John Harvey - Rough Treatment

“What kept you?” he grinned to Lynn Kellogg over his shoulder.

Lynn looked at him and shook her head. Divine’s face was glowing. Once they were back at the station he’d sink two egg-sausage-and-bacon sandwiches and make the whole business sound like Twickenham or Cardiff Arms Park. Or South Africa.

By ten Grice was bored. The television was all men in corduroy jackets talking earnestly about amoeba or reruns of documentaries about New Forest ponies. Not even Playschool or some such, with young women in short skirts who bent their knees just enough and talked baby talk. A walk into the city would clear his head and he could stop by the video shop and take out 9 1/2 Weeks or that other one, where she walks away from the bandstand in that white skirt and it flaps open wide to her pants, the one where she’s getting her lover to kill her husband. He’d recognize it from the box.

If he still felt like it, he could even wander back into the estate agent’s and see if that woman was there, the one with the Aussie accent and the red heels. Grice wondered what it would cost to get her to pay a house call? He could provide the massage lotion and the towels. All she’d need to bring …

“Trevor Grice?”

Grice gave a little jump, hadn’t seen the man coming. Turning fast he was staring into this slim face. Asian, apologetic almost. Tall for their kind, wiry most likely. Grice was reckoning his chances as he made the unmarked car opposite, saw a uniformed officer hovering at the far end of the street.

“Yes,” Grice said. “What’s up?”

“I’d like you to come with me to the station,” Patel said.

“All right,” said Grice, starting to walk with him towards the car, “why not?”

As they drove off Grice looked back through the rear window and saw an old woman in gym shoes, standing in the middle of the road and cackling her head off. Stupid cow!

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Fine. I’m fine.”

“Only if something’s wrong …”

“Jerry, I’m telling you.”

“Okay, okay. It’s just you seem a little …” He let his finger ends glide along the dimpled flesh inside her upper arm. “It doesn’t matter.”

“A little what?”

“Tense, I suppose.”

“Because I didn’t come?”

“No, not that.”

“No?” Maria laughed.

“Well,” Grabianski elbowed his way lower and kissed between her breasts, below. “That might have had something to do with it.”

“Listen,” she said, plucking at the thick hair at the back of his head, she liked the feel of it, strong, like wire almost, “if you knew how long it had been … since I came with a man, anyone but myself, then you, you wouldn’t be so worried.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Or so quick to notice.”

“Maria …”

“Hm?”

“Nothing tense down there.” His face was pressed against her belly, tasting the residue of sweat down there, saltiness of the skin in amongst where those fine dark hairs rose up like a half-opened fan.

Maria couldn’t see, but she guessed that his eyes were closed and thought that now he might take a nap. Harold had gone out of the house this morning like a man who’d dreamed himself in the dock watching the judge reach for the black cap-then woke up and discovered he hadn’t been dreaming at all. Whereas she had taken her second cup of coffee up to the bathroom and enjoyed a good soak while Simon Bates worked his way towards “Our Tune.” Getting ready for Jerry Grabianski: lying there, pampered by bubbles and perfume and warm water; there, she could imagine it continuing forever. Even allowing herself to, encouraged it. Fantasies, too, not the kind with handcuffs and leather, but real Mills and Boon doctors-and-nurses stuff; the penniless artist who turns out to be the son of a rich laird and has a castle in the Western Isles. At her age. Her fantasy, and she didn’t want to lose it too soon: you’re not going to get your hands on a lot worth having at your age, Maria, so when you do …

Grabianski stirred and settled.

Maria smiled and glanced at the clock. If he dozed for another half an hour, she would get up and go downstairs, make them both hot chocolate, some of those nice biscuits she’d bought from Marks, maybe she could talk him into sharing yet another bath. Two or three a day she’d had since this had begun; Maria started to giggle but didn’t want to wake him-what a psychiatrist would have to say about all that sudden desire for cleansing, her and Lady Macbeth both.

Grabianski wasn’t sleeping. He kept seeing the face of that poor, overweight guy expiring in front of him. Near enough. Before getting a cab out here he had bluffed his way up to the ward and although they hadn’t allowed him through the door, he had talked with the staff nurse. His condition was stable, all that could be expected, he’d had a lucky escape-change his lifestyle, he might live till he was an old man. Well, an older one.

“What in God’s name did you do that for?” Grice had sniped at him, back in their rented flat.

How did you answer that kind of a question?

“You could have had us in all kinds of trouble. You could have had us nicked, five to ten, inside, that what you want?”

“He was dying,” Grabianski had said.

“I know he was fucking dying. Whose fault was that? He should never have been there in the first place.”

In the end it hadn’t been worth arguing, Grabianski had left Grice to drink, his eyes closed, watching some middle-of-the-night TV movie with Angie Dickinson and Telly Savalas, and had leafed through some back issues of the RSPB magazine he’d come across in a second-hand shop on the Mansfield Road. Grice was right about one thing though, he’d thought, the man should never have been there, his property or no. Something about their luck, the quality of the information they were buying, something was changing.

Then-stirring, grazing the inside of his lips against Maria’s pliant skin-all the luck he’d had hadn’t been bad.

Neither of them heard the car, but there was no avoiding the peremptory knocking at the front door, the finger hard down on the bell. Maria’s first thought was Harold again, but, as they knew, Harold was likely to use his own key. Grabianski’s assumptions were of a different nature.

“We’d better get some clothes on,” he said, rising from the bed.

“Wait here,” Maria said, “whoever it is, they’ll go away.”

Grabianski, reaching for his trousers, bent down and kissed her softly on the mouth. “I don’t think so,” he said.

Resnick was standing alone on the doorstep. No other officers in attendance; even the car had been left out of sight on the street, rather than deliberately blocking the drive. Maria Roy stood back to let him in, causing Resnick to wonder whatever she would have worn if housecoats had not been invented.

Grabianski was in the kitchen, standing between sink and table, jacket already on and ready to go, if that was the way it was going to be.

“Inspector.”

Resnick nodded, fought back an impulse to shake the man’s hand.

“Aren’t we at least entitled to some kind of explanation for this?” Maria began, walking around the table to Grabianski’s side.

“It’s okay, Maria,” Grabianski said, patting his hand back against her arm.

“Like hell it is. This is my house. I …”

“Maria, hush.”

“You wouldn’t like to make us some coffee,” Resnick said.

Grabianski caught himself wanting to smile-so that was the way it was going to be. “D’you mind?” he said to Maria, who glared at the pair of them but moved towards the coffee-maker all the same.

“Have a seat?” Grabianski said, for all the world as though it were his own house.