Off Minor (2 page)

Resnick stood back so that he could be seen more easily through the spyhole in the door and held up his warrant card. In the fish-eye distortion of the circular lens, Edith Summers saw a bulky man, broad-faced, tall inside the uneven folds of his open raincoat; the slack knot of his striped tie several inches below the missing button at the neck of his shirt.

“Detective Inspector Resnick. I’d like to talk to you about Gloria.”

Two bolts were fumbled back, a chain released, the latch slipped on the lock.

“Mrs. Summers?”

“You’ve found her?”

A slow shake of the head. “Afraid not. Not yet.”

Edith Summers’s shoulders slumped; anxiety had already forced out most of her hope. The corners of her eyes were red from rubbing, sore from tears. She stood in the doorway to her flat and looked at Resnick, half-broken by guilt.

“Mrs. Summers?”

“Edith Summers, yes.”

“Perhaps we could go inside?”

She stepped back and showed him along the short hall into the living room: a television set, a goldfish tank, some knitting, photographs lopsided in their frames. On the TV, barely audibly, a man in a white dress suit and a wig was persuading a middle-aged couple to humiliate themselves further for the sake of a new fridge-freezer. In one corner, beneath a square table with screw-in legs and a gold-painted rim, the arms and heads of several dolls poked from a green plastic bag.

“You’re Gloria’s grandmother?”

“Her nan, yes.”

“And her mother?”

“She lives here with me.”

“The mother?”

“Gloria.”

Resnick tried to blank out the thud of a poorly amplified bass from the upstairs flat, hip-hop or rap, he wasn’t sure he knew the difference.

“You’ve seen no sign of her yourself?” Resnick asked. “Nobody’s been in touch?”

She looked at him without answering, plucked at something in the ends of her hair. Resnick sat down and she did the same, the two of them in matching easy chairs, curved wooden arms and skinny cushions, upholstered backs. He wished he’d brought along Lynn Kellogg, wondered if he should find the kitchen, make a pot of tea.

“She’s always lived here along of me. It was me as brought her up.”

Edith Summers shook a cigarette from a packet in her cardigan pocket; lit it with a match from the household box on top of the gas fire. Turned low, the center of the fire burned blue.

“Like she was my own.”

She sat back down, absent-mindedly straightening the loose skirt of her belted dress over her knees. The cardigan draped across her shoulders had been cable stitched in black. On her feet were faded purple slippers with no back and an off-white puff of wool attached to one of them still. Her hair was less than shoulder length and mostly dark. She could have been anything between forty and fifty-five; probably, Resnick thought, she was around the same age as himself.

“Someone’s taken her, haven’t they?”

“We don’t know that.”

“Some bastard’s taken her.”

“We don’t know that.”

“We don’t know bloody anything!”

Sudden anger flared her cheeks. With a swift wrench of the controls she turned the television volume almost to full, then sharply off. Without explanation she left the room, to reappear moments later with a long-handled mop, the end of which she banged against the ceiling hard.

“Turn down that sodding row!” she screamed.

“Mrs. Summers …” Resnick started.

Someone above turned up the sound still further, so that the bass reverberated through the room.

“I’ll go up and have a word,” offered Resnick.

Edith sat back down. “Don’t bother. Soon as they see you go, it’d be twice as bad.”

“Gloria’s mother,” Resnick said, “there’s no chance she might be with her?”

Her laughter was short and harsh. “No chance.”

“But she does see her daughter?”

“Once in a while. Whenever it takes her fancy.”

“She lives here, then? I mean, in the city?”

“Oh, yes. She’s here all right.”

Resnick reached for his notebook. “If you could let me have an address …”

“Address? I can give you the names of a few pubs.”

“We have to check, Mrs. Summers. We have to …”

“Find Gloria, that’s what you’ve got to do. Find her, for God’s sake. Here. Look, here.” She was on her feet again, picking up first one photograph then another, cutting her finger on the edge of the glass before she could free one from its frame.

Resnick held in his hands a round-faced little girl with a pale dress and spiraling curls. It was the picture that would appear on the front pages of newspapers, that would be beamed into millions of homes, often accompanied by Resnick himself, or his superintendent, Jack Skelton, looking suitably severe and patrician, pleading for information.

