John Harvey: Cutting Edge

“Christ, Charlie! You’ve got three of the little buggers!”

“Four,” Resnick corrected. Somewhere, paw blissfully blind-folding his eyes, Pepper would be curled inside something, anything, sleeping.

“If I’d known that, I’d never have left the cleaver.”

He made up a bed in the room at the top of the house. It smelt damp, but no worse, Resnick was sure, than his guest had become used to. Even so, he fetched up a small electric fan beater and set it working in one corner. By the time he got back downstairs, Silver had swung his legs up on to the sofa in the living room and seemed sound asleep. Resnick went back and found a blanket, draping it over him, smelling the rancid, sickly-sweet smell of his clothing. Urine and rough red wine. Carefully, Resnick removed Silver’s glasses and set them down on the carpet, where Miles sniffed at them curiously to see if somehow they might be food.

By now it was past two and Resnick was wondering whether he would get any sleep himself at all. In the kitchen he ground coffee beans, shiny and dark, doled out food into the cats’ four colored bowls, examined the contents of the fridge for the makings of a sandwich.

The last time he had seen Ed Silver he had not long been wearing his sergeant’s stripes. Uniform to CID then back to uniform again: forging a career, following a plan. Silver had been guesting at a short-lived club near the top of Carlton Hill, so far out of the city that few people had found it. When Ed Silver had walked in, instrument cases under both arms, he’d looked around and scowled and called the place a morgue.

The first tune he’d tapped in a tempo that had the house drummer and bassist staring at each other, mouths open. Silver had maneuvered his alto through the changes of “I’ve Got Rhythm” at breakneck speed, but when he realized the locals were capable of keeping up, he’d let his shoulders sag a little, relaxed and enjoyed himself.

Chatting to Resnick afterwards, rolling cubes of ice around inside a tall glass of ginger ale, he’d talked of his first recording contract in seven years, a tour, later that year, of Sweden and Norway.

“See,” he’d said, stretching out both hands. “No shakes.” Then he’d laughed and set the glass on the back of one hand and after a few seconds the ice cubes ceased to chink against the inside.

“See!” he’d boasted. “What’d I tell you?”

Resnick heard nothing more of him for over a year. There was a paragraph in one of the magazines, suggesting that he’d recorded in Oslo with Warne Marsh, but he never saw the album reviewed, or any announcement of its release. What he did read, near the foot of page two on a slow Saturday in the Guardian , was that Ed Silver had fallen face first from the stage at the Nuffield Theater, Southampton, suffering concussion and a nose broken in two places.

Someone had done a good job on the nose, Resnick thought, finishing his sandwich, looking over at Ed Silver, fast out on his sofa. It looked to be the part of his face in the best shape.

He went quietly to the stereo and set Art Pepper on the turn-table. Midway through “Straight Life,” he thought he saw Ed Silver’s sleeping face twist into a smile. As the tune ended, Silver suddenly pushed himself up on to one arm and, eyes still closed tight, said, “Charlie? Didn’t you used to have a wife?” Without waiting for an answer, he lowered himself back down and resumed his sleep.

Karen Archer found Tim Fletcher at around the time Resnick was beginning his walk down through the Lace Market towards Aloysius House. That is, she found something sprawled across the top of the metal steps which led up from the university grounds to the pedestrian walkway; something dark, wedged half-in, half-out of the first set of doors. An old bundle of discarded clothing, bin-liners stuffed with rubbish and dumped. It wasn’t until she was almost at the head of the steps that she realized what was lying there was a person and at first she took it to be a drunk. What told her otherwise was the tubing of a stethoscope protruding from beneath it.

Karen held herself steady against the railing, staring down at the surface of the ring road, rainbowed lightly with petrol. The chipped metal was cold against the palms of her hands, cold on her forehead when she lowered her face against it. When the worst of her panic had passed, when her breathing had finally steadied, only then did she go back to the body. Get closer. Possibly three minutes, four.

She held the door open with her hip and dragged, then pulled, Fletcher inside. No part of him seemed to be moving, other than what she moved for him. As best she could, Karen turned him on to his back and lowered her face until it was close to his; her fingers fidgeted at his wrists, searching for a pulse. She tried not to look at his wounds, along which dark knots of blood had begun to coagulate.

“Tim!” She shouted his name as if the force of the cry might waken him. “Tim!”

With a soft swoosh an articulated lorry moved beneath the bridge, its lights catching Karen’s face as she stood. Fletcher’s Walkman lay close by the inner door and, irrationally, she stooped to make sure it was in the off position, the battery not wasting.

She hurried through to the hospital, willing her legs to run but getting no response, the squeak, squeak of her trainers on the hard, grooved rubber following her across. She didn’t know whether she was leaving Tim Fletcher alive or dead.

It took several moments for Karen to make clear what had happened, but from there all was quiet speed and efficiency. If the casualty officer who spoke to Karen was surprised, he did nothing to betray it. All she saw of Tim were blankets, a stretcher being wheeled between curtains. All she heard were the same quiet voices. Transfusion. Consciousness. Surgery. They sat her in a corner and gave her, eventually, tea, sweet and not quite warm, in a ribbed and colored plastic cup.

“Is he all right?”

“Try not to worry.”

“Will he be all right?”

Unhurried footsteps, walking away.

“God!” Tim Fletcher had exclaimed, that first time in her room. “God!” Staring at her face, her breasts. “You’re perfect!”

“Miss?”

Karen’s fingers tightened around the cup, glancing up. The police officer had gingery hair and a face that reminded her of her younger brother; he held his helmet against his knee, tapping it lightly, arhythmically, against the blue of his uniform.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you might answer a few questions?”

Karen’s chest tightened beneath her purple jumper and she began to cry.

The officer glanced around, embarrassed.

“Miss …”

The crying wasn’t going to stop. He squatted down in front of her, took the cup from her hands and rested it on the floor beside his helmet. In the three months he’d been on the force, Paul Houghton had stepped between four youths squaring up with bottles after closing; he had lifted a panicking three-year-old from a second-floor window and out on to a ladder, close to the end of one shift, he’d followed screams and curses to an alley back of a pub and found a middle-aged man on all fours, the dart that his girlfriend had hurled at his face still embedded, an inch below the eye. In each case, he’d acted, never really stopped to think. Now he didn’t know what to do.

“It’s okay,” he said, uncertain, reaching out to pat her hand. She grabbed hold of his fingers and squeezed them hard.

“Maybe you’d like another cup of tea?” he suggested.

When she shook her head, Karen’s breath caught and the tears became sobs. Inconsolable. Bubbles appeared at both nostrils and, with his free hand, Paul Houghton fished into his pocket and found a tissue, already matted with use.