Contents
About the Author
Also by John Harvey
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
References
Copyright
John Harvey is the author of the richly praised sequence of eleven Charlie Resnick novels, the first of which, Lonely Hearts, was named by The Times as one of the ‘100 Best Crime Novels of the Century’. His first novel featuring retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder, Flesh and Blood, was published to great acclaim in 2004, and won the CWA Silver Dagger Award. John Harvey is the winner of the 2007 CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2009 he was awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters, by the University of Nottingham.
Find out more about John Harvey by visiting his website at:
www.mellotone.co.uk
In a True Light
Nick’s Blues
Gone to Ground
Far Cry
The Elder Novels
Flesh and Blood
Ash and Bone
Darkness & Light
The Resnick Novels
Lonely Hearts
Rough Treatment
Cutting Edge
Off Minor
Wasted Years
Cold Light
Living Proof
Easy Meat
Last Rites
Cold in Hand
Short Stories
Now’s the Time
Minor Key
A Darker Shade of Blue
Poetry
Ghosts of a Chance
Bluer Than This
As Editor
Blue Lightning
Men from Boys
For Sarah: something changed
It was the night Milt Jackson came to town: Milt Jackson, who for more than twenty years had been a member of one of the most famous jazz groups in the world, the Modern Jazz Quartet; who had gone into the studio on Christmas Eve, 1954, and along with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, recorded one of Resnick’s all-time favourite pieces, ‘Bag’s Groove’; the same Milt Jackson who was standing now behind his vibraphone on the stage of the Broadway Media Centre’s Cinema Two, brought there with his new quartet as part of the Centre’s Film and Jazz Festival; Milt, handsome and dapper in his dark grey suit, black handkerchief poking folded from its breast pocket, floral tie, wedding ring broad on his finger and catching the light as he reaches down for the yellow mallets resting across his instrument; Milton ‘Bags’ Jackson, born Detroit, Michigan on New Year’s Day, 1923, and looking nothing like his seventy-three years, turning now to nod at the young piano player – relatively young – and the crowd that is packed into the auditorium, Resnick amongst them, holds its breath, and as Jackson raises a mallet shoulder high to strike the first note, the bleeper attached to the inside pocket of Resnick’s jacket intrudes its own insistent sound.
And there is a moment, Resnick bulkily rising from his seat near the centre of row four and fumbling inside his coat as he excuses himself, embarrassed, past people’s knees, in which Jackson, expression shifting between annoyance and amusement, catches Resnick’s eye and grins.
Out in the foyer, Resnick hurried to the ticket desk and asked to use the phone. Jack Skelton’s voice was clipped and sharp: the body had been discovered less than twenty minutes earlier, trapped beneath the lock gates of the canal, just where it flows into the Trent. Resnick’s sergeant was already on his way there, along with three of the team. Resnick glanced at his watch and estimated how long it would take to drive through the city, heading west.
‘Shall I send a car for you, Charlie?’ the superintendent asked.
‘No, it’ll be all right. No need.’
He had driven to the theatre that night with Hannah, or rather, she had driven him, preferring to wait for him in the CaféBar. Jazz she could tolerate, but not for hours on end.
Resnick picked her out immediately, sitting at a table close to the back wall with Mollie Hansen, Broadway’s head of marketing. Hannah with her hair just short of shoulder length, brown shading gently into red, a man’s dress shirt, not Resnick’s, worn loose over a deep blue T-shirt, blue jeans. Wearing black beside her, Mollie seemed slighter, younger, though the difference between them was no more than a few years; Mollie’s hair was shorter, her face sharper, pale skinned, bright eyed.
‘Not over already?’ Mollie said with a grin.
Resnick shook his head. ‘Something’s come up.’ He tried not to notice the concern cross Hannah’s face.
‘Work?’ she asked and Resnick nodded. She took her car keys from her bag and dropped them into his hand.
‘Shame about the concert,’ she said.
Resnick nodded again, distracted, anxious to be away.
The air was hazy and humid, warm for June, and even with the windows of Hannah’s Beetle wound down, Resnick could feel his shirt beginning to stick beneath his arms and along his back. The streets seemed to grow narrower, the houses smaller the closer he came; there was the scent of something sweet and sickly like honeysuckle and though it was still light, the moon hung in the sky, almost full, its reflection misted in the still water of the canal.
An ambulance was parked near the intersection of Canal Side and Riverside Road; several police vehicles were pulled back alongside the recreation ground that led to the lock. Resnick left the VW behind these and walked to where Millington was standing on the narrow lock bridge, talking to a sergeant from the river police. Lynn Kellogg was on the tow-path, notebook in hand, questioning a youth in a baseball cap and a girl in a skimpy top and skirt who could have been no more than fourteen. He saw Naylor crouching down by the far lock gate, something stretched along the gravel beside him, covered in a plastic sheet. Carl Vincent was perhaps a dozen yards away, chatting to a pair of paramedics. There were people standing curious at windows and in open doorways, clustering in twos and threes at the pavement’s edge.
As he approached the bridge Resnick could hear clearly the roar of river water as it tumbled over the weir beyond the lock.
‘Graham.’
