Ian Carew waited until Resnick had left the office before sitting back down. Patel was sitting near one of the windows in the CID room, typing up his report. “If he tries to leave,” Resnick said, nodding his head back towards his office door, “stall him.”
“I’ll try, sir.”
“Do better than that.” He glanced down at what Patel was typing, trying to read it upside down. “Anywhere with the clothing thing?”
“No, sir.”
Resnick hurried from the room. Lynn Kellogg and Maureen Madden were already in the superintendent’s office and the expressions on all of their faces told Resnick what he didn’t want to know.
“No chance she’ll change her mind?” asked Resnick.
“She might,” said Lynn. “A couple of hours later she’ll have changed it back again.”
“How about the other business?” asked Skelton. “It is the more serious charge.” He carried on, intercepting Maureen Madden’s fierce look and ignoring it. “GBH at least, attempted murder.”
“More serious than rape, sir?” said Maureen regardless.
“No time to ride the hobby horse,” said Skelton sharply. “I treat rape every bit as seriously as you do.”
“Really, sir?”
“Well, Charlie?” Skelton said.
“Possible motivation, sir. Dodgy alibi. Now we know he’s capable of violence. But, no, nothing to link him in directly. Not as yet.”
“So we let him go.”
“Sir,” said Lynn, cheeks flushed, “he beat up that girl and raped her.”
“Who says? I mean, according to which account?”
“The medical evidence …” Maureen Madden began.
“Intercourse had taken place, cuts and bruising to the face and body-without the girl’s sworn word, what does that prove? No worse than what goes on between couples all over the city every Saturday night. Consenting adults. What’s to prevent him getting up and saying, well, it was how she liked it? Hard and rough.”
“Jesus!” Maureen Madden breathed quietly.
Lynn Kellogg stared at the floor.
“We can warn him,” Skelton continued. “Even though she won’t press charges, we can officially warn him, let him know that warning will be registered, documented. On that matter, that’s all we can do and it will be done. For the rest-watch and wait.”
There was only the flat click of the wall clock, the sounds of four people breathing. Outside, along the corridor, officers and clerical staff walking, talking, getting about their business. The greedy persistence of telephones, like starlings.
“All right, Lynn?” Skelton said. “Maureen?”
“Yes, sir.” Overlapping, subdued. “All right, Charlie?”
“Yes, sir.”
Resnick’s office was empty. Anxiety hovered around Patel’s dark eyes. “He walked out, sir. Insisted upon leaving. He said he had the right. I didn’t think I could try and prevent him.”
“Don’t worry,” Resnick said. “Dig out Naylor and go and pick him up again. No charge, no caution, get him back here just the same.”
“Yes, sir.”
Resnick’s stomach gave another empty lurch. Time enough to cross to the island at the middle of the circus, have them make up a couple of sandwiches, smoked ham and Emmental, breast of turkey with wholegrain mustard, pickled cucumber and mayonnaise. He would have a quiet word with Lynn on his way out, perhaps she’d like to be present while he was giving Carew a good bollocking.
Fourteen
When Karl Dougherty had told his mother he was going to be a nurse, she had pointed through the kitchen window at the way the chrysanthemums were leaning over and blamed the rain. When he had told his father, the look in the older man’s eyes had made it clear he thought his son was telling him he was gay. Not that Dougherty would have called it that: nancy boy, shirt-lifter, plain old-fashioned poof-those were the expressions that would have come to mind.
“You can’t,” his mother had said after the third time of telling.
“Why ever not?”
Karl watched as she placed six pounds of oranges on the Formica work top and began to slice them with a knife. The copper jam-pot she had bought at auction was waiting on the stove. Soon the kitchen would be studded with glass jars, scrubbed and recycled, labeled in her almost indecipherable hand. Quite frequently at breakfast one of the family had spooned gooseberry chutney onto their toast by mistake.
“Why can’t I?”
“Because you’ve got a degree.” His mother had looked at him as if that were the most obvious reason in the world and she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it for himself.
He had shown her the letter, accepting him for a place at the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary as a student nurse.
“There you are,” she said. “You’re not a student. You’re a BA, a good upper second. They’ve got it wrong.” She smiled up from the last of the oranges. “There’s been a mistake.”
Karl had found his father in the cellar, planing a length of beech. “We can’t support you,” his father said. “Not again. We’ve been through all that.”
“I shall be paid,” Karl explained. “Not very much, but a wage.”
“And living? Where will you live?”
Karl looked at the woodworking tools, arranged on and around the shelves in neat order, each wiped and cleaned after use. “There’s a place in the nurses’ home. If I want it.”
“Good.”
When Karl was at the steps, his father said, “I never wanted you to go to that bloody university in the first place, you know.”
“I know.”
“Waste of bloody time and money.”
“Maybe.”
“And you know one thing-this’ll do for your mother. She’ll not begin to understand.”
A few nights later, Karl had been in his room to the rear of the upstairs, writing a letter. His father had come in with a half-bottle of Scotch and two glasses, tumblers that had been given away with so many gallons of petrol.
“Here,” sitting on the bottom of Karl’s bed and handing him one of the glasses, pouring a generous measure into them both. He had seen his father drink bottled beer on Sunday afternoons, port and the occasional sherry at Christmas; he had never known him to drink whisky.
They sat there for close on three-quarters of an hour, drinking, never speaking. Finally, his father tipped what remained into Karl’s glass and stood up to leave.
“Was there something you wanted to say to me?” his father asked.
Karl shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“I thought there might have been something you wanted to tell me.”
“No.”
The incident was never referred to again by either of them, but for some time, whenever they met, Karl’s father would avoid looking him in the eye.
There was scarcely a week went by during Karl’s training, he didn’t consider throwing it in. Neither was there a week when something took place-usually an interchange with one of the patients-which didn’t confirm for him the Tightness of his decision. For the first time since he could remember, his life had a purpose: he felt he was of use.
“This is my son, Karl,” his mother said, introducing him to friends when he made an unannounced visit home. “He’s training to be a doctor.”
“A nurse,” Karl corrected her.
She smiled at her guests. “There’s been a mistake.”
The evening after Karl received notification that he had qualified, he called his father and arranged to meet him for a drink. They went to a pub on the old road from Eastwood to Nottingham and sat with halves of bitter while youths in leather jackets played darts and Elvis on the juke box. “You think I’m gay, don’t you?” Karl asked. “Homosexual.”
His father sucked in air and closed his eyes as if a heavy foot had been pressed down on his chest.
“Well, I’m not. I just don’t like women very much. I mean, only as friends. Okay?”
When his father opened his eyes, Karl reached out a hand towards him and his father pulled his own hand, sharply, away.
After his registration, Karl did a couple of years of general nursing before specializing; he worked on a genito-urinary ward for three years, not bothering to tell either of his parents the day-to-day focus for his skills. He spent two years nursing in the States, Boston and San Francisco, well paid and, he felt, under-used. Patients paying for their private rooms thought it was okay to summon him to fetch their newspaper from across the room, reposition the TV set away from the sun. Before he could do as much as issue an aspirin or clip a toenail, he had to call a doctor and obtain permission.