Cutting Edge (3 page)

She held the door open with her hip and dragged, then pulled, Fletcher inside. No part of him seemed to be moving, other than what she moved for him. As best she could, Karen turned him on to his back and lowered her face until it was close to his; her fingers fidgeted at his wrists, searching for a pulse. She tried not to look at his wounds, along which dark knots of blood had begun to coagulate.

“Tim!” She shouted his name as if the force of the cry might waken him. “Tim!”

With a soft swoosh an articulated lorry moved beneath the bridge, its lights catching Karen’s face as she stood. Fletcher’s Walkman lay close by the inner door and, irrationally, she stooped to make sure it was in the
off
position, the battery not wasting.

She hurried through to the hospital, willing her legs to run but getting no response, the squeak, squeak of her trainers on the hard, grooved rubber following her across. She didn’t know whether she was leaving Tim Fletcher alive or dead.

It took several moments for Karen to make clear what had happened, but from there all was quiet speed and efficiency. If the casualty officer who spoke to Karen was surprised, he did nothing to betray it. All she saw of Tim were blankets, a stretcher being wheeled between curtains. All she heard were the same quiet voices. Transfusion. Consciousness. Surgery. They sat her in a corner and gave her, eventually, tea, sweet and not quite warm, in a ribbed and colored plastic cup.

“Is he all right?”

“Try not to worry.”

“Will he be all right?”

Unhurried footsteps, walking away.

“God!” Tim Fletcher had exclaimed, that first time in her room. “God!” Staring at her face, her breasts. “You’re perfect!”

“Miss?”

Karen’s fingers tightened around the cup, glancing up. The police officer had gingery hair and a face that reminded her of her younger brother; he held his helmet against his knee, tapping it lightly, arhythmically, against the blue of his uniform.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you might answer a few questions?”

Karen’s chest tightened beneath her purple jumper and she began to cry.

The officer glanced around, embarrassed.

“Miss …”

The crying wasn’t going to stop. He squatted down in front of her, took the cup from her hands and rested it on the floor beside his helmet. In the three months he’d been on the force, Paul Houghton had stepped between four youths squaring up with bottles after closing; he had lifted a panicking three-year-old from a second-floor window and out on to a ladder, close to the end of one shift, he’d followed screams and curses to an alley back of a pub and found a middle-aged man on all fours, the dart that his girlfriend had hurled at his face still embedded, an inch below the eye. In each case, he’d acted, never really stopped to think. Now he didn’t know what to do.

“It’s okay,” he said, uncertain, reaching out to pat her hand. She grabbed hold of his fingers and squeezed them hard.

“Maybe you’d like another cup of tea?” he suggested.

When she shook her head, Karen’s breath caught and the tears became sobs. Inconsolable. Bubbles appeared at both nostrils and, with his free hand, Paul Houghton fished into his pocket and found a tissue, already matted with use.

“Here,” he said, dabbing gingerly.

Heads were turned, staring.

“Rotten bugger!” a woman shouted. “Leave the girl alone.”

“Stick ’em in a uniform,” commented another, “and they think they can do as they bloody like!”

“I’m sorry,” breathed Karen, using the soiled tissue to wipe round her eyes, finally to blow her nose.

“S’all right.”

He wasn’t like her brother, Karen thought, looking at him through blurred lashes, he was younger. She felt sorry for him then, beyond the mere platitude, meaning it.

Karen handed him back his scrappy tissue and he stuffed it out of sight, standing. The backs of his legs ached and he wanted to rub them, but didn’t. He took his notebook from his breast pocket.

“I shall have to ask you some questions,” he said, blushing.

Resnick had finally got to bed at four and found himself unable to sleep. Miles and Bud were a weight at the bottom of the covers and Ed Silver’s broken snoring filtered up from the floor below, nudging him where he didn’t want to go.

Didn’t you used to have a wife, Charlie?

No cats then and every penny counted. DC’s pay. Elaine had kept the house well, having been the one to see it first, boxed advert in the paper,
must be viewed to be appreciated
. Walking him round from room to room, hand in his or beneath the arm, guiding.
That fireplace, Charlie. Look. Isn’t it wonderful
?The mortgage had stretched them fine, his salary and hers; evenings of repapering and painting; front and back garden some nights till dark.
Just as well I’m working, Charlie. Without that, I don’t know where we’d be
.

