Wasted Years (18 page)

“I shan’t be late,” he called from the hall.

If Elaine responded, he failed to hear.

Somewhere in his teens, for reasons he would have found difficult now to clearly remember or define, Resnick had turned against his parents’ Polish culture. Perhaps it was no more than what teenagers did. The young Resnick as James Dean. He recalled seeing the film,
Rebel Without a Cause,
most of his sympathies flowing to Dean’s father, poor Jim Backus, wearing an apron and embarrassed, standing mortified upon the stairs, flinching from the anger of his son’s tirade.

For Resnick it had been less dramatic, more gradual; little by little he had stopped answering his parents in their native tongue, speaking in his own instead. The boys at school had rechristened him Charlie long since and Charlie he had been happy to become.

Sitting now with an iced glass of lemon vodka, he felt he was visiting a strange country, stranded in the past. Photographs on the walls of men in uniform, decorations for lost wars. The bartender in his neat white jacket looked along at him and smiled. At round tables heads were lowered in desperate conversation. Suddenly standing, he swallowed down the remainder of his vodka and pushed through the doors into the street.

The city was soft red brick, broken by green trees. For more than an hour he walked it aimlessly, nodding to people whenever they passed.

The phone rang a little shy of four a.m. and Resnick reached mistakenly for the alarm. By the time he had propped himself on one elbow and lifted the receiver, Elaine was awake as well, looking at him reproachfully from her side of the bed. Resnick listened, grunted a few times in agreement and broke the connection.

“What is it?” she asked as he swung his feet towards the floor. “This time of night.”

“Morning,” Resnick said, beginning to assemble his clothes. “It’s morning, more or less. They found a woman, Mapperley Plains, out on the golf course.”

Resnick read the question in her eyes.

“No,” he said. “She’s alive. Pretty badly beaten, apparently. They’ve taken her to Queens.”

“Why phone you?”

Without looking in the mirror, Resnick was fastening his tie. “Case I’m involved in. Some chance there’s a connection.”

“Charlie,” she said, when he was at the door.

“Yes?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. You’d better go.”

Car headlights cut soft channels through the slight mist; the surface of the grass was bright with dew. Unseen, birds stirred up the day. There was still an indentation where the body had been found, midway to the seventh hole, nestling the edge of the rough. Yellow tape marked off the spot.

The uniformed officer who had found her was still there, peaked cap circling round and round between his fingers, Panda car parked close with the others, static and occasional voices from its radio spilling out across the green.

“Caretaker rang in,” he told Resnick, “reckoned how he’d heard this car. Couple of break-ins past month or so. Worried this might be another. Drove out and checked around like. Just on my way when I heard this sound.” His gaze flickered away to the markings on the ground. “It were the girl.”

Resnick nodded, understanding the startled expression that survived at the back of the young officer’s eyes. He and Ben Riley had been that young once, stumbling upon their first assault victims, pretending that it didn’t affect them, needing to show they didn’t care.

“No doubt who she is?”

The constable shook his head. “Bag was off in the bushes. Must’ve got thrown, no telling who by.”

Versions of the scene were already playing themselves out in Resnick’s mind.

The handbag was plastic, creased shiny black. Inside were several tissues, crumpled and used, a lipstick labeled Evening Rose, three Lillets, a packet of condoms with two remaining, a small tan diary in which little had been written—entries Resnick recognized as the names of pubs, a handful of names—at the front, on the page headed Personal Details, she had written Marie Jacob, five foot three, brown eyes, brown hair, no birth date, an address in Arnold.

Resnick remembered the photograph Rains had brought in from Mary MacDonald’s empty room, two women on the front at Great Yarmouth, smiling, squinting their eyes against the sun. Mary and Marie.

“She’d been cut,” the constable said. “Across the face. Here.”

With the tip of his index finger he drew a line diagonally down from below the lobe of his ear, almost to the cleft of his chin.

“And beaten. Knocked around pretty bad. Time I found her, this eye, it were good as closed.”

Resnick nodded, picturing it clearly. “No sign of any weapon?”

The young PC shook his head.

“Give the light half an hour, maybe a little more. Then get a search organized. Thorough. Every blade of grass. If the weapon’s here, we want it found.”

They could wash away the caked blood and the dirt, replace the blood, lessen the pain; what they could not do was remove the fear.

“I don’t know,” Marie said in an accent so soft that Resnick had to lean over her face to hear. “I don’t know who he was.”

Her lips were swollen and cracked.

“I met him, earlier, you know. We were on the golf course for a bit of business when he started in hitting me, no reason at all.”

She motioned that her mouth was dry and Resnick lifted the glass from the bedside table, was gentle as he could be, one hand raising her head so that she could drink through a bendy straw.

“No,” she said, voice fading near to nothing. “I never knew him. Never saw him before.”

When Resnick held photographs before her she blinked her eyes and barely shook her head. She cried. Resnick sat there till the staff nurse tapped him on the shoulder and then he left.

“Believe her, Charlie?”

“No, sir. Not really. Could be telling the truth, of course, but no, I don’t think she’s giving us all she knows.”

“Just a feeling, or have you got something more?”

“Just a feeling.”

Skelton stood by the window, looking out. Below, a line of lockup garages, factories with raised roofs, and a few neat streets of council houses beyond. In the middle distance the floodlight towers of both soccer grounds pushed up against the sky. Farther still, the green of a solitary hill. “Prior,” he said, turning back into the room. “You think Rains could have been right.”

Right as Rains: it didn’t even raise a smile.

“Don’t want to, do you, Charlie?”

“Maybe not.”

“No more your methods than mine.”

“No.”

“But within hours of us lifting him, both women Rains says might have dropped him in it …” Skelton shook his head. “One’s in hospital, terrified half out of her wits, and the other … Well, we don’t know where she is at all, do we?”

