WELL, YOU NEEDN’T
November the third, ’94, and it was Resnick’s birthday. He just wasn’t saying which one. Two days more and he would have been celebrating alongside scores of others, fireworks and bonfires, the burns unit at Queen’s Medical on full alert and the Fire Service stretched to near breaking. As it was, he treated himself to a rare cooked breakfast, eggs and ham and some leftover potatoes fried to the point of crispness, two mugs of coffee instead of the usual one. The cats hovered around his feet, hoping for titbits of rind.
Outside, it was as cold as Margaret Thatcher’s heart.
Ten years since she had broken the miners; broken them with the help, if not of Resnick himself then men like him. Her Majesty’s Constabulary. Even now, Resnick shrivelled at the thought.
He had a pal, Peter Waites, who had stood shoulder to shoulder on the picket line until he was clubbed to the ground. Still lived in the same two-up, two-down Coal Board house in Arkwright Town. Ten years on the dole. When his son, Jack, had joined the force as a young PC, Peter Waites had buckled with the shame.
‘It’s not coppers as is the enemy,’ Jack had said. ‘They’re just takin’ orders, same as everyone else.’
Waites had stared away, remembering the clash and clatter of horses’ hoofs on cobbled streets, the flare of pain as the truncheon struck his shoulder blade, chipping bone.
Now his lad was attached to CID and stationed at Canning Circus under Resnick’s command.
‘Congratulations in order, I hear,’ Millington said, greeting Resnick at the top of the stairs. ‘Another year closer to retirement.’ A smile hovered furtively beneath the edges of his moustache. ‘Be drinks all round tonight, I dare say. Bit of a celebration.’
Resnick grunted and carried on past: inside his office he firmly closed the door. When it opened again, some forty minutes later, it was Jack Waites, notebook in hand.
‘Come in, lad,’ Resnick said. ‘Take a seat.’
Waites preferred to stand.
‘How’s your dad?
‘Bitter. Bloody-minded. Same as bloody ever.’ The young man had held his gaze.
‘What can I do for you?’ Resnick asked.
‘That break-in at the Green Man. Looks like it was Shotter right enough. Prints all over window frame in back.’
Resnick sighed. Three nights before, someone had broken into the rear of a pub off the Alfreton Road and made off with a small haul of spirits and cigarettes, the petty cash from the till.
Like Jack Waites’ father, Barrie Shotter’s life had been shattered by the Miners’ Strike: in common with many in the Nottinghamshire pits, he had ignored the strike call and continued to report for work. The windows of his house were smashed. ‘SCAB’ in foot-high paint on his walls and scratched into his front door. Wife and kiddies jostled in the streets. One morning a group of flying pickets overturned his car; stones were thrown and a sliver of glass spooned out his right eye like the yolk of a boiled egg, neat and entire.
For months he sat in a darkened room and drank: drank away the rent money and the furniture and what little bit they’d saved. When his wife borrowed the bus fare and took the kids back to her mum’s in Derby, he tried to hang himself but failed. Took to thieving instead. He was already on probation following his last offence: prison this time, without fail.
Waites was eager to pick him up, make an arrest.
‘Later,’ Resnick said wearily. ‘Later. He’s not going anywhere.’
That morning Resnick had a meeting scheduled with the Assistant Chief Constable, himself and a dozen other officers of similar rank — strategy, long-term goals, deference and long words. On the way back he dropped into a record shop on one of the arcades between Upper Parliament Street and Angel Row. Mostly CDs now, of course, but still some racks of vinyl, second-hand. A double album with a slightly dog-eared cover caught his eye: Thelonious Monk Live at the Jazz Workshop. The titles were mostly tunes he recognised. ‘Round Midnight’. ‘Misterioso’. ‘Blue Monk’. Recorded in San Francisco over two nights in 1964. November third and fourth. Resnick smiled and reached for his wallet: what better gift?
Barrie Shotter lived in the Meadows, a terraced house not so far from the recreation ground. Jack Waites and two other officers had presented the warrant at the door, Resnick hanging back. Now while they searched the upstairs, cock-a-hoop over finding bottles of vodka and Scotch, Bensons king size by the score, Resnick sat across from Shotter in the small kitchen, neither man speaking, the kettle boiling away behind them, ignored.
There were pictures of Shotter’s children, three boys and a girl, all under ten, thumbtacked to the cupboard by the stove. Spotted now and splashed with grease.
Resnick made tea while his men made an inventory.
Shotter mumbled thanks, stirred in two spoons of sugar and then a third.
‘You’re a daft bugger, Barrie,’ Resnick said.
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Shotter said.
They took him away and double-locked the door.
There was a wedge of bread pudding waiting on his desk with a candle sticking out of it, Millington’s idea of a joke. He stood the troops a couple of rounds in the pub across the street, put fifty pounds behind the bar and left them to it.
At home he fed the cats then made himself a sandwich, toasted cheese. A shot of whisky in a water glass. His birthday present to himself was on the stereo. A jinking upturned phrase from Monk’s piano, the same repeated twice, three times, before the advent of bass and drums and then the saxophone. ‘Well You Needn’t’, November third.
Resnick leaned back in the chair to listen and when the smallest of the cats jumped up on to his lap he let it stay.
HOME
Resnick was unable to sleep. All those years of living alone, just the weight of the cats, one and occasionally more, pressing lightly down on the covers by his feet or in the V behind his legs, and now, with Lynn away for just forty-eight hours, he was lost without her by his side. The warmth of her body next to his, the small collisions as they turned from their respective dreams into a splay of legs, her arm sliding across his chest. ‘Lay still, Charlie. Another five minutes, okay?’ Musk of her early-morning breath.
He pushed away the sheet and swivelled round, then rose to his feet. Through an inch of open window, he could hear the slight swish of cars along the Woodborough Road. Not so many minutes short of two a.m.
Downstairs, Dizzy, the oldest of the four cats, a warrior no longer, raised his head from the fruit bowl he had long since appropriated as a bed, cocked a chewed and half-torn ear and regarded Resnick with a yellow eye.
Padding past, Resnick set the kettle to boil and slid a tin of coffee beans from the fridge. A flier announcing Lynn’s course was pinned to the cork board on the wall — ‘Unzipping the Agenda: A Guide to Creative Management and Open Thinking’. Lynn and forty or so other officers from the East Midlands and East Anglia at a conference centre and hotel beside the Al outside Stevenage. Promotion material. High fliers. When she had joined the Serious Crime Unit a little more than two years ago, it has been as a sergeant; an inspector now and barely thirty, unless somehow she blotted her copybook, the only way was up. Whereas for Resnick, who had turned down promotion and the chance to move on to a bigger stage, little more than a pension awaited once his years were in.
While the coffee dripped slowly through its filter, Resnick opened the back door into the garden and, as he did so, another of the cats slithered past his ankles. Beyond the allotments, the lights of the city burned dully through a haze of rain and mist. Down there, on the streets of St Ann’s and the Meadows, armed officers patrolled with Walther P990s holstered at their hips. Drugs, of course, the cause of most of it, the cause and the core: all the way from after-dinner cocaine served at trendy middle-class dinner parties alongside squares of Green and Black’s dark organic chocolate, to twenty-five-pound wraps of brown changing hands in the stairwells of dilapidated blocks of flats.