The information came; for almost two weeks they were flooded with sightings and rumors, accusations and prophecies, but then, when little seemed to happen, attention waned. Instead of the photograph of Gloria there was now a single paragraph at the foot of page five, and, after the police had followed every lead, sifted through everything, they had been told there was nothing.

No clue.

Nowhere to go.

No Gloria.

The photograph could still be found on posters round the city, smeared, stained and torn, ignored.

Some bastard’s taken her.

Sixty-three days.

Three

Whenever Raymond lifted his fingers to his face, he could smell it. Living there. His arms, too, inside, where the meat slapped against him as he struggled to free it from the hooks that swung from the conveyor running along the covered yard. No matter how hard he scrubbed, scoring his skin with pumice stone, harsh bristles of the brush, he could never drive it out. Fingers and arms, shoulders and back. Smell of it in his hair. Never mind the shampoo, the soap, deodorant and aftershave, splash on, spray or douse, Raymond carried it with him, a gray film, a second skin, like gristle.

“Here, Ray. Ray, c’m here. Listen. You want, I can fix you up.”

“Leave him, Terry, leave him. Don’t waste your breath.”

“No, no. Serious. I’m serious. He wants a job, I know this bloke, I can put in a word.”

“Wanted a job, he’d haul himself out of bed of a morning.”

“He hasn’t got the need …”

“My boot up his arse, that’d give him need enough.”

“Jackie, he’s not a kid any more, he’s a grown man.”

“Grown! Look at him.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“What’s bollocking right, more like.”

“All he wants is a job.”

“And the rest.”

“Jackie!”

“Any road, he’s not interested. Jobs, he’s had them till they were running out of his ears. And how long did he ever spend in any of them? Three weeks, no more. Maybe a month. Once, I think maybe once, he stuck it for a month. I tell you, Terry, son of mine or not, put yourself out for him and you’re the one’ll end up with his hands in the shit. He’s not worth it.”

“Your flesh and blood.”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“Jackie!”

“What?”

“Give the boy a chance.”

“You’re so keen, you give him a chance.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I can help him. Ray, Raymond, here, listen. This bloke I know from snooker, I could pull a favor, only one thing, you got to promise not to let me down.”

“Some chance.”

“Jackie!”

“What?”

“What about it, Ray? You interested or what?”

Raymond’s father and his uncle Terry talking about him in the public bar of their local, almost a year before. A pint of Shippos, pint of mixed, for Raymond a half of lager he’d been sitting over the best part of an hour. Not wanting his old man going on at him for never paying his whack, standing a round.

“Butcher’s. Wholesale. Over by the County ground.”

“That’s the abattoir,” Raymond’s father said.

“It’s
near
the abattoir.”

“I don’t fancy working in the abattoir,” Raymond said.

“You don’t fancy working anywhere,” his father said.

“It isn’t
in
the abattoir,” said his uncle. “Near it. Close. Suppose you could say, alongside.”

“Handy,” his father said.

Raymond had walked past there at night, turning right by Incinerator Road: steady hum of electricity through the wall, a warm smell that seeped into the air, sometimes so strong that you choked and held your breath and hurried past before your stomach heaved, your eyes began to water.

“Ray-o,” his uncle said, draining his glass as he stood to get in another. “What d’you reckon?”

“Tell you what,” said his father, passing up his own glass, “he thinks when he can carry on sponging off me a bit longer, why bother?”

“Talk to him,” Raymond said to his uncle. “Tell him I’ll do it.”

“Good on you!” His uncle grinned and scooped up Raymond’s glass too.

“What the fizzing heck you want to do that for?” his father hissed, face close into his. “Why the hell d’you want to tell him you’ll work in the sodding abattoir?”

“Least it’ll get me out from under your feet,” said Raymond, not looking into his father’s eyes. “Stop you getting on at me all the time.”

“You great pillock! Half the time you’d never think to wipe your arse without someone there to tell you.”

“We’ll see.”

“Aye, we’ll see right enough. See you come whinging home with your tail between your legs, that’s the only thing we’ll like to see.”

