Rough Treatment (4 page)

Jeff Harrison, blood streaming from the bridge of his nose, blocking out one eye, had stared him down with the other. Half a minute, more or less, and the weapon had been laid on the turf, its blade retracted. There were four youths waiting between the touchline and the barrier when reinforcements arrived.

The second occasion was later, after Harrison had transferred into CID. He and Resnick had been involved in a raid on a warehouse on the canal that was suspected of housing stolen goods. They picked up a known thief running clear, a villain, real dyed-in-the-wool, regional crime squad had had him targeted for months. Try as they might, nothing would tie him in, nothing that would stand up as evidence.

“Bend the rules a little, Charlie,” Harrison had said. It was one in the morning, in a drinking club off Bridlesmith Gate. “In a good cause. That confession I heard him make, you heard it too.”

“No, Jeff,” Resnick had said, “I did not.”

Two memories, clear as daylight.

“Good to see you, Charlie.”

“Jeff.”

They shook hands and Harrison offered Resnick a seat, a cup of tea, a cigarette. Resnick sat down, shook his head to the rest.

“Course, you don’t, do you?” Harrison emptied the ashtray into the metal waste bin and lit up again. He was still in CID, like Resnick now an inspector.

“Tom Parker says you’re interested in this break-in.”

Resnick sat forward, shrugged. “Might fit, might not.”

“I’ve had a copy of the report done for you. Young DC went out there, Featherstone. He’s not in as of now, or you could have talked to him yourself.”

Resnick pushed the manila envelope into his side pocket. “You didn’t go out there?”

“Couldn’t see any point. Pretty straightforward. Run of the mill.”

“You’ll not mind if I do?”

Harrison tapped ash from his cigarette and leaned his chair back on to its hind legs. “Help yourself.”

Resnick got to his feet. “Thanks, Jeff.”

“Any time. Charlie,” the chair came down on all fours, “we must have a drink or two. Been a while.”

“Yes.” Resnick was heading for the door.

“You do come up with anything,” Harrison said, “you’ll keep me posted.”

“Depend on it.”

After Resnick had gone, Jeff Harrison sat where he was until he’d smoked down that cigarette and then another. What was it about Charlie Resnick that made him so special? With his shirt still crumpled from the wash and his tie knotted arse-about-face.

Grabianski tried to imagine how Grice spent his afternoons. He pictured him sitting in the auditoriums of mostly empty cinemas, eating popcorn and doing his best to ignore the snores and shuffles from the semi-darkness around him. The last film Grabianski had seen had been
Catch 22,
and he had barely lasted the opening sequence: the promise of blood and bowels spilled across the airplane fuselage had brought back memories of his father’s wartime stories, too keen for Grabianski’s own stomach. He had thrown up, quietly, into a toilet bowl in the gents, fluttered his half-ticket down into the flushing water and left.

“Jerry!”

Grice was standing near the hotel entrance beneath a sign that promised TVs and en-suite showers in every room. His fists were stuffed into the pockets of a sheepskin car-coat and his thinning hair had been combed sideways over the broad curve of his head. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Grabianski climbed into the front of a nearly new cherry-red Vauxhall that was parked at the curb.

“You changed your car,” he said as Grice pulled out into the slow stream of traffic.

“Observant today,” Grice said sharply. He jabbed the palm of his hand at the horn and found the indicator, swore, tried again and swerved around one vehicle and cut across another to make the roundabout.

“What’s pissing you off?” Grabianski asked.

Grice depressed the accelerator and laughed. “This is pissed off?”

“You tell me.”

“Eleven thirty this morning, that was pissed off.”

“Your day got better?”

“Better beyond belief.”

“I’m glad.”

Grice measured the distance between a milk truck and the central bollard almost to perfection.

“Whatever it is,” said Grabianski, both hands tight against the dash, arms tensed, “do you have to celebrate this enthusiastically?”

“’S’he doing delivering milk this time of day, anyway? Gone three in the afternoon. He early or late or what?” He glanced over at Grabianski, who was just easing back in his seat and starting to breathe more freely. “You know what’s the best way to break your arms, don’t you? We hit anything, seat belt’s not going to do your arms one bit of good, you got them braced like that. Snap!”

