Living Proof (2 page)

Three incidents, probably unrelated, and now a fourth.

Resnick crossed the street from the centre of Canning Circus, early traffic already building up on its way along Derby Road towards the city centre. Time was, he would have bumped into Jack Skelton at this hour, the superintendent setting out on his regular three-mile run.

But since early spring, Skelton's exercise had been restricted to pacing the four walls of his office. Whether the superintendent's relationship with DI Helen Siddons had progressed beyond an older man's fantasy or not, Resnick could imagine only too well the tartness with which Alice Skelton would have scolded him for his folly. And Siddons' accelerated promotion to the West Country had done little to ease the situation, leaving Skelton increasingly disgruntled and grey-haired, his girth thickening at a noticeable rate.

The CID office was close to the head of the stairs on the first floor, an L-shaped room with filing cabinets ranked along the far wall, below detailed maps of the city. A succession of desks and tables ran along two of the walls and down the centre of the room.

Graham Millington's desk was on its own, adjacent to the thinly partitioned office which had the words Detective Inspector Charles Resnick on its door.

Behind Millington's desk were the kettle and mugs and the rest of the paraphernalia for tea- and coffee-making. Most of the other surfaces were clogged with official forms in a variety of shades and colours, typewriters and VDUs, here and there foil containers harbouring the remains of the previous night's chicken korma or lamb kebab.

In the usual way of things, only the officer on early shift would have been present when Resnick arrived, busy updating the files that logged the night's activities, after which the primary investigation of the inevitable breakins would be his or her responsibility. This morning, though. Mark Divine had been there from first light, back aching after sharing the interior of a rusting blue Transit with Kevin Naylor, the pair of them peeing into old orange juice cartons and waiting forlornly for the Home- care warehouse on the Abbeyfield Industrial Estate to be raided for a third time.

"What buggers me," as Divine was overfond of saying, 'is who'd go to all that trouble to liberate three gross of sink plungers and a couple of dozen aluminium ladders? "

The fourth night in a row in which they were no nearer to finding an answer.

Naylor had snuck off home to snatch a quick hour snuggled up to his Debbie, while Divine, for whom home offered no such luxury, had opted for a kip behind his desk. He had been snoring nicely when the duty officer rang up from below with details of a man who'd been brought in barely conscious from the end of the Alfreton Road. Soon after which, he had phoned his superior.

"Mark," Resnick said, door swinging to behind him.

"Boss." Divine swung his legs down from his desk and stood to uncertain attention.

"Best fill me in."

Divine told him what little he knew about the man who was presently in a bed at Queen's Medical, barely conscious and temporarily restricted to fluids.

"This stab wound," Resnick asked.

"Life threatening?"

"Seemed so at first, now they reckon he's going to be okay. Missed anything vital, by the sound of it." Divine shrugged.

"Lost a fair bit of blood all the same."

"And the nature of the attack, how much do we know about that?"

"Not a heck of a lot. I mean, when he first come round he was full of it Tart and whore, over and over, blaming her, like, for what had happened."

"It was the woman who stabbed him, that's what he's claiming?"

"No two ways about it. Aside from that, though, started asking him a few questions, clammed up tighter'n a virgin's arse. Wouldn't even tell us his name."

Resnick frowned and shook his head.

"All right. Have a word with Vice, see if they had anyone on patrol last night, late. They might have noticed something that'll tie in. Minute Kevin arrives, pair of you can get up by the Forest, talk to the girls on the early shift.

Meantime, I'll drop by the hospital. Maybe if our mystery man knows he's out of danger, he'll be more ready to talk. "

"Right, boss." Divine was alert now, tiredness fallen away. It wasn't every day Resnick was prepared to trust the younger man's instincts and there was a grin around the corners of Divine's mouth as he sat back behind his desk, reaching for the phone.

Lynn Kellogg was on the stairs as Resnick went down. After the traumas at the start of the year, she had had her hair cut short, making her face seem less rounded, more severe. More often than not now, there was a haunted look, hunched at the back of her eyes.

