After several seconds’ hesitation, Declan Farrell opened the door and walked out. Maureen looked across at Resnick and slowly shook her head, closed her eyes.
When Carl Vincent came into Resnick’s office he was looking a little tired, a man who had been up all night and only snatched a half-hour’s sleep, slumped across a table in the canteen. There were a couple of marks on the sleeve of his lightweight suit, picked up during the search, and his collar was somewhat awry, but otherwise he didn’t look much the worse for wear.
A sight better than Resnick himself. “Carl, what can I do for you?” he asked.
“This business last night, the talk is you’re not making any connection with the Aston murder.”
“That’s pretty much right.”
Vincent drew a deep breath. “Look, sir, maybe I should’ve said before, but I saw him a year ago, Aston, in a gay club in Leicester.”
For a second, the pulse beating at the side of Resnick’s head seemed to stop. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying Bill Aston was gay.”
Thirty-nine
Not even minutes, Resnick seemed to have been sitting there for a small eternity.
A year ago … a club in Leicester … gay.
It was not only tiredness, but anxiety in Vincent’s eyes. “This club,” Resnick said eventually, “you were there on duty?”
Fleetingly, the eyes closed and when they looked at Resnick again there was no avoidance, no guile. “No, sir.”
Resnick breathed through his mouth. He said, “You’d best sit down.”
Vincent crossed one leg over the other, uncrossed it, sitting with his hands resting just above his knees.
“And Inspector Aston,” Resnick said, “there’s no way he wasn’t there on duty either?”
Vincent shook his head.
“You’re sure? Positive?”
“He left with somebody,” Vincent said.
Resnick was seeing Aston’s wife, her plumpish little body ill-fitting in black, her voice fierce against the afternoon. You knew him, Charlie, better than most.
“And you couldn’t have been mistaken? Misinterpreted the situation?”
But Vincent was already shaking his head.
“A year ago,” Resnick said.
“The reason I remember, someone pointed him out to me. Someone I knew there, in the Job. He’d seen him at some course, I think. Aston. Knew he was from up here, this force. Said he’d come across him before, you know, in Leicester, once or twice.”
“You didn’t speak to him?”
For a moment, Vincent smiled. “Not my type.”
“But you are gay?”
“It doesn’t mean we fancy everyone, you know.”
“I know,” Resnick said. “But what you’re saying is you’re gay but you’ve not gone public about it.”
“That’s right.”
Resnick shook his head. “What’s really worrying me is why you didn’t tell me about Aston before?”
Vincent didn’t respond right away. “Because I wasn’t sure. I mean, I hadn’t known his name. And the photograph …” Resnick staring at him, waiting for all of the truth. “No, all right, I thought I recognized him, the connection was made, but then, it seemed to have nothing to do … I couldn’t see the relevance to what had happened. Gay or not gay, sexuality didn’t seem to be an issue.”
“Except for yours.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Except for yours. Your sexuality.”
“Look …”
“No, you look.” Resnick leaning forward now, head slightly to one side, fingers beginning to point. “The reason you didn’t come forward with this information sooner was personal. To do with you. Give up Aston and you’re giving up yourself. In keeping silent, you were protecting yourself.”
Slightly muffled through the door, the constant, shifting sound of telephones, their call and response. Someone knocked on Resnick’s door and receiving no answer, turned away.
“It was an issue for me, yes,” Vincent finally said.
“The issue.”
“No, sir. If that was the case I’d never have come forward now. I’d have kept my silence, prayed it didn’t matter, or if it did it’d come out some other way. But as soon as I heard, you know, last night, what happened to the guy in the park, there was no way I could keep quiet then.”
“Even though it means exposing yourself like this?”
Vincent shook his head. “I’m a copper, just like you.”
Not just like me, Resnick thought. “Carl,” Resnick said, “I don’t care what you do in bed or who you do it with.” Not even sure if that were true. “The only place it affects me is here, when you let it affect you, how you do your job. And what prevented you from acting as you should, it wasn’t the fact of your being gay, it was that you’ve kept that fact a secret. That’s what was wrong.”
Vincent stifled a laugh. “You think I should come out?”
“That’s up to you.”
“But that’s what you’re saying.”
A shake of Resnick’s head. “What I’m saying, as long as you don’t, there’ll be other incidents like this, judgment calls you feel you have to make. And they’ll be to do with protecting yourself, your secret, and not your job.”
“I’m sorry,” Vincent said, “I’m finding this a little difficult to take in.”
“That I want you to be honest about yourself? Tell the truth.”
“That here’s my senior officer, telling me I have a duty to come out as being gay.”
“I don’t think I shall be able to trust you, your judgment, not fully unless you do.”
“And if I did?”
“Your instincts are good, you seem to talk to people well, work hard. You’re clearly bright.” He shrugged. “No reason you shouldn’t make a good detective.”
“You’d keep me on your team?”
Resnick thought for longer than probably he should. “Yes, why not?”
Vincent smiled, pleased like a kid that’d been handed a prize, confused; he touched his hands together and rocked back in his chair. “I don’t know …” Openly, this time he laughed. “You think it isn’t difficult enough, getting on in the Job being black, without having to stand up for being gay as well?”
Skelton had not been having a good twenty-four hours. His daughter had telephoned him in the middle of dinner to tell him she was thinking about dropping out from university to become part of a medical outreach team in Zaire; his wife, whose only recent communication with him had been by means of grunts or notes stuck to the door of the fridge, had launched into a diatribe about setting up a new regime which seemed to be going to start with Skelton laundering his own underpants; and then there had been the call-out on account of that poof who’d been raped on Lenton Rec.
Now this.
“Jesus, Charlie! They’re everywhere.”
Resnick offered no comment.
“You can’t switch on the television nowadays without there’s some clever little bastard smarming on about equal rights for gays. Strikes me, we’ll soon be the ones needing extra rights. Blokes on East Enders holding hands and dying from AIDS; lezzies all up and down Brookside. And the BBC-the BBC, mind, not Channel 4-have started this-what is it? Gaytime TV. As though it was all a big laugh. Whatever happened to normal, eh, Charlie? Normal blokes with normal families, that’s what I’d like to know.”