She bought a half of bitter for herself, a pint for Kevin Naylor and joined him near the window. From the edges of the room came the electronic clamor of games machines, through the ropey pub stereo Phil Collins was making promises he couldn’t keep. Lynn liked Phil Collins: that spring she’d gone across to Birmingham by coach to see him, the NEC, seats had been naff, but he’d been good, really good.
“How’s it going?” Lynn asked.
“Don’t ask.”
She drank some beer and let it be; he’d talk in his own good time or not at all, that was Kevin.
“It’s all gone to crap,” he said suddenly, moments later. She thought he was talking about the investigation and quickly realized it was something else. “Debbie’s back home with her mum, properly moved back in, and she’s taken the kid with her. Absolute bloody crap!”
“Oh, Kevin,” Lynn took his free hand and gave it a squeeze. “I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well, I’m up to here with being sorry and it don’t make a scrap of sodding difference.”
“Can’t you talk to her, reason …?”
“Shut it!” Naylor said suddenly and Lynn jerked back as though she’d been slapped. It was only when she looked at Kevin’s face that she realized his response had been to the television set above the bar and not to what she had said.
The artist’s impression of the man seen outside the Morrison home was still on the screen, a lined face with a strong nose, close shaven, beginning to lose his hair.
“Kevin, what is it?”
“That bloke. I only know him, don’t I? I was only talking to him this afternoon.”
Thirty-one
When Resnick had been a boy, eleven, his grandmother had slipped and fallen in the small back room, the parlor. Her arm or leg, some part of her, had dislodged coals from the fire, the coal had smoldered on the carpet as she lay unconscious, stunned by the blow her temple had taken from the polished tiles of the hearth. After not so many minutes a spark attached to the fabric of her dress and flared to life. Resnick’s mother, mixing the flour and suet for dumplings in the kitchen, adding water from the measuring jug, a teaspoon of dry mustard, a sprinkling, thumb and forefinger, of dill, had smelled burning. Not the stew. By the time she had found the source, the older woman’s clothes were ablaze around her and she had woken to the center of a dream that was no dream, a nightmare no nightmare, the screams that broke searing from her, her own screams. An old woman with her hair ablaze around her face.
Resnick’s mother had responded with the cool control and speed that sometimes visit us in dire emergencies. By the time the fire brigade arrived, the ambulance, the police-and they were quick-all but a few smoldering remnants of the fire had been extinguished. Her mother lay close against the heavy sideboard which stood along the side wall, blankets covering most of her body, shrouding her burnt, blistering head. She was taken to the hospital, sedated, treated for shock, transferred to the burns unit as soon as her condition had stabilized. “You have to understand,” the registrar said, “your mother has been through a traumatic experience. It will take time for her to recover.” Almost a month Resnick’s parents kept to the silent bedside, disturbed only by whimpers of pain whenever she moved. Resnick himself was kept at home, told little of the worst, shielded from upset. When his grandmother did at last open her mouth it was to scream and call her daughter a whore.
There were weeks of silence and sudden, wild accusations almost inevitably in Polish. In the worst of these, her children were betraying her to the Nazis, she was being dragged headlong from the ghetto, she was bundled into a cattle car on its way to the concentration camp, she could see the ashes floating on the air, smell the burning of the ovens, the sweet pungent smell of smoldering flesh, of skin, of hair.
When, finally, she was allowed home all that she would do was sit in the kitchen and rock herself slowly back and forth in a high-backed wooden chair, a shawl around her head where her hair had grown back patchily between her scars. Resnick stood once until the blood in his legs sang, hand in hers, uncertain if she knew, not who he was but whether he were even there. After little more than weeks, another ambulance came and she was taken off, this time to the hospital for the mentally disturbed where she would end her days.
On Sundays they would drive and park in the hospital grounds, his father in suit and tie, his mother in her good dress, a bag containing fruit, home-made biscuits, a Thermos of soup held at her side. Resnick would be told to lock the doors and stay in the car, while they disappeared into this tall, dark building with turrets at the corners, iron railings ranged along the roof. An hour later they would reemerge, his father shaking his head, mother sniffing, dabbing at the tears. When he would ask them how his grandmother was, his father would fail to reply, his mother would press her lips together and force a smile. “A little better this week, don’t you think so, Father? Yes, Charles, a little better.” When, after almost a year, she caught pneumonia and died they agreed it was a blessing. For her funeral, the community came out in force, the procession from the cathedral to the cemetery blocking the traffic for almost half an hour.
Now Resnick sat in the car park again, an early winter evening that promised little more than rain.
The doctor’s call had come through to Resnick late that afternoon, hesitant, careful. “An officer was in contact earlier, making inquiries; she referred me to you.”
There were lights in one wing of the building only. The remainder stood dark and disused. Despite protest, it seemed likely that within a twelvemonth, the rest would be closed down, most of the patients released into the community. Some would stay in hostels or live together in houses which the authority had bought and renovated specially for them. But many would shuffle, bewildered, between an already overextended network of social workers and volunteers, out-patient clinics and GPs. Soon Resnick would take to recognizing their faces on the benches above Bobby Brown’s Café, by the fountains in Slab Square; leaning outside the night shelter near the London Road roundabout, asleep among the cigarette ends and vomit on the bus station floor.
The nurse who met Resnick was in his late twenties, slight and not far short of Resnick’s height; his sandy hair was worn long, eyes clear pale blue. He was wearing loose beige cotton trousers, a faded green shirt over an equally faded T-shirt that swore solidarity to a cause Resnick could not discern. He told Resnick Diana had been admitted the previous Friday, claiming she no longer felt able to cope.
“What with?” Resnick asked.
The nurse looked back at him, somewhat incredulous.
“She’s been here ever since? No way she could have gone back outside?”
“She could. But, no, I don’t think she has. She hasn’t wanted anything to do with anyone or anything. That’s the only way we’ve been able to keep the news away from her.” He looked at Resnick earnestly. “I presume you’re not proposing to tell her, about her daughter?”
A shake of the head.
“It can’t be kept from her for ever. It shouldn’t, but coming right now …”
“You have my word.”
“What you have to understand, Diana is under a great deal of stress; she has been for some while. Having said that, a lot of progress has been made. But even so, something like this, it could put her back a long way.” The eyes held Resnick fast. “In agreeing for you to see her, we’re assuming that you will be sensitive to her condition.”