"Morning, Lynn. Everything okay?"

Fine. "

Neither of them believed it.

Resnick made a mental note to ask if she were still seeing the police psychiatrist, and if she were, whether it was doing any good.

Four After circling the inner ring road twice, Resnick squeezed into a parking place at the rear of the hospital, close to the offshoot of the canal. Above, the sky showed a flat, unbroken blue, but the sun, for early summer, gave off little warmth. He thrust both hands deep into his jacket pockets as he walked.

That way in took him past the psychiatric wing and an image of his ex-wife, Elaine, slipped unbidden into his mind: the way she had looked the last time he had seen her, after spending God knows how much time in places likes this. And Lynn, he kept thinking of Lynn two years without a relationship worthy of the name, and when she had come close to giving her trust to someone again, it had been the wrong man.

It had been a mistake that had cost her more than pride and self-esteem; it had very nearly cost her life. Resnick remembered how it ended: the mud that had sucked, thick, about his feet as he had run across the field-end, awkwardly towards her, helicopter hovering noisily above; the way the blood had pumped, jaggedly, from his heart when he knew that she was safe.

In the months since then, all conversation between them had been formal, withdrawn, as if what each had glimpsed in that despairing clutch of arms was more than they would dare acknowledge. And Michael Best was in custody awaiting trial for kidnapping and murder. His days in court and Lynn's still to come.

The single door which Resnick knew led through to the 11 rear of Accident and Emergency was directly in front of him and he pushed it open and went in.

They sat in small groups of relatives and friends or else they sat alone, staring off into that space where time, long since, had decided to stand still. For so many of the people here, Resnick thought, this was how they spent their lives; uncomfortably, on institutional chairs in institutional rooms, waiting for the number clicking slowly over to correspond to the one clutched in their hands. Social services, the housing department, medical centre, the dole; the bored clerk checking their answers, painstakingly scrawled upon this form or that. Rent rebate, clothing allowance, disability benefit. The women, pregnant, or with three kids under five who ran and chased between the lines of chairs, defying all the shouts and threats, sporadic and half-hearted, until finally they went flying, arse over tip, crashed into the wall and cried. Men with short moustaches, tattoos and sallow faces, shutting out all noise, clenching and re clenching their fists at their children's screams the futility of dreams.

An Asian family sat off on its own, near the door, the man in a brown suit, bandage lopsided about his head, his wife in a said, pale blue and green, carpet slippers on her feet, a small child, little more than a baby, sleeping fitfully inside her arms. Close to Resnick, a middle-aged man with tight grey hair and lined face, wearing someone's cast-off Fair Isle pullover pocked with holes and small burns , sat smoking a cigarette, after each drag carefully tapping the ash into the empty can of Strongbow cider clenched between his knees.

The nurse Resnick intercepted was wearing a sister's uniform and the badge on its lapel told him her name was Geraldine McAllister. Almost certaintly she was older, but all she looked was twenty-five or six.

"Excuse me," Resnick said.

"But you had somebody brought in earlier, a stab wound..."

"We had several."

"This one..."

"Three, to be exact." Resnick had expected Irish and what he got was Scots, not broad but unmistakable, musical.

"The one I'm interested in ..." he began.

She was looking at the warrant card he held out in one hand.

"That would be John Smith, then, I expect."

"Is that his name?"

She smiled.

"Probably not. But we had to call him something. He refused to give a name." The smile was still there, broader if anything.

"Not very inventive, is it?"

"I'm sure you've got better things to do."

"Than be inventive? I doubt that. Not round here."

"Gerry," a male nurse called from round a curtain, 'can you take a look at this a minute? "

"You," she said to Resnick.

"Inspector. Don't go. Two shakes now and I'll be back."

One small emergency extended into another and it was not so far short of half an hour before they were sitting in a cramped office behind the receptionist's desk. A polystyrene cup of lukewarm grey coffee sat, unwanted, between Resnick's feet.

Gerry McAllister held an X-ray in her hand, slanted up towards the light.

