Off Minor (17 page)

“He must’ve broke in round the back, sir …”

“Who?”

“Morrison, sir. Least, that’s who I think it is.”

“How did he break in?”

“Window in the door, sir. Key must’ve been inside.”

“You didn’t see him? Hear him?”

“Only after it happened, sir. See …” glancing warily at the woman, who was now fitting a piece of Elastoplast over the treated cotton wool, “… I was taking a break, like.”

“You what?”

“No more than a cup of tea and a cheese cob,” the woman said.

“I wasn’t gone above five minutes, sir.”

“And the rest”

“Don’t be so hard on lad.”

“However long it was,” Resnick said, “time enough for the mother to’ve been in and gone.”

“Sir, I don’t think so, sir. I …”

“Don’t think is just about right. How do we know she’s not in there now, with him? Well?”

The constable looked unhappily at the crown of his helmet. “We don’t, sir.”

“Exactly.”

“There’s been no shouting, sir. Nothing like that.”

“What has there been?”

“Bit of breaking, I think, sir. Things being thrown around.”

“One or two in your direction, by the look of it.”

“Poor lamb …” the woman began, till Resnick’s expression made her think better of it.

“I stuck my head through the door, sir. Calling for him to come out.”

Resnick shook his head slowly, more in sorrow than in anger. “You did phone it in?”

“Yes, sir. They said someone was already on the way.”

Resnick nodded. “That was me.” He turned towards the house. “Come on. If you’re through being cosseted, let’s see what’s going on.”

“He’s still inside,” said the cloth-capped man, leaning against his back fence.

Resnick nodded thanks and carried on into the rear yard. There was no sign of life in back room or kitchen, but the floor of the former was littered with pages torn from scrapbooks and hurled about. Photographs were jumbled together on the table. A shattered vase, presumably the one that had struck the PC, lay on the quarry tiles in the kitchen.

“Michael Morrison?”

Aside from a dog barking higher up the street and the thrum of traffic, it was disturbingly quiet.

“Michael Morrison? It’s Detective Inspector Resnick. We talked yesterday.” A pause. “Why don’t you come and let us in?”

No response.

To the young constable, Resnick said quietly, “Round and watch the front.”

Resnick reached through the broken pane of pebbled glass and tried the handle of the door. The top bolt had been slid into place but he could just reach it with finger and thumb, ease it back. The soles of his feet crunched lightly on china shards. The room smelt slightly musty. Quarry tiles, Resnick reckoned, laid directly on to the packed earth, encouraging the damp.

“Michael?”

Bending towards the rough gray scrapbook sheets, he glimpsed pantomime tickets, a sticker from the Wild West Adventure Park a souvenir program from
Babes in the Wood.
On the torn pages of an album there were small square photographs of a man and a woman with a small child, a baby: Michael and Diana, Emily.

“Michael Morrison?”

The front room was snug and dark. It would have been possible to lean in all directions from one of the easy chairs and touch all four walls. The PC’s anxious face, strips of plaster incongruous beneath the peak of his helmet, looked back at Resnick through patterned lace.

On the stairs, the edges of carpet had all but worn through.

“Michael, it’s Inspector Resnick. I’m coming up.”

He was in the bedroom at the front of the house; two beds side by side with enough room for Michael to be sitting between them, back against the wall. The bed closest to the window Resnick guessed to be Diana’s: an alarm dock on the plywood cabinet beside it, two mugs containing an inch or so of long-cold tea, orange now around the edges, a paperback on stress, another, shiny reflective cover, on the subject of assertiveness. On the second bed soft animals crowded round the head. A cushion embroidered with a multi-colored cat lay near the foot. On the adjacent, straight-backed chair there were slim books with vivid covers:
Teddybears 1 to 10, Morris’s Disappearing Bag.
Scattered over both beds were more pages ripped from the albums and scrapbooks Michael Morrison had found below, his family in pieces all around him. His first family. He sat there not looking up at Resnick, an almost empty half-bottle of whisky tight between his knees.

“Michael.”

The eyes flickered towards him, then away. The fingers of Michael’s left hand were curled around a doll, round, flat face and hair like straw. A striped dress, yellow and red.

“Michael.”

In his other hand was a knife. Serrated edge, the kind more commonly used for slicing bread.

Resnick leaned towards him, careful not to startle, not to draw attention to his own hands.

“It’s my fault,” Michael Morrison said.

“No,” Resnick said and shook his head.

“My fault!”

“No!”

Resnick saw the tensing in Michael Morrison’s eyes, and grabbed for the knife too late. The point of the blade plunged fast at the doll and missed, driving hard into Morrison’s own thigh.

There was a vast intake of breath, pitched like a sigh: a shout building to a scream.

“Christ!” The word no sooner from Resnick’s mouth than Morrison had pulled the knife back out and, fingers buckled open, dropped it to the ground.

Resnick plucked the knife clear and slid it back over the thin carpet, out of reach. Blood was beginning to well, surprisingly bright, through the tear in Michael Morrison’s trousers, the puncture in his leg.

Resnick wrenched back the clasp, threw open the window. “Ambulance,” he yelled. “Fast.” And then he was hurling off the blankets, looking for a sheet to make a tourniquet.

Twenty-four

“Thank you,” Lorraine said in scarcely more than a whisper.

There in the hospital corridor, porters and nurses hurrying round her, she looked more like someone’s daughter than anyone’s wife. Whatever make-up she had been wearing had long been cried from her face. Hands like moths around her body, never still.

“I didn’t do anything,” Resnick said.

