Cutting Edge (18 page)

Skelton gave him a short, hard stare and resumed pacing his office carpet. As a superintendent you get thicker pile and a choice of colors, replacement every five years if you had the right connections. The way Skelton was going, that might be something else to talk to Paul Groves about.

“It’s distracting,” Skelton said, behind Resnick now and making him turn in his chair. “That’s what worries me. Leading us away from what I think should be our main focus.”

“But if it’s there …”

“What, Charlie? What exactly?”

“If Groves and Dougherty were involved …”

“Come on, Charlie. We don’t know that.”

“Seems pretty incontrovertible Groves is gay, bisexual at least.”

“Where’s your evidence about Dougherty?”

“Close to thirty interviews, people who’ve worked with him, some of them for quite a while. Had a drink with him, socialized. Not a great deal, but a little. Never once, any talk of a girlfriend. Woman. Not once.”

“That means he’s gay?”

Resnick shrugged. What was Skelton getting so worked up about? “It’s an indication.”

“Of what? That he doesn’t like women? That he doesn’t like sex? Maybe he’s a very private person. Maybe it’s his hormones. If we all had our sexuality determined by our rate of intimacy, where would that leave us?” Skelton was back behind his desk, constructing cages with his fingers. “Come to think of it, Charlie, last couple of police functions, you haven’t brought anybody with you, the opposite sex. Not significant, is it?”

Resnick found himself wriggling a little more than was comfortable. Either Skelton was accusing him of being a long time in the closet or being innately prejudiced, he wasn’t sure which. Perhaps it was both. Or simply a game? No. The only games he could imagine Skelton being interested in had strict rules, required the utmost concentration and alertness, were important to win and absolutely no fun at all. Fun, Resnick thought, wasn’t a concept the superintendent believed in.

Poor Kate!

“I’m sure there was something going on between them,” Resnick said. “Something to make Dougherty leave early, more than this shift business. I saw Groves’s face when I suggested they might have been having a row.”

“Lovers’ quarrel, Charlie?” said Skelton dismissively.

“Could have followed him out of the bar, across the street. One thing, if Dougherty knew who his attacker was, that would explain why he was able to get close, get in the first blow.”

“From behind, Charlie?”

The thought set up possibilities neither man was prepared fully to consider. Skelton slid back one of his desk drawers and took out a blue folder, some papers clipped neatly together.

“Home Office statistics. Rise in recorded sexual offenses, five percent to twenty-eight thousand in ’89, since then more or less holding.” Skelton flipped over two pages. “Research into that extra five percent, thirteen hundred cases, between half and a third indecency charges against men. One town’s public toilets. You can imagine what the gays had to say about that. You know.” Skelton turned to another sheet, a photo copy of a magazine article. “‘The prosecution and persecution of gay men,’” Skelton read.

“With respect, sir …”

“Let the media get wind of this,” Skelton said, “they’ll have a field day. Gays carving themselves up in lavatories. The so-called silent majority will want officers on observation, armed with everything from mirrors to video cameras and everyone to the left of the Co-op Labour Party will be organizing demos and picketing police stations on behalf of their oppressed brothers.”

Resnick allowed a small silence to collect around them. Beyond it a car went by, all of its windows presumably down, loudspeakers blaring. From further along the corridor, not quite decipherable, the familiar cadence of swearing. Telephones, their urgencies overlapping.

“If he had motivation, sir. Groves. Opportunity.”

“Yes,” said Skelton, subdued now. “I agree. We have to check it out. But, Charlie, low profile, low key, be careful who you use. And remember, if there is anything in it, where does that leave us with the attack on Fletcher? The hospital, Charlie, I still think that’s where we’ll find our answers.”

“Yes, sir,” Resnick said, getting to his feet.

“The wrong kind of publicity, Charlie,” Skelton said as Resnick reached the door, “it can only get in the way.”

Patel was worrying over the information that had come back from the hospital, fussing with the computer, opening files, finding facts to cross-reference, and concluding there were too few. If there was a clear link between Fletcher and Karl Dougherty he couldn’t pin it down. Aside from the obvious; apart from the fact that they had survived. In Dougherty’s case, just. His condition was still giving cause for concern.

