While the taped organ music wobbled through ‘Abide With Me’, inside his head Resnick was hearing Ed Silver in that small club off Carlton
Hill, stilling the drinking and the chatter with an elegiac ‘Parker’s Mood’.
‘No family, then?’ the vicar said outside, anxious to find time for a cigarette and a pee before the next service.
‘Not as far as I know.’
The vicar nodded sagely. ‘If you’ve nothing else in mind for them, we’ll see to it the ashes are scattered here, on the rose garden. Blooms are a picture, let me tell you, later in the year. We have one or two visitors, find time to lend a hand keeping it in order, but of course there’s no funding as such. We’re dependent upon donations.’
Resnick reached into his pocket for his wallet and realized it was gone.
The ‘meat rack’ stretched back either side of the station, roads lined by lock-up garages and hole-in-the-wall businesses offering third-hand office furniture and auto parts. Resnick walked the gauntlet, hands in pockets, head down, the best part of three blocks and neither girl in sight. Finally, he stopped by a woman in a red coat, sitting on an upturned dustbin and using a discarded plastic fork to scrape dog shit from the sole of her shoe. There were bruises on her neck, yellow and violet, fading under the soiled white blouse which was all she was wearing above the waist.
‘Ought to be locked up,’ the woman said, scarcely glancing up, ‘letting their animals do their business anywhere. Fall arse over tit and get your hand in this, God knows what kind of disease you could pick up.’ And then, flicking the contents of the fork out towards the street, ‘Twenty-five, short time.’
‘No,’ Resnick said, ‘I don’t…’
She shook her head and swore as the fork snapped in two. ‘Fifteen, then, standing up.’
‘I’m looking for someone,’ Resnick said.
‘Oh, are you? Right, well,’ she stood straight and barely came level with his elbows, ‘as long as it’s not Jesus.’
He assured her it was not.
‘You’d be amazed, the number we get round here, looking to find Jesus. Mind you, they’re not above copping a good feel while they’re about it. Took me, one of them, dog collar an’ all, round that bit of waste ground there. Mary, he says, get down on your knees and pray. Father, I says, I doubt you’ll find the Lord up there, one hand on his rosary beads, the other way up my skirt. Mind you, it’s my mother I blame, causing me to be christened Mary. On account of that Mary Magdalene, you know, in the Bible. Right horny twat, and no mistake.’ Resnick had the impression that even if he walked away she would carry on talking just the same. ‘This person you’re looking for,’ she said, ‘does she have a name or what?’
The hotel was in a row of similar hotels, cream paint flaking from its walls and a sign that advertised all modern conveniences in every room. And then a few, Resnick thought. The manager was in Cyprus and the youth behind the desk was an archaeology student from King’s, working his way, none too laboriously, through college. ‘Brenda?’ he said, slipping an unwrapped condom into the pages of his book to keep his place. ‘Is that the one from Glasgow or the one from Kirkby-in-Ashfield?’
‘Where?’
‘Kirkby. It’s near…’
‘I know where it’s near.’
‘Yes? Don’t sound as though you’re from round there.’
‘Neither do you.’
‘Langwith,’ the student said. ‘It’s the posh side of Mansfield.’
Resnick had heard it called some things in his time, but never that. ‘That Brenda,’ he said. ‘Is she here?’
‘Look, you’re not her father, are you?’
Resnick shook his head.
‘Just old enough to be.’ When Resnick failed to crack a smile, he apologized. ‘She’s busy.’ He took a quick look at his watch. ‘Not for so very much longer.’
Resnick sighed and stepped away. The lobby was airless and smelt of… he didn’t like to think what it smelt of. Whoever had blu-tacked the print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers to the wall had managed to get it upside down. Perhaps it was the student, Resnick thought, perhaps it was a statement. A – what was it called? – a metaphor.
If Brenda was as young as she looked and from Kirkby, chances were she’d done a runner from home. As soon as this was over, he’d place a call, have her checked out. He was still thinking that when he heard the door slam and then the scream.
Resnick’s shoulder spun the door wide, shredding wood from around its hinges. At first the man’s back was all he could see, arm raised high and set to come thrashing down, a woman’s heeled shoe reversed in his hand. Hidden behind him, Brenda shrieked in anticipation. Resnick seized the man’s arm as he turned and stepped inside his swing. The shoe flew high and landed on top of the plywood wardrobe in the corner of the room. Resnick released his grip and the man hit the door jamb with a smack and fell to his knees. His round face flushed around startled eyes and a swathe of hair hung sideways from his head. His pale blue shirt was hanging out over dark striped trousers and at one side his braces were undone. Resnick didn’t need to see the briefcase in the corner to know it was there.
From just beyond the doorway the student stood thinking, there, I was right, he is her father.
‘She was asking…’ the man began.
‘Shut it!’ said Resnick. ‘I don’t want to hear.’
Brenda was crying, short sobs that shook her body. Blood was meandering from a cut below one eye. ‘Bastard wanted to do it without a rubber. Bastard! I wouldn’t let him. Not unless he give me another twenty pound.’
Resnick leaned over and lifted her carefully to her feet, held her there. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘you’ve got anything like first-aid.’
The man snatched up his briefcase and ran, careening between the banister and the wall. ‘I think there’s plasters or something,’ the student said.
Resnick had gone to the hospital with her and waited while they put seven stitches in her cheek. His wallet had been in her bag, warrant card, return ticket and, astonishingly, the credit card he almost never used were still there; the cash, of course, was gone. He used the card to withdraw money from the change kiosk in the station. Now they were sitting in the Burger King opposite St Pancras and Resnick was tucking into a double cheese-burger with bacon, while Brenda picked at chicken pieces and chain-smoked Rothmans King Size.
Without her make-up, she looked absurdly young.
‘I’m eighteen,’ she’d said, when Resnick had informed her he was contacting her family. ‘I can go wherever I like.’
She was eleven weeks past her fifteenth birthday; she hadn’t been to school since September, had been in London a little over a month. She had palled up with Lorraine the second or third night she was down. Half of her takings went to Lorraine’s pimp boyfriend, who spent it on crack; almost half the rest went on renting out the room.
‘You can’t make me go back,’ she said.
Resnick asked if she wanted tea or coffee and she opted for a milk shake instead. The female police officer waiting patiently outside would escort her home on the last train.
‘You know you’re wasting your fucking time, don’t you?’ she called at Resnick across the pavement. ‘I’ll only run off again. I’ll be back down here inside a fucking week!’
The officer raised an eyebrow towards Resnick, who nodded, and the last he saw was the two of them crossing against the traffic, Brenda keeping one clear step ahead.
The maitre’d. at Ronnie Scott’s had trouble seating Resnick because he was stubbornly on his own; finally he slipped him in to one of the raised tables at the side, next to a woman who was drinking copious amounts of mineral water and doing her knitting. Spike Robinson was on the stand, stooped and somewhat fragile-looking, Ed Silver’s contemporary, more or less. A little bit of Stan Getz, a lot of Lester Young, Robinson had been one of Resnick’s favourite tenor players for quite a while. There was an album of Gershwin tunes that found its way onto his record player an awful lot.