Elaine stood up. “If the phone’s still where it used to be, I’m going to call a taxi.”
Resnick shook his head. “No need. I’ll drop you.”
“Charlie, you don’t want to know where I’m going.”
At the front door, he said, “Take care.”
“I’ll try,” she said. And, “Maybe I’ll drop you a line some time.”
“Do.”
Elaine smiled. “You can always tear it up.”
Forty
“Helen!”
Bernard Salt was wearing his white coat over shirt sleeves and a pair of tan cavalry twills that he’d bought from Dunn’s more than ten years back and were still going strong. His tie was the one with little pigs on it his elder daughter had given him one Father’s Day as a joke. That morning he’d slid it from the rack and knotted it swiftly, left the house before he realized and now he was stuck with it, no intention of appearing on duty without a tie. Besides, look at it this way, with half the hospital privy to his private life, half of those despising him as a heartless chauvinist, the remainder thinking, himself and Helen Minton, there wasn’t much to choose between them, well, it was a gesture. Let them think he didn’t care. If they were brainless enough to take the word of a neurotic woman, superficial judgments, well and good. He’d pig it out.
And with this other business, checks in and out, escorts and taxis home, extra security cameras, the staff whose job it was actually watching the screens instead of playing Find the Ball and reading the Sun-there were other things to preoccupy the hospital mind.
“Helen!”
This time she half-cocked her head, the slightest acknowledgment, before disappearing into her office and closing the door.
Salt opened it again and left it open, standing just inside.
Witnesses, no more meeting in car parks, fumbling behind closed doors. Fine!
“What do you want, Bernard?” Somehow she’d found time to have her hair re-permed and it was more like wire wool than ever. She stood ramrod straight, staring at him, this woman who had once teased from him a tenderness he had been almost frightened to realize he possessed.
“Very little, except to say how much I welcome what you’ve done. You were right, I have a freedom from personal responsibilities such as I haven’t experienced in thirty years. Now that you have acted as you have, there is no way in which you can threaten that again. I didn’t want you, Helen, I haven’t wanted you for a long time. I don’t love you and if I ever did, the way you have behaved is guaranteed to make me forget it.”
There was a slight tightening of the muscles in Helen’s face, nothing more.
“Thank you,” Bernard Salt said.
Helen said nothing. A nurse came towards the open door, hesitated, went away again.
“I was chatting with the Senior Nursing Officer over coffee; I shouldn’t be surprised if the hospital doesn’t offer you early retirement, obvious stress, neuroses, maybe you could carry on doing a little part-time work … at a more junior level.”
Helen willed herself not to move until he had gone, from her office, from the ward. She willed herself not to cry. Tears enough already and what good had they done her? From the side drawer of her desk, she took the photocopy of the theatre report book and folded it carefully in half and then in half again before placing it in an envelope and sealing the envelope down. Better than crying.
“How long, Inspector, are you intending to detain my client?”
“For as long as it takes?”
Suzanne Olds gave a quick little shake of the head. “You don’t have that long.”
“I’m sure the superintendent will authorize an extension of custody. In the circumstances.”
“The circumstances being that, aside from the girl’s diary, you haven’t been able to come up with a single piece of evidence that places my client in any relationship with the victim.” She used a small gold lighter to light a cigarette. “Getting on for eighteen hours of frantic searching for what? A fingerprint? A sudden reluctant witness?”
“We can apply to the magistrate …”
“An application we would have every chance of successfully contesting.”
Resnick shrugged and wearily smiled. “You’ll do what you have to do.”
“And so will you.” She shifted the balance of the bag slung over her arm. “The trouble is, you want to find him guilty for all the wrong reasons. You don’t like him, do you? Not one little bit.”
Resnick looked back at her. “Do you?”
Calvin didn’t know what had got into his father lately. Dinner last night had been those little beef patties from the butcher down on the High Street, the one he’d sworn never to use again on account of some racist jibe he thought he’d overheard. Patties and tomatoes out of a tin, swimming around in all that pale red juice. Calvin hated that.
Breakfast today had been toast, toast, and toast. The jar of beyond-the-sell-by-date honey had had a fungus growing over it a quarter-inch thick. And just as Calvin had been on the point of sweetening his tea with a couple of spoonfuls of that sugar substitute his father had bought by the twenty-eight-pound bag, he happened to look across at the paper and there the people who made the stuff, NutraSweet, were being accused of falsifying their research and pushing a product that could cause headaches, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, depression, loss of memory, mood swings, and swelling of the bodily extremities. Calvin let go of the spoon and sipped the tea as it was. He knew there wasn’t a granule of real sugar in the house and though he knew some people liked to use honey to sweeten what they were drinking, he wasn’t about to take a risk with that gunk.
Jesus! The tea had tasted terrible.
And Calvin never quite believed what he read in the papers anyway. He spooned in the NutraSweet and started to flip through, looking to see when Guns N’ Roses were appearing in the city, one thing they couldn’t lie about, announcements, and he noticed that one of the pages had been torn away. The front one. He’d found the ad he was looking for and there was Canceled printed all the way across it. Refunds available on receipt of the original tickets. Even when they didn’t lie, newspapers, what they were full of was bad news.
His father had come back in from doing something to his bike, the chain slipping, something like that, and Calvin had asked him when they were going to get some decent jam again, out-of-date Oxford marmalade there was never anything wrong with that, what was he going to do with twenty-eight pounds of poisonous artificial sweetener, where was the rest of the paper?
His dad had mumbled something and rinsed his hands under the tap, wiped them on a tea towel and gone back outside to get them all oily again.
Calvin had found the missing front page in the bin under the sink, tea leaves and what hadn’t been eaten of the tinned tomatoes wrapped inside it. Stained with a sort of dark orange, he’d read the headline: NEW HOSPITAL ALERT, the first few lines about somebody being arrested in the grounds, helping the police with their inquiries.
One of Calvin’s friends had helped the police with their inquiries. He’d been off work for six weeks and lost his job, bruises consistent with falling down a flight of steps his parents had been told. Bruises consistent with being called a black bastard and out on his own with a holdall at one in the morning, that was more like it.
Calvin had pushed the paper back down into the bin and headed off to his room. He was fast running out of dope and just a quick hit listening to some music, that would set him up for the day, get out on the streets and score some more.
Skelton and Resnick were in the corridor, trying to ignore the phones that were ringing everywhere, footsteps, the rise and fall of voices. Graham Millington passed between them with a murmured excuse me, a man in a sense of dazed elation: twelve dozen cartons of cigarettes traceable to two different robberies and at that moment the magistrate was issuing a warrant to search a lock-up in Bulwell.