“Budge up,” she grinned, settling the tray in the center of the bed and then sliding in behind it. “We haven't,” she said, “a slice of bread or a biscuit in the place.”
Slowly, she slid her forefinger down into the pink taramasalata and brought it, laden, to his mouth.
“When you rang, asked to come round,” she said, “is this what you had in mind?”
Resnick shook his head.
“Honestly?”
“Of course not.”
Dana sipped her tea. “Why, of course?”
Resnick didn't know how he was supposed to respond, what to say. “I just didn't ⦠I mean, I wouldn't ⦔
“Wouldn't?”
“No.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Clean in thought, word and deed, the policeman's code.”
“That isn't what I mean.”
“What you mean is, you didn't find me attractive.”
“No.”
“No, you didn't, or no, you did?”
“No, that isn't what I mean.”
“What is then?”
To give himself time, he tried the coffee; it was almost certainly instant, certainly too weak. “I meant I knew you were an attractive woman, but I hadn't thought about you in this ⦠like this, I mean, sexually, and if I had I probably wouldn't have called up like that and invited myself round so as to ⦔
“Why not?”
He put the mug back down. “I don't know.”
“You're involved with somebody else?”
“No.”
“Then why not?”
Not knowing why this was so embarrassing, nonetheless he looked away. “It wouldn't have seemed right.”
“Oh.”
“And besides ⦔
“Yes?”
“I'd never have thought you'd be interested.”
“In sex?”
“In me.”
“Oh, Charlie,” touching the side of his face with her hand.
“What?”
“Don't you know you're an attractive man?”
“No,” he said. “No, I don't.”
Smiling she let her hand slide around to the back of his neck as she leaned towards him for a kiss. “Of course,” she said, “that's one of the most attractive things about you.” And then, “But you are pleased to be here?”
He didn't have to answer; she could see that he was.
“Before it's too late,” she said, “why don't we just move this tray?”
She was stretching to set it on the floor when Resnick ran his hands down her back on to her buttocks, then, more slowly, out along her thighs. He heard her breathing change.
“Dana,” he said.
“Mmm?”
“Nothing.” He had just wanted to hear how it sounded when he spoke her name.
It was after one. The second mug of coffee had been stronger and black. The same Rod Stewart selection was playing, more quietly, in the next room. Resnick lay on his stomach, Dana with one leg and arm carelessly across him. This time she had been the one to fall asleep, but now she was sleepily awake.
“You know, I saw him once,” Resnick said.
“Who?”
“Rod Stewart. That's who it is, isn't it?”
“Mm.”
“Years ago. He was with the Steam Packet. Club down by the Trent. Almost couldn't get through the doors.”
“Not surprising.”
Resnick smiled over his shoulder. “Could've counted on one hand, most likely, those who'd as much as heard of him then, never mind gone specially to see him. Long John Baldry, he was the one they were there for.”
Dana shook her head, she hadn't heard of him.
“Him and Julie Driscoll, they were the main singers with the band. Stewart came on first, did a few numbers at the start of the set. Skinny kid with a harmonica. Rod the Mod, that's what he was being called.”
“Good, though, was he?”
Resnick laughed. “Terrible.”
“Now you're having me on.”
“No, I'm not. He was dreadful. Appalling.”
Dana's face went serious. “You're not, are you, Charlie?”
“What?”
“Having me on? Messing me around?”
Resnick pushed himself around, sat up. “I don't think so.”
“Cause I've had enough of that. One night stands.”
She had turned away from him, shoulder slumped forward, and although he could neither see nor hear, Resnick knew she was crying. He didn't know what to do; he left her alone and let her cry and then he moved close and kissed the top of her back, just below the dark line of her hair, and she turned into his arms.
“Oh God!” she said. “It doesn't seem right. Doing this. Feeling this good. After what's happened to Nancy. You know what I mean?”
Her tears had smeared what little makeup remained on her face.
“We don't know,” Resnick said, “what's happened to Nancy. Not for sure.”