Millington nodded a response to the greeting. ‘You know Phil Given, river police? Charlie Resnick, my DI.’
‘I think I’ve bumped into you, County ground,’ Given said, ‘season or so back.’
‘Likely.’ Resnick was looking beyond them, down towards the water. ‘What do we know?’
‘Couple of kids found her,’ Given said, ‘half-seven, thereabouts . . .’
‘That’s them,’ Millington interrupted, ‘talking to Lynn now.’
‘Must’ve floated down to the gate here and got wedged somehow against the support of the bridge. Trapped by her arm.’ Given pointed below them in the direction of the bank. ‘Above the water line, look, you can just see the marks.’
‘Any idea how long she’d been there?’ Resnick asked.
Given shook his head. ‘Couple of hours. Maybe more.’
Resnick nodded. ‘Doctor not here yet?’
Millington finished lighting a cigarette. ‘Parkinson. On his way.’
‘I don’t suppose we’ve any idea who she is?’
Millington shook his head.
Resnick left them standing there and walked to where Lynn Kellogg was still talking to the kids who’d reported the body. He listened for a few moments, not interfering, moving on to where Naylor was still standing guard, the young DC’s face yellow and strained. Some came to think little more of a corpse than roadkill; for others it was new every time.
‘You could have a word with some of that lot standing round gawking,’ Resnick said. ‘Get Carl to give you a hand. One of them might have seen something, you never know.’
Resnick lowered himself onto one knee and folded back the sheet: the face had lost much of its definition, the skin was puckered fast in some places, loose in others as an ill-fitting glove. There were marks – what might have been tiny bite marks – around the sockets of the eyes. High on the right temple, a gash opened, raw and washed deep into the bone. After or before, Resnick wondered, straightening? After or before?
‘At least it’s not four in the morning, Charlie,’ said a voice from behind him. ‘You’ll be grateful for that.’
‘Maybe,’ Resnick said, lowering the plastic carefully into place. ‘And maybe not.’ He imagined the impeccable flow of notes from Jackson’s vibraphone, their rise and fall stretching out across the becalmed evening air.
Parkinson smiled benevolently over his half-moon spectacles and unfastened the centre button of his suit. ‘Bridge, that’s what this saved me from. Going two off in four clubs, what’s more. Four clubs, idiotic call.’
‘I dare say,’ said Resnick, for whom card games were as enticing as Gilbert and Sullivan or a quick game of croquet.
‘Time and cause,’ Parkinson said, ‘I’ll do what I can. But don’t hold your hopes. Not yet awhile.’
There was enough water in the lungs for death to have been caused by drowning, though the blow to the head was severe and would have caused considerable trauma and loss of blood. A contributory factor, then, though whether the blow had been administered before or soon after the body had been introduced into the water, remained unclear. As for the exact nature of the instrument which had delivered the blow – something heavy, probably metallic, sharp but not pointed and travelling, at the moment that it met the head of the deceased, with considerable speed, propelled with considerable force.
She was a young woman, twenty-four to twenty-seven years of age, of average size and build. She had had an appendectomy in her late teens, a pregnancy terminated within the past eighteen months. One of her front teeth was capped with a chrome crown, a procedure normally carried out only in Eastern Europe. Her clothing – denim shirt and cotton trousers, underwear – was of a type obtainable in chain stores in most major and medium-size cities of the world. Her feet had been bare. The silver ring on the little finger of her left hand had no idiosyncratic marks or features of design. The inexact photograph taken after basic reconstruction and forwarded to police forces throughout the United Kingdom and Europe resulted in no positive identification. Attempts to link the death to those of three others, two female, one male, whose bodies had been discovered in canals in the preceding seven years – two in the East Midlands, one in the North-East – proved inconclusive.
Nothing happened.
After three months the file was marked Pending.
Media references to the Canal Murders were spiked or stillborn. Resnick knew from occasional comments overheard in the canteen that the victim was referred to as the Phantom Floater, the Woman Who Went for an Early Bath. But for Resnick it was always the night he missed hearing Milt Jackson; the night Milt Jackson came to town.
‘Charlie, is it tarragon or basil you don’t like? I can never remember.’
Resnick was sitting in the downstairs front room of Hannah’s house, dark even though it was shy of seven on this late September evening, dark across the park that faced the small terrace through shrubs and railings, and Resnick sitting close by the corner table lamp, glossing through Hannah’s back copies of the Independent’s Sunday magazine.
‘Tarragon,’ he called back, ‘but it’s not that I don’t like it. A bit strong sometimes, that’s all.’
In the kitchen, Hannah laughed quietly. From a man who regularly crammed sandwiches with everything from extra strong Gorgonzola to garlic salami, she thought that was a bit rich. ‘You could open the wine in a few minutes,’ she called back.
‘What time are they coming?’
‘Half-seven. Which probably means not till eight. I thought we could have a glass first.’
