Still Waters (2 page)

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 color 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 organize 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 intellectualize 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 program. Hannah, you should get Charlie to come along, I think he might enjoy it.”

Hannah smiled and said that she would see.

Alex leaned toward 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 center of the attic room, low between rugs, two pine chests of drawers. A cloud of orange city light spun down from twin skylights, angled toward 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 downward 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.

Three

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 jewelry, 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 organizing, 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 patronizing, 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 lunchtime, 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 realized it was the latter. A large yellow sun hung low over a plowed 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 center table and leaning slightly toward 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 center holding flowers, a sharp yellow rectangle of light.