s father did as he was told; sat in a small room that smelt of camphor and accepted cup after cup of strong sweet tea.

The nurse was to become Jerzy’s mother.

Jerzy.

It had been years since anyone had called him anything other than Jerry.

Many years.

He walked to the window and looked down on the hotel car park, out over the college and the other small hotels, over the bowling green, the tennis courts, the stretch of worn grass and the edge of the cemetery on the hill—the first cluster of marble and sculpted stone, graves, one of them his father’s. He would have to take a walk there later, when the light was beginning to fade and the bell soon to be rung to announce closing. Long enough to read the inscription but not too long. He wondered, maybe, should he take flowers?

He knew that kids climbed over the wall and stole them, went from house to house and sold them, wrapped in discarded newspaper.

There was a bottle of Bass and a can of Diet Pepsi in the courtesy fridge, tea bags and a small jar of instant coffee alongside the electric kettle, containers of UHT milk. From the wall behind the television set a reproduction of Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
stubbornly refused to bloom. He lifted his watch from the dressing table and strapped it to his wrist: Grice was already twenty minutes late.

Resnick had two clear memories of Jeff Harrison. One was a league match at the County ground, Notts against Manchester City, and City needed three points to win the division. The normal crowd, three to five thousand, was swollen by at least as many Manchester supporters. Not only a special train, but coaches, convoys of them, had come across the Pennines and down the Ml. Notts had little enough to play for, save pride, and the Manchester celebrations were under way before the match began. Banners, flags, most striking of all, faces painted sky blue and gray; so many raucous clowns shrieking their team towards promotion.

Police presence had been increased: never by enough.

Resnick had been there as a spectator, his usual place midway along the terraces flooded for the occasion with unfamiliar bodies. All that good humor was bound to bring a negative response, spill over into ugliness. When it happened, half time, Jeff Harrison, in uniform, waded into a dozen youths who had climbed the barrier on to the pitch. He was in the midst of them when the bottle struck his face. Resnick had tried to push a way through to him, but there hadn’t been the time, and in the end there wasn’t the need. Harrison had hurled two of the supporters back against the wire, caught hold of a third and thrust his arm up behind his back; the rest had scattered, except for a big lad with a shaved head daubed the same colors as his face. The lad had a Stanley knife in his hand. Likely he’d been drinking since early that morning; he’d pulled the knife from his pocket without thinking and now that he was fast against a uniformed officer with the crowd roaring at his back, the worst possibility was that he would panic.