Rough Treatment (30 page)

Skelton and his daughter sat at either side of the superintendent’s desk, avoiding each other’s eyes, not speaking, When Lynn Kellogg had first shown her into the office, when the door had closed behind her and she had been left alone there with her father, Kate had cried. Tears she had thought used up already. Her father had offered her a handkerchief and she had moved her head away, preferring a handful of tissues, pink and wet and torn.

“Sit down, Kate.”

She had sat, knowing the questions he must want to ask, the answers he was quickly learning to dread. After a while it was almost calm, almost pleasant. The hum of sound from other rooms, steps that moved closer, past and away. Their breathing. Telephones. Traffic changing gear before the traffic lights, the roundabout. Her mother—somewhere her mother was folding a school blouse after ironing, laying it down inside a drawer in Kate’s room. Moving to the kitchen, perhaps, a glance towards the timer on the oven, a casserole to be tasted, salt and black pepper ground in and stirred. “That child,” Kate had overheard one dismal evening, “you give in to her too easily. Things she gets away with. In this house and out. The way you are with youngsters in your job—a pity a little of that hasn’t rubbed off here. She might not be as wild as she is. Might show us both a little more respect.”

“Kate …”

“What?”

“Do you want to …?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go home?”

Right across the road from where Resnick was walking there had once been a mainline railway station. Now the original clock stood on its tower in front of one of the city’s two shopping centers, this one with high-rise fiats rising from inside it like concrete stalagmites. Up here on the left the Moulin Rouge: one and nine it had cost Resnick to see his first foreign film, patchy subtitles and imitations of carnality; barely remembered glimpses of Brigitte Bardot’s breasts, somewhere that might have been St. Tropez. Gone like most of the other fleapits where he had watched Jerry Lewis, Doris Day.

Resnick pushed open the door to the Partridge and walked into the left-hand room. Jeff Harrison was nursing a scotch at the end of the bar and he scarcely looked up when Resnick entered, but clearly knew he was there. Most of the bench seats were taken; at one of the round tables four young men still wearing long overcoats smoked roll-ups and played dominoes. Resnick squeezed in alongside Jeff Harrison and ordered a Guinness and a bag of plain crisps.

“Bit late, Jeff. Sorry.”

“Overtime?”

Resnick shook his head. “Feeding the cats.”

“Give them all the tit, do you, Charlie?”

Another shake of the head. “Whiskas, as a rule.”

Harrison looked towards a couple of empty seats in the back corner. “Want to sit down?”

“Suit yourself.”

Apparently it suited Harrison to stay as he was. They chatted sporadically, Resnick pacing himself down his glass, wondering how long it would take Harrison to get to the point.

“Anyone had asked me, Charlie, I might have said we were mates.”

Resnick looked at him along his shoulder. “Not that exactly.”

“But not enemies.”

“No, not enemies.”

“Then why all this?”

“Come on, Jeff, there’s no all about it.”

“Vendetta, that’s what I’d call it.”

Resnick didn’t answer. He’d known this was going to be difficult, one of the reasons he’d been putting it off as long as he had. Maybe he should have left it another forty-eight hours, or did he owe Harrison more than that, mate or no?

“You’ve had men going behind my back …”

“No.”

“I’m not stupid. Not a fool.”

“No one’s been doing anything behind your back.”

“Like buggery!”

“Jeff, you know …”

“Yes?”

“There were reasons for pushing on the Roy investigations. You were told what they were.”

“This has gone further than that.”

“All through the DCI.”

“Pals, together, that it, Charlie? Scratch my balls, I’ll scratch yours. Or is it the trouser leg rolled up the knee, the funny handshake?”

“Pursuing an inquiry, that’s what it is.”

“Yes?” Harrison stared at him. “Into that burglary or into me?”

The woman behind the bar was trying so hard to listen she’d developed a serious list to one side.

“Not here, Jeff.”

“No? Why the hell not here? Or would you rather wait till the interview room, back at the station?”

Resnick’s Guinness tasted sharper than usual. “Is that where this is all leading?”

“Right. You’re asking me. As if I know what’s going on. I’m the last to know what’s going on. Just ignore that fucker, waltz around him, make him dizzy. Don’t tell him a thing.”

