“Theirs.”
“She’s still the mother.”
“And she’s ill.”
“Aaah!”
“You’re a callous bastard.”
“Facts. Not callous to look at the facts, is it? She knew what it was all about, didn’t she? What it meant. If she didn’t like it, she should’ve kept swallowing her pill.” Divine pushed himself off the desk. “That’s what it’s for, isn’t it?” He moved towards her, a leer on his face. “Then, since lover boy took to his bike and scarpered, you wouldn’t be bothered with that. Unless you keep swallowing them on the off-chance that some dark night …”
Lynn’s feet were perfectly set, her weight balanced, the backward dip of her shoulder exactly right; the open hand that cracked across Divine’s face spun him sideways, jarred him backwards.
Four fingers, red, slightly parted, glowed on the suddenly pale skin of Divine’s cheek.
“You …!”
“No!” Resnick’s shout came from the door to his office.
“That bitch, she’s not …”
Resnick moved with surprising speed, placing himself between the pair of them. The flat of one hand was set firmly against Divine’s chest. He had seen the DC battling through the nick of the rugby field on more than one occasion and had no illusions about the damage he could do if he found the opportunity.
Patel was close by Divine on his right side, ready to grab his arm if necessary. Hurt anger showed in the tightness of Divine’s eyes, the unsteadiness of the breathing through his open mouth.
“Let it be,” Resnick said.
“No …” The pressure against Resnick’s hand showed no sign of diminishing.
“Leave it there.”
Divine took an awkward step sideways, colliding with Patel. Resnick moved with him.
“You saw what the stupid cow …”
“Divine!”
“What?”
Resnick looked him full in the face, five, ten, fifteen seconds; slowly he lowered his hand, slowly stepped a pace back. Divine glared back at him, staring him out. His face was stinging and what he wanted to do was place his own fingers against it, tentatively, but he wasn’t going to give Resnick that satisfaction. Not Resnick, nor any of them.
“Over,” Resnick said. “All right?”
Divine couldn’t keep it up. He looked away, allowed his head to fall, pushed one hand up through his hair and let his shoulders slump.
“My office,” Resnick said, almost an invitation.
“Sir …”
“Now, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
To be sure, Resnick kept himself between Divine and Lynn until his office door had opened and then closed, Divine on the other side of it. For the first time he could see that Lynn was almost as pale as Divine himself, certainly as shaken by what she had done.
“Five minutes,” he said.
“Right, sir.”
He wasn’t sure at which point Kevin Naylor had come back into the room, only that he was standing close by the main door, bemused, tired, doing his best to stifle another yawn.
“With respect, sir, he’s a pig.”
“That doesn’t sound like respect.”
“I meant for you, sir, not Divine.”
“In many ways he’s a good detective.”
“Yes, sir. If you say so.”
“His arrest record says so, not me.”
“Is that all there is to it, sir, arrests?”
“The public would say so.”
“And you, sir?”
“He is a detective, you are all detectives. Your job is to detect crime, detain perpetrators. If you want something else, maybe you should go back into uniform, community policing.”
“Is that what you want, sir? From me, I mean?”
“No.”
They sat there for some moments, Resnick and Lynn Kellogg, silence between them.
“How about you, Lynn? Needing a change?”
“No, sir.”
“Good.”
Resnick stood up, Lynn following suit. The last thing he wanted was to lose her, especially to Divine’s crass arrogance: Divine, Naylor, Patel, she was the brightest of them, lacking Patel’s diligence, but her sensibilities were the most finely tuned.
“There shouldn’t be any repetition,” he said, moving with her towards the door. “I’ve made it quite clear what will happen if there’s any retaliation.”
He had left Divine in no doubt that the least false move would result in the carpet being whipped from beneath his feet so fast he would think he was in the Co-op’s Christmas version of Aladdin.
“How’s it coming along at the center?” Resnick asked.
Lynn was submerging herself daily among the shoppers who coursed through the shopping center, on the look-out for a gang of thieves who were getting away with over a thousand pounds’ worth of goods a week. It wasn’t casual, wasn’t kids, though they could be a part of it: it was planned, highly organized, profitable-except for the shopkeepers.
“I suppose there’s no chance of some extra bodies, sir? You know how many shops there are in that place. And these people, whoever they are, they know what they’re doing. Otherwise the store security would have nabbed them by now.”
Resnick held open the office door. “I’ll have a word. See if we can’t liberate a few WPCs out of uniform.”
Lynn Kellogg walked past him with a smile. “Men go shopping as well, you know, sir.”
It had all been, Resnick thought, one hell of a way to start the day. If Lynn Kellogg had kept her fist closed, he thought, chances are that Divine would have gone down for an eight count. He allowed himself a smile at the thought; then frowned again over when he had heard about young Kevin Naylor. First chance he got, he would have him in for a word.
Ahead of him, a top-of-the-range red Citroën came out on to the road too fast, narrowly avoiding a pedestrian exercising his dog. Resnick glimpsed the driver’s tense face as he went past heard, even through the reinforced glass, the bass reverberating through the car’s four speakers.
Pebbles scattered across the pavement from the drive confirmed Resnick’s identification. Either Harold Roy was late for work or else he was glad to be out of the house. He braked with care outside the double garage, shut the car door firmly but not loudly and turned the key to set the lock.
Maria Roy had abandoned any thoughts of driving into the city and spending some more of Harold’s money. In the nine months they had lived there, she felt she had exhausted the best of its possibilities. Those dress shops with a tendency towards the exclusive she had become bored with, and the prospect of buying more tights from John Lewis or another lampshade from Habitat gave her a cold tightening wherever she kept her heart. Maybe she would lounge around this morning, phone a few friends, go in this afternoon and have her hair done, pick up some mussels from Marks and pop them in the microwave when she returned.
For now it was enough to have Harold out of the house.
She flipped back through the pages of the paper, undecided between making a fresh pot of tea or going upstairs to run her bath. That she did neither was due to the ringing of the doorbell.
Through the window she glimpsed the sleeve of an overcoat, white-and-gray herringbone. Only in those last seconds before she opened the door did Maria think it might be her burglar, returned.
What she saw was a man, tall and bare-headed, a brown scarf pushed haphazardly inside the collar of his coat. To Resnick, there was no disguising the surprise, the hint of disappointment in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Resnick said with something of a smile.
She looked up at him, uncomprehending, one hand holding tight to the folds of her robe. “Sorry?”
“Not who you were expecting?”
“Expecting?” For God’s sake, Maria thought, you sound like a ventriloquist’s parrot.
“You looked as if you were expecting somebody …”
“Oh, well, my husband, he left in a hurry …”
“I think I saw him.”
“Driving too fast, that was him. Four times out of five he’s back, swearing because he’s left a script behind.”
Resnick nodded. “I see.” For several moments he said nothing and then: “Don’t you want to know who I am?”