Last Rites (12 page)

It made, Resnick thought, heading back toward his own office, absolute sense. Why then, deep in his gut, didn’t it feel right?

Norma Snape’s kitchen looked out on to a square of garden which had once been grassed, but was overrun now with weeds and littered with empty burger boxes and cans, tossed across the back fence by whoever was using the rear alley as a cut-through. When Shane had still been there, he would occasionally bestir himself from watching the afternoon racing on TV and set it to rights. Now it was simply another of Norma’s good intentions, somewhere between persuading that bloke she’d been chatting with in the pub to bring round his tools and fix the boiler and getting something done about the leak in the front roof, something more permanent than the bucket she’d put out to catch the drips.

Several of the houses close by, Resnick noticed, were boarded up; one had been burned out, another stripped of all the tiles from its roof.

Norma answered the door wearing baggy sweat-pants and a white blouse that had been through the wash too many times, old tennis shoes on her feet. If Resnick hadn’t known she was still under forty, he would have put her at ten years older.

“Sugar’s on the side,” she said, lifting the tea bag out of Resnick’s mug before passing it across. “If you want it, that is.”

Resnick was sitting at the melamine-topped kitchen table, doing his best to ignore the sandy-colored mongrel dog that was alternately nuzzling its head against his groin and biting at his shoes.

“Push him out of it, if he’s a nuisance,” Norma said encouragingly.

“No, it’s okay. He’s fine.”

Norma reached over and took a whack at him anyway, the dog reacting with a snap at her hand and a low whine. “It’s cats you’ve got, i’n’t it? Remember you told me once.”

Resnick nodded.

“Least they’re not slobbering round you all hours, either that or carrying on to be let out, then barking to be let back in again. More of a mind of their own, I suppose you’d say. Independent.” Norma sipped at her tea and made a face. “Gnat’s piss!”

Resnick grinned. “I’ve tasted worse.”

“We had a cat, you know. Nicky’s it was, really. Well, it was him as brought it home. Buggered off after he … you know, after what happened. Thought maybe it’d got run over, something of the sort. No such soddin’ thing. Found itself a better home, couple of streets away. This old girl as feeds it bits of fish and chicken, bought it a fancy cushion to sleep on.” Norma reached for her packet of Silk Cut and shook one loose. “Like bastard men, cats are. Always on the lookout for a better hole.”

Leaning back, she lit her cigarette and, wafting away the first release of smoke, looked Resnick square in the eye. “It’s our Sheena, i’n’t it? Got to be. Only poor sod left.”

Resnick told her the details, as much as she needed to hear, one man getting shot, another wounded, a quantity of drugs found in the car, more maybe than could be for personal use.

“Well,” Norma said, when he’d finished, “least she’ll not be able to say I never warned her. That lot she’s been hanging out with, I knew it’d come to something bad. I told her. Told her she’d end up going the same way as her brothers and all she did was stick two fingers in my face and laugh. Well, now she’ll be laughing on the other side of her own.”

“You’ll be wanting to go and see her.”

“Will I, buggeration! Let her stew for a bit. Come sneakin’ back with her tail between her legs. If she’ll not learn her lesson from this lot, she never will. Next time, it’ll be her they’re draggin’ out of some motor on the Forest with a bullet in her. Too late to say she’s scutterin’ sorry then.”

Resnick swallowed down some more tea. “I don’t know for certain what’ll happen. Looks as if it’ll not be my case. But I doubt they’ll hold her, not more than overnight.”

“They bloody should.”

“Most likely she’ll get police bail in the morning, it depends. At the moment she’s not co-operating …”

“Grassing, you mean.”

“She was witness to a serious incident, a shooting …”

“Oh, right.” Norma pushing herself back from the table, up on her feet. “I’ve got it now. This is what it’s all about, you comin’ round here, butterin’ me up. Mr. Sympathy. Oh, yeah. What you’re after is me going down there, talking her into grassing up her own. Well, I’ll not do it. I’ll not and that’s a fact.” Norma glared at him, arms folded across her chest; the dog over by the back door growling, alerted by the change of tone in Norma’s voice.

“Norma, I’ve told you,” Resnick said, “it’s not my inquiry.”

“It’s you that’s bloody here.”

“You had to be told what had happened. I thought it might be better if you heard it from me.”

