“Couple of uniforms checked her address,” Skelton said. “Nothing useful there at all. But then, they wouldn’t look with your eyes.”
“I’ll get out there,” Resnick said. “Poke around.”
Skelton nodded, giving each of his shirt cuffs a little tug before turning back to the window. When he had applied for the transfer, accepted the promotion, he had failed to realize how different it would be, less than a hundred miles north and close to the Trent. How hard to slot in. He hoped that, as his wife was in the habit of suggesting, he had not perpetrated one of the major miscalculations of his life.
Twenty-Seven
Resnick spent forty minutes with a sixty-eight-year-old man who was convinced he had come about his stolen bike. “Locked the bugger up in the entry an’ everything. Right t’the bloody fence. Side entry along of the house. Safe enough you’d say, aye, so did I. But it weren’t, you see. Some clever sod’s snuck round there with bolt clippers, right through bloody lock, less time than it takes to crack an egg. Wouldn’t mind so much, but I’ve had that bike-Raleigh, good ’un, made good ’uns in those days-had that bike, must be-what? — well, dozen year at least. Maybe more. Who’d want to steal a bike like that? Spite, that’s what I put it down to. Spite or cussed-ness, ’cause they’ll not get much for it. All them fancy colored jobs with half-assed handlebars and great thick frames, that’s what they want nowadays. Not solid and dependable, like mine.”
He looked across his back kitchen at Resnick, a wiry man with a shiny bullet head and a neat graying moustache, braces hanging down either side of his trousers.
“Got so,” he said, “you can’t leave anything out your sight more’n a minute or it’s gone. Thieving bastards’d have the shirt off your back if they thought as they’d get away with it.” He shook his head. “That bike, my lifeline were that. Now it’s bloody gone.”
Resnick phoned through and checked the crime number, established that no progress had been made. Truth was, though they might catch the thief, the bike would already have been sold intact or stripped down for parts.
He accepted several cups of tea, each stronger than the last, sipping from a thick china cup, the inside of which was stained with overlapping rings of orangey brown. Trying hard not to look at his watch, he listened while the man talked about his son in Australia, the grandchildren he had never seen, the stroke that had taken his wife-God rest her-early from the world. Agreed that Tommy Lawton was the best center forward this country had ever had-bits of kids nowadays with these flash cars, won’t as much as kick a ball without there’s someone there fanning ’em with a check.
Resnick had seen players in the County side the past few seasons, would have found it difficult to kick anything without the aid of an on-the-pitch injection.
“I don’t want you to think,” the man said, showing Resnick to the door, “as I’m one of those who can’t keep up with the times, forever rattling on about how much better everything was when they were young, ’cause I’m not. Not by a long chalk. But I’ll say one thing and I know you’ll bear me out, folk were a lot more honest in them days, folk round here, ordinary folk I’m talking of now, like you and me. Why, twenty year back, I’d gone off down the shops, I’d not so much’ve bothered to’ve locked this front door, never mind bike. Now-well, you know about now well as I do.”
Resnick thanked him for the tea and walked past the bushes of roses that needed pruning, out of the gate and on to the street. The house was three doors down from Marie Jacob’s address and the old man thought he might have seen her once or twice, but couldn’t be sure. “Time I might have looked at a bit of skirt,” he’d said, “now you are going back a fair while. Not that I wasn’t above a thing or two when wind were in right direction.” And he’d winked and grinned and Resnick had grinned back, men together, talking the way men did, in the old days and now.
Marie Jacob had lived with her aunt, a short, plumpish woman who was struggling to move an easy chair down the stairs and into the middle room when Resnick rang the bell. He took off his jacket and helped, finally forcing the legs past the frame of the final door with a shove that stripped away several layers of paint and the skin from his own forefinger.
“Here,” Clarise Jacob said, “let me put a plaster on that. You’ll not want it turning all gangrenous on you, sure you won’t.”
Despite his protestations, Resnick found himself sat firmly down, while the woman fussed and cleaned and smeared his finger with Germolene before wrapping it in Elastoplast with a technique which leaned heavily on the early Egyptians.
“I never asked her a great deal, you know, about her life. I mean, she’s a grown woman.” Clarise smiled. “More so than me. I’m only four foot eleven, did you know that? Can’t even see over the counter at the bank without I’ve got my high heels.”
“Marie,” Resnick prompted. “You don’t know who she might have been meeting last night?”
Clarise Jacob pursed her lips. “Like I say, I was never one to interfere. As long as, you know, she came across at the end of the month with her little bit of rent.” She looked at Resnick directly. “Family or no, bills’ve got to be paid. Either that or we’d all be out on the street.”
Exactly, Resnick thought, where Marie was earning her money in the first place.
“You’d know, though, what time she left?”
“I would. I would. You’re right. It couldn’t have been before ten, on account of I was still watching the box. I made a habit of turning it off, you know, right at the start of the news.” She studied Resnick’s face seriously again. “It’s not good for you, that’s the thing, too much of it, you see.”
Whether she meant television or news, Resnick wasn’t clear. “I wonder …” he began, getting to his feet.
“If you can see her room. Oh, sure. Though those two boys earlier, they did the same.” She escorted him up the stairs. “I’ll not speak ill of her behind her back, specially after what happened, but, you’ll see, the tidiest soul on this planet she was not.”
The walls were covered with posters of rock stars and the previous Pope; almost every available surface was covered with a riot of clothing, garments of all designs and colors.
“The officers who searched earlier,” Resnick asked, “they weren’t responsible for this?”
“Oh, no. They did a bit of tidying up.”
“Did you ever hear her,” Resnick asked, “mention a man by the name of Prior? John Prior?” He was back downstairs now, towering over Clarise Jacob in her tiny hall.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not being a lot of help at all.”
Resnick slipped the lock on the front door. “Anything you think of later that might be relevant, give me a call. I’ve left my name and number.”
“All right. And, ooh, when you’re making out your report, it’s Clarise with an S, R-I-S-E. Everyone always gets it wrong. Bye-bye.”
Eleven minutes past two: if I were a social worker, Resnick thought, I might consider I’d had a pretty good morning. The Fiesta in front of him swerved outwards to avoid an aging pigeon and Resnick braked hard, then swore as the engine stalled. He had vaguely intended to call in at home, but that was enough to change his mind; if he took one of these turnings to the right, that would bring him down onto the Mansfield Road. He was humming one of those Parker tunes with unpronounceable names, beating his fingers against the wheel, when he saw a woman walking out of a house a little off to the right. The house was quite substantial, thirties probably, set back from the road; the woman, wearing a blue suit, smart, turned her head to look back at the man who was now locking the front door and she was smiling. It was Elaine.
Resnick accelerated clear, took the next road to the left, a narrow street curving back up the hill, swung in between two parked cars, switched off the engine and applied the brake. Suddenly, in the sealed space of the car, he could hear his own breathing, smell his own sweat. He was starting to shake.