John Harvey: Off Minor

Which meant that it was not the detective inspector, but his sergeant who was the senior officer in the CID room when the call came through.

Graham Millington shouldn’t have been there, either. By rights, he should have been at home in his garden, stealing a march on autumn before it did the same to him. His garden or Somerset. Taunton, to be precise. He and the wife should have been in Taunton, drinking some ghastly mix of Earl Grey tea and eating egg and salad sandwiches while his wife’s sister and her excuse for a husband went on at great length about the rising crime rate, the ozone layer and the diminishing Tory vote. Oh, and Jesus. Millington’s in-laws, the original right-wing, Christian conservationists, sitting up there at the Green right hand of God, like as not offering him another wholemeal lettuce and cucumber and some advice about keeping acid rain well clear of the hem of his garment.

Millington’s long face and protracted warnings about traffic hold-ups on the M5 had finally had their effect. “Right,” his wife had declared, metaphorically folding her arms across her chest, “we won’t go anywhere.” Promptly, she had shut herself in the front room with an illustrated companion to the Tate Gallery, a new biography of Stanley Spencer and a set of earplugs: this term’s course on art history was beginning with a new look at British visionaries. Millington had staked a few dahlias, dead-headed what remained of the roses and got as far as seriously considering putting top dressing on the back lawn. The weight of his wife’s umbrage bore heavily on him, sullen-faced on the newly re-covered settee with those awful paintings she’d shown him. What was it? The cows at bloody Cookham. Jesus Christ!

He hadn’t been in the office ten minutes, less time than it took to boil a kettle, set the tea to mash, when the phone rang. Gloria Summers. Last seen on the swings at Lenton Recreation Ground a little after one o’clock. Relatives, neighbors, friends, none had set eyes on her; not since her grandmother left her to walk to the shops, no more than two streets away. Stay there now, there’s a good girl. Gloria Summers: six years old.

Millington wrote down the details, took a taste or two of tea before raising Resnick on the phone. At least once the boss was involved he’d likely talk to the kiddie’s parents himself; one thing above all else that turned his stomach, Millington, looking into those collapsing faces, telling lies.

The summons saved Resnick from a difficult decision: Saturday night propping up the bar at the Polish Club, wishing all the while that he’d stayed home, or Saturday night at home, wishing now he’d gone to the Club. He spoke to Maurice Wainright, making sure all uniforms had been alerted, car patrols diverted, nothing new in the way of information yet obtained. Six o’clock: he guessed the superintendent would be listening to the radio news and he was right.

“See your team started well, Charlie,” Jack Skelton said.

“Couldn’t seem to get going, sir.”

“Leave it too late as usual, like as not.”

“I daresay, sir,” Resnick said, and then told him about the missing girl.

Skelton was quiet: in the background Resnick could hear the disembodied newsreader and laid over it, a woman’s questioning voice, Skelton’s wife or daughter, he didn’t know which.

“Five hours, Charlie. One way or another, not such a long time.”

She could have jumped down from the swing and realized her gran was no longer there, panicked and gone looking for her, got lost. Somebody’s mum, someone who should have known better, might have bundled her back with friends for cake and cola, a rented video of cartoons, anthropomorphic animals perpetrating unspeakable violence upon one another while the little girls laughed until they were crying. She could even be sitting up the road in the Savoy, hands sticky from too much popcorn, roped in on another’s birthday treat. All that was possible, they had known it all before.

Then there was the other set of possibilities …

Neither Resnick nor Skelton needed to voice what was nagging at their minds.

“You’ll go to the home,” Skelton said, not a question.

“Directly.”

“Keep me informed.”

Resnick set down the small cat that had climbed into his lap, the back of whose ears he had been absent-mindedly stroking, and headed for the door.

Outside it was darkening. Lights here and there at the windows of the high-rise gave it the appearance of an unfinished puzzle. Resnick turned off the main road between the twenty-four-hour garage and the cinema and parked beyond the slip road’s curve. A desultory group of youngsters, the eldest no more than fourteen, evaporated at his approach. He was surprised to find the lift working, less so by the sharp stink of urine, the promises of love and hatred graffitied on the walls.

Someone had painted the door of Number 37 a dull, dark green which petered unevenly out a brush stroke from the bottom, as if either the paint or the energy had suddenly run out.

Resnick rang the bell and, uncertain whether it was working, rattled the letter-box as well.

The muffled sound of television laughter became more muffled still.

“Who is it?”

Resnick stood back so that he could be seen more easily through the spyhole in the door and held up his warrant card. In the fish-eye distortion of the circular lens, Edith Summers saw a bulky man, broad-faced, tall inside the uneven folds of his open raincoat; the slack knot of his striped tie several inches below the missing button at the neck of his shirt.

“Detective Inspector Resnick. I’d like to talk to you about Gloria.”

Two bolts were fumbled back, a chain released, the latch slipped on the lock.

“Mrs. Summers?”

“You’ve found her?”

A slow shake of the head. “Afraid not. Not yet.”

Edith Summers’s shoulders slumped; anxiety had already forced out most of her hope. The corners of her eyes were red from rubbing, sore from tears. She stood in the doorway to her flat and looked at Resnick, half-broken by guilt.

“Mrs. Summers?”

“Edith Summers, yes.”

“Perhaps we could go inside?”

She stepped back and showed him along the short hall into the living room: a television set, a goldfish tank, some knitting, photographs lopsided in their frames. On the TV, barely audibly, a man in a white dress suit and a wig was persuading a middle-aged couple to humiliate themselves further for the sake of a new fridge-freezer. In one corner, beneath a square table with screw-in legs and a gold-painted rim, the arms and heads of several dolls poked from a green plastic bag.

“You’re Gloria’s grandmother?”

“Her nan, yes.”

“And her mother?”

“She lives here with me.”

“The mother?”

“Gloria.”

Resnick tried to blank out the thud of a poorly amplified bass from the upstairs flat, hip-hop or rap, he wasn’t sure he knew the difference.

“You’ve seen no sign of her yourself?” Resnick asked. “Nobody’s been in touch?”

She looked at him without answering, plucked at something in the ends of her hair. Resnick sat down and she did the same, the two of them in matching easy chairs, curved wooden arms and skinny cushions, upholstered backs. He wished he’d brought along Lynn Kellogg, wondered if he should find the kitchen, make a pot of tea.

“She’s always lived here along of me. It was me as brought her up.”

Edith Summers shook a cigarette from a packet in her cardigan pocket; lit it with a match from the household box on top of the gas fire. Turned low, the center of the fire burned blue.

“Like she was my own.”

She sat back down, absent-mindedly straightening the loose skirt of her belted dress over her knees. The cardigan draped across her shoulders had been cable stitched in black. On her feet were faded purple slippers with no back and an off-white puff of wool attached to one of them still. Her hair was less than shoulder length and mostly dark. She could have been anything between forty and fifty-five; probably, Resnick thought, she was around the same age as himself.