Best part of twenty minutes he’d been watching it now and still he couldn’t be certain.
First off, he marked it down as a wren, tiny brown bird with its tilted tail. Marvelous the way it crept between the branches and under wisps of dried grass the wind had lifted there and spread. Calling no attention to itself, like the best of thieves. Except, of course, when it sang. Then the sound it made was loud and clear, surprisingly penetrating for such a tiny bird. Which, of course, was what made him think that it was not a wren.
The song, when finally it came, was short and not so sweet. Grabianski had refocused, watched more closely. The tail-the tail was wrong; instead of tilting up it followed the curve of the back, spreading wide instead of moving to a point. And the underside-wasn’t that a show of white?
When it climbed, without faltering, straight up the sheer trunk of tree, he knew: it was certhia familaris. A tree creeper.
Grabianski went back up on to his toes and scanned along the branches, this way, then that. Ah! There! Finger and thumb turning a fraction, he honed in. Yes. Look at the way the beak curves down so it can get at insects buried in the bark.
“Grabianski!”
The shout surprised him and he had to grab the back of the chair to prevent himself from toppling off.
“You want to watch out. There’s a law against that sort of thing, you know.”
The entrance to the station was chock-a-block with Chinese. It was enough to make Resnick, as he made his way through with his lunch, guilty for not having sweet-and-sour pork, a couple of spring rolls at least. What he had was pastrami and horseradish on black bread, Jarlsberg and parma ham on caraway with rye, two fat gherkins wrapped in shiny white paper.
“What’s going on?” he asked the nearest constable once he was inside the door.
The PC gestured towards the stairs. “Your sergeant, sir. Got one of them in interrogation.”
Resnick nodded and continued on his way. When he knocked on the door of the interview room and peered around it, Graham Millington was face to face with a bespectacled Chinaman wearing a red tuxedo with dark velvet lapels. There was a tape recorder on the desk between them and it seemed to be recording a lot of silence.
Resnick closed the door softly and went along the corridor to the CID room. Patel was trying to reach the boiling kettle with one hand without losing his grasp of the telephone into which he was talking.
“Yes, madam,” he said with exquisite politeness, although Resnick sensed that he was saying it for the umpteenth time. “Yes, madam. Yes.”
Resnick stepped around him and lifted the kettle clear. He made a sign at Patel that suggested tea.
Patel smiled and nodded.
“Yes, madam,” he said. “I really think the best thing for me to do is transfer you to the duty sergeant. Yes, I am sure he will take care of the matter. Promptly, yes. Yes. Good day.”
Resnick dropped tea bags into the pot while the DC transferred the call.
“Anything interesting?” he asked when Patel had set down the phone.
“Peeping Tom,” said Patel. He seemed to find the idea mildly amusing.
“Bring me through a cup when it’s had time to mash.”
“Yes, sir.”
Before Resnick could retreat inside his office the phones had rung twice more. He slit the brown paper bag down one side with his Biro and opened it out, an improvised tablecloth. It was either that or get vinegar all over his team’s reports. Well, today it would be vinegar; most usually, a mixture of mustard and mayonnaise.
He was biting into his first gherkin when Patel came through with his tea; savoring the second when Millington knocked and entered, his face a picture of grief.
“I don’t want to be racist, but that bugger’s bleeding inscrutable.”
“You don’t need an interpreter?”
“Bloody mind-reader, more like.”
“Want me to have a go at him?”
“No disrespect, sir, but I was wondering if Lynn might have any luck?”
“Feminine wiles, Graham?”
“Not exactly, sir. Thought he might not find it so easy to stare at her and play dumb. Respect women in their culture, don’t they?”
What they did, Resnick thought, was bind their feet.
“Mean taking her out of the center,” Resnick said.
“No more than an hour, sir.”
“Okay.”
Millington nodded and rose to go.
“Fire officer’s report, Graham-got that now, have we?”
“Came through earlier, sir.”
Resnick made a point of looking at his desk. “Not to me.”
“I’ll pass it through, sir.”
“Good.”
Jesus! Millington thought as he shuffled papers around on his desk, I’ve just got to leave him one loophole and he gets me through it every time. Straightening with the report, he saw Patel smiling gently at him from across the room. You’re the one I should let loose on him, Millington said to himself, turning away, then you could have a high old time being sly and devious to one another. In for a racist penny, in for a pound.
The jewelry was sent Red Star to a highly respectable Glasgow silversmith, who, some short time later, made a transfer of funds under an assumed name, equally into two accounts. These accounts, needless to say, were also held under pseudonyms. At intervals which coincided with the determining of interest, money from these accounts was filtered through to the Isle of Man.
It was Grice’s idea and his particular pleasure, annually, to fly over to Douglas, ostensibly to check on their financial affairs; in reality his cherished ambition, so far in vain, was to be present when one of the TT riders came off his bike going into a hairpin bend.
Once a year, Grice and Grabianski had what Grice liked to call a financial summit. Aside from those periods when they were “working,” this was the only occasion the two men met. They took their equal share of any proceeds and used it only in such ways as would not compromise the operation or increase the risk of discovery. Grice had purchased a small villa in the north of Portugal, well clear of any riff-raff (by which he meant the British or German varieties), and occasionally indulged himself on a flight to visit an old friend in Australia, via a number of Far Eastern brothels and massage parlors.
Grabianski had a time-share in a Forestry Commission cabin in the Scottish Highlands and one of the smaller houses in Macclesfield, a location that put him within easy each of both the Peaks and the Pennines. Each year he traveled overseas with the Ramblers Association-so far, he had walked Turkey, Crete, the Himalayas, New Zealand and was working himself up to Peru.
They were two men with little or nothing in common, aside from a shared trade or craft. They didn’t like one another, but then they didn’t have to. What they both were was careful. Contacts they cultivated assiduously; usually Grabianski softened them up and then Grice took over and kept their spirits keen and their pockets never quite full enough. Cities they treated as provident farmers did their fields-every so often, they were left to lie fallow.
“I’ve been thinking about this kilo,” Grice said.
“Mm?”
“I think we’ll give them the chance to buy it back.”
Resnick ate his last piece of pastrami and washed it down with a mouthful of cold tea. He could see Naylor moving around in the outer office and knew he should call him in and have a talk-trouble with sleeping? Debbie still experiencing difficulties? Not to worry, happens to the best regulated of families. But if you’d like to talk about it …
Resnick knew that that was just about the last thing, right then, he wanted to do. He picked up Millington’s preliminary report and scanned it through. The man he was interviewing owned several restaurants and had a controlling share in others. His youngest son had incurred his wrath by marrying into a local family, non-Chinese, and opening his own restaurant and takeaway.