Cutting Edge (16 page)

“Oh,” said Lynn, “I really don’t know. Except, well, it is a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? If that’s what it is.”

Fletcher didn’t want to talk about it, not any more. Bad enough being reminded of what had happened every time you tried to turn over in the bed, each faltering move you made under the physio’s eye. In the waste of night, his senses recreated for him the hot smell of hard rubber from the bridge floor with uncanny accuracy.

“All these flowers,” Lynn said, seeking a polite note on which to leave, “from Karen, I suppose?”

“Not all of them.”

“They’re lovely.” She got up from the bed and moved in front of Fletcher’s chair. “How is she? Karen.”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought …”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“Oh?”

“She called, left a message with the Sister. Bit off-color.” He glanced round at the bedside cupboard. “She sent a card, lots of cards. I’m sure she’ll be in tomorrow.”

“Yes,” Lynn said, “I’m sure.”

Last thing she was likely to do, Lynn thought as she walked back through the ward, show herself with her face looking like a relief map of somewhere Wainwright might have hiked. Probably she was hiding in her room, waiting for the bruising to subside. No reason to think it was any more than that. Taking the stairs instead of the lift, Lynn glanced at her watch. It wouldn’t be far out of her way and if nothing else it would set her mind at rest.

For what was still the middle of the day, the street seemed unnaturally quiet. The rain had stopped, leaving gray cloud overhanging the sky like a warning. The bottle of unclaimed milk on the doorstep was a crusted yellow beyond cream. Lynn had lived in shared houses and understood the tendency never to see what didn’t immediately concern you; once you started taking out the garbage, you were saddled with it until you left. Holding her breath as best she could, Lynn rang the bell, then knocked. Through the letter box she could see the same pile of unwanted mail on the low table, the telephone. She had feared it might prove a wasted journey and the silence inside the house told her she had been right. Oh, well …

As she was turning away, Lynn heard a door opening inside.

She knocked again and eventually a man appeared, blinking at the dull light. He was in his early twenties, wearing a V-neck sweater over jeans with horizontal tears across both knees. Several days’ stubble on a blotchy face. A student or out of work, guessed Lynn, she found it difficult to tell the difference.

She told him who she was and showed him her warrant card, but he was already shambling back along the narrow hall.

“Karen Archer,” Lynn said, stepping inside. “Is she …?”

The man mumbled something she failed to catch and pointed upwards. Closing the front door behind her, Lynn climbed the stairs, almost forgetting the broken tread but not quite. The picture of kissing lovers had gone from the door to Karen’s room and the catch that had once held a small padlock stood open. There was a sudden burst of music, loud from below, and the top half of her body jerked.
The door to the garden had not quite been open
. Almost two years now, still whenever she went through a door, uncertain of what she might find, the same images came silently slipping down.
Stray ends of cloud moved gray across the moon. A bicycle without a rear wheel leaned against the wall. Her toe touched against something and she bent to pick it up
. Mary Sheppard had taken her two children to her mother’s and gone out to meet a man; invited him home. What? Coffee? Mary Sheppard: the first body Lynn had found.
Dark lines like ribbons drawn through her hair
. Come on, Lynn. She turned the handle and stepped inside.

Stripped: stripped and gone. The box mattress, slightly stained and sagging at its center, the veneered dressing table were the only furniture left in the room. Screwed-up tissues, pale blue, yellow and pink, clustered near one corner. A single sock, purple and green shapes that had begun to run into one another, lay in the space between window and bed. Looking down over the backyards, Lynn saw short lines of washing, a baby asleep in a pram, geraniums; on the end of a square wooden post, a white and gray cat sat immobile, ears pricked. In one of the dressing-table drawers Lynn found an old receipt from the launderette, in another an empty box of tampons. Curling already at the ends, the Polaroid strip had fallen behind and, easing the dressing table from the wall, she lifted it out. Karen Archer and Tim Fletcher making funny faces with the photo-booth curtain as backdrop; no matter how distorted Karen tried to make her features, it was impossible to disguise her beauty. Or, now she looked at the photos closely, Fletcher’s hopefulness. There was a print mark on the bottom picture, the one in which they kissed. Lynn opened her shoulder bag and, carefully, placed the strip inside her notebook.

Downstairs in the communal kitchen the young man who’d let Lynn in was pouring warm baked beans over cold mashed potato.

“When did she leave?”

“Who?”

“Karen.”

