“You become used to it, is that what you mean? Become-what’s the word? — inured. Hardened to it, I suppose.”
Resnick wondered whether this was what he wanted to be doing, talking about this. “To a degree, yes, otherwise you couldn’t do the job.” He wanted to go across the room and touch her, but, what had happened the last time notwithstanding, he didn’t know how. He wondered if he were guilty of staring too obviously at her mouth. He looked instead at the glass in his hand and drank some more wine.
Hannah was moved by it, the shyness of him. “A penny for them, Charlie. That’s what my dad used to say.”
“Your dad called you Charlie?”
“No.” Laughing. “You know what I mean.”
Resnick thought that he did. “So did mine,” he said. “Except that it was in Polish. But I suspect it was more or less the same.”
“So what were you thinking of?” He didn’t answer.
“Not murder?”
“No.” He shook his head.
Hannah set down her glass and got to her feet. “Just so long as you don’t think that whenever you come here, the first thing we do is tumble into bed.”
“No.” Looking at her mouth again, openly this time. “That’s not what I think.”
“Good.” She was holding out her hand.
He was aware of her moving beside him, felt a touch of her shoulder, warm and smooth, as she turned. In the almost dark of the room, he looked at his watch and was surprised that it was only a little after two. He felt as if he had been asleep for hours.
Quietly, Hannah slid her legs from beneath the duvet and sat up. A small gasp as Resnick reached out and touched her back, the knots of spine against the skin. She reached behind and circled her fingers around his wrist.
“Don’t stop. That’s not to make you stop.”
He kissed the back of her hand, the space between her shoulder blades, her neck; she moved her hand from his and ran it along his chest.
“I was going to the bathroom,” she said. And then, near the door. “Can I get you anything?”
He looked at her, naked beneath the skylight, unselfconscious now, the dark wedge of hair between her legs that he might cover with his hand. Everything, part of him responded silently, that part to which he usually paid no heed.
“Water, anything?”
“A glass of water would be fine.”
They sat together in the kitchen, dunking biscuits into tea, contentedly not talking, at least not a great deal, Resnick dressed save for his jacket, Hannah wrapped in her dressing gown, already the beginnings of what seemed like routine.
“What’s happening …” Resnick began.
She pressed a finger close across his mouth. “Not now, Charlie. Not now.”
His eyes asked her why.
“If anything’s going to happen, there’ll be time enough.”
On cue, there was the sound of a cab approaching the rear of the house.
“Maybe next time you’d like to come round to me? I could make a bit of supper, something like that.” He was shrugging on his coat.
Hannah smiled. “All those cats.”
“They’re not always all four there at once.”
“Oh. I suppose that makes it okay.”
At the door she went to kiss him on the cheek and deftly he moved his head so that she kissed him on the mouth instead. At the end of the alley, the taxi driver sounded his horn twice.
“Isn’t there supposed to be a law against that?” Hannah smiled.
“Kissing?”
“Using your horn after dark.”
For a moment, he touched her breast beneath the soft fabric of her gown. “I have to go.”
“Yes.”
Stooping his head, he kissed her where his hand had been.
She watched him walk away towards the light and already those first familiar feelings of pain were swaying inside her.
Thirty
As far as Kevin Naylor was concerned, this was not a good day. It had started when Debbie had walked out of the bathroom that morning, not saying anything, but the expression on her face telling him everything he needed to know. She had got her period. Punctual to the minute.
“Deb …”
But she had brushed him away, opening the fridge to stand there, head angled towards it, staring between the flavored yogurts, the leftover lemon pie, the lettuce, and the film-wrapped cheese at what she could no longer see.
“Deb …”
“Leave it, will you! Just leave it.”
And he had, slurping down the last of his tea, grabbing a piece of toast which he ate on the way to the car. The traffic was a bastard as usual that time of the morning, and all the while Debbie’s unspoken accusation knifing into him, as if it were all his fault.
“Maybe we should go to the doctor,” she’d ventured once before when they’d been trying. “See if there’s anything, you know, that he can do.”
“I’m not going to see any doctor. Fuck the doctor!” Kevin had replied.
“Okay.” Debbie grinning. “If you think he’d do a better job.”
“Fuck you too,” Kevin had said, but with a smile. And he had, but it hadn’t made a difference, then or now.
“Don’t worry,” she had said last night, taking him in her hand. “You fret too much about it, I reckon that’s what it is. I was reading, you know, this article in Cosmopolitan, how anxiety, it, you know, it’s-what you call it? — inhibiting.”
Sometimes he even wondered if that weren’t right; after all, when making a baby had been just about the last thing on their minds, there hadn’t been any problem at all. And they’d had their two years of sleepless nights to prove it.
And as if all of that weren’t enough, there was this, waiting on his desk for him when he walked in; the analysis of the footmarks around Aston’s body. The regular shoe, size eight, had been recently repaired with a rubber stick-on sole and a quarter heel, the kind that were fitted in over twenty instant shoe repair shops in this and any other city. Anonymity guaranteed. The work boot was a Caterpillar, size ten, well-worn. Eight local outlets, God knows how many hundred sold. And the trainer-a Nike indoor sports shoe, badminton or squash, a kidney-shaped zigzag pattern, deeply cut, below the ball of the foot, another, similar, but shaped like an elongated heart, beneath the heel. Relatively new, or, at least, sparingly used. The kind that had a color flash at the side, a scored section in a contrasting color just above the heel. Fabriqué en Thailande. US size twelve, UK eleven, European size forty-six. One of Nike’s more popular lines.
“Jesus wept!” Naylor said, pushing the report to the other side of his desk.
“What’s up?” Divine asked, squeezing past on his way to the Gents.
“Nothing. Bloody nothing.”
“Suit yourself.”
Naylor sat down, spun a pencil round and round on top of the envelope the report had arrived in, retrieved and reread it, looking at the patterns more carefully this time, and then reached for the phone and began to dial.
Divine stood close up against the stall, grimacing, trying not to notice the burning sensation as he tried to pee. Trying and failing. Even when he wasn’t feeling it, which had not been often in the past thirty-six hours, he couldn’t seem to shake it out of his mind.
If that little slut he’d picked out round back of the Orchid had given him a dose, he’d seek her out and give her a good backhander before she went off to get her penicillin.
Jesus! Ow! Christ almighty, that hurt.
Almost, but not quite as much as the time he woke up early one morning and stumbled out for his regulation slash and there it was, clear even to his befogged eyes, blood washing around in his piss. That wasn’t what had really hurt. It was later, on his back in the clap clinic, this male nurse, chubby little bastard-black, too, that had really been the icing on the sodding cake-telling him, smiling all the while, “The bad news, you’re going to feel this. Nothing we can do about that. But the good news, it’ll be over so fast, you won’t believe it’s happened. Okay. Now just try to relax.” And before Divine could protest he manipulated him a little, before pushing this umbrella-shaped needle down into the end of his penis, down into the opening and scooping it back out. “There now, all done.” Still grinning, he had patted Divine on the shoulder and for a moment Divine had thought he was going to give him a sweetie for being good, Divine lying there in that narrow cubicle, unable to believe what had just happened to his dick.