There was time to walk up to the indoor market and take his usual seat at the Italian coffee stall. The girl slid an espresso in front of him without waiting to be asked and Resnick drank it down in two and ordered another.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
Resnick slid the coins across the counter and shrugged. How was it going? Phones rang and were answered. It was part of the job, it was what he did.
The courthouse had been newly built from pink stone and smoked glass, and from the foyer entrance you could watch the buses pulling out of the station and into the traffic, one every couple of minutes. Hiss of brakes, hiss of rain. Resnick turned and saw the couple, child and mother, sitting on a bench seat, clear space between them. Had he thought about it, he would have known they would be there, known he would see them, but he had stopped himself thinking about it. These things took a long time. He wondered if the little girl would recognize him and how she would react if she did.
A woman stood beside them, bending down to talk to the mother, her hand brushing the fall of the child’s hair as she straightened away. Resnick dismissed her as being a relative, put her down as a social worker, not the same one who had been at the station when they had been asking their questions.
“Yes, it hurt me.”
This woman was tall, tall enough; she had a way of standing that said I know who I am and what I’m doing here and if you don’t, well, I don’t give a damn. The deep collar of her camel coat was pulled high, the belt looped loosely over. Resnick caught sight of tan boots with a heel, a glimpse of blue skirt where the hem of the coat separated out.
When he realized she was looking back at him, Resnick slid one hand inside his jacket and left it there, resting on the fastened button, covering the stain on his tie.
He felt the need to walk over and talk to the mother, say something calming and trite. What stopped him was not knowing how to speak to the little girl, sitting there plucking at a button on her sleeve and tapping her toes against that newly polished floor. What stopped him was knowing that his reason for doing it was to appear sympathetic in front of the woman in the camel coat.
Rachel Chaplin rested her right hand on the back of the bench and watched Resnick walk away towards the door of the court. She didn’t know his name, but knew his rank; she knew him for a police officer. She knew that he had been looking at her and not at the clients who were sitting on the bench. When he had been about to approach them she had guessed that he had been involved in the arrest and in a moment she would ask Mrs. Taylor if that had been so. Meanwhile, she was wondering what had made him change his mind.
He was an overweight man in his early forties, whose narrow eyes were bagged and tired, and who couldn’t find the time to drop his tie off at the cleaners.
Now Rachel Chaplin was wondering just why she was smiling.
Giving evidence, Resnick stumbled over a date and had to flick back through the pages of his notebook for verification. Yes, that did mean that the child was examined by a doctor precisely seven days after he had received the initial call. Yes, the delay was in part due to the manner in which the mother had elected to inform the authorities. Did he think that the mother had been to any degree complicit in the father’s behavior towards their daughter?
Only once did Resnick allow himself to look directly at the man standing between two officers in the dock. He had been asked to describe the accused’s emotions when faced with the offense. Had he shown unusual emotion? Had he broken down? Wept? Asked for forgiveness? He stood there now much as a man might stand, bored, in the Friday-night queue at the supermarket.
“Detective Inspector?”
Resnick’s eyes never left the father’s face as he answered. “The accused said, ‘She’s just a bloody kid!’ And then he said, ‘The lying little bitch!’”
Rachel could have been waiting for him, but she wasn’t. She was by the exit, talking to a ginger-haired man Resnick recognized as the probation officer to the court. She was talking earnestly, her oval face serious amidst curls.
“Inspector…” The soft leather bag that hung from her right shoulder hit against the glass door as she moved.
Resnick turned towards her, nodding to the probation officer as he did so.
“I won’t keep you a moment,” Rachel said. There was an uneven-ness at the bottom of her front teeth, as though a piece had been chipped away.
“I’m Rachel Chaplin, I’m…”
“You’re the Taylors’ social worker,” Resnick interrupted.
“Yes.”
The probation officer raised a hand that neither acknowledged and walked between them, down and into the street.
“How are they coping?” asked Resnick.
“In the circumstances it’s difficult to say.”
“The girl…”
A barrister hurried behind Resnick, stuffing his gown down into a sports bag as he went. The step which the inspector automatically took forward placed him close enough to Rachel Chaplin to see his reflection clearly in the red-framed glasses that she wore.
“Ask me again in six months, a year. I might have an answer for you. Ask me after the father comes out of prison, after therapy. I don’t know.” She looked away from him and then back and asked, “How are you?”
Taken by surprise, Resnick didn’t know what to say. “You seem tense,” Rachel said. “You’ve got frown lines cluttering up your eyes and you haven’t been sleeping properly.”
“I haven’t?”
“Uh-huh. You’ve probably got a bed that isn’t firm enough to take your weight and if you told me you drank Scotch before trying to sleep, I’d believe you.”
“Suppose it’s coffee?”
“The effect’s the same.”
He couldn’t decide if her eyes were more green than blue.
He said: “Is this why you called me over?”
She said: “It’s what I’ve ended up saying.”
“But when you stopped me…?”
“I wanted to tell you that Mrs. Taylor…this morning, before court, I asked her about you.”
“Yes?”
“She said how understanding you’d been.”
“Then she’s wrong,” Resnick said. “I don’t understand at all.”
Instead of leaving the building with her, the two of them walking down the steps side-by-side, Resnick was on his own. The corner outside the court was jammed with people waiting for the lights to change. He hadn’t thought about turning away from her, he had just done it.
He was heading for the underpass that would take him through the shopping precinct and back into the city center when the bleeper clipped inside his jacket sounded and sent him in search of the nearest telephone.
Three
Resnick had lived here, this part of the city, when he had been a uniformed sergeant, straining to get back into CID, eager to improve his status, move on up. Now the terraced streets had two-tone 2CVs parked at the curb and, through painted blinds, glimpses of parlor palms and Laura Ashley wallpaper: maybe he should have stuck around a little longer.
There was an ambulance outside number 37 and Resnick pulled in between it and a maroon saloon which he recognized as belonging to Parkinson, the police surgeon.
The rain had stopped but the air was still damp enough to make aging bones ache. A few people stood around on the opposite side of the street, hands in their pockets, shuffling their feet and speculating. Faces stared out from windows, several with lights already switched on in the rooms behind.
DC Kellogg stood talking to a youth with a shaft of black gelled hair in the doorway of number 39, listening and making notes. By the entrance to number 37, a young constable stood with hands clasped behind his back, embarrassed to be the temporary focus of so much attention.
Millington met Resnick in the narrow hallway.
“How did it go at court?”
Resnick ignored the question, looked past his sergeant at the partly open doorway ahead. “Scene-of-crime here yet?”