Elaine, leaving the house, low heels clipping the flagged path beside the gravel drive. A suit that had cost a month’s wages and more. Graceful turn of the head and slow. A smile he had seen before. Beside the front garden shrubs, the low stone wall, a sign which read For Sale. The man at the front door, pocketing the keys. Volvo parked at the curb, dark blue. It had been a long time now since Resnick had seen that smile.
When his breathing was back to normal and his hands steady, he continued up the sloping road, circling an irregular block.
The Volvo had gone.
Slowly, Resnick slid into its place.
Viewing Strictly by Appointment Only across the bottom of the sign.
The garden was orderly, just the grass perhaps in need of a trim. The curtains at the upstairs windows had been drawn a uniform third across. Below, the ruched blinds had been set to deny any nosy passerby an easy glance. Resnick sat there for a quarter of an hour and nobody walked past in either direction, there was no sign of movement from inside the house, no sound.
He got out of the car, locked it, and walked up to the front door. Two locks, a Chubb and a Yale. The gate beside the garage was bolted, but a tall man could reach the bolt end on tiptoe. It took seconds, not minutes, to slip the back door lock with an Access card he rarely, if ever, used. Two glasses had been rinsed and left on the drainer to dry; they were not dry yet. Nothing else in the kitchen suggested recent occupation. The air was flat and smelled faintly of lavender, the central heating had been switched off.
Faint, he could see the marks their feet had made upon the stairs.
The toilet had recently been flushed, a fragment of paper flat against the inside of the bowl, a single curl of hair floating dark upon the water. The taps of the hand basin were slightly damp to the touch, bubbles of lather on the purple soap.
In the second bedroom, at the back of the house, the pillows bulked unevenly against the quilted headboard. Resnick lifted up the floral duvet and eased it down towards the foot of the bed, lowered his face towards the imagined indentations at the center of the sheet. Careful, they had left no marks. What remained, unmistakable, was the sour-sweet smell of sex: another scent, the natural odor of Elaine’s body, clinging to it lovingly.
Twenty-Eight
Rains had half of a chicken rogan josh in a plastic container and he was offering it round the CID room when Resnick came in. “How ’bout you, Charlie? Never known you to say no to some free grub.”
Resnick said no.
He went over to his desk and sat shuffling through meaningless pieces of paper, applications for courses, arrest forms, incident reports. Back across the room someone got the most from the punchline to an old joke and someone else laughed. Phones rang and were answered. Business as usual.
Rains dumped the container in the metal bin, wiped his fingers on a pocket handkerchief, lit a cigarette. “That woman, Charlie, Prior’s wife. Knew her, didn’t you? Some time back.” He perched on a corner of Resnick’s desk, leg swinging. “Know her well?”
Resnick opened one of the drawers and took out a notebook, spiral bound.
“Anything I saw may be taken down?” Rains grinned.
Not for the first time, Resnick caught himself wondering how it was that Rains managed to dress the way he did on a DC’s salary. According to gossip from officers who claimed they’d been there, the interior of Rain’s flat looked like something out of an ad for expense-account living. The car he had parked downstairs was a two-year-old Golf GTI.
“You do know her?” Rains said. “Ruth Prior?”
“Not really. Not personally. Who she is, that’s all. Who she used to be.”
“Some singer, right?”
The last time Resnick had heard her, or maybe the next to last, she had done a version of “I’d Rather Go Blind,” so slow, he thought, listening, time must have stopped.
“Yes,” he said. “She was a singer. Local, mostly. Blues, soul, stuff like that.”
“Sort of Tina Turner?”
“If you like.”
“Without the tan.”
Resnick said nothing.
“And she gave it up to marry him, Prior?”
“I suppose so.”
“No kids, though, eh?”
“Not as far as I know.”
Rains let himself down from the desk. “How long d’you reckon it is, then? Since she jacked it all in for a life of domestic bliss?”
“Must be five years at least. Six?”
Rains grinned. “No wonder.”
Resnick’s expression: what?
Still grinning, Rains cupped his crotch in one hand. “Ready for a taste of something fresh.”
“Is she?”
“Yeh. See it in her eyes. Just might not know it yet herself, that’s all.” Midway between Resnick’s desk and the door, Rains looked over and winked. “Married women, they’re a cinch.”
When Elaine got home a shade after six thirty she assumed Resnick had not yet returned. It was only after making herself a pot of tea and opening the tin of lemon creams that, wandering between rooms, she noticed his jacket on the bannister rail.
“Charlie! Charlie, are you here?”
It was quite likely that he could have been in and gone out again; certainly, his car hadn’t been outside.
“Charlie?”
She sat in the comfort of their new settee-the arguments there had been before she’d felt able to go into Hopewells and put a down payment on that-drank her tea, and leafed through a magazine. Unable to concentrate, she knew that something was troubling her: she didn’t feel that she was alone.
“Charlie? You’re not in bed, are you?”
The bedroom was empty, her dressing gown diagonally across the foot of the bed where she had left it. A pair of discarded tights on the floor near the wardrobe and she scooped them up, dropping them in the laundry basket as she walked out of the room towards the last flight of stairs.
“Charlie, whatever are you doing here?”
He was sitting in an old easy chair that had come from his parents’ home, the fabric along the arms worn smooth until the original pattern had all but disappeared.
“What are you doing up here?”
There was new wallpaper on the walls, an old carpet on the floor, a whitewood chest pushed into one corner of the room. Cartons and boxes that had never been emptied since they had moved. Some of them-God! — Elaine knew were stuffed full of rubbish she had kept since leaving schooclass="underline" reports, magazines, pocket-sized diaries crammed with spidery writing, fevered accounts of first kisses and half-conjured dreams. In there somewhere was a scratched Parlophone single: the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“What about?”
It was too dark in the room for her to be able to clearly see his face. Only the light from the stairs lengthening Elaine’s faint shadow.
“You don’t normally come up here.”
“Sometimes I do.”
It occurred to her that were she not able to see him, she might have had difficulty in recognizing his voice.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Work.”
“That girl, the one on the golf course?”
“Yes, that.”
Elaine took a pace back towards the door. “I’ve not long made some tea.”
Resnick nodded. “I’ll be down.”
She hesitated a few moments longer before going back downstairs. When Resnick eventually followed the tea had grown stewed and cold and Elaine was washing salad to go with the grilled chicken breasts they were having for their meal. As Resnick crossed in front of her, taking a beer from the fridge, she didn’t say anything more about the incident and neither did he.
“Ready in about half an hour, that okay?”
“Yes,” Resnick said, pouring the beer over near the sink, “that’ll be fine.”
Prior was channel-hopping, switching between the highlights of the Eurovision Song Contest, a studio discussion about law and order in our cities, and an interview with Spurs’ Argentinian midfield player, Osvaldo Ardiles. “If they win the Cup, it’ll be down to that little bastard,” Prior said over his shoulder. “Lawyer, too, back home.” Prior laughed. “Ever end up in court, reckon I’ll ask for him. Ossie for the defense. Good, eh?”