Still Waters (6 page)

“I can't be certain this is relevant, of course, but I thought, well, if it were and I neglected to bring it to your attention …”

Resnick looked at her encouragingly and decided to dunk his biscuit after all.

“It would be some time ago now, more than a year. Yes. I was trying to get it clear in my mind before. You're busy, of course, all of you, and the last thing I wanted to do was waste your time, but the nearest I could pin it down would be the early summer of last year.” Her gaze shifted off along the garden. “The magnolia was still in flower. He made specific mention of it, which is why I can remember.”

She smiled and lifted her teacup from its saucer; yes, the little finger crooked away.

Resnick waited. He could smell basil, over the scent of the Earl Grey. “Who, Miss Johnson?” he finally asked. “Who mentioned the magnolia?”

“I didn't say?”

Resnick shook his head.

“I could have sworn …” She frowned as she issued herself an internal reprimand. “Vernon Thackray, that was his name. At least, that was what he claimed.”

“You didn't believe him?”

“Mr. Resnick, if he had told me it was Wednesday, I should have looked at both my calendar and the daily newspaper before believing it to be so. Though it was …” Her face brightened and her voice rose higher. “Isn't that interesting, it was a Wednesday. Maurice was here, tending the garden. I should never have let this Thackray into the house otherwise, not if I had been on my own.”

“You didn't trust him? He frightened you?”

“My fears, Mr. Resnick, would not have been for myself, rather for the family silver. As it were. A metaphor. All the good things, unfortunately, had to be sold long ago.”

“Then it was the paintings, that's why he was here?”

“Absolutely. From somewhere, obviously, he had heard about the Dalzeils and presented himself on my doorstep as a serious collector, imagining that I would be this dotty old maid, bereft of her senses thanks to Alzheimer's disease and happy to let him take them off me for a pittance.”

Resnick grinned. “You gave him short shrift.”

“I told him I appreciated his interest but that the paintings were not for sale. That was unconditional.”

“How did he react to that?”

“Oh, by telling me how much safer they would be in someone else's hands, how fortunate I had been not to have had them stolen. At my advanced years—he actually said that, Inspector, that phrase, my advanced years indeed—wouldn't I be more sensible, rather than risk losing them altogether and ending up with nothing, to take what I could get for them and enjoy the proceeds while I was still able.”

Indignantly, she rattled her cup and saucer down onto the table.

“When he was saying this, did you get the impression he was threatening you?”

“Oh, no. Never personally, no.”

“But the paintings—was he implying, sell them to me or I'll get my hands on them some other way?”

Miriam Johnson took her time. “One could place that construction upon what he said, yes.”

“You let him see the paintings?”

“Of course. His admiration for them was genuine, of that I am sure.”

“And you heard from him again?”

“No.”

Resnick uncrossed his legs and sat forward. “Did he leave you an address, a card?”

She had it ready for him, in the side pocket of her Pringle cardigan.
Vernon Thackray
in a slightly ornate purple font and with only a telephone number underneath. An 01728 code. Suffolk, somewhere, Resnick thought.

“You didn't contact him?”

“Nor he, me, Inspector. Not to my certain knowledge, at least.” She smiled at him, bright eyed.

“How'd it go with Mark?”

Millington was at his desk, troughing into what looked suspiciously like an M & S chicken and mushroom pie.

Resnick was still filling him in when the duty officer phoned up to say that Suzanne Olds had arrived.

“Know more in a minute, Graham.”

“Happen he should've stuck with seeing the shrink more'n the couple of sessions he did.” Pausing, Millington eased a piece of something unchewable to one side of his mouth with his tongue. “Mind you, what with Lynn still trotting off for therapy rain or shine, only needs you to crack up and we can run the whole CID room from the psychiatric unit.”

Me, Resnick thought. Why me? But then Millington was so much less likely a candidate. Disregard his avowed intention of happily resettling in Skegness and Resnick doubted a more unimaginatively sane man existed.