“Dunno.”

Lynn wanted to force his head under the cold tap, wake some life into him. “Think.”

He struck the underside of the sauce bottle with the flat of his hand and a gout of tomato sauce flopped out, most of it on the plate. “Might have been yesterday. Must’ve been. Supposed to give us notice, four weeks. Now we’ve got to go tarting round for someone else.”

Lynn’s heart bled for him. “Any idea where she’s gone?”

He looked up at her disparagingly. “Home to Mummy.”

“She’s giving up her course?”

He shrugged and stirred the beans and potato together.

“Have you got an address for her?” Lynn asked.

“Somewhere.”

It was all she could do to stop herself from pushing his face down into his plate. She contented herself by plucking the fork from his hand, waiting till she had his attention firmly on her face, “Get it,” she said. “Wherever it is, the address, get it now.”

He didn’t like it but he did as he was told.

During all of this, Resnick had been doing more than his share of window-shopping: anywhere with male assistants wearing suits. In succession, he had feigned a passing interest in bicycles, fourteen-day trips to the Yugoslavian coast, all-in, a new sports jacket, a signet ring, a char-grilled burger with fries and a 90-Day Extra Savings account; he had considered the possibilities of walking boots, cricket bats, Filofaxes, framed posters of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, separately or together; now he was standing between broad rolls of carpet, listening to a disquisition on the virtues (or otherwise) of underlay, when he noticed one of the salesmen leading a couple towards a central table to confirm the details of a sale.

As the salesman filled in the form, pausing at intervals to ask a question, once to laugh, several times to smile, Resnick watched him. Twenty-five or -six, but already thinning on top, hair combed from either side towards the center of his head in a vain attempt at disguise. He was wearing a double-breasted light gray suit that would have fitted somebody perfectly, but not him. Resnick waited until the final handshakes, the nod of the head, promise of delivery, beginnings of an accompanying walk towards the door. Don’t go all the way, don’t waste time, there is commission to be earned.

“Excuse me,” Resnick said evenly, approaching from behind,

The salesman blinked as he turned, moving half a pace back so as to get Resnick properly in focus. Family man, not about to spend a fortune, with any luck a three-bedroom semi in need of recarpeting throughout.

“Yes, sir.” Cheerily.

“Peter …” tried Resnick.

“Paul, as it happens. I …”

“You know a Karl Dougherty, by any chance?”

Paul Groves shot a glance towards the door and instinctively Resnick moved across to cover any attempt to escape. But: “Is it still raining?” Groves asked. “Wondered if I’d need a coat.”

Twenty-one

Resnick watched Groves all the way back to the station, alongside him in the back of the summoned car, one of his elbows resting against the window, not staring, not making it too obvious. Just the fifteen feet across the pavement from the shop doorway to the curb had been enough to destroy the loose thatch of Groves’s hair, one side falling past his left ear, the other sticking out like a mistake, pale scalp exposed clearly between. Even so, he didn’t look too disturbed, now and again glancing out, interested, as if being driven through a city he only remembered. Sure, his fingers tugged at the slack of his suit trousers once in a while and the collar beneath his blue-and-silver striped tie was getting a touch too tight, but underneath he seemed unconcerned. As if, at base, he knew nothing could really get to him; he was safe. Resnick wondered.

Outside the CID room he told Groves to hang on and put his head round the door, beckoning Patel from the desk where he was diligently making his way through his paperwork.

“News from the hospital?” he asked quietly, as they turned into the corridor.

“Back in intensive care. Apparently stable.”

Resnick nodded and directed Groves into the nearest interview room, with a view across the sloping car park towards four-story houses where two-bedroom flats were still fetching in excess of a hundred thousand. He pointed to a chair and waited for Groves to sit down, taking the chair opposite for himself, leaving Patel room to make notes at the end of the table.

“I knew you’d want to talk to me,” Paul Groves said. “After what happened.”

Resnick didn’t respond, not directly. “You’re here of your own volition to make a statement and can leave at any time. You understand that?”

Groves nodded.

“Why don’t you tell us about last night?”

Groves loosened his tie a little, then tightened it again, holding the knot between the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand while he pulled on the short end with his right. No matter how easily they come to water, Resnick thought, rare that they rush to drink.

“Karl and I had arranged to meet for a drink,” Groves began. “Half nine and he was late, but then he always was.” Resnick noted the always but let it go. Questions later. “I suppose it was nearly ten by the time he arrived. We stayed there till closing, talking, as much as you can over the music, two or three drinks, that’s all. We’re not what you’d call drinkers, either of us.”