Grice lifted his hands from the steering wheel long enough to clap them together loudly in front of his face.

“How far are we going?” Grabianski asked. Unless he sat well down in the seat, the upholstery of the roof touched against his head.

“Relax,” Grice said, “we’re almost there.”

Grabianski nodded and looked through the side window. Super-save Furnishings were offering a 40 percent discount on all beds, settees and three-piece suites, free delivery: green and blue plaid moquette or dimpled red plastic with a fur trim seemed to be the popular styles.

They found a parking space between a Porsche and a gleaming red Ferrari with personalized number plates. The house was four stories, broad and glowering Victorian gothic. High above the arched front doorway, panes of stained glass caught at what was already late-afternoon light.

“I didn’t know we were working,” Grabianski said, looking up towards a pair of circular turrets at either end of the roof.

“We’re not.”

Grice slipped off his glove, took a ring of keys from his pocket and used one to open the front door.

The entrance hall was harlequin-tiled and marble-edged; the stairs broad and thickly carpeted, and there were dying pot plants on each landing. Outside one of the doors two bottles of milk were turning to a creamy green. Grice fingered a second key into the lock of flat number seven, top floor.

“We’ll have to get that changed,” he said, pushing the door open over a collection of free newspapers and amazing offers from
Reader’s Digest.
“Anyone who fancied it could get through there easy as breathing.”

He walked along a short corridor and into a long room with high windows on one side and a slanting roof on the other.

“Servants’ quarters,” he said, pointing towards the windows. “Never wanted them to see the light of day, did they?”

Grabianski poked at a dark ridge in the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “What are we doing?” he said.

“Moving in.”

Resnick had tried the number three times without getting a response. He had driven out to the house and knocked on the door, rung the bell. For twenty minutes he had parked on the opposite side of the road, leaning back with a copy of the local paper spread across the wheel. A woman with a shopping basket on wheels walked past him, slowly, twice; up along the opposite pavement, back down this one. Finally, a man in his sixties, wearing a blue track suit and leading a small Yorkshire terrier, tapped on the window.

Resnick folded his paper, wound the window midway down and smiled.

“I don’t like to bother you, but …”

“Mrs. Roy,” said Resnick, nodding in the direction of the detached house across the road.

“Yes, I believe she’s …”

“She’s out.”

“Yes.”

The man stood there, gazing in. The dog was probably cocking its leg at the wheels of Resnick’s car.

“I think she left at lunchtime,” the man offered. “When I took Alice for her midday walk the car was there in the drive—the Mini, that’s hers—but then as we came back I couldn’t help noticing that it was gone.” He paused, gave a short tug on the lead. “I’ve no idea when she might be back.”

Resnick took his warrant card from his pocket and opened it under the man’s nose.

“Oh. Oh. Of course, there was a burglary. Just the other day.” He shook his head. “It still happens, doesn’t seem to matter how vigilant you are, they still get away with it. I mean, I know you do your best, but, then, there’s only so much you can do. I suppose that’s it, isn’t it? More of them than there are of you. A measure of the way things have changed. That and other things.” He leaned a little closer. “Do you know they were three weeks after the last bank holiday before they came and emptied our dustbins and only then after I’d telephoned each morning at eight sharp; four mornings on the trot, that’s what it took. And, of course, when they did finally come, it was the usual torrent of bad language and litter and such left scattered the length of the drive.”

Resnick rewound the window, switched on the ignition and put the car in gear; if he waited until the good neighbor got to his conclusion about the way the country was going to rack and ruin, he might have felt obliged to ask him which way he’d voted at the last couple of elections.

He would call in at Jeff Harrison’s station on the way back and see if the PC who’d spoken to Maria Roy had returned. If not, there was plenty to attend to back on his own patch, and little about this to suggest it was urgent.

As he turned the car around and headed back the way he had come, he was wondering why the alarm system at the Roy house had apparently failed to function.

“Took me till twelve o’clock to screw an extra hundred out of this imbecile in the showroom and even then, God is my witness, I had to walk almost to the door twice. So, by a little after 12.30 I’ve had a couple of halves and a scotch and without really knowing why, I’m inside this estate agent’s, pretending to look at properties between forty and sixty thousand, when what I’m really doing is looking round the edge of the desk at this woman in red boots.”

