Before the applause for her first song had begun to fade, she had signaled to the keyboard player, closed her eyes, thrown back her head, beaten in the tempo with an open hand against her thigh.
Slow blues in three flats.
Wedged into the middle of the floor, Ben Riley and the stoop-shouldered girl stood with their arms around each other, scarcely moving.
“Wasted years …” Ruth sang, raw-edged.
“Sure you don’t want to dance?” Lesley’s voice close by Resnick’s shoulder.
“No, thanks. Really.”
A suit-yourself shrug and she was turning away.
Every night I spend waiting
All those dreams and wasted tears,
Every minute, every second, babe,
The worst of all my fears
When you walk back through my door again,
All you’ll have for me are empty arms,
And empty promises,
And ten more, ten more, oh baby,
Ten more wasted years.
The band driving hard behind her, the final note torn and ugly, a wrench of pain. Arms loose now by her sides, she stood, head bowed. Applause. Resnick finished his pint and checked his watch. Early shift. Ben Riley no longer in sight. He left his plastic glass on the corner of the bar, rather than have it splintered underfoot. A final glance over his shoulder as he moved towards the door.
“Hey!” A woman’s voice, sharp and aggrieved.
“I’m sorry.”
“I should think so, too.”
“I was just …”
“Leaving. Yes, I can see. And I was coming in.”
“I didn’t mean …”
“Difference was, I was looking where I was going.”
“Look, I said, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else …”
“To say. No, I don’t suppose you do. Walking all over my feet like that. It’s a wonder I didn’t go flying back down the stairs. And don’t stand there grinning.”
Resnick bit his lip and looked at her seriously: not tall, around the same age as himself, mid-twenties, not pretty, anger bringing brightness to her eyes, a glow to her skin. Her shoe, where he had trodden on it, was scuffed; her tights were torn.
He reached towards his pocket. “Maybe I could buy you …?”
“A new pair of tights? Don’t bother.”
“I was thinking more of a drink.”
“What?” Eyes widening. “And pour it down my front.”
“Elaine,” a voice said off to the side and Resnick realized for the first time that she was not alone.
“All right,” she said, withering Resnick with one more look as she squeezed past. “Coming.”
Outside on the bank, the water looked dark. Buses moved in slow convoy across the bridge, heading towards the lights of the city. Gravel crunched lightly underfoot. “Elaine,” Resnick said quietly, testing the name on his tongue. It would be more than four years before he would say it to her face.
Two
1992
“Espresso, inspector?”
“Please.”
“Full, yes?”
Resnick nodded and unfolded the early edition of the local paper, thumbing through the pages in search of hard news, knowing he wouldn’t like what he found. Fifteen-year-old youth wounded by four girls in knife attack; old woman of eighty-three robbed and raped; Asian shopkeeper driven from estate by racist taunts and threats of violence. In the magistrates’ court, a man explaining why he pushed a petrol bomb through his neighbor’s letter box-“Night and day they had this music playing, night and day. I asked them to turn it down but they never took no notice. Something inside me just snapped.”
Setting the newspaper aside, Resnick sipped the strong coffee and, for a moment, closed his eyes.
The Italian coffee stall was located among the market stalls on the upper level of one of the city’s two shopping centers. Vegetables, fruit, and flowers, fish and meat and bread, Afro-Caribbean and Asian specialties; the two Polish delicatessen stalls where Resnick did much of his shopping, replying to greetings offered in his family’s language with the flattened vowels of the English Midlands. His stubborn use of English was not a slight; merely a way of saying I was born here, this city, this is where I was brought up. These streets. Eyes open, Resnick scanned the other customers sitting round the U-shaped stalclass="underline" middle-aged shoppers whose varicose veins were giving them gyp; mums with kids who couldn’t make up their minds which flavor milk shake and would never sit still; old men with rheumy eyes who sat for hours over the same strong tea; the photography student from the Poly who drank two cappuccinos back to back and whose fingers smelt of chemicals; the solicitor who could eat a doughnut without getting as much as a granule of sugar on the skirt of her power suit; the tramp who waited till someone bought him a drink, then skulked off by the photo machine to finish it, legs visible through the rags of his trousers. These people.
Angled across from where Resnick was sitting, Suzanne Olds licked her finger ends clean with the fastidious delicacy of one of his cats. Lifting her leather briefcase from the floor, she slid from her stool and approached. The last time they had spoken, one of the solicitor’s clients had been up on five charges under sections 18 and 47 of the Offenses Against the Person Act, shuffling alibis like a dog-eared pack of cards.
“Inspector.”
“Ms Olds.”
“I was at dinner with a new colleague of yours a few nights ago. Helen Siddons. Very bright. Sharp.” Suzanne Olds smiled. “Aware of the issues.”
“I thought crime was the issue: solving it, preventing it.”
Suzanne Olds laughed. “Come off it, Inspector, you’re not as naive as that.”
Resnick watched her walk away, incongruously elegant and somewhat intimidating as she passed between local-grown spinach and pink and white shell suits, the latter greatly reduced, council clothing vouchers welcomed. He had met Helen Siddons a number of times since she joined the local force; transferred from Sussex, detective inspector at twenty-nine, eighteen months and she would have moved on. A graduate with a degree in law, she was being propelled by the Home Office along a fast track towards the highest ranks. She should be looking at Assistant Chief Constable by the time she was forty. Resnick could see how well she and Suzanne Olds would have got along; serious conversations between courses about the sexism endemic in the force, racism, the errors-careless or malicious-in police evidence which had led to conviction after conviction being so publicly overturned.
Why was it, when he agreed, at heart, with most of the beliefs women like Helen Siddons and Suzanne Olds held, he found it so hard to give them his support? Was it simply that he found them a threat? Or the almost certain feeling that the support of men like himself, career coppers for more than twenty years, would not be welcomed?
“Another?” asked the stall owner, whisking his cup into the air.
Tempted, Resnick checked his watch and shook his head. “Got to be off. Important meeting. Maybe see you later. Cheers.”
And he ambled away, shoulders hunched, a wave at the man from the fish stall forever on at him about giving a bit of a talk to the Church Fellowship, a bulky man in a shiny suit that had been beautifully tailored by his uncle more than fifteen years before-for somebody else and not for him.
Reg Cossall was standing on the steps of the central police station, swopping tales of arson with the senior officer from the fire station alongside.