Off Minor (20 page)

With what bravery Elaine had finally come to see him, to the house where they had lived as man and wife, Resnick could no more than guess at. Her face gaunt in the stairs’ light, she had handed him her years of pain.
Once a week we’d sit in this room, all of us and talk but mostly there wasn’t anyone to talk to.
Least of all you, Charlie; least of all, you.

“Lynn! Kevin! In here.”

Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

“Lynn, go and see Michael Morrison. See if he knows the name of his ex-wife’s doctor; if not the present one, the last. Trace it forward from there. One of the reasons he got custody at the divorce was Diana had been having psychiatric treatment. I doubt that he visited her, but he might remember the hospital. Find out when they last treated her; if they’re treating her now.

“Kevin, contact all the other hospitals in the area, special care units, whatever. Right? Let’s not waste any more time.”

The two detectives had only just left his office when the phone rang and it was Skelton, asking him to step along the corridor.

“Charlie,” Skelton said, “this is Geoffrey Morrison, Michael Morrison’s brother. Detective Inspector Resnick.”

The two men shook hands and stepped back. Fitter looking than his brother, but older, Resnick was thinking, that aside, you’d know they were family and close. And that Geoffrey spent more on what he was wearing than Michael likely earned in a month.

“Mr. Morrison, quite reasonably, wanted to be sure that we were doing everything to find his niece and I think I’ve put him at ease on most points.” Skelton paused, eyes on Resnick’s face. “There is one thing, however … Mr. Morrison thinks we would get quicker results if we were to offer a reward.”

“Ten thousand for information resulting in Emily’s recovery. Safely, of course.”

Resnick was shaking his head.

“I assure you it’s no idle offer.”

“I’m sure it’s not.”

“I can afford it and if it helps to bring my niece back …”

“On the first front,” Resnick said, “I don’t doubt it. On the second …”

“I’ve explained some of the difficulties as I see them,” Skelton said.

“Without doubt,” said Resnick, “there would be a huge response. We’d be inundated with calls from all over the country, sightings from the Hebrides to Plymouth Hoe, and the net result would be to tie up personnel and computer time to little actual effect. We’d get hoaxers trying to talk their way into some easy money, psychics with a reputation to prove, worst of all, within hours your brother and his wife would receive their first ransom call. If it can be avoided, I don’t think they should be put through that.”

Skelton moved around his desk. “Trust us, Mr. Morrison. We’re doing everything that can be done.”

Geoffrey Morrison looked from one officer to the other. The superintendent had a sense of how an executive should dress, even seemed to keep himself in good trim, but this other one … he wouldn’t let him within a hundred meters of the board room looking like that.

“You know that if I choose,” Morrison said, “I can go straight from here to the office of a national newspaper and it’ll be all over their front page by the next edition?”

Both Skelton and Resnick realized that was probably true; neither of them said a word, watching their visitor all his way to the door.

“All right, for the time being, I’m prepared to wait. But you have to know, in case Emily isn’t found soon, I’m retaining the reward as an option.”

“Thanks, Charlie,” Skelton said once Morrison had gone. “Thought I needed a little moral support.”

Resnick nodded okay and his stomach lurched loudly.

“Sounds,” said Skelton, “as if you could do with something more substantial.”

Twenty-eight

Resnick was on his way back into the building with a chicken breast and Brie on rye, a sardine and radicchio with crumbled blue cheese, when he almost collided with a woman standing at the inquiry desk. She was backing away from the square of window, set so low down that you risked slipping a disc bending towards it.

“Oh, sorry!”

“Sorry!”

Resnick lost one of the sandwiches from his grasp, made a lunge towards it and missed. One of his feet slid out from underneath him so that, off balance, he slipped almost to the floor. Clutching the other sandwich to his chest, he steadied himself against the woman, one hand gripping her not insubstantial thigh. If both noticed this, neither saw fit to mention it.

Apologizing again, Resnick pushed himself to his feet. Meanwhile, the woman retrieved his straying sandwich, all save for some curls of lettuce which had sprung clear.

“You wouldn’t be Inspector Resnick?” she asked.

