John Harvey - Rough Treatment

For now it was enough to have Harold out of the house.

She flipped back through the pages of the paper, undecided between making a fresh pot of tea or going upstairs to run her bath. That she did neither was due to the ringing of the doorbell.

Through the window she glimpsed the sleeve of an overcoat, white-and-gray herringbone. Only in those last seconds before she opened the door did Maria think it might be her burglar, returned.

What she saw was a man, tall and bare-headed, a brown scarf pushed haphazardly inside the collar of his coat. To Resnick, there was no disguising the surprise, the hint of disappointment in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Resnick said with something of a smile.

She looked up at him, uncomprehending, one hand holding tight to the folds of her robe. “Sorry?”

“Not who you were expecting?”

“Expecting?” For God’s sake, Maria thought, you sound like a ventriloquist’s parrot.

“You looked as if you were expecting somebody …”

“Oh, well, my husband, he left in a hurry …”

“I think I saw him.”

“Driving too fast, that was him. Four times out of five he’s back, swearing because he’s left a script behind.”

Resnick nodded. “I see.” For several moments he said nothing and then: “Don’t you want to know who I am?”

Maria Roy drew in rather too much air, and nodded. Resnick took out his wallet and showed her his identification.

“Resnick?” Maria said.

“Detective inspector.”

She looked at his face: his eyes were dark and a little hooded and there were too many lines of tiredness surrounding them. He had shaved that morning, but not too closely or too well. There was a trail of dried blood speckling the skin below his left ear, dark like old tears.

“The last time,” she said, “it was only a constable.”

Resnick smiled again, closer to the full works.

“I was just about to make some more tea,” Maria said, holding back the door as she stood aside to let him in.

He would have preferred coffee but accepted tea anyway, black with a slice of lemon. He watched with a sense of strange familiarity a woman moving around her own kitchen, wearing a robe that reached down to her calves and occasionally opened itself at her thigh. Was it really silk, he wondered, or pale imitation? By the time she had set a selection of biscuits on a plate before him and sat down herself, across the table which still held breakfast things, he had concluded that it was real.

“Is the tea all right?”

“Fine.”

She was well enough into her forties to need more flattering lighting if she were to pass for less. That didn’t matter to Resnick one scrap, but he sensed it did to her.

He pushed the plate out of easy reach and caught her smiling, understanding why.

“When you thought I might have been your husband, you said something about a script. Is he a writer?”

“Writer?” Maria shook her head. “D’you think we could afford to rent a place like this if he were a writer?”

“Harold Robbins,” Resnick said, “Jackie Collins.”

“Oh, sure. But then we’d be out in LA, not here in the Midlands.”

Resnick lifted his cup from its saucer. “What does he do?”

“Harold? Rumor has it he’s a director.”

“In the theater?”

“Not any more. Television.” She tapped a cigarette out into her fingers, lit it, inhaled and, averting her head, released a film of fine smoke. “He’s here on a twelve-month contract. The series to end all other series.”

“Why here?”

“A good question. Everyone thinks the business is all in London, but that’s only where they take one another out to lunch.” She waved away more smoke with a flap of her hand. “Since I became Harold’s camp follower, I’ve really seen the world. Birmingham. Manchester. Southampton. Belfast-I couldn’t go to the supermarket for Tampax there without being searched twice.” She looked around for an ashtray, couldn’t see one within reach and deposited a neat quarter-inch of ash against the rim of her saucer. “Now here.”

Resnick drank some more tea. It was a mixture of Earl Grey and something he couldn’t identify, but it was too weak.

“I’ve never been really sure what a director does,” he said.

“That’s Harold’s problem, too.” She stubbed out the remaining two-thirds of her cigarette and stood up. “Anyway, why all this interest in Harold?”

“Making conversation,” said Resnick pleasantly.

“I’m surprised you can find the time.”

“Actually, I think what I’m doing is trying to put you at ease.”

“Then the last thing you should be talking about is my husband.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“A sticky patch?” suggested Resnick helpfully.

“A quagmire.”

“Oh.”

Maria continued to look at him: the tie he was wearing-red-and-blue-diagonals-failed to hide the fact that the top button of his shirt was hanging on by a thread of the wrong color.

“Perhaps we should change the subject,” Resnick said.

“Perhaps we should.”

“You said the house was rented, it’s not yours.”

“We have a year’s lease. I believe the family who own it are in Canada.”

“But the insurance is yours?”

“We had our names put on the policy, to cover the contents.”

“What I can remember of your inventory, quite a lot of money was involved. Several items of jewelry valued in the high hundreds. More.”

“Harold checked with the company after we moved in. They sent somebody round to make sure the house was secure. I suppose he was satisfied.”

“By a disconnected burglar alarm?”

Maria’s eyes tightened. “We were asked to have it properly reinstalled.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“We were getting it done. I think one man came out, but Harold said his quotation was outrageous. He was getting in touch with somebody else. I suppose he just hadn’t got around to it.”

“The man who came? You don’t happen to remember his name?”

Maria shook her head. He had been wearing red and-white-running shoes and a pale leather jacket and his breath had reminded her of her parents’ aging cocker spaniel.

“Would your husband remember?”

“I dare say he might. Why? Is it important?”

Resnick shook his head. “I doubt it.”

Maria clicked her lighter. Detective inspectors came in more promising packages. True, this one was a little too much on the slobby side to be seen with in public, but once you got your head around that he wasn’t a bad looking man. Big, she would have to grant him that. He was a big man. For a moment cold rippled her stomach and she was back in the living room, staring at Grabianski over her glass of scotch, the way he had stood easy in the doorway, watching her. A big man.

“These burglars,” said Resnick, changing tack, “you’ve not had any more thoughts about what they looked like? The one you saw first, for instance.”

Without thinking, Maria answered: “As a matter of fact, he looked a bit like you.”

“But black,” Resnick said.

“Sorry?”

“Like me, but black. You told the officer …”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

“He was black, then?”

“Yes.”

“Both of them?”

“That’s right. Absolutely.”

“No doubt?”

“Well, there couldn’t be, could there?”

“But like me? One of them.”

“I suppose …”

“It was what you said.”

“I know.”

“You said, as a matter of fact …”

“Yes, I know. I meant …” She gestured vaguely with her hands. “His size, height, you know, he was …”

“He was about my size?”

“That’s right.”