Or two, Resnick thought. He hadn’t met these particular friends of Hannah’s before, but if the rest were anything to go by, they would be artsy Labour-voting liberals with a cottage they were slowly rebuilding somewhere in southern France, a couple of kids called Ben and Sasha, a Volvo estate and a cleaner who came twice a week; they would laugh at their own jokes and the cleverness of their cultural references, be perfectly amiable to Resnick and at the end of the evening try not to appear too resentful that his presence was keeping them from skinning up and passing round a splif. He suspected they had cast him as one of Hannah’s passing idiosyncrasies – like taking her holidays in Scarborough or eating fish fingers mashed between two slices of white bread. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
One of Hannah’s CDs was playing, an album he’d chanced on by Chris Smither with a version of ‘Statesboro Blues’ that wouldn’t have Willie McTell turning blind in his grave. He waited till that track had finished and then stood by the window for some moments, staring off into the dark.
Come Monday morning, Resnick was thinking, the newly formed Serious Crime Squad would be moving into its headquarters in a converted building that had once been part of the General Hospital. Twenty detective constables, four sergeants, a smattering of support staff, one inspector and, running the show under the general supervision of a detective superintendent, a freshly appointed detective chief inspector.
There were those – and at times Resnick surprised himself by being amongst them – who thought it should have been him.
Jack Skelton, heaven knows, had nagged at him long enough – get in that application, Charlie, it’s maybe your last chance; even the chief constable designate had buttonholed him in the Central Police station corridor and asked him point-blank what had happened to his ambition.
Still Resnick had prevaricated. He knew there would be over a hundred applicants, fifteen of whom would be selected for interview, at least six of those thirtyish high-fliers from the Police Staff College at Bramshill, their cards already marked.
‘Charlie, am I opening this wine or are you?’
There were those high up in the force, Resnick knew, who valued his experience, the fact that he had dedicated all his working life to the city. And there were others who saw him as small-minded and provincial, a good copper certainly, but past his sell-by date where promotion was concerned. So finally Resnick had forgone the pleasures of giving a five-minute presentation on the major problems of policing in the year 2000, and of sitting with his fellow candidates in some anonymous examination room sweating over a string of questions. He had convinced himself that doing what he was doing, running a small CID squad from a sub-station on the edge of the city centre, was still challenge enough to see him through the next five years. He had a team that by and large he trusted, whose strengths and weaknesses he knew.
But one of his DCs, Mark Divine, had still not returned after almost six months’ leave of absence, and another, Lynn Kellogg, having passed her sergeant’s board, had surprised him by applying for a transfer to the Family Support Unit. Even Graham Millington was murmuring darkly about going back into uniform and moving himself and Madeleine out to Skegness.
Some days Resnick felt like a captain who was busily lashing himself to the mast while everyone else was resolutely jumping ship.
‘Charlie?’ Hannah’s voice behind him was soft and questioning. ‘You okay?’
‘Yes, why?’
She gave a small shake of her head and smiled with her eyes. ‘Here,’ holding out a glass of wine, ‘I thought you might like this.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes, sure.’ And looking at her then, standing close, her fingers still resting on his as they held the glass, it was true.
‘The risotto will be ready in twenty minutes. If they’re not here by then, we’ll eat it ourselves.’
Alex and Jane Peterson arrived shortly after eight, bearing apologies and flowers, a bottle of Sancerre and another, smaller, of Italian dessert wine the colour of peaches.
Alex, as Hannah had explained earlier, was a dentist, one of the few still working inside the National Health Service, a balding man of around Resnick’s age, some ten years or more older than his wife. Unlike Resnick and Hannah, they had both dressed with a degree of formality, Alex in a loose cream suit with burgundy waistcoat, a white tie-less shirt buttoned to the neck; Jane was wearing a black linen jacket and black flared trousers, her hair, streaked blonde, cut short and close to her head.
Throughout the meal, Alex talked vociferously, often humorously, holding strong and sardonic opinions on almost everything, and when he lapsed into silence, managing to convey the impression that he was holding back in order to give the others a chance. Jane, who taught at the same school as Hannah, seemed tired but cheery, her pale face flushed as the evening wore on. Only when the subject of a day school she was helping to organise at Broadway came up, was she really animated.
‘Not sure what I think about all this, Charlie,’ Alex said, pointing at Resnick with his fork. ‘What is it, Jane? Something about women and television, women and the media? Where d’you stand on that, Charlie, seminars on popular culture? Some academic from the university giving forth about stereotypes and the like.’
Resnick passed.
‘Personally,’ Alex went on, ‘I’d sooner slob out in front of EastEnders without thinking I was going to be interrogated about its gender issues the minute it was over.’
Jane could scarcely wait for him to finish. ‘That’s nonsense, Alex, and you know it. For one thing, you never slob in front of the TV, you’ve just read about other people doing it, and for another, you jump at the opportunity to intellectualise absolutely anything faster than anyone I know.’ She stared at him, defiant. ‘And just to set the record straight, it’s about women and sexual violence and it’s in next month’s programme. Hannah, you should get Charlie to come along, I think he might enjoy it.’
Hannah smiled and said that she would see.
Alex leaned towards Jane and deposited a kiss on the side of her neck.
The risotto was followed by pork loin with red cabbage and sweet potatoes, crème brûlée and a plethora of cheeses.
‘Do you cook yourself, Charlie?’ Alex asked, helping himself to more wine. ‘Master of the nouvelle cuisine?’
‘Can’t say as I get much of a chance.’
