“What’s all this?” Resnick said, setting down his own glass and moving across to the settee to sit beside her. “Taking on my guilt to make me feel better?”
Hannah smiled and brushed her hair away from her eyes. “Not really. Not consciously.”
“You’re not to blame for whatever’s going wrong in Sheena’s life.”
“Aren’t I?”
“No.” Resnick’s arm was resting on Hannah’s leg, his hand on her knee. “No more than we all are.”
“And we punish her for our mistakes.”
Resnick shook his head. “That’s too easy.”
“Why?”
“She may not be academically bright, but she’s not stupid. She has to take some responsibility for her own actions.”
“Yes. I know.”
There had been a moment, crossing the room, and later, when Resnick had thought he might kiss her, but now it had gone. He was looking at his watch.
“Busy day tomorrow,” Hannah said.
“You or me?”
“Both.”
At the door, she slipped her hand around his waist enjoying, however briefly, the solidity of his body, the inward curve of his back. She kissed him on the mouth, but before he could respond she had stepped away again and was wishing him goodnight. “Call me, Charlie.”
“Of course.”
“No, I mean it.”
“Yes. I know.” Resnick walking, crablike, down the path.
At the railings, he raised a hand and in the failing light she smiled. Inside, she leaned back against the door, his footsteps faint and growing fainter till they disappeared. Some months before, happy, half-drunk, turned on, she had asked him to join in the fantasy that was playing, unbidden, through her mind; the man heavy on top of her as she struggled, pinning her arms to the bed with his knees; a voice she barely recognized as her own, shouting, “Hold me, Charlie! Hold me down!” For Resnick, it had been too close to the realities of his working life: power, force, aggression. Neither of them had talked about it since. But it had been the first wedge between them; nothing afterward had been quite the same.
Hannah carried the glasses through into the kitchen and rinsed them under the tap. Not so far short of eleven; too late, she reasoned, to phone her mother now. Her father’s letter was where she had left it, out of reach if not out of mind. She stood for a while at the upstairs window, gazing out into the dark. Denying the impulse to call Resnick, tell him she’d been stupid, jump in a cab, come on round. Her father’s writing was oddly small, squirrelly. She had needed to read the words twice before their meaning became clear. Robyn and I have decided … never imagined I’d want to get married again … important to both of us … writing to you before I say anything to your mother… easier coming from you … I hope you will understand. He had even tried for a joke: now Robyn’s reached the grand old age of thirty, I think she wants to settle down. And what, Hannah thought? Sell the place in the French countryside Robyn and her father had spent years doing up and buy somewhere larger? Move back to England? Write another best-selling novel? Have children? A child.
She didn’t realize until it was done that she had torn the letter into smaller and smaller pieces, which went fluttering like confetti down around her feet where she stood.
Eighteen
It was early enough still for Resnick to rub his hands together for warmth as he walked. Mist was wreathed faintly around the trees edging the grounds of the university and, off to the east of the city, the sun showed only as an orange smear above the waters of the Trent. He had considered wearing a topcoat, before deciding against it, and the material of his gray suit was feeling not only shiny but thin.
Parker’s café was facing him now across the boulevard and he waited for a pause in the traffic swishing off the Dunkirk roundabout before hurrying toward it. In younger days, Parker’s had been an informal meeting place for Resnick and a clutch of his fellow officers, and for Norman Mann it seemed it still was.
There was steam on the insides of the windows and the heat struck Resnick, not unpleasantly, as he entered. Heat and cigarette smoke, the savory smell of bacon frying. For several moments, he wondered why he had stayed away so long.
Mann was on his feet, leaning over one of the other tables, joking with two men in dark overalls. As usual, there were a number of fire officers from the station next door, uniform jackets unbuttoned, celebrating the beginning or end of a shift with oversized mugs of tea.
“Charlie.” Breaking off his conversation, Mann greeted him with a strong handshake and slap on the shoulder. “Let’s sit over here. This corner. I’ve already ordered mine. Sort out your poison and we’ll talk.”
At the counter, old habits quarreled with new-fangled ways, his own leanings toward moderation linked to Hannah’s lectures about healthy eating and coronary failure. In addition to coffee, no sugar, no milk, he settled for a sausage sandwich with brown sauce and grilled tomatoes on the side. Set against Mann’s full breakfast with black pudding and fried bread, it looked positively frugal. But then, Resnick told himself, it wasn’t his stomach that was straining shirt buttons to the last thread, or needing a strongly buckled belt to hold it aloft.
“Cutting down, Charlie?” Mann asked, pointing across the table with his knife.
Resnick shrugged.
“Only live once, Charlie. Enjoy it. That’s my motto. And bollocks to anyone who says different. Present company always excepted.”
For several minutes, they ate and said nothing, the blur of conversation rising and falling around them. How many wives was it now, Resnick wondered? The third Mrs. Mann or possibly the fourth? Each of them, those Resnick had seen, no taller than Norman’s shoulder, dark-haired, dark-eyed, soft-spoken; submissive, seemingly, until the day those eyes were opened and they packed their bags and walked away. He didn’t change and neither did they.
Mann balanced his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray and broke off a piece of fried bread with his fingers. “Siddons, Charlie, I know she’s been on to you as well as me. You and Jack. Getting her knickers in a rare old twist about this business with Valentine. Looking to poke her skinny nose in.” He broke the surface of his egg with a corner of the bread, dipping it first in tomato sauce, then mustard, before lifting it to his mouth.
“Fucking Valentine, we’ve been after that black bastard for fucking months. Run a tap on his phones, stripped that fancy Porsche of his down to the chassis, got more intimate with the inside of his house than a fucking death-watch beetle. Never come up with anything more than a couple of spliffs and a packet of Neurofen.”
A sliver of reddish yellow slid, unimpeded, round the side of Mann’s chin.
“He is dealing?” Resnick said.
Mann laughed and wiped a paper napkin across his face. “’Course he’s bloody dealing. Even he can’t live that way on social bloody security. But, try as we may, we’ve never been able to lay a hand on him. Not one that counts.”
Resnick sipped his coffee. “So what? Lucky? Clever? What?”
“Fuck knows, Charlie. I don’t.” Mann speared a circle of black pudding. “Best thing could’ve happened, that youth’d been a bit more on target with his knife, lopped Valentine’s tackle off and slung it out to the dogs. As it is, he’ll get patched up good as new and that’ll be the end of it.”
“He shot somebody in the head.”
“According to who? You’ve got witnesses, reliable? A couple of tarts with less brains between them than the average cockroach. And how about the weapon? Even if it does turn up, which I tend to doubt, you reckon it’s going to have our man’s prints all over it, nice and sharp? No, Charlie, it’s a waste of time. My way of thinking, let Siddons flap around like she’s running the show, keep her sweet. Comes up empty-handed, it’s her bloody fault and not yours or mine.”