“Jeff…”

“You’ve had that Paki nudging away at my lads behind my back, seeing if they won’t cough for some misdemeanor or other, own up to how far I tied their hands behind their backs. Questioning my evidence, my procedures. Going back to my witnesses …”

“I asked …”

“Once, once you came to me, face to face, and asked. This is something more, this is different.” He grabbed hold of Resnick’s forearm and pressed it hard against the edge of the bar. “Charlie, there’s blokes in the force get a hard-on doing that kind of shit. Shafting their own. That’s not you. Not without you’ve got a special reason.”

Resnick looked at Harrison, glanced down at the grip he had on his arm. Harrison released him and turned abruptly away. He might have been leaving and Resnick would have been glad to see him go, but all that happened was he went to the gents and came back.

“Promotion, Charlie—is that it?” Harrison signaled for another scotch and Resnick placed his hand down over the top of his own glass, not wanting more. “Fed up with plain inspector?”

Resnick didn’t answer. He could think of a great many places he would sooner be; not one that, right then, might be worse.

“You’ll be all right there, Charlie. Oh, you might be an odd sort of a sod, not exactly by the book, but, I’ll give you this, you get results. More than your fair share, I shouldn’t be surprised. But then, you’re still in the action. Nobody shunted you out to one side because your face didn’t fit; you hadn’t made the mistake to go mouthing off a few home truths to the wrong suits, the wrong faces.” Harrison downed his scotch in one, wiped the back of a hand thoughtfully across his mouth. “There’s more to life out there than this, sitting back behind a desk and waiting for a pension. Open a little shop somewhere, move out to Mablethorpe and start up in a bed and breakfast. You know the way things are going, Charlie. Law enforcement. Private security. There’s housing estates down in London pay for their own patrols, round the clock. Some bloke in a uniform, a guard dog and a flashlight. They don’t care who it is, just so long as they can look out of their window of an evening and see somebody there. The less we do it, the more they want it; the more they’ll pay. I don’t want to wait until it’s too late, until I retire.”

“You’ve got connections, then?” Resnick asked.

“Never you mind what I’ve got, just get off my back. That understood?”

Resnick lifted the glass to his mouth and Harrison grabbed him again, the elbow this time, the rim forced against the underside of his lip.

“Understood, Charlie?”

The pub noise went on around them. They both knew that Resnick was unlikely to do anything there and then.

“You don’t know anything, Charlie,” Harrison said, turning back to the bar. “If you did, you’d not be here now.”

“’Night, Jeff. Finish the crisps, if you want.”

Resnick shouldered his way between customers and stood for several moments outside on the street. A city bus went slowly past, one woman sitting alone on the top deck, staring out. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to go himself, what he wanted to do, except that, rare for him, he didn’t want it to be alone.

Of course, the directory was missing from the phone booth and the young man fielding inquiries informed him that no Diane Woolf was listed. Resnick put the receiver back in place, lifted it back almost immediately and redialed. A different voice, a woman this time, gave him Claire Millinder’s number. Resnick looked at it, written in Biro on the back of his hand.

Charlie, we’re not talking major commitment here.

He left the booth and headed back to where his car was parked, erasing her number with even movements of his thumb.

Twenty-nine

“There’ve got to be other ways,” said Grabianski, a touch wistfully.

“Of getting inside?”

“Of earning a living.”

Grice looked up from the rear window-catch in disbelief. Until he saw Grabianski’s face clearly, it wasn’t possible to tell if he was being serious or just winding him up.

“Funny,” Grice said. “Can’t see her hand, but it must be there.”

“Where? What hand? What are you on about?”

“Her. The one who’s got you by the balls.”

“Nobody’s got me by the balls.”

Grice’s attention was back on the window. “What’s she after? Round-the-world cruise, is it? Then half a lifetime of happiness in Saffron Walden?”

“She isn’t after anything. She’s nothing to do with this.”

“Just your regular cold feet, then?”

Grabianski shook his head, “Considering the options, that’s all.”

The catch yielded enough for Grice to gain some real purchase. “We did that a long time back, the pair of us.”

“No reason we can’t think again.”