‘Lucky to find a woman then who can. Who can do it as well as this.’ Alex raised his glass. ‘Hannah, we owe you a vote of thanks.’
Jane reached over and squeezed her hand and Resnick wondered why he should be feeling embarrassed on Hannah’s behalf when she obviously seemed so pleased.
‘And now,’ Alex said, ‘if you could pass me a smidgen more of that delicious cheese. Yes, that’s it, the Vignote.’
They took their coffee through into the living-room and Hannah surprised Resnick by playing the Billie Holiday compilation he had given her for her birthday and which she seemed to have ignored ever since.
‘This doesn’t sound like you,’ Jane remarked with a smile, Billie stalking her way through ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’.
‘Charlie gave it to me.’
‘Educating you, is he?’ said Alex.
‘Not exactly.’
‘Well, I like it anyway,’ Jane said. ‘Don’t you, Alex?’
Alex jinked his cup against its saucer. ‘All right for selling lipstick to, I suppose, Italian cars. Modishly moody. Just a shame she can’t really sing.’
Resnick bit his tongue.
Hannah had lit candles, three of them in glass holders, and they burned with a thick vanilla scent. The bed was in the centre of the attic room, low between rugs, two pine chests of drawers. A cloud of orange city light spun down from twin skylights, angled towards each other from either side of the sloping roof.
Resnick had washed the dinner things, Hannah had dried and put away. They had sat ten minutes longer in the front room, enjoying the silence, the virtual dark. Now Hannah was on her side, knees pulled up under the hem of the oversize T-shirt she wore in bed, and Resnick lay close in behind her, one arm running along the pillow between Hannah’s shoulder and chin.
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘Was it as awful as you thought?’
‘Who said I thought it would be awful?’
‘Oh, Charlie, come on! Your face, your voice, everything about you. You were mooching around downstairs before they came like someone waiting for – I don’t know – something dreadful.’
‘Like waiting for the dentist, you mean.’
‘Funny!’
Resnick edged forward a touch more and angled his arm downwards so his hand could cup one of Hannah’s breasts.
‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘what did you think of them?’
‘They were okay. I liked her. Quiet, but she seemed nice enough. She’s fond of you. Alex, I’m not so sure. Small doses, maybe.’
‘And together, as a couple?’
‘I don’t know . . . they seemed to get on well enough, I suppose.’
Hannah turned over to face him, dislodging his hand from her breast. ‘He’s a bully, Charlie. He bullies her. It upsets me to see it, it really does.’
Slowly, she rolled away from him and when Resnick reached out for her he felt her tense against his hand.
At a quarter to six that morning the air was raw; mist silvered across the flat expanse of the park and the Asian taxi-driver waiting for Resnick at the corner of Gloucester Avenue sat rubbing gloved hands.
‘Why don’t you leave some of your things here?’ Hannah had suggested once. ‘There’s plenty of room. Then you could go straight to work without having to get us both up at the crack of dawn. You could walk it in ten minutes.’
But there had been the cats – there were always, for the foreseeable future, the cats. So whenever Resnick stayed over the alarm was set for five thirty and, one of his older jackets he’d forgotten aside, Hannah’s wardrobe remained her own. Despite his assurances that she didn’t need to get up with him, she persisted in doing so, making coffee for him and tea for herself; once Resnick left, taking a second cup back to bed and reading and dozing her way through the next hour.
Resnick’s return was always greeted with preening disdain by the largest of his four cats; Dizzy presenting him with a proud backside and running ahead of him along the length of stone wall that skirted the drive, jumping down and waiting with studied impatience by the front door.
By the time Resnick had showered, changed, fed the cats, made toast and more coffee for himself, and driven the short distance across town to the Canning Circus station, it was close to half past eight. Carl Vincent had more or less finished getting the night’s files ready for Resnick’s inspection and was wolfing down a bacon and egg sandwich he’d fetched from the canteen. In the corner of the CID room, on the cabinets alongside Resnick’s partitioned office, the kettle was simmering, ready to make tea for the assembling officers.
‘Much activity?’ Resnick asked.
Vincent swallowed too hastily and came close to choking. ‘Not really,’ he finally managed. ‘Quiet. One thing, though. Those paintings we thought someone was trying to lift a few months back. One of those big houses in the Park. April, was it? May?’ He opened the file and pointed. ‘Here. Someone broke into the place last night. Had them both away.’
Resnick recalled the occasion clearly: he even remembered the paintings. Landscapes. both of them, quite small Around the turn of the century? Somebody called . . . Dalzeil? Dalzeil. He didn’t think it was pronounced the way it looked.
He remembered waiting outside the house for the intruder to leave, others keeping watch over the side fire escape and the rear. Except that when Jerzy Grabianski let himself out of the house it was by the front door and the holdall he was carrying proved to contain nothing but a Polaroid camera, a torch and a pair of gloves.
‘Knew him, didn’t you?’ Vincent asked. ‘Some connection?’
Aside from the fact we’re both Polish, Resnick thought, ancestry anyway? And, he might have added, that we both top six foot and are heavy with it. The first time he had seen Grabianski it had been a little like walking into a room and coming face to face with your double. Save that he was a copper and Jerzy Grabianski was a professional criminal, a thief.
