Resnick rarely went there, climbed those stairs. He had tried moving once, thought of it many times, but somehow he had stayed. A family house, though he had no immediate family, unless you included the cats and he did not. Cats were cats and people people and Resnick knew the difference, he was clear on that. To all intents and purposes, he lived in just three rooms and let the rest succumb to dust.
When he arrived home that evening on foot, after buying Millington and the CID team a quick round in the pub, the black cat, Dizzy, was waiting for him, as usual, atop the length of wall. Automatically, Resnick reached out a hand to stroke the animal’s glossy fur, but Dizzy turned away from his touch and, tail raised, presented Resnick with a fine view of his backside as he ran along the wall and then sprang down towards the door, anxious to be fed. A neat encapsulation, Resnick thought, of man’s relationship with cats.
Inside, two of the others, Miles and Pepper, threaded themselves between his legs as he walked towards the kitchen, sifting through the mail he had picked up from the floor. Bud, the fourth and last, eternally young and stupid, lay wedged, for no apparent reason, midway through the cat door, mewing pathetically. Dropping straight into the bin the usual conglomeration of circulars and catalogs, advertisements for a double CD or cassette collection of Songs that Won the War, and invitations from his bank to come in and discuss his financial affairs, Resnick bent down and prized open the cat flap and Bud came sprawling through.
Fifteen minutes later, he had fed them, ground coffee, and set the kettle on to boil, improvised a sandwich from scraps of stilton, a few fading leaves of rocket, a rasher of cold, cooked bacon, and the last of a jar of mayonnaise. The Post had arrived, offering free tickets to Butlins, free flights to Spain, six hundred pounds’ worth of holiday vouchers and free beer. Pretty soon, Resnick thought, the entire population of the city would be off sunning itself and singing “Viva Españia!” and the crime figures would take care of themselves.
In the front room, he dropped into an easy chair and closed his eyes. When he opened them again the night was gathering close around the windows, the coffee was cold but still drinkable, and the sandwich-the sandwich tasted just fine. As he ate it he stared across the room at his recent acquisition, a brand-new CD player to complement his stereo; his nightly project, working through the tracks of the ten-disc Billie Holiday set he had bought himself the Christmas before last.
What would it be this evening?
“Some Other Spring”?
“Sometimes I’m Happy”?
“I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)”?
When the call came through, he was listening to “Body and Soul,” the ’57 version with Harry Edison taking the bridge. Resnick recognized the slight catch in Kevin Naylor’s voice as the younger officer struggled to keep his emotions in check.
“Alive?” Resnick asked, frowning.
“Yes, sir. Last I heard. The old woman, though, got to be touch and go.”
“Anyone gone to the hospital?”
“Mark, sir.”
“Not Lynn?”
“Already out. Something to do with this kid as absconded.”
“Right. Call Graham, tell him to meet me at the house. And you, stay there till I arrive. And for Christ’s sake don’t let any bugger trample over everything.”
Without waiting to hear Naylor’s reply, Resnick set down the receiver and headed for the door. Near enough eleven thirty and it was going to be a long night. He found his car keys on the table in the hall and grabbed a topcoat from the hooks inside the door. Long and likely cold.
Unaware, though she was never really that, Billie Holiday sang on in the empty room.
Graham Millington, burly, hands in pocket, was pacing the pavement inside the area that had been cordoned off, firing an occasional scowl in the direction of those bystanders who were still lingering in the wake of the sirens’ call. Naylor stood in the doorway, face paler than usual in the fall of the street light, one of those faces that were forever young until the day that suddenly they were old.
Resnick parked at the opposite side of the street and strode across.
“Break-in, looks like,” Millington said, falling into step.
“Entry?”
“Round back. Shimmied in through the window.”
“How many?”
“Hard to say as yet. By sight of what’s in there, happen half a hundred of ’em.”
Resnick blinked. Something was pulsing away behind his left temple, some premonition of pain.
“I’ve this minute had a call from Mark,” Naylor said. “Woman’s in the operating theatre, crushed skull. Brain damage, sounds like. Serious.”
“And the husband?”
“Be okay, I think. Cuts and bruises. Shock.”
Resnick turned towards the street, faces indistinct between curtains pulled back. “Witnesses? Anyone seen running away?”
Naylor fidgeted uneasily on the step. “None come forward, sir, as yet.”
“Chances are this wasn’t the only house broken into. Get yourself about, find out what you can. We’ll organize a proper house-to-house first thing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Think he’ll ever break the habit?” Millington asked, watching Naylor in sports jacket and khaki trousers walking towards the next-door house.
“Which habit’s that?”
“Calling you sir.”
Resnick didn’t bother to reply. He was looking at the turmoil in the small back room, like one of those newspaper photographs showing the spread of damage some distance from the epicenter of an earthquake. A small world turned upside down.
“Something got him in a rare snit,” Millington said.
“Him?”
“Them. Maybe.”
Resnick surveyed the shattered ornaments, broken picture frames, the shards of mirrored glass. In his mind’s eye it was the work of one man, one pair of hands, a sudden unleashing of bewildered rage. Which was not to say that others had not been present, looking on.
“It happened up here,” Millington said, close by the foot of the stairs.
Resnick nodded, cast his eyes around one last time before going up. Shielded by the seat of a fallen chair, something caught his eye, shiny and plastic, a library card, computerized. Gloves already on, he bent down and picked it up carefully between forefinger and thumb.
The moment Resnick entered the bedroom it was like stepping back in time. The way the blood seemed to have spun, spiraling around the walls, across the bedspread and the wardrobe face. And the smell of it. The smell he could never clear from his mind.
“Looks like they got trapped somehow,” Millington said, “between here and the end of the bed.”
“Yes.”
Behind Resnick’s temple the same nerve triggered again, a pulse of memory. If he closed his eyes he knew he would hear, along with the cries of those who had been attacked where he now stood, the screams of Rachel Chaplin, jagged and sharp, echoing from the upper bedroom of his own house. Would see the dead man’s savagely self-mutilated body lodged between floor and wall.
“Think he was trying to knock it out of ’em, where they were hiding whatever he were after?”
“I don’t know, Graham.” Stretching his leg across the perimeter of blood, Resnick moved to the far side of the bed. “I don’t know if whoever did this was being that rational.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How come she came off so much the worse for wear?”