Do you mean, Resnick wondered, that I have a choice? “The man at the desk said you’d be back at any minute.”

“Here I am,” said Resnick. “Not before time. What was it about?”

“The little girl. Emily—is it?—Morrison.”

Resnick dumped the brown paper bags on his desk and turned to look at his visitor. She was a little over medium height; dark, almost black hair pierced with gray and cut against the nape of her neck. She was wearing a loose skirt, dark blue, a paler blue sweater under a maroon jacket with deep pockets and padded shoulders. Resnick couldn’t be certain, but he thought she might be wearing contact lenses. He put her in her late thirties, early forties and he was underestimating by a good five years.

“I’m Vivien Nathanson,” she said.

All these years and Resnick was still uncertain about shaking hands: did it matter that ten minutes later the person had become a suspect in some heinous crime or was confessing to acts which made the imagination reel? He offered coffee instead.

“I don’t suppose I could have tea?”

“Of course.”

“Black?”

“Given the usual state of the milk, safest choice.” Resnick called into the CID room and Divine stirred himself from the shadow of Miss December to oblige.

“I heard an appeal on the radio as I was driving to work. At the university. I teach.”

She didn’t look as if she cleaned the floors.

“Canadian Studies.”

Resnick was mystified. He hadn’t realized there was such a thing as Canadian Studies. What was there to study, after all? Great Canadian inventors? The life cycle of the beaver? Trees? He knew an ambitious detective sergeant from Chesterfield who had arranged a sabbatical for himself, working with the Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta. Reckoned to have spent most of his time watching snow melt.

“You’re interested in the identity of a woman seen near where the girl disappeared. I think it might have been me.”

Divine knocked on the door and brought in the tea.

“Where’s mine?” Resnick added.

“Sorry, sir. Never said.”

“I was in the crescent on Sunday afternoon, some time between three and four. I’m afraid I can’t be more specific.”

“Visiting?”

“Walking.”

“Just walking?”

Vivien smiled. “I don’t suppose you know a writer named Ray Bradbury, Inspector?”

Resnick shook his head. “Is he Canadian?”

“American. From Illinois, I believe. And do …” as she moved to sip her tea “… start on your lunch.”

Resnick opened the bag containing the chicken breast and Brie. He wondered how long she was going to take to get to the point but had already decided, within reason, he didn’t much care.

“Anyway,” she was saying, “in one of his stories a man is arrested by a prowling police car for walking alone through this neighborhood. Meandering. Suspicious enough in itself to be considered a crime. When he attempts to argue back, make his case, he finds it’s impossible. The police car is fully automated, no human being inside.”

“Is that what’s called a parable?” Resnick asked. Vivien Nathanson smiled. “More an extended metaphor, probably.”

“And I’m the inhuman policeman?”

“I hope not. How’s your sandwich?”

“Terrific.” He gestured for her to take a piece, but she declined.

“Too far into my pre-Christmas diet to stop now.”

“What were you doing? While you were walking.”

“Oh, thinking.”

“Lectures and the like?”

“Uh-huh. Among other things.”

Resnick found himself wanting to ask which other things. “While you were passing through the crescent, did you see anyone of Emily Morrison’s description?”

He passed a picture across his desk and she looked at it carefully before answering no.

“And you didn’t see anything unusual going on around the Morrison house?”

“I don’t know which one that is.”

“The woman who was seen, some of the reports suggest she was showing a special interest in the house.”

“But I don’t know …”

“You said.”

“I think,” Vivien Nathanson said, “unless lam very much mistaken, the tone of this conversation has changed.”

“A girl gone missing: it’s a serious matter.”

“And I’m under suspicion?”

“Not exactly.”

“But if I had a specific reason for being in that area at that time, if, for instance, I were calling on a friend at Number, oh, twenty-eight or thirty-two …” She stopped, seeing the reaction on Resnick’s face. “That’s the house, isn’t it? Thirty-two. Where they live? The Morrisons.”

Resnick nodded.

“I didn’t know.”

He didn’t say a thing, but watched her; a hint of alarm undermining her manner, not a seminar any longer.

