John Harvey: Cutting Edge

Karen took a pack of cigarettes from the back of her underwear drawer, failed to find a box of matches and put the pack back again. She didn’t need one. If that had been Tim on the phone, he might be on his way.

She pulled on her ankle-length suede boots and took down from behind the door the camel coat her aunt had thoughtfully found in an Oxfam shop in Richmond. Pocketing her keys, she headed down the stairs, automatically stepping over the one with the missing tread. If she walked in the direction of the bridge, more than likely she would meet him.

“Another, Charlie?”

“Better not.” Resnick shook his head. “Time I was making a move.”

“Right. Right.” Frank Delaney nodded understandingly, reached over the bar and poured a fresh Guinness into the detective inspector’s glass.

“Some of us start earlier than others,” Resnick said. The clock to the left of the small stage showed the wrong side of midnight.

“Sure you do,” Delaney winked. “Sure you do. And after tomorrow I needn’t be getting up at all.” He raised his own glass towards Resnick’s face and smiled. “A toast, Charlie. Early retirement.”

The glasses clinked and both men drank, Resnick sparingly.

“How long is it for you, Charlie?”

“Retirement?”

“Can’t be long now.”

“Long enough.”

It lay ahead of him like some unwelcome sea, something to be swum through every morning, no matter the weather; the same aimless movements, made simply to be doing something, an illusion: either that or you trod water until one day you drowned.

“Tomorrow morning,” Frank Delaney said, “eleven o’clock. I shall be in the bank in my best suit, shaking hands. Someone will give me a fountain pen with a 24-carat gold nib and not so many minutes later I’ll be walking out of there with a check for a million pounds. Not bad, eh, Charlie, for an ignorant son of a bitch like me? Left school at fourteen with the arse hanging out of his trousers. Not bad.”

Resnick sipped at his Guinness and glanced around the room. When Frank Delaney had bought the place-what? Ten years back? More? — it had been little more than four walls and space on the floor for the drunks to fall safely. Frank had brought in carpets and couch seats with dark upholstery, chandeliers and a mishmash of mostly fake Victoriana. At the weekends, he’d instituted Old Time Music Hall and with a little persuasion would get up at the mike himself and lead the patrons through choruses of “You Made Me Love You,” “Who’s Sorry Now?”

In the week the doors were opened to other things: country and western, poetry and jazz. By this week’s end the developers would be tearing out the inside, stripping it all away. Another office block in the making.

“We’ve had some good nights here, Charlie.”

Resnick nodded. “We have.”

On that stage he had heard some of the best music of his life: David Murray, Stan Tracey-on a cold March evening, Red Rodney, who’d played trumpet with Charlie Parker when little more than a kid, had brought tears of pleasure to Resnick’s eyes and goose pimples to his skin.

“Have I told you what folk said when I bought this place, Charlie?”

Only a dozen times.

“They said I’d go bust within a six-month. Bankrupt.” Delaney laughed and opened another bottle of Newcastle Brown. “I’ve shown ’em. Eh?”

Resnick covered his own glass with his hand and stood up. “No regrets, then, Frank?”

Delaney gave him a long look across the rim of his glass. “A million pound? From nothing, more or less. What have I got to be regretful about?” He got to his feet and shook Resnick’s hand. “Anything else, that’s sentimentality. Won’t even pay the rent.”

Resnick walked through the partly darkened room towards the door. Sliding back the bolt, turning the heavy key, he let himself out on to the street. Fletcher Gate. Directly across from him a youth wearing baggy jeans and with his shirt sleeves rolled high was vomiting chicken biriani against the brick of the car-park wall. A black and white cab rose up the hill from the station and Resnick thought about hailing it, but realized he was in no great hurry to get home after all.

“Hey, you!” the youth opposite called out at him belligerently. “Hey, you!”

Resnick slotted his hands into his overcoat pockets and crossed the road at a steep angle, head slightly bowed.

When Resnick had first been a beat copper, walking these streets in uniform, himself and Ben Riley, the winos, the down-and-outs, the homeless had looked away as they passed. A scattering of old men who sat around their bottles of cider, VP wine. Now there were kids who hung around the soup kitchens, the shelters, young enough to have been Resnick’s own. And these thrust out a hand, looked you in the eye.

Eighteen to twenty-six. Smack in the trap. Too many reasons for not living at home, too few jobs, precious little from the state: now they shared Slab Square with the pigeons, sprawled or hunched before the pillars of the Council House, the ornate mosaic of the city’s coat of arms, the pair of polished limousines waiting to carry civic dignitaries to this important function or that.

The more you descended Goose Gate, the less prestigious the shops became. Two sets of lights and you were in the wholesale market, broken crates and discarded dark blue tissue, and beyond that Sneinton, where gentrification was still a word best left to crosswords. Fourteen Across: A process of changing the character of the inner-city.

Before the first of those traffic lights the pavement broadened out and Resnick slowed his step. There were a dozen or more people between the telephone kiosk and the entrance to Aloysius House. Two were in the kiosk itself, keeping warm with the aid of a quarter-bottle of navy rum. This is a dry house read the sign by the entrance. A middle-aged man, wearing the upper half of a gray pin-striped suit and with dark trousers that gaped over pale flanks, leaned back against the wall as he drained a can of Special Brew, shaking the last drops into his mouth.

“Locked out?” Resnick asked the nearest of the men.

“Fuck you!” the man replied.

Resnick moved closer to the door, brushing against a couple who declined to step aside.

“Wondered how long it’d be before they sent for you,” one of them said accusingly.

Resnick’s head turned instinctively from the cheap alcohol on his breath.

“Sodding copper!” he explained to his companion.

The second man stared at Resnick, cleared his throat and spat on to the pavement, close between Resnick’s shoes.

“Need a bloody sight more than you to sort this out,” called someone. “Bastard’s in there with a bastard ax!”

Resnick knocked on the glass of the hostel door. There were two men in the small lobby, one of them sitting on the floor. Resnick took out his warrant card and held it against the glass, motioning for them to let him in.

Inside the dimly lit main room, bodies shifted and snored in the darkness. Here and there Resnick saw the dim glow of a cigarette. From one of the chairs, knees tucked into his chest, someone cried out in a dream.

The woman who had charge of the night shift came towards Resnick from the foot of the stairs. She was wearing a cream-colored sweater over dark sweatpants, Resnick couldn’t be certain of the color in that light. Her hair had been pulled up at the sides and sat a little awkwardly, secured by a pair of broad combs, white plastic. She was in her late twenties, early thirties and her name was Jean, Joan, Jeanie, something close. He had been introduced to her once at Central Station, he couldn’t remember exactly when.

“Inspector Resnick?”

He nodded.