Back in Lenton, Resnick’s answer, unspoken, St Anne’s or Sneinton, a two-bedroom terraced with a bricked-in yard and a front lawn you could clip in fifteen minutes with a pair of shears.

Time a-plenty for moving, he might have said. When we need the room.

All that early interest in real estate, it prepared Elaine for the man she was to go off with, eventually, when the tacky weeks of subterfuge were at an end. That Tuesday afternoon when Resnick had driven through Woodthorpe, not his usual route at all, cutting down from Mapperley Plains, he had seen the dark blue Volvo first, parked with its near-side wheels on the curb, close to the For Sale sign at the gate. A man in a three-piece suit, not tall, keys in hand, walking towards it. And a pace behind him, buttoning up the tailored jacket that she wore for work, Elaine. Still smiling.

How many other empty properties she had visited with her lover, how many evenings she had passed in his Volvo, discreetly parked, Resnick had not wanted to know. Later, all out in the open, in court, nothing left to lose, Elaine had made sure that he did.

Knowing hadn’t meant that he understood. Not exactly, not quite. The mystery of living with someone for so long and never really knowing them, little more than how they like their tea, the wrist on which they wore a watch, which angle they prefer to lie in bed.

Not long ago there had been three letters: the first two close together, the third after a gap of several months. There had been no mistaking the writing and by the time the last arrived, curiosity had got the better of him. He had read the first sentences quickly, the first communication from Elaine in almost ten years; glanced at the end, where she had written,
Love
. After tearing it, he had taken it into the kitchen and burned it.

Ed Silver had stopped snoring; the cats were curled into each other and still. Without meaning to, Resnick slept.

“How’d it go at the hospital, Ginge? Waste of time?”

Paul Houghton fidgeted with a collar that was always too tight. “Not exactly, Sarge.”

“Let’s be having it, then.”

Only a brief way into Houghton’s verbal report, the sergeant interrupted him, picked up the phone and dialed the uniformed inspector on night duty.

“If you’ve a minute, sir, you might care to come through … Right, sir. Yes.”

He set the receiver down and looked across at Paul Houghton with a half-grin. “Making a bit of a habit of this, aren’t you? Darts, sharp implements.”

Houghton shrugged. “Suppose so, Sarge.”

“Girl as found him, all right, was she?”

“Upset, Sarge, naturally, but …”

“No, I mean was she
all right
?”

He could feel the red rising up his neck. “I didn’t really …”

“Held her hand, did you? You know, make her feel better.”

Paul Houghton was blushing so strongly that the backs of his eyes had begun to water.

Five

Season of mists and bollocking fruitfulness! Okay, it meant, with any luck, he’d be back in the First XV, a few jugs after the match, but that apart, what was it? Gray mornings when your car wouldn’t start on account of the tossing damp and alternate Saturdays when, instead of playing a proper game, you were on overtime babysitting a bunch of pissed-up morons with shit for brains and arseholes where their mouths were supposed to be. Christ! Mark Divine thought, if there was one thing that summed autumn up for him, that was it. Hanging around the railway station waiting for some excursion special so you could crocodile a mob from Manchester or Liverpool or Chelsea (they were the worst, Chelsea, the ones for whom he saved his real loathing, no doubt about it) across the river to trade insults and worse with the Forest fans massed at the Trent End.

That was autumn, not the poncey crap Yeats or Keats or whoever reckoned it to be. And he’d seen that other soft bastard, not Keats or Yeats, six foot under the pair of them, dead from the neck down now as well as up, not them but Quentin, that bloody teacher, the one who had them all learning that gobbledegook, standing up and reading it out. Clearly, clearly, what are you mumbling into your boots for? That’s it, Mark, you read it for us. Good and strong. Wonderful, Divine! Smirking at his own stupid joke, rest of the kids sniggering and making faces, bending their hands at him like he was some kind of poofter. As if it wasn’t hard enough, going through school with a name like Divine, without some clever-clever bastard taking the piss out of him in front of everyone.

