“Norma, I’ve told you,” Resnick said, “it’s not my inquiry.”
“It’s you that’s bloody here.”
“You had to be told what had happened. I thought it might be better if you heard it from me.”
“You what? Why the fuck would you think that? Eh? You think I like having you here? Detective Inspector high-and-mighty Resnick. Slipping round here. Supping tea. How d’you think that makes me look up and down this street? Bastard police traipsing in and out. But no, you’re too full of your own bloody puffed-up self to think of that.”
With a slow sigh, Resnick rose to his feet, automatically taking his half-empty mug toward the sink.
“Bastard!” Norma struck the mug from his hand and it shattered on the floor. The dog braced itself on its hind legs and started to bark. “You think I like having you here in this house? Yeah? Do you? You really think I’d rather bad news came from out of your mouth? Norma, that lad of yours, we’ve got him locked up for murder. Norma, that bairn of yours, he’s took his own life, hanged hisself, we just this minute finished cutting him down. Oh, yes, you can bet your days I love it when Mr. Charlie sodding Resnick comes round here, up to his armpits in bad news. I thought you’d rather hear it from me, Norma. Well, what I’d wish,” Norma close to him now, pushing him back with the force of her words, “I’d never set eyes on your fat prick of a face at my door!”
Resnick held his ground for five long seconds before turning on his heels and walking out into the passageway, past the open living-room door, out through the front, and across to where four skinny kids with pinched faces and short cropped hair were loitering round the unmarked Ford he’d borrowed from the pool.
“Give us twenty pee, mister.”
“Give us a fag.”
When Resnick drove off, they raced after him, making signs mimicking masturbation, shouting abuse.
Seventeen
Early evening. Hannah Campbell stood in her small front garden, looking out across the expanse of the recreation ground opposite, its grass no longer the peculiarly vibrant green of midday or even mid-afternoon, but calming now into the softer shade that reminded Hannah of a particular dress her mother used to wear, muted and warm. The shadows of the railings and the trees standing close alongside them were soft and slowly lengthening and, from the middle distance, the cries of children clambering over the playground swings were faint, even musical. Off and on, scenes from Hannah’s own childhood had been picking at the edges of her brain all day, and she knew the reason lay in the letter, French-postmarked, from her father: My dearest Hannah, I hope you will understand …
She stood a while longer outside the late-Victorian terraced house, with hanging baskets beside its blue door. She had bought the house several years ago, at a figure she could ill afford; but its position, traffic-free, so close to open space, yet near the center of the city, made it worth its price and more. Now she felt settled there, more so than anywhere since she had left her family home to go to university, not quite nineteen. At her next birthday she would be thirty-seven, nearing forty.
Preoccupied, she was startled to see Resnick, hands in pockets, turn into the path which led toward the front of the house. Was it two weeks since he had called round unannounced, or three?
They sat in the L-shaped kitchen-dining room at the back of the house, Resnick at the scrubbed pine table, his back toward the old range which Hannah never used, but kept for appearances. Hannah was moving between the table and the narrow strip of kitchen, washing greens for a salad, shaking lemon oil and vinegar together for a dressing, cutting cubes of cheese, spooning hummus into an earthenware bowl, heating ciabatta in the oven.
“Are you going to stick with beer, Charlie, or d’you fancy some of this wine?”
Resnick raised his glass. “Beer’s fine.”
Salad bowl in hand, Hannah paused before the table and smiled. “There’s some work I have to do later, I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, why should I mind?”
“I just didn’t want you to think …” She shrugged. “You know.”
“That I was going to stay the night?”
“Yes, I suppose …”
He had followed her from the table and when she turned it was almost into his arms.
“That wasn’t why I came, you know.”
“A bit of sex.”
“Yes.”
“Slip back into the old routine.”
“Is that what it was? Routine?”
She looked into his face. “Sometimes, yes, I think so. Don’t you?”
“Maybe that’s what happens.”
“This soon?”
Resnick shrugged. His shirt was crumpled and his tie had been pulled off and draped across the same chair back as his jacket. His hair was something of a mess.
Hannah touched his wrist and felt the veins running under the cuff of his sleeve. “Why did you come round?” she asked.
“I wanted to see you,” he said, but the pause before speaking was too long.
“The truth.” Smiling at him all the same.
“I don’t know. Does there have to be a reason? I don’t know.”
“Oh, Charlie …”
“What?”
Reaching up, she kissed him close to the corner of his mouth. “You had a bad day.”
“It wasn’t good.”
“You had a bad day and you didn’t want to sit with the rest of your team in the pub and you didn’t fancy going home to that barn of an empty house with nothing there but the cats, so you came here instead. You wanted company, comfort; someone, maybe, to hold your hand.” She was holding his hand. “Charlie, it’s okay. I understand. I just don’t want to go to bed with you, not tonight. I don’t want to make love. Is that all right?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
After they’d eaten, Resnick wandered into the front of the house and switched on the light by the shelf where Hannah kept her small stack of CDs. He toyed with the idea of Billie singing “This Year’s Kisses”-the ones which no longer meant the same; or the knowing irony with which she leaned back upon the beat and sang “Getting Some Fun Out of Life”; Lester Young’s tenor saxophone adding its dry commentary to “Foolin’ Myself.”
Was that what he was doing? What both he and Hannah had been guilty of? The simple truth-Resnick caught himself smiling-the simple truth rarely existed outside of fairy-tales and thirty-two bars of popular song. And even then … his mind went back to Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood. Nothing simple there.
He slipped the Billie Holiday back into place and pulled out the Cowboy Junkies. Not exactly cheery stuff, but somehow, he knew, Hannah seemed to find consolation in the almost forlorn, floating pessimism of their songs-”Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park”; “This Street, That Man, This Life.”
Sitting in the armchair, Hannah with her legs up on the settee, Resnick told her about his meeting with Norma Snape. Feeling sympathy for them both, Hannah listened: it was easy to understand why Resnick, acting out of all the best intentions, should feel hurt, rebuffed, misunderstood; but Norma-and she knew, from her work, many women whose situations, while less extreme, were not so far removed from Norma’s-Hannah could feel her helplessness and frustration, a life lived forever at the mercy of circumstance and patronizing authority.
“What will happen to her, Charlie? The girl.”
“Sheena? Maybe nothing much, not this time. But in the future …”
“I remember her, you know. She was in my class at school. Just for a year. And in all that time she barely spoke, other than to her mates. Did as little work as possible, enough to steer clear of trouble. And I don’t think we did anything-I did anything-in the whole three terms that engaged her imagination one scrap.” Leaning sideways, Hannah retrieved her glass of wine. “I didn’t do anything about it, Charlie. I didn’t even try. All my energies, they went on the dozen or so who could be real pains if you gave them half a chance, them and the few who were really good, genuinely interested, off writing poems in their spare time, plays, borrowing the tape-recorder to make a documentary about where they lived. Those were the kids I really bothered about. That’s what was rewarding, that kind of response. As long as Sheena showed up and shut up, I didn’t care.”