‘We pulled him in a few years back,’ Resnick said, ‘along with a nasty piece of work called Grice. Stolen jewellery, other valuables, cash, half a kilo of cocaine . . .’
Vincent whistled. ‘They weren’t dealing?’
Resnick shook his head. ‘Came on it more or less by chance and tried to get rid.’
‘Still, must’ve drawn some heavy time.’
‘Grice, certainly. Still away somewhere for all I know. Lincoln. The Scrubs.’
‘Not Grabianski?’
‘He helped us nail somebody we’d been after a long time. Big supplier. We did a deal.’
‘And he got off? Nothing?’
‘A few months. By the time it came to trial . . .’ Resnick shrugged. ‘Get yourself out to the house first call. If nothing else has been disturbed, clean entry, place looking more like it’s had a visit from an overnight cleaner than a burglar, Grabianski might be in the frame.’
‘Right, boss.’
From the shrill version of ‘This is My Song’ that came whistling up the stairs, Resnick knew DS Graham Millington was about to make an appearance.
Hannah had said little more about Alex and Jane Peterson. She and Resnick had soon fallen asleep – the consequence of good food and good wine – and their morning had been too rushed and sleepy for much in the way of conversation.
Sitting in his office now, shuffling papers, Resnick thought back to the previous night’s dinner, trying to recall any signs that would support Hannah’s accusation. Alex had been the more dominant, it was true; domineering even. He clearly felt his opinions counted for a great deal and was not used to having them contradicted: a consequence perhaps, Resnick thought, of talking to people whose mouths were usually stretched wide and crammed with metal implements.
But while Jane had been quiet, she had scarcely seemed cowed. And when she had stood up to him about the Broadway event she was organising, he seemed to take it well enough. Hadn’t he kissed her as if to say he didn’t mind, well done? While Resnick was aware that Hannah would probably regard that as patronising, he wasn’t sure he altogether agreed.
How long, Resnick wondered, had they been married, Alex and Jane? And whatever patterns their relationship had formed or fallen into, who was to say they were necessarily wrong? What best suited some, Resnick thought, sent others scurrying for solace elsewhere – his own ex-wife, Elaine, for one.
He was mulling over this and wondering if it wasn’t time to wander across to the deli for a little something to see him through till lunch-time, when Millington knocked on his door.
‘Our Carl, called in from that place in the Park you were talking about earlier. Wondered if you might spare the time to go down there. Reckons how it’d be worth your while.’
The photographs showed the paintings clearly. One was a perfectly ordinary landscape, nothing especially interesting about it that Resnick could see: sheep, fields, trees, a boy of fourteen or fifteen, a shepherd with white shirt and tousled hair. The other was different. Was it the photograph or the painting that had slipped out of focus? As Resnick continued to look he realised it was the latter. A large yellow sun hung low over a ploughed field patched with stubble; undefined, purplish shadows bunched on the horizon. And everything within the painting blurred with the tremor of evening light.
‘What do you think of them, Inspector?’ Miriam Johnson asked. ‘Are they worth stealing, do you think?’
Resnick looked down at her, a small keen-faced woman with almost white hair and an arthritic stoop, voice and mind still sharp and clear in her eighty-first year.
‘It seems somebody thought so.’
‘You don’t like them. then? Not to your taste?’
When it came to art, Resnick wasn’t sure what his taste was. Which probably meant he didn’t have any at all. Though there were reproductions here and there in Hannah’s house that he liked: a large postcard showing a scene in a busy restaurant, a man talking earnestly to a woman at a centre table and leaning slightly towards her, hand raised to make a point, the woman in a fur-trimmed collar and reddish flowerpot hat; and another, smaller, which was tucked into the frame of the bathroom mirror, a woman painted again from behind, seated, but looking out across reddish-brown rooftops from one side of a large bay window – Resnick remembered the white vase at the centre holding flowers, a sharp yellow rectangle of light.
‘I think I like this one,’ Resnick said, pointing at the second photograph. ‘It’s more interesting. Unusual.’
Miriam Johnson smiled. ‘It’s a study for Departing Day, you know. His most famous painting, in so far as poor Herbert was famous at all. He made the mistake of being British, you see. Had he had the foresight to have been born French . . .’ She tilted her head into an oddly girlish laugh. ‘French and Impressionist, it’s almost as if they were brought together from birth, don’t you think? Whereas if you were to stop some person in the street and ask them what they knew of our British Impressionists all you’d get would be so many blank looks.
‘Even amongst the knowledgeable few,’ she continued, ‘it is Sargent who is remembered, Whistler of course; but not Herbert Dalzeil.’ She pronounced it De-el.
‘Excuse me if this is a daft question,’ Vincent said, ‘but if he’s not famous, why would anyone go out of their way to steal his work? Especially if it’s not like, you know, the one that’s reckoned his best?’
