“Anything to eat?” Resnick said over her shoulder.
She didn’t look round. “Cold chicken in the fridge.”
“You?”
“I had lunch.”
“It’s supper.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Resnick opened a pot of Dijon mustard and dipped pieces of three-day-old chicken into it, eating absentmindedly as he scanned the local paper, the urban ghetto scare stories in the Mail. In the front room he put a record on the stereo, realized he wasn’t listening and switched off.
“How about the Club? I wouldn’t mind a drink.”
Elaine turned slowly. “The Polish Club.”
“Where else?”
“I thought you’d allowed your membership to lapse?”
Resnick shrugged. “A chance to rejoin.”
“You go. I ought to finish this.”
For some moments Resnick struggled to summon up the interest to ask what this was. “Maybe meet me there later?” he said.
“Maybe.”
“I shan’t be late,” he called from the hall.
If Elaine responded, he failed to hear.
Somewhere in his teens, for reasons he would have found difficult now to clearly remember or define, Resnick had turned against his parents’ Polish culture. Perhaps it was no more than what teenagers did. The young Resnick as James Dean. He recalled seeing the film, Rebel Without a Cause, most of his sympathies flowing to Dean’s father, poor Jim Backus, wearing an apron and embarrassed, standing mortified upon the stairs, flinching from the anger of his son’s tirade.
For Resnick it had been less dramatic, more gradual; little by little he had stopped answering his parents in their native tongue, speaking in his own instead. The boys at school had rechristened him Charlie long since and Charlie he had been happy to become.
Sitting now with an iced glass of lemon vodka, he felt he was visiting a strange country, stranded in the past. Photographs on the walls of men in uniform, decorations for lost wars. The bartender in his neat white jacket looked along at him and smiled. At round tables heads were lowered in desperate conversation. Suddenly standing, he swallowed down the remainder of his vodka and pushed through the doors into the street.
The city was soft red brick, broken by green trees. For more than an hour he walked it aimlessly, nodding to people whenever they passed.
The phone rang a little shy of four a.m. and Resnick reached mistakenly for the alarm. By the time he had propped himself on one elbow and lifted the receiver, Elaine was awake as well, looking at him reproachfully from her side of the bed. Resnick listened, grunted a few times in agreement and broke the connection.
“What is it?” she asked as he swung his feet towards the floor. “This time of night.”
“Morning,” Resnick said, beginning to assemble his clothes. “It’s morning, more or less. They found a woman, Mapperley Plains, out on the golf course.”
Resnick read the question in her eyes.
“No,” he said. “She’s alive. Pretty badly beaten, apparently. They’ve taken her to Queens.”
“Why phone you?”
Without looking in the mirror, Resnick was fastening his tie. “Case I’m involved in. Some chance there’s a connection.”
“Charlie,” she said, when he was at the door.
“Yes?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. You’d better go.”
Car headlights cut soft channels through the slight mist; the surface of the grass was bright with dew. Unseen, birds stirred up the day. There was still an indentation where the body had been found, midway to the seventh hole, nestling the edge of the rough. Yellow tape marked off the spot.
The uniformed officer who had found her was still there, peaked cap circling round and round between his fingers, Panda car parked close with the others, static and occasional voices from its radio spilling out across the green.
“Caretaker rang in,” he told Resnick, “reckoned how he’d heard this car. Couple of break-ins past month or so. Worried this might be another. Drove out and checked around like. Just on my way when I heard this sound.” His gaze flickered away to the markings on the ground. “It were the girl.”
Resnick nodded, understanding the startled expression that survived at the back of the young officer’s eyes. He and Ben Riley had been that young once, stumbling upon their first assault victims, pretending that it didn’t affect them, needing to show they didn’t care.
“No doubt who she is?”
The constable shook his head. “Bag was off in the bushes. Must’ve got thrown, no telling who by.”
Versions of the scene were already playing themselves out in Resnick’s mind.
The handbag was plastic, creased shiny black. Inside were several tissues, crumpled and used, a lipstick labeled Evening Rose, three Lillets, a packet of condoms with two remaining, a small tan diary in which little had been written-entries Resnick recognized as the names of pubs, a handful of names-at the front, on the page headed Personal Details, she had written Marie Jacob, five foot three, brown eyes, brown hair, no birth date, an address in Arnold.
Resnick remembered the photograph Rains had brought in from Mary MacDonald’s empty room, two women on the front at Great Yarmouth, smiling, squinting their eyes against the sun. Mary and Marie.
“She’d been cut,” the constable said. “Across the face. Here.”
With the tip of his index finger he drew a line diagonally down from below the lobe of his ear, almost to the cleft of his chin.
“And beaten. Knocked around pretty bad. Time I found her, this eye, it were good as closed.”
Resnick nodded, picturing it clearly. “No sign of any weapon?”
The young PC shook his head.
“Give the light half an hour, maybe a little more. Then get a search organized. Thorough. Every blade of grass. If the weapon’s here, we want it found.”
They could wash away the caked blood and the dirt, replace the blood, lessen the pain; what they could not do was remove the fear.
“I don’t know,” Marie said in an accent so soft that Resnick had to lean over her face to hear. “I don’t know who he was.”
Her lips were swollen and cracked.
“I met him, earlier, you know. We were on the golf course for a bit of business when he started in hitting me, no reason at all.”
She motioned that her mouth was dry and Resnick lifted the glass from the bedside table, was gentle as he could be, one hand raising her head so that she could drink through a bendy straw.
“No,” she said, voice fading near to nothing. “I never knew him. Never saw him before.”
When Resnick held photographs before her she blinked her eyes and barely shook her head. She cried. Resnick sat there till the staff nurse tapped him on the shoulder and then he left.
“Believe her, Charlie?”
“No, sir. Not really. Could be telling the truth, of course, but no, I don’t think she’s giving us all she knows.”
“Just a feeling, or have you got something more?”
“Just a feeling.”
Skelton stood by the window, looking out. Below, a line of lockup garages, factories with raised roofs, and a few neat streets of council houses beyond. In the middle distance the floodlight towers of both soccer grounds pushed up against the sky. Farther still, the green of a solitary hill. “Prior,” he said, turning back into the room. “You think Rains could have been right.”
Right as Rains: it didn’t even raise a smile.
“Don’t want to, do you, Charlie?”
“Maybe not.”
“No more your methods than mine.”
“No.”
“But within hours of us lifting him, both women Rains says might have dropped him in it …” Skelton shook his head. “One’s in hospital, terrified half out of her wits, and the other … Well, we don’t know where she is at all, do we?”
“Manchester,” Resnick said. “They’re still checking.”
“Let’s hope with some success.”
Resnick thought about Marie Jacob’s face and prayed the inspector was right.