Cutting Edge (22 page)

“I’ve got a note somewhere for your mother, too. You give it to her, see that she reads it.”

“Sure.”

The same thing every fortnight, the same note, more or less, same words on blue-lined paper bought in a pad from the shop down on the corner and written painstakingly with a pencil. Knowing what would happen to them at his mother’s hands, Calvin no longer bothered to deliver them, tore them into tiny pieces and pushed them out of sight behind the seat on the bus instead.

Helen Minton had thought she might write the letters by hand, but had decided instead that typing them would be better. She had a small Silver Reed, a portable she’d bought at Smith’s, oh, so many years ago she couldn’t remember. Typing was far from natural to her, far from fast. Not often did she get through a sentence without having to wind the paper up, dab on the Tippex, wind it back down. She had been up since well before light, curtains open just a crack, lamp by her elbow, the typewriter on the living-room table. Four envelopes were fanned across one another like cards, addressed and ready, stamped. The tea had long gone cold in its mug and formed a viscous, orange rim.
Dear Mrs. Salt
, she wrote, and
now that you and Bernard are divorced you may not think this concerns you directly
, and
during the last eight years of your marriage …

Dear Father
, wrote Patel, another letter of appeasement and promises, what he was doing, how close he was to sitting his sergeant’s exam.

Dear Mum
, wrote Paul Groves,
I don’t want you to be too upset, but I might not be able to get home next week, something’s cropped up
…

Dear Helen
, wrote Bernard Salt and immediately tore it up.

In the intensive care ward, Karl Dougherty opened his eyes when the nurse spoke to him and, for the first time since he had been admitted, knew exactly who and where he was.

Amanda Hooson, a second-year social sciences student at the university, sweated on the floor of her small room, no way of knowing that she was pushing herself through her morning exercises for the very last time.

Twenty-eight

“Are you following me?”

“Not at all.”

“So what are you doing here then?”

“Not following anyone, just sitting.”

“You just happen to be sitting.”

“Yes.”

“In a parked car.”

“Yes.”

“At the end of my street.”

“Your street?”

“You know what I mean.”

“The street where you live.” Lynn had a sudden flash of memory, one of her mother’s few records, its cover torn and bent at the edges, stained with greasy fingerprints and ring-marked by mugs of tea, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews,
My Fair Lady
.

“What’s so funny?” Carew said, a vein above his right eye standing out through the sweat.

“Nothing.”

“Then what’s that smirk doing on your face?”

The smirk disappeared.

“I suppose you’re here for the view?” Carew said.

“How was your run?” Lynn asked.

“Fine.”

“A little over twenty minutes. What’s that, two miles, three?”

“Four.”

“Really? That’s pretty good.”

“What? You want to be my coach or something?”

“Depends what you need coaching in.”

He leaned low towards the car window, a few drops of sweat falling from his nose down on to the sill. “What would you suggest?”

“Oh,” Lynn said. “I don’t know. I should imagine it’s difficult teaching much to a man like you.”

He gave her a glare and turned his back, started to walk away. He was wearing shorts this morning, despite the fall in the temperature, brief and tight across his buttocks. The muscles at the backs of his legs were thick and taut and shone with the dull glow of sweat. The hair along his legs and arms was thick and dark.

“When did you last see Karen Archer?” Lynn called after him.

Carew stopped instantly and Lynn repeated her question.

He faced her slowly, began to walk back. Lynn read the expression on his face and thought for a minute he was going to reach in and try to drag her from the car. The moment passed. “You know I’m not allowed to see her,” Carew said.

“Does that mean you haven’t seen her?” Lynn said.

“Remember? I’m warned off.”

“Not everyone pays attention to warnings.”

“Perhaps I do.”

I doubt that, Lynn thought. “So you haven’t spoken to Karen since you were at the station? You haven’t seen her, there’s been no contact?”

“That’s right.”

“Because she’s missing.”

“Oh, well!” Carew threw out both arms like a bad stage tenor. “That’s it then. It’s obviously me. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Karen’s hidden in a cupboard somewhere. Ian Carew. No other explanation.”

“Is there?”

“What?”

“Another explanation?”

“I should think so, hundreds of them. You just like this one.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because it’s easy. You don’t have to think further than the end of your nose.” He made a gesture, maybe automatic, perhaps not, a tug at the front of his shorts. “Because you resent me.”

Lynn bit her tongue, best to let it ride. “Why did you say a cupboard?” she said.

“Did I?”

“Hidden in a cupboard somewhere, that’s what you said.”

“The sweat’s drying on me,” he said. “I need to take a shower. It’s getting cold.”

“A cupboard,” Lynn persisted.

“That’s right,” Carew smiling, “that’s where I’ve dumped her. Inside a sack after I hacked her to pieces.” He leaned close and leered. “Why don’t you come in and look?”

Lynn stared at him, stone-faced.

“Come on, search. You do have a search warrant, don’t you?”

Lynn turned the key in the ignition. “If Karen gets in touch with you, please let us know. Ask her to contact the station, ask for me.”

Carew sneered two soundless words, unmistakable. Lynn made herself let out the clutch slowly, check the mirror, indicate. When she reached the main road and swung up past the hospital towards the station, she was still shaking.

It was raining again: a fine, sweeping drizzle that seeped, finally, into the bones, chilling you as only English rain could. On a makeshift stage at the center of the old market square, the Burton Youth Band were playing a selection from the shows to a scattering of casual listeners and a few sodden relatives who had made the journey over on the band coach. Off to one side of the stage, in a row of their own, a boy and a girl, eleven or twelve and not in uniform like the rest, sat behind a single music stand, mouths moving as they counted the bars. Resnick watched them—the lad with spectacles and cow-licked hair, the girl thin-faced and skimpily dressed, legs purple-patched from rain and wind—nervously fingering the valves of their cornets as they waited to come in.