Miriam Johnson smiled; such a nice boy, that soft dark skin, not black at all, but polished, almost metallic brown. And he wasn’t brash, like some young men. Polite. ‘He painted so little, you see. Especially towards the end of his life. He would have been, oh, sixty I suppose when he did his best work, but then he lived on another thirty years.’ She laid a finger on Vincent’s sleeve. ‘It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? He was born right in the middle of the last century and yet he lived to see the first years of the Second World War.’ Again she laughed, girlishly. ‘He was even older than I am now. But he lost his health, you see. His eyesight, too. Can you imagine, for a painter, what a loss that must be?’
She smiled a little sadly and Vincent smiled back.
‘It’s their rarity, then, that would make these worth stealing?’ Resnick asked.
‘And not their beauty?’ Miriam Johnson countered.
‘I don’t know. To a collector, I dare say both. Though I doubt anyone would try to sell them on the open market; any reputable dealer would know they were stolen.’
‘Japan,’ Vincent said, ‘isn’t that where most of them go? There or Texas.’
‘I should have given them to a museum,’ Miriam Johnson said, ‘I realise that. That’s what was intended to happen to them, of course, when I died. It was all arranged in my will. The Castle would gladly have added them to their collection, they don’t have a single Dalzeil. I know it was wrong to cling onto them, especially once I couldn’t afford the insurance premiums. But I was so used to having them, you see. And I would look at them every day, not simply pass them by but really sit with them and look. Of course, I had the time. And each year I thought it can wait, it can wait, there can’t be long to go, just let me keep them for now.’ Her eyes as she looked up at Resnick were bright and clear. ‘I was a foolish old woman, that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Well, Inspector, you should be.’
Like many in the Park, the house had been built in the latter half of the last century, testimony to the wealth which coal and lace had brought to the city. Not converted into apartments like so many of the others, it lingered on in drab high-ceilinged splendour, slowly declining into terminal disrepair. The burglar – and they were assuming it was one person acting alone – had risked the rusting fire escape and forced entry into an unoccupied second-floor bedroom. The window frame had been so rotten the catch had been easy to prise away whole. In the drawing-room, pale rectangular patches on the heavy wallpaper showed clearly where the paintings had hung, one above the other. Nothing had disturbed the owner, asleep at the rear of the ground floor.
‘Careful,’ Vincent remarked. ‘Professional.’
‘Yes.’
‘Professional enough for your friend Grabianski?’
Resnick remembered the smile that had settled on Jerzy Grabianski’s face, the hint of smugness in his voice. ‘Half an hour with one of the unsung masters, worth any amount of risk. Besides, you’ll not bother charging me, not worth the paperwork. Nothing taken. Not as much as a speck of dust disturbed.’
All right, Resnick thought: that was then and this was now. ‘Maybe, Carl, maybe. But there are ways of finding out.’
The Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help lived in an undistinguished three-storey house midway between the car park for the Asda supermarket and the road alongside the Forest recreation ground where the local prostitutes regularly plied their trade.
There but for the grace of God, as Sister Bonaventura used to remark, bustling past. Whether she was referring to whoring or working at the checkout, Sister Teresa and Sister Marguerite were never sure.
All three of them were attached to the order’s outreach programme, living in one of the poorer areas of the city and administering as best they could to the unfortunate and the needy, daily going about the Lord’s business without the off putting and inconvenient trappings of liturgical habits but wearing instead civilian clothes donated by members of the local parish. Plain fare for the most part, but ameliorated by small personal indulgences.
Sister Marguerite, who came out in a painful rash if she wore anything other than silk closest to her skin, purchased her underwear by mail order from a catalogue. Sister Bonaventura stuck pretty much to black, which she relieved with scarlet Aids ribbons and a neat metallic badge denoting Labour Party membership. ‘Who do you think He would vote for, if he came back down to reclaim his Kingdom on earth?’ she would ask when challenged about this. ‘The Conservatives?’
And Sister Teresa, whose mother had stopped measuring her against the kitchen wall at fourteen when she had reached five foot seven, was forced to make her own arrangements as the kind supply of cast-offs rarely matched her size. Regularly, she would bundle up a pile of pleated skirts and crimplene trouser suits and take them to the Oxfam shop where she would exchange them for something more fitting.
Today, when Resnick met the sister by the entrance to the radio station where she broadcast charity appeals and dispensed advice, she was wearing a calf-length navy skirt and a plain white blouse with a high collar and broad sleeves. She wore no discernible make-up and her dark hair was pulled back from her face by a length of ribbon.
Recognising Resnick, she smiled.
‘Good programme?’ he asked.
‘Oh, you know. Sometimes when the same people phone in week after week demanding the same answers, you get to wonder. But, no, once in a while I think it may genuinely help and, at least, it makes people aware that we’re here. I’m grateful for the opportunity to do that.’ When she smiled again, Resnick noticed, not for the first time, the tiny lines that creased next to the green of her eyes. ‘It increases our visibility, that’s what Sister Bonaventura says. And she’s the one with the diploma in media studies.’
‘You don’t think it makes you a little too visible at times?’ After one helpline session during which Sister Teresa had advised a battered wife to go into a refuge, the woman’s husband had been waiting for Teresa and had attacked her in the station’s car park – which had been where Grabianski, unlikely knight errant, had leaped to her rescue.
‘It is only radio, Inspector,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘It’s not as if I were making a spectacle of myself on television. People don’t point at me in the street.’