"You can see, the wound isn't very deep, a couple of inches at most. Even so," she shook her head, 'a little bit higher and to the left. "

Her hair was not chestnut as Resnick had first supposed, but auburn, redder at the ends than at the roots. And she was older, a cross-hatch of worry lines around her eyes. Thirty-four or five?

"Was it consistent with, I mean, did it seem to have been made with a knife?"

13 "Rather than what? A knitting needle, something like that?"

It hadn't been precisely what Resnick had in mind.

"A couple of weeks back," Gerry McAllister said, 'we had this woman come in. She'd nagged down a taxi on the road; didn't have any money, but the driver brought her here just the same. There was a knitting needle sticking out from the corner of her eye. "

Automatically, Resnick cast his mind back, trying to recall whether the incident had been reported.

"There'd been a row at home, apparently. Things had got out of hand."

Resnick nodded.

"Boyfriend or husband?"

The sister shook her head firmly.

"Mother. Should they go to the bingo or stay in and watch Blind Date.1 She smiled.

"Alarming, isn't it, the way things get blown up out of all proportion? Arguing like that over something like Blind Date."

"Our Mr Smith," Resnick said.

"He didn't say anything about how he came to be stabbed?"

"My hand slipped a little on the needle," Gerry said, 'when I was giving him his injection. Punctured the skin more than I'd intended.

He didn't even open his mouth then. "

Resnick grinned and got to his feet.

"I've checked up on the ward, it's okay for you to go up and see him.

Maybe he'll talk to you," she said.

Resnick doubted that were true, but thanked Gerry McAllister and followed her out of the room. Immediately, three voices were calling her from three different directions, each as urgent as the next.

The anonymous victim had been put into a side ward which he shared with two men way past pension able age and a nervous-looking youth whose bed was marked

"Nil by Mouth'.

He was lying on his side, face towards the wall, a tray of barely browned toast and soggy cereal on the bedside cabinet, untouched.

"Not hungry?" Resnick asked, pulling out a chair and setting it down close to the bed.

The man raised his head enough to look into Resnick's eyes, then rolled away.

"Whatever happened," Resnick said, 'you were lucky. Lucky someone found you, brought you to us; lucky to be here. That whoever did this wasn't stronger. "

He reached out and, without force, rested his hand on the upper edge of the sheet, bone and flesh of the man's shoulder beneath. At his touch, the man flinched but nothing more.

"Listen," Resnick said, 'if there's somebody out there attacking men, men who put themselves in a vulnerable position we need to bring them in. If we don't, well, you understand what I'm saying. The next person might not get off as easy as you. " His voice was soft beneath the squeak of passing trolley wheels, the muffled inanities of breakfast television from the main ward.

"You wouldn't want to be responsible for that, would you? Someone dying?"

Beneath his hand, Resnick felt the muscles tighten through the loose flesh of the man's arm.

"Whatever you were up to, last night, no reason that shouldn't remain your business. No need to broadcast it around. Time to time, we all do things we'd rather nobody else knew. Family. Friends. It's something I can understand."

For an answer, the man shuffled further across the bed, shrugging off Resnick's hand; sheet and blanket he pulled up until they half-covered his head.

Resnick leaned low across him, close enough to sense the damp ripeness of the man's sweat. His fear.

"Think on what I've said. Talk to us. Co-operate. You'll 15 find it easier all around." Resnick raised his head and then, almost as an afterthought: "There is a charge, you know, obstructing the police in the course of their duties."

He took a card from his wallet and slipped it between the man's reluctant fingers.

"I'll be waiting for you to call me. Don't leave it too long."

Five "Yes, madam," the uniformed PC was saying to the old lady at Enquiries, 'of course I can arrange for the Crime Prevention Officer to call round. If you'll just let me have your name and address and phone number, then he'll get in touch with you and agree a time. "

Resnick stepped around the woman as she fumbled in her handbag for the scrap of paper on which she had scribbled all the details down.

"I've just moved, you see, and I forget..."

Off to the right of the stairs, a repetitive yelling came from the direction of the police cells, the same two words, over and over, deadened of all meaning.