It was close to where Resnick was standing that Paul Groves had sat, staring off, and talked about his friendship with Karl Dougherty.
I touched him one time and you’d have thought I’d stuck a knife right in his back
. Once, while he and Elaine were still sharing the same house, truths spilling like stains everywhere between them, they had passed close together near the foot of the stairs and Resnick, unthinking, had reached to touch the soft skin inside her arm. He could picture now the hostility that had fired her eyes; the already instinctive recoiling.

The band hit the last note of “Some Enchanted Evening” more or less together and Resnick clapped, startling a few dazed pigeons. An elderly lady wheeled her shopping trolley across in front of the stage and dropped a coin into the bass-drum case that was collecting puddles and contributions towards the band’s winter tour of Germany and the conductor announced the final number. Time to go, Resnick thought, but he stayed on as the two beginners lifted their instruments towards their lips. The conductor waved a hand encouragingly in their direction, the wind lifted their sheet music from its stand and their chance was lost. Without hesitation, the boy retrieved it and Resnick watched the girl’s pinched serious face as, biting the inside of her mouth, she struggled to find her place in time for the next chorus. Only when they had played their sixteen bars and sat back, did Resnick turn away, tears, daft sod, pricking at his eyes.

Carew had taken his time over showering and now he sat in his room with the gas fire turned high, just blue-and-white striped boxers and a lambswool V-neck, eating a second apple and glancing through the review section of
The Times
. So many sections, it was getting difficult to tell Saturdays from Sundays. At hand but unopened, a book on neurosurgery that needed returning to the library, notes for an essay that should have been submitted the week before and for which he had every intention of applying for a further extension.

He refolded the paper and dropped it to the floor, walked on bare feet to the window. The car was back again, square to the end of the street, he could see the dark-haired silhouette clearly enough but not the face. Well, fuck her! He pulled on faded jeans, clean from the launderette, replaced his sweater with a white shirt. His black leather jacket was hanging behind the door. The door at the side of the kitchen led past an outside toilet, now disused, across a small flagged yard to a narrow entry. Half way along, Carew let himself through someone’s rear gate and slipped through the side passage into the adjacent road.

He wondered if she’d still be sitting there when he got back, or whether her patience would have run out. On the whole, Carew thought with a smile, he preferred the former. Maybe then he would make a show of walking past, returning when she didn’t even know he’d left, give her something to think about. Or simply go back in the way he’d come out, leaving her none the wiser. Either had its advantages.

And which one Carew chose, what would that depend on? Whim, mood, or how he got on where he was going?

Lynn Kellogg shifted her position behind the wheel yet again, stretching her legs as best she could before beginning another set of exercises to keep the circulation flowing, raising and lowering first her toes, then all of the foot, circling and lifting, pressing down. Ankling, her former cyclist boyfriend had called it, one of the few techniques he could be relied upon to demonstrate successfully, those times she caught him flat on his back on their bed. She told herself not to check her watch but, of course, she did. She tried to clear her mind and concentrate, not wanting to think about the state of her bladder, how many more Sundays she could go without driving home to Norfolk, exactly what Resnick would say if ever she had to explain what she was doing.

Twenty-nine

Cheryl Falmer looked at her watch for the second time in as many minutes and walked across to the desk to check that it was correct. She had arranged to meet Amanda on court at four and there she was, changed and ready, twenty past four and no Amanda. She was beginning to feel stupid, standing in the sports-center foyer in that skirt, pretending not to notice the rugby players staring at her legs as they came in from training.

“It is four o’clock?” she asked the woman at reception. “Badminton. Booked in the name of Hooson.”

“That’s right. Not turned up?”

“No.”

“Maybe she’s forgotten.”

Cheryl moved away, shaking her head. Amanda wasn’t the kind to forget. Not anything. Every week they’d been playing, through the last two terms of the previous year and carrying on in this. She knew that Amanda marked it down in the little diary she always carded. Green dot with a four alongside it: badminton. Blue dots for essays in. Yellow for tutorials, red for you know what. Unlike a lot of her group, Amanda was serious, organized; not a stick-in-the-mud, not po-faced like the few feminist-Leninists or whatever they were, always scowling from behind their hand-knitted sweaters and hand-rolled cigarettes; a little older, more mature, she had chosen social sciences with a purpose, not fallen into it as an easy option or an academic back door.

Even so: nearly twenty-five past and no sign.

If it had been squash, it would have been worth going on to the court by herself and thwacking the ball against the wall for half an hour. But the prospect of lofting shuttles high above the net, practicing her serve, didn’t appeal. She would go back into the changing room and get into her Simple Minds sweatshirt, her denim jacket and jeans. If she cut across between the practice pitches, it was easy enough to call by Amanda’s hall of residence and find out what had happened, what had gone wrong.

Jazz Record Requests
was just finishing as Resnick entered the house. Hearing the signature tune, he assumed that Ed Silver had switched the radio on and left it playing, hardly expected him still to be there. But he was at the kitchen table, so intent upon Resnick’s battered copy of
The Horn
that he scarcely looked up. Miles, who had been spread the width of Silver’s bony knees, leapt off at Resnick’s approach and ran towards his bowl.

“Thought you couldn’t stand cats,” Resnick said.

“I can’t,” not looking round.

Resnick shrugged off his damp coat and leaned his plastic bag of shopping against the fridge. The other cats were there now, all save Dizzy, and Resnick ministered to them before grinding coffee for himself.