‘You’ll not mind being seen with me, then,’ Resnick said. ‘I thought if you had time for a cup of coffee . . .’
‘Were you thinking of going into the market?’
‘Why not?’
‘Then I’ll have a strawberry milk shake. And pray for forgiveness afterwards.’
The market stalls, selling fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy produce, meat and fish, had once done battle with the elements in the Old Market Square; for years after that they had jostled comfortably together in a covered hall near the now defunct bus station. When one of the city’s railway stations was demolished to make way for a vast new shopping centre, the food market moved again, finding space on the upper floor above the ubiquitous Dorothy Perkins, Mothercare and Gap.
Resnick came here frequently to buy salami and rich cheesecake at the Polish delicatessen, ham off the bone, Jarlsberg and blue Stilton, and to perch on one of the stools around the Italian coffee stall, drinking small cups of strong dark espresso which the proprietor dispensed with an extravagant flourish.
This particular afternoon Aldo’s appraising eye travelled its politically incorrect way the length and breadth of Sister Teresa’s body, resting finally on the ring which she wore, third finger, left hand.
‘Si bella, signora. If you were not married already I would fall to my knees this moment and propose.’
‘I’ll bet you say that to all the nuns,’ Teresa said.
Rapidly crossing himself, Aldo withdrew behind the Gaggia machine.
‘Jerzy Grabianski,’ Resnick began.
‘What about him?’
‘I wondered if you’d seen anything of him recently.’
A slight frown passed across Teresa’s face.
‘It’s not that I mean to pry.’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s just I thought he might have been in touch.’
‘In person, would this be?’ Turning her head a little to one side, Teresa smiled.
‘Possibly.’
‘He’s been here, then? In the city?’
‘Possibly.’ Resnick’s turn to smile.
‘I’ve not heard anything from him since . . . oh, several months, it would be. A postcard from Slimbridge, the Wildfowl Trust. Birding, I suppose.’ She tried her milk shake, drawing it up carefully through a coloured straw. Oversweet. ‘I’ve always thought it was from him, though he didn’t sign it, of course. It was a painting of a blue-winged teal. A rare visitor from America, apparently. He’d seen a pair of them that day, checked them off in his little book, I expect. Quite the collector.’
‘Exactly,’ Resnick said. And then, setting aside his espresso, ‘He didn’t mention anything about paintings by any chance?’
They were sitting in the narrow kitchen of the sisters’ house, previously a vicarage and close alongside the cmmunity centre that had once been a church. If you listened carefully you could hear the click of pool balls through the wall.
Sister Bonaventura had greeted Resnick with an appraising stare and invited him inside. ‘Always bringing men home, our Teresa. Likes to think she’s saving their souls.’
Teresa scolded her and hurried upstairs to her room, leaving Sister Bonaventura to play hostess, which she did by thrusting a potato peeler into Resnick’s hand and pointing him at the bag of King Edwards that sat waiting on the counter. By the time Teresa returned, a worn envelope in her hand, the sister had engaged Resnick in a discussion about New Labour and the pernicious spread of Social Democratic policies.
‘When I read that Billy Bragg had torn up his party membership card,’ she said, ‘I had to fight hard to restrain myself from doing the same.’ She topped and tailed two washed carrots and chopped them into a pot simmering on the stove. ‘After all the work that young man put into the cause. You remember Red Wedge, Inspector, naturally?’
Resnick allowed that he might, though it was confused in his mind with Arthur Scargill and the miners’ strike. He knew if he got onto that subject with Sister Bonaventura, he would be there long enough not just to share supper, but to wash the pots as well.
‘Here,’ Teresa said, rescuing him. ‘Are these what you’re referring to, I wonder?’
These were a pair of photographs, Polaroids, both of the later Dalzeil painting, one clearly showing the surround of Miriam Johnson’s wall. Sister Teresa’s name and address were on the envelope, the postmark too smudged to read.
‘When did you get these?’ Resnick asked.
‘It would have been early May, the seventh or the eighth perhaps.’
‘As if you didn’t know,’ Sister Bonaventura said.
Teresa ignored her.
Reflected in one of the photographs, Resnick could now see, was the blurred image of the man taking the picture – Jerzy Grabianski at work. Resnick remembered the camera they had discovered in his bag.
‘Why are you so interested in him?’ Teresa asked. ‘I mean, why now?’
‘Two paintings – this and another by the same artist – they’ve been stolen.’
‘And you think Jerry . . .’
‘I think it’s a strong possibility, don’t you? Given his proclivities.’
‘As an art lover.’
‘As a thief.’
‘You didn’t get very far with those potatoes,’ Sister Bonaventura remarked.
‘You don’t know for certain that it was him?’ Teresa said.
Resnick shook his head.
‘Of course. If you did there would be no need to be shilly-shallying here with me. You’d have him somewhere under arrest. But since presumably all you have are suspicions, if he had been here and made contact with me that would be – what would you call it? – circumstantial evidence.’
‘It might have helped to place him near the scene.’
‘Of the crime,’ Sister Bonaventura said.
‘It would be my duty, then,’ Sister Teresa said a touch regretfully, ‘to help you if I could.’