“But you didn’t see the girl?”

“No.”

“Any girl?”

“Not that I remember.”

“And you would remember?”

“Possibly. Probably.”

“How about a Ford Sierra?”

Vivien shook her head. “I’m afraid the only time I’d notice a car is if it ran over me.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“But I did see a man.”

Jesus, thought Resnick, has she been playing with me all this time?

“He might even be the one you’re looking for. On the radio, it mentioned someone who was running.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I was crossing over, you know, towards the footpath that leads through to the canal. He bumped right into me, almost knocked me down.”

Like downstairs, Resnick thought, though he had been the one falling. “Your mind on other things?” he asked.

“To a degree. But he was most at fault. Just wasn’t looking where he was going.”

“Where had he been looking?”

“Back over his shoulder.”

Resnick could see the curve of the street clearly in his mind, the direction Vivien had been heading, the path the runner had been following. A man running with his head angled back the way he had come, back in the direction of Number 32.

Resnick could feel tiny goose-pimples forming all along his arms, hear the shift of register in his voice when he spoke. “You could give us a description?”

“I think so.”

“Detailed?”

“It was only for a moment.”

“But close.”

“Yes, close.”

Resnick was already reaching for the phone. “What I’d like to do, as well as taking your statement, arrange for an artist to come to the station, make a drawing under your advice. See how close we can get. Okay?”

“In that case,” smiling as she leaned forward, “if I’m going to be here all that time, I will have half of this sandwich.”

Twenty-nine

“I didn’t know you had that.”

Michael shook his head. “Neither did I. Diana must have dropped it in with her things. I doubt she did it on purpose.”

“Perhaps Emily took it.”

“Could be.”

The tag was clear plastic, snapped through at the end where it would have been fastened about the newborn leg or arm: the name written in black felt-tip,
Emily
, the name and the date.

They had been in her room for almost an hour now, sorting through clothes, some of which, handed on from friends, bought dutifully by Lorraine’s parents, Emily had never worn. In a folder there were Instamatic pictures of the first holiday they had taken, the three of them, after their marriage, the divorce.

“D’you remember that?”

Emily on the back of a bored donkey, clutching Michael’s hand. Although neither of them would put it into words, each was thinking of Emily as though they would never see her again.

“Who was that on the phone earlier?” Michael asked.

“Just my mother.”

Michael nodded, wondering by what twists of logic she would have laid the blame for what had happened squarely at his feet.

“She sent you her love,” Lorraine said, both of them knowing it was a lie.

“I thought it might have been the police.”

“Michael, I would have told you.”

Last night it had been Lorraine who had slept heavily, Michael who had turned and turned, his injured leg throbbing; sat finally in the electric light of the kitchen, drinking tea, glancing now and then towards the unopened whisky bottle on the shelf, the empty one on the floor beside the bin. This morning he’d woken Lorraine with grapefruit juice and toast, kissed her on the lids of both eyes, the first time he had done either of those things for longer than she liked to remember.

“Will it always be like this?” she had asked in the heady days of their courtship—or, as her mother preferred to call it, their sordid little affair.

“Absolutely,” Michael had said, touching the back of his hand to her breast. Kissing her: “Absolutely.”

“Love fades,” says the passer-by in
Annie Hall.

“Love hurts,” sing the Everly Brothers on their TV-advertised CD
Greatest Hits.
“Love dies.”

Their love, Lorraine’s and Michael’s, had slipped into limbo, fallen somewhere between the late nights and the early mornings, Lorraine forever rushing from her job at the bank to the supermarket to collect Emily from school; Michael turning the car into the drive, exhausted by the stubbornness of clients, the miniature of Scotch with which he chased the cans of beer bought on the swaying train.

“I love Emily, Michael, you know I do, but even so, we will, you know, have a baby of our own?”

“Of course we will, of course. We just have to wait until the time is right.”

They had not had that conversation for months, more; as far as Michael was concerned, Lorraine doubted that the time ever would be right. She had even begun to live with it. And after what had happened with Diana, what had happened to his son, to James, Lorraine thought that perhaps she could accept, understand. After all, there was Emily.