John Harvey - Confirmation

OFFICER: Detective Inspector Charles Resnick

FORCE: Nottingham CID

TIME: 1996

CASES: ‘Lonely Hearts’ (1989), ‘Rough Treatment’ (1990), ‘Wasted years’ (1993), ‘Cold Light’ (1994), ‘Living Proof’ (1995) etc.

PROFILE: Charlie Resnick has been described as the misfit copper with a curious, passive charm. A man with a middle-aged paunch due to unhealthy food, bags under his eyes from too little sleep, he operates in the gritty and down-at-heel areas of Nottingham which are said to have among the highest number of cases of violent crime and murder per head in England: a fair proportion of which fall into Resnick’s lap. Several of his cases have involved him crucially with women-a fact which frequently causes him to dwell on the state of his own lovelife. When not at work, Charlie fills in time on his own drinking and listening to jazz. With his Polish roots, quartet of cats named after jazz legends, and general feeling of disillusionment with police politics, Resnick is a multidimensional policeman who throws himself into an investigation as much to escape his loneliness as to solve the crime. In America, he has been greeted by reviewers as ‘one of the most fully realised characters in modern crime fiction’, while The Times recently said that he has now become established as the latest addition to ‘that select band of cold but cultured English inspectors like Morse and Dalgliesh’.

CREATOR: John Harvey (b. 1948) started writing and editing while lie was at school and later in college. For some years he worked as a teacher, at the same time continuing to write a whole batch of pseudonymous paperback novels. In 1976 he created his first private eye, Londoner Scott Mitchell, in ‘Amphetamines and Pearls’, and followed this with three more titles which, he says, were heavily influenced by the works of Raymond Chandler. It was in 1989 that he found his own voice with the first Resnick novel, ‘Lonely Hearts’, and added a new figure to the pantheon of memorable contemporary police detectives. John has also written scripts for television, including Central TV’s series, ‘Hard Cases’, and was closely involved in the making of the BBC TV version of ‘Resnick’, starring Tom Wilkinson. The story ‘Confirmation’ is a new case for the lonely DI that John wrote especially for this collection.

Terry Cooke went to the pool every morning because it was good for his health. His doctor had told him so. Or, rather, his doctor had said, squinting above a pair of glasses held together with orange Elastoplast, ‘Terry, you’re going to have to change your lifestyle, that is if you’re going to have any life at all. Future tense.’

A quarter past eleven on a sunny January morning, Terry was finally in Dr Max Bone’s surgery after forty minutes shared with old copies of the Guardian magazine and the usual selection of bad backs, hacking coughs, and unmarried mums-to-be about to drop their firstborn on the worn carpet. The Guardian, for Christ’s sake, where did Bone think this was, West Bridgford? And there was the doc ignoring his request for a referral to a chiropodist so Terry could get rid of his troublesome bunion on the NHS, and engaging him instead on issues of mortality. Life or death. His. Terry’s.

‘I’ll stop smoking,’ Terry said, prepared to be alarmed.

‘You should.’

‘Cut back on the drink.’

‘Yes.’

‘For pity’s sake, I’m not even fifty.’

‘You want to be?’

Terry got up from the chair and walked to the window. In the street outside, two kids in bomber jackets, neither of them above ten years old, and both wearing nearly-new Nike trainers that had come down the chimney with Santa, were dismantling a black and silver mountain bike whose owner had optimistically left it chained to a parking meter.

‘Exercise,’ the doctor said.

Terry couldn’t see himself in one of those poncey jogging suits, sidestepping the dog shit round the edges of Victoria Park.

‘Specifically, swimming; that’s the thing.’

The only time in the last fifteen years Terry had been swimming, Carrington Lido had still been an open-air pool and not a bunch of cramped chi-chi houses with satellite dishes the size of dinner plates and shiny gold numbers on the doors.

‘It’s not just the aerobic activity,’ Bone said, ‘though you need that without question. It’s the effect of the water. Calming.’ He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘It’s the stress, Terry, it’s making too great demands upon the heart.’

His back to the window, Terry could feel it, angry and irregular against his ribs. Cautiously, he returned to the chair and sat down. ‘Swimming,’ he said, uncertainly. That’d really make a difference?’

Bone nodded. ‘If not, I know a wonderful masseuse. Shiatsu. Unfortunately not on the National Health.’

Terry thought he would try the swimming first. He shook Bone’s hand and, out on the street, clipped the ear of an eight-year-old demanding a pound to look after his car, make sure no one tried to nick the radio, see it didn’t get scratched.

‘Listen, you, I find one mark on that motor you’re for it. This is Terry Cooke you’re talking to, right?’

‘Yeah, and my Dad’s Frank Bruno.’

Terry shrugged; anything was possible. He walked as far as the corner of Carlton Road and sat in the side bar of an empty pub with a half of bitter and a large Bells. Stress, the doc was right. Terry had it in spades.

There was his daughter, Sarah, for instance. Several months back she had followed her mother’s inexact path and taken the overnight National Express north to Edinburgh. No note, no reason, though Sarah’s gran, Terry’s own mum, that is, had acted strangely about the whole thing and Terry was sure she knew more about it than she was letting on. One of these fine days, when she’d suckled enough gin, it’d all come pouring out. Till then, it was the occasional reversed-charge call from Sarah and a postcard of Greyfriar’s Bobby with a scrawled message to say that she and her mum were fine. Terry could imagine the pair of them shacked up in some scabby flat, more likely than not a squat. As long as her mother wasn’t into sharing needles, it might not work out so bad.

At least it made it easier with Eileen, Terry’s live-in girlfriend. Eileen was a stripper of considerable abilities who, since moving in with Terry, had taken herself upmarket and now specialised in delivering personalised birthday messages dressed in her own version of a WPC’s uniform.

Terry tried to tell himself he didn’t mind Eileen going out and cuffing some spotty car salesman to a chair while she gave him a tongue lashing, but the truth was that he did. After all, the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her himself, it had been the speed with which she’d got down to her spangled g-string that had taken his eye. Slowly, very slowly. Now whenever Eileen went out on a job, part of him was terrified she’d encounter some muscled hard boy who worked out six days a weeks and made love like a power machine on the seventh. Twenty-three, Eileen, and young enough, just about, to be Terry’s daughter herself.

Sarah… then Eileen… and the star over the sodding stable hadn’t long faded before Inspector bloody Charlie Resnick had been sniffing round the secondhand shop Terry rented out by Bobbers Mill. Resnick like some scruffy Santa with a ho-ho-ho and turkey gravy on his tie, offering to do a special New Year inventory of suspect goods. It was only good luck that Terry had been there himself that day, and not his gormless nephew Raymond, otherwise it might not have been so easy to steer Resnick away from the several gross of Sega and Nintendo that had escaped the Christmas market. To say nothing of the camcorders.