John Harvey - Off Minor

“Bin bags?” asked Lawrence.

Resnick nodded. “… covered those over with a piece of old tarpaulin and then built a kind of shelter round it, planks of wood, whatever was around.” For a moment the mug of coffee was less than steady in his hand. “Without all of that, the body wouldn’t have stayed as intact as apparently it has; that whole area’s alive with rats.”

“They never got to it at all?”

“That’s not what I said.” Resnick got up and walked across to the coffee machine, helped himself to another half a mug. So far, he’d only spoken to Parkinson, the Home Office pathologist, on the phone, but what he had heard had been enough to twist his guts into a knot.

“I’m not clear what you’re saying,” said Tom Parker. “Are we going to be able to make an identification or not?”

“We’re not going to be able to look at a photograph and say yes, that’s her, that’s the kiddie, that’s one thing we’re not going to do.” Resnick realized, too late, how high his voice was raised.

Tom Parker looked at him, only mildly surprised.

“You think it’s the little girl who went missing,” Skelton said, lining up the paperweight against the picture of his wife and child.

“Yes.” Resnick nodded and sat down.

“Gloria.”

“Summers. Yes.”

“September, wasn’t it?” Len Lawrence shifted his weight in the chair. Sitting too long in one position gave him cramp: privately, he was dreading the flight to New Zealand.

“Yes,” said Resnick. “Nine weeks now. A little over.”

“No leads,” said Lawrence.

“Till now.”

“You can’t be certain, Charlie,” Skelton said. “Not yet.”

“No, sir.”

But he was.

Resnick was conscious of the comparative silence outside the room, the virtual absence of traffic on the normally busy road outside; a lull between the usually omnipresent ringing of telephones. Most people were turning over in bed for an extra half-hour, going downstairs in dressing gowns and bare feet to put on the kettle, fetch the paper from the front-door mat, let in or out the dog or cat. They sat there in that first-floor room, four middle-aged men, talking about murder. The next time it was officially discussed there would be maps and photographs, computers, newly opened files and many more personnel. Too many people, Resnick thought, not wanting the silence to break; knowing that when it did he would have to get out on the street, the next step in the investigation.

“At least,” Kevin Naylor said, pointing his fork in the direction of Mark Divine’s plate, “it hasn’t cost you your appetite.”

Divine grunted and cut diagonally across his second sausage, forking up one end and using it to break the yolk of his second egg. He carefully wiped this around the juice of his tinned tomatoes and baked beans before lifting it to his mouth.

“Something like this,” Divine said, “what it does to you,” wiping his chin with a convenient slice of fried bread, “makes you think about being alive. You know, savoring it.”

Naylor, who had restricted himself to two rounds of toast and a large tea, nodded understanding. He remembered his father telling him, an unusually unguarded moment, how after his wife’s, Kevin’s mother’s, funeral, all he could think of was hustling his aunt Mary into the spare bedroom and giving her one. Nine months later, the two of them were married and, from what Naylor could make out on his rare visits to Marsden, his dad was still trying.

“Tell you what,” Divine said through a mouthful of breakfast, “that feller wrote that book about serial murder, you know, the bloke who skins ’em alive and wears them like a shell suit, according to him, what you do, keep the stink from turning your gut, like, it’s carry round this little pot of Vick and rub it round inside your nose. Bollocks! Half a ton of it wouldn’t have kept this from wellying the old nerve ends. Stroll on! Worse than a bevy of bottled farts well past their sell-by date.”

He speared three miscellaneous pieces of egg white and the last of the sausage. Divine had been one of two CID officers on duty when the report had come in. He had talked briefly to Raymond Cooke and Sara Prine, sending them off with a promise to come back and make a full statement around mid-morning. By the time he got out to Sneinton, the whole area had been roped off, lights were being setup, the scene-of-crime boys eager to move in and shoot a video that would fetch a small fortune if copies ever found their way on to the market. Parkinson had driven down from a dinner party in Lincoln, still wearing his evening dress, rat droppings and worse making a right old mess of the bottoms of his trousers, patent leather shoes. Not that there was much the pathologist could establish there and then. Most of his work would have to take place in more clinical conditions.

“You know what I think,” Divine said, voice lowered and leaning close. “Next time something like this crops up,” glancing across the canteen now to where Diptak Patel was standing alongside Lynn Kellogg in the queue, “we ought to send Sunshine out there, all that oil and incense, stuff he has to eat, like as not he wouldn’t even notice.”

Finding Gloria Summers’s mother the first time had not been as difficult as the grandmother had suggested. Susan had been living with a girlfriend in a second-story housing association flat in one of those conversions that lined the upper edge of the Forest. This time, mid-morning on the Sunday, the friend was there, but Susan had not returned.

“Since last night?” Resnick asked.

“Since a lot of nights.”

“Any idea where she might be?”

“Oh, yes.” Resnick had the impression she might have grinned at him, including him in the joke, if she had not been so obviously bored. “A lot of ideas.”

“Boyfriends?”

“If you want to call them that.”

Resnick’s notebook was in his hand. “Where shall I start?”

“What might be a good idea, get a bigger book.”

He struck lucky with his third call. A bleary-eyed West Indian opened the door, scratching himself beneath the voluminous arm of a kaftan top. Resnick identified himself and told the man he was looking for Susan Summers.

The West Indian smiled and ushered him in.

Susan was propped up against several pillows, not too fussed about the way the sheet was covering her body. The bed was a mattress stretched across the floor, take-away cartons and Red Stripe cans strategically around it. An ashtray the diameter of a dinner plate was close to overflowing.

“Cup of tea?” the man asked, smiling now at the way Resnick was looking at Susan, trying not to look.

“Thanks, no.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Remember me?” Resnick said to the young woman in the bed.

The last time he had spoken to her, asking if she had any idea where her daughter might have gone to, asking if she had seen the girl herself, Susan Summers had replied: “Ask that cow of a mother of mine, why don’t you? She’s the only one good enough even to wipe the shit from her precious little arse.”

Now, when Resnick told her he didn’t want to upset her, but there was a chance that a body they’d found that night might be that of her daughter, what she said was, “About fucking time!”

Raymond had called work early, spoken to the under-manager; told him he had a cold, heavy, he was planning to go back to bed, dose himself up with aspirin, hot milk and whisky, the way his father had told him, sweat it out. Sure, he’d be back tomorrow. No problem. Last thing he was about to do, let on that he was going to the police station, make a statement. You did what? You found what ? There’d be enough of that later on, once the news got out.