“What the hell happened here?”
“Oh, the poor love …”
The PC blushed.
“He’s old enough to answer for himself,” Resnick said. “Just.”
“Excuse me!”
“He must’ve broke in round the back, sir …”
“Who?”
“Morrison, sir. Least, that’s who I think it is.”
“How did he break in?”
“Window in the door, sir. Key must’ve been inside.”
“You didn’t see him? Hear him?”
“Only after it happened, sir. See …” glancing warily at the woman, who was now fitting a piece of Elastoplast over the treated cotton wool, “… I was taking a break, like.”
“You what?”
“No more than a cup of tea and a cheese cob,” the woman said.
“I wasn’t gone above five minutes, sir.”
“And the rest”
“Don’t be so hard on lad.”
“However long it was,” Resnick said, “time enough for the mother to’ve been in and gone.”
“Sir, I don’t think so, sir. I …”
“Don’t think is just about right. How do we know she’s not in there now, with him? Well?”
The constable looked unhappily at the crown of his helmet. “We don’t, sir.”
“Exactly.”
“There’s been no shouting, sir. Nothing like that.”
“What has there been?”
“Bit of breaking, I think, sir. Things being thrown around.”
“One or two in your direction, by the look of it.”
“Poor lamb …” the woman began, till Resnick’s expression made her think better of it.
“I stuck my head through the door, sir. Calling for him to come out.”
Resnick shook his head slowly, more in sorrow than in anger. “You did phone it in?”
“Yes, sir. They said someone was already on the way.”
Resnick nodded. “That was me.” He turned towards the house. “Come on. If you’re through being cosseted, let’s see what’s going on.”
“He’s still inside,” said the cloth-capped man, leaning against his back fence.
Resnick nodded thanks and carried on into the rear yard. There was no sign of life in back room or kitchen, but the floor of the former was littered with pages torn from scrapbooks and hurled about. Photographs were jumbled together on the table. A shattered vase, presumably the one that had struck the PC, lay on the quarry tiles in the kitchen.
“Michael Morrison?”
Aside from a dog barking higher up the street and the thrum of traffic, it was disturbingly quiet.
“Michael Morrison? It’s Detective Inspector Resnick. We talked yesterday.” A pause. “Why don’t you come and let us in?”
No response.
To the young constable, Resnick said quietly, “Round and watch the front.”
Resnick reached through the broken pane of pebbled glass and tried the handle of the door. The top bolt had been slid into place but he could just reach it with finger and thumb, ease it back. The soles of his feet crunched lightly on china shards. The room smelt slightly musty. Quarry tiles, Resnick reckoned, laid directly on to the packed earth, encouraging the damp.
“Michael?”
Bending towards the rough gray scrapbook sheets, he glimpsed pantomime tickets, a sticker from the Wild West Adventure Park a souvenir program from Babes in the Wood. On the torn pages of an album there were small square photographs of a man and a woman with a small child, a baby: Michael and Diana, Emily.
“Michael Morrison?”
The front room was snug and dark. It would have been possible to lean in all directions from one of the easy chairs and touch all four walls. The PC’s anxious face, strips of plaster incongruous beneath the peak of his helmet, looked back at Resnick through patterned lace.
On the stairs, the edges of carpet had all but worn through.
“Michael, it’s Inspector Resnick. I’m coming up.”
He was in the bedroom at the front of the house; two beds side by side with enough room for Michael to be sitting between them, back against the wall. The bed closest to the window Resnick guessed to be Diana’s: an alarm dock on the plywood cabinet beside it, two mugs containing an inch or so of long-cold tea, orange now around the edges, a paperback on stress, another, shiny reflective cover, on the subject of assertiveness. On the second bed soft animals crowded round the head. A cushion embroidered with a multi-colored cat lay near the foot. On the adjacent, straight-backed chair there were slim books with vivid covers: Teddybears 1 to 10, Morris’s Disappearing Bag. Scattered over both beds were more pages ripped from the albums and scrapbooks Michael Morrison had found below, his family in pieces all around him. His first family. He sat there not looking up at Resnick, an almost empty half-bottle of whisky tight between his knees.
“Michael.”
The eyes flickered towards him, then away. The fingers of Michael’s left hand were curled around a doll, round, flat face and hair like straw. A striped dress, yellow and red.
“Michael.”
In his other hand was a knife. Serrated edge, the kind more commonly used for slicing bread.
Resnick leaned towards him, careful not to startle, not to draw attention to his own hands.
“It’s my fault,” Michael Morrison said.
“No,” Resnick said and shook his head.
“My fault!”
“No!”
Resnick saw the tensing in Michael Morrison’s eyes, and grabbed for the knife too late. The point of the blade plunged fast at the doll and missed, driving hard into Morrison’s own thigh.
There was a vast intake of breath, pitched like a sigh: a shout building to a scream.
“Christ!” The word no sooner from Resnick’s mouth than Morrison had pulled the knife back out and, fingers buckled open, dropped it to the ground.
Resnick plucked the knife clear and slid it back over the thin carpet, out of reach. Blood was beginning to well, surprisingly bright, through the tear in Michael Morrison’s trousers, the puncture in his leg.
Resnick wrenched back the clasp, threw open the window. “Ambulance,” he yelled. “Fast.” And then he was hurling off the blankets, looking for a sheet to make a tourniquet.
Twenty-four
“Thank you,” Lorraine said in scarcely more than a whisper.
There in the hospital corridor, porters and nurses hurrying round her, she looked more like someone’s daughter than anyone’s wife. Whatever make-up she had been wearing had long been cried from her face. Hands like moths around her body, never still.
“I didn’t do anything,” Resnick said.
“The doctor, he said that without you Michael would have lost a lot more blood.”
Resnick nodded. The wound had been less than two inches deep and surprisingly clean. There seemed little reason for them keeping him in overnight.
“Come on,” Resnick said. “I’m taking you home.”
“I can’t.” A blur of hands. “Not without Michael.”
“Michael’s sleeping. When he wakes they’ll check him over, phone you.”
“Even so.”
“You can’t do anything here. And if you don’t rest yourself you’re not going to be much good to him when he gets home.”
He could tell she wanted to argue, but she no longer had the strength. Within two days she had suffered a stepdaughter abducted, now a husband hospitalized at his own hand. If she stood there much longer, she would keel over and Resnick was going to have to move smartly to catch her. He put his arm across her shoulders instead. “I’ll drive you back.”
Between car and house she faltered, only one cameraman hanging on, ready to get a picture of Lorraine fainting on her own front lawn. But she rallied herself, depriving the nation of a front-page splash. Resnick waited, patient, while she found the door keys. My fault, Michael Morrison had said; he wondered what he had meant by that.