John Harvey - Living Proof

"Charlie Resnick," he said, head bent awkwardly towards the intercom.

"Here to see Miss Hansen."

Too late, he thought Ms would have been more appropriate, awkward to pronounce as he always found it.

The door to Mollie's office was open, but Resnick hesitated long enough to catch her eye before walking in.

The scarlet had been replaced by a plaid shirt which almost matched the one on k. d. lang in the Even Cowgirls Get the Blues poster that was tacked up behind Mollie's desk. The desk itself held neatly labelled files, a stack of bright red plastic trays close to overflowing, several movie books, a battered A-Z map of the city, three purple mugs, each holding a residue of coffee and, at me centre, a desk- size Filofax with annotations in three colours.

"You found it all right, then?" Mollie said brightly, gesturing for him to sit down.

Resnick moved two telephone directories and eased himself down into the chair.

"Coffee? I can send out for cappuccino. You know the new deli at the end of the street?"

"If it's no trouble."

Mollie called past him towards the open door.

"Larry, I don't suppose you've got a minute…"

He had.

Mollie drew a sheet of paper from one of the files and slid it towards Resnick. Her desk, he thought, lively and organised as it was, lacked the merest trace of anything 46 purely personal a photograph, a fading birthday card, a Post-it note reminding her to buy more flour, a pint of milk. He wondered where she kept her life and what it was like or if this were all there was.

"This is Cathy Jordan's itinerary," Mollie was saying. "As you can see, we're trying to make as much use of her as we can. Some of these things…" leaning forward, she pointed with her finger, '. are arranged in tandem with her publisher. And here, and you see, here, she's taking a couple of days out. Stratford, I think, and Scotland.

Or maybe it's the Lakes. "

Resnick ran his eyes up and down the page press conference. Radio Nottingham, Radio Trent, Central TV, BBC Radio Four, several book signings, a reading, two panel discussions and her attendance was requested at a civic reception. Also there were the name and address of the hotel where Cathy Jordan would be staying, complete with telephone, fax and room numbers. He would study it all in detail later.

"Covering all of these isn't going to be easy."

"Until we've talked to Cathy Jordan, we just don't know." Only slightly mocking, she treated him to her professional smile.

"One thing we have to remember, she's not just our guest, she's a guest of the city as well."

"And our responsibility."

Mollie was still smiling. Resnick folded the list and slid it into his inside pocket.

Larry turned out to be a ruddy-faced youth of nineteen or twenty, ponytail dangling down beneath the reversed peak of his deep red Washington Redskins cap. The coffee, in white polystyrene cups, was strong and still hot. Mollie took a spoon from one of the used mugs and lifted chocolatey froth towards her mouth with such expectation that, for a moment, Resnick saw more than an efficient young woman whose life was strictly colour-coded.

"The letters," Mollie said, 'what did you think? I mean, ought we to be taking them seriously or not? "

Resnick tasted a little more of his coffee. To a point, I don't see we have any choice. After all, Louella Trabert, Anita Mulholland they may just be characters in books, but that doesn't mean the threats aren't real. "

Mollie smiled, meaning it this time.

"You've got a good memory for names."

Resnick knew that it was true. Names and faces. There were others he could have added. Victims. Fact and not fiction. It went with the job, like so much else: a blessing and a curse.

"You don't like her, do you?"

"Who?" Mollie sitting back a little, on the defensive.

"Cathy Jordan."

"I don't know her."

"You know her books."

That's not the same thing. "

Resnick shrugged.

"Isn't it? I should have thought they must come close."

Mollie was fidgeting with her spoon.

"Anyway, what I think's neither here nor there." She leaned forward again, the beginnings of a gleam across the grey of her eyes. "Unless you think I'm the one who wrote the letters."

Are you? "

Mollie nipped a page in her Filofax.

"If the train's on time, I could ask her to meet you at the hotel. There should be time before the opening reception. Say, a quarter past six?"

Resnick set down his cup.

"All right Always assuming nothing crops up more urgent."

"Good."

He got to his feet.

"Here," Mollie said, handing him a glossy black brochure with the Shots in the Dark logo heavily embossed on its cover. This is the press kit There's a programme 48 inside. And a complimentary ticket. It is a crime festival, after all. I should have thought you'd find quite a lot of interest.

Especially if you like the cinema. "

For all his good memory, Resnick was having trouble remembering anything he'd seen since The Magnificent Seven. He took the brochure and nodded his thanks.

"I don't suppose you've had a chance to look at that book yet?"

Mollie asked when he was at the door.

"No, afraid not."

As he walked out along the narrow entryway and on to the street, Resnick noticed a freshening of the wind and when, back at the corner of Hetcher Gate, he tilted his head upwards, he felt the first drops of a summer shower bright upon his face.

Eleven It wasn't as though Cathy Jordan had never been to England before.

First, as a visiting student, on exchange from her state college in Kansas City, Kansas, she had been catapulted headlong into the heyday of British hippydom. Carnaby Street and the Beatles and the Stones and her first toke, four girls passing it between them, cramped inside one of the cubicles in the ladies' room at the Roundhouse.

Could it really have been the Crazy World of Arthur Brown out on stage, singing Tire'? Or maybe that was later, underground at UFO?

She couldn't remember now. The way her world had spun three hundred and sixty degrees beneath her, it was a wonder she remembered anything at all. Her family ringing nightly, after watching television newscasts of the French students setting fire to the barricades outside the Sorborme; youngsters with long hair battling with police outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square.

"Are you okay? My God, Catherine, are you sure you're okay? What is going on over there? The whole world seems suddenly to have gone mad." One of her dad's Eddie Pisher albums playing steadfastly away in the background – "Oh! My Papa!"

"Wish You Were Here."

Her second visit had been made almost ten years later, when her first husband had been stationed at a US air force base in Lincolnshire and she had opted to join him for six months. In a number of ways, it had not proved such a good idea. From time to time, women old enough to be not 50 just her mother but her grandmother had chained themselves to the base's perimeter fence in protest at the American presence. Sometimes when she was shopping in the nearest town, angelic-faced young men wearing CND badges or brandishing copies of Socialist Worker would spit at her in the street.

Whatever else, her abiding impression of England was not of cobbled streets, spied through the swirl of a quaint Dickensian pea-souper; nor of some fading thatched roof idyll over which the sun barely set and where the squire and village bobby reigned supreme. England, for Cathy Jordan, represented unrest and disruption, change not only for the country, but for herself.

Yet looking out now through the smirched window of the Intercity train as it cleaved through the flat softness of the Midlands landscape, she saw only field on field washed by a perpetual grey drizzle cattle standing morose at hedgerows, a single tractor turning ever-widening circles to no purpose, knots of ugly houses huddled at road ends nothing to stir her heart or energise her mind.