Still, he’d seen him, Quentin, just the other week, standing in line at the post office, waiting to get his old-age pension most likely, poor old sod with one leg locked like he had bad arthritis and dandruff spread over the back of his jacket as though someone had been at his scalp with a cheese grater. Given Divine a lot of satisfaction that had, thinking about him shuffling off home to read some crap about getting old, dying.

It still brought a smile to his face now, signaling right going round Canning Circus, weather forecast on the radio, five to seven driving into the station for the early shift.

Divine spun the wheel hard, loosening his grip as it swung back, straightening before turning again, left this time, across the pavement and into the car park. One good thing about coming in at this time, always plenty of room. He grabbed his jacket from the rear seat and locked the car door. The only good thing, just about. The night’s files to sort through, prisoners in and out, messages to be arranged into two sets, national and local, all of that so that the DI didn’t stand there with his mouth gaping open when he took the briefing at eight.

Like as not there’d been the usual rash of burglaries in the small hours and that would account for the best part of his day, his responsibility, trying to have patience with some stupid cow who left the kitchen window open to let the air circulate and didn’t reckon on her new video and CD player being put back into circulation at the same time.

And—pushing open the door past the custody sergeant’s office, the corridor leading to the cells—on top of all that, he had to make the sodding tea!

Not this particular morning.

“I’ve mashed already.”

Bloody hell! What was he doing here? Hadn’t noticed his car downstairs. Resnick sitting at one of the desks in the middle of the CID room, not even in his own office, chair pushed back on two legs and reading the paper. He wasn’t supposed to be here for half an hour yet.

“You can pour us a mug if you like. Milk, not too much, no sugar. Couple of juicy break-ins waiting for you, by the look of it. Just carry on as if I wasn’t here.”

Resnick turned another page of the
Independent
, dreading the obituaries these days, always another film star you’d lusted over in your youth, another musician you’d heard and now would never get to see. DC Divine walked past him, draped his jacket over the back of his chair and turned the corner to where the teapot was waiting.

Well short of nine the CID briefing was over and Resnick was back in his office, a partitioned rectangle with rotas pinned behind the desk and filing cabinets alongside. A number of the other officers were at their desks, finishing up paperwork before setting off. Mark Divine was already out knocking on doors, ringing bells, examining broken catches, faulty locks, standing straight-faced as homeowners practiced on him the exaggerated claims they would foist on their insurance companies by first-class post. Diptak Patel, thermos flask, telephoto lens, Milky Ways, and binoculars, was behind the wheel of a stationary Fiesta, watching a clothing warehouse on the Glaisdale Park Industrial Estate. His highlighted copy of Benyon’s
A Tale of Failure: Race and Policing
was in the glove compartment for when this, the third successive day of obs, became too boring.

Lynn Kellogg, hair cut newly short and sporting a certain amount of shine from a henna rinse, was allowing Karen Archer an extra half-hour’s rest before calling to ask questions about last night. Kevin Naylor stood at the back of the lift making its way up to the ward where Tim Fletcher was now a patient; the last time he’d been in the hospital had been when Debbie had been giving birth and if he were silent enough, he could still hear her voice as she screamed for Entonox, an epidural, anything to stop the pain.

Resnick’s DS, Graham Millington, knocked on his door before leaving for a liaison meeting with officers from the West Midlands. A spate of organized thefts of cigarettes and liquor, lorries hijacked or broken into at service areas where they had been parked, had spread from the West Midlands to the East and back again.

“If this takes as long as it might, sir, OK if I nip straight home? Wife’s got her Spanish class, starting tonight.”

“Thought it was Russian, Graham?” said Resnick, looking up.

“New term, sir. Thought she’d have a go at something different.”

Resnick nodded. “Right. Ring in if that’s what you’re going to do. You can fill me in in the morning.”

He watched through the glass of the door as Graham Millington automatically adjusted his tie and gave a quick downward tug at the front of his jacket. If he wasn’t necessarily going to be the brightest over at Walsall, at least he could be the best pressed. Cleanliness and godliness: a drawer full of perfectly folded shirts and seven pairs of well-buffed shoes set you right on the road to heaven. Millington’s father had worked all his life for Home Brothers and at weekends been a lay preacher for the Wesleyan Methodists.