Though in their hearts, they were certain, both of them, that they did.
“What time is it?” Dana said. In the darkness of the room, she could see that Resnick, between the end of the bed and the door, was fully dressed.
“A little after two.”
“And you're leaving?”
“I have to.”
She sat up in bed, the edge of the duvet covering one breast. “Without telling me?”
“I didn't want to wake you.”
Dana stretched out an arm and Resnick sat on the side of the bed, holding her hand. She stitched her fingers between his.
“You never did tell me,” she said, “why it was you wanted to see me.”
“I know. I thought maybe I should leave it to another time.”
“What was it, though?” She brought his hand to her face and rubbed his knuckles against her cheek.
“Robin Hidden ⦔
“What about him?”
“I wanted to ask you about him.”
Dana released his hand and leaned away. “Surely you don't suspect Robin?”
Resnick didn't answer. She could see little more than the outline of his face; impossible to read the expression in his eyes, tell what he was thinking.
“You do, don't you?”
“You know what had happened between them?”
“Nancy had chucked him, yes. But that doesn't mean ⦔
“He saw her that evening, Christmas Eve ⦔
“He couldn't have.”
“He went to the hotel, looking for her, just before midnight.”
“And?”
Resnick didn't immediately reply; had said already more than probably he should.
“And?” Dana said again, touching his hand.
“Nothing. He saw her and drove away.”
“Without talking to her?”
Resnick shrugged. “That's what he says.”
“But you don't believe him?”
“I don't know.”
“You think there was some kind of awful row, Robin lost his temper, and ⦔ Dana had raised her hands as she was talking and now let them fall to her sides.
“It's possible,” Resnick said.
Dana leaned towards him. “You've spoken to Robin, though? Talked to him?”
“Yes?”
“And you still think he could do something like that? Hurt her? Harm her?”
“Like I said, it's possible. It's ⦔
“He wouldn't do that. He couldn't. He's just not the type. And besides, if you'd seen him with Nancy, you'd know. Whatever she thought of him, he really loved her.”
Exactly, Resnick thought. “Sometimes,” he said, “that's enough.”
“God!” Dana pulled at the duvet and moved away, swiftly to the far side of the bed. “I suppose it's no surprise, doing what you do, you should be as cynical as you are.” Barefoot, she took a robe from where it was hanging on the open wardrobe door and slipped it around her.
“Cynical,” Resnick said, “is that what it is? Loving somebody so much you lose all perspective.”
“Enough to want to hurt them? Or worse? That's not cynical, it's sick.”
“It's what happens,” said Resnick. “Time and again. It's what I have to deal with.” He was talking to the open door.
Dana took a sachet of herbal tea from the packet and hung it over the edge of a freshly rinsed mug. When she pointed at the jar of Gold Blend, Resnick shook his head. “I'll wait till I get home.”
“Suit yourself.” Sitting at the table, Dana toyed with a spoon, avoiding Resnick's eye.
Resnick was starting to feel more than uncomfortable; he wished he were no longer there, but couldn't quite bring himself to go. “I didn't mean to upset you,” he said.
“I was already upset. What happened, it made me forget it for a while, that's all.”
On the narrow shelf, the kettle was coming noisily to the boil. She was still refusing to look at him and still he hovered near the doorway, reluctant to leave. “Their relationship, Nancy and Robin, it was, well, as far as you know, it was sexual?”
Dana laughed, without humor, more a simple expelling of air than a laugh. “Did I hear the usual groans and gasps through the wall? Why not? She's an attractive woman; Robin's athletic, a good body whatever else.”
“It was passionate, then, between them?”
She was staring at him now, open faced. “Is that all the proof you need, Charlie? That someone's capable of passion? Is that enough to tip the scales?”
“I'll call you,” Resnick said, stepping back into the hallway.
If Dana heard him, jinking the sachet in and out of her tea, she gave no sign. Mindful of the hour, Resnick closed the door firmly yet quietly behind him.