“The doctor, he said that without you Michael would have lost a lot more blood.”

Resnick nodded. The wound had been less than two inches deep and surprisingly clean. There seemed little reason for them keeping him in overnight.

“Come on,” Resnick said. “I’m taking you home.”

“I can’t.” A blur of hands. “Not without Michael.”

“Michael’s sleeping. When he wakes they’ll check him over, phone you.”

“Even so.”

“You can’t do anything here. And if you don’t rest yourself you’re not going to be much good to him when he gets home.”

He could tell she wanted to argue, but she no longer had the strength. Within two days she had suffered a stepdaughter abducted, now a husband hospitalized at his own hand. If she stood there much longer, she would keel over and Resnick was going to have to move smartly to catch her. He put his arm across her shoulders instead. “I’ll drive you back.”

Between car and house she faltered, only one cameraman hanging on, ready to get a picture of Lorraine fainting on her own front lawn. But she rallied herself, depriving the nation of a front-page splash. Resnick waited, patient, while she found the door keys. My fault, Michael Morrison had said; he wondered what he had meant by that.

“You look as if you could sleep for a week,” Resnick said, inside the hall.

“I only wish I could,” she smiled wanly. “As it is, I doubt if I’d sleep a wink.”

Resnick followed her through the house. “How long is it since you had anything to eat?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Okay. Sit down somewhere. I’ll see what I can find.”

Again, she was about to argue and, again, the necessary energy deserted her. Resnick left her in the living room, legs tucked up beneath her. The kitchen looked like something from an advertisement for modern living. The kind, Resnick thought ruefully, that Elaine would have aspired to for the pair of them: except she had fostered other ambitions, altogether more affluent. Why else fall for a high-flying estate agent with a holiday home in Wales and a Volvo big enough to allow easy adultery on the rear seat? Jesus, Charlie! Resnick thought, cracking eggs into a bowl, you can be a self-righteous son-of-a-bitch at times!

When he went back into the living room, omelets and coffee on a tray, Lorraine was fast asleep. Smiling, he put his own plate and mug down on the floor and turned quietly towards the door. He was turning the handle when Lorraine spoke.

“Where are you going?”

“Put this in the oven to keep warm.”

“Were you looking at me? Just now, I mean.”

“Only for a second.”

“That’s funny. I thought someone was standing over me. Staring. It woke me up.”

“Come on,” Resnick said, “you might as well eat this while it’s hot.”

Lorraine regarded the omelet with suspicion, pushed at it with her fork listlessly. After a few mouthfuls her appetite revived.

“What’s in this?” she said, surprised.

“Oh, nothing much. Tomato, onion, a small turnip I found to grate. Garlic. I sliced up your last rasher of bacon, I’m afraid. Oh, and I finished the cream.”

“But what’s this on top?”

“Parmesan. I sprinkled a little on after adding the cream. If you cook it the last couple of minutes under the grill, it gets that sort of crust.”

Lorraine was looking at him as if she couldn’t believe him, quite. “Where did you learn all that?”

“Nowhere special,” Resnick shrugged. “Picked it up, I suppose.”

“I learned from my mother.”

“If I’d learned from mine, it would have been dill and barley with everything, so many dumplings I would’ve been twice the size I am now. If that’s possible.”

“You’re not fat,” said Lorraine politely.

“No,” Resnick smiled, “just overweight.”

“Anyway,” Lorraine returned his smile, “this omelet, I’ve never tasted anything like it. It’s wonderful.” And speaking through another helping, a habit of which her mother would most certainly have disapproved, added, “Thank you very much.”

For a few seconds, Resnick caught himself thinking maybe his life would be better if there were somebody else to provide for, look after, someone other than his cats.

Jacqueline Verdon had shut up shop. It had not taken her long to convince Patel that she and Diana Wills were close friends or that, at that particular time, she did not know where Diana was.

“She was to have been here this weekend. The arrangements were the same as usual. Except that when I went down to the station to meet the train, no Diana. I met every train until eleven o’clock. I tried to contact her, for her to ring. By midday Saturday, I’d managed to convince myself she wasn’t coming.” The eyes held Patel fast and he knew she was telling the truth. “I haven’t heard from Diana since she was here a little over a fortnight ago. I have no idea where she is. I wish I had.”

The truth or something very close.

The hospital rang to say they were sending Michael Morrison home in an ambulance within the next half-hour. Lorraine had fallen asleep almost as soon as the last mouthful had passed her lips. Resnick lifted the plate away before it slid from her fingers. At six, Michael still not returned, he switched on the TV news, volume set to a whisper. There was a photograph of Emily, some footage of the house and neighborhood, mention of a woman the police were anxious to interview. Outside in the hall he called the station, letting them know he would be there within the hour. He took a coat from the hall cupboard and spread it across Lorraine’s knees. If he and Elaine had had a child straight off, she wouldn’t have been a lot younger than her. As he clicked the living-room door gently closed, he heard the ambulance draw up outside.

Twenty-five

Naylor had been in and out of schools the entire day. Cups of tea with harassed secretaries while he waited to sit across the desk from even more hard-worked and harassed head teachers; more tea in the furthest corners of staff rooms, where he was regarded with deep suspicion and the Bourbon biscuits were shielded from his sight Although everyone was genuinely shocked by what had happened, they could offer very little that was helpful; some even seeming to begrudge the hasty conversations in cloakrooms that smelled faintly of urine and were constantly interrupted by a litany of “Miss! Miss! Miss! Sir! Sir! Sir!”