John Harvey - Rough Treatment

“Yes, sir. She … DC Kellogg, she was on duty at the center. Kate …”

“Christ,” breathed Skelton. “She’s been caught shoplifting.”

Resnick nodded. “Yes.”

“She’s here? Here now?”

“Outside.”

“God, Charlie.” Skelton’s fingers rested on Resnick’s arm as the life seemed to pass from his eyes. Turning back to his desk, the spring had gone from his step, his shoulders, ever straight, slumped forward.

“There’s no question?”

“She’s admitted the offense. On the way in.”

“I see.”

“Others, too. It seems … seems to have been going on some little time.” The occasions he had been forced to do this, parents called unknowing to the door, mistaking him for a Jehovah’s Witness, some cowboy wanting to set slates back on the roof; their minds still swimming with whatever they’d been watching on TV. Slowly dawning: I’ll kill the little bastard, what’s he been up to now? Belligerence. Anger. Tears. My Terry, he’s off t’youth club, I know for a fact. My Tracy … My Kate.

Skelton didn’t say anything, sat there trying not to stare at the family photos, precise and particular on his desk.

“You’ll want to see her, sir. Before she’s interviewed. Makes a statement.”

“All right, Charlie.” He looked poleaxed. “Just give me a couple of minutes, will you? Then ask DC Kellogg to bring her through.”

Resnick nodded and went towards the door. It seemed a strangely long way and all the time he was expecting the superintendent to call him back, say something more, though he didn’t know what that should be. But there was nothing further. Resnick opened the office door and closed it again behind him.

“A couple of minutes,” he said to Lynn.

“Right, sir.”

When he looked at Kate, she turned her head away.

Graham Millington was feeling pretty chipper. His wife had agreed to take time off from her evening classes, one of the neighbors had promised to keep an eye on the kids, they had seats for the Royal Center, third row center. Petula Clark. As far as Millington was concerned you could take all your Elaine Paiges and Barbara Dicksons, Shirley Basseys even, lump them all together and they still wouldn’t rival Petula. God, she’d been going since before he could remember and that had to say something for her. And it wasn’t just her voice that was in great shape. She wasn’t page three, of course, never had been and wouldn’t thank you for saying so, but at least what there was was all hers. No nipping and tucking there. None of your hormone transplants either. Fifty whatever she was and looking like that. Incredible!

Millington wandered across the CID room in happy reverie, whistling “Downtown.”

“What is it with you, Graham?” Resnick asked.

“Sorry, sir?”

“Last year it was all I could do to keep you from murdering ‘Moonlight Serenade.’”

Millington looked down at his feet and for one awful moment Resnick thought the sergeant was going to break into a soft-shoe shuffle. “Your mother wasn’t frightened by the Black and White Minstrels when she was carrying you, was she?”

Millington had been inside Resnick’s house once; he’d seen the inspector’s record collection. The sort he listened to, half of them snuffed it from sticking needles in their arms before they were thirty.

“Heard about the super’s kid,” Millington said, changing the subject. “How’s he taking it?”

“How d’you think?” said Resnick sharply. Millington had a clear vision of one of his own, the time he’d found him sitting down behind his bed getting too interested in a tube of Airfix glue.

“Anything new?” Resnick asked. “Fossey, for instance.”

The sergeant recalled the other reason he’d been whistling happily. “Patel, sir. The bloke our man Grice met in the pub, he put the number through Swansea. Car’s licensed to an Andrew John Savage.”

“Fossey’s friend.”

“And helper. Low-grade insurance broker. Lowest quotes, immediate and personal service guaranteed.”

It was Resnick’s turn to smile. “Fossey didn’t get back in touch with his records, I suppose?”

Millington shook his head. “Might be enough now to get a warrant.”

“Let’s wait on that one. Push too hard and he might be tempted to do a runner. They both might. We’ll have a little get-together first thing tomorrow, make sure the strategy’s right. Okay. Graham?”

“Yes, sir,” Millington nodded. But he didn’t move away-and neither did he stop smiling.

“There’s more?” Resnick asked. He hoped it wasn’t going to be “Don’t Sleep in the Subway,” even, heaven forbid, “Winchester Cathedral.” “Sailor!”

“Trevor Grice. We never ran a check on him till now.”

Resnick waited for the punchline.

“Two years for burglary back in ’76.”

“Clean since then?”

“According to the computer.”

“Except we know better, eh, Graham?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well done. Good piece of work. Tell Patel, if you haven’t already. And Graham …”

Millington looked at him expectantly.

“Get yourself an early night. Next couple of days, I’d say we’re liable to be pretty busy.”

Skelton and his daughter sat at either side of the superintendent’s desk, avoiding each other’s eyes, not speaking, When Lynn Kellogg had first shown her into the office, when the door had closed behind her and she had been left alone there with her father, Kate had cried. Tears she had thought used up already. Her father had offered her a handkerchief and she had moved her head away, preferring a handful of tissues, pink and wet and torn.

“Sit down, Kate.”

She had sat, knowing the questions he must want to ask, the answers he was quickly learning to dread. After a while it was almost calm, almost pleasant. The hum of sound from other rooms, steps that moved closer, past and away. Their breathing. Telephones. Traffic changing gear before the traffic lights, the roundabout. Her mother-somewhere her mother was folding a school blouse after ironing, laying it down inside a drawer in Kate’s room. Moving to the kitchen, perhaps, a glance towards the timer on the oven, a casserole to be tasted, salt and black pepper ground in and stirred. “That child,” Kate had overheard one dismal evening, “you give in to her too easily. Things she gets away with. In this house and out. The way you are with youngsters in your job-a pity a little of that hasn’t rubbed off here. She might not be as wild as she is. Might show us both a little more respect.”

“Kate …”

“What?”

“Do you want to …?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go home?”

Right across the road from where Resnick was walking there had once been a mainline railway station. Now the original clock stood on its tower in front of one of the city’s two shopping centers, this one with high-rise fiats rising from inside it like concrete stalagmites. Up here on the left the Moulin Rouge: one and nine it had cost Resnick to see his first foreign film, patchy subtitles and imitations of carnality; barely remembered glimpses of Brigitte Bardot’s breasts, somewhere that might have been St. Tropez. Gone like most of the other fleapits where he had watched Jerry Lewis, Doris Day.

Resnick pushed open the door to the Partridge and walked into the left-hand room. Jeff Harrison was nursing a scotch at the end of the bar and he scarcely looked up when Resnick entered, but clearly knew he was there. Most of the bench seats were taken; at one of the round tables four young men still wearing long overcoats smoked roll-ups and played dominoes. Resnick squeezed in alongside Jeff Harrison and ordered a Guinness and a bag of plain crisps.