“Manchester,” Resnick said. “They’re still checking.”

“Let’s hope with some success.”

Resnick thought about Marie Jacob’s face and prayed the inspector was right.

“Couple of uniforms checked her address,” Skelton said. “Nothing useful there at all. But then, they wouldn’t look with your eyes.”

“I’ll get out there,” Resnick said. “Poke around.”

Skelton nodded, giving each of his shirt cuffs a little tug before turning back to the window. When he had applied for the transfer, accepted the promotion, he had failed to realize how different it would be, less than a hundred miles north and close to the Trent. How hard to slot in. He hoped that, as his wife was in the habit of suggesting, he had not perpetrated one of the major miscalculations of his life.

Twenty-Seven

Resnick spent forty minutes with a sixty-eight-year-old man who was convinced he had come about his stolen bike. “Locked the bugger up in the entry an’ everything. Right t’the bloody fence. Side entry along of the house. Safe enough you’d say, aye, so did I. But it weren’t, you see. Some clever sod’s snuck round there with bolt clippers, right through bloody lock, less time than it takes to crack an egg. Wouldn’t mind so much, but I’ve had that bike—Raleigh, good ’un, made good ’uns in those days—had that bike, must be—what?—well, dozen year at least. Maybe more. Who’d want to steal a bike like that? Spite, that’s what I put it down to. Spite or cussed-ness, ’cause they’ll not get much for it. All them fancy colored jobs with half-assed handlebars and great thick frames, that’s what they want nowadays. Not solid and dependable, like mine.”

He looked across his back kitchen at Resnick, a wiry man with a shiny bullet head and a neat graying moustache, braces hanging down either side of his trousers.

“Got so,” he said, “you can’t leave anything out your sight more’n a minute or it’s gone. Thieving bastards’d have the shirt off your back if they thought as they’d get away with it.” He shook his head. “That bike, my lifeline were that. Now it’s bloody gone.”

Resnick phoned through and checked the crime number, established that no progress had been made. Truth was, though they might catch the thief, the bike would already have been sold intact or stripped down for parts.

He accepted several cups of tea, each stronger than the last, sipping from a thick china cup, the inside of which was stained with overlapping rings of orangey brown. Trying hard not to look at his watch, he listened while the man talked about his son in Australia, the grandchildren he had never seen, the stroke that had taken his wife—God rest her—early from the world. Agreed that Tommy Lawton was the best center forward this country had ever had—bits of kids nowadays with these flash cars, won’t as much as kick a ball without there’s someone there fanning ’em with a check.

Resnick had seen players in the County side the past few seasons, would have found it difficult to kick anything without the aid of an on-the-pitch injection.

“I don’t want you to think,” the man said, showing Resnick to the door, “as I’m one of those who can’t keep up with the times, forever rattling on about how much better everything was when they were young, ’cause I’m not. Not by a long chalk. But I’ll say one thing and I know you’ll bear me out, folk were a lot more honest in them days, folk round here, ordinary folk I’m talking of now, like you and me. Why, twenty year back, I’d gone off down the shops, I’d not so much’ve bothered to’ve locked this front door, never mind bike. Now—well, you know about now well as I do.”

Resnick thanked him for the tea and walked past the bushes of roses that needed pruning, out of the gate and on to the street. The house was three doors down from Marie Jacob’s address and the old man thought he might have seen her once or twice, but couldn’t be sure. “Time I might have looked at a bit of skirt,” he’d said, “now you are going back a fair while. Not that I wasn’t above a thing or two when wind were in right direction.” And he’d winked and grinned and Resnick had grinned back, men together, talking the way men did, in the old days and now.

Marie Jacob had lived with her aunt, a short, plumpish woman who was struggling to move an easy chair down the stairs and into the middle room when Resnick rang the bell. He took off his jacket and helped, finally forcing the legs past the frame of the final door with a shove that stripped away several layers of paint and the skin from his own forefinger.

“Here,” Clarise Jacob said, “let me put a plaster on that. You’ll not want it turning all gangrenous on you, sure you won’t.”

Despite his protestations, Resnick found himself sat firmly down, while the woman fussed and cleaned and smeared his finger with Germolene before wrapping it in Elastoplast with a technique which leaned heavily on the early Egyptians.

“I never asked her a great deal, you know, about her life. I mean, she’s a grown woman.” Clarise smiled. “More so than me. I’m only four foot eleven, did you know that? Can’t even see over the counter at the bank without I’ve got my high heels.”

“Marie,” Resnick prompted. “You don’t know who she might have been meeting last night?”

Clarise Jacob pursed her lips. “Like I say, I was never one to interfere. As long as, you know, she came across at the end of the month with her little bit of rent.” She looked at Resnick directly. “Family or no, bills’ve got to be paid. Either that or we’d all be out on the street.”

Exactly, Resnick thought, where Marie was earning her money in the first place.

“You’d know, though, what time she left?”

“I would. I would. You’re right. It couldn’t have been before ten, on account of I was still watching the box. I made a habit of turning it off, you know, right at the start of the news.” She studied Resnick’s face seriously again. “It’s not good for you, that’s the thing, too much of it, you see.”

Whether she meant television or news, Resnick wasn’t clear. “I wonder …” he began, getting to his feet.

“If you can see her room. Oh, sure. Though those two boys earlier, they did the same.” She escorted him up the stairs. “I’ll not speak ill of her behind her back, specially after what happened, but, you’ll see, the tidiest soul on this planet she was not.”

The walls were covered with posters of rock stars and the previous Pope; almost every available surface was covered with a riot of clothing, garments of all designs and colors.

“The officers who searched earlier,” Resnick asked, “they weren’t responsible for this?”