‘What is a crime,’ said Sister Bonaventura, ‘is that these paintings were ever in private hands in the first place. They should be on public view, available to all and sundry. Not just the privileged few.’
‘I don’t see our friend Grabianski,’ Resnick said, ‘as some artistic Robin Hood.’
‘Don’t you?’ Teresa asked.
‘Maidens in distress,’ Sister Bonaventura said, now peeling the potatoes herself. ‘A different legend, surely.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a number for him? Any kind of current address?’ asked Resnick.
Sister Teresa said that she did not.
‘Ah, well . . .’ With a sigh, Resnick rose to his feet.
‘You’re not staying for supper, then?’ Sister Bonaventura asked.
‘Maybe some other time.’
Teresa escorted him to the door. ‘Do you need to borrow these?’ she asked, glancing down at the envelope by her side. ‘If they’d be any help . . .’
‘I don’t think so. Not now, at least.’ He looked at her handsome face, unflinching green eyes. ‘I doubt you’ll be getting rid of them, throwing them away.’
When he turned back near the street end, she was still standing in the doorway, a tall, solidly built woman in simple, straightforward clothes. Had she always wanted to become a nun, he wondered, one of those fantasies so beloved of little Catholic girls, one that most of them leave behind with their first period, their first real kiss? Or had something happened in a split second that had changed her life? Like walking into a room and finding yourself face to face with God?
Next time, he thought, crossing towards the Boulevard, he just might ask. Next time. For now there was a colleague he could contact down in the smoke, someone who kept his ear well to the ground. And the secretary of the Polish Club would have connections with his counterparts in Kensington and Balham. Small worlds and where they connected, Grabianski might be found.
Hannah was wearing a Cowboy Junkies T-shirt, white with a picture of the band low over her waistline; if she hadn’t been wearing it loose outside her jeans they would have been tucked from sight. The Lay It Down tour, is that what it had been called? She remembered the way Margo Timmins had performed half of her numbers sitting down, hands resting across the microphone, a voice that was clear and strong, stronger than on their recordings. Unhurried. Hannah had liked that. Liked, too, the way she had prattled on between songs, seemingly inconsequential stories she felt needed telling, despite the hectoring calls from young men on the edges of the audience. Beautiful, also – but then they always were – Margo with her sculpted nose and perfect mouth, bare legs and arms. Well, women were beautiful, Hannah knew that.
She reached out towards the mug of coffee she had made after she had showered and changed from school, but it had long grown cold. A handful of small boys, primary age, were playing football in the park, an elderly woman in a dark anorak was slowly walking with a lead but no apparent dog; the foliage was several shades of green. Beside Hannah, on the floor by her comfortable chair, were folders for her to mark and grade, fourth-year essays on soap opera – realism or melodrama? For tomorrow there were lessons still to prepare, chapters of Hardy to reread, Lawrence short stories, poems by Jackie Kay, Armitage and Duffy.
Hannah folded her arms across her lap and closed her eyes.
When she awoke, the telephone was ringing. Disorientated, she made her way towards it; although it had probably been no more than twenty minutes, she felt she had been asleep for hours.
‘Hello?’ Even her voice seemed blurred.
‘Hannah? I thought perhaps you weren’t there.’ It was Jane, husky and concerned.
‘Has something happened? Are you okay?’ She had seen Jane in the staff room less than two hours before.
‘Oh, yes, it’s this stupid thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘This day school, what else?’
Alex, Hannah had been thinking, something’s happened with Alex. Some monumental row. ‘I thought everything was in hand,’ she said.
‘So did I. There was a message when I got home. The film we’re meant to be showing – Strange Days – it looks as if it might not be available. Apparently the distributors saw some of the advance publicity about the event and got cold feet. They’re worried we’re setting it up as an easy target so it can be rubbished.’
‘Oh, Jane, I’m sorry.’
‘I wish I’d never taken it all on.’
‘It was a good idea.’
‘Was is right.’
‘Come on, it’ll be fine. And, anyway, maybe they’ll change their minds.’
‘I suppose so.’ There was a silence and then: ‘Hannah, would it be all right if I came round?’
‘You mean now?’
‘No, it’s fine. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Jane . . .’
‘Really.’
‘Jane.’
‘Yes?’
‘Stop off at the off-licence, okay?’
When Resnick got to Hannah’s house a couple of hours later, the two women were sitting in the kitchen with the remains of a bottle of Chardonnay between them, plates pushed to one side.
‘Charlie, sorry, we’ve already eaten. I wasn’t sure if you were coming or not.’
‘I should have called. Let you know.’
‘No. No.’
Resnick glanced across from Hannah to Jane, the patches beneath Jane’s eyes suggesting she had been crying.
‘I should go,’ Jane said, pushing back her chair.
‘There’s no need,’ Resnick said. ‘Not on my account.’
Jane banged her hip hard against the table and stifled a cry.
‘Are you all right?’ Hannah asked.
‘Uum. Yes.’
‘You weren’t thinking of driving?’ Resnick said, giving the bottle a meaningful glance.
‘I was.’
‘I’ll make coffee,’ Hannah said, getting to her feet. ‘Charlie, coffee?’
‘Thanks.’