Grice smiled. “When we’re doing so well?” The window slowly lifted, only the slightest of squeaks from the sash.

“We can’t go on getting dressed up and turning over other people’s places for ever.”

Grice hoisted himself on to the sill. Inside the room he could see the outlines of heavy furniture, recently bought in sale-room auctions; hear the monotone of a grandfather clock. Small fortune passed over trying to reinvent an upstairs, downstairs sort of past. Stupid bastards!

He took a firm grip of Grabianski’s hand and helped him through the open window, pushing it down behind them. “You’re right,” he said.

“About what?”

“We can’t go on forever.”

Knowing Grice was being facetious, Grabianski waited for what was to follow.

“Every hundred extra we pay into those pension schemes now becomes around a thousand at sixty-five. Is that attractive or what?”

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

Grice grinned. “You know very well. What’s the point of having your own tame broker if you don’t take advantage of professional advice?”

Grabianski was moving stealthily between two high-backed chairs with rolled arms. “I’m going to check the other rooms before we start.”

“Don’t worry,” said Grice, happier now they were inside. “You’re not about to strike lucky twice.”

High against the back of his skull, Grabianski was getting a headache. He went into each and every room, expecting to find someone sleeping, sitting up, insomniac, with cheese biscuits and a book. If he had found somebody, he might almost have felt easier. It would have explained this feeling he was getting, not just the one beginning to throb inside his head.

Grice whispered gleefully from the bathroom. In a plastic bag pushed back beneath a cluster of towels, close to £1,300 in twenties and tens. Mad money? Money to pay the interior decorator, cash in hand and forget about the VAT? Either way, it didn’t matter: now it was their money, his and Grabianski’s. Already, in a decorated cigar-box on the dressing table of the master bedroom, they had found Eurochecks, sterling traveler’s checks, Spanish, US and German currency. Gold rings wrapped inside pink tissue and stuffed down inside a pair of tights. Grice did appreciate people who were careful—it made their task so much the easier.

“What’s the story here?” asked Grabianski.

“Story?”

“The owners.”

“Moving up from Kent. House they had was going to be left standing, but the orchard and four acres were being plowed under for the Channel Tunnel rail link. They’ve got a flat in the Barbican and now this. When he’s not abroad, the bloke spends most of his time in London. Wife and kids’ll move in up here when they’ve got prep schools sorted out. Till then, nobody here save for the occasional weekend. Satisfied?”

Grabianski didn’t answer.

“Relax.”

“I am relaxed.”

“You won’t be relaxed till we’re back in that cozy little flat of ours and you’re whisking up your Horlicks.”

“Think that picture’s worth anything?” Grabianski asked, nodding in the direction of a dusky portrait on the wall, a sallow-faced woman with her hands folded across her lap and eyes that seemed to be staring out of another painting altogether.

“Search me,” said Grice. “You’re the one with culture.”

“You make it sound like an incurable disease.”

Grice laughed, more a hiss than a real laugh, and before the sound faded they heard the key turn in the downstairs lock. As if by magic the throbbing in Grabianski’s head ceased, to be replaced by a keen, knife-like pain. The front door opened and closed; one light went on, then another.

Neither Grice nor Grabianski moved, not as much as a muscle.

A radio was switched on and tuned between stations, voices, some low-grade pop music, more voices, a snatch of Haydn, silence again. Grice knew, in the semi-darkness of the upstairs landing, that Grabianski was staring at him. Knew that he was thinking whatever else, no way you could call this the occasional weekend.

What if, Grice wondered, it’s another burglary? Someone with a copied set of keys, a skeleton? But then the man—the weight of his steps suggested that, yes, it was a man—went into where they knew the kitchen to be and they heard the faint click of a cupboard being closed.

Grabianski signaled towards Grice: while whoever had come in was making whatever it was in the kitchen, there was time for them to descend the stairs, get out the way they’d come in.

Now it was Grice who was indecisive, but a hand to his shoulder propelled him forwards and down. They were three rises from the foot of the stairs when Hugo Furlong, his plane rerouted to East Midlands Airport and within easy reach of a friendly bed for the night, wandered through from the kitchen. He was spooning raspberry jam from a jar, just about the only edible thing he’d been able to fancy and find.