John Harvey - Cutting Edge

“No more babies. That’s what they said: no more babies.”

“Suddenly, the one thing more important than all the rest, now he knew I couldn’t have one, he wanted a child, a son, an heir. God, Charlie, he turned into you. Except that he hit me. He drank more than usual, more than before, and he started hitting me. Places where it wouldn’t be seen, wouldn’t easily be noticed. Here, the lower back, the kidneys. My breasts. I backed his Volvo into the pool and I left him, sued for divorce. One after another his friends, the friends we’d had together, more ways than one some of them, they went up into the witness box and lied to their hind teeth. His barrister tore me apart and I was lucky to leave the court with the clothes I stood up in.”

She looked at Resnick and smiled ruefully.

“That was when I should have come back to you, Charlie. If I was going to do it at all. Instead of waiting till I became like this.”

“Elaine …”

“No.”

“Elaine …”

She placed her finger firmly on his lips.

“Don’t, Charlie. Whatever you say now, by the morning you’ll regret it.”

He would have been able, at that moment, to have taken her in his arms and forgiven her what little there was to forgive, maybe even forgiven himself. He could have foraged amongst the albums he never played and found Otis Blue and set it on the turntable and stood with his arms around her and said, “Let’s dance.”

Elaine stood up. “If the phone’s still where it used to be, I’m going to call a taxi.”

Resnick shook his head. “No need. I’ll drop you.”

“Charlie, you don’t want to know where I’m going.”

At the front door, he said, “Take care.”

“I’ll try,” she said. And, “Maybe I’ll drop you a line some time.”

“Do.”

Elaine smiled. “You can always tear it up.”

“Helen!”

Bernard Salt was wearing his white coat over shirt sleeves and a pair of tan cavalry twills that he’d bought from Dunn’s more than ten years back and were still going strong. His tie was the one with little pigs on it his elder daughter had given him one Father’s Day as a joke. That morning he’d slid it from the rack and knotted it swiftly, left the house before he realized and now he was stuck with it, no intention of appearing on duty without a tie. Besides, look at it this way, with half the hospital privy to his private life, half of those despising him as a heartless chauvinist, the remainder thinking, himself and Helen Minton, there wasn’t much to choose between them, well, it was a gesture. Let them think he didn’t care. If they were brainless enough to take the word of a neurotic woman, superficial judgments, well and good. He’d pig it out.

And with this other business, checks in and out, escorts and taxis home, extra security cameras, the staff whose job it was actually watching the screens instead of playing Find the Ball and reading the Sun -there were other things to preoccupy the hospital mind.

“Helen!”

This time she half-cocked her head, the slightest acknowledgment, before disappearing into her office and closing the door.

Salt opened it again and left it open, standing just inside.

Witnesses, no more meeting in car parks, fumbling behind closed doors. Fine!

“What do you want, Bernard?” Somehow she’d found time to have her hair re-permed and it was more like wire wool than ever. She stood ramrod straight, staring at him, this woman who had once teased from him a tenderness he had been almost frightened to realize he possessed.

“Very little, except to say how much I welcome what you’ve done. You were right, I have a freedom from personal responsibilities such as I haven’t experienced in thirty years. Now that you have acted as you have, there is no way in which you can threaten that again. I didn’t want you, Helen, I haven’t wanted you for a long time. I don’t love you and if I ever did, the way you have behaved is guaranteed to make me forget it.”

There was a slight tightening of the muscles in Helen’s face, nothing more.

“Thank you,” Bernard Salt said.

Helen said nothing. A nurse came towards the open door, hesitated, went away again.

“I was chatting with the Senior Nursing Officer over coffee; I shouldn’t be surprised if the hospital doesn’t offer you early retirement, obvious stress, neuroses, maybe you could carry on doing a little part-time work … at a more junior level.”

Helen willed herself not to move until he had gone, from her office, from the ward. She willed herself not to cry. Tears enough already and what good had they done her? From the side drawer of her desk, she took the photocopy of the theatre report book and folded it carefully in half and then in half again before placing it in an envelope and sealing the envelope down. Better than crying.

“How long, Inspector, are you intending to detain my client?”

“For as long as it takes?”

Suzanne Olds gave a quick little shake of the head. “You don’t have that long.”

“I’m sure the superintendent will authorize an extension of custody. In the circumstances.”

“The circumstances being that, aside from the girl’s diary, you haven’t been able to come up with a single piece of evidence that places my client in any relationship with the victim.” She used a small gold lighter to light a cigarette. “Getting on for eighteen hours of frantic searching for what? A fingerprint? A sudden reluctant witness?”

“We can apply to the magistrate …”

“An application we would have every chance of successfully contesting.”

Resnick shrugged and wearily smiled. “You’ll do what you have to do.”

“And so will you.” She shifted the balance of the bag slung over her arm. “The trouble is, you want to find him guilty for all the wrong reasons. You don’t like him, do you? Not one little bit.”

Resnick looked back at her. “Do you?”

Calvin didn’t know what had got into his father lately. Dinner last night had been those little beef patties from the butcher down on the High Street, the one he’d sworn never to use again on account of some racist jibe he thought he’d overheard. Patties and tomatoes out of a tin, swimming around in all that pale red juice. Calvin hated that.

Breakfast today had been toast, toast, and toast. The jar of beyond-the-sell-by-date honey had had a fungus growing over it a quarter-inch thick. And just as Calvin had been on the point of sweetening his tea with a couple of spoonfuls of that sugar substitute his father had bought by the twenty-eight-pound bag, he happened to look across at the paper and there the people who made the stuff, NutraSweet, were being accused of falsifying their research and pushing a product that could cause headaches, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, depression, loss of memory, mood swings, and swelling of the bodily extremities. Calvin let go of the spoon and sipped the tea as it was. He knew there wasn’t a granule of real sugar in the house and though he knew some people liked to use honey to sweeten what they were drinking, he wasn’t about to take a risk with that gunk.

Jesus! The tea had tasted terrible.

And Calvin never quite believed what he read in the papers anyway. He spooned in the NutraSweet and started to flip through, looking to see when Guns N’ Roses were appearing in the city, one thing they couldn’t lie about, announcements, and he noticed that one of the pages had been torn away. The front one. He’d found the ad he was looking for and there was Canceled printed all the way across it. Refunds available on receipt of the original tickets. Even when they didn’t lie, newspapers, what they were full of was bad news.