“Details about locals who might fit the profile, though,” Resnick began. “We can go at it that way.”
“Absolutely. No problem.” Ulman took two large envelopes from his case and passed them across to where Resnick was sitting. “The quality of some of these is a little suspect, they’ve been blown up from video, but the rest, ones we’ve taken ourselves, they’ll be fine. You’ve got brief descriptions here too, known associates and addresses, though those do tend to slip out of date pretty fast.”
“And will some of these,” Resnick asked, “be Combat 18?”
“A few. You want to talk to Special Branch. They’ll have this area well sussed.”
Resnick nodded and thanked Ulman for all his help. Making contact with the local office of the Branch was already high on his list. But not until after lunch.
Thirty-three
The day was sharp and clear, the sky an almost unbroken blue. They walked along the upper path through the cemetery, close by the red brick wall that separated it from the road. Stone angels stared back at them, empty-eyed. Also Flora, aged four months. Agnes Hilda Jane, wife of the above. Suffer the little children. Gone to a better place. Below them, among a maze of smaller headstones and carefully carved epitaphs, the ground leveled out, before rising again with the trees and shrubs of the Arboretum.
Resnick had brought sandwiches from the deli and slices of rich pecan pie; in her bag Hannah had orange juice, pots of blueberry yogurt, paper napkins, plastic spoons: the arrangement they had made.
“You know the best places to take a girl, Charlie. I’ll say that for you.”
Resnick checked, but she was smiling, that crease that he was getting used to, quite pronounced, at the right side of her mouth.
“Do you want to sit down?”
Hannah looked at her watch. “Let’s walk a little farther. Are you okay for time?”
“Fine.”
They went through the gate and across Waverley Street, up between the aviary and the small pond with its low, curved railings, climbing the path that wound towards the bandstand, the borders rich with late spring flowers, purple and gold.
Hannah expressed her approval at the sandwiches, nothing too idiosyncratic, smoked turkey breast with cranberry, egg mayonnaise with cress. Resnick, panicking at the last moment that she might be a vegetarian, had thought this way, at least, they could have one each. But Hannah bit heartily into her half of the turkey sandwich and Resnick contrived, more through luck than judgment, to trap a sudden squish of egg on the back of his hand before it landed on his shirt. He thought he might allow her to take the second yogurt back for her tea.
“These are good,” Hannah said.
Lower down the slope, three Asian men in shirtsleeves had spread a newspaper on the grass and were using it as a surface on which to play cards. Mouth full, Resnick nodded agreement.
“D’you always eat this well?”
“If this is well, yes. I suppose so.”
Hannah pushed a straw down into the carton of orange. “I suppose 1 think of policemen as eating chips with everything. Or late-night curries, you know, the kind where, no matter what it is, it always tastes the same.”
Recognizing the description, Resnick smiled. “There’s a lot of that, too. Sometimes. It depends.”
Swiveling on the bench, she looked at him. “One thing you don’t do, Charlie, is take rejection very well.”
He blinked. “You mean last night?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who does? Who would? I just wanted to see you, that was all.”
With a slow shake of the head, Hannah said, “Charlie, you were feeling down. I don’t know why …”
“I …”
“And it doesn’t matter, I don’t need to know. But there you were, on your own, feeling low, and you picked up the phone. Let’s call Hannah, she’ll make me feel better, take me out of myself for a few hours. Wasn’t that it? Something like that, at least.”
Resnick put the uneaten piece of sandwich back down on the bench, appetite lost in the guilty truth of what she had said. “I didn’t think … I mean, is that so wrong?”
Lightly, briefly, she touched his hand, the back of his wrist. “I’m not a comfort station, Charlie. That’s not what I want to be. Waiting around for you to phone so that I can be pressed into service, relieving the stresses and strains of a difficult day.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said and she thought he believed it.
“The other evening, the last time I saw you, you asked-I think you were going to ask-what was happening. Between us. And 1 stopped you; it didn’t seem the right time. And I said the one thing I didn’t want to happen, that we get into that pattern where all you have to do is call and whenever you came round we ended up in bed.”
“But that’s not …”
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Oh, Charlie.” Hannah looked away towards the rose garden on the other side of the hill, the blackened cannons dragged back from the Crimea. Part of Resnick telling him, okay, stop it now, you don’t need this, get up and walk away.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said, turning back to face him, reading the concern in his eyes, “if this is going to come to anything. But I’ve got baggage, Charlie, the same as you.” She smiled, almost a grin. “Maybe not quite as much. But I’m being careful here. I know it may not always seem so, but I am. Cautious, in my way. And one thing I’m not prepared to do is become a tidy little corner of your life. The place where you go to get rid of a little passion, whatever’s extra, whatever you can’t somehow soak up in the rest of your day.” She shook her head. “I don’t know if that makes any sense; I don’t know if I’ve made that clear.”
He touched her then, high on her shoulder, his littlest finger resting against her neck; the other fingers then, circling softly against the skin. She had smooth skin.
Hannah waited for him to say something, make some response, but he didn’t speak. “So what do you want to do, Charlie?” she asked.
“You mean now?”
Grinning. “No, not now.”
“Well, I suppose that depends, you know, on you.”
“God, Charlie!”
“All right, I want to carry on seeing you. I want … I’d like to find a way, something you feel comfortable with …”
“You don’t want to hide me away?”
“No.”
“Your little bit on the side?”
A shake of the head, emphatic. “No.”
“Good. Dinner, then. Friday night.”
“All right. Where …?”
But Hannah was already collecting together her things, brushing crumbs from her lap, getting ready to go. “You decide. Call me and tell me where you want to meet. Okay?”
“Yes, yes. Of course, that’s fine.”
“This yogurt,” Hannah said, holding it towards him. “Do you want it or not?”
“Probably not.”
With a small gesture of acceptance she dropped it down in her bag. “That sandwich, though, you’re not leaving that?”
“I’ll eat it on the way back.”
“You’ll get it all down yourself.”
“Look,” Resnick said, smiling. “Mothering. That’s another habit we could do without. Where I’m concerned, at least.”
Khan was waiting in the CID room when Resnick returned, head stuck into a copy of the Daily Mail. Naylor was talking into the telephone, close to the far wall. As soon as he saw Resnick, Khan hastily folded the newspaper and set it aside. “Elizabeth Peck, sir. Booked herself a holiday through American Express. One of those late-availability deals. Two-city trip to Spain, Barcelona and Madrid.”
“Good. Oughtn’t to be too difficult to track her down.”