Naylor and Lynn Kellogg were talking into telephones, opposite ends of the office.

“Nobody tramps the streets with a pram for eight hours,” Naylor was saying. “Nobody in their right mind.”

“And when she made this application,” said Lynn Kellogg, “did she say what she was going to do?… Mm, hm. Mm, hm … And did she say where?”

Resnick stood for a while behind Patel’s desk, looking at the characters springing up on the green screen. Names, dates, times. It should all be checked against a list of patients Fletcher would have had dealings with, patients from Bernard Salt’s list, but that list was slow in coming. The consultant’s secretary had greeted Patel’s request like an invitation to perform a particularly unsavory sexual act.

If Skelton was right and the hospital was where they were going to get their answers, they would have to do better than this.

“I would go back there, sir,” Patel said. “But with the best will in the world, I don’t think it would make a lot of difference. She is a very determined lady.”

Resnick nodded. The sort that, generations back, would have traveled across the Sahara by camel without ever breaking sweat or needing to urinate behind the nearest pyramid; who held the Raj together in the face of disease, the caste system, and the occasional difficulty in getting a fourth for bridge.

“If you might call her yourself, sir,” Patel suggested.

“I’ll get the super to do it.”

“I don’t know,” Naylor was saying. “As soon as I can. What does it matter anyway, if you’re not going to be there?”

“Thank you,” said Lynn. “If she does get in touch, you’ll let me know?”

Resnick watched as Naylor slammed down the phone and left the office with a speed that nearly left a startled DC, who happened to be coming through the door, minus an arm. Resnick looked questioningly towards Lynn Kellogg and slowly she shook her head. The number of times Resnick had seen it happen: young officers who think a kiddie is all they need to bring them and their young wives back together.

He headed for his office and Lynn followed him.

“Karen Archer, sir. I’ve checked with the university. Seems she saw the student counselor and was advised to take some time off. Compassionate leave, sort of thing. The department secretary assumed she’d gone home to her parents, but didn’t know for sure. I’ve tried to contact them and can’t get any response.”

“You’re worried?”

“Just a feeling, sir.”

“She had obviously moved out, though. Signaled her intentions.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not as if Carew’s gone after her again, no suggestion of that?”

Lynn shook her head.

“The concern is, then, what? She might have harmed herself?”

“Something like that, sir. Rape. The way Maureen Madden explained it, at least if she’d agreed to press charges, that would have been acknowledging what happened and saying that it wasn’t her fault. Not leaving her trying to suppress it or feeling guilty.”

“Her parents. Where do they live?”

“Devon, sir. Close to Lynmouth.”

“Put through a call to the local station. Ask them to contact the parents if they can.” He looked across at her, a stocky, earnest woman with worried, sympathetic eyes. “Take it from there.”

“Yes, sir.”

Before Lynn had left his office, Resnick was getting himself put through to Skelton. The superintendent brought his rank and authority to bear on Bernard Salt’s secretary, who promised she would have the necessary information available by the end of the day. Resnick thanked him and checked that he could pick it up himself. He had another call to make that would take him close.

A little after five, Resnick was standing in the back garden of the Doughertys’ house in Wollaton, balancing a cup and saucer in his left hand. The sky was losing light and across a succession of privet hedges bungalows were falling into silhouette. Inside, in the kitchen, Pauline Dougherty was washing their best dinner service, the one that had been a wedding gift, for the second time.

“I’m sorry,” Resnick said to William Dougherty, who was standing to his left, staring at some non-existent blemish on the lawn, “but there’s something I have to ask you about Karl. Something personal.”

Twenty-four

“Helen, this is simply not the best time.”

“No?”

“No.”

“But then, Bernard, it never is.”

Bernard Salt put both hands briefly to his face, covering his mouth, tiredness; his eyes alone had any brightness left in them and even they were showing signs of strain. All the damned day in theater and now this.