Grice was sitting on a reversed wooden chair, with his heels tucked into the rungs at the side. He had a can of Swan Light in his hands and the rest of the six-pack was behind him on the table. “Get something non-alcoholic,” he’d told Grabianski. “One thing I can’t stand, failing asleep in the middle of the day.” It was somewhere between four and five and Grabianski, who wasn’t drinking anything, was in the only easy chair in the room, staring back at Grice and trying hard to seem interested.

“She comes over and asks if she can help and I point at a few things and joke about mortgages and so on and then I’m telling her I’m probably only going to be in the city for a few months and buying anything’s really out of order. ‘Work?’ she asked and I nod. ‘Short-term contract?’ I nod again and mumble something and I don’t know if she mishears me or guesses or what, but she says, ‘Oh, you’re working out at the television studio,’ and I say, ‘Yes, that’s right,’ and she gets this bright little look in her eye and asks me if I’d mind waiting there a minute, which, of course, I don’t, so, she goes off and when she comes back five minutes later she’s got these papers fastened to her clipboard and she asks if I’d be interested in renting somewhere on an agreed temporary basis.”

Grice swallowed some 1 percent lager and belched. “I sit down at her desk and she explains they’ve had this flat on the market for over a year and no way can they sell it. Half the people who look at it say it’s too dark, and the ones that don’t care about that all pull out when their surveys show them there’s damp coming through from the roof above the kitchen and the bathroom, and half a dozen attempts to patch it up haven’t done a scrap of good. Seems the only answer is to take off the whole roof and have it renewed and there’s no way of that happening because it would need all the other flat owners to kick in with five hundred and they’re not listening. ‘Why don’t you take over the tenancy for three months? That way, at least we’re getting something back for the owner.’ I can see she’s on a hiding to nothing and it takes me less than ten minutes to knock fifty a month off the rent.”

He pointed the can at Grabianski. “I knew you’d be chuffed. Knew you wanted to get clear of that poxy hotel.”

Grice unhooked his heels and stood up.

“For tonight, there’s an old z-bed you can make up in here and I’ll have the bedroom. Tomorrow we’ll go into the city and buy you a proper bed.”

Before then, Grabianski hoped, they would figure out what they were going to do with the kilo of cocaine they had taken from the back of Maria Roy’s bedroom safe.

Four

He couldn’t see the clock face from where he was sitting, but he guessed it was somewhere between half-two and three. Low, from the stereo, the song of Johnny Hodges’ saxophone, the note held, rising, while the rhythm pulsed beneath it. On the label he was using an alias, but his was the perfect print, the impossibility of disguise. “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” Resnick shifted in the chair and, implanted half-way up his chest, Bud complained, somewhere between a hiss and a whimper.
Why, for instance, do you want to move from this house?
“Come on, sweetheart,” said Resnick, “time to go.” He cupped both hands beneath the cat’s body and lifted him to the floor; felt against his thumbs, the ends of his fingers, the animal’s bones were like the spars of a model mast, matchwood and hope.
Why?

His feet were bare against the fiber of the carpet. Mr. Albertson had surveyed it with a slow shake of the head: you could try for a couple of hundred, curtains as well, but in the end … Now Albertson had got him to a nunnery or wherever and Resnick’s affairs were in fresh hands.
You’re good at that I’ll bet. Being patient.
He measured dark coffee into the percolator, tamping it down. At first, when he had ceased being able to sleep through, he had made himself cut back on caffeine, less throughout the day, none after the fall of light. All that happened, his team had suffered. Half a sentence out of their mouths before he had shot them down. On and on until Lynn Kellogg had cornered him in his office and asked, direct, soft burr of her Norfolk voice at odds with the anxiety of her eyes, sir, what’s wrong?

He had restored his usual ten cups a day or more, tried tempering them before bed with Horlicks and the like, warm milk and whisky. If he managed three to four hours, unbroken, he counted his blessings. Better than sheep. Bud purred encouragingly and Resnick opened the fridge for the tin of cat food: one gain from these sleepless middle nights he and the runt of his litter had shared together—free to eat alone and unpestered, Bud was at last beginning to put on a little weight.