Across the room a phone rang and Millington picked up the receiver, “CID.” Then, “Right, sir. Yes, sir. The superintendent,” he said to Resnick. “Will you pop up and see him before he goes?”
Resnick was already on his way.
The newspaper was spread across the superintendent’s desk, open at the report of the trial. Most of page two and a run-on to page three: child abuse was still big news. Resnick looked down at an out-of-date press photograph of himself, blurred and upside down.
“Not a very good likeness.”
“No, sir.”
“And the report-any more accurate, would you say?” Resnick lifted the paper from the desk and skimmed it through. Skelton studied the station roster on the side wall. You could have fitted Resnick’s office into the superintendent’s several times and still had room to do fifty push-ups during the lunch break. Rumor had it that an overzealous inspector had come bursting in one day and found Skelton standing on his head beside the filing cabinets. But that was only rumor.
“Yes, sir,” Resnick said, replacing the newspaper. “I suppose it’s fair.”
Skelton made a sound pitched somewhere between a cough and a grunt. “It doesn’t usually serve our purposes to become combative in court.”
“He was trying to steamroller me. Make an impression in front of the jury.”
“Which you didn’t want him to do. Unopposed.”
“He’d been practicing this one in front of the mirror. Look sharp, score points, and bugger the truth.”
“You’ve got the monopoly, have you, Charlie?”
Resnick didn’t answer.
“Emotionally involved, Charlie?”
“Yes, sir,” Resnick said. “Of course I am.”
Skelton’s eyes grazed the picture of his wife and daughter, safe in their silver frame. “How about the jury? Any idea which way they’ll go?”
Resnick thought about their faces, solemn, apprehensive: the bald man in the sports jacket who made notes with a ballpoint pen on the back of an envelope; the woman who gripped her handbag tighter during portions of the evidence and whose lips moved rapidly, silently, as if in prayer.
“I don’t know, sir.”
Skelton slid back in his chair and stood up, a single fluid action. He had been in the building for close to nine hours and his clothes looked as if they’d come from the dry cleaners within the past twenty minutes. Sensible shoes, sensible diet: Resnick didn’t suppose Skelton ever left the house without first buffing up his brogues and enjoying a smooth bowel movement.
“You’ve seen Macliesh?”
“Not yet, sir. I was just talking to Millington.”
“Frustrating afternoon.”
Resnick nodded.
“I can’t delay on intimation much longer. There was the threat against a witness, the custody sergeant heard that as well, loud and clear. But I can hardly claim that we’re securing evidence by questioning-not expeditiously, at any rate. Come morning, we’re going to let him make his call and he’s got to have a solicitor. If he refuses to request one, we’ll take whoever’s duty solicitor on call.” He nodded briskly and Resnick stood up.
“All right, Charlie. You’ll be looking after things here in the morning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Try talking to Macliesh yourself.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, and Charlie?”
“Sir?”
“Do you ever do anything-in the way of exercise?” Resnick looked at the superintendent a shade blankly. Weekend before last he’d lugged that Hoover all over the house, up and down stairs, rooms whose only function was to gather dust and the dried remains of dead birds. Was that the sort of thing Skelton meant?
“No, sir,” he said. “Not really.”
“Maybe you should.” He looked appraisingly at Resnick’s figure. “You’re starting to look a little plump.”
The pub was round a couple of corners from Central Police Station and Resnick had sometimes used it when he was stationed there. The road that led away from it, up the hill towards the cemetery, was a mixture of pork butchers and Chinese restaurants, secondhand shops with rusting refrigerators and Baby Bellings in the window and a dozen paperbacks outside in an apple box, ten pence each. Its clientele was a mixture of locals who lived in the narrow terraced streets that spawned off to either side and students stretching out their polytechnic grants or in for a quick half before or after their adult education classes opposite.
Rachel Chaplin was already there, sitting at the rear of the right-hand room, squeezed up into a corner of the upholstered bench that ran along the wall. She had a book open on her lap, a glass of white wine close by her hand. The buttons at the front of her blue suit jacket were undone. All she has to do is sit there, Resnick thought, all she has to do to make me feel like this.
Rachel was aware that he’d arrived before she glanced up, felt his eyes upon her, just as she had before. The way she’d known in court that turning towards her was what he had wanted to do. She finished the sentence she was reading, lifted the wine and soda towards her mouth.
A group of kids from the poly pushed past Resnick as he walked towards where she was sitting. One of the girls-short skirt, gray, up around her hips over ribbed tights-collided with him and moved, giggling, away. He was nothing to her: an older man filling space. Sexless.
Was that how she saw him? Rachel thought. Even in his best courtroom suit, his trousers were bagged at the knee, the knot of his tie had become twisted round so that the short, thinner end hung down in front.
“Sorry I’m late.” Resnick found space beside her. “Work.”
His leg touched hers lightly and pulling it away he banged against the table, not hard. “It’ll thin out in a bit. A lot of these’ll be off to the WEA.”
“I know,” Rachel said. “I used to go to yoga.”
Seeing his expression, she continued, “It’s okay. I didn’t live up to the stereotype very well. Packed it in after the first three weeks.”
“How come?”
“Whenever she told us to lie down on the floor and relax, I went right off.”
“Asleep?”
“Sound.”
“I thought I was the one whose nights were in need of repair?”
“When I gave up the class, I got myself a new mattress.”
And a new man to share it with, Resnick guessed. “Yoga’s not so bad,” he said. “I was afraid you were going to own up to transactional analysis.”
Resnick’s wife had gone to TA. Positive strokes, negative strokes, he had felt like a cat on an electric fence. He stretched an arm behind Rachel’s shoulders and pressed the button set into the woodwork.
“I didn’t know anywhere had those any more,” Rachel said as he withdrew his arm. “Bells and waiters.”
“Used to be all there was,” Resnick told her. “Every lounge bar in the city.”
She looked away and immediately Resnick wished he hadn’t said it, didn’t like the way it made him sound, hankering after a past where a shilling was a shilling and all the telephone boxes were red and none of them were working. Nostalgia was arthritis of the brain.
He ordered a Guinness, draught, in a straight glass. The woman waiting-on was wafer-thin and her back curved like old paper left in the sun. She knew Resnick by sight and nothing more: each time she served him as though it were the first.
“Any sandwiches left?” he asked.
“Cobs, duck. Cheese, cheese and onion, onion.”
“Cheese and onion.” He angled his head towards Rachel and she raised her hand, no.
They talked about Mrs. Taylor and how she was faring, how quiet the little girl had become, furled in upon herself. She asked him how the murder inquiry was progressing and he said they’d brought in a man for questioning.
“Husband?” Rachel asked.
“Good as.”
She drank some more of her wine. “One of the things I’m involved in, a women’s refuge here in the city.” She looked at Resnick carefully: “Are you married?”
The waitress leant over them, setting down Resnick’s drink and roll.
“Can I have another white wine and soda?” Rachel asked.