John Harvey: Last Rites

It was twelve years since she’d seen him. Not that she hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t written to him often enough, in the early days at least, asking him to change his mind. Featherstone, Haverigg, Wandsworth, the Scrubs. Begging him, near enough. He’ll get over it with time, she’d thought, feeling the way he does.

At first she had gone anyway, long journeys, sometimes by car, more usually by train. Not to contravene his word, only to be there, be near him, share something of the same atmosphere, the same air. From a distance she would watch the visitors at the gate: wives, lovers, got up in their best, hair specially done and makeup refreshed; others burdened, encumbered, dragging kids who skulked and slouched and scuffed their shoes. Coming out, she would mingle with them if she could, snatch bits and pieces of their conversations for her own. Then, abruptly, she stopped going; she wrote to him instead, regularly, the first of every month. Her ritual. Family gossip, bits and pieces about the kids. She persuaded herself it didn’t matter that he never replied.

Some evenings when she stood upstairs alone, gazing out across the roofs of the other houses, noticing the way the light caught their edges immediately before it fell, she would try to remember the way he used to look at her, something bright flaring for a moment in the slate-gray of his eyes.

Life. After all that waiting, it had been out of the judge’s mouth almost before she had heard or properly understood. That word: life.

She could still see her mother’s face, the soft sigh of pain as if the air had been released from within, the pale skin puckering, sinking in. She could feel again her own panic rising in her veins. Life, was that what he had said? As though he were giving and not taking away. A term of no less than twenty-five years. She had wanted to shout out then, turn it all back, the short days of the trial, the photographic evidence, exhibit A, exhibit B, the summing-up. Begin again. No: farther, farther back than that.

For a moment, as she leaned against the heavy wooden railing of the gallery, he had turned his head toward her, tilted up. And she had read it there on his face, the apportioning of blame. Just that moment and then the officers on either side had moved him on and down. Anger, even guilt-what she had felt most from him was shame. Not for himself, or what he’d done, but for her.

Resnick had woken at a quarter to six, blinked at the light already filtering promisingly through the curtains, and decided to allow himself another fifteen minutes. Entwined near the foot of the bed, impossible to tell where one ended and the other began, the middle pair of his four cats, Miles and Pepper, breathed as one. Bud, the skinniest of the oddly adopted litter, lay with his head not quite touching Resnick’s pillow, one paw covering his eyes, snoring lightly. Dizzy, scornful of the comforts of home life, would be out patrolling the neighbors’ gardens, stalking the hedgerows for voles, field-mice, birds, occasionally a slow-moving rat, once a young squirrel, more than once a rabbit. Trophies that he would drag through the cat flap and lay with due ceremony at Resnick’s feet, bright-eyed, arching his back with pride.

This morning, though, when Resnick finally shuffled his way, barefoot, from bedroom to shower, shower to bedroom, down the wide stairs to the hallway and on into the kitchen, there were no bodies waiting to ambush him, dead or dying.

An electrician friend of Resnick’s, a man he knew from the Polish Club, had rigged up a second set of speakers in the kitchen and, after filling the kettle and setting it on the gas, Resnick wandered into the front room and pulled an old album from the shelf, scratchy vinyl, the cover with its reproduction of a painting by Henri Rousseau, The Repast of the Lion -not quite Dizzy, perhaps, this large cat devouring its prey among giant flowers, but close enough that Resnick could see the family resemblance.

The record was Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington, one of the first pieces of modern jazz he had ever heard or owned; that strange piano sound, so familiar now, insistent yet fragmentary, Monk stalking Duke’s tunes with eloquent uncertainty.

Back in the kitchen, he opened a tin of Choosy, chicken-flavored, and emptied it into the four colored bowls. Coffee beans he varied from time to time, his present favorite being a mixture of French Roast and Mocha bought at The White House on Parliament Terrace. He tipped a handful of the shiny beans into his hand, savoring the strong smell before tipping them into the elegant Krups grinder Hannah had bought him for Christmas.

Hannah; oh, Hannah.

A trilling little four-note pattern repeated four times, a shuffle of Kenny Clarke’s brushes on the snare, and Monk sailed jauntily into “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart.”

What had happened with Hannah? To Hannah and himself? When had he last felt the urge to pick up the telephone and dial the number he still knew by heart? One of the cats nudged against his leg and began to purr; someone happy at least that Resnick’s nights away from home were less frequent, that his presence in the early mornings was more and more assured.

He sliced some dark rye bread and placed it under the grill. Damson jam or marmalade? He thought damson jam. There was a book he’d started to read-reread in parts at least- Talking Jazz: an Oral History. Jackie Ferris, a sergeant with the Yard’s Arts and Antiques Squad, had sent it as a gift at the conclusion of a case they’d been working jointly. Segments of recorded conversation, it was ideal for the ten minutes he allowed himself in the easy chair before setting off for work.

The patch Resnick was charged with policing sat nicely on the edge of the inner city, perched as it was on the front line between the poorer, largely working-class area of Radford and the more affluent and middle-class former private estate of The Park. To the east of the Alfreton Road were the student flats of Lenton and to the west was the city itself, with its burgeoning clubs and pubs, and ever-present hordes in search of the ultimate good time.

The CID room was on the first floor, Resnick’s office partitioned off in the farthest corner, the squad’s desks crammed with telephones, scraps of paper, stained mugs, directories, chewed-up ballpoints, printed forms, keyboards, VDUs.

Kevin Naylor, one of the four detective constables in the team, phone wedged between chin and shoulder, was doing his best to calm an elderly woman who had come down that morning to find her front door wide open and her TV set, camera, microwave, and the hundred and fifty pounds she kept in an old Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin all missing. “Yes,” Naylor said, and “Yes, of course,” and “Yes,” and “Yes, I understand,” using an HB pencil alternately to scribble notes on a lined pad and stir his tea.

Sharon Garnett fidgeted absentmindedly with a loose curl of hair, as she scrolled through a list of known offenders, searching for a possible match between an address in Radford and a name she had half heard in a crowded bar. Close to the side wall, Carl Vincent, cuffs turned back neatly against his wrists, was cross-checking the details of last night’s stolen vehicles with one of the information officers at Central station.

All there was to show of Ben Fowles was a half-eaten bacon cob in the middle of his desk. Resnick pushed the temptation to the back of his mind.

Graham Millington, his sergeant for longer than either of them cared to remember, hovered close to the door to Resnick’s office, chest puffed out, mustache bristling. A stoat, Resnick thought, hankering to be after the rabbit.