John Harvey - Off Minor

What is it that causes us to take a man who, despite disease and self-doubt, can create such glory and throw him into the stockade, denying him everything, a 34-year-old, light-skinned black man in deepest Georgia? Take a girl with china-blue eyes and blonde hair and break her body, bury her in bin bags in the wasted dark?

“I Never Knew.”

Resnick lowered his foot on the accelerator, turned up the volume of the tape until the sound trembled on the edge of distortion, closing out all other noise, all thought.

Mablethorpe, less than twenty miles up the coast from Skeggy, and forever its poor relation, welcomed Resnick like a Dickensian pallbearer wintering away from the poorhouse. Along the length of the single main street, boarded-up shop fronts vainly promised lettered rock and candy floss, jumbo hot dogs and fresh-made doughnuts, five for a pound. A white-haired man in an old RAF greatcoat nodded at him, his wire-haired fox terrier showing a passing interest in Resnick’s ankles. Up ahead, the broad concrete promenade had all the friendliness of the Maginot Line. And beyond that, all but lost in mist, the North Sea rolled coldly in, inexorable, more like sludge than sea.

Edith Summers had swapped her high-rise flat for a 1930s bungalow with a pebble-dash fascia, three doors down from a corner café advertising fresh caught local cod and chips (tea included, bread and butter extra). She didn’t say anything when she recognized Resnick standing at her front door, shoulders hunched against the drizzle and the wind.

She had brought her fish tank and gold-rimmed table with her; hired a new TV, bolted on to a black metal trolley, and, in poorly mixed color, Petula Clark was gazing wistfully at Fred Astaire, singing “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” in a failing Irish accent. Edith left Resnick in the low-ceilinged room and returned with a flowered cup and saucer.

“I’ve not long mashed.”

When he was sitting, sipping at the lukewarm tea, she said: “I know why you’re here.”

Resnick nodded.

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, but …”

“What I said …”

“Yes.”

At first, he thought she was going to control it, brave it through until he’d gone, but, sitting in front of him, a distance that could be spanned too easily by an outstretched arm, he watched her face crumple inwards, a balloon from which the air is being slowly released.

While the first sobs were still raking her, he set down his cup and saucer, knelt beside her, reaching up, until she buried her face in the crook of his neck, cheek fast against the rough collar of his coat.

“Had he, you know, molested her? Interfered with her, like?” It was later, dark pressed up against the windows; Resnick had made the tea this time and the pot sat before the bars of the electric fire, knitted tea cozy not quite in place.

“We don’t know. Not for certain. The length of time she’d been left. But, yes, you have to think it’s possible.” A shiver coursed through him, nothing to do with the cold. “I’m sorry.”

Edith shook her head. “I can’t understand it, can you? How anyone in his right mind …?”

“No,” Resnick said.

“Then, of course, that’s it. They’re not in their right mind, are they?”

He said nothing.

“Sick, sick. They need whipping, locking up.”

He began to reach a hand towards her.

“No, no. It’s all right. I shall be all right.”

Inside the room it seemed airless. The fire was burning Resnick’s right leg, making no impression on the left. Despite himself, he was thinking of the long drive home, the murder incident room the next morning.

“The funeral,” Edith said suddenly. “Whatever’s going to happen about the funeral?”

“Perhaps Gloria’s mother …” Resnick began and then stopped.

“It’s my fault, you know.”

“No.”

“It is. It is my fault.”

“No one can be expected to watch over a child all the time. Where you left her …”

But that wasn’t what Edith Summers meant. She meant her daughter, Susan, born late, virtually ignored by her father for the first nine months of her life, chased and harried by him for the eighteen after that until he left, setting up house in Ilkeston with a woman he’d met on the checkout in Safeway, old enough to indulge him and count the consequences. He scarcely ever came round after that, not all the while Susan was growing towards her teens. Not that Edith encouraged him, better at gritting her teeth and bearing it than she ever was at reconciliation.

When Susan reached ten, rising eleven, all that seemed to change. Her dad’s relationship had broken up and he was back in the city, sharing a house with a couple of taxi drivers who lived at Top Valley and driving a cab himself. “Edith,” he would say, smiling his way round the door on his increasingly frequent visits, “Edie, lighten up. She’s my daughter, too. Aren’t you, princess?” Offering Susan the comics, the chocolate, the Top-Twenty singles to play on the Taiwanese music center he’d bought her as a Christmas present. “Eh, his dad’s girl.”

Three years it lasted, lightning visits whenever one of his fares left him over in the right direction, time to call in and sweep his daughter off her feet all over again. Then the Saturday he kissed Susan on the top of the head and said to her mother, “Right, c’mon. Get your coat, we’re off round the pub. Nothing for you to worry about, princess. Back in a couple of shakes.”

Over a pint of mixed and Edith’s gin and Dubonnet, he told her about America, the woman he had met when she was over here on holiday-“Just picked her up in the cab, short fare from the Lace Hall to Tales of Robin Hood, who’d have thought it?” She was the one who’d invited him over, reckoned she could put in a word, get him fixed up with a job, someone who would vouch for him, see that he settled.

“And Susan?” Edith had managed.

“She’ll be able to come over, won’t she? Holidays. You see; I’ll send the fare.”

What he sent were postcards, once a Mickey Mouse that lost a leg in flight. Susan sulked and cried and claimed she didn’t care: right up to the time she first stayed out all night and when she arrived back home next morning, dropped off by a 25-year-old in a purple and gold Cortina, said to her mother’s face, “It’s my life and I’ll do what I want with it and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” Not so many days short of her fifteenth birthday.

Edith looked at the tea pot by the fire through blurred eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s anything in there worth drinking?”

Resnick tried for a smile. “I’ll make some more.”

“No,” getting to her feet, “let me. It’s my house. Bungalow, anyhow. You’re the visitor, remember?”

He followed her into the tiny kitchen; whenever she needed to reach for the packet of Tips, the carton of UHT milk, Resnick had to suck in his stomach, hold his breath.

“Sixteen she was when she fell for Gloria,” Edith said, waiting for the tea to draw. “I was only surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. If ever I asked her, you know, said anything about taking precautions, all that happened was she told me to watch my mouth, mind my own business. I suppose I should have stood my ground, made a scene, dragged her off screaming and kicking to the doctor, family planning, if that’s what it needed.” She sighed and gave the pot a final stir before beginning to pour. “But I didn’t, I let it alone. Look,” handing him the cup and saucer, “you’re sure that’s not too strong?”

Resnick nodded, fine, and they moved back into the other room.

“Turned out,” Edith said, sitting down, “she’d got in with this particular gang of lads, old enough to have known better: they’d been passing her round like some blanket you use to take the chill out of the grass when you lie down. Any one of them it could have been and, of course, none of them stood up for it. Susan was too concerned with being sick, being angry to think about pointing fingers, blood tests, any of that.”