He refolded the charts as Mark Divine came into the office with two mugs of tea. Why couldn’t he be like Divine? The world divided into three equal parts: you drank it, fly-tackled, it or got your leg over it.
“Boss back?”
“Not yet.”
“Think we’ll get to go up to Scottyland?”
“Who knows?”
“Good beer. Heavy, they call it. Pint of heavy. First time I heard that I thought…”
Both men stood up as Resnick came in, biting into a cream-cheese and gammon sandwich and balancing one styrofoam cup of black coffee on top of another. He nodded in the direction of his office and a chunk of gammon squeezed out and bounced from Resnick’s cuff to his trouser leg and then to the floor.
“Where is he?” Resnick asked, using a brown envelope to swab up the spilt coffee.
“Aberdeen, sir,” Naylor and Divine answered, more or less in unison.
Resnick closed his eyes for a moment. “Am I supposed to say good work?”
“Bloke across the hall,” Divine stepped in swiftly, “bumped into him the other night after the pubs turned out. Macliesh said something about going back up to work on the oil rigs.”
“There was a train from Midland Station this morning,” said Divine. “Quarter-past eight. Booking clerk recognized him from the photograph.”
Resnick remembered the picture the dead woman’s mother had lifted out from beneath worn cardigans folded into a drawer. Shirley Peters wearing a white suit and holding a bouquet of pink flowers in front of her. Had she caught them, Resnick wondered, when the bride had tossed them through the air? “Three times she were bridesmaid,” Mrs. Peters had said. And then: “At least she never married the lousy sod!” Tony Macliesh stood beside her in a borrowed suit, his eyes unable to focus. If the clerk had known him from that, he was doing well.
“The train’s in when?” Resnick asked.
“Three forty-seven, sir,” said Naylor. “Forty-nine,” corrected Divine. “Sir.”
“Of course, you’ve been in touch with Aberdeen?”
“There’s a Detective Inspector Cameron, sir. Says he’ll make sure the train is met. He’d like you to give him a bell.”
Resnick nodded, wrote the name on a pad. “Get yourselves up there. Catch some sleep. Bring him back down, first thing.”
“You want us to charge him, sir?” Divine sounded eager.
“Just bring him back down.”
“Not arrest him?”
Resnick looked at him evenly, holding his gaze until the constable looked away. “No point in hurling ourselves into this. Let’s get him in and ask some questions.”
“Sir, I thought…” Divine blurted.
“No, Divine, that’s what you didn’t do. What you did was see the obvious and not look beyond it.”
“Yes, sir.” Divine wasn’t looking beyond anything now; he was studying his feet on his inspector’s carpet.
“If you want to be any good as a detective, Divine, that’s what you’ve got to learn to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
Standing alongside, it required strenuous effort from Naylor not to smirk.
“We’re lucky he’s getting picked up in Scotland,” said Resnick. “England or Wales and the twenty-four hours we can hold him starts the moment he’s arrested. Coming from Scotland, it doesn’t start till we get him back in the station. But I expect you both knew that.”
Naylor and Divine exchanged glances.
“Yes, sir,” they said without conviction.
“Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984. Take a copy with you. It’ll keep you awake on the journey.”
He waited until he was on his own before prizing the lid from the first of the cups. Whatever the knack was of managing this without the coffee running down the insides of your fingers, he hadn’t yet acquired it.
Five
It was five minutes short of five o’clock when Resnick called Rachel Chaplin. She was in the middle of discussing a long-term fostering breakdown. The kid was a fourteen-year-old West Indian lad who, after months of stealing systematically from his foster mother’s purse, had neglected to send her a card on her birthday. The petty theft she’d been able to understand, even expected; the ignoring of her birthday, purposeful or merely forgetful, she found more difficult to take.
“What are the chances of finding him a hostel place?” asked one of the other workers.
Rachel picked up her phone on the second ring. “Social Services,” she said.
“Hello, this is Charlie Resnick.”
“I’m sorry. Who did you say?”
“Resnick. We met in court. You were there with Mrs. Taylor.”
Charlie, Rachel was thinking. His name is Charlie!
“What can I do for you, Inspector?”
“I was just wondering…”
“Look, I’m in a meeting at the moment. Can I ring you back?”
“A drink,” Resnick said. “How about a drink after work?”
“We might be able to get one of the project foster parents to take him on short-term,” someone near her suggested.
“I don’t know what time this will get sorted,” Rachel said into the phone.
“You don’t think there’s any chance at all of keeping things as they are?” Rachel said into the room. “Are we all saying that that’s just not on?”
“How about six-thirty?” asked Resnick.
“Make it seven.”
“Where?”
“Could we try Buxton?” Rachel said.
“Isn’t fifty miles rather a long way to go for a drink?” said Resnick.
“I wasn’t talking to you. Unless you’d like to foster a wayward but charming teenager.”
“Not tonight.”
“All right then. You know the Peach Tree?”
“Yes.”
“Seven o’clock.”
She put down the phone and got on with her meeting.
All over the city, these past few years, local pubs had been stripped and gutted, painted and refitted, finally re-emerging as wine bars, cocktail bars, theme bars, simply bars. Resnick reckoned the manufacturers of strip lighting and nostalgia posters must have their Christmas holidays in the Bahamas on permanent reservation. This place was less than two hundred yards from his station, yet he hadn’t been inside it since the day the refurbishers had moved in.
Now he pushed between a pair of frosted glass doors and found himself among a crowd of fashionable young people shouting at each other over pre-recorded music. Ah! thought Resnick knowledgeably, the Happy Hour crowd. One thing about browsing the color supplements-it kept you up-to-date with life the way some folk lived it.
It was three-deep to the curve of the downstairs bar, so Resnick found the stairs at the back and climbed up into a “living” video. Set amongst hi-tech furniture, green plants, and cream-colored blinds was a vision of money wearing money.
He had turned and was starting on his way back down when he saw Rachel at the foot of the stairs.
“Don’t believe in waiting long, do you?” She was wearing a white shirt, large and loose, belted over deep blue cords, a black blouson jacket with wide epaulettes. Only the boots appeared to be the same as before.
“I thought I might have missed you downstairs.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “D’you want to come down?”
“Not really.”
A smile came to the edges of her mouth. “You want to stay up there?”
“Not really.”
Rachel marched up the steps smartly, turned him round, and moved him towards the bar. “Come on, since we’re here, I’ll buy you a drink.”
They found a small table at the front, looking down at the traffic driving up the hill from the city through the rain that had started to fall again.
“Last time I came here,” Resnick said, “it was an Irish pub with cheese and onion cobs and good Guinness. The backroom downstairs was carved straight out of the rock and they had a juke box in there with the best selection of rock ‘n’ roll in the city. Played it so loud on a Saturday night, pieces used to flake off the walls and fall into your pint.”