John Harvey: Last Rites

“Yes. Yes, thanks, Graham. I’m fine.”

“The way you took that shot, let him hit you, you know, sapping his strength. It was good to see.”

“Yes, well. Maybe next time I’ll try to duck.”

“Maybe next time he’ll punch straight.”

Resnick accepted Carl Vincent’s offer of a malt whisky and settled for a Laphroiag, more peaty than he was used to, but warm enough to burn away not the pain, more the embarrassment and the surprise. He tried to convince himself that Mann had been drinking too, an early belt from the bottle in his desk drawer. Something to explain a reaction so uncharacteristic, over the top. Resnick wanting to believe that rather than some more sinister implication: Norman blustering to cover up something he didn’t want to admit to, something to which he’d turned a blind eye for too long.

When he arrived home, an hour or so later, Lynn Kellogg’s car was parked in his drive, Lynn herself curled sideways across the driver’s seat, asleep.

Resnick let himself into the house, did his duty by the cats, set the kettle on to boil, and went back outside. Looking down at Lynn through the dusty glass, Resnick remembered the first time he had set eyes on her, six, almost seven years before. Lynn, redder of face, stockier, her native Norfolk burr more evident in her voice. He remembered another night, later than this, she and Naylor had been called out to a house not so many yards from where Hannah now lived. A young mother, out for the evening with a man she scarcely knew, the children, two of them, left with their grandmother across town. It was Lynn who had found-almost stumbled across-the body, the moon sliding out from the cloud in time for her to see the woman, partly clothed, stretched out beside the garden path, drying blood for ribbons in her hair.

The first dead body Lynn had seen.

Talking to her in the victim’s living room soon after the discovery, concerned to know how she was feeling, Resnick had caught her as she fell, a cup of sweet tea spilling from her hands. One side of her face had pressed, momentarily unconscious, against his chest, the fingers of one hand catching against one corner of his mouth.

A long time ago.

And now?

He realized she was stirring and took a pace away.

Rubbing her fists across her eyes, yawning, Lynn lowered the window. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to go back to the flat. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

Resnick nodded. “You’d best come on inside.”

“Are you sure it’s no bother?” But she was already getting out of the car.

They stood in the kitchen, Resnick between fridge and stove, Lynn close to the center of the room, one of the cats, curious, twisting in and out between her legs, occasionally nudging his head against her shins, the caps of her shoes. She was wearing a long cardigan, charcoal-gray, a pale-gray cotton top; navy-blue chinos, a pair of lace-up DMs that had once been bottle-green but had faded now to a chalky shade of black. Her hair was fudged up at one side where she had been sleeping.

“Do you want to talk?” Resnick said.

“No. Not yet.”

“Coffee, then? Kettle’s boiling. I can have it ready in a few minutes.”

Wanly, she smiled. “You know what I’d really like?”

“Tell me.”

“A bath. A nice, hot bath.”

Resnick smiled back, more a grin than a smile. “Wait here. Well, not here. I mean you don’t have to. Sit down. The front room. Over there. Anywhere. I’ll run the water now.”

Upstairs he checked the temperature from the taps, tipped in Radox and swirled it round, found a towel that was both dry and clean. Stepping out on to the landing, he heard music from below and, when he eased open the door to the living room, Lynn was sitting with her legs pulled up in one of the armchairs, Bud lying full length, belly up, along the crack between her chest and thigh, and the Mills Brothers were singing “Nevertheless.” He had left the CD on the machine.

This time, she woke up almost at once.

“Your bath’s running now. It won’t take very long.”

“Okay.” Lynn stretched and Bud moaned, and she rubbed her fingers along the length of his tummy and tickled his neck. His bones seemed impossibly fragile, impossibly close to the skin. “I just pressed play on the stereo, I hope you don’t mind?”

“Oh. No, of course not.” He nodded in the direction of the speakers. “Nevertheless” had become “I’ll Be Around.” “Funny old sound. Old-fashioned.”

“I like it.” Depositing Bud back on the chair, she headed for the door.

“You know where it is? It’s just along the first landing and …”

“I’ll find it, don’t worry.”

Resnick fidgeted around for a while, not knowing quite what to do. The Mills Brothers were starting to get on his nerves, too much of a good thing, and he replaced them with the Alex Welsh Band, changing them almost immediately-too bright and loud-for Spike Robinson playing Gershwin, nice melodic tenor sax.

He made coffee anyway, two cups, and carried one upstairs.

“Lynn?” He knocked softly on the bathroom door.

“Yes?”

She answered immediately. He’d thought the warm water might have lulled her back to sleep. “I’ve brought you up some coffee. I’ll leave it outside the door.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

From the hall, he heard the door open and then close. In the kitchen, he peeled and chopped first an onion, then a potato, the latter into pieces no bigger than the tip of his little finger. Butter and a splash of olive oil hissed in the pan and he dumped in both potato and onion, gave them a stir, and turned up the heat. From the fridge, he took a piece of chorizo and sliced it into rounds the thickness of a ten-pence piece. Eggs he broke into a basin and whisked, adding salt and pepper and the last inch from a pot of cream. By now, the potatoes were starting to stick, so he gave the pan an energetic shake. The bits he didn’t think the cats would eat from the floor, he shooed in the direction of the bin with last night’s paper.

“Something smells good.” Her hair was still wet and shone. Her gray top hung loose over her belt and her feet were bare.

“How was the bath?”

“Great. Perfect. If it hadn’t been for the thought of the water getting cold, I could have stayed there for hours. Soaked.”

“Then you’d have missed this.”

He added the sausage to the potato and onion, and cut an edge of butter into a second, smaller pan.

“Can I do anything?”

“Watch.”

When the surface was close to smoking, he gave the omelet mixture a final whisk, then poured it in. With a wooden spoon, he moved it around a little, let it settle, starting to pull it away from the edges when it threatened to set; a couple of good shakes and he added the contents of the first pan.

“You should be on television,” Lynn said.

Resnick grinned. “Radio, more like.”

She laughed. It was a good sound.

“There is something you can do,” he said. “Knives and forks, in that drawer over there.”

“Right. Plates?”

“That cupboard. About level with your head. You could put them just here.”

He divided the omelet into two and served it out.

“There’s bread,” he said, “in that bin. I forgot.”

“Butter?”

“On the side.”

They sat at the kitchen table, facing one another, Resnick’s face flushed from standing over the stove, Lynn’s from her bath.

“We should have some wine,” he said.

Lynn was already attacking her omelet with a fork. “Later. We don’t want this to spoil.”

“No, you’re right.”

There was a bottle of red in the cupboard, he thought, something Hannah had brought round and they’d never drunk. He didn’t know what it was, but guessed it would be okay.