“You what? Why the fuck would you think that? Eh? You think I like having you here? Detective Inspector high-and-mighty Resnick. Slipping round here. Supping tea. How d’you think that makes me look up and down this street? Bastard police traipsing in and out. But no, you’re too full of your own bloody puffed-up self to think of that.”

With a slow sigh, Resnick rose to his feet, automatically taking his half-empty mug toward the sink.

“Bastard!” Norma struck the mug from his hand and it shattered on the floor. The dog braced itself on its hind legs and started to bark. “You think I like having you here in this house? Yeah? Do you? You really think I’d rather bad news came from out of your mouth? Norma, that lad of yours, we’ve got him locked up for murder. Norma, that bairn of yours, he’s took his own life, hanged hisself, we just this minute finished cutting him down. Oh, yes, you can bet your days I love it when Mr. Charlie sodding Resnick comes round here, up to his armpits in bad news. I thought you’d rather hear it from me, Norma. Well, what I’d wish,” Norma close to him now, pushing him back with the force of her words, “I’d never set eyes on your fat prick of a face at my door!”

Resnick held his ground for five long seconds before turning on his heels and walking out into the passageway, past the open living-room door, out through the front, and across to where four skinny kids with pinched faces and short cropped hair were loitering round the unmarked Ford he’d borrowed from the pool.

“Give us twenty pee, mister.”

“Give us a fag.”

When Resnick drove off, they raced after him, making signs mimicking masturbation, shouting abuse.

Seventeen

Early evening. Hannah Campbell stood in her small front garden, looking out across the expanse of the recreation ground opposite, its grass no longer the peculiarly vibrant green of midday or even mid-afternoon, but calming now into the softer shade that reminded Hannah of a particular dress her mother used to wear, muted and warm. The shadows of the railings and the trees standing close alongside them were soft and slowly lengthening and, from the middle distance, the cries of children clambering over the playground swings were faint, even musical. Off and on, scenes from Hannah’s own childhood had been picking at the edges of her brain all day, and she knew the reason lay in the letter, French-postmarked, from her father:
My dearest Hannah, I hope you will understand …

She stood a while longer outside the late-Victorian terraced house, with hanging baskets beside its blue door. She had bought the house several years ago, at a figure she could ill afford; but its position, traffic-free, so close to open space, yet near the center of the city, made it worth its price and more. Now she felt settled there, more so than anywhere since she had left her family home to go to university, not quite nineteen. At her next birthday she would be thirty-seven, nearing forty.

Preoccupied, she was startled to see Resnick, hands in pockets, turn into the path which led toward the front of the house. Was it two weeks since he had called round unannounced, or three?

They sat in the L-shaped kitchen-dining room at the back of the house, Resnick at the scrubbed pine table, his back toward the old range which Hannah never used, but kept for appearances. Hannah was moving between the table and the narrow strip of kitchen, washing greens for a salad, shaking lemon oil and vinegar together for a dressing, cutting cubes of cheese, spooning hummus into an earthenware bowl, heating ciabatta in the oven.

“Are you going to stick with beer, Charlie, or d’you fancy some of this wine?”

Resnick raised his glass. “Beer’s fine.”

Salad bowl in hand, Hannah paused before the table and smiled. “There’s some work I have to do later, I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, why should I mind?”

“I just didn’t want you to think …” She shrugged. “You know.”

“That I was going to stay the night?”

“Yes, I suppose …”

He had followed her from the table and when she turned it was almost into his arms.

“That wasn’t why I came, you know.”

“A bit of sex.”

“Yes.”

“Slip back into the old routine.”

“Is that what it was? Routine?”

She looked into his face. “Sometimes, yes, I think so. Don’t you?”

“Maybe that’s what happens.”

“This soon?”

Resnick shrugged. His shirt was crumpled and his tie had been pulled off and draped across the same chair back as his jacket. His hair was something of a mess.

Hannah touched his wrist and felt the veins running under the cuff of his sleeve. “Why did you come round?” she asked.

“I wanted to see you,” he said, but the pause before speaking was too long.

“The truth.” Smiling at him all the same.

“I don’t know. Does there have to be a reason? I don’t know.”

“Oh, Charlie …”

“What?”

Reaching up, she kissed him close to the corner of his mouth. “You had a bad day.”

“It wasn’t good.”

“You had a bad day and you didn’t want to sit with the rest of your team in the pub and you didn’t fancy going home to that barn of an empty house with nothing there but the cats, so you came here instead. You wanted company, comfort; someone, maybe, to hold your hand.” She was holding his hand. “Charlie, it’s okay. I understand. I just don’t want to go to bed with you, not tonight. I don’t want to make love. Is that all right?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

After they’d eaten, Resnick wandered into the front of the house and switched on the light by the shelf where Hannah kept her small stack of CDs. He toyed with the idea of Billie singing “This Year’s Kisses”—the ones which no longer meant the same; or the knowing irony with which she leaned back upon the beat and sang “Getting Some Fun Out of Life”; Lester Young’s tenor saxophone adding its dry commentary to “Foolin’ Myself.”

Was that what he was doing? What both he and Hannah had been guilty of? The simple truth—Resnick caught himself smiling—the simple truth rarely existed outside of fairy-tales and thirty-two bars of popular song. And even then … his mind went back to Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood. Nothing simple there.

He slipped the Billie Holiday back into place and pulled out the Cowboy Junkies. Not exactly cheery stuff, but somehow, he knew, Hannah seemed to find consolation in the almost forlorn, floating pessimism of their songs—”Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park”; “This Street, That Man, This Life.”

Sitting in the armchair, Hannah with her legs up on the settee, Resnick told her about his meeting with Norma Snape. Feeling sympathy for them both, Hannah listened: it was easy to understand why Resnick, acting out of all the best intentions, should feel hurt, rebuffed, misunderstood; but Norma—and she knew, from her work, many women whose situations, while less extreme, were not so far removed from Norma’s—Hannah could feel her helplessness and frustration, a life lived forever at the mercy of circumstance and patronizing authority.

“What will happen to her, Charlie? The girl.”

“Sheena? Maybe nothing much, not this time. But in the future …”

“I remember her, you know. She was in my class at school. Just for a year. And in all that time she barely spoke, other than to her mates. Did as little work as possible, enough to steer clear of trouble. And I don’t think we did anything—I did anything—in the whole three terms that engaged her imagination one scrap.” Leaning sideways, Hannah retrieved her glass of wine. “I didn’t do anything about it, Charlie. I didn’t even try. All my energies, they went on the dozen or so who could be real pains if you gave them half a chance, them and the few who were really good, genuinely interested, off writing poems in their spare time, plays, borrowing the tape-recorder to make a documentary about where they lived. Those were the kids I really bothered about. That’s what was rewarding, that kind of response. As long as Sheena showed up and shut up, I didn’t care.”

“What’s all this?” Resnick said, setting down his own glass and moving across to the settee to sit beside her. “Taking on my guilt to make me feel better?”

Hannah smiled and brushed her hair away from her eyes. “Not really. Not consciously.”

“You’re not to blame for whatever’s going wrong in Sheena’s life.”

“Aren’t I?”

“No.” Resnick’s arm was resting on Hannah’s leg, his hand on her knee. “No more than we all are.”

“And we punish her for our mistakes.”

Resnick shook his head. “That’s too easy.”

“Why?”

“She may not be academically bright, but she’s not stupid. She has to take some responsibility for her own actions.”

“Yes. I know.”

There had been a moment, crossing the room, and later, when Resnick had thought he might kiss her, but now it had gone. He was looking at his watch.

“Busy day tomorrow,” Hannah said.

“You or me?”

“Both.”

At the door, she slipped her hand around his waist enjoying, however briefly, the solidity of his body, the inward curve of his back. She kissed him on the mouth, but before he could respond she had stepped away again and was wishing him goodnight. “Call me, Charlie.”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean it.”

“Yes. I know.” Resnick walking, crablike, down the path.

At the railings, he raised a hand and in the failing light she smiled. Inside, she leaned back against the door, his footsteps faint and growing fainter till they disappeared. Some months before, happy, half-drunk, turned on, she had asked him to join in the fantasy that was playing, unbidden, through her mind; the man heavy on top of her as she struggled, pinning her arms to the bed with his knees; a voice she barely recognized as her own, shouting, “Hold me, Charlie! Hold me down!” For Resnick, it had been too close to the realities of his working life: power, force, aggression. Neither of them had talked about it since. But it had been the first wedge between them; nothing afterward had been quite the same.