John Harvey - Off Minor

For God’s sake, Divine thought, what’s the matter with the youth? Squirming round on that seat like he’s got St. Vitus’s dance. As if I’m about to give a toss what he did to his little tart and why. Bloody miracle was that she went with him at all. Face like a lavatory floor at close of business and whenever he leaned close Divine got this whiff of him, like opening a tin of cat food with your nose too sharp to the tin.

As for the jacket … Oxfam job if ever he saw one.

Divine stifled a yawn and tried not to make it too obvious he was looking at his watch. Come on, come on, get to the point. Only another six hours and he’d be over in the pub with the lads, sinking a few pints, curry later, that’s what he fancied, put a bit of spice into the evening. Somebody reckoned the Black Orchid the place to go early in the week, good pickings, but look, these days, it paid to be careful where you were sticking it, didn’t do to take too many chances.

“Hold, up!” Divine spread his hands on the table, interrupting his own line of thought. “Let’s have that bit again.”

“What?”

“What you just said.”

Raymond looked perplexed. What had he said?

“You said,” Divine prompted him, “as soon as you saw the shoe …”

“Oh, yes, I guessed what it was. You know, under there.” Divine was shaking his head. “Not exactly, what you said was, you knew. ”

Raymond shrugged, fidgeted some more. “Knew, guessed, I don’t know, what’s the difference?”

“One means you were certain. If you knew, you …”

“That’s right, I did. Least, I thought I did. Wasn’t just the shoe, there was this … hand, I s’pose it was, a hand, part of her hand. And the smell.” Raymond looked away from the table, where he’d been staring at his own chewed fingers, the bitten-down nails, and flush into Divine’s face. “Had to be her. Didn’t it?”

“ Her? ”

“The little girl, the one who went missing, ages back, you know.” Divine held his breath. “What you’re saying, Raymond, right off, it wasn’t simply you knew what was hidden in that corner was a body, you knew whose body it was.”

Raymond stared back at him, not squirming any more, quite calm. “Yes,” he said. “Gloria. I knew her. Used to live near me. See her mornings, on her way, like, into school. Weekends, off down the shops with her nan. Yes. Gloria. I used to watch her.”

“Here,” the pathologist said, “take one of these.”

Resnick slipped one of Parkinson’s extra-strong mints inside his mouth, pushing it high against his palate with his tongue. It was quiet enough in the small office for Resnick to hear the tick of the old-fashioned fob watch Parkinson always wore, attached by a chain at the front of his waistcoat. Only when he had to don an apron did the pathologist remove the jacket of his three-piece suit; the only occasion he removed his cuff links, rolled his shirt sleeves carefully back up, was when his assistant was holding out a pair of flesh-colored surgical gloves.

“Quite a mess, eh, Charlie?”

Resnick nodded.

“As well we found her when we did.”

Resnick nodded again, trying not to visualize the bite marks on the body; the front of the face, one way or another, laid bare almost to the bone.

“What helped most, of course, either it’s my damned age or this has set to be one of the chilliest winters we’ve had for years. Building like that, no heating, much of the time it would have stayed the right side of forty degrees.”

They had identified Gloria Summers from her dental charts and by comparison of bones from an X-ray that had been taken a year earlier, when she had fallen and broken a bone in her right ankle. Resnick had asked her mother if she wanted to come to the mortuary and see the body and Susan Summers had looked at him with raised eyebrows and said, “Are you kidding?”

“How definite can you be,” Resnick asked now, “as to cause of death?”

Parkinson removed his bifocals and proceeded to give them an unnecessary polish. “One thing’s positive: strangulation. Without doubt the windpipe has been fractured; the other signs you’d anticipate are clearly there. Hemorrhaging in the neck, close by the hyoid bone. Some evidence of swelling in the veins at the back of the head, caused by the increase in pressure when the blood is unable to escape.”

“Then that was what killed her?”

“Not necessarily.” Satisfied, Parkinson set the glasses back upon his nose. “There is also a severe fracture at the rear of the skull, acute extradural and subdural hematoma …”

“Fall or a blow?”

“Almost certainly a blow. The way the hemorrhaging’s below the fracture. While she could have sustained a similar fracture as the result of a fall-she was only a wee girl remember-the force of that kind of accident jolts the brain hard against the skull and I’d be looking to find bleeding further forward, scarcely any underneath the fracture at all.”

Resnick crunched the last fragments of mint between his back teeth. “So, your report, which one will you be opting for, principal cause?”

Parkinson shook his head. “Either, or.” He put his hand into his waistcoat pocket, offered Resnick another mint. “Come the end of the day, I’ll be surprised if it greatly matters.”

Resnick got back to the station to find Graham Millington closeted in his office with Kellogg and Divine. Millington hadn’t quite dared to take Resnick’s chair, but hovered near it instead, as if he might be invited to sit at any moment. Divine, of course, sportsman that he was, had been working his way through Benson and Hedges Silk Cut, giving a pretty fair impression of Sellafield on a cloudy day.

“Sorry,” Millington said, straightening not quite to attention, “like open house out there.”

Resnick shook his head. “I assume you’re not in here to discuss the dinner and dance?”

“No, sir.”

Resnick wafted the door back and forth a few times, settled for leaving it partly open. “Better fill me in,” he said.

Millington looked pointedly at Mark Divine and waited for him to start. Resnick listened, observing carefully: the way Divine leaned forward, shoulders hunched as if locking into a scrum, the eagerness in his voice; Lynn, more centered on her chair, soft skepticism on her face; and Millington-outside of the moral righteousness that went with a well-tended garden and a clean shirt, whatever he might be thinking was a mystery. Aside from the fact that he’d been sergeant for too long now, couldn’t understand why the promotion he surely deserved still seemed so far away.

There was a moment after Divine had finished that they looked, all three of them, directly at Resnick, leaning back behind his desk. Outside, officers answered telephones, identifying themselves, rank and name; a single laugh, harsh and loud, broke into a racking cough; someone whistled the chorus of “Stand By Your Man” and Resnick smiled as he saw Lynn Kellogg bridle.

“He actually said that?” Resnick asked. “‘I used to watch her’?”

“Very words. Look.” He held his notebook towards Resnick’s face. “No two ways about it.”

“No chance you had a tape running?” Millington said.

Divine scowled and shook his head.

“Clearly, you think it means something,” said Resnick.

“Sir, you should have seen him. When he said it, about watching her. He didn’t mean, yes, well, I used to bump into her in the street, knew who she was. He didn’t mean I used to see her, casual-like. What he was on about was something more.”

“You didn’t question him about that? Try to confirm your suspicions.”

“No, sir. I thought if I did, then, I mean, he might, you know, clam up.”