He paused and looked at Resnick directly, the first time since he’d begun talking.

“That’s Manhattan’s. That’s where we were. But I suppose you know that?”

“Go on,” Resnick said.

“There’s not a lot more, really. Karl left a bit before me, not long. I went home. I assumed he’d done the same. Until this morning when I heard the news. Local. They didn’t give many details at first, not even a name. Went through the back of my mind it might have been Karl, but why should it have been? I mean, really? Why would it?” His arms were resting on the edge of the table, several inches back from the wrist; the more he spoke, the more he gesticulated with his hands. Now they closed into fists and were still. “Then they said who it was.”

It crossed Resnick’s mind that Groves had been practicing this, rehearsing the shifts in tone, the moves.

“I called the hospital,” Groves said, “wouldn’t say a lot over the phone, but they did tell me how he was.” A quick glance up. “I was going into see him, tonight, after work. I mean, I would have taken time off, only with Karl being like he is …”

“Like he is?”

“Not conscious, not really conscious and in intensive care. They said they might have to operate again …”

“They did.”

Now the response was real, concern jumping across his eyes.

“Whatever they did,” Resnick said, “seems to have been successful. The last we heard he was resting. Not out of the wood, but …” Resnick spread his hands, suggesting, with luck, everything would turn out all right.

“Is this going to take much longer?” Groves asked.

“There’s just a couple of things …”

“Yes?”

“You say Karl left first?”

“Yes.”

“Why was that?”

Groves looked at him sharply.

“You met for a drink, spend—what?—an hour together, more, normal thing, I would have thought, you’d have left at the same time.”

“Karl was worried about getting home.”

“Oh?”

“He was on an early. Next day, today.”

“Arrived late, left early.”

“Yes.”

“One of the penalties, going out with a nurse.”

“Sorry?” Just a touch sharper, arms away from the desk, but not still, stretching away from his sides.

“Same with the police. Shift work. Plays havoc with your social life. Police and nurses. Earlies and lates.” Resnick leaned his chair back on to its rear legs, relaxed. “That’s all there was to it, then? His leaving before you?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Yes,” Resnick nodded. “So you did.”

He smiled at Groves helpfully, waiting for more. Revisions of revisions. Groves fidgeted, the tie, the table, creases in his trousers, the tie again. “I can’t think of any other reason.”

Resnick could: several. “It’s not true there was an argument, then? No truth in that?”

“What argument?”

“I don’t know, it’s only a suggestion.”

“Whose suggestion?”

“Probably nothing to it.”

“That’s right.”

“There’s nothing to it?”

“No.”

“Karl and yourself, you didn’t argue?”

“No.”

“No raised voices?”

“No.”

Resnick lowered the front legs of his chair carefully to the floor. He leaned forward across the table and, instinctively, Paul Groves leaned back. Of the two, Resnick was by far the bigger man. “Like I said, it was pretty noisy, the music. Quite a few dancing. Almost had to shout to make ourselves heard.”

“I expect that’s what it was, then.”

Groves shrugged.

“Not a row at all.”

Groves looked at him. “What would we have to row about?”

Resnick gave him another encouraging smile. “You tell me.”

Three shots out of four, Divine could get the paper into the waste bin without it touching the sides. Mind you, that was after twenty minutes of concerted practice. The boss was in the interview room, safely out of the way, everyone else God knows where, and he was writing up another report. A couple of hours of sitting in taxis down round the square, all very well for them to have those NO SMOKING stickers in the front, came out of the cabs smelling like an Indian restaurant. Anyway, there’s this bloke comes prancing by in that purple sports gear they all seem to fancy just now, brand-new ghetto-blaster in one hand and an Adidas sports bag in the other. All Divine had done was go across and talk to him, by the numbers, warrant card, name and rank, station. “I have reason to believe …” Now the guy was threatening official complaint, witnesses, racial harassment. In the court just the other week, some clever-bollocks of a barrister trying to make him look like a lifelong supporter of the National Front. “Why did you stop the accused, constable? Had my client been white, would you have acted in the same way?” If the bastard had been white, he’d have been a sight less likely to be walking home at two in the morning with half an ounce of crack and his wallet thick with dirty tenners he’d just ponced off the girls he pimped for on Waverley Street.