“Look,” he extended his hands towards her, palms up, fingers loosely spread; the way he approached relatives, persuasive, calming; the way he approached them when the prognosis was poor. Helen Minton knew: she had seen it in operation many times before. “Look, Helen, here’s what we’ll do. Your diary, mine, we’ll make a definite date for later in the week …”

Already she was shaking her head.

“Go somewhere pleasant, that restaurant out at Plumtree …”

“No, Bernard.”

“Give us a chance to talk properly …”

“Bernard, no.”

“Relax. Surely that’s better than this?”

Helen Minton lifted her head and began to laugh.

“Look at us. You’re tired, I’m tired. It’s the end of the day.”

“Yes,” Helen said, still laughing. “It’s always the end of the day.”

He came close to taking her by the arm but thought better of it. “Helen, please …”

The laughter continued, grew louder. Salt glanced anxiously towards the connecting door, the faint shadow of his secretary at her desk, the soft purr and click of the electric typewriter maintaining the same even tempo. The laughter rose and broke and was gone.

“Don’t worry about her, Bernard. She’ll think I’m just another hysterical, middle-aged woman for you to deal with. I’m sure she’s used to them, trooping in and out of your office. The fact that this one’s in uniform probably doesn’t make a lot of difference. She’ll never betray your confidence, expose you to anything as unsavory as gossip.” Helen smiled without humor. “She’s probably in love with you herself.”

Salt shook his head. “Now you are being stupid.”

“Of course,” she said, “I always am, sooner or later. If I weren’t, how could you dismiss me so easily. Ignore me as a fool.”

The consultant shook his head and sat down. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Yes, you do. It’s simple. Give me an answer.”

He looked up at her and back at his desk. Slightly muffled, there was a knock at the outer office door. “I can’t,” he said.

They stayed as they were, Helen staring at Salt, at the fleshiness around his jaw, hating it, sickened by it, the sight of him; if he turned his head towards her now and said the right words, she would weep with gratitude and fall into his arms.

“Excuse me,” said the secretary apologetically, opening the door, “but the inspector is here. To collect the patients’ details. He wondered if you had a minute to spare.”

Without another word, Helen Minton hurried out, past the secretary, past Resnick, into the corridor.

“Of course,” said Salt wearily. “Ask him to come in.”

The book shop was on the ground floor, close to the medical school entrance. Situated in the broad corridor outside was the telephone from which Tim Fletcher had tried to call Karen Archer the night he was attacked; around the corner and through the doors was the bridge where it had happened.

Ian Carew was wearing a sports jacket and underneath it a T-shirt with the slogan,
Medics have bigger balls
. Navy blue sweatpants and running shoes. In his hand, held against his side, were an A4 file and a textbook on anatomy and physiology. He watched Sarah Leonard walk into the corridor from the hospital and cross towards the bookshop and go inside. He gave her half a minute and went after her.

In amongst all of the professional sections there were a few general paperbacks, Booker runners-up and beach reading. Carew pretended to browse through these, watching Sarah all the while, the way the muscles of her calves tightened as she reached for something from an upper shelf.

Suddenly, she turned to face him, as if aware that he had been watching her and Carew had only two choices. He walked straight to her, finding his smile easily, glancing at the books in her hands.

“Teasdale
and
Rubinstein. Heavy duty, even for a staff nurse with ambitions.”

Sarah looked at him as if expecting him to move aside, allow her to get to the cash desk.

Carew didn’t move. “I recognized you,” he said. “From the other night.” Pointedly looking at the engraved badge pinned above her breast. “Sarah.”

“Yes,” she said. “You were curb crawling.”

Carew tut-tutted. “I offered you a lift.”

“You tried to pick me up.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did.”

“Why?” she asked, sensing immediately it was the wrong thing to say.

Because of your hair, Carew thought, the way you were walking, striding out. He didn’t say those things; not yet. He wasn’t so stupid or inept.

“Are you really getting both of those?” he asked, tapping the uppermost of the books.

“They’re not for me. One of the doctors …”

“Don’t tell me he’s got you running errands.”

“He couldn’t get here himself.”

“Too busy.” Just an edge of sarcasm.

“He was badly injured. A few nights ago.”

“Not Fletcher? Tim Fletcher?”