John Harvey: Rough Treatment

Her father-Jerzy’s father-unclasped the string of wooden beads from around Krystyna’s neck and kept it close until it was lost one black night when he parachuted out over the English Channel. But that was 1944.

The remaining family had split up, some to stay in what soon became Vichy France, others to head for England where they lived as close to the Polish government-in-exile of General Sikorski as was possible. Battersea: Clapham Common: Lambeth. Jerry’s father had joined the air force in France, utilizing his skills as a navigator; when France fell he flew bomber campaigns over Germany with the RAF until the war ended. He was not a man easily deflected from a course once he had set his mind to it, and being spilled into the freezing Channel only made him more determined.

He had vowed to get his family out of Poland and, for the most part, he’d succeeded. He had sworn to help defeat the Nazis and so he had. Somewhere inside himself he had made an agreement to make up for Krystyna’s death with another child but the strain of the last five years had rendered his wife an old woman. She died at thirty-seven, looking fifty-seven, lay on her front in the upstairs back bedroom of a terraced house between Clapham and Balham and simply stopped breathing. When they found her she had one arm curled out from the bed and was clinging to the bedside table as her daughter had clung to that broken oar. And she was almost as cold.

She was buried on a day of slant rain and keen wind, in a walled cemetery within sight of St. George’s Hospital. Walking home afterwards, temporarily lost in the maze of streets, Jerzy’s father bumped-literally bumped-into a nurse on her way home from duty. She took one look at his father’s face and thought that he might be in shock, insisted that he came along the street to her rented room and sit down a while. Probably because of her uniform, Jerzy’s father did as he was told; sat in a small room that smelt of camphor and accepted cup after cup of strong sweet tea.

The nurse was to become Jerzy’s mother.

Jerzy.

It had been years since anyone had called him anything other than Jerry.

Many years.

He walked to the window and looked down on the hotel car park, out over the college and the other small hotels, over the bowling green, the tennis courts, the stretch of worn grass and the edge of the cemetery on the hill-the first cluster of marble and sculpted stone, graves, one of them his father’s. He would have to take a walk there later, when the light was beginning to fade and the bell soon to be rung to announce closing. Long enough to read the inscription but not too long. He wondered, maybe, should he take flowers?

He knew that kids climbed over the wall and stole them, went from house to house and sold them, wrapped in discarded newspaper.

There was a bottle of Bass and a can of Diet Pepsi in the courtesy fridge, tea bags and a small jar of instant coffee alongside the electric kettle, containers of UHT milk. From the wall behind the television set a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers stubbornly refused to bloom. He lifted his watch from the dressing table and strapped it to his wrist: Grice was already twenty minutes late.

Resnick had two clear memories of Jeff Harrison. One was a league match at the County ground, Notts against Manchester City, and City needed three points to win the division. The normal crowd, three to five thousand, was swollen by at least as many Manchester supporters. Not only a special train, but coaches, convoys of them, had come across the Pennines and down the Ml. Notts had little enough to play for, save pride, and the Manchester celebrations were under way before the match began. Banners, flags, most striking of all, faces painted sky blue and gray; so many raucous clowns shrieking their team towards promotion.

Police presence had been increased: never by enough.

Resnick had been there as a spectator, his usual place midway along the terraces flooded for the occasion with unfamiliar bodies. All that good humor was bound to bring a negative response, spill over into ugliness. When it happened, half time, Jeff Harrison, in uniform, waded into a dozen youths who had climbed the barrier on to the pitch. He was in the midst of them when the bottle struck his face. Resnick had tried to push a way through to him, but there hadn’t been the time, and in the end there wasn’t the need. Harrison had hurled two of the supporters back against the wire, caught hold of a third and thrust his arm up behind his back; the rest had scattered, except for a big lad with a shaved head daubed the same colors as his face. The lad had a Stanley knife in his hand. Likely he’d been drinking since early that morning; he’d pulled the knife from his pocket without thinking and now that he was fast against a uniformed officer with the crowd roaring at his back, the worst possibility was that he would panic.

Jeff Harrison, blood streaming from the bridge of his nose, blocking out one eye, had stared him down with the other. Half a minute, more or less, and the weapon had been laid on the turf, its blade retracted. There were four youths waiting between the touchline and the barrier when reinforcements arrived.

The second occasion was later, after Harrison had transferred into CID. He and Resnick had been involved in a raid on a warehouse on the canal that was suspected of housing stolen goods. They picked up a known thief running clear, a villain, real dyed-in-the-wool, regional crime squad had had him targeted for months. Try as they might, nothing would tie him in, nothing that would stand up as evidence.

“Bend the rules a little, Charlie,” Harrison had said. It was one in the morning, in a drinking club off Bridlesmith Gate. “In a good cause. That confession I heard him make, you heard it too.”

“No, Jeff,” Resnick had said, “I did not.”

Two memories, clear as daylight.

“Good to see you, Charlie.”

“Jeff.”

They shook hands and Harrison offered Resnick a seat, a cup of tea, a cigarette. Resnick sat down, shook his head to the rest.

“Course, you don’t, do you?” Harrison emptied the ashtray into the metal waste bin and lit up again. He was still in CID, like Resnick now an inspector.

“Tom Parker says you’re interested in this break-in.”

Resnick sat forward, shrugged. “Might fit, might not.”

“I’ve had a copy of the report done for you. Young DC went out there, Featherstone. He’s not in as of now, or you could have talked to him yourself.”

Resnick pushed the manila envelope into his side pocket. “You didn’t go out there?”

“Couldn’t see any point. Pretty straightforward. Run of the mill.”

“You’ll not mind if I do?”

Harrison tapped ash from his cigarette and leaned his chair back on to its hind legs. “Help yourself.”

Resnick got to his feet. “Thanks, Jeff.”

“Any time. Charlie,” the chair came down on all fours, “we must have a drink or two. Been a while.”

“Yes.” Resnick was heading for the door.

“You do come up with anything,” Harrison said, “you’ll keep me posted.”

“Depend on it.”

After Resnick had gone, Jeff Harrison sat where he was until he’d smoked down that cigarette and then another. What was it about Charlie Resnick that made him so special? With his shirt still crumpled from the wash and his tie knotted arse-about-face.

Grabianski tried to imagine how Grice spent his afternoons. He pictured him sitting in the auditoriums of mostly empty cinemas, eating popcorn and doing his best to ignore the snores and shuffles from the semi-darkness around him. The last film Grabianski had seen had been Catch 22, and he had barely lasted the opening sequence: the promise of blood and bowels spilled across the airplane fuselage had brought back memories of his father’s wartime stories, too keen for Grabianski’s own stomach. He had thrown up, quietly, into a toilet bowl in the gents, fluttered his half-ticket down into the flushing water and left.