Suzanne Olds wrinkled up her nose at the offer of longmashed tea. She and Resnick had been crossing swords for years, Olds capable of raising her well-modulated voice in anger while rarely losing her cool; each respected the other's integrity, their underlying sense of what was right.

“They'll be ready to charge him this evening, push him through court tomorrow. Preliminary hearing. There's nothing I can say will talk them out of keeping him in the cells overnight.”

“Charges?”

“Affray. Causing grievous bodily harm.”

“And the knife?”

“If we're lucky, possession of an offensive weapon, nothing more.”

“He'll get bail?”

“Given his police record, yes, I'd be surprised if he didn't. There'll be conditions, of course. It's difficult to know yet how stringent.”

“And then Crown Court.”

“Uh-hum.”

“One month, two.”

“Try two.”

In that time, Resnick thought, who was to say what havoc Divine might wreak upon himself and other people?

“There's no way,” Resnick said, “when it comes to trial, of defending him without hauling all that happened back out into the open?”

“And keep him out of prison? I doubt it.”

Suzanne Olds shifted her weight from one foot to the other, back perfectly straight. In her teens, Resnick knew, she had been a prize ice-skater, county champion. “Divine's attitude might well have made him friends in the police canteen, but not many places else. Sexist, racist: just the kind the powers-that-be would love to see being held up as an example. Cleaning the Augean stables before the shit gets too high off the floor.”

Resnick sighed. “You'll represent him all the same?”

“He needed to be taught a lesson, but not like that. I'll do what I can.”

The number Vernon Thackray had left with Miriam Johnson was in Aldeburgh and was unobtainable. “Something must be wrong with the line,” the BT official finally told him, having left Resnick to listen to endless repetitions of “Greensleeves.” “We could have it checked.”

Carl Vincent came back from his tour of the local auction houses empty of information, but carrying a nicely framed watercolor to give to his new boyfriend. Lynn's face showed every sign of an afternoon spent listening to people shouting abuse to and about their neighbors. Kevin Naylor had discovered two empty petrol cans on a piece of waste ground near the torched lock-up and submitted them for analysis. Only Graham Millington seemed due to end the day with optimism lightening his tread: a meeting with his informant arranged at the Royal Children for half-nine and every hope that names would be produced in exchange for a few pints and a nice little backhander.

Resnick was about to jack it all in and head home when Sister Teresa made her return call: another card from Grabianski had arrived, still without a return address—although this one did suggest a place in London where, if she ever traveled down, they might easily meet.

Eight

“You've got all this, all this tightness up here, the upper part of your body. The shoulders and … there, feel that. Can you feel that?”

Grabianski could feel it right enough, pointy tips of her fingers driving into him like sticks, the heel of her hand.

“Feel that now?”

It was all he could do not to call out.

“It's all seized up, blocked; all that energy blocked and we have to find a way of letting it out. It's because of what you do, the way you're always having to use your imagination, the creative part of you.”

He had never told her what he did, not a thing.

“And here, of course. Down here. Feel that, in the chest? This is where it all stems from. See? That tension? Stiffness. That's where the source of the trouble is, that's where you're all clenched up. There, around the heart.”

She tapped him on the shoulder and he could feel her leaning back from him, sliding away.

“Turn over now, okay?”

At first when he'd met her, Holly, met her on the street, Grabianski had thought she was just another pretty girl—that area he was now living in so full of them, sometimes he had to remind himself to look. But there she'd been, backing away from the window of this place selling second-hand designer clothing, Grabianski with his mind set on how he was going to find a buyer for a brace of nicely engraved solid silver pieces, eighteenth century, and the pair of them had collided, surprise and apologies. Holly wearing royal blue crushed velvet trousers, a cerise top that stopped several inches short of the plain gold ring in her navel. A delicate oval face with brown eyes and browner hair. Not English, not entirely. Eurasian? They were yards away from the wicker chairs and tables set up outside the Bar Rouge.

