Back page, front page, page three: what he’d really like was ten minutes to put his feet up, relax with the paper.
Some chance.
“Ideas?” said Resnick, looking round.
Millington, Divine, Naylor, Kellogg, Patel-none of them seemed eager to offer an opinion.
“Family away for its winter fun and high-jinks and all there is by way of security is an alarm box on the wall which hasn’t functioned these last eighteen months. Much the same as the Roy job. What d’you make of that?”
“Luck?” offered Divine, shifting his chair a shade further from the inspector’s desk.
“Whose?” said Resnick.
“Lucky they didn’t get turned over before now,” said Millington. “What’s the point of an alarm that’s not wired up?”
“The appearance, sir,” Patel said, sliding his fingers together. “That is the deterrent.”
Millington turned his face aside, ignoring him.
“Didn’t work that way this time, did it?” said Divine. Resnick drummed a two-fingered pattern on the underside of his desk.
“If it wasn’t fortuitous, sir,” Lynn Kellogg began.
“Wasn’t what?” interrupted Divine.
“Fortuitous. You know, like you said, luck. A lucky chance.”
“Don’t they have that word in the Sun?” asked Naylor, a smile crossing his face, rare these days.
“Only in the crossword,” said Millington, a Mail man through and through.
“Well, if it wasn’t, sir,” said Lynn, looking at Resnick, getting back to the point, “I mean, if whoever did it was working on some kind of information, why did they leave it till the last minute?”
“Maybe they came back early,” said Divine. “The Stanleys.”
“Right,” said Resnick positively. “Good point. Maybe they did. Make sure you find that out when you’re there.”
Good God! Mark Divine was thinking, he actually agreed with something I said.
“Ask about that duff alarm. Who fitted it in the first place, who disconnected it, why?”
“Sir,” said Graham Millington, “wasn’t there a …”
“Lloyd Fossey.”
“Yes, Lloyd. Expected him to be black with a name like that.”
“Or Welsh,” said Divine.
“Wasn’t either. Sutton-in-Ashfield, born and bred. Shifty little bugger. Something wrong with one eye.”
“Fossey worked for one of the local security firms until he was sacked,” Resnick explained. “We thought he might have been working out a grudge …”
“Using what he knew to supplement his dole money,” chipped in Millington.
“But we couldn’t ever tie him in to anything.”
“Slippery bastard.”
“Better luck this time, Graham,” Resnick said.
“Do what I can, sir,” said Millington, “after I’ve got this Chinese business sorted.”
“Another lot of slippery bastards,” said Divine, low-voiced.
“Why do you say that?” asked Patel.
“Nothing,” said Divine.
“But you said …”
“Forget it.”
“No, I should like …”
“Not now,” Resnick said evenly. “I’m due to see the superintendent in ten minutes and that doesn’t leave us enough time to offer Mark guidance in avoiding the pitfalls of racial prejudice.”
“What prejudice?” asked Divine, aggrieved. “All I said was …”
Resnick gave him a hard look and he didn’t say any more.
“I could try and fit it in this afternoon,” Millington said.
“Good. If there’s a problem, see that it’s handled by someone else.” Resnick checked his watch. “Mark, make the Stanley house your first call. Anything that seems important, phone it back in before you move on. Kevin, it would be interesting to know if this place and the one the Roys are renting are insured by the same company. Check back on that last outbreak of similar break-ins, see if there’s any connection there. They’d have access to a lot of information any self-respecting burglar would give a great deal for. See if you can find out who, if anyone, came out to check the properties before insurance cover was agreed. If this is the same team as last time and if they are working on inside knowledge, we won’t be satisfied just catching them, we want the source as well. All right?”
Resnick stood up, signaling a shuffling of feet and scraping of chairs.
“Lynn,” he said, as the officers were filing out, “are you back in the shopping center?”
“Yes, sir.” She sounded less than enthusiastic.
“I might pass through later. I’ll let you buy me a coffee.”
“Right, sir.”
Resnick touched Patel on the arm and the young DC jumped. “You were right to pick up Divine,” he said. “Not that I suppose he understood.”
“No, sir.”
“Perhaps I should have let you try to explain.”
Patel looked back at him without responding.
“Maria Roy,” Resnick said. “How did you find her story?”
“Shaky, sir.”
“Inconsistent?”
“Absolutely.”
“The two men who broke in-she’s still maintaining they were short and black?”
“Tall, sir. Tall and black. They were growing taller all the time I was with her.”
“But still black?”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
Resnick winked at him. “Maybe she’s color-blind?”
“I don’t think so, sir. Not so many people are. In my experience.”
Resnick nodded. “Then I wonder why she’s lying.”
My God! thought Maria Roy. What is it that’s the matter with me? I should be seeing some kind of doctor, some psychiatrist, not standing here, hiding in doorways, waiting to meet a man I don’t know. A criminal. She thought her breath was coming so quickly, so loudly, that the other women moving past her, in and out of Debenhams, could surely hear. She took her hands from her pockets, pulled off her gloves, finger by finger, returned her hands to the pockets, gloves bunched inside them. What had she chosen this coat for? It didn’t even look smart. She put up the collar and then pulled it down again; it made her look like a spy and besides, it didn’t do a thing for her color. The hands on the clock high above the Council House were taking forever to reach eleven. And even then she had no way of knowing for certain that he would come. No: that she knew.
She was refastening the top button on her coat when she saw him, Grabianski, threading his way between shifting gray clusters of pigeons in the square.
Resnick liked to sit on the end stool, either that or the one next to it. That would be the side of the stall that placed him close to the perspex container of orange juice and the milkshake maker, not the heating unit that kept sausage rolls and pasties lukewarm.
“Ten minutes,” said Sarah, one of the two girls who worked there. “All right?”
Resnick gestured with the upturned palm of his hand, all right. The espresso machine was like an old-fashioned train; every so often you had to wait for it to get up steam.
Two ladies in their late fifties sat down and dumped their bags of shopping, ordering cups of tea as they lit their cigarettes. Most of the other customers were stallholders in the indoor market, drinking from their own mugs which were kept beneath the counter, making jokes.
Resnick was thinking about what Skelton had said as he was leaving the superintendent’s office: “The source of this information, Charlie, if there is a source-you don’t suppose it could be closer to home?”
“Stop it,” Maria said.
“Stop what?”
“You know what.”
“What?”
“Staring.”
They were upstairs above a card shop, a place that called itself a tearooms, though neither of them was drinking tea. They had the window seat and a view down across the city center, the square with its latter-day punks and its alcoholics sharing the spray from the fountains, the splendid gray stone of the Council House at the far end, the municipal mosaic and the carved lions at either end of broad steps. A bus, green and two-thirds empty, slid by, turning up the sloped street that would lift it towards the columns of the renovated theater. A news vendor shouted the arrival of the first edition. A flotilla of truant kids sailed by on roller-skates. Couples paused beside a rail of leather coats, reduced. Young men in shirt-sleeves, mustaches and tattoos. Ordinary people doing ordinary things.