“Mind the …”
“I remember.”
The room was much as he’d remembered it as well, clutter and last night’s cigarette smoke. It had almost been enough to put him off her, the way, after a meal, after the cinema, after sex, she would automatically light up. Cheap. Expensive to look at but cheap underneath. He watched as she pulled on a pair of faded blue jeans and exchanged her socks for a pair of sports shoes, white with a pink trim.
She picked up the kettle. “Tea?”
“When did I ever drink tea in the mornings?”
Karen spooned instant coffee into mugs, relieved that he seemed to have calmed down, feeling safer now that he was almost friendly, wanting to keep him that way, only not too much. Carew watched her as the water boiled, lounging with one of his bare elbows against the wall, posing.
“I should be really pissed off with you,” he said, as she spooned sugar into her own mug, ready.
“You mean you’re not?”
“I ought to be.” Not leaning any more now, standing close as she lifted the kettle, almost touching her, touching her. “Desperate without you, that what you reckoned? Thought of someone else in there with you, in bed, picture of it driving me insane?” His knee was resting against the back of her thigh, knuckles sliding gently up and down her arm.
Karen moved away, turning back towards him at arm’s length, offering him the coffee.
“Thanks,” smiling through the faintest shimmer of steam.
Smug bastard! Karen thought. “It was the police who asked me about you,” she said. “I didn’t mention your name.”
“I have been thinking about you, you know.”
“I doubt it.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s because you’re here. If you weren’t here, you’d be thinking about running, getting drunk, lectures, somebody else.”
“Well,” he said, reaching for her, hands up under the sleeves of her T-shirt, alternately pushing and stroking, someone who read an article on massage once but became distracted midway through the third paragraph. “Well, I’m here now.”
Somebody along the street shouted at a dog, a cat or a child and slammed their back door so forcefully that Karen’s window, despite folds of yellowing newspaper, rattled in its frame.
“Look,” said Karen, pushing his hands away, moving across the narrow room, picking up things and putting them down, trying to seem businesslike, “I’m sorry about the police. Really. But now I’ve got to go. I’m already late for a lecture.”
“What?”
Hand on hip, she looked at him. Unmade, the bed was between them, a tatty stuffed animal poking out from beneath the rumpled duvet.
“What lecture?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Then don’t go.”
“I mean it doesn’t matter to you, what does it matter, what bloody lecture I have to go to?”
“Hey, Karen. Calm down.” Oh, God! Trying the smile, giving his teeth their best shot. Don’t bother! She opened the door to the room and left it open, wide to the stairs.
He didn’t move.
Neither of them moved.
Karen prayed for the communal phone to ring, someone to come to the door, postman, milkman, double-glazing salesman, anyone, one of her fellow tenants to return. She considered leaving him there and taking off down the stairs, but knew he would come after her and catch her, haul her back before throwing her down on the bed. It had happened like that several times before but then it had been different, she had enjoyed it, they’d been going together.
“What I can’t understand,” Carew said, “is why you’d prefer someone like that anyway.”
“Someone like what?” Karen said, knowing as soon as the words were out of her mouth that she shouldn’t.
“Oh, you know …” He gestured with his hands. “Small.” Karen shook her head. “You don’t know the first thing about him.”
“I’ve seen him in the hospital. Scurrying around with those headphones on, like whatever, the white mouse, white rabbit.” He started around the bed. “What’s he listening to all the time anyway? Special little tapes you make for him?” He patted the duvet, patted the mattress, caught hold of the toy animal and tossed it to the floor. “Little fantasies. Used to be good at those, I remember. Train carriage fantasy. Swimming pool fantasy.” Close again, voice low in his throat and that look in his eyes: she knew that look. “Burglar fantasies.”
Karen turned and ran, swung herself round by the banister rail and jumped the first four steps, stumbled the rest. He caught hold of her before she reached the bottom, hip thrust into her side, a hand fast in her hair.
“All right, Karen,” he said, “just like the old days. Like it used to be.”
“Someone with something against him, this Fletcher? That what you think, Charlie? Someone with a grudge?”
Resnick nodded.
“Professional or personal?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“But if you had to guess.”
“Fletcher’s at the bottom of the heap. Starting out. I shouldn’t have thought he’d have stepped on the wrong toes, become involved in rivalries … not enough to warrant this.”
“Personal, then?”
Again, Resnick nodded.
“This …” Skelton glanced at the notes before him. “… Carew.”
“Claims to have been at the Irish Center …”
“Doesn’t sound Irish.”
“He’s not, sir. Claims he was there till one-thirty, quarter to two. Back home quarter past. Straight off to sleep.”
“Fletcher was attacked when?”
“Went off duty a few minutes after two. Staff nurse in charge of the ward where Fletcher was working is pretty certain of that. Quick trip to the Gents, find his coat, he’d be on the bridge in five minutes, ten at the outside. Anxious to get away, see his girlfriend.”
“That time of the morning?”
“Promised to wait up for him. Fletcher’d been talking to the staff nurse about it, earlier.”
“And the girlfriend, she found him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How old?”
“Nineteen.”
Skelton’s eyes flicked in the direction of the framed photographs, his daughter Kate. “Carew alibied for the time he was at this …”
“Irish Center.”
“That’s it.”
“Went on his own, left the same way. Claims to have seen several people there he knows.”
“Checked out?”
“Doesn’t know all of them by name, not surname, anyway. We’ve spoken to two of the rest.”
“And?”
“One, another medical student, thinks he may have seen Carew there, but he isn’t positive. Place gets packed after eleven-thirty, twelve, and it isn’t what you’d call well lit. The other one, however, postgraduate student in psychology, she’s definite. Didn’t see him all evening.”
There was a knock at the superintendent’s door, discreet, and Skelton ignored it.
“You bringing him in?” Skelton asked.
“Thought we should give it a little time, finish checking him out,” said Resnick. “Haul him in too soon, we might end up having to let him go.”
“No chance he’s going to do a runner?”
Resnick shook his head. “Naylor’s down there, keeping an eye. Anything out of the usual, he’ll stop him.”
Skelton inclined his head upwards, pressed the tips of his fingers together, outsides of the index fingers resting against the center of his upper lip. There was a time, Resnick remembered, when the super used to have a neat little mustache.
“Keep me informed, Charlie.”
“Yes, sir.”
When Resnick was almost at the door, Skelton spoke again. “Your eyes, Charlie, looking tired. Should try for a few early nights.” Resnick turned and looked at him. “Single man your age, shouldn’t be too difficult.”
Resnick liked to let Lynn Kellogg drive: it enabled him to set aside any charges of being hierarchical or chauvinist in one fell swoop and besides, it gave him time to think. Ian Carew was living with three other medical students in a house in Lenton, easy walking distance from the medical school, the hospital, the bridge. Naylor was sitting in a Ford Fiesta just around the corner from the Boulevard, there at the end of a short street of Victorian houses, the last on the right being Carew’s. Lynn pulled up in front of him and Naylor got out of his car and walked towards theirs. He looked about as happy as he usually did, these days.