Twenty-four
What little had been seen of the season of goodwill was soon lost in a fog of malevolence and discontent. Uniformed officers summoned to a night club in the city, after receiving an emergency call claiming that a man had been knifed, walked into a blitz of bottles and bricks, and one hastily assembled petrol bomb was rolled beneath their car. A firefighting team arriving to tackle a blaze in the upper stories of a terraced house two streets away from Gary and Michelle found themselves pelted with rubbish and abuse by a gang of white youths, one of their hoses split by an ax, the tires of an engine slashed. The family living in the house, two of whom suffered broken limbs jumping to the ground while others, children between five years and eighteen months, suffered severe burns, were from Bangladesh.
At something short of five one morning, a young woman with a Glasgow accent stumbled into the police station at Canning Circus with blood running freely from a wound to the side of her head and one eye tightly closed. She and her boyfriend, a twenty-nine-year-old known to be a small-time dealer, had been smoking crack cocaine in an abandoned house near the Forest; she had drifted off and been woken by the sound of his fists pummeling her face. Medical examination in casualty revealed a fractured cheekbone and a detached retina in the eye.
The driver of the last bus from the Old Market Square to Bestwood Estate refused to accept the fare of a clearly drunken man who had been offering him verbal abuse and had a piece of masonry thrown at his windscreen, splintering it across. Another taxi driver was attacked, this time with a baseball bat.
A memo was passed round, offering overtime for officers willing to be drafted in to assist the Mansfield division in policing a concert by right-wing skinhead rock groups to be held in the old Palais de Dance. The event had been advertised in fascist magazines all over Europe and at least two coachloads were expected from Germany and Holland.
“Sounds like just the thing for our Mark,” Kevin Naylor remarked, passing the memo across the CID room.
“Knowing him,” Lynn said, “he'll have his ticket already. Front row.”
Nancy Phelan's parents made a ritual of visiting the station twice, sometimes three times a day, demanding to speak with either Resnick or Skelton to find out what progress had been made. Between times, they turned up on one or other of the local radio programs, wrote to the
Post
, the free papers, the nationals, petitioned the Lord Mayor and the city's M.P. Clarise Phelan took to standing in front of the stone columns of the Council House at one end of the Market Square with a placard bearing a blown-up photograph of Nancy and underneath,
My lovely daughter
â
missing and nobody cares
.
After forty-eight hours when the temperature had risen high enough for Resnick to discard both scarf and gloves, the weather bit back. It hit freezing and stayed. Trains were cancelled, buses curtailed; cars slid into slow, unstoppable collisions which blocked the roads for hours. Understaffed, close to overwhelmed, Skelton and Resnick struggled to delegate, prioritize, keep their feet from slipping under them.
Both of Nancy Phelan's missing boyfriends returned, shocked by what had happened, but unable to shed any light on how or why. James Guillery was stretchered off the plane at Luton Airport with a broken leg, victim not of the snow but an accident involving the chairlift and a snapped bolt. Eric Capaldi had sped in his low-slung sports car to the outskirts of Copenhagen and back. His aim had been to interview, for a potential radio slot of his own, a fifty-two-year-old percussionist who had been a counter-culture star for fifteen minutes in the late sixties and was now composing minimalist religious music for trans-European radio. After the interview and most of a bottle of brandy and to Eric's abiding confusion, he had ended up in the percussionist's arms and then his bed.
Robin Hidden continued to maintain that he had driven away that night without speaking to Nancy Phelan and had finally issued a statement through his solicitor saying that, as far as that particular subject went, he had nothing more to say.
As David Welch, smiling for once, had expressed it, handing Graham Millington the envelope, “Put up or shut up, you know what I mean?”
“Cocky so-and-so,” Millington thought. “Well above himself.” But he and Resnick knew only too well Welch was right. Arrest Hidden as things stood and within twenty-four hours, thirty-six at most, he would be back out on the street again and what would have been gained?