“Here we are then.” Raymond’s uncle splashed the drinks down on to the table. “Sup up. Let’s drink a toast to the new working man. Good as.” And he reached down and gave Raymond’s ear a tweak and broadly winked.

The house was in a cul-de-sac east of Lenton Boulevard, nursery school to the right, pub to the left. High-rise blocks of graying concrete poked from the grass and Tarmac ground behind. Like most of the terrace, it had been bought cheap, barely renovated, rented out to working men or students—“professionals” or “graduates” graced the Park, the suburbs, lived in flats instead of rooms.

Raymond’s was the first floor back. Space for a narrow bed, a melamine wardrobe and three-drawer chest, a chair. The landlord’s promise of a table had never materialized, but supper was something eaten on his knees, eyes fastened on the faintly flickering images of a black and white set, breakfast instant coffee and curled toast he swallowed down while getting dressed. What else might he want a table for?

In the shared living room a sagging three-piece suite, burn marks on its arms, was arranged around the communally rented TV, the VCR, rented copies of
Casual Sex, Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel, American Ninja 4: The Annihilation.
Unwashed mugs and encrusted bowls spilled from the sink and draining board onto the kitchen floor; the bacon fat layered round the grill pan could have greased any one of them through a cross-Channel swim. Every so often one of the shifting group of five tenants would draw up a rota and stick it to the door of the fridge; within a few days it would be pulled down to write a note for the milkman, light a cigarette.

Raymond kept himself to himself, mumbled “hi” and “bye”; only got on the others’ nerves the way he would lock himself in the bathroom after work for hours, run the hot water till the tank was empty, all the taps were running cold.

On this particular Saturday, Raymond had restricted himself to forty minutes, though he would have stayed longer had the door not been subjected to a series of sharp kicks and the air blue with suggestions as to exactly which perversions he was practicing under the cover of excessive cleanliness.

He hurried out and down the threadbare stairs to his own room, probing the passages of his ears with a Q-tip as he went. The small, frameless mirror propped on the windowsill revealed a curving line of pimples—whiteheads rather than blackheads—at the corner of his left eye. He popped these with his fingernails, wiping them clean under the arms of his deep blue sweatshirt, where it was unlikely to be seen. He was wearing brown cords, ten quid in the sale at H & M, black shoes with a toecap that might have been Doc Martens but weren’t, red and brown paisley pattern socks; he lifted his leather jacket down from its wire hanger in the wardrobe, feeling good about the way the jacket tilted just a fraction to one side—the weight of the knife.

Four

As yet the Polish Club was quiet; recorded music filtered through from another room. The line of vodka drinkers at the bar was only one deep. Resnick allowed himself to be guided to a corner table, well clear of the crowd to come, the dancing that would inevitably start. He had been no more than mildly surprised at Marian Witzak’s call, glad enough that the responsibility for a decision had been removed. A bone of contention from years before, when he had been a young DC and married to Elaine, that his nights off were so few and far between. Now they seemed so many.

“You did not mind that I telephoned?”

Resnick poured the rest of the Pilsner Urquel into his glass and shook his head.

“Such short notice.”

“It was all right.”

“I wondered, perhaps, if you might think it rude.”

“Marian, it’s fine.”

“You know, Charles …” She paused and her fingers, narrow and long, moved along the stem of her glass. Resnick thought of the piano near the French windows of her living room, sheet music for a polonaise, the slowly yellowing keys. “… sometimes I think, if it were left for you to contact me, we would not very often meet.”

Although she had been in England all of her adult life, Marian still talked as if her English had been learned from watching untold episodes of
The Forsyte Saga
in scratchy black and white, from lessons spent mimicking the teacher’s words.

“
This is a pencil. What is this?
”

“
This is a pencil.
”

She was wearing a plain black dress with a high neck and a white belt, tied at one side into a loose bow. As usual her hair had been tightly drawn back and pinned precisely into place.

“You know, Charles, I was to go to the theater tonight. Shakespeare. A touring company from London, very good, I think. Highly spoken of. All week I have been looking forward to this. It is not so often there is something cultural coming now to the city.” Marian Witzak sipped her drink and shook her head. “It is a shame.”