John Harvey: Still Waters

She was a young woman, twenty-four to twenty-seven years of age, of average size and build. She had had an appendectomy in her late teens, a pregnancy terminated within the past eighteen months. One of her front teeth was capped with a chrome crown, a procedure normally carried out only in Eastern Europe. Her clothing-denim shirt and cotton trousers, underwear-was of a type obtainable in chain stores in most major and medium-size cities of the world. Her feet had been bare. The silver ring on the little finger of her left hand had no idiosyncratic marks or features of design. The inexact photograph taken after basic reconstruction and forwarded to police forces throughout the United Kingdom and Europe resulted in no positive identification. Attempts to link the death to those of three others, two female, one male, whose bodies had been discovered in canals in the preceding seven years-two in the East Midlands, one in the North East-proved inconclusive.

Nothing happened.

After three months, the file was marked Pending.

Media references to the Canal Murders were spiked or stillborn. Resnick knew from occasional comments overheard in the canteen that the victim was referred to as the Phantom Floater, the Woman Who Went for an Early Bath. But for Resnick it was always the night he missed hearing Milt Jackson; the night Milt Jackson came to town.

“Charlie, is it tarragon or basil you don’t like? I can never remember.”

Resnick was sitting in the downstairs front room of Hannah’s house, dark even though it was shy of seven on this late September evening, dark across the park that faced the small terrace through shrubs and railings, and Resnick sitting close by the corner table lamp, glossing through Hannah’s back copies of the Independent’ s Sunday magazine.

“Tarragon,” he called back, “but it’s not that I don’t like it. A bit strong sometimes, that’s all.”

In the kitchen, Hannah laughed quietly. From a man who regularly crammed sandwiches with everything from extra strong Gorgonzola to garlic salami, she thought that was a bit rich. “You could open the wine in a few minutes,” she called back.

“What time are they coming?”

“Half-seven. Which probably means not till eight. I thought we could have a glass first.”

Or two, Resnick thought. He hadn’t met these particular friends of Hannah’s before, but if the rest were anything to go by, they would be artsy, Labour-voting liberals with a cottage they were slowly rebuilding somewhere in southern France, a couple of kids called Ben and Sasha, a Volvo estate, and a cleaner who came twice a week; they would laugh at their own jokes and the cleverness of their cultural references, be perfectly amiable to Resnick, and at the end of the evening try not to appear too resentful that his presence was keeping them from skinning up and passing round a spliff. He suspected they had cast him as one of Hannah’s passing idiosyncrasies-like taking her holidays in Scarborough or eating fish fingers mashed between two slices of white bread. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll be there in a minute.”

One of Hannah’s CDs was playing, an album he’d chanced on by Chris Smither with a version of “Statesboro Blues” that wouldn’t have Willie McTell turning blind in his grave. He waited till that track had finished and then stood by the window for some moments, staring off into the dark.

Come Monday morning, Resnick was thinking, the newly formed Serious Crime Squad would be moving into its headquarters in a converted building that had once been part of the General Hospital. Twenty detective constables, four sergeants, a smattering of support staff, one inspector, and, running the show under the general supervision of a detective superintendent, a freshly appointed detective chief inspector.

There were those-and at times Resnick surprised himself by being among them-who thought it should have been him.

Jack Skelton, heaven knows, had nagged at him long enough-get in that application, Charlie, it’s maybe your last chance; even the chief constable designate had buttonholed him in the Central Police station corridor and asked him point-blank what had happened to his ambition.

Still Resnick had prevaricated. He knew there would be over a hundred applicants, fifteen of whom would be selected for interview, at least six of those thirtyish high-fliers from the Police Staff College at Bramshill, their cards already marked.

“Charlie, am I opening this wine or are you?”

There were those high up in the force, Resnick knew, who valued his experience, the fact that he had dedicated all his working life to the city. And there were others who saw him as small-minded and provincial, a good copper certainly, but past his sell-by date where promotion was concerned. So finally Resnick had forgone the pleasures of giving a five-minute presentation on the major problems of policing in the year 2000, and of sitting with his fellow candidates in some anonymous examination room sweating over a string of questions. He had convinced himself that doing what he was doing, running a small CID squad from a substation on the edge of the city center, was still challenge enough to see him through the next five years. He had a team that by and large he trusted, whose strengths and weaknesses he knew.

But one of his DCs, Mark Divine, had still not returned after almost six months’ leave of absence, and another, Lynn Kellogg, having passed her sergeant’s board, had surprised him by applying for a transfer to the Family Support Unit. Even Graham Millington was murmuring darkly about going back into uniform and moving himself and Madeleine out to Skegness.

Some days, Resnick felt like a captain who was busily lashing himself to the mast while everyone else was resolutely jumping ship.

“Charlie?” Hannah’s voice behind him was soft and questioning. “You okay?”

“Yes, why?”

She gave a small shake of her head and smiled with her eyes. “Here,” holding out a glass of wine, “I thought you might like this.”

“Thanks.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, sure.” And looking at her then, standing close, her fingers still resting on his as they held the glass, it was true.

“The risotto will be ready in twenty minutes. If they’re not here by then, we’ll eat it ourselves.”

Alex and Jane Peterson arrived shortly after eight, bearing apologies and flowers, a bottle of Sancerre and another, smaller, of Italian dessert wine the color of peaches.

Alex, as Hannah had explained earlier, was a dentist, one of the few still working inside the National Health Service, a balding man of around Resnick’s age, some ten years or more older than his wife. Unlike Resnick and Hannah, they had both dressed with a degree of formality, Alex in a loose cream suit with burgundy waistcoat, a white tie-less shirt buttoned to the neck; Jane was wearing a black linen jacket and black flared trousers, her hair, streaked blonde, cut short and close to her head.

Throughout the meal, Alex talked vociferously, often humorously, holding strong and sardonic opinions on almost everything, and when he lapsed into silence, managing to convey the impression that he was holding back in order to give the others a chance. Jane, who taught at the same school as Hannah, seemed tired but cheery, her pale face flushed as the evening wore on. Only when the subject of a day school she was helping to organize at Broadway came up, was she really animated.

“Not sure what I think about all this, Charlie,” Alex said, pointing at Resnick with his fork. “What is it, Jane? Something about women and television, women and the media? Where d’you stand on that, Charlie, seminars on popular culture? Some academic from the university giving forth about stereotypes and the like.”