“How about some coffee?” Grabianski had said.

Holly smiling; guarded, but smiling just the same. “I'm picking my daughter up from school.”

Grabianski put her at late twenties, possibly thirty-one or thirty-two.

“Some other time,” she said and he forbade himself from watching her walk away, crushed velvet tight over that neat little behind: Grabianski, a natural voyeur, practicing self-control.

He didn't see her for weeks and then he did, coming out of the post office across the street. Wearing a white dress today, simple and straight, hair pinned high, bare legs. Let it go, Grabianski had told himself, she won't remember you anyway.

She called to him from the pedestrian crossing, raised her hand and waved.

She ordered herb tea, camomile, and the waiter, recognizing Grabianski, brought him a
café au lait
. It was then that she told him her name, Holly, and, making conversation, he asked her what she did.

“Massage.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

The elderly lady from the fruit and vegetable shop alongside where they were sitting was carefully arranging bundles of asparagus and Holly leaned toward her and lifted a plum between forefinger and thumb.

“Pay you later?”

“Like usual.”

Grabianski watched her teeth bite into the yellow flesh. “What kind of massage?”

“Shiatsu. Shiatsu-do.”

“Oh.”

He was aware of her looking at him appraisingly, bulky beneath a pale blue shirt open at the neck. “You should come some time, it would do you good.”

Whenever she saw him after that, every few weeks on average, differing times of the day, she would smile and remind him about the massage. Once she had her daughter with her, a freckle-faced child of no more than five who didn't look Eurasian at all.

“Here,” and she gave him her card. “Make an appointment. Phone me.”

He had already begun to think about lying there naked, just a towel across him, how his body would behave when she touched him. Visions of unguents and oils.

“Make sure you're wearing something loose,” she told him when finally he phoned.

The address was close to where he himself was living, above a shop selling candles and hand-printed fabrics. “Take off your shoes and leave them there,” Holly pointing to where several other pairs were lined up, her daughter's and her own.

In the low-ceilinged living room a white sheet was stretched out across the center of the rug; beyond it a cloth lay draped across a wooden chest, turning it into a kind of altar with fruit and pieces of dried wood arranged in metal bowls. Incense in the air.

“Lie down,” Holly said, indicating the sheet. “On your tummy first. That's it, head to one side, so you can breathe.”

But it had taken his breath away, the force with which she could press into him with her slight body, slim wrists and hands.

“Breathe in … and slowly out. All right, why don't you turn over onto your back.”

After the first time, he had not gone again for almost a month and on their next meeting she had chided him gently on the street; since then, it had fallen into a pattern, he would visit her once every couple of weeks. She would work on him for nearly an hour, advise him on diet, assign him exercises which he forgot. Sometimes, squatting over his body, she would simply chat: something her daughter, Melanie, had done or said; once, mention of Melanie's father, who lived in Copenhagen, where he worked as an artist, computer graphics and videotape.

Now she eased herself back onto the balls of her feet and from there, in one smooth movement, rose to her feet.

“Have you been doing those exercises I showed you?” she asked.

Grabianski was afraid he might blush. “Maybe not as often as I should.”

“You were really bad today.”

“I was?”

“Across your shoulders again, your neck. I couldn't move it at all.” Holly smiled. “It's stress, of course. You're worried about something, that's what it is.”

What was worrying Grabianski, worrying him specifically, was that since he had acquired two rare Impressionist paintings on Vernon Thackray's behalf, of Thackray neither hide nor hair had been seen. That was without this business with the nun. Why, Grabianski was already asking himself, why had he succumbed to temptation, sent her another card?

He had first met Thackray some, oh, four or five years before, when he and Grice had been working a circuit that took them from Manchester in the West to Norwich in the East, Leeds in the North to Leicester in the South